If so, you need to perform an SEO competitor analysis to understand why they always seem to be on top. 

Otherwise, you’ll be shooting in the dark with your SEO efforts, making it highly unlikely that you’ll ever crack the code. 

Even if you somehow manage to outrank them through random tactics, you won’t know why – making it incredibly difficult to maintain the edge. 

With an in-depth SEO competitor analysis, you’ll learn precisely why other sites are outranking you, such as a considerable gap in the number of backlinks you have compared to sites ranking in the top 5. 

When it comes to analyzing your SEO competitors, there’s no better platform to use than Semrush. 

Why is that?

It’s because Semrush provides a whole host of tools perfect for sizing up the competition. 

These tools allow you to do the following:

• Identify top competitors in your field 
• Analyze competitors’ backlink profiles and authority scores
• View keywords competitors are ranking for that you aren’t 
• Discover lost keyword rankings 
• Learn your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses 
• Compare your SEO performance to other sites

As you can see, you can use Semrush to uncover invaluable SEO insights that’ll supercharge your campaigns. 

We’ve only scratched the surface so far, so stay tuned to learn how to perform a complete SEO competitor analysis with Semrush. 

What’s a SEO Competitor Analysis, and Why Does it Matter?

The search engine landscape is fiercely competitive, with websites from every industry and niche duking it out to rank as high as possible on the SERPs for their most important keywords. 

Google’s ranking algorithm is kept under lock and key, so SEOs are constantly experimenting with new ways to boost their online visibility and position rankings. 

These tactics have varying degrees of effectiveness, and while there are certain SEO best practices that most sites follow, SERP rankings can be mysterious at times. 

That’s why taking a peek behind the scenes with a competitor analysis is so helpful. 

For example, if a website is beating you in the rankings for your most important keyword, there could be a million reasons why. 

They could have higher quality content, better keyword optimization, more backlinks, tighter technical SEO factors (like faster loading speed), and the list goes on and on. 

Only when you sit down to do a competitor analysis will you finally learn why another site is getting the best of you on the SERPs. 

Once you know why you’re getting left in the dust, you’ll be able to make the necessary modifications to your site to start closing the gap and eventually outrank them. 

Knowledge is power, and Semrush will equip you with the tools you need to learn your competitors’ secrets. 

If you’re ready to take your SEO game to the next level, don’t wait to try out Semrush Pro today.      

How to Use Semrushto Conduct an SEO Competitor Analysis Step-by-Step 

Semrush has an entire suite of tools dedicated to competitive research on its SEO dashboard, which includes the following:

• Domain Overview
• Traffic Analytics
• Organic Research 
• Keyword Gap 
• Backlink Gap 

Each tool contains ways to garner valuable insights from competitors, so let’s dive in for a closer look. 

Step #1: Square up competitors with the Organic Research tool 

First things first: You need to learn who your top competitors are, and Semrush’s Organic Research tool is the easiest way to find them. 

The tool is extremely easy to use, as you just need to enter your domain, select your country, and hit the Search button. 

From there, you’ll be greeted with a ton of widgets breaking down things like your top keywords, position changes, and keyword trends. 

However, what we’re interested in is the Main Organic Competitors widget near the bottom of the page. Here, you’ll find a list of your top 5 organic competitors. You can also view the entire list of your competitors (ours contains 7.5k sites, so we’ll stick with the top 5). 

Step #2: Use the Keyword Gap tool to peek at their keywords 

Next, the true analysis begins. The Keyword Gap tool will let you know about all the keywords your competitors are ranking for that you aren’t.

This is super helpful for two reasons: A) you get to uncover valuable keyword opportunities you wouldn’t have known about otherwise, and B) you’ll be able to tell if competitors are outranking you due to their use of keywords. 

You can enter up to four competitors to compare keyword profiles. 

The Missing filter will let you know which keywords they rank for you, but you don’t, while the Weak filter lets you know which keywords they’re better optimized for than you. 

Step #3: Use the Backlink Gap tool to size up their link profile 

Backlinks are a huge ranking factor for Google Search, so if a competitor has stronger backlinks than you, they’ll likely outrank you. 

To find out if links are the culprit, navigate to SEMrush’s Backlink Gap tool from the SEO Dashboard. 

It works exactly like the Keyword Gap tool, where you can enter up to 4 competitors to compare link profiles. 

This tool is amazing for uncovering valuable backlink opportunities from your competitors, such as syndication networks and sites that accept guest posts. 

Step #4: Analyze their traffic and metrics 

Lastly, don’t forget to take a look at your competitor’s traffic and site metrics using the Traffic Analytics and Domain Overview tools. 

The Traffic Analytics tool provides metrics like bounce rate, dwell time, unique visitors, device trends, and top traffic channels. 

These will help you better understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, which you can use to your advantage. 

The Domain Overview tool is where you’ll find competitors’ authority scores (which represent how likely they are to appear in the SERPs), total backlinks, and organic search traffic. You can also view their traffic distribution by country to understand where most of their traffic comes from. 

Using Semrush to Crush the Competition 

Performing an SEO competitor analysis is made simple with Semrush, and the platform contains other tools to help bolster your SEO strategy. 

Once you understand why your competitors are beating you on the SERPs, you’ll know the exact steps you need to take to leave them in the dust (instead of the other way around). 

If you’re ready to take your SEO game to the next level, don’t wait to try out Semrush Pro today.      

The post I See What You Did There: Analyzing Competitors with Semrush appeared first on The HOTH.

So what if you sell great products? People can’t buy them if they can’t find them.

Link building is the secret sauce for climbing higher in search results and getting in front of ready-to-buy customers. 

And no, you don’t have to wait for links to come to you.

E-commerce store owners can be strategic about link building and start reaping SEO benefits and more sales, pronto.

Here’s why link building matters for online store owners and how to build links that create revenue.

Types of Links that Matter for E-commerce

Links refer to clickable text that takes you to another web page when clicked. Ideally, these links will take visitors to your product pages, blog, or loyalty program – anything to either make a sale or keep the conversation going.

There are two types of links: external links and internal links.

External links come from third-party sources. Search algorithms love external links because they signify quality. (Usually.) It shows other people find your content valuable, so search engines reward you with higher rankings.

Internal links link your own content to more of your own content. For example, you might link a blog article to a product page. These links provide search engines with more context about your content so they can rank you accordingly.

Both types of links are crucial for SEO.

But more links aren’t always better.

There’s also the matter of high-quality vs. low-quality links.

Here’s the difference:

For example, let’s say you sell computer accessories. Ideally, your backlinks would be from computer-related websites since their readers are most likely people who love and use computer gear.

You also want the links to use relevant anchor text to help search engines associate the link with your products. This might be broad text like “mouse pads” to link to a product category. 

Or “Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card” to link to a specific product.

When you grasp the fundamentals of link building for e-commerce, you can take control of who’s linking to you, how they’re linking to you, and the quality of those links.

4 Powerful Link Building Strategies for E-commerce

Now that you know more about the role of link building for e-commerce, let’s explore six proven strategies for getting quality links that drive sales.

1. Create High-Quality, Sharable Content

How-to guides, tutorials, video product demos, and product reviews and comparisons give customers valuable information they’re actively looking for (hello, search engine gold!). 

Other websites find this type of content link-worthy too, especially if it’s thorough, well-written, and visually appealing.

This content lives on your e-commerce site blog. Use this content as the foundation for our next strategy.

2. Build Relationships to Build Links

Organic backlinks aren’t quite unicorns, but they can be hard to come by. Instead of playing the waiting game, reach out to other websites, blogs, or even your suppliers to see if they’re willing to link to your content.

This is relationship-based link-building, the new and improved (and lemon-scented) way of building backlinks. 

It trades cold outreach for warm requests, and you’re more likely to get what you want (with a little schmoozing).

Here’s how it works:

1. Make a shortlist of websites in your niche with a high Domain Authority and low spam score.
2. Get the name and email of the person to contact.
3. Connect with them on LinkedIn and Twitter to start nurturing the relationship.
4. Ask and ye shall (hopefully) receive! 

Bonus points if you have an article in mind you’d like to be included in AND

Show them where they can include the link in a natural way AND

Give them the link and anchor text you want them to use.

(Basically doing everything for them except adding the link.)

It’s a long game, but it can pay off in spades.

3. Leverage Online Directories and Business Listings

Business directories and local citations put your business on the digital map. 

Think Google Business, LinkedIn Company Page, or your local Chamber of Commerce.

These directories provide a home for your business details, like your name, phone number, and website. 

Or as we like to call it… free links!

Listing your business on relevant directories is fast and easy. You can list your business on directories one by one or enlist a citation-building service to do it for you.

4. Outsource Your E-commerce Link-Building

If you don’t have the time, skills, or knowledge to do something, there’s someone else who does. It’s true with plumbing, and it’s true with link building.

Enlist the help of a link insertion outreach service with experience in e-commerce. Tap into their network of relationships, professional-grade tools, and the time they’ve spent perfecting the process.

You’re bound to get high-quality links from reputable sources, plus you won’t have to wade through a sea of rejections.

Your competitors might call it cheating.

We call it working smarter, not harder.

Start Your Journey to Link-Building Success

It’s clear that link building for e-commerce is not a fruitless tactic, but rather a cornerstone of success. The right links give you free exposure, free traffic, and an SEO boost that will send you miles higher than your competitors (especially those that haven’t caught on to the value of backlinks).

New to link building (or just don’t have the time it requires)? Check out Hoth Link Outreach which does the hard work for you.

The post Link Building for E-commerce: 4 Strategies to Send Your Sales Soaring appeared first on The HOTH.

Or maybe you’re having trouble getting a page to rank even though it features outstanding content and is well-optimized for SEO. 

Either way, you’re experiencing Google ranking issues, which are far more common than you might think. 

There are countless on-page and technical SEO factors that can affect your rankings, and some of them can be very sneaky. 

For instance, all it takes is one missing asset (such as an image or JavaScript file) to cause a web page to display a 404 error. If that web page happens to be a high-ranking blog or product page, its rankings and traffic will plummet immediately. 

Besides issues that occur on your website, external factors can also affect your Google rankings. 

Google algorithm updates, lost backlinks, and changes in user behavior can all impact your SERP rankings in a big way. 

For instance, Google’s recent Link Spam Update negated the impact paid backlinks had on SEO, causing many websites to see dramatic ranking drops virtually overnight. 

Additionally, Google dishes out manual penalties to websites that violate its Webmaster Quality Guidelines. 

Black-hat SEO techniques like cloaking, content scraping, keyword spam, and link schemes will land you a penalty if you’re caught, and your rankings will take a serious hit as a result. 

The good news is that you can uncover and resolve all these ranking issues, which is what we’re here to help you do today – so read on to learn how. 

Understanding Google’s Ranking Factors 

To get a better grasp of Google ranking issues, you need to understand how their ranking system works. 

Google uses over 200 known ranking factors, and some carry more clout than others. 

Not only that, but Google is constantly updating and tweaking its algorithm to resolve issues and provide a better user experience. 

As a result, it’s crucial to keep up with the latest Google updates, as well as understand which ranking factors matter most for your content. 

10 of the most important ranking factors on Google 

While we don’t have enough time to cover all 200 ranking factors, here’s a condensed look at what most SEOs agree are the top 10 factors that affect search rankings on Google. 

1. Content quality. The relevance and quality of your content are among the most important ranking factors for Google Search. 
2. Content length. Google’s algorithm values long-form posts that provide a lot of value to users. Research shows that the sweet spot lies around the 2,500-word mark. 
3. Backlinks. High-authority backlinks are one of the strongest ranking signals on Google, with the #1 spot containing an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2 – 10. 
4. Loading speed. Google’s Core Web Vitals test will check to see if your website’s loading speed meets its standards. You won’t appear in the top results if you’re too slow. 
5. E-E-A-T. Google’s quality raters follow an acronym that stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These four factors are what Google believes a high-quality result will encompass. 
6. Keyword optimization. Even if you have outstanding content that’s relevant to your audience, that won’t matter if it’s not optimized with the right keywords. 
7. Mobile-friendliness. Ever since 2017, Google has practiced mobile-first indexing. That means if your website doesn’t work on mobile devices, you won’t be able to dominate the SERPs.
8. Content freshness. Google doesn’t want to provide users with outdated information, which is why they prioritize ranking newer content the highest. 
9. Site architecture. If your website doesn’t use a logical internal linking structure, some of your most important content may not appear in Google’s index. 
10. Site security. Google prioritizes safety for its users, which is why they rank sites that use HTTPS higher than HTTP sites. 

If any of these 10 factors are missing from your website, that’s likely the cause of your Google ranking issues. If everything checks out, then something else is the culprit. 

The Most Common Google Ranking Issues 

Whether one of your web pages lost its top ranking spot or you haven’t been able to penetrate the top 10, knowing how to fix Google ranking issues will save the day. 

SEOs have been optimizing their websites for Google for decades now, and they’ve run into just about every ranking issue in existence. 

That’s actually a good thing, as they’ve likely already figured out a fix for the ranking problem currently giving you headaches.

Here’s a look at the most common Google ranking issues and how to resolve them. 

Crawling & indexing errors 

If Google’s search bots aren’t able to crawl and index your website, you won’t appear in the SERPs at all. 

There are lots of factors that disrupt the crawling process, which is why technical SEO audits are so important. 

Redirect errors, soft 404s, noindex tags, and canonical issues will cause crawling errors, bringing the process to a screeching halt. 

So if the content you worked so hard on isn’t appearing in Google’s SERPs, it could be that it’s not even in Google’s index. 

How can you discover if crawling errors are affecting your website?

You can do this by using Google Search Console (GSC), an extremely useful (and free) tool for site owners to see how Google views their website. 

In particular, the Page Indexing Report will let you know how many of your web pages appear in Google’s index. 

Moreover, the Index Coverage Report provides a detailed breakdown of any and all crawling/indexing errors Googlebots ran into. The best part is that GSC lets you know details about each error (such as if it’s a problem with a redirect or 404) to make them easier to fix. 

Exceeding crawl budget 

Also, you need to keep your crawl budget in mind when viewing the Page Indexing Report. 

Why is that?

It’s because Google will only have the bandwidth to crawl some of your URLs, namely your most important pages (i.e., blogs, product pages, landing pages, etc.). 

So if you’re attempting to index nearly every URL on your website, Google’s search bots will max out your crawl budget – and it may cause some of your most crucial web pages to get left out. 

To ensure that all the pages you want to rank on Google’s SERPs appear in its index, you need to choose which pages to index and which to ignore. 

Admin pages, login pages, and thank you pages are examples of web pages that you should hit with a noindex tag. 

That’s because including these web pages in Google’s SERPs won’t provide any value to your business. There’s no reason why someone would search for one of your admin pages or author archives – nor would generating organic traffic to these pages provide any benefit via sales or leads. 

As such, you should only index pages that will help your business and website grow. Everything else should receive a noindex tag to get the most out of your crawl budget. 

If you run an eCommerce store, you’ll need to use canonical tags for the ‘vanilla’ version of each product you sell. If you sell multiple colors/sizes of a product, you don’t need to include each one in Google’s index. 

Not only does this preserve your crawl budget, but it’ll help you avoid duplicate content. 

Blocking Googlebot from accessing your website 

If you wake up one morning and realize that your content has disappeared from the SERPs entirely, it could be that Google’s bots can’t access your website to crawl & index it. 

Sometimes web administrators grow frustrated with bots browsing their sites and leaving comments on their messaging boards. 

As a result, they head into your website’s settings and block all traffic originating from bots. 

Now your site will be free of bot spam, and everything will be peachy, right?

It would be, only that now your web pages won’t be able to appear in Google’s search results. Since Google’s search bots are still bots, blocking all traffic from bots will also block them, and they won’t be able to crawl your site. 

To ensure this doesn’t happen, make sure that your website allows traffic from bots. 

If you aren’t sure if Google is blocked or not, you can use their Rich Results Test to find out. Request a URL from your site and see if it’s able to work. If it doesn’t, it could be that you’ve inadvertently blocked Google from accessing your website. 

Page speed slowdown 

If a high-ranking web page falls more than a few positions at once, it could be that something is increasing the page load time. 

As stated before, Google’s Core Web Vitals test checks every website for loading speed and response times. 

Fail the test, and you can kiss your excellent rankings goodbye.

Lots of factors affect page loading times, including JavaScript and CSS, images, videos, plugins, hosting companies, and more.

To discover if your website is having trouble with loading times, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It’ll let you know if your website is running slow, and it’ll provide suggestions for speeding things up. 

If your site is starting to load slower, here are some quick tips for remedying that:

• Minimize JavaScript and CSS (i.e., shorten lengthier lines of code if possible) 
• Compress all images and videos 
• Consider using a content distribution network (CDN), as they can speed up your website 
• Cut back on the number of plugins you use on your website, especially if they’re outdated or aren’t necessary 
• If your site has too many redirects, it can slow things down, so try to minimize their usage when possible 

Google algorithm updates 

If you experience drops in SERP rankings, checking for a Google algorithm update should be one of the first things you do. 

Google is constantly making modifications to its algorithm in order to provide a better user experience, resolve issues, and keep up with modern trends. 

Most recently, Google released two updates very close to one another in late 2022. 

First, they came out with a Link Spam Update on December 12th, 2022. 

Just three days later, they announced the update to their Quality Rater Guidelines (E-E-A-T). 

Algorithm updates can cause changes in SERP rankings, so it’s essential to do your best to roll with the punches. 

Besides major algorithm updates, Google is always making smaller tweaks and changes that draw less attention. For instance, it was uncovered that Google made over 3,000 changes to its search algorithm in the year 2018, and that number has likely increased as time has gone on. 

Also, ranking drops don’t always happen overnight, as sometimes the impact of an algorithm update takes some time to appear. 

So if you start to notice your rankings are slowly slipping away, an algorithm update could be the reason. 

Making changes to your website 

Did you recently switch CMS providers and totally redesign your website?

If so, that’s certainly going to affect your search rankings. 

The same is true for virtually any change you make to your website, whether you’re switching to HTTPS or tweaking your site architecture. 

It’s crucial to note that while some of these changes may cause a temporary drop in rankings, that doesn’t mean that they won’t help your SEO in the long run. 

For instance, if you tighten up your site architecture (i.e., using a flat-style design), you may see a brief rankings drop-off, but your SEO profile will be better off – and you’ll likely recover (and maybe even rank higher than before). 

Losing backlinks 

Lastly, it’s common to experience Google ranking issues whenever you lose a backlink. 

As mentioned previously, backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors on Google Search. 

Yet, backlinks aren’t set in stone, and website owners may choose to remove your backlink in favor of another one. 

After all, that’s the entire methodology behind the skyscraper technique, where you target desirable competitor backlinks to poach by outdoing their content. 

That means that the same thing can happen to you in reverse, where one of your competitors snags one of your most effective backlinks. 

You can use our free backlink checker tool to review your backlink profile to see if you’ve lost any of your top-performing links. 

Concluding Thoughts: Google Ranking Issues 

There are lots of factors that can affect your existing Google rankings, some of which are completely out of your control. 

The most important thing is to stay calm and perform an SEO analysis whenever you see changes in your rankings. That way, you’ll be able to identify & resolve the issue as soon as possible. 

Do you need help ranking higher on Google’s SERPs?

Then you need to check out HOTH X, our five-star managed SEO services. We’ve helped countless clients climb to the top of Google’s search results, and we’d love for you to be next – so don’t wait to get in touch now.    

The post Google Ranking Issues: How to Identify & Resolve Them appeared first on The HOTH.

Yet, these are all on-page and off-page SEO techniques, as technical SEO factors often get overlooked. 

While fixing broken links and improving your loading times aren’t as exciting as content creation, technical SEO is still undeniably crucial if you want your content to rank. 

For example, even if you have the highest quality content in the world, If Google isn’t able to crawl & index your site due to a technical issue, you won’t appear in the SERPs at all. 

If on-page SEO is the brash movie star soaking up the glory and fame, technical SEO is the director working hard behind the scenes to make the movie a reality. 

While the movie star’s charisma and daring stunts are what draws in the audience (stellar content), nobody would be able to bear witness to it without the director’s cameras (your technical SEO strategy). 

Technical SEO involves tweaking your webpages so that they’re effortless for search engines to crawl & index them. 

That means implementing a mobile-friendly site design, an organized site structure, optimized page speed, and a consistent URL structure – just to name a few technical aspects that affect SEO. 

Even in the age of AI-powered content creation, technical SEO still matters, so stay tuned to learn how to master it. 

Understanding Technical SEO 

Most digital marketers will break down SEO into three core components; on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. 

On-page SEO refers to everything you do to increase SERP (search engine results pages) rankings on your website. It primarily has to do with content that tells search engines what your website is about, such as meta descriptions, image alt text, headings, internal links, and keyword usage. 

Off-page SEO is your SEO efforts that occur off your website, such as high-authority backlinks, guest blog posts, videos on platforms like YouTube, and social media marketing. 

Technical SEO refers to your efforts to adhere to the technical requirements of search engines like Google & Bing. In addition to making it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and render your website, some technical SEO factors also improve user experience, like boosting your website’s loading times. 

Search engine crawlers can become confused if your technical SEO isn’t on point, which can lead to you disappearing from the SERPs altogether. 

Common factors that affect technical SEO include the following:

• Duplicate content issues
• Broken links 
• XML sitemaps (or a lack of one)
• Structured data 
• CSS & Javascript
• Schema markup
• Site architecture 
• Indexing issues 
• Poor load speed 
• Mobile-friendliness 
• 404 pages 
• 301 redirects
• Hreflang attributes 

As you can see, quite a bit goes into technical SEO, so you need a strong understanding of the fundamentals if you want your web pages to show up in the SERPS.

If you’ve got rock-solid content that’s optimized for relevant keywords, but you still aren’t seeing the results you want, technical issues may be the culprit. 

It can be incredibly frustrating to lose organic traffic due to avoidable issues like broken links & 404 pages, so you need to take technical SEO seriously. 

Why Does Technical SEO Still Matter in the Age of AI?

Now that intuitive AI platforms are widely used to generate content, is there still a need for technical SEO?

The answer is a definite yes. 

While AI chatbots and content generators are indeed impressive, they still can’t account for technical aspects taking place behind the scenes. 

Accordingly, you still need to keep a close eye on your technical SEO, ensuring that you don’t run into duplicate pages or indexing issues. Beyond that, you still need to implement an organized site structure if you want your content to get properly crawled & indexed. 

If you upload your AI-generated content on orphan pages (web pages containing no internal links pointing to them), you can kiss all the potential organic traffic it could generate goodbye. 

However, that’s not to say that there aren’t AI tools out there that can make technical SEO easier for you. 

You can use AI tools to do the following:

• Automate the creation of XML sitemaps
• Generate JSON-LD schema
• Automate crawl directives 
• Aid with programmatic content 

Leveraging AI in this manner will help you automate certain aspects of your technical SEO strategy, which will free up a lot of your time to focus on other things. 

Yet, it’s important to distinguish the difference between AI content generation and using AI to help with technical SEO. Generating AI content and mindlessly uploading it to your website won’t work, as you need to be more calculated than that. 

If you can successfully blend AI content with rigorous technical SEO, you’ll see the best results. 

A Crash Course in Technical SEO 

Are you a total beginner to the technical aspects of search engine optimization?

Not to worry, as this brief yet informative crash course will teach you everything you need to know about the technical side of an SEO strategy. 

That way, you’ll be able to start optimizing your website so that it’s easier for search engines to crawl, index, and render your website, which will help boost your online visibility immensely. 

Using a flat site architecture 

It’s imperative to start your technical SEO with your site architecture, as it will inform & guide the rest of your strategy. Lots of technical issues pop up because the site architecture isn’t optimal, so perfecting it from the get-go will help you avoid problems later on. 

It’s akin to beginning on-page SEO work with in-depth keyword research. 

In particular, you need to have a logical, organized site structure wherein every page is connected via internal links. Not only that, but each webpage should only be a few clicks away from the homepage. 

That’ll make it extremely easy for search engine bots to crawl & index every page on your website. 

If your site architecture is all over the place, you may inadvertently create orphan pages with no internal links. 

That’s disastrous for your SEO, as it’ll be near impossible for bots to locate, crawl, and index orphan pages. 

Airtight site architecture is an absolute must if you run an eCommerce store with dozens of product pages. That’s because a messy site structure can get out of control fast, and fixing it can be a nightmare if your website has thousands of pages. 

An unorganized site structure also makes it extremely difficult to identify and resolve indexing issues, which is a headache that you don’t need. 

How can you find out what your site architecture looks like?

Visual Site Mapper is an excellent free technical SEO tool that provides a visual representation of your internal linking structure that’ll help you avoid orphan pages. You can also use our free SEO Audit tool for in-depth insights into technical SEO factors like page load speed, link structure, and more. 

Use a uniform URL structure 

How you structure your URLs is as crucial as your site structure – and yes, the two are directly related. 

URLs have subfolders (i.e., www.mysite.com/blog) and subdirectories (i.e., blog.mysite.com). 

It’s crucial to know the distinction between the two when deciding on the structure for your URLs. 

Most importantly, once you decide on a URL structure, it needs to be set in stone. Consistency matters for URLs, and you’ll confuse both bots and online users if you stray from the formula. 

Also, try making your URLs short and to the point. There’s no need to muddy the waters with lengthy descriptions of each web page. Other best practices include only using lowercase characters, using dashes to separate words, and including target SEO keywords. 

Categorizing your pages is another great idea that’s helpful to bots & users. 

Your online users will always know where they are on your website if you categorize your pages logically (i.e., grouping together resources, tools, and blogs in specific categories). 

In addition, Google’s crawlers like knowing what role a page plays in the larger context of the website, as evidenced by this quote from Google’s Search Engine Central. So if your pages are categorized, crawlers will be able to garner more context about them, which can help your rankings. 

Create & upload an XML sitemap to Google Search Console 

Once you’ve got a well-organized site structure in place, you need to create an XML sitemap for it. 

What’s that?

A sitemap is a file that serves as a blueprint for your site structure, containing information about all the web pages, pictures, images, and videos on your website. 

There are two distinct types of sitemaps, HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps. 

An HTML sitemap is a series of hyperlinks to help users navigate your website. You tend to see them at the very bottom of websites, where there’s an archive of hyperlinks – typically in different categories like Company, Products, and Resources (you can see our HTML sitemap at the bottom of our homepage). 

XML sitemaps, on the other hand, help search engines better navigate your website. An XML sitemap will let crawlers know how many pages your website has and exactly where to find them. That means you’ll have a much better chance of getting 100% of your web pages crawled & indexed. 

There are plenty of XML sitemap generators online that make creating one very easy. 

Once you have one ready, you need to manually upload it to Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools (if your SEO strategy includes Bing). 

If you aren’t already set up on GSC, check out our extensive guide on Google Search Console. 

Once you log in to GSC, go to Indexing > Sitemaps from the sidebar. From there, all you have to do is copy & paste the URL of your sitemap and hit submit, and Google will have full visibility of your web pages. 

It can’t be understated how necessary it is to take this step, as there’s no reason not to upload your sitemaps to ensure proper crawling & indexing takes place. 

Leaving a trail of breadcrumbs 

The ‘breadcrumbs’ style of navigation is excellent for SEO, as it adds more internal links to your category pages. 

Users also love breadcrumbs because they greatly simplify website navigation. 

How they work is akin to Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way back home. Whenever a user begins navigating pages on your website, a breadcrumb menu will provide a series of internal links at the top documenting their journey. 

Here’s an example of what a breadcrumb menu looks like:

Home > Resources > Learning Hub > Start Learning SEO 

As you can see, there’s a trail left behind for every page they visited before ‘Start Learning SEO.’ That way, if a user wants to navigate to a previous page, they can easily do so via the breadcrumbs menu. 

Your users aren’t the only ones who benefit from breadcrumbs, though, as bots and web crawlers also use them. 

However, for bots to make sense of your breadcrumb menus, you need to add structured data markup language to provide the proper context. 

If you aren’t sure how to add structured data to your website, check out our guide on local schema markup. 

Robots.txt files & noindex tags 

Any time a web robot crawls your website, it has to check your robots.txt file first – AKA the Robot Exclusion Protocol. 

What’s that?

It’s a file that gives the power to allow or not allow certain web robots to crawl your website. You can even control whether the bots can access certain web pages or not, which will help you allocate your crawl budget. 

There are certain web robots out there that have malicious intent, and they can start posting spam on your website if you aren’t careful. Luckily, you have the ability to ban these bots via a noindex robots meta tag. 

Then there are noindex tags that you can use on web pages that you don’t want search engines to crawl & index. 

Since you have a crawl budget, you don’t want to waste it on crawling pages that add no value to your SEO profile. 

Which types of pages are worth noindex tags?

Here are a few common examples:

• Thank You pages 
• Login pages 
• Author archives 
• Attachment pages 
• Admin pages 
• Community profile pages 

There’s no benefit in generating organic traffic to these types of pages, which is why it’s best to use noindex tags to preserve your crawl budget for more important pages (blogs, videos, podcasts, and infographics). 

Canonical tags 

Duplicate content is a huge no-no for SEO, as there’s no faster way to confuse web crawlers than by having two near-identical pages. 

However, that poses an interesting conundrum for eCommerce website owners, as duplicate content is almost inevitable. 

That’s because it’s common to have multiple pages for slightly different versions of the same product. As an example, say you sell cowboy hats online that are available in 10 different colors. 

Well, you’ll need to create 10 pages for each hat, and those pages will be duplicates of each other except for one minute detail – the color of the hat. 

In these types of situations, you need to use canonical URLs or canon tags. 

Here’s the way they work; you set a canon tag on the primary version of the cowboy hat (i.e., the one with default settings). That lets search engines know that it’s the ‘canon’ version of the product that they should crawl & index, all while ignoring the other variations. 

That’ll help you avoid duplicate pages while still having unique URLs for each color & size of your cowboy hats. 

Optimizing page speed 

Next, your site speed is a huge part of technical SEO, so you need to make sure it’s up to par. 

Google takes page speed & responsiveness extremely seriously, which is why they developed the Core Web Vitals test that they run on every website. If you don’t pass the test, you won’t show up in the SERPs. 

How can you practice for the test?

PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that will help you diagnose loading speed issues on your website. 

Beyond that, here are some candid tips for improving your site’s loading times:

• Compressing & optimizing images
• Reduce the number of redirects you have
• Enable browser caching 
• Cache your web pages
• Clean up messy Javascript & CSS
• Get rid of unnecessary plugins 

Once your page speed is lightning-fast, you’ll pass Google’s test, and your users will enjoy a faster, better experience. 

Finding and resolving indexing issues

Lastly, you need to discover if your website has any indexing problems that are holding it back. 

What’s the best tool for finding indexing errors?

You guessed it, Google Search Console. 

After all, Google’s the #1 search engine online, and GSC will let you know if there are any issues with indexing your web pages. 

From the homepage, navigate to the Coverage Report to see if there are any indexing issues that you need to address. Common problems include:

• Soft 404s (301 redirects will fix)
• Redirect errors 
• Unauthorized request 401 (usually password-protected pages that you should noindex)
• Blocked due to 4xx issue 

Google’s URL Inspection Tool is excellent at fixing these common issues, so don’t hesitate to use it. 

Final Thoughts: Technical SEO in 2023 

By now, you should have a better understanding of what technical SEO is, why it matters, and why you can’t do without it. 

A rock-solid technical SEO strategy is required to achieve top SERP rankings, so you shouldn’t neglect it. 

Do you need help with the technical SEO at your company?

Then we’d love to help you at The HOTH, so don’t wait to check out our in-depth managed technical SEO services today.      

The post Technical SEO in 2023: Why it Still Matters & How to Perfect It  appeared first on The HOTH.

One thing to note is the Top 3 URLs on the SERPs get 75.1% of user clicks. 

If your site doesn’t appear on the first page of search engine results pages (SERP), the chances of people finding it are slim to none. 

One solution is using long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords change how search engines like Google respond.  

Below, we’ll look at how long-tail keywords work and why they are important to your SEO. Lastly, how you should use them in your content marketing for excellent results. 

Let’s get started!

What Are Long-tail Keywords, and Why are They Important for SEO?

Long-tail Keywords are exact search terms and rank better and bring in more combined traffic. 

They attract quality leads and generate a higher conversion rate than short-tail keywords. Searchers use them to get more specific results. 

Plus, they often have a very attractive (i.e., low) search volume.

So, what exactly are long-tail keywords, and how do they improve search volume? 

Generally speaking, long-tail keywords are specific phrases of 3 or more words relevant to certain niches. 

Here are some examples:

• Stainless steel, double-wide toaster for bagels
• Running shoes for people with wide feet
• SEO services for start-up organizations

Long-tail keywords have lower competition

Long-tail keywords are typically easier to target due to less competition. 

For example, long-tail search terms usually have lower traffic volume potential. This can lead to higher search volume and conversion rates from your content marketing and search terms.

By targeting long-tail keywords, you’ll rank faster. Also, you’ll see similar total traffic levels as head keywords.

Long-tail keywords drive overall traffic to a website, landing page, or other online content. They also have a higher conversion rate than other search terms.

For example, long-tail keywords achieve up to 2.5 times higher conversion rates than short-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords increase the effectiveness of your blogging strategy. 

They improve the SEO of your content marketing and help your rank high on search engine results. 

How? 

By adding relevance and context to your content. They also help you get closer to that all-important first page on Google with every piece of content you publish.

Plus, long-tail keywords appeal to voice-assisted searches. 

This search type is becoming more popular thanks to voice-assisted devices like Siri and Alexa.

In short, long-tail keywords are a significant traffic source when doing keyword research. Plus, searchers now use voice assist, increasing the use of long-tail keywords significantly. 

Why not make long-tail keywords work harder for you? 

Here’s how:

How to Find Long-tail Keywords

Keyword tools are fantastic for finding long-tail keywords in bulk and optimizing your content and search volume. 

If you need quick data on potential keywords for content and search volume, go straight to the source: Google. 

Using Google’s auto-suggest features, you can uncover some incredible data.

Start with a list of “seed keywords.” These search terms reflect how your competitors and customers talk about your products or services. 

The HOTH’s free tool keyword extraction checker can help you gather a list of different keywords used by your competitors.

Next, type each seed keyword into the Google search box and note the automated suggestions. 

These will show the most popular terms that use the beginning parts of the phrase you entered.

Then, for each search, scroll to the bottom of the search results and take note of related search suggestions. You can add these to your long-tail keywords list while doing your keyword research.

Here’s a great tip; plug these new long-tail phrases into a keyword tool to double-check keyword data for more specific traffic metrics. 

Alternatively, you can use Google Keyword Planner on AdWords. 

Use Keyword Research Tools to Find the Long-tail Keywords that Work Best

If you want to take your keyword research a step further, use keyword research tools. These include Ubersuggest, Keyword Tool, and Answer the Public. 

All provide additional ideas and search queries. Keyword research tools are an excellent way to perform keyword research on different keyword phrases. 

They can positively affect your SEO, conversion rates, and every piece of content you create. Additionally, they boost your search traffic, conversation rates, and overall user experience. 

Answer the Public, and Ubersuggest can also help generate topic ideas. If you don’t have pages that correspond to existing keywords, you can use these new keywords to generate more content.

With Answer the Public, you can discover challenging variations of your keywords. That includes both short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. 

Using visualization for data, you can see common questions related to your topic that you can address with blog content, optimizing the SEO on every piece of content you create.

You can also get ahead of your digital marketing competition by keeping an eye on up-and-coming keywords that reflect trends in your industry. 

Use keyword research tools like Google Trends to spot trending topics. 

Then, create content or offers before others by comparing search trends, predicting seasonal peaks, and identifying opportunities for reactive content.

Google Trends is key for tapping into more viral topics and connecting them to your niche. It’s a great tool for improving search volume and bringing more online searchers to your virtual door.

How To Incorporate Long tail Keywords into Your Content Strategy

Instead of jamming every long-tail keyword into a limited number of web pages, you can use this list of keywords to increase your content marketing strategy.

Publishing new content marketing keeps your website and landing pages on search engine radar. 

Each unique piece of content allows you to rank for a specific long-tail keyword.

Don’t look at long-tail keywords as more work. 

Think of them as more opportunities. Searchers on Google will help your conversion rates and get you closer to Google’s first page. 

Related keywords in every piece of content will help your SEO strategy. (Even if they aren’t super competitive keywords.)

Here’s how to integrate long-tail keywords into your content strategy:

1. Clearly state your objectives and goals

Clarifying the goal for each piece of content you publish will help you determine the search intent (more on that below). 

Also, the correct long-tail keyword to rank for.

The objective of every piece of content should align with your organizational and marketing goals. That will provide the best results on Google search and other search engines. 

Here are some excellent examples: 

• Educate searchers about their challenges and how to overcome them.
• Attract searchers with usable, real-world information that helps solve an issue or challenge.
• Drive high-quality leads to your website with search terms that align with searchers‘ needs, wants, and desires.
• Move searchers through the sales funnel with engaging, persuasive content geared towards their ultimate goal.

Each piece of content should serve a direct purpose and influence your SERP. Content creation for the sake of content creation is worthless. 

When the searcher is finished, they haven’t gained anything of value.

2. Align your long-tail keywords with search intent

The search intent behind any particular long-tail or short-tail keyword is just as important as the keyword itself. 

The keywords should appear in a context that addresses your visitors’ needs, wants, or desires. 

When they do, the page is more likely to rank high on search engines and improve your SEO and SERP.

Intent-based optimization identifies topics and questions your customers want to know about. 

They will search using a specific long-tail keyword. This fact helps you create content that meets their needs, which is what every searcher is looking for.

There are several types of search intent, including informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial. 

Your landing page’s objective should match the keywords’ search intent to drive traffic. Start with your top landing pages to get a good grasp of your visitors’ search intent.

Find out why searchers landed on a page, what they were searching for, and what answers they hoped to find.

Time on-site is a great metric to see if your content matches your intent. This analysis assesses the relevance of your long-tail keywords. A longer time on-site indicates you’re keeping searchers interested.

Next, identify keywords you should optimize to provide useful content and increase conversion rates. You’ll deliver a relevant user experience with every piece of content you create.

If you’re struggling with search intent, simply Google the corresponding keywords to those you’re targeting. Then, scan the top related searches. 

Look closely at the big-name brands targeting these queries to get ideas about intent.

How to Use Long-tail Keywords for E-commerce

SEO for e-commerce websites presents more opportunities. The objective is to drive quality traffic. Plus, find searchers ready to make a purchase and take advantage of how your target prospects are searching.

Here’s how long-tail keywords can help improve your e-commerce SEO:

1. Descriptive Phrases

Searchers looking for a specific item are more likely to make a purchase. They use longer and more descriptive long-tail keywords, like “green running shoes for women.”

The depth of their search terms shows that they aren’t new to this research. These searchers are, in many cases, much further along the buyer’s journey than someone searching for a basic term like “workout shoes.”

That’s precisely why descriptive long-tail keywords capture high-quality traffic better than short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords better describe your products or services.

That takes us to another keyword research tool; surveys and social listening. Using both, you can get direct insight into consumers’ exact searches rather than generic keyword ideas and search terms.

Here’s how; The on-site search terms report in Google Analytics. These on-site terms provide easy wins when suggesting products that users commonly search for and the search terms they use to find them.

You’ll discover long-tail keywords and search terms you haven’t been using in your pieces of content. Start using them to improve your SEO and conversion rates and reach the first page on search engines.

2. Commercial Intent

Search engine algorithms take intent into account. Because of this, you want to inform visitors they can purchase products or services from your website.

Focus on using keywords with commercial intent on your e-commerce product pages, such as:

• “Buy now” keywords (e.g., coupon, discount, deals)
• Product keywords (e.g., review, best, specific product, or brand name)
• Informational keywords (e.g., how to, ways to, when to, etc.)
• Tire kicker keywords (e.g., free, no charge, BOGO)

3. Landing Pages

It pays to consider the entire customer journey. An incohesive user experience can increase your bounce rate and hurt your SEO and search volume. 

Create content or product pages around long-tail keywords and phrases. 

Select a landing page with the most relevant product or content your keywords are ranking for. 

Your content marketing will deliver a coherent user experience and increase your conversion rate.

Give the searcher precisely what they ask for, always. They will reward you with sales, loyalty, and repeat sales.

What are the Benefits of long-tail Keywords in SEO?

As mentioned, long-tail keywords are composed of many words, which generally makes them more specific keywords to search results. Instead of heavily saturated popular keywords, use more targeted phrases to find the right people. 

This means that both you and your audience generally get a better experience. Your brand gets traffic from the right audience, and your target audience is happy because they found what they’re looking for. 

This also improves the ability to effectively bring new customers into each stage of the buyer’s journey. 

There are several benefits to using long-keyword suggestions:

• They’re more specific, although they usually have fewer monthly searches.
• They have lower search volume and competition.
• They increase your rank on SERPs.
• They have higher conversion rates.
• They improve the visibility of your online content,
• They can improve the ranking on your pages quickly.
• They can optimize your SEO and blog strategy.
• They allow for more personalized content with higher intent.
• They help your organization prepare for future trends.
• They’re more popular using AI-assisted voice search.

Let’s Wrap it Up!

It’s not impossible to rank high on search engines, find excellent search terms and improve the SEO and results of your content marketing.

With the correct long-tail keyword strategy, you can improve your SEO, help searchers find you, and move closer to that all-powerful first page. 

Visit The HOTH and schedule a talk with an SEO expert today! 

Our SEO specialists can provide up-to-date, actionable advice on finding, using, and profiting from long-tail keywords. 

The post How to Get Ahead in SEO Using Long-tail Keywords appeared first on The HOTH.

No matter how fancy your website looks, without SEO no one will find it. 

SEO allows your website to appear in relevant search results and drives customers to your business for free. 

The remaining article will cover how to do SEO for a new website and other helpful tips and tricks to get you started. 

Ready to boost your traffic? Keep scrolling!

How to Do SEO for a New Website 

You should begin your SEO efforts as soon as possible, and that process starts with your domain name. 

Think of it as your very own slice of online real estate. It’s going to shape how customers find you, and also the credibility of your brand moving forward.

For that reason, there are a few key factors to keep in mind before selecting and securing the right domain for you.

A good website should be easy to search for. This means it needs to be:

• Short
• Memorable
• Use a .com
• Use keywords in your domain
• Make it easy to pronounce and spell
• Keep it unique 
• Avoid hyphens
• Don’t use double letters

Aim for a domain name that relates to what you do or sell, with little to no punctuation getting in the way.

Here are a few other tips for new website SEO suggestions: 

Make it crawler-friendly

Despite domain keywords not being as important today as they once were, domain names still count as a valuable ranking factor.

Search engines like Google and Bing have crawlers that will analyze your domain name to gauge what your site is about. 

For this reason, it’s a good idea to include your primary keyword in your name.

If you’re unsure about your target keywords at this point, a quick search on a free keyword planner tool can help you out.

However, try not to overload your domain name with several target keywords as this appears spammy to search algorithms and is often referred to as “keyword stuffing”.

Strive for brand authority

Not only will a keyword-heavy domain name like “keyword-keyword.com” look spammy to search engine crawlers, but it also looks untrustworthy to potential customers. 

Internet users are scam-savvy, and anything other than “yourcompanyname.com” can ring alarm bells. 

Choosing a domain name that is solid, credible, and trustworthy will provide the perfect foundation to build brand authority online. 

And the more brand authority you have online, the higher search engines will rank you.

An easy way of finding domain name ideas is to run a few searches on a domain checker. 

This will tell you if your company name is available as a domain, and provide other formats and ideas if it is not. 

You could also try using a free domain authority checker tool to see how your competitors’ domains are performing. The domain names of top-performing sites could influence your choice. 

Technical SEO

The next key step in making your new site search engine optimized is setting it up in a way that is easy for search engine bots to crawl. 

This is called “technical SEO”.

Search engine algorithms prefer to rank websites that fulfill certain technical criteria, as it ensures they are recommending the most user-friendly sites to browsers.

When you are in the process of setting up a new site, it’s the perfect time to make sure you’re ticking all of the following boxes:

Pagespeed

Pagespeed is essential.

In fact, 53% of web browsers leave pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load.

And a mere second delay has been shown to reduce page views by 11%.

Not only does a slow website produce fewer page views, but Google’s crawlers also have a limited amount of time to spend analyzing each website. 

As a result, faster loading sites will always rank higher in searches. 

There are several easy ways that you can boost your site’s pagespeed, including:

• Make sure you are using a fast DNS (domain name system)
• If you are building your site on WordPress, you can try to limit the number of plugins you use
• Use smaller image files without compromising on quality and user experience
• Compress your site’s web pages

Friendly for mobile devices

Google has stated that 79% of people say that they are more likely to revisit or share a mobile site if it is easy to use. 

Therefore, having a mobile-friendly site is an important ranking factor in the Google algorithm.

Ensuring that your website features a “responsive” design means that it will automatically adjust the user experience to best suit those browsing on a desktop, mobile, or tablet.

Map out your web pages

The architecture of your website not only makes it easier for customers to find their way around but also makes it easier for crawlers to index your site.

Before you start building your website, or before you finalize and publish it, sketch out a site map that includes all relevant web pages.

The core pages on any website will be the homepage, the contact page, the about page, a page for services, as well as any individual service pages you might need. 

It’s also a great idea to include a blog page so that you can publish more content that boosts your SEO.

All of these core pages should be easily accessible via your main menu. You can then opt to include another menu in your site’s footer that adds to the user navigation process.

Planning your menu and page structure ahead of time will help you organize your site’s content in the most user and bot-friendly way.

Once your site is ready, use a sitemap generator to create an XML sitemap. 

This provides search engines with the valuable information they need to index each page, as we’ll explain in the next step.

Register with Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that allows you to submit your website to be indexed by the search engine. Bing also offers a similar tool called Bing Webmaster Tools. 

Once your site is complete and published, submit your XML sitemap to both of these tools so that they can index your pages and start displaying you in their search results.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the words and phrases that browsers enter into search engines, so incorporating the right ones into your website content will help you appear in relevant search results.

Keyword research helps you find the right keywords for your site. It tells you exactly what your target audience is searching for, and any relevant questions they have that you could answer.

It also tells you the keywords that are searched the most, the terms that are easiest to rank for, and some tools even show you the keywords that your competitors are ranking for.

We’re going to dig into our top 3 free keyword research tools on the web and explain how to use them. 

Then we’ll follow up with how to do SEO for a new website and how to find the most useful keywords.

How to do SEO for a new website using keywords

Your keyword research tools will have provided a variety of key terms, phrases, and long-tail keywords. 

And each one will be paired with data on search volume and competition.

You can then use this data to locate keywords that will help you rank higher on Google. 

An ideal keyword would have a high search volume paired with low competition, but unless you’re running a very valuable niche this probably won’t be an option.

However, you can locate easy and valuable keywords to target by:

• Ignoring key search terms that have little to no search volume
• Prioritizing relevant keywords that have low competition

However, you may want to take a look at Google Trends to see if any terms with a lower search volume are projected to rise in popularity in the future.

If your keyword research reveals a low competition term, try running a Google search to see how many sites have relevant and up-to-date articles for that term. 

If there are less than 5 pages battling it out, you have an opportunity to win a top ranking by default.

All of the above keyword SEO tools will provide you with the appropriate target keywords for your on-page SEO. 

Now, let’s get into how to write and format a website that search engines will love.

The HOTH Google Keyword Planner Tool

We can’t help but begin this list with a shameless plug for our own tool – and why not?

It’s a totally free, easy-to-use tool powered by Semrush, and we wouldn’t be recommending it if we didn’t believe it was one of the best on the market.

To use our tool, simply enter any keyword or phrase related to your website/business into the search bar. 

Hit the button that says “view keyword research” to reveal high-volume relevant keywords and phrases related to the subject of your site.

You can then use this list and relevant data to decipher a primary keyword to begin targeting, in addition to long-tail keywords that will help draw searchers to your site. 

Your search will reveal a list of key terms and phrases in order of the highest search volume. 

You’ll also see the cost per click (CPC) for each term, level of competition, number of results, as well as the search trend.

When choosing your main keyword, you will want to look for a balance between relevance to your business, high search volume, and low competition.

Unless you’re setting up an especially niche site, there will probably be a certain degree of compromise here.

Google Keyword Planner

If you already have a Google Ads account, the search engine’s keyword planner is free to use and can be helpful for guiding your keyword research. 

The tool has been designed to inform your PPC campaigns, but it also offers valuable insights into search trends and competition.

Using Google’s Keyword Planner is a fairly similar process to the other tools mentioned on this list. 

You simply enter one or several keywords related to your website, and your search will reveal relevant key terms and data. 

Wordstream’s Free Keyword Tool

The unique thing about this free tool from Wordstream is that it offers strategic advice. 

It is also an especially handy tool for PPC research if you decide to reinforce your SEO efforts with paid marketing.

To begin, you can enter either a keyword or a URL to reveal a list of key term suggestions. 

Every term includes the cost per click for both Bing and Google, search volume, and competition. 

They offer 24 industry verticals to filter your search by, in addition to 23 countries.

On-Page SEO for a New Website

How to do SEO for a new website involves on-page SEO practices of optimizing your web pages so that they rank better on search engines. 

You will need to use the keywords you found in step 3 in order to make the following elements more Google-friendly:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• HTML code
• URL structure
• Images
• Page content
• Internal linking

Optimizing each of these aspects of your web pages will allow Google’s crawlers to better understand what your pages are about so that they can rank you in the most appropriate search queries. 

Consequently, you’ll end up with organic traffic from the warmest leads.

We’ll guide you through optimizing each of these on-page elements:

Title tags and headings

Your title tag is the page title of your web page in an HTML format.  

This title tag will appear as a clickable headline in search engine results pages, so you will want it to be a short, snappy, and accurate description of your page’s content. 

Depending on your content management system or website builder, you may sometimes see title tags referred to as “meta title tags”.

When crafting your title tags you will want to ensure that they are the right length. 

Google has a 600-pixel width limit, so we recommend keeping your title under 60 characters. 

For SEO purposes, it is also a good idea to place your keyword or phrase as close to the start of your title as possible.

You can use our free title tag generator to create optimized header ideas. 

Once you have your title tag, you can go ahead and build the content for that specific page. 

In which case, there are certain HTML tags you should be using for headings throughout the page:

• The primary title should use the H1 tag.
• Secondary headings should all use the H2 tags.
• And any other subheadings should use H3 and H4 tags accordingly.

Meta Description

The meta description is the little preview snippet that will appear below your clickable headline in Google search results. 

Just like the title tag, search engines have some guidelines that will help you optimize these snippets.

• Make sure your snippet is around 155 characters
• Use your focus keyword, and some synonyms where possible
• Make sure it concisely summarizes the content on the web page

Meta descriptions are important as they will help you generate click-throughs to your page. 

Although Google is not actively crawling meta descriptions to decide where they rank you in searches, they do measure click-through rate.

URL Structure

The URL is the web address that provides access to a web page. 

URLs matter for website SEO because they tell Google exactly what your page is about, and they also affect the user experience.

You will want to ensure that every page on your website has a simple and logical URL slug.

Sometimes website builders can automatically generate a URL that’s just a bunch of numbers. 

This tells Google nothing about the web page and they will struggle to rank it in their search results. 

Simply change this slug to use one or two words, and if that includes a keyword – even better!

For instance, your about page URL should be: 

• yourcompany.com/about

Once you have some blog posts on your site, these will also need a special slug too. The best way to do this is by using hyphens.

For instance, if you had a blog post titled “SEO: 8 Steps To Optimize A New Site”. 

You may want to use a URL like: youcompany.com/blog/seo-for-new-site

Images

Images are a huge part of the user experience, as many browsers will be intimidated by a wall of text on a web page. 

Images are key for quality content, but only if they are relevant and helpful. 

However, for SEO purposes there are a few other factors to consider when uploading images to a page. 

• Reduce the file size to ensure images load quickly.
• Use alt text tags to tell Google what the image is about – include a relevant key term.
• Give your images titles and file names with relevant keywords.

Page Content

When writing new content for a web page, you will want to ensure you utilize your keywords from step 3.

To decide how to best use the results of your keyword research, you might want to begin by dividing them into groups based on each web page on your site map. 

Every page should have a target keyword, as well as a range of related keywords, long-tail keywords, questions, and synonyms. 

You will want to use all of these terms wisely in your page content. 

For every web page, you will want to begin by mentioning your target keyword in the first paragraph. 

This not only makes the page’s purpose immediately clear to visitors but also to search engines looking to decipher your site rank. 

Furthermore, build out a plan for each page’s content before writing, taking care to plan each section and header. 

Then you can make sure that your relevant related keywords feature in H2 tags where possible. 

Outbound and internal linking

Lastly, when planning and writing your page content you should be sure to include outbound and internal linking. 

Outbound links are links in your content that lead to pages on another website. Whereas internal links are links to other relevant pages on your own website. 

Both of these are important in organic search optimization as they provide Google with more information about the subject of your page. 

Internal links make your site more crawler-friendly, and they are really easy to implement into your content. 

If you mention a product or service, pair the relevant anchor text with a hyperlink to the appropriate page. Every page on your site should be linked to several other pages on your site.

Outbound links provide you with an opportunity to link to high-quality and high-authority sources. This can help reinforce your own authority and trustworthiness.

Develop A Content Marketing Plan

No digital marketing strategy is complete without a content marketing plan. Remember when we told you to make sure there is a blog page on your new site? Now is the time to use it!

If you are a small business without a large online marketing budget, content marketing provides a low-cost way to attract organic traffic and warm leads to your business. 

Furthermore, when you plan your content ahead of time – it’s pretty pain-free too!

Boost organic traffic with a content calendar

Securing a content marketing plan before your site’s launch ensures that you will be continuing to boost your SEO efforts, rising through the ranks and attracting more of your target audience.

You already dabbled in SEO writing when you wrote your on-page content. 

However, these pages like the “homepage”, “about us”, and “services” page are permanent to your site. 

Blog content allows you to target all of those specific keywords, phrases, and questions that you haven’t been able to use yet. 

Additionally, blog content provides an opportunity to regularly expand your website’s content and increase your organic traffic.

Most bloggers aim to publish a new search engine optimized blog every week. 

You can put together a basic content calendar for every month of the year, ensuring you’re always working a month in advance. 

Every week should have a topic, a title, and a target keyword to begin with.

If you are a plumbing and heating business your keyword research may have revealed search queries about pricing, repairs, and certain products. 

In which case, you can sketch out an article title that answers these search queries.

Then go back to your chosen keyword research tool and search for your new focus keyword. 

This will reveal an array of related key terms and phrases to also include in your content. 

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO refers to factors outside of your own website that impacts your search engine performance. These factors include:

• Backlinks
• Anchor text
• Link equity

These factors help inform search engines of your site’s authority, authenticity, and relevance.  

The core of any off-site SEO strategy is link building or backlinks, which are links from other sites that lead to your web pages. 

The more authority a website accumulates, the more sites will naturally link to them as a resource. 

It can feel challenging to accumulate links as a new website, but we’ve put together a list of methods to receive low-hanging, easy-to-access links.

Link building for a new site

Securing a few quality backlinks from high authority sites can provide you with the fast track you need to rise through the search results ranks. In theory, this is easy to do. 

You simply have to ask a relevant site for the backlink. 

However, you have to understand that a lot of these backlink requests will be ignored. 

Some easy ways to begin your link-building portfolio include: 

• Ask your suppliers and manufacturers
• Ask relevant colleagues, business partners, friends, and family.
• See if your college has an alumni list complete with website links.
• Industry directories online.
• Look for relevant broken links.
• Submit guest posts.
• Contribute to crowdsourced posts.
• Ask bloggers for product reviews.
• Look for micro-influencers on social media.

Analytics

An SEO strategy is worthless if you can’t track the results. So get ahead of the game and learn all about analytics before your site gets off the ground. 

There are a variety of SEO analytics tools available on the market, some paid and some free. However, the best place to start is with Google’s own analytics tool. 

Getting started with Google Analytics

First, you’ll need to make sure that you are signed up and have an account with Google Analytics that’s paired to your website. 

Once your website is up and running you will be able to see all kinds of metrics about your site’s traffic. Including:

• Organic and paid traffic.
• Where you are acquiring site visitors from.
• Website visitor behavior.
• Where website visitors are located.
• How much time do users spend on your web pages?
• Bounce rate.

You can then utilize this information to enhance your website. 

For instance, if users are spending more time on one specific type of content you can add more content like this to your site. 

Check your domain metrics

A free domain authority checker tool can help you check and track key SEO metrics for your website. 

You will be able to see an overview of organic traffic to your site, as well as the strength of specific pages compared to others. 

You can also use this tool to compare a page on your website to a similar page on a competitor’s site. 

All of these factors can show you where you need to improve in order to perform better in search engine results.

Takeaways

Search engine optimization is a never-ending process as search engines continue to update their algorithms all of the time. 

If you need help getting your new website to rank, give us a call today!

The post How to Do SEO for a New Website 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.

For example, if one of your pages isn’t indexed, it won’t show up in the Google search results. 

In other words, your page is invisible to Google – and you’re getting zero SEO value from it. 

That’s why Google Search Console is such an invaluable tool. One of its key features will let you know if Google ran into any errors when attempting to crawl and index your site. 

As a result, you’ll be able to instantly identify any pages that aren’t indexed so you can fix the crawl issue (or another type of error).

Beyond that, GSC provides detailed reports and analytics on how your website is performing organically. That’s powerful information to have – as it lets you measure how effective your SEO tactics are, according to Google.  

That’s why I put together this extensive guide for identifying and resolving Google Search Console errors. Read on to learn how to use the index coverage report to resolve problems and improve your overall SEO strategy.

Understanding Google’s Indexing Process

In order for your website to show up on search engine results pages (SERPs), it must go through the following three processes:

Discovering 

Before Google can crawl and index your site, it has to discover it first. The most common way to discover a website is to process its XML sitemap. Google can also follow on and off-site links to discover websites, as well as other methods. 

Besides indexing errors, issues can arise during the discovery process as well. The good news is you can upload your XML sitemap to GSC to ensure it discovers your site. 

Crawling 

Once Google discovers the site, it’s in the queue for crawling. During a crawl, Googlebot will gather the metadata, title tags, alt tags, and more for the indexing process. Once the crawl is complete, it will request indexing. 

Indexing 

This is the last phase of the process, and it’s where Googlebot attempts to make sense of the information from the crawling phase. In other words, the indexer will determine how relevant the content is for a search query. 

As you can see, your website MUST make it past the indexing phase for it to show up on search engines. Errors can occur during each phase, so it’s critical to familiarize yourself with GSC’s error reports. 

Too technical? Check out HOTH Technical SEO. 

The Basics of Google Search Console 

Now that you know why GSC is such a powerful SEO tool – it’s time to learn how to use it. Before you can dive into its numerous features, you’ll need to verify ownership of your website within GSC. Otherwise, the Console won’t know which domains you own – so it won’t have any analytics to show you. 

Also, you’ll want to claim ownership of all your domains and subdomains. That includes all the different variations of your domain, such as:

• http://yourwebsite.com
• https://yourwebsite.com
• http://www.yourwebsite.com
• https://www.yourwebsite.com
• Any other subdomains that don’t contain ‘www’ (i.e., blog.yourwebsite.com)

Google will treat each of these variations as a separate website – which is why it’s imperative to claim ownership of them all. If you forget even one of them, you’ll miss out on crucial reports and data for it. 

To verify ownership, you’ll need to head to your website’s verification settings page. If you use Yoast SEO on WordPress, you can easily verify your website by using an HTML tag. To do so, head to the Verify Ownership page on GSC. That’s where you’ll find the HTML tag, so make sure to copy it. 
Inside WordPress, open the Yoast SEO plugin and paste the code into the ‘Google Verification Code’ text box in the ‘Webmaster Tools’ tab. 

The performance tab 

Now that you’ve verified ownership of your domains, you can now use the Performance Tab to view your analytics. In it, you’ll be able to clearly see which keywords you’re ranking for on Google. There’s also a myriad of other helpful information and metrics, such as:

Number of clicks 

This metric lets you know how many people actually clicked on your website through Google’s SERPs. If your number of clicks is low – it can be a sign that your title tags and meta descriptions need some work. If users aren’t clicking on them, they aren’t enticing enough to warrant a click. 

Total impressions 

What’s an impression? It’s whenever your website pops up in the results for a given keyword. An example would be if you sell guitars and your website shows up for the keyword ‘guitar sales.’ That would be considered an ‘impression,’ and this metric measures how many you receive. 

Average CTR (click-through rate) 

Your click-through rate refers to the number of times that you showed up in a search and a user clicked through to your web page. In general, higher rankings translate to higher click-through rates. If you want to strengthen your CTR, try rewriting your title tag and meta description to make them more appealing (you can try including a call-to-action, for example). 

Average position

This refers to the average ranking position you had for a particular keyword or page. Yet, this tends to be the most unreliable metric of the bunch – as it can vary heavily from user to user. At the same time, it’s a useful metric to gauge if the other three metrics are accurately reflecting your position. 

The performance tab will be your go-to when measuring the success of your SEO efforts. Measuring, analyzing, and tweaking your results through GSC can bolster your digital marketing strategy – so it’s a tool well worth your while.

Index coverage tab and reports

Remember, your pages won’t bring you any SEO value if they aren’t indexed by Google. To make sure that Google has indexed each submitted URL, you can head over to the Index Coverage Tab. 

This page will let you know how many of your pages are in Google’s index since the latest update, how many are not, and if any errors occurred during indexing. 

Note: You’ll want to view the Index Coverage Report for not only the primary version of your website but all its versions as well. (i.e., the domain variations we listed before, such as http://www.yourwebsite.com)

To keep it simple, we’ll focus on troubleshooting the primary version of your website for now. 

To run the report, pull up the Index Coverage Tab first. You’ll see a dashboard containing your index coverage, performance search results, and more. Scroll to the Index Coverage graph, and click on Open Report in the top-right hand corner. 

From here, you’ll be able to discover common Google Search Console errors, indexing issues, coverage issues, and other types of problems. It’s also where you’ll be able to do maintenance to resolve and prevent these errors. The report breaks issues down into four different categories:

• Errors. This is where GSC will notify you of any major problems that took place during the discovery, crawling, and indexing process. 
• Valid. These pages were indexed with no problems.
• Valid with warnings. The pages were indexed, but there are a few issues that you should look at. 
• Excluded. Pages that were not indexed because they were set to noindex. Examples of pages that you want to leave out of the indexing process include admin pages, thank you pages, author archives, and more. In other words, you should noindex pages that you don’t want to drive traffic to. 

You’ll want to pay the most attention to the Errors category, as it contains problems with important pages that you wanted to get indexed but weren’t. There are many types of errors that can occur, including:

• Server errors (5xx)
• Redirect errors
• Blocked by robots.txt file 
• Marked ‘noindex’ 
• Soft 404 errors 
• 404 Not Found

Let’s dive into each issue to discover why they occur, how to fix them, and how to prevent them from happening again in the future. 

Server Errors (5xx) 

There are a few different types of server errors – but the most common is that your server took too long to respond. When a Googlebot crawls a website, it only waits for a set period of time for the server to load. If it’s taking too long, the Googlebot will give up, and the request will time out. Since the bot can’t crawl the site, it won’t get indexed, either. 

People often confuse server errors with DNS (Domain Name System) errors. 

A DNS error means the bot can’t even look up your URL in the first place, making it a discovery error, not a crawling one. 

Server errors take place during the crawling phase. Google can discover your URL, but the server fails to load in time for the bot to crawl it. Whenever a problem with the server occurs, it will show up as 5xx on the GSC.

What’s that mean?

5xx refers to any HTTP code that begins with 5. GSC uses 5xx to represent 500, 502, and 503 errors, among others, but they’re the most common. Here’s what each error code means:

• 500: Internal Server Error. For whatever reason, technical issues are causing the server to delay processing the request. It could be a coding error in the CMS, improper PHP code, or a thousand other reasons. 

• 502: Bad Gateway. You’ll get a 502 whenever the request is delayed due to an upstream service not responding. This upstream service could be running on the same machine or another machine. Regardless, something is causing it to malfunction and not respond within time. If you get a 502, it may be due to a problem with your WordPress CMS. 
• 503: Service Unavailable. If your server is too busy or is down for maintenance, you’ll get a 503 error. It means that the server is temporarily unavailable, but will be back later. If your server is contending with a heavy amount of traffic, it may trigger a 503 error if a bot is trying to crawl your website. 

Those are by no means the only error codes starting with 5 (there are PLENTY more), but these tend to be the most prevalent. 

How urgent is a server error?

If a server error pops up on GSC, you should strive to fix it as soon as possible. Server errors are incredibly urgent as they’re fundamental errors that will harm your site and negatively affect your search engine optimization. 

The first step is to ensure that Google can discover your website. As such, you should make sure that the Googlebot can connect to the DNS. Once you rule that out, you’ll know that you’re dealing with a server error occurring during the crawling phase. 

In addition to fixing server errors, you should put preventative measures in place to stop them from happening again. 

That’s because if server errors pop up on GSC, it’s a good sign that they’ve occurred before. If your website is running fine when they show up, it may have caused trouble in the past. That’s why you’ll want to make sure that they don’t happen again. 

How to fix server errors

Google has an official diagnostic to run to see if the search engine can crawl your website or not. It’s called Fetch as Google – a webmaster tool that you can use on the GSC. If it shoots back the content of your homepage (or another specific page) untouched, you know that Google can crawl your website without any issues. 

You’ll also want to diagnose the specific type of server error that you’re experiencing. For example, is it an internal server error or a bad gateway? Knowing this is imperative if you want to resolve the problem – so pay attention to the 5xx code you get from GSC. Here are a few methods to try to fix server errors:

• Refresh the page. The problem may be temporary, so a simple refresh may be all you need to do to fix it. 
• Clear the browser cache. This is another simple fix to try before you dive deeper into debugging your site. If it doesn’t work, you know something else is the culprit. 
• Check your CMS. There may be corrupted files in your WordPress (or other CMS) database. Try reinstalling plugins and themes, as well as reinstalling WordPress. You should also check your Javascript and CSS, as faulty lines of code may be causing your issues. 
• Check your PHP memory limit. Lastly, you may have exhausted your PHP memory limit – which can cause server issues. 

These are by no means the only fixes, but they should help you get started with diagnosing the issue. For additional help, you can consult the GSC help page to fix server errors. 

Redirect Errors

Sometimes Google runs into redirect errors with URLs. If you’ve redirected your URL more than a few times, this type of error can occur. The common causes of redirect errors include:

• A redirect loop. If you’ve used redirects for a while, you could have inadvertently created a redirect loop. That’s where redirects lead to other redirects and never point to a live URL. 
• The redirect chain was too long. Even if the redirects don’t loop, sometimes there are too many redirects in a row, and the Googlebot gives up. 
• A bad or empty URL in the chain. All it takes is one bad apple to ruin a redirect chain. If the bot comes across a bad URL or an empty one, that’s the end of that. The bot will give up and display a redirect error. 
• The redirect URL exceeded the max character length. A URL can’t be too long, or it will exceed the maximum length. If that happens, the bot won’t crawl the website. 

Since Google has so much content to crawl, it doesn’t mess around with lengthy redirects. The good news is that you can solve these issues by using a single redirect that goes to the final URL. You can also use a URL inspection tool to uncover and fix redirect errors. 

How to Fix Redirect Errors

To fix a redirect error, you’ll need to identify the original redirect and the final URL. There are various SEO tools out there that can help with this, such as SEO Minion. It will provide the entire redirect path for you to observe. That way, you can identify which area needs tweaking. 

Do your best to cut out the middle steps – as they’re likely what’s causing the redirect error. Instead, keep it simple with one redirect and one URL at the end. Once you’ve done that, run GSC’s Index Coverage Report again to see if the problem is gone. 

Blocked by Robots.txt File 

If this error pops up, it means Google could not retrieve your robots.txt file. 

What’s that?

A robots.txt file enables you to have page content that you do not want search engines to index. As stated before, there are numerous reasons why you wouldn’t want certain pages to show up on search engines. These are primarily admin pages that contain no value to readers and aren’t part of your SEO strategy. 

Note: You only need a robots.txt file if you have web pages that you don’t want to index. If you don’t have a problem with Google crawling and indexing every page on your site, you don’t need one. All that will happen is that Googlebot will index your entire website. That’s not a big deal for smaller sites, but larger sites often have pages that they want to keep secret with a noindex’ tag. 

If you have a robots.txt file, but Google cannot load it, this error will occur. It’s an urgent issue because your website won’t be crawled or indexed until you fix it. 

How to fix blocked by robots.txt file 

A reliable way to fix this issue is to use a robots.txt tester. It will let you know if there’s an issue with the file or not. Beyond using this tool, you’ll want to do a manual inspection to make sure that the file is properly configured. 

Go through the file and make sure that it’s not crawling any pages that you don’t want it to. 

Beyond that, you’ll want to look for one line of code in particular: ‘Disallow: /’. If you see it, eliminate it immediately. It should not be in your robots.txt file, as it will prohibit your website from showing up on Google. 

If you’re still experiencing issues and don’t know why it’s best to delete your robots.txt file for the time being. That’s because it’s better to go without a robots.txt file than have one that’s misconfigured. If you don’t have one, Google will crawl your website like normal. If you have one that’s not set up right – the crawling won’t take place until you resolve the issue. 

Marked ‘Noindex’ 

This is a common problem, but it’s also a relatively simple one to fix. What happens is you tell Google to crawl a page – but you don’t know or remember that the page has a noindex tag. In other words, you’re giving Google some seriously mixed signals. 

You may have noindexed pages by mistake as well. For example, an X-robots tag HTTP header response can noindex page. As such, these are more difficult to spot. 

To fix a URL marked as noindex, you need to remove the noindex directive or HTTP response. To discover which pages are marked as noindex, you can check your robots.txt file and HTTP responses. Once you remove the tag, the issue will resolve. So if you see a marked noindex error show up in your notifications, don’t panic. All you’ll need to do is remove the noindex tag, and you’ll be good to go. 

Soft 404 Errors

You’ve likely run across a 404 Not Found page during your time browsing the internet – but what’s a Soft 404? 

A Soft 404 occurs whenever a page displays 200 (which means found) but should display 404 (Not Found). In other words, the page says that it’s there, but it really isn’t. It’s a discrepancy that you won’t see on the content side of the page. All you’ll see (and users will see) is what appears to be a standard 404 Not Found page. 

Yet, on the crawler-visible side – it’s seeing a 200, not a 404 or 410 (which means gone). That’s what causes a ‘soft’ 404 error, and they can be very puzzling if you don’t know what causes them. It means the header HTTP does not return the 404 or 410 code in response to a non-existent page. 

If a page doesn’t exist, you should always return it with a 404 or 410. Fixing this issue is as simple as correcting the HTTP header code. 

Besides 200, a Soft 404 can occur due to a 301 redirect that points to non-related pages. An example would be a 301 redirect that sends you back to the homepage. So if you’re going to use 301 redirects, make sure that they’re for related content. If you use a ton of 301 redirects that point to the homepage, they’ll likely show up as Soft 404s.

The urgency of a Soft 404 depends on the pages it appears on. Pages that aren’t crucial to your operations that have Soft 404s aren’t very urgent. Yet, if Soft 404s show up on essential pages to your business, you’ll want to solve them ASAP. 

404 Not Found

You’ll see a 404 Not Found error whenever Google attempts to crawl a web page on your site that doesn’t exist. It finds these errors whenever other pages or sites link to a non-existent page. 

In Google’s Guidelines, they state that 404 pages on your site will not affect your ability to rank in the SERPs. 

Yet, that doesn’t mean that you should ignore them by any means. While a few 404s on non-essential pages won’t mean much, 404s on crucial pages will hurt your SEO. Also, sometimes 404 errors only show up on mobile devices such as smartphones. 

You’ll have a few options when dealing with 404 errors. If the page is of no relevance to your business, it’s ok to let it 404. If you’d rather redirect users to a relevant page, you can use a 301 redirect. 

You can also check your CMS to make sure that the page is indeed published and not only in draft mode. If it’s listed amongst your valid pages, then you’ll know something else is at foot. Also, make sure that the URL variation is correct for the 404. 

Concluding Thoughts: Common Google Search Console Errors

That’s a breakdown of the most prevalent crawl errors that may show up on GSC. Remember, to rank on search engines – you’ll need a Googlebot to be able to successfully discover, crawl, and index your site.

Numerous errors can occur at each of these phases, which is why GSC is such a useful tool. Remember to check the response code for each URL to make sure they add up. Also, you should test live URLs to make sure there are no redirect errors. 

As long as you keep a keen eye on the Index Coverage Tab and your valid URLs, you should be able to keep your domains running smoothly. That way, Google won’t have trouble crawling and indexing them, and your SEO efforts will get the chance to bear fruit. 

Do you want your domains to run error-free so you can generate the most traffic and revenue? If so, please don’t wait to schedule a call with our expert consultants. Our team can help you revolutionize the way you approach SEO. 

If you don’t have time to run your own strategy, we’ll take care of everything for you with our HOTH X fully-managed SEO services.  

The post Common Google Search Console Errors and How to Fix Them appeared first on The HOTH.

Would you like to be able to generate 100, or even 1000+ content ideas for blogs, articles, and social media posts in less than 3 minutes without doing a ton of hard work? 

This type of strategy can save you loads of time, effort, and money. It can also help you take over all the keywords in your industry strategically. 

How is this possible? Behold, the power of the content gap analysis! 

Let me explain:

What Is A Content Gap Analysis?

To make a difference you not only need a good content strategy, and high-quality, long-form content, but you also need to be able to point out the gaps of information that are missing from your content.

A content gap analysis is a process to discover content ideas that are missing from your website or piece of content. 

Essentially this process helps you find keywords that your competitors are ranking for that your website does not. This is the easiest way to find lots of ideas on what content to create next.

Here are some of the best practices for content gap analysis:

• Research Google’s first page 
• Use tools such as SEMrush or services like HOTH X 
• Perform a content audit

Most businesses or people who use any kind of SEO usually publish content with the goal of getting on Google’s first page. So, a good way of knowing what type of content gets you that rank is to research what is already there for your primary keywords. 

The HOTH has a tool that can help you with the content gap analysis process. It helps you find topics and gaps. To use it, just enter a competitor into the tool and you can see all the keywords they rank for that you don’t. 

You can then look at the first page for those keywords and search for content gaps that you could fill. 

Alternatively, if you’d like some help with performing a content gap analysis for your site (and creating the strategy, content, and ranking it), then you might be interested in our managed SEO service, HOTH X.

One of the best places to look for content gaps is within your own content. Content audits can show you which pieces of content on your website are underperforming. 

Here are some common content gaps you can optimize if you aren’t sure what to look for:

• Content freshness
• Thoroughness
• Usability
• Unanswered questions
• Buyer’s intent 

Check some of your content for these factors, and if they are missing, add them. You could create new content or even update your old content so it’s re-optimized to drive rankings. 

An Ahrefs case study suggests that only 5.7% of pages rank in the top 10 search results within a year of publication. That means not only does it take time to rank, but you need to analyze your content even a year after it’s been published. Optimizing old content (and new content) is an important step in content gap analysis.

Why Is Content Gap Analysis Important? 

Every day, potential customers are searching for answers to questions they have about your products or services. Wherever they are on the buyer’s journey, it’s important to understand your audience by using search intent and keyword research. In fact, 70.87% of keywords with more than 10,000 monthly searches consist of only one or two words. So, picking the best keywords for your content is vital to SEO success. 

Let me take a second to give you some idea of what the buyer’s journey is:

The buyer’s journey is the path that a buyer goes down before completing a purchase. People don’t usually just wake up and buy on a whim. There is usually a process that takes place before buying a product or service. In fact, B2B buyers spend up to 90% of their decision journey simply educating themselves on a service or product. 

Here are the stages of a buyer’s journey: 

Awareness State: Someone becomes aware of the fact that they need a product or service

Considerations Stage: This stage includes someone who begins to consider options to solve the issue that they need a product or service. This can sometimes include looking at videos and reviews.

Decision Stage: This stage consists of the buyer’s evaluation and deciding on the right place to make their purchase. 

Each stage has keyword opportunities connected to them such as “buy (insert product)” or *(product) reviews.” These key phrases are an important aspect of targeting the right audience with quality content at the right time. 

If you don’t have content that addresses your target audience’s questions, then they will probably find your competition and end up buying from them instead, which then lowers your conversions. 

If your site covers important topics in your industry or solves major pain points your customer may have, your site will become the authority in your niche. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on your metrics by using Google Analytics and Google Search Console so you can see what kind of content is working for you and what isn’t. 

Google loves and trusts authority sites and rewards them with tons of free traffic. Because pleasing Google’s algorithm is such an important part of SEO, marketers say that their top three SEO goals are to have successful content marketing focused on generating brand awareness, building credibility and trust, and educating their audiences. 

Actually, a Backlinko study suggests that the #1 result in Google’s organic search results has an average CTR of 31.7%. So, by doing this process, you’ll be able to identify ideas for content that will help you become the #1 site in your industry. 

Here are some benefits of performing a content gap analysis: 

• Help you map your buyer’s journey
• Determine your primary content goals
• Helps you research your competitor’s content
• Helps you conduct market research
• Shows you where to fill in the gaps

As I mentioned, by understanding the different stages of your buyer’s journey, you can identify things like demographics, interests, and needs. Then, identify these steps and come up with content that answers the questions the same buyer will likely ask during each step of their journey. 

Interviewing your potential clients and industry experts by sending out surveys will help you get the feedback you need to better help you understand your audience. It may also be a good practice to find out where your potential customers buy from, what type of interests they have, and what kind of content they are getting from relevant sources. 

It is perfectly acceptable to spy on your top competitor’s websites just to see how they move through the buyer’s journey. Identify what they do better than you, and then improve on that. 

Attract More Sales With Content Gap Analysis 

One of the largest problems we see with most sites is that they only target end-buyer-cycle keywords, meaning keywords that customers are searching for right before they purchase.

These are usually in the form of sales pages or review pages.

End-buyer-cycle keywords are great to target, but if you only target these, you’ll miss out on the vast majority of the search traffic that’s out there!

In fact, a Hubspot study suggests that 60% of marketers measure the success of their content marketing strategy through sales. That’s what makes content creation so important, and if you can expand on content gaps, then you can create more content that drives revenue. 

How Does A Content Gap Analysis Work?

To perform a content gap analysis on existing content, you’re going to need the proper tools used to research the rankings of your competitor’s domains.

Lucky for you, we have an awesome free Keyword Gap Analysis Tool to do the job!

Click Here To Access The Tool

Our tool lets you analyze your top 3 competitors and provides you with the number of search results, average cost per click, and the estimated search volume of the keywords that they’re currently ranking for.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Find your competitors

In the tool, you can enter up to 3 competitors. You’ll want to use websites from your industry that are creating great content.

There are a couple of ways to look at competitors:

• Direct competitors: These are businesses that sell the same thing you do
• Indirect competitors: Businesses who don’t sell exactly what you do, but sell to the same audience.

Either one can work well with this process!

If you need help finding your competitors, try searching for your money keyword on Google to see who is already ranking for it.

Once you have your top 3 competitors, you can input them into the tool.

Make sure to use http:// or https:// before the URL.

Pro Tip: Feel free to change out the competitors to get the best results. Sometimes if you have a competitor with a big site, they might be ranking for keywords that are not super relevant, so just switch them out with a closer competitor. Additionally, to narrow down the results, you can use specific URLs instead of entire domains.

Step 2: Run the keyword gap analysis & select your target keywords

When you run the tool, it will pull a ton of keyword ideas (usually 100+ if you use the right competitors).

These are all keywords that your competitors rank for that you do not or big opportunities for you to create content!

Look for keywords or topics that make sense in your customer journey and then prioritize them accordingly. You may want to consider the search volume and the keyword difficulty when selecting your targets. 

Step 3: Create the content

Once you have your keywords prioritized, you can start creating content around those keywords!

Start with your title and make sure it uses the keywords you selected. If you need some fresh ideas for titles, check out our Headline Generator Tool.

Make sure you search the keyword in Google to understand the search intent, and what type of content Google is ranking for that keyword.

For instance, Google might be ranking sales pages, long guides, short blog posts, reviews, tools, or even something different. You’ll want to match the type of content that Google is ranking currently if you want to compete for that keyword.

If you keep creating consistent content month over month, you can drastically increase your organic search traffic!

Final Thoughts

Performing a content gap analysis is a great way to find content ideas and keywords that are going to help your customers along their purchase cycle.

We’ve helped hundreds of businesses just like yours outrank their competitors and provide content that’s designed to convert traffic into sales.

If you have any additional questions regarding a content gap analysis feel free to reach out and schedule a call with me or one of our experts today! 

The post Content Gap Analysis: How To Find 100+ Content Ideas in 3 Minutes! appeared first on The HOTH.

• 11 Million+ organic monthly traffic*
• 3.1 Million+ organic keywords ranking*
• $100 Million projected in annual revenue**
• $520 Million valuation by investors**

(*SEMrush estimates, **According to a 2016 Inc. report)

We decided to conduct an SEO investigation to figure out what they did to capture so much search traffic.

In this post, we’re going to show you 7 ways how Nerdwallet grew to a $520 million valuation with SEO – and how you can use the same ideas for your website.

Ready for these tips?

• [Tip #1] The Biggest Link Building Hack You Haven’t Tried Yet: Ego Bait
• [Tip #2] Scale Up Your Referrals with “As Featured In” Links
• [Tip #3] Submit Your Site for Reviews
• [Tip #4] Ramp Up Your Backlinks with Content Syndication
• [Tip #5] Create and Promote “Backlink” Magnets
• [Tip #6] Promote the Types of Content That Generate Social Shares
• [Tip #7] Capture Your Keywords with Best-in-its-Class SEO Content

NerdWallet went from $800 and an excel sheet comparing credit cards in 2009…to $100 million in annual revenue and a huge market share of financial content, tools, and apps today.

They’re beating competitors including:

• Mint
• Lending Tree
• Credit Karma
• The Motley Fool
• Bankrate (which also owns CreditCards.com)

Their share of search engine traffic within the personal finance niche was already way bigger than the competition’s by 2016:

The crazy thing? They’ve grown and continued to grow primarily through this one marketing channel.

Check out their current traffic sources (data from SimilarWeb):

NerdWallet’s search marketing strategies fully blur the lines between PR and SEO to scale the backlinks and traffic to their site.

The best part? You can use these SEO ideas for your business.

Let’s get into it.

[Tip #1] The Biggest Link Building Hack You Haven’t Tried Yet: Ego Bait

Ego Bait involves creating content that appeals to another website’s self-importance to get a link.

The best way to do it at scale, and the way Nerdwallet does it, is by giving out awards that come with a fancy badge. When someone wins an award the will often proudly show others…

…and perhaps, even on their homepage.

…and perhaps, even with a link!

This results in Nerdwallet having TONs of HIGH DA homepage links as a result of these campaigns.

Cha-ching!

Let me show you some examples:

Company, Product, or Service Awards
Nerdwallet’s list of 2018 Award winners contains enterprise sites with high authority like Chase, Fidelity, and Betterment. They get a lot of links back from these different corporate winners.

For example, Discover (DR 83), linked back to the awards post to announce NerdWallet’s recognition of them:

Nerdwallet SCALES this strategy big-time through a wide variety of awards categories.

For example, awards for “the best” services like Mortgage Lenders, which got them a homepage link from Lenda:

Individual Awards

It’s not just companies like credit cards and mortgage lenders who get NerdWallet awards. Real people get awards too.

For example, NerdWallet published a list of “30 Credit Counselors Who Made a Difference” that included counselors from Clearpoint.

That list no longer exists on NerdWallet’s site, but the link they got from a post on Clearpoint’s blog announcing the good news is still up.

Think you could put together a list recognizing the prominent figures in your industry?

Location-Specific Awards

Let’s talk about NerdWallet’s location-specific awards. This gets them TONS of links including valuable homepage links.

For example, their award for “The Best Places for Young Families” in each state is ego-bait that worked at SCALE.

How did they do it?

• They selected 10 towns in every state to win.
• They created 1 separate post for every state, announcing 10 winners in each.
• This created 500 towns who “won,” and resulted in tons of opportunities to get a press link, chamber of commerce or a town homepage link for the award.

Did they stop there?

No! They made even more awards for each state…and different areas of the state. Such as:

• Best Cities for Young Families in Southern California
• Best Cities for Young Families in Northern California
• Best Cities for Homeownership in California
• Best Cities for Job Seekers in California
• Best Cities for Renters in Southern California

…and that’s just California!

Many of the homepage links from sites like town governments stay up even though the award has aged.

Greenville, South Carolina’s homepage has a footer with a link back to the award announcement post for the “Top Small Cities to Start a Business” from 2015:

Even if you don’t end up on the homepage, websites have other pages listing their awards and recognitions, both large and small.

The town of Gainesville, Florida listed their award for being one of NerdWallet’s “Best Places for Women-Owned Businesses” even though they only ranked 31st on the list:

Better still: NerdWallet’s awards (and their other content) are making their way into Wikipedia as references.

NerdWallet now has more than 250+ backlinks from Wikipedia, a valuable site to get a link from:

Ego bait does the double duty of earning you links while increasing your brand recognition and exposure.

As your brand grows, it should become even easier to get links with other awards categories that you create.

Will this strategy work for you? Is it oversaturated?

Sites don’t mind posting multiple awards on their homepage.

As you can see from Springhill, TN’s town government homepage, Nerdwallet isn’t the only business pursuing this strategy:

(Even rentapplication.com got a link… this looks like something very replicable!)

Here are the steps to acquire links with Ego Bait:

1. Decide what award category is relevant to your niche and appealing enough for the winners to brag about.
2. Make a list of winners using sound methodology. For example, NerdWallet looked at the percentage of companies owned by women in a city, the average revenue of women-owned businesses in that city, and other statistics to list the best cities for women-owned business.
3. Publish the award winners in a post.
4. Create a graphic badge to make it easier for the winners to post the win on their homepage and get you a link back from it.
5. Promote the post by reaching out to relevant webmasters and press to notify them that they’ve won. Suggest that they brag about the award on a page of their site or in a press release (or put out your own press release).
6. Establish new award categories and renew the list each year to repeat the process and gain more links.

If you do renew the award, announce it on the same original page. That page will collect additional backlinks.

[Tip #2] Give A Little Recognition to Get a Lot of Referrals with “As Featured In” Links

Even if you feature a website without giving them an award they might brag about it.

The strategy for gaining “As Featured In” links has some parallels to Ego-Bait – but with some crucial differences.

Rather than using the appeal of winning an award, you can get “As Featured In” links by publishing favorable profiles or reviews of people, companies, products on your site. Reach out to get a link back to that content piece.

For example, Nerdwallet profiled tabletop credit card processor TabbedOut:

And the company now features a link back to NerdWallet’s profile of them on their homepage:

Another way to get “As Featured In” links is through legitimate partnerships.

For example, Nerdwallet created a cost-of-living calculator tool that draws data from The Council for Community and Economic Research’s cost-of-living index.

They’re linked on the homepage now as a result:

The steps for gaining As Featured In Links are:

1. Select a website, product, service, etc to feature in a content piece profiling them, or strike a legitimate partnership with them.
2. Remember: If they are already posting links like this on their site, you’re more likely to get your link added to that area of the site as well.
3. Publish the piece about them or create the partnership.
4. Reach out to request your badge and/or link in the homepage footer or another relevant area of the site where it should appear.

If the link back to you is coming from a partnership, convince them to put your link on their site when you put the deal together rather than afterward.

[Tip #3] Submit Your Site for Reviews

A reversal of the “As Featured In Link” where you attempt to be the one profiled in a content piece on a different site.

For example, a site that seems like it would be a competitor with Nerdwallet, CreditLoan.com features an article that is basically an introduction to Nerdwallet. (Everything You Need to Know About Nerdwallet):

When you can identify sites in your industry that publish content on other entities in the same industry, you have a decent chance of getting posted on their site too (if you’ve done your branding right).

The steps to getting a profile of your website published are:

1. Identify relevant industry sites with active blogs or directories of businesses.
2. Reach out to propose a piece profiling or reviewing your brand and make sure to highly emphasize why THEIR audience would care to know about your website.
3. Create an information sheet or content piece about your business that makes it easy for them to quickly put up a profile and/or review of you.
4. Double check that they included links back to you in the piece.

If you pick the right websites, usually ones that are adjacent to the topics you cover, you increase your odds of getting featured.

[Tip #4] Ramp Up Your Backlinks with Content Syndication

To win in content marketing, you sometimes need a competitive advantage beyond publishing as many good content pieces as you can.

The PR industry can be secretive, but it somehow helped Nerdwallet land a rare partnership deal with The Associated Press.

The AP distributes Nerdwallet’s content to 1,650 media outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post (with at least one backlink in each piece, and usually containing 2-3 links back to NerdWallet or more).

Nerdwallet is also partners with Apple News, CNBC, Flipboard, Gannett/USA Today, Hearst, MarketWatch, MSN, Mashable, Fox Business Network and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Just imagine if all those links were coming in to YOUR site.

PR isn’t just reprinting syndicated content, but guest posting as well.

Thanks to those media partnerships, NerdWallet’s writers will regularly contribute original pieces to other publishers and include a link to Nerdwallet in their writer bio.

One NerdWallet columnist, Liz Weston, was already an established financial writer for the AP beforehand. Hiring Weston made it easy for NerdWallet to associate themselves with her existing byline:

Traditional public relations combined with SEO is central to Nerdwallet’s link building strategy.

While not everyone can get syndicated by the Associated Press, let me emphasize that as a strategy: partnering up with a PR firm to land better opportunities is not out of reach for you.

There are a lot of PR firms out there who will do the hard work of scaling up your links through guest posts and syndication.

Nerdwallet was a client of this PR firm at an earlier stage of their growth. I’m speculating that this firm did a lot of content distribution on Nerdwallet’s behalf based on their service description:

Here’s an example of what those byline links look like from this piece in Forbes on the best places for new graduates to invest:

This one writer has contributed a LOT of pieces like this just to Forbes, 8-12 in a single year, each one with a link back to Nerdwallet.

Here’s another content partnership article at USA today. It has multiple links for continued reading at Nerdwallet’s site at the end:

Before you say, “But I can’t afford PR services yet,” I want you to remember that Nerdwallet started small with this strategy.

They began with a smaller PR deal (along with in-house work) to get their content syndicated. They scaled from niche blogs, smaller press outlets, and town government pages up to financial institutions and mainstream news sources.

Your odds of getting syndicated are improved when you offer it to a publisher who needs it.

When the AP announced their deal with Nerdwallet in 2016, they said:

“Customers consistently tell us they’re interested in stories that offer advice about money issues – retirement, credit, savings, etc. This partnership will allow us to give them far more of this service journalism while keeping our own journalists free to focus on high-impact breaking news and enterprise.”

This provides a view into the conversation that took place to strike the deal. Namely, that the AP had a need for more financial content from a reliable source, and Nerdwallet fit that criteria.

Start by being a leader in your niche so you can strike partnerships with powerful niche publishers like Nerdwallet did with financial blog Clark.com. Then branch out to those powerful mainstream publishers like USA Today.

You can follow a similar path as you grow your brand by matching your syndication outlets to your brand’s clout:

1. Maintain journalistic standards in your content while also optimizing it for SEO.
2. Find the best publishers who would be interested in reprinting your content or giving your writers a regular byline.
3. Alternately, hire on writers who already have an established byline so that you can access it.
4. Scale your production to create a large volume of regularly published content. This will gain you the legitimacy to strike syndication deals with those major news sites, or other outlets.

Can’t Form A PR Deal Yet? Own Your Syndication: Become a Copy-Paste Content Provider

Maybe you can’t “be a news source” at the current point in your project. Or maybe your particular business isn’t set up to be an impartial entity the way that Nerdwallet is…

How do you start syndicating your content for links to improve your brand equity…when you don’t have much brand equity to begin with?

The thing about content distribution is: There’s a lack of consistent, quality content in tons of different verticals.

Repurposed articles made for reprinting are usually lower quality and aren’t used as often by credible sites. People like to keep their best content for themselves!

NerdWallet offered an easy way to populate blogs and online profiles with solid, worthwhile information…and you can use their strategy too.

In 2015, they started their own in-house wire service called NerdWallet Wire for real estate and insurance content.

They used the following selling points (that you should also use) to convince real estate and insurance brokers, along with other professionals and publishers, to syndicate their content:

• All of NerdWallet’s content is generated in-house by staff writers.
• The company’s experience in financial markets provides a solid basis from which to offer real estate, insurance, and other content.
• Content is about generally common issues affecting the audience rather than specific ones
• Agents are not bound to specific articles; you can pick and the choose article subjects to publish.
• Once you join the wire service, you can find an article, study or graphic you like, preview it, and download an HTML, .doc or an .XML file for embedding in your website.
• You can insert custom content and images.
• HOWEVER, NerdWallet does maintain its own byline with a link back to the source content each time syndication occurs.

The content you provide doesn’t have to be “the best ever,” it just has to be a great resource for email filler and social media by smaller companies. Not groundbreaking stuff: but professional, informed and, most importantly, consistently good.

You may already be aware that there are tons of sites out there that will repost your content like this. Here’s one that recently reprinted a NerdWallet article:

You can see that the site is made for reprints like this by looking at their footer text:

It’s not just these types of content-reprinting sites that post NerdWallet’s content though.

Many sites in the actual industries that the content is about love to use NerdWallet’s pieces as supplemental content for their blogs, as this local realty group did:

Don’t be fooled by the post’s listed author, the real author is in a disclaimer at the bottom:

Here’s another realtor redistributing NerdWallet’s content:

…and their links back to NerdWallet:

Links from smaller realty and insurance brokers’ blogs are exactly where the content was meant by NerdWallet to be redistributed.

A content aggregator site like the first example can help too, but it looks most natural to receive links from a combination of sites both within your niche and outside of it.

Nerdwallet has since scaled down this strategy as they landed better media partnerships with bigger publishers, but it’s one you should try.

If you don’t have the brand power like Nerdwallet, luckily you can still utilize this strategy with the HOTH Syndication Content Distribution service.

[Tip #5] Create and Promote “Backlink” Magnets

Today, branding and advertising is done through content.

One of the best ways to establish your brand is through the content you produce. It’s all about building authority in your industry…and in search engines.

Your potential customers are more likely to buy your products (or 3rd-party offers listed on your site) if your business is an authority.

I know, “make good content,” is a cliche at this point. But it’s the gospel truth when it comes to getting backlinks, traffic, and social shares.

We looked at NerdWallet’s top content to give you some pointers on the type of content to produce for your business.

When it comes to SEO, it’s important to realize that certain types of content perform better in different ways than others.

Sure, some content might rank, attract backlinks and go viral on social media all-in-one. Usually, though, a piece of content will perform better in one or two of those areas.

Truly useful content that can serve as a reference, such as original research, guides, and tools, tend to attract a higher number of backlinks than other content types.

NerdWallet’s research, guides and tools attract a ton of backlinks from a variety of high authority sources. Here are some examples the top backlinked content on their site:

Original Research
Example: Average Household Debt Study 2017
Try creating original research pieces that also touch on people’s emotions. Debt is a huge societal issue, and by publishing original research on a hot topic, NerdWallet capitalizes on the value of the piece in terms of data and shock value. This piece has 2,600+ Referring Domains (RDs), including links from the New York Times, The Guardian, Forbes, CNN, Techcrunch, and many more high authority sites because it’s such a good reference.

Tools
Example: Home Affordability Calculator
This piece gets 585 RDs and a massive amount of organic traffic (111k). Tools are great for linking to because they offer functionality that isn’t available on the sites referencing them. Forbes, Buzzfeed, and NasDaq or only a few of the authority links pointing to this tool.

Short Guides
Example 1: The Huge, Hidden Costs of Owning a Home
By creating a guide that’s angled to appeal to the reader’s fear of incurring costs from homeownership, this piece gets 658 RDs. It’s an evergreen topic that they can continue promoting to get even more links.

Example 2: Biweekly Mortgage Payments
Your shorter content might not rank as easily, but it’s the best content for actually getting read This piece got more RDs (805) than words (682). As an article, it offers a simple and straightforward explanation with an actionable strategy. It’s been reprinted by other publishers quite a bit and referenced as a biweekly payment plan in other content. It’s a piece that is successful because it’s the right length for its topic.

Long Guides
Example 1: How to Get a Small Business Loan
This piece is longer because the topic requires it. There aren’t many pieces at over 5000 words on NerdWallet. Out of those, this one has the most backlinks (116) and traffic (12k) as a comprehensive reference for other pieces.

Example 2: Long-Term Care Insurance Explained
This is the longest piece on their site, at 6900 words, and it gets 61 RD’s and 2.6k in traffic.

[Tip #6] Create the Types of Content That Generate Social Shares:

Content that is more snackable or controversial like top 10 lists and op-eds are more prone to be shared by others on social media.

While people will link to content that serves as a useful or notable reference, people SHARE content that strikes an emotional cord by being entertaining or opinionated.

Here’s NerdWallet’s top-shared content on social media:

“Best ___” Lists
Example: Best Balance Transfer Cards
The most social shares go to this piece, at 45k Facebook shares. It also has a lot of RDs (147), partially, we can assume, as a result of being shared so much.

Op-Eds
Example: Your Wallet Will Suffer If This Agency is Gutted
They published a major op-ed calling for the protection of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from being gutted by the government. This content piece fits in with their brand promise of protecting consumers finances. It got a lot of social shares for being controversial and is the 2nd most shared NerdWallet content piece at 10k Facebook shares.

Top 10 Lists
Example: Top 10 Credit Card Deals
This list is at 9.4k shares. Everybody likes Top 10 Lists, and everybody likes a good deal.

There’s no secret for making a piece of content go viral other than coming up with a great headline and topic. Snackable content in the form of a listicle or how to, or controversial content with an emotional headline is going to better for you on social in terms of shares.

[Tip #7] Capture Your Keywords with Best-in-its-Class SEO Content

Quite a variety of content can end up ranking on page 1 of Google for its target keywords and attract organic traffic (and backlinks).

NerdWallet’s top-trafficked content includes their highly-backlinked tools and guides. Traffic and backlinks can behave like a positive feedback loop, gaining in one can contribute to gaining in the other.

Primarily, they capture traffic by creating comprehensive ratings and reviews of products and services to capture those highly valuable branded keywords.

To generate traffic closer to the top of the funnel they also create comprehensive resource hubs for a variety of topics including starting a business, getting out of debt, or shopping on Black Friday.

Proprietary Tools
Example 1: Mortgage calculator
(The top-trafficked content on NerdWallet as of Sept 17, 2018. It also has 172 RDs.)

Example 2: Home Affordability Calculator
(The 2nd top-trafficked content as of Sept 17, 2018 Gets 592 RD’s)
Research done well is a highly valued form of content when you’re trying to build your equity as a publisher.

Comprehensive Ratings & Reviews
Example 1: Nerdwallet’s Best Credit Cards
This rating page is a super-optimized moneymaker for them and the 3rd-most trafficked piece of content on their site.

Example 2: Nerdwallet’s review of Costco’s Travel Vacation Packages currently brings them 191k by ranking #2 for “costco travel.”

Example 3: NerdWallet’s review of eTrade brings them 55k in traffic by ranking #5 for “etrade.”

Resource Hubs
Example: Black Friday Sales
This hub on their blog is the 4th-top trafficked piece of content on their site. This page serves as a hub for all black Friday related content on the site – which they use to capitalize on users’ black Friday excitement. NerdWallet uses hubs like this on their site in various areas to provide comprehensive resources to help people to decide how and where to spend their money. It’s also updated every year to keep it current and compound its backlinks.

What Did We Learn from NerdWallet’s Content?

NerdWallet serves as the perfect example of how focusing on content production and distribution can build a profitable brand from the ground up.

If you’re in the financial space, you can look at Nerdwallet’s top performing content and try to create similar pieces that are proven to work.

If you’re in another niche, then you need to look up your competitor’s top-performing content and create your own spin on it.

To look up your competitor’s content:

1. Look at what sites are ranking on the first page of Google for the keywords you want to rank for.
2. Then use an SEO tool like SEMrush Backlink Analytics to see what content on their domain has the most backlinks, traffic, and/or social shares.
3. Note down those content types, whether they get traffic, backlinks, shares, or a combination, the topics, length, and any other important features.
4. Create similar content for your site, prioritizing by the types that got the most traffic, backlinks, and shares.
5. Promote the content so that it can start working for you.

When In Doubt: Focus on Research and Tools

The importance of publishing original research and creating proprietary tools can’t be understated.

You can see above that tools like the mortgage and home affordability calculators are the top-trafficked content on NerdWallet’s site.

Research and tools naturally attract more links, traffic, and even social shares compared to other content types…ESPECIALLY if you can angle your data in an intriguing or practical way.

In terms of what successful research looks like, take a look at NerdWallet’s Millenials and Homebuying Data.

Even though this piece doesn’t get much organic search engine traffic, it gets a lot of RDs (652), and shares (almost 8k) by angling personal finance data at a specific subset of their audience: millennials.

It also got a lot of powerful publisher backlinks for being a topical reference:

Maintain Traffic and Compound Your Backlinks by Updating Your “Sticky” Content

Publishers are more likely to reference content when it’s up to date.

Once you publish a piece of content and see that it performs well, you’ll want to update and promote it again periodically to make it work for you again.

There’s no point in reinventing the wheel if you can make the same piece of content gain for you repeatedly.

NerdWallet definitely continues building up the authority of individual pages on their site by updating them again year-to-year before promoting them again.

This allows your content to continue getting backlinks, increasing its page authority, your site’s authority, and thus its ranking potential each year. In most cases, it’s better to be a site with 10 high authority pages that bring in traffic than 100 low authority ones that don’t.

Some of NW’s top content, including their list of the best credit cards is updated regularly each year.

This is a cornerstone content piece for them that gets new links from high authority domains consistently.

It got links from Forbes, International Business Times, Discover and many others just in the last 30 days.

It’s likely why Nerdwallet branched out into sublists of credit cards such as “the best balance transfer credit cards for 2017” to replicate the strategy within an adjacent topic.

NerdWallet does this strategy throughout its other product and service comparisons. They update many of the other hubs and resources on their site to keep them timely.

For example, they update their Black Friday shopping guide each year to take advantage of the annual Black Friday wave:

There are different deals announced by retailers each year for Black Friday, and there’s a mad dash of search traffic trying to find them.

Keeping this Black Friday shopping guide up-to-date allows it to take advantage of that seasonal burst of traffic and capture a bit more of it each year.

You can see that since it first came out in November, 2013, the piece gets a spike in traffic followed by a decrease and then a bigger spike the next year (vertical lines mark each November, when Black Friday occurs):

Looks like this Black Friday hub is due for a big traffic spike this year.

NerdWallet’s resource on Federal Income Tax Brackets is similarly kept up-to-date:

Each year, the current brackets are shown in the table, and the previous year’s income brackets are referenced at the bottom of the page.

There’s no way it could have continued gaining as many backlinks as it did year-to-year had the information not been kept up-to-date:

The steps to compounding backlinks through updating content are:

1. Identify the top linked-to content already on your site, and consider whether it’s a topic you can update and promote repeatedly
2. Publish new content that is relevant to a particular year, whether it’s a guide, a resource, or some form of list
3. Promote it
4. Update it
5. Promote it again

It’s simple!

How Can You Be Succesful Like NerdWallet?

Nerdwallet adopted SEO strategies that aggressively built up their website’s authority and traffic.

By avoiding a reliance on paid traffic, NerdWallet has been able to compete as a player in the cutthroat financial niche without needing to outspend their competitors.

In other words, NerdWallet thrives from organic search traffic by creating content at scale that serves their audience and distributing it for a massive number of backlinks.

This isn’t the entirety of their SEO strategy, and they have since adopted paid marketing methods including PPC and TV spots – but you’ve seen the results possible by focusing on SEO from the start.

Is it easier said than done? Of course! But you can gain a competitive advantage by putting 100% of your efforts into the innovative strategies like these that will gain you the most links and traffic.

Here are the 7 key takeaways:

#1. Make your website appealing to link to by publishing content that strokes the ego (like NerdWallet did with the Ego Bait of issuing awards through their content).

#2. If you want to get powerful homepage links to your brand, target sites that list awards and feature those sites or partner with them for your content.

#3. Find sites where the audience that you want to get in front of is hanging out and get a review of your business shown to them by that 3rd party.

#4. When you can’t scale everything yourself, do what most businesses wait to do until they’re “big enough” by leveraging a PR firm’s connections for more guest posts, features, and reprints of your content with links back to you. If you can’t get a PR deal yet, look for and invite other media platforms to distribute your content and earn additional backlinks from them.

#5. You can build content that naturally attracts backlinks and update it regularly to compound more backlinks. Create enough “sticky content” that needs to be updated periodically and your domain’s authority will increase.

#6. The content that builds your brand on social media is usually more digestible and emotional than the content that gets organic traffic or backlinks.

#7. If you want to attract links, social shares, or traffic in your vertical, look at the competitor’s content that gets disproportionately higher numbers and create your own version of it (don’t steal, use similar angles for your own, original content).

BONUS TAKEAWAY: When something works in SEO, repeat it. NerdWallet recognized strategies or content types that worked, and they went all-in on replicating them to maximize their opportunities for links and traffic.

What Should You Do Now?

If you’re serious about becoming great at growth marketing through SEO, you should do two things:

1. Retweet or share this article (just click the social sharing buttons at the top of this page)
2. Leave a comment with your biggest takeaway from NerdWallet’s SEO growth strategy below
3. Talk to us about scaling your business through SEO and content marketing.

The post 7 SEO Ideas from Inside NerdWallet’s $520 Million Content Strategy appeared first on The HOTH.