If you guessed optimized anchor text, then you’re 100% correct. 

Both established and new SEOs tend to overlook optimizing their anchor text, as they’re too focused on acquiring as many backlinks as possible. 

Yet, anchor text is a ranking factor, as it provides valuable context to search engines about the web pages your links point to. 

Moreover, anchor text ratios are equally as important to establishing a ‘natural-looking’ link profile. 

What are those?

Anchor text ratios refer to the percentage of anchor text types you use throughout your homepage and inner pages. 

Believe it or not, there’s in-depth strategizing involved in choosing the type of anchor text you use for every internal link, external link, and backlink. 

Options include using exact matches for your keywords (i.e., link building), partial match key phrases (i.e., link-building is essential), your brand name (i.e., The HOTH), and more. 

How do we know this works?

Here at The HOTH, we’ve conducted extensive research into top-ranked Google results from countless industries to discover what a #1 ranking link profile looks like. 

We were able to determine undeniable similarities in the anchor text ratios of top-ranked Google results. 

In other words, we uncovered the magic ratios for achieving top-tier backlink profiles, so read on to learn how to master anchor text optimization for your website. 

Understanding Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the words that comprise a hyperlink. 

For example, if we wanted you to check out our Rankings Drop Guide (hint: we do), we would insert a hyperlink to it (like we did).

As you can see, the text rankings drop guide is ‘anchored’ to a hyperlink to our blog post covering common Google rankings drop issues. 

Anchor text applies to any type of link, including internal, external, and backlinks. 

Sometimes links don’t contain any special text and use the bare URL as the link (i.e., www.thehoth.com), which are known as ‘naked’ links. 

While it’s easy not to think too much about anchor text since it seems so basic, it actually plays a big role in your SEO (and user experience). 

In fact, your anchor text is how search engines understand the context of A) the page you’re linking to and B) how it relates to the web page containing the link. 

Not only that, but anchor text also provides much-needed context for your users. 

For instance, let’s say that you want to link to a related blog post in one of your articles. If you don’t provide context for it through anchor text, it will confuse your readers – as they won’t know why it’s there or where it leads. 

Here’s an example:

Gardening is an excellent hobby that anyone can enjoy (click here), which is why we’ve put together this beginner’s guide. 

The anchor text here is far too generic and doesn’t provide any context, which is why optimized anchor text matters for search engines and users.

Google’s History with Anchor Text Ratios

In the early days of Google, less importance was placed on ‘natural-looking’ backlink profiles.

As a result, anchor text containing target keywords was the most powerful – causing many SEOs to spam their anchors with keywords. 

The tactic provided impressive results, too, as keyword-rich anchor text often led to stellar rankings. 

That all changed in 2012 when Google rolled out one of its most infamous algorithm updates, Penguin. 

It was one of Google’s first attempts at ridding their search results of keyword spam, and it was enormously effective. 

Nearly overnight, SEOs relying on keyword-rich anchor text saw their rankings come crashing down in a big way. 

In the eyes of Google, spammy keyword anchors only served to game their algorithm – leading to high rankings for websites that weren’t necessarily of the highest quality (or relevant to user search queries). 

Ever since Penguin, SEO has been all about making your backlink profile appear as natural as possible. 

Hence, the need for utilizing anchor text ratios came about. 

Instead of relying solely on keyword-rich anchor text, websites need to mix things up with different types of anchors. An example would be blending partial match anchors, brand anchors, and exact match keyword anchors.  

That way, your backlink profile will appear ‘natural’ to Google, as on paper – it looks like you acquired links from lots of different sources without trying to game the system. 

As stated in the intro, we’ve rigorously researched the top-ranked Google backlink profiles to determine the picture-perfect anchor text ratio. 

Before we get to that, it’s essential to understand the different types of anchor text that are viable for SEO. 

Understanding the Different Types of Anchor Text 

There are numerous ways you can go about writing anchor text, and not all of them are good for your SERP rankings. 

However, sticking to one type of anchor text isn’t a good idea either, as it’ll make your link profile appear unnatural to Google. 

Here’s a look at the different types of anchor text you can use to create your anchor text ratio. 

Generic anchors 

First, let’s look at the type of anchor that you should NEVER use for anchor text that you want to help your SEO. 

Generic anchors are basic phrases like:

• Buy now
• Read more 
• Click here
• Go here 
• Act now 
• This website 
• This page 
• This one 

Google does not value these types of anchors due to the lack of context they provide for the page you’re linking to. 

These anchors don’t provide a great user experience either, as your users won’t know what they’re clicking on beforehand. 

While generic anchors can sometimes work when combined with the CTA at the end of blog posts, your best bet is to avoid them – especially if you want your anchor text to affect your SEO positively. 

Branded anchors 

A branded anchor is when you use your brand name as the anchor text for a link. 

In our case, a branded anchor would look like this: 

Visit The HOTH to learn more about our expert white-label digital marketing services. 

Branded anchors are SEO-friendly, especially for backlinks and non-blog-related areas of your website. 

In fact, most of the backlinks you acquire naturally will probably use branded anchors, as it tends to be the default choice for most website owners when adding links to other sites.

This is where a catchy and well-known brand name will really help you out, as some of the most recognizable companies (think big names like Best Buy, Amazon, and Apple) get loads of backlinks just by others mentioning and linking to their brand. 

Another perk is that branded anchors appear very natural to Google, so using them is always a safe bet. 

Natural anchors 

Sometimes a link doesn’t contain a target keyword or a brand name and simply blends in with the rest of the content. 

This is known as natural anchor text, and it should play a part in your overall anchor text ratio.

Why include anchors that don’t provide any value to your SEO strategy?

While it may seem counterproductive to not include at least one keyword in the anchor text, sometimes your best bet is to refrain. 

Remember, your #1 goal is to build a natural backlink profile that doesn’t scream over-optimization. 

That’s why you need to include natural anchors along with branded and keyword anchors – as it’ll keep your link profile squeaky clean. 

Strategically, it makes the most sense to include natural anchors whenever there’s no relevant keyword that applies to the link without sounding awkward or forced. You should also use natural anchors when it doesn’t make sense to use your brand name. 

Pro tip: Just because you aren’t using keywords doesn’t mean you can’t provide much-needed context to search engines through natural anchors. Ensure that you write anchor text that provides a preview of what you’re linking to, as it’s best to avoid generic phrases even when writing natural anchors. 

Image anchors 

Sometimes anchor text doesn’t have to contain text at all, like when an image doubles as a hyperlink to another web page. 

Whenever you use an image as a link, the alt text serves as the anchor text for search engine crawlers. 

Since crawler bots lack computer vision, they won’t be able to see any images that you include in your content. The alt text lets them know what the image displays, as well as how it relates to your content (if you wrote it properly, that is). 

You should include the web page’s target keyword in the alt text, as well as a brief description of what the image shows. 

Including an occasional image-based link can be good for your anchor text ratios; just remember to include alt text. 

Naked anchors (URLs)

As mentioned previously, a link is considered ‘naked’ when it uses the URL instead of anchor text.

A healthy, natural backlink profile needs to have some naked URLs included in the anchor text ratio, so don’t forget to use them. 

Exact match anchors 

Now we’re getting into anchors that use your target keywords. Exact match anchors one of your keywords as the anchor text (i.e., link-building). 

You’ll want to use a majority of your exact match anchors for your inner pages and blog content, as you’ll mainly stick with branded anchors for your homepage. 

Remember not to go too crazy with exact match anchors, as that’s what wrecked the rankings of countless websites whenever Penguin dropped way back in 2012. 

In fact, exact match anchors should comprise the smallest portion of your anchor text ratios, as they’re by far the riskiest for getting content flagged as spam. 

Partial match anchors

These anchors also use keywords, but only in combination with other words (i.e., our proven effective link-building strategies). 

Partial match anchors are a safer bet for using keywords, as they have additional words providing further context – which appears more natural and less a blatant attempt at including key phrases.

What are Ideal Anchor Text Ratios?

Now that you’re well-versed in the different types of anchor text, it’s time to learn how to form the perfect anchor text ratio for your website. 

There is no one-size-fits-all ratio that works for every web page, as you’ll want to use unique ratios for your homepage, blog content, and inner pages.

To determine these ideal ratios, we looked at the link profiles for thousands of #1-ranked results on Google. It took countless hours of research, but we uncovered undeniable similarities in the anchor text ratios for top-ranked results.

Here’s a look at our findings. 

Homepage anchor text ratio 

If you want your homepage to be as SEO-friendly as possible, here’s the anchor text ratio that you should strive for:

• 80% – 95% of your links should feature branded anchors, URLs, and natural anchor text. 
• Only 10% of your links should contain partial match anchors. 
• 5% or less of your homepage links should have exact match anchors. 

Branded anchors, naked URLs, and natural anchors should almost entirely dominate your homepage strategy. 

That’s the best way to boost your SEO profile and appear natural to Google’s crawlers. 

The proof?

Here’s a look at the anchor text ratio of Overstock.com’s homepage – one of the most notorious online retail companies. 

As you can see, their homepage’s anchor text ratio follows our recommendation of primarily using branded, natural, and URL anchors while ignoring anchors containing keywords (they even have 0% exact match anchors). 

Inner page anchor text ratio 

By inner pages, we mean your blog content, landing pages, and product pages. These pages are where you should use the most keywords in your anchors while still using discretion. 

Here’s the anchor text ratio we recommend for your inner pages:

• 35% – 45% of your links should contain branded, URL, or natural anchors. 
• 50% – 60% should contain partial match anchors. 
• No more than 10% of your links should include exact match anchors. 

Even on your inner pages, you should use exact match anchors sparingly, so stick with partial matches whenever possible. 

Closing Thoughts: Anchor Text Ratios 

If you want to reach the top of the Google SERPs, your backlink profile needs to contain the right anchor text ratios. 

The last thing you want is to see your rankings tank because you used too many exact match anchors, so ensure that you’re strategic when writing anchor text. 

The ratios found in this article come from thousands of hours of real-world research, and they’re based on link profiles that Google feels are natural and high value. 

Do you need help forming a link-building strategy (including anchor text ratios) for your business?

Then you need to check out our Link Outreach and Link Insertion Services from The HOTH. Our link-building experts will help you dominate the SERPs for your niche, so don’t wait to get in touch today.

The post Anchor Text Ratios: Why They Still Matter for SEO Strategies appeared first on The HOTH.

That’s why reps place so much emphasis on that first point of contact – like really knocking it out of the park with a riveting sales pitch or an engaging product demo. 

Yet, most prospects won’t immediately make a purchase, as they may need some time to weigh other options, gain approval from their team, or free up enough time to complete the sale. 

While this fact can discourage some, it’s crucial to stay persistent with your efforts – hence the need for sales follow-ups. 

According to data, 80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls, which may seem excessive at first. 

After all, many sales reps shy away from following up too much in fear of seeming too pushy. 

However, 5 follow-ups are par-the-course for most customers, as Marketing Donut points out with their research – 92% of reps give up after four ‘no’s,’ but 80% of prospects say ‘no’ four times before saying ‘yes.’ 

So don’t give up if a prospective customer doesn’t say yes straight away, as most will not. 

That doesn’t mean that you should go nuts and follow up with your prospects every single day, either. 

It takes tactfulness to determine when to follow up & which method to use (i.e., phone calls, text messages, follow-up emails, etc.) – so stay tuned to learn how. 

Why Should You Follow Up with Customers?

First, it’s important that we make a clear distinction. 

There’s a big difference between spamming uninterested prospects with messages and properly following up with qualified leads. 

The former will get you absolutely nowhere with your marketing strategy, while the latter will yield tons of new business. 

Many salespeople have an irrational fear that their follow-up messages will be seen as spam by their prospects, which is why they adopt such a skittish attitude towards it. 

They need to know that as long as you’re following up with a qualified lead that hasn’t outright declined interest in what you’re selling, follow-up messages are fair game.

While you still need to be tactful with how and when you send your follow-ups (i.e., don’t go crazy and call them every day), you can and should send as many follow-up messages as it takes to get a response. 

There are plenty of real-world examples where reps finally landed a sale after following up with prospects 40 – 100 times. 

As an example, James Altucher cold-emailed hedge fund billionaire Stevie Cohen for an entire year before finally receiving a response – a true testament to the power of persistence. 

The point is that you should never give up on a qualified lead that goes cold. If you continue to receive no response, keep trying to contact them every week until you do. Even if you get a definitive no, at least you saw it through until the end. 

According to the data gathered by Scripted, 44% of salespeople give up after only one follow-up call, which is leaving quite a few sales on the table, given the other stats that we know are true (such as 80% of sales requiring five follow-up calls). 

The Benefits of Customer Follow-Ups 

As long as you take the right approach, following up with your sales prospects will yield numerous benefits for your organization. 

Besides sending follow-ups to your most qualified leads, you should also follow up with your existing customers to ensure they’re satisfied with your products and services. 

That will ensure that your existing customers remain loyal and continue to choose your brand over the competition. 

Follow-up messages let your established customers know that you care, and they help boost conversions for your prospects. Here’s a closer look at the top benefits you’ll enjoy from improving your ability to follow up with customers. 

Following up shows you care 

Whether you’re pursuing a qualified lead or want to check in with one of your existing customers, follow-up calls and emails let your customers know that you care. 

That’s especially true when following up with your established customers. 

You’ve already made the sale, but you’re checking in to ensure their continued satisfaction with your products and services. 

Also, be open to customer feedback when checking in with existing customers. If you’re willing to listen to their suggestions for improvement, it shows that you care about catering to your customer’s needs – which can pay off in a big way. 

According to a survey by Acquia, 75% of American consumers are more likely to show loyalty to a brand that understands them on a personal level, which is why listening to feedback is crucial. 

Beyond that, the survey also found that once customers commit, they tend to remain loyal for life.  

Also, following up on leads shows that you care about landing the sale and that you’ll do whatever it takes to gain their business. 

82% of buyers will at least consider accepting meetings with sales reps that reach out to them for this very reason. Tenacity pays off and can even be flattering to customers, so don’t be shy about pursuing active leads with all your might to boost sales.

It improves your customer experience (CX)

While this benefit primarily applies to following up with your existing customer base, pursuing sales leads can also boost your CX. 

If you’re consistently following up with a lead in a way that’s tenacious yet tactful, it serves as a preview of what it’s like to be one of your company’s customers. In particular, your follow-ups can serve as a window into what your customer support will be like. 

So if you’re sending well-written follow-up messages in tandem with the prospects’ schedule (i.e., not calling them on a day when you know they’re busy) – it can reflect positively on your organization as a whole. 

That can actually help you land the sale – as stellar customer service is a top factor (56%) for building customer loyalty. 

Follow-up calls with existing customer relationships are even more important for your CX. That’s especially true if a customer has had a negative experience with your brand. 

The follow-up will give them a chance to vent about their experience, and you’ll get a chance to apologize, resolve the issue, and retain their business. 

Customers appreciate when brands care enough to reach out and resolve their issues. In fact, 59% of customers state that fast, consistent, and satisfactory answers to their queries is key to gaining their trust & loyalty. 

It gives you a chance to address any issues

You never know when a prospect or existing customer will run into issues with your products and services. 

It could be that they have an additional question regarding your product, or they could have run into a problem when trying to use your product. 

Either way, your follow-up calls and emails are the perfect opportunities for catching & resolving these issues before they can affect your reputation or cause you to lose a sale. 

It’s important to follow up with new customers (especially if they bought a new product) to see if everything is working out the way they wanted. To make your follow-up emails even more helpful, you can include a list of FAQs new customers tend to have about your products and services.

Following up also gives you a chance to address and resolve any issues your potential customers may have. 

For instance, let’s say you really impress a lead with a product demo, but you don’t hear back for a week. By following up to check in with the prospect, you uncover that they have additional concerns regarding pricing. 

They’d like to buy your product, but after convening with their higher-ups, it was determined that they lacked the funds to make it happen. 

Rather than losing the sale, you inform them of special offers that will knock down the price of your product (or of lower-tier subscription plans that won’t hit their wallet as hard). 

That’s a simple example of how following up can help you catch and address issues that would have cost you a sale otherwise. 

Following up reminds customers that you exist 

The average person today receives dozens of emails, phone calls, texts, and voicemails every single day. 

So if you send a qualified lead a follow-up email, the chances of them seeing it and actually spending the time to read it are quite slim. 

That’s why you shouldn’t get discouraged if your prospects don’t respond to your initial follow-up emails. 

In fact, it may take 10 or 20 emails before you actually get a response. 

Remember, keep following up with leads until they reply. If they tell you in no uncertain terms that they’re not interested, leave them alone and remove them from your follow-up list. However, if you’ve yet to receive a reply – it’s probably because the prospect is far too busy and hasn’t had the time to respond yet. 

Sending regular follow-up messages to your prospects will remind them that you exist, which is crucial to do in today’s oversaturated market. 

Don’t forget that while you’re sending emails in hopes of a response, your competitors likely are at the same time – so keep trying. 

The Best Ways to Follow Up with Customers 

Now that you know not to be shy about following up with qualified prospects, it’s time to learn the best methods for doing so. 

There’s a lot that goes into deciding how and when to follow up with a customer, not to mention which contact method to choose. 

Should you text, call, or email your existing and prospective customers?

Beyond that, you need to determine how often to reach out without overstepping your bounds or disappearing entirely. 

Checking in with prospects and customers is an art form, so let’s take a look at the best practices for customer follow-ups. 

Vary your contact methods 

There’s no one-size-fits-all contact method for getting in touch with customers, as everyone has different needs. 

For instance, if you only send follow-up emails to your prospects, you may run into customers that never check their email. As a result, every follow-up message you send shoots off into a black hole, never to be seen again.

However, if you do a little digging and discover that despite never checking their inbox, the client is very active on LinkedIn and other social media platforms – messaging them through there is the way to go. 

Conversely, sending an email may yield better results if you try calling a client but receive their voicemail every time. 

It’s important to utilize more than a few contact methods for each client until you receive a reply. 

The only exception to this rule is if the customer provides you with their preferred contact method. In that case, you should stick to it like glue – otherwise, you may wind up annoying the prospect. 

You should be mindful of your contact methods even when following up with your existing customers. 

If you’re trying to follow up with a new customer but aren’t receiving replies through text or email, you can try looking them up on social media or try calling their phone number. Going the extra mile to contact them can build trust and ensure total customer satisfaction. 

Write stand-out subject lines 

Your subject lines will make or break your follow-up emails. 

Since the average inbox contains hundreds of unread emails, if your subject line doesn’t immediately catch the eye, it’s likely that its next destination is the trash. 

Generic subject lines like “Just Checking In” should immediately be discarded for this reason. They’re far too easy to overlook, especially when they’re buried in a pile of emails with equally generic subject lines. 

Without a catchy subject line for your follow-up email, the odds of your customer seeing it are akin to finding a needle in a haystack. 

Want to know how to instantly boost your open rates with one simple trick?

Include the recipient’s name in the subject line. 

This small tactic has a powerful impact, as one study showed that personalizing email subject lines could boost open rates by 29% – and click-through rates by 41%. 

Besides personalization, other tips for writing stand-out subject lines include the following:

• Elicit a sense of urgency by including a timeframe (i.e., specific meeting dates, special offers about to expire, etc.)
• Ask direct questions to the recipient in the subject line (Is This Of Interest to You?)
• Mention the value included in the email (i.e., blog posts, videos, whitepapers, etc.)

Keep things short and sweet 

The last thing you want to do in a follow-up message is ramble on and overstay your welcome. 

You’re here to check in with a qualified lead or an existing customer, which means you need to get in, get to the point, and get out. 

Don’t waste a few paragraphs updating them on the state of your business, and get straight to the value you have to offer. After all, it’s a follow-up message, not a newsletter. 

Also, EVERY follow-up email needs to include a call-to-action (CTA) at the end. 

What’s that?

A call-to-action is a brief line of text that informs your customers what you want them to do next. Here’s an example of a CTA:

We’d love to offer you 30% off your first visit, so don’t wait to take advantage of this offer now. 

This sentence lets your prospects know you want them to take you up on your special offer. Also, you’d need to use the last few words of the sentence as anchor text for a hyperlink to one of your product pages. 

If you’re following up on the phone, you definitely need to be concise. People have busy schedules, and they won’t have long to chat with you, so you need to make that time count. 

To respect your customer’s time, it’s a good idea to let them know approximately how long the call will take at the beginning. A busy prospect will be less likely to rush you off the phone if they know the call is only going to take two minutes from the start. 

Don’t get too clingy but don’t disappear 

To follow up with customers like a pro, you need to master the balancing act of knowing when to follow up and when to leave your customers alone. 

Purchase decisions take time, and you can’t expect to make a sale overnight. 

That’s why you shouldn’t send too many follow-up messages at once.

In general, following up once a week is enough to suffice. It hits the perfect sweet spot between staying in touch and not getting too clingy. 

Of course, you also need to consider the specific needs of your clients. 

If you know that a prospect is taking a two-week vacation, following up with them during that time isn’t a smart idea. 

Sometimes potential customers will let you know the best times to contact them, which you should adhere to without fault. Sending a follow-up message at an unexpected or unwanted time can seriously backfire, so be mindful when deciding when to send your messages. 

Wrapping Up: How to Follow Up With Customers 

Are you being persistent enough with your customer follow-ups?

If not, it’s never too late to start being more tenacious when pursuing your qualified leads. 

You never know when you’ll receive a reply giving you the go-ahead for another meeting or to make a purchase. 

People are extremely busy today, so don’t be shy about following up numerous times using various methods until you receive a reply. 

Do you need help formulating your company’s winning digital marketing strategy, including effective customer follow-ups?

Get in touch with us to learn more about HOTH Performance, our premiere CRM tool.

Our marketing experts can also provide managed SEO services to take your online visibility to the next level, so don’t wait to check us out.        

The post How to Follow Up with Customers: Being Proactive & Tactful appeared first on The HOTH.

Then you need to implement an eCommerce SEO strategy to make that dream a reality. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to tweaking your on-page and off-page content to cater to search engine algorithms. 

When done correctly, you can secure a top-ranking spot on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. 

Ideally, you want to penetrate the top 5 results to increase your online visibility and generate the most organic traffic. 

Why does this matter for eCommerce sites?

It does because 43% of all eCommerce traffic comes from organic Google search results. Not only that, but 23.6% of eCommerce orders come from organic visitors from search engines. 

With a top-ranking spot on Google and landing pages designed to convert, you’ll enjoy loads of new potential customers and sales, which is why eCommerce SEO is well worth the effort. 

Yet, there’s quite a bit to know if you want your eCommerce website to reach the top of the SERPs. Quite a bit goes into developing an SEO strategy, and there’s no shortage of fierce competition out there. 

Luckily, our extensive guide is here to teach you everything you need to know. Stick around to discover how to build a winning eCommerce SEO campaign. 

What Makes eCommerce SEO Unique?

There’s a reason why eCommerce SEO has its own specialized category – and that’s because there are many factors that make it different from traditional SEO. 

Everything from the keyword research you’ll conduct to the backlinks you’ll go after will have an eCommerce twist to them. 

For instance, instead of searching for informational keywords to rank for, you’ll want to target product searches and transactional searches (i.e., ‘coffee filters’ is a product search, and ‘buy coffee filters’ is a transactional search). 

Not only that, but there are many on-page SEO tweaks you’ll need to make to your online store that are unique to eCommerce. 

Your internal site structure, category pages, internal link structure, and user experience are all factors you’ll need to tweak to find success with eCommerce SEO. 

eCommerce SERPs

There’s also a difference in the types of searches your potential customers will make. 

Most of the time, the organic search results will appear at the top for informational keyword searches. Occasionally, there may be a featured snippet or knowledge bar on the side, but that’s about it. 

As a quick example, if we search for ‘encyclopedia’ on Google, a snippet appears defining the term, and then it goes straight to the organic results. 

Product searches are very different, as their SERPs tend to be more populated with shopping features. 

For instance, when we type ‘buy coffee filters’ into Google, the top of the page (called position zero) is occupied with a SERP feature called shopping results. 

It’s a carousel of coffee filters for sale from websites like Amazon and Target. Each item features a picture and a price, which is convenient for shoppers. 

Below the shopping results, another SERP feature pops up before we reach the organic results. 

This one is called the local pack, and it features a Google Map showing all the local stores where you can buy coffee filters. Beneath that, we finally reach the organic search results. 

As you can see, searchers have quite a bit to scroll through before they reach the organic listings. That’s why it’s even more crucial to rank in a top spot for eCommerce SEO to ensure you get the most visibility. 

Keyword Research for eCommerce Websites 

Every type of SEO strategy starts with keyword research, and eCommerce SEO is no exception.

Why is that?

It’s because your keyword research serves as the foundation for all your SEO tactics. 

Without a list of keywords that your target audience regularly searches for, you won’t be able to do the following:

• Create content. You’ll need to use your keywords in your blogs, videos, infographics, and any other type of content you plan on releasing. 
• Make on-page SEO tweaks. To rank on search engines, your keywords need to appear in your content and your title tags, meta descriptions, product pages, product descriptions, and more. 
• Make technical SEO tweaks. Even your technical SEO requires target keywords, as you’ll need to use them in your URLs and site architecture. 
• Off-page SEO. You also need to have a list of relevant keywords when listing your sites in directories and making social media posts. 

These are all reasons why your eCommerce SEO strategy MUST begin with keyword research. 

Not only that, but all your SEO efforts will live or die by the quality of your keywords. 

If you choose irrelevant keywords, your content could wind up in front of the wrong audience, which won’t lead to much traffic generation – and what little traffic you do get won’t be interested in your products. 

eCommerce-friendly keywords 

Beyond that, you need to target the right types of keywords to bring in potential customers looking to make a purchase. 

If you focus on informational keywords, such as ‘how-to’ phrases, you’ll attract the wrong type of user. For the most part, your goal with eCommerce SEO is to attract customers that are ready to buy instead of educating your audience. 

That’s not to say that informational keywords don’t have their place in eCommerce. For instance, if you’re selling expensive products that tend to have longer sales cycles, you’ll want to target informational keywords to educate your audience before convincing them that they need your products. 

A majority of the time, though, you should target product keywords and transactional keywords. 

As a result, your keyword research efforts should center around product-focused keywords that your target audience searches for regularly. 

How do you find those types of keywords?

There are quite a few ways, so let’s take a look at each one. 

Using Amazon and Google Suggest 

A fantastic way to uncover relevant keywords is to use the suggestion feature of both Google and Amazon. 

Whenever you start to type words into Amazon or Google, a list of suggested keywords will pop up. The good news is that these are targeted keywords that users search for on a regular basis, so you can use them for your SEO tactics. 

While Amazon is technically your competitor, as the largest eCommerce platform in the world, they’re a goldmine for product keywords. That means you can use their massive investment into SEO for your benefit. 

Here’s how to use Amazon’s suggested feature to uncover relevant keywords for your audience. 

Simply go to Amazon.com, and start to enter keywords that describe your products. After entering a few letters, Amazon will spit out a list of relevant, targeted long-tail keywords that you can use. 

Why does that matter?

It does because long-tail keywords have a habit of converting better than short-tail keywords, and they also have much less competition. 

You can use this strategy for every product on your website, so don’t be shy about putting Amazon’s suggestion feature to use. 

You can also repeat the same technique on Google search, as it also has an auto-complete suggestion feature containing valuable keywords. 

Google is unique in that it lists keyword suggestions in two locations. 

Besides the autocomplete feature in the search bar, Google also lists related keywords at the bottom of the page in a section called Related Searches. The long-tail keywords that you’ll find here are equally as valuable as the ones generated by the search bar, so you can use them, too. 

The Keyword Tool Dominator for Amazon 

Besides autocomplete, you can use the Keyword Tool Dominator to uncover product keywords from Amazon. 

All you have to do is enter a keyword into it, and it will generate an extensive list of relevant long-tail keywords related to your products. 

Why use this tool over autocomplete?

You should use them both in tandem to see the best results. In general, though, the Keyword Tool Dominator will provide more keyword ideas than the autocomplete feature. For instance, the average autocomplete list consists of around 8 keyword ideas, while the Keyword Tool Dominator can generate up to 100 at a time. 

As such, this tool will make extensive keyword research go a lot quicker. 

The autocomplete feature can work if you only need to find a few keywords. Yet, if you’re searching for 100s of keywords for all your products, using the Keyword Tool Dominator will drastically speed up the process. 

The tool also gives you some unique options for filtering your results, including the following:

• The ability to add phrases that the keyword must contain or not contain 
• Minimum and maximum word count 
• Minimum and maximum rank 
• A toggle for if the keyword ranks in the Top 10 or not 
• Whether the keyword is a precise match, normal match, or broad match 
• The country and marketplace 
• The Amazon department 

As you can see, you can get incredibly specific with what type of keywords you want to see, which is why this keyword research tool is so valuable. 

Amazon’s category pages 

Another page you should take out of Amazon’s book is how they format their product categories. 

This is an area that many SEOs overlook due to the belief that category pages don’t convert as well as product pages. While that is generally true, they still generate sales, so you shouldn’t ignore them. 

The fact is that most eCommerce websites use random keywords to optimize their category pages. The thinking is that as long as they have keywords in the content, it won’t matter what they are. 

This isn’t true, and many eCommerce sites end up costing themselves sales as a result. 

That’s why you should conduct in-depth keyword research for your category pages to give them a logical structure. Your customers will appreciate organized categories with appropriate keywords, as it will make browsing your eCommerce site far easier. 

Search engine algorithms will also rank you higher if your category pages contain the right keywords, so it’s worth putting in the time to do the research.

What’s the best way to find keywords for your category pages?

Once again, you should turn to Amazon. They have a fantastic structure for their product categories, and you can use their keywords for inspiration. 

Finding category page keywords 

Start by selecting ‘All’ to see every category on the website. While that’s probably far too broad, the subcategories are where this tactic starts to shine. 

There are dozens of subcategories on Amazon, so you can get as specific as possible with your niche. 

Another technique is to click on the ‘Full Store Directory’ under ‘All’ to see a complete list of all Amazon’s departments and subcategories on one page. 

Let’s consider an example where you sell gardening tools. Start by clicking on the Home, Garden & Tools departments to find category keywords. That will take you to a list of subcategories, including Garden & Outdoor. Once you click on that, you’ll see a list of more subcategories, including Gardening Tools. 

Bingo! Once you click on it, you’ll see a list of category keywords for their gardening tools in the sidebar, which includes the following:

• Gardening axes 
• Bonsai tools 
• Bulb planters 
• Hand edgers 
• Cultivators & tillers 

These are all excellent product category keywords that you can use on your eCommerce site, so feel free to use them. Besides Amazon, there are plenty of other eCommerce businesses you can use to uncover category keywords – including your direct competitors. 

As an example, if you sell garden tools and want to find more category keywords than the ones you found on Amazon, you can turn to websites like Home Depot and Lowe’s, which have plenty of category keywords for gardening tools that you can use. 

Using a keyword planner tool 

Another way to find suitable keywords for your niche is to use our free Google keyword planner tool. 

What’s that?

It’s an SEO tool that not only helps you find keywords but also provides essential metrics for them, such as search volume and keyword difficulty. 

In fact, you can use this tool to vet all the keywords that you find using other methods like Google and Amazon suggest.

Here’s an example of how it works. 

Going with the gardening tools example, you find the long-tail keyword ‘garden axe’ from Amazon’s Gardening Tools category page. 

From there, you input the keyword into the planner tool, complete the CAPTCHA, and then view the results. Besides the keyword garden axe, the tool will also generate a list of related keywords that you can use. 

In this case, it provided us with 49 other results in addition to the original query. 

You’ll get to view the following metrics for each keyword:

Search volume

This number refers to how many people are actively searching for the keyword. For the keyword garden axe, it has a search volume of 140, which is decent. 

In general, you should use keywords that have a search volume of 100 – 1,000 searches per month for the effort to be worth your while. 

CPC (cost-per-click)

This metric is for PPC (pay-per-click) ad campaigns, as it lets you know the cost-per-click of the keyword on Google Ads. Garden axe has a relatively low CPC at $0.39. 

What’s a good CPC?

It will depend on the types of ads you run and how much traffic you generate as a result. The golden rule tends to be a 5:1 ratio of profit to ad cost. 

In other words, you’ll want to make 5 times more in revenue than it costs to create the ad. 

So in the case of a CPC of $0.39, if you can make $1.95 off each click, then you’re in the green. 

Competition

This is another PPC metric that refers to how competitive the ad placement is for the keyword online. Garden axe has a competition score of 1, which isn’t too bad. 

In fact, its low competition is reflected in its meager CPC. 

That’s because keywords with high competition cost more per bid due to the increased demand. As a result, high-competition keywords will have higher CPCs, and they’ll also be more difficult to rank in a top position. 

To stay on the safe side, do your best to find keywords that have decent search volume but not much in the way of competition. 

Results

This displays how many results show up for the keyword on Google. Garden axe has 35,400,000, which is a ton. 

That means there are thousands upon thousands of web pages containing the keyword garden axe. 

We can also assume that a great deal of those web pages are selling garden axes and gardening tools, making them your competitors. 

The good news?

Despite the vast number of results, the keyword difficulty is still relatively low. That means you won’t have that hard of a time ranking in a top spot if you’re thorough enough with your optimization. 

Difficulty

Also referred to as a KD (keyword difficulty) score, this metric refers to how difficult it will be to rank in one of the top spots due to the number of competitors. 

If this number is too high, it’s best to try another keyword. 

That’s because it’s a sign that many other websites are using high-level SEO tactics to rank for the keyword. It could also mean that the top spot is occupied by an enterprise-level website that has hundreds of thousands of high-authority backlinks (think sites like Facebook, Amazon, and Wikipedia). 

That’s why it’s best to stick to keywords that have lower difficulty scores to A) make your life easier and B) increase your chances of securing a top spot on the SERPs. 

Garden axe has a modest score of 19, so we can still go for it. (For reference, anything above 70 is considered high). 

Search trend

Our keyword planner provides a line graph representing the interest in the keyword over time. 

If it’s trending up, then the keyword is gaining in popularity and will likely generate a ton of traffic. If it’s trending down, then the keyword is losing momentum. 

It’s essentially a pocket view of Google Trends, another free tool you can use to bolster your digital marketing strategy (along with Google Search Console and Google Analytics). 

Garden axe peaked in popularity a while ago, but the trend is rising again, which is a good sign. 

Most keywords rise and fall in popularity over time, which is why being able to see a line graph of their trends is so valuable. 

For instance, you could wind up with a dud without checking a keyword’s trend. Let’s say you find a stellar keyword relevant to your audience with a sky-high search volume and a very low difficulty score. 

Time to double down and create tons of content for it, right?

Well, not yet. 

By taking a quick look at its trend graph, you notice that it peaked in popularity a few weeks ago and is currently on a nosedive. 

That means that the high search volume that you planned on generating a ton of traffic is about to disappear. What’s even worse is that you’re about to spend a ton of resources creating content for a keyword that’s about to become irrelevant. 

That’s why checking the trend for a keyword is so crucial, so make sure you do so for every keyword on your website. 

Using Wikipedia to find keywords 

Lastly, Wikipedia is another fantastic resource for finding keywords. 

Why is that?

Much like Google and Amazon, Wikipedia is impeccably organized with keywords and categories, all of which are SEO-friendly. 

That means you can take advantage of their massive keyword database for your benefit. 

Of course, you should run any keywords you find through our keyword planner to ensure that they have a desirable search volume, low difficulty score, and an upward search trend. 

As a bonus, finding keywords related to your niche on Wikipedia is very easy. 

All you have to do is enter a keyword that describes your products. To keep things simple, we’ll stick with the gardening tools example. 

By entering gardening tools into Wikipedia, we’re directed to a web page discussing hand tools and power tools, complete with a ton of relevant keywords, including the following:

• Hatchet 
• Trenchers
• Axe
• Sickle 
• Sythe 
• Pitchfork 
• Trenchers 
• Leaf Blowers 
• Chainsaws 

Beyond that, each one of these keywords links to another web page that can provide more ideas for you. 

Using Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, and our keyword planner tool in tandem is a reliable and effective way to uncover eCommerce keywords. 

eCommerce Site Architecture 

By now, you should have an extensive list of keywords to use in your eCommerce SEO strategy. 

You now have what you need to flesh out the rest of your SEO campaign, including your site structure. 

What’s that?

Your website’s structure/architecture refers to how all your web pages connect and relate to one another. A logical site structure is a critical ranking factor for any SEO strategy, but it’s doubly important for eCommerce. 

That’s because your eCommerce site is bound to have many more pages than your average website due to the products you sell. 

It’s common for an eCommerce website to have hundreds or even thousands of pages, depending on how many products they sell. For instance, Amazon has millions of landing pages for its products, which is why an airtight site architecture is a must for them to operate. 

You’ll want to create a layout that makes it effortless for your customers to find what they’re looking for on your website. 

That’s another reason why well-thought-out category pages (and keywords) are so crucial for eCommerce SEO. 

How to implement a logical site structure 

The SEO best practice for site architecture is to keep every web page within three clicks or less from your homepage. 

You can think of your homepage as the central hub for all your product and landing pages. That’s because the further you navigate away from your homepage, the more your authority begins to deteriorate. 

What’s authority?

In a nutshell, ‘authority’ in search engine terms refers to how much Google trusts and values your content. You obtain authority through backlinks, which is a link on an external site that ‘points back’ to your website. 

An example would be a link on a guest blog post that directs to your eCommerce website. The more trustworthy sites that you have linking to your website, the more Google will trust you and view you as authoritative. 

It’s similar to citing sources and references at the end of a research paper. 

The catch is that most of your backlinks will point to your homepage. As a result, your homepage will contain the most authority out of any other page on your website. Therefore, the further you drift from your homepage, the more your authority will deteriorate. 

That’s why you don’t want any page to be more than 4 pages away from your homepage to retain its authority. From page 5 and beyond, your authority will begin to wane, so be wary. 

It’s also essential that your old pages redirect to new pages for your content to stay fresh and rankable on search engines. 

Avoid orphan pages 

A notorious no-no for any type of SEO is to have orphan pages on your website. 

An orphan page is one that has no internal links pointing to it, thus making it nearly impossible for someone to visit. 

Search engines like Google use your internal linking structure as a guide for understanding your website, and orphan pages throw off their algorithms. Beyond that, an orphan page stands next to no chance of ranking if it does get crawled and indexed. 

That’s because links are an integral part of SEO, as they convey authority, relevance, and quality to a web page. Without them, your orphan page will have extremely low domain authority, so it likely won’t show up on page one of Google (if it shows up in the results at all). 

When designing your site architecture, ensure that every page has at least one internal link pointing to it (preferably more than that). Also, if possible, each page should include one or more relevant and authoritative external links somewhere in its content. 

How can you find out if you have any existing orphan pages?

All you need is a website crawler like Screaming Frog and a complete list of your site’s web pages. Run a crawl for all pages that have zero inbound links, and analyze the results of the audit. 

That will quickly point out any orphan pages you may have, and resolving them is as simple as adding an internal link to them on your homepage. 

Two problems facing eCommerce site structure: thin content and duplicate content

eCommerce SEO strategies tend to hit two snags, pages that have what Google considers thin content and pages that are considered duplicate content. 

The primary issue is that both problems come with the territory of an eCommerce website. Since you likely sell products that come in different sizes and colors, you’ll likely have many product pages where the only changes are the colors and sizes – with no change to the copy, price, or even the product name in some cases. 

As far as thin content goes, simpler products are likely to have brief descriptions, which can lead Google to flag the page as having thin content. 

Google generally considers any page with less than 300 words to be thin content. Their thinking is that for a web page to add value; it needs to provide more information than 300 words. 

That’s why most blog posts have a lengthier word count of about 1,000 – 2,500 words. 

For an eCommerce site, some product filter pages and product attribute pages may only list a few items. Also, it’ll be tough to include lengthier product descriptions for simple products (think paper clips), which can be challenging for eCommerce store owners. 

Fixing the problems 

Here’s how you can fix both issues. 

Adding blog content to your eCommerce store is a great remedy for the thin content issue. By simply including links to your blog posts on each page (complete with a few lines from each post as a preview), you can drastically bump up the word count to avoid thin content. 

You can also add more detail to your product descriptions (if possible), as well as add:

• Product specifications 
• Pricing information 
• Customer reviews 
• Related items that people also search for 

These are all candid ways to not only add to the word count of each page but also to make enhancements to your store. 

Adding specs can provide helpful information for users looking for precise sizes (such as nails and screws). Customer reviews can help convince prospects to part with their hard-earned dollars, and a related items carousel can improve your average ticket size. 

Next, there’s solving the duplicate content issue. 

For product pages that only serve to show different attributes, such as color and size, you can use canonical tags to designate one ‘master’ version of each product that shows up on search engines. 

For instance, if you offer a shoe in seven different colors, including every single page on the SERPs will lead to duplicate content. Therefore, you mark the base shoe (probably in black) with a canonical tag. That will tell Google that this is the version that you want to appear in the search engine results pages. 

For the other six colors, you mark them with a noindex tag, which will cause Google to ignore them. 

Technical SEO for Ecommerce Sites 

Now let’s get into the technical tweaks you need to make to optimize your site for search engines. 

Technical factors that affect SEO include:

• Broken links 
• 404 Not Found pages 
• No XML sitemap 
• Improper indexing
• Slow page speed 
• Not optimized for mobile devices
• Not enough schema markup 

Site speed is among the most important technical SEO factors, as nothing will encourage a user to leave your site more than poor loading times. 

Google also puts every website through its Core Web Vitals test to check its loading speed. If your site fails the test, Google won’t rank you in a top spot. To speed things up, you can reduce CSS/Javascript, compress your images and videos, and switch web hosting services. 

To discover if you have any technical issues, you can use our free in-depth SEO audit tool. 

Content Marketing for eCommerce SEO 

Since you have a list of keywords, a well-structured site, and have made technical tweaks, it’s time to start releasing content to rise through the ranks on Google and other search engines. 

Blogging is one of the most popular content types for SEO for a few reasons. 

First, blog posts are excellent ways to use the keywords you found in your research. Besides using them in your headings, copy, and conclusion – you can base entire posts around keyword topics. Search engines will pick up on this, and they’ll start to rank your content higher for your target keywords. 

Next, blogs can drive lots of traffic to your site from users that are interested in your products, which is great for your conversion rates and click-through rates. 

Also, companies who blog get 97% more links, so blogging is excellent for link-building as well. 

Pro blogging tips 

If you want to find success with your blogs, you’ll need to know a few best practices. 

43% of users admit to skimming blog posts before reading them, so you’ll want to make your blog posts scannable. 

How do you do that?

You do it by making appropriate use of headings. There are different-sized headers, and both readers and search engines pay attention to them. 

The H1 heading is your main title, and it should be succinct and on topic. From there, H2 headings comprise each subtopic, and H3, H4, and so on further embellish each point. 

When formatted correctly, it will be effortless for users to scan your article and get an idea of what it’s about. At the same time, crawlers will use your headings to do the same thing, so using them appropriately is crucial. 

Also, you should make your blogs as readable as possible. 

That means using short sentences and brief paragraphs that don’t contain more than three sentences consecutively. 

Finding content topics 

Your list of keywords is a goldmine for creating high-quality content. For instance, going with the garden axe example from before, you could create a blog post, video, or infographic called 10 Ways to Use a Garden Axe. 

Now your prospects can learn exciting new ways to use one of your products, which is what you want. 

Another great way to develop content topics is to uncover problems plaguing your target audience and offer your products as a solution. 

An example would be framing unwanted weeds in your garden as a pain point, and your garden axe as the ultimate solution. 

eCommerce Link Building 

As stated before, Google gives the most credence to websites that have trustworthy backlinks pointing to them. 

The thinking is if a credible website chooses to link to your website, you must be credible as a result. 

That’s why link-building is a core aspect of any SEO strategy. The more authoritative backlinks you can acquire, the higher you’ll rank on Google. 

Here’s a look at some of the most common link-building strategies that you can start using today. 

Guest blogging 

Guest posting is one of the most common ways to acquire backlinks, and it’s a win-win for both parties. 

First, you find a related blog in your niche and reach out to them about doing a guest post. To sweeten the pot, you can offer them a guest post (and a backlink) on your blog in return. You can run a competitor keyword analysis on Ahrefs to find a list of other blogs in your niche. 

HARO 

The website Help-A-Reporter-Out (HARO) is an excellent resource for backlinks. The website sends out emails a few times a day containing tons of queries from reporters. They’re looking for experts to interview for stories they’re writing online, which is amazing for building backlinks. 

Responding to the query usually means providing your expertise on a subject for a quote they’ll use in their story. Whenever you respond, don’t forget to ask for a backlink in exchange for your quote. 

Broken links 

Another effective link-building tactic is to scour the web for broken links on pages you can replace. 

For example, if you find a broken link for a blog on gardening axes, you could replace it with your post 10 Ways to Use a Garden Axe. Reach out to the website owner and let them know you have a replacement for their broken link. 

This benefits both the website owner and you, as you fix a broken link while acquiring a valuable backlink. 

How do you find broken links?

You can easily find them by using a tool like Dead Link Checker. 

Concluding Thoughts: eCommerce SEO 

eCommerce SEO certainly has unique challenges, but that doesn’t mean it’s not doable. 

A robust eCommerce SEO strategy can propel you to the top of the search rankings even if you only run a small Shopify store. 

That’s why it’s worth following this guide to implement an SEO campaign for your eCommerce store. 

Are you seeking expert help for your eCommerce SEO strategy?

Then you need to check out our in-depth eCommerce digital marketing services at The HOTH, which includes HOTH X, our fully managed SEO services.      

The post eCommerce SEO: How to be a Big Fish in a Huge Pond appeared first on The HOTH.

Setting up a digital marketing agency that sells SEO services takes a ton of time, effort, and money.

Yet, once your agency is up and running, you face the additional challenge of building a robust client base – which means you need to have an airtight system for lead generation. 

There’s a significant reason why the salesmen of the famous movie/play Glengarry Glen Ross place so much stock on obtaining high-quality leads. 

Why is that?

It’s because, without qualified leads, it’s next to impossible for companies to achieve consistent, sustainable growth. 

For the salespeople in the movie, the premium leads are like golden tickets for snagging potential top-tier clients – which means big-time commissions for them and the chance at winning a new car. 

For SEO agencies, qualified leads are just as crucial, albeit for the growth of your company & client base, instead of scoring a brand-new Cadillac Eldorado. 

In fact, 95% of marketers claim that lead generation is their #1 goal, with 53% allocating half of their marketing budget to it. 

However, to find new leads on a consistent basis, you’ll need a lead generation strategy, which is what we’re going to provide you with today.

Learning how to generate qualified leads & potential customers that transform into new clients is an art every SEO agency needs to learn how to master if they want to find continued success in the future – so read on to learn how. 

What are SEO Leads?

An SEO lead is an individual or a business that’s shown interest in your SEO services. It may be that they need help building backlinks, making technical SEO adjustments, or they might need a fully managed SEO campaign. 

Their needs will vary, as the SEO industry is vast. 

Inside the umbrella term search engine optimization, there are many different specialties, including:

• Law firm SEO 
• eCommerce SEO 
• B2B SEO 
• CBD SEO 
• B2C SEO 
• Retail SEO
• Real estate SEO
• Healthcare SEO 

And the list goes on and on. For every type of industry or business, there’s an SEO specialty that goes along with it. 

Due to how inclusive the term SEO is, it can be challenging to source the right kind of leads for the services you provide. 

That’s why there’s great benefit in getting highly specific with the types of SEO services you provide. 

Many new SEO agencies make the mistake of going too broad with their approach. They go for the jack-of-all-trades method, where they try to provide every SEO service under the sun for every type of business. 

Keyword research, link-building, on-page & off-page SEO, they offer it all to anyone interested in doing business with them. 

The results?

They wind up not finding very many clients at all due to how all-encompassing & vague their services are. 

That leads us to the first rule of thumb with SEO leads; the more specific you can get with your services, the better. That’s because the more well-defined your services are, the easier it will be to find clients in need of what you provide. 

Selecting a Niche Focus for Your SEO Services

The first step in learning how to generate SEO leads consistently is to give your agency a concise focus for your services. 

It’s crucial to cater to your talents here, so think about what you do best. 

Does your team always knock it out of the park when acquiring backlinks for clients? Then you should consider making that your primary focus. 

If keyword research is your forte, you can make a considerable living selling that service to agencies & companies. 

Or maybe content marketing is what earns you the most accolades. No matter the service, it’s imperative to pinpoint your strongest areas and then focus on them the most. 

The point is to make what you provide as specific as possible, as that will make generating leads easier down the line. 

Besides identifying the services you excel at, you should also choose a niche for your SEO agency. 

The idea is to carve out a corner of the SEO market for yourself, where you can clearly define what it is you do and why you outshine the competition. 

As stated above, there’s a version of SEO for just about every type of business out there, so you should choose one to focus on. 

Instead of being the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none SEO agency, you can become the healthcare SEO agency specializing in premium keyword research & link-building. 

See the difference?

The second agency has a far clearer idea of what they do, and they seem more convincing and experienced as a result. 

How Do You Find SEO Leads?

Now that you know why it’s essential to have a niche focus, how do you start generating SEO leads?

There are many methods for acquiring leads, including using lead generation tools, referrals, Google ads, and inbound & outbound marketing techniques. 

Yet, finding SEO leads is only half the battle. 

Once you have an extensive list of qualified leads, then the challenge becomes contacting them, convincing them to use your services, and then signing a contract. 

For now, let’s focus on the top ways to find SEO leads so you can work on building a list of prospects. 

Inbound & Outbound Marketing Tactics for SEO Lead Generation 

When it comes to marketing strategies, there are two primary types of techniques – inbound and outbound. 

What are those?

Inbound marketing refers to tactics that bring your customers to you instead of seeking them out. Examples include helpful blog posts and videos that solve user pain points and answer common questions. 

Users will directly seek out this type of content to educate themselves or solve a problem, which is why they’re so effective. With a concise CTA (call to action) at the end of the piece of content, you can convince readers to become customers. 

You can also use inbound content to generate leads via acquiring email addresses. You can use a lead magnet, which is a free piece of content you give users in exchange for their contact information. 

Lead magnets can be PDFs, videos, eBooks, and other types of content. The only rule of thumb is they have to provide significant value to your audience. 

Outbound marketing refers to your efforts to bring your brand to customers, which means using things like PPC ads, YouTube ads, and manual outreach via social media. 

While outbound techniques can sometimes be viewed as obstructive by users, they can be just as effective at generating leads and sales as inbound content. Outbound techniques are also best for discovering new leads outside of your current base of SEO clients. 

It’s best to use a combination of inbound & outbound techniques to uncover the most SEO leads. 

Inbound: listing your website in digital agency directories

We’ll start with the inbound technique of listing your website in essential SEO directories. 

What are those?

A digital agency directory is a website containing a list of marketing agencies with varying specialties. 

These directories are perfect for generating SEO leads because they attract individuals, businesses, and web admins that are actively looking for marketing partners & agencies. 

Here are a few examples of digital agency directories:

• HubSpot 
• Marketo 
• Digital Agency Network 
• Clutch 
• Google Partners 

Some of these examples, such as Google Partners, are completely free for any agency wanting to get listed on the directory. 

Other options, like Marketo, require you to be an existing member of their platform to get listed in their directories.

In addition to digital marketing agency directories, you can also list your SEO agency on traditional directories like Yelp, Craigslist, and Yellow Pages to further expand your reach and online visibility. 

These directories are ‘catch-all’ options that provide listings for many different types of businesses, but they still get millions of hits each day, so listing your agency can be worth your while. 

Outbound: finding websites in desperate need of your SEO services 

Switching to outbound tactics for a moment, there’s no reason why you can’t actively seek out web pages that desperately need your services. 

For instance, if your SEO business involves doing stellar keyword research for healthcare agencies, you could look for physician’s websites struggling to rank on page one of the SERPs due to their poor use of keywords. 

How do you find these types of websites?

The easiest way is to do what nobody ever thinks to do – venture beyond the first page of Google results. 

Dive deep into the SERPs, going to page 10 or so, which is an SEO dead zone. Any healthcare website ranking on this page is definitely in need of your help, so don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Once you’ve found a few promising leads, do some outreach and get in touch with the web admins. Let them know about a few ways to improve their website to prove you know you’re stuff and to intrigue them to learn more. 

How to handle the outreach

Here’s an example of an outreach email you could send to a web admin in need of your outstanding keyword research:

Dear Prospect,

I noticed your website during my research and noticed that despite your excellent design, talented staff, and top-notch services, you’re ranking on page 10 of Google. 

My SEO agency specializes in keyword research, where we target specific search queries and optimize our client’s content for them to rank higher. We’ve identified many keywords that we could target and increase your rankings by a significant margin (think page one of Google, generating tons of organic traffic, leads, and sales). 

If you’re interested in what we do, please don’t hesitate to get in touch for a call. 

Thanks, 

SEO expert 

Just like that, you’ve made a convincing case for the prospect to at least hear you out on your offer. To increase your chances of landing a client even further, you can link to your case studies and testimonials to provide proof of your effectiveness. 

Inbound: creating high-quality content to attract prospects to your website

A classic inbound technique is to create useful content (blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.) to attract lots of website visitors that are interested in what you do. 

This will help you generate qualified leads for your services. 

The best part?

While many outbound techniques are unsustainable in the long run (such as spending money and resources on PPC ads), content marketing will continuously generate leads for you. 

Once you publish a blog, video, or infographic, it will remain there indefinitely, continuing to attract leads for you well into the future without requiring further investment. 

Something as simple as a well-written blog article can generate leads for you for months and years down the line. 

Yet, for your content to have the desired impact, it needs to be relevant and valuable to your target audience. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources creating content. 

That means you’ll need to do some research to uncover which types of content your audience values the most. Beyond that, you’ll need to learn their pain points, problems, wants, desires, and needs. 

To do so, take to relevant social media groups and forums related to your niche audience, and listen to what they have to say. You can also use keyword research tools (like our free keyword planner from The HOTH) to see which keywords are trending and gaining the most traction – as they can give you content ideas. 

For example, if you notice lots of users searching for the keyword ‘back pain remedies,’ you can write a blog post about the most effective ways to relieve back pain. 

Content marketing ideas for generating SEO leads 

There are many different types of content you can use to generate leads and even boost your sales. 

Blogs are extremely popular for content marketing and SEO, primarily due to how easy they are to produce and how effective they can be at generating traffic, leads, and sales. You can choose to write blogs yourself, or you can seek the help of freelancers to knock out the writing for you. 

If you want your blog posts to actively generate leads for you, it’s crucial to include CTAs and lead magnets in them. 

Videos are another prevalent form of content that can generate leads for you, but they’re a bit more time-consuming and expensive to produce than blogs. 

Yet, video content is the way of the future, as video content is expected to account for 82.5% of all web traffic, which will make it the #1 type of content online. So if you aren’t already producing video content, now is the time to start. 

If your budget is limited, you can produce inexpensive, high-quality videos by shooting on a smartphone and using basic video editing software. To generate SEO leads with your videos, go over the top reasons why you provide the best SEO services in your niche. 

You can also create videos featuring powerful customer testimonials and case studies to encourage your prospects to give you a call or, at the very least, leave their contact information. 

Podcasts and webinars are other types of content that are effective at generating leads. For podcasts, do your best to interview lots of relevant guests from the digital marketing and SEO industry. For webinars, let your attendees know how your SEO services can transform their business for the better. 

Inbound: using word of mouth and referrals 

Referrals are one of the most powerful ways to acquire SEO leads and qualified new customers. 

Why is that?

It’s because these leads come from your existing customer base, who can prove to your prospects that you do amazing work that provides real results. 

Nothing holds as much merit as a word-of-mouth referral from a close friend or colleague, which is why you should definitely pay attention to referrals. 

In fact, referrals are so powerful that there are entire businesses (including SEO companies) that thrive off referrals and word-of-mouth hype as their primary marketing strategies. 

How do you get your clients to refer others to you?

The best and most reliable way to do so is to simply provide excellent services for your clients. That alone is enough to get your clients singing your praises to their friends, family, and coworkers.

From there, you can also let your clients know that you’re looking for referrals and that you’d appreciate any they can provide. 

To sweeten the pot for your clients, you can offer discounts or special rewards for referrals. You can see this tactic at work with all sorts of companies, such as getting $50 for referring others to your internet provider. 

Your clients have the incentive of the reward you provide for the referral, and you benefit by gaining a new, qualified client. 

Outbound: outreach using social media marketing 

Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are goldmines for lead generation if you know where to look. 

In particular, you should take to groups related to the SEO services you provide and then become highly active within them. 

If you sell healthcare SEO services, then joining health & wellness groups on Facebook is the way to go. You can also frequent medical forums where physicians and nurses post about their jobs. 

Yet, you won’t be able to go for the hard sell approach here, as many social media groups prevent users from outright plugging their products and services. 

Instead of creating posts advertising your services, engage with the users in the group instead. Read their posts, and chime in with some relevant advice. If you can, bring up times that you’ve solved similar problems for your clients with your SEO services. 

By doing this, you’ll build trust within the group, and they’ll appreciate your insights. 

That’s a far better approach than pitching your services without any context, as that will come off as tacky and disingenuous. 

After you’ve engaged with the group for a while, members may begin messaging you for help with their SEO-related issues or even actively seek out your services. 

Outbound: attending relevant webinars and SEO online meetups 

This is a proven effective tactic that many SEO agencies fall back on when they need leads. 

It’s a social technique that involves chatting with attendees and seeing if they require your services. 

To find the most success, you should come up with several different pitches and then use them accordingly. 

Why is that?

It’s because there will be a wide variety of attendees with different needs at each meetup. 

For instance, if you’re speaking with a prospect that’s already very familiar with how SEO works, an in-depth explanation of search engine optimization isn’t necessary and will likely lose their interest. A better pitch for this type of client is to be succinct and get straight to the point. 

Conversely, if you’re speaking to a potential client that has no clue what SEO is, a more in-depth explanation is perfectly acceptable and even necessary. 

That’s why it’s crucial to adapt your pitch to each client, as it will help you acquire as many SEO leads as possible while attending meetups. 

Inbound: generating leads with your website 

Last but not least, you can transform your website into a powerful lead-generation tool with the right tweaks. 

This is where it pays off to have invested in your own website’s SEO. 

If you’re ranking in top spots for keywords like ‘healthcare SEO agencies near me,’ you can turn the traffic you generate into viable leads with the right types of landing pages. 

For the service pages users land on, don’t just offer your services. 

Instead, use a lead generator like a free tool to use in exchange for the user’s email address. You could offer an SEO audit, keyword research, or other types of freebies like PDFs or eBooks. 

These are useful because not every visitor to your website will be ready to enlist your services. 

However, that doesn’t mean that they won’t need your SEO services eventually. 

If you’re able to salvage their email address, you can send them follow-up content and offers. That way, whenever the time comes that they do need healthcare SEO services, your agency will be the first one that comes to mind. 

They already know you, and they regularly receive emails containing helpful and relevant content. As a result, going with your agency will be a no-brainer. That’s why you should always include a lead generator on your landing pages. 

Qualifying SEO Leads 

Now that you have a long list of SEO leads, it’s time to whittle it down to only the most qualified prospects. 

In particular, you need to pay close attention to the company’s structure and any key stakeholders that will be involved in the SEO process. 

You should also examine their online presence, including their current performance on search engines. This will help you not only determine if they’re a qualified prospect, but it will also help you start forming your SEO strategy for their website. 

Include a qualifying form on your website or through email 

A no-nonsense way to qualify your leads is to include an inquiry form on your website or through email. 

This form should contain all the important information you need to determine a qualified lead from an unqualified one. 

While it’s entirely up to you to create this form, here are some suggestions for what it should include:

• What types of SEO services do they want or need
• Their current budget level and how much they’re willing to allocate toward SEO
• When they want to get started 

If they provide satisfactory answers to all three questions, that’s a great sign that they’ll make a valuable client for your agency. 

If the answers aren’t satisfactory, you can ask them to sign up for your newsletter instead of booking a consulting call. That way, if they ever do become a qualified client, they’ll already be in your database, and they’ll know about your services. 

Contacting Your Qualified SEO Leads 

Once you’ve separated the wheat from the chaff in terms of qualified leads, it’s time to get in touch and start to seal the deal. 

Whether you choose to contact your prospects by email or over the phone, here are some pointers you won’t want to forget to include.

Keep things concise 

You’re not here to talk your prospect’s ear off or to send them an email the size of an eBook. Instead, include just enough to hook them and generate interest in your services. 

In other words, you don’t need to harp on and on about the benefits of working with your agency, especially at this stage. 

If you’re typing an email, the sweet spot is to keep it between 50 to 125 words to heighten the chances of receiving a response. 

Make it effortless for clients to take the next step 

Before you pick up the phone or type a word in an email to your client, first think about what you want them to do. 

Do you want them to schedule a consulting call, or would you prefer a face-to-face meeting?

Either way, make what you want explicitly clear in your call or email. If you want them to schedule a meeting with you, make that apparent by saying something along the lines of:

We’d love to meet with you to discuss our SEO services in more detail. Can you please provide a few dates when you’re available?

Just as with CTAs for blog posts, you can’t expect prospects to read your mind when it comes to what you want them to do, so be clear and direct about it. 

Concluding Thoughts: SEO Leads 

If you want your SEO agency to grow and expand in the future, then you need a way to generate a consistent pipeline of leads. 

Referrals, creating content, attending meetups, and finding existing websites in need of your services are all great ways to acquire SEO leads. 

Beyond that, you need to carefully qualify and contact your leads to heighten the chances of them converting into clients. 

Do you need help obtaining leads for your business?

Then don’t wait to check out our white-label digital marketing services at The HOTH. Our team comprises link-building, SEO, and digital marketing experts, so don’t wait to book a call today to revolutionize the way you approach your marketing.

The post How to Get New SEO Leads Without Spending a Ton of Time or Resources appeared first on The HOTH.

Read on to find out how to avoid the infamous Google penalty and keep your online traffic flowing freely.

Let’s start with some basics:

What is a Google Penalty? 

Think of a Google penalty as a traffic ticket for breaking a particular traffic law.

Like those traffic tickets, a Google penalty punishes a website that doesn’t follow Google’s Guidelines and any other practices that Google enforces. 

Although many websites have been punished by big algorithm updates, most websites are also penalized by small manual actions that Google takes. 

In fact, a Kissmetrics study suggests that only 5% of penalized websites submit a reconsideration request every month to recover their rankings.

Furthermore, when Google updates its ranking algorithm, many websites can be penalized as a result. 

With that said, here are a few steps you can take to avoid a Google penalty:

• Remove any backlinks you have that are in violation of Google’s guidelines.
• Remove any duplicate content that is of low quality.
• Remove backlinks from websites that are irrelevant to your topic niche.
• Remove unwanted or spammy comments or forum profiles.
• Consider updating old, outdated posts and replacing them with fresh content.

Additionally, here are a few other shady actions that are in violation of Google’s guidelines:

• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Doorway pages
• Hacking
• Link schemes

What are Some Consequences of a Google Penalty?

Have your rankings on Google suddenly dropped like a stone? Did your website traffic dry up and blow away? If either or both of those situations occurred, there’s a good chance that Google has penalized you. 

When they do, the ranking for your most important targeted keywords can drop dramatically. 

Even worse, Google will no longer list your website at all in their search results, which can be disastrous. 

When Google’s algorithm updates rolled out called Panda and Penguin, Google de-ranked many websites in search results that did not meet their standards in Google’s webmaster guidelines. 

Google also has a huge team manually reviewing websites and searching for web pages that use “black hat” SEO tactics that are against their rules and regulations.

Black Hat SEO includes:

• Inadvertently improper website maintenance
• Keyword stuffing or hiding
• Using private link networks
• Spamdexing
• Blog comment spam

Furthermore, here are some different types of Google penalties:

• Excessive reciprocal linking
• Manual spam links
• Low-quality link
• Unnatural outbound link penalty
• Unnatural links to or from your website

Some of the most basic consequences of a Google penalty include a drop in SEO ranking and an inability to use organic search to reach out to potential customers and clients. 

A Google penalty means that not only will your website or important pages drop in rank, but if you are removed from Google’s listings altogether, you may lose your target audience because they can no longer find you in results. 

For some companies that rely on their website to bring in business, a Google penalty can cause a severe dent in their financial stream and a concurrent drop in profitability.

With that said, let’s move on to how to avoid Google penalties:

How to Avoid Google Penalties

One great point to make here is that if you optimize your high-quality content, then you aren’t very likely to receive one of Google’s penalties. However, if your pages are lacking with thin content, then your audience will have a bad user experience which tells Google your website isn’t worth ranking.

Recovering from Google penalties isn’t impossible, however, if you think you’ve received a penalty by mistake, you can contact Google by using Google Search Console. You can also use Disavow which is a tool to help you find what’s causing you to lose rank.

Additionally, below are several mistakes you should avoid when marketing via Google so the chance they penalize you remain low and your traffic remains at full flow. 

1. Don’t Stuff Keywords

One of the worst mistakes you can make on Google is keyword stuffing. To avoid a penalty for keyword stuffing, use natural language that mimics how humans converse in the real world. 

Keep your keywords at about 3% of your total word count, as the risk of a penalty increases significantly over that amount.

Furthermore, here are some ways to avoid keyword stuffing:

• Conduct quality keyword research
• Extend your word count 
• Measure your keyword density
• Give each page a separate primary keyword
• Use secondary keywords
• Manage your on-page SEO with tools like SEO Minion

2. Use Well-Written, In-Depth Content

Driving traffic to your website means publishing new content online regularly. That content should be indexed, well-written and useful, at the very least, to avoid a penalty for having shallow content depth.

A good suggestion is to have a dedicated content staff publishing a blog related to your industry with in-depth, well-written, valuable content.

Some types of content are as follows:

• Stay relevant to your topic
• Answer the “people also ask” section of Google
• Share your content on social media to boost brand awareness
• Begin your intro with a statistic
• Understand your target audience
• Use short paragraphs
• Use simple and easy-to-understand words

3. Never Buy Black-Hat BackLinks

One of the easiest ways to get a penalty from Google is to purchase links. Yes, it’s very tempting, especially if you don’t have a lot of links yet, but Google has a way of catching companies that do. 

Rather than buy low-quality links, make it so that others want to link to your content. 

For example, become a source for bloggers, and use branded strategies and content formats that have already been proven to generate links. 

Before moving forward, let’s go over why it’s okay to buy some backlinks but not others. 

Backlinks are a valuable commodity because the weight of backlinks pointing to a website is a major ranking factor. 

In simple terms, you can buy white-hat backlinks for your website, which are natural, high-quality links that come from solid sources and help you generate more traffic to your website. 

With that said, low-quality backlinks from shady websites are not okay.

4. Don’t Reuse Content

Google hates it when you use duplicate content or infringe on another’s copyright. They don’t even like it when you use your content in multiple places, like when you copy and paste content from your website and use it in a guest blog post. 

The easiest way to avoid this penalty is always to use 100% unique content you or your team have created and use it in one location only. And, of course, never plagiarize content from another company’s website.

Here are some tips to avoid this:

• Don’t create duplicate content such as duplicate URLs, slugs, etc.
• Redirect duplicate content to a canonical URL
• Add an HTML link from a duplicate page to the canonical page

5. Don’t Write URLs Solely to Attract Traffic

Writing URLs to rank higher on Google or attract traffic only is a mistake many companies make. Instead, you should write clear and concise URLs that explain to the searcher exactly what they will be getting when they click the link.

An example of this would be titles that are similar to click-baiting. These links or titles don’t explain what the content is about, they are mainly there to get you to click on them. 

These shady methods are just a part of black-hat SEO tactics and should be avoided.

6. Never Hide Content

One of the oldest spam techniques in the book is to hide text so that only Google can see it. This hidden text often uses repeated keywords to manipulate Google and increase ranking. 

Hidden content can also improve a website’s click-through rate and send a user to a page where they can make a purchase, a 20th-century improvement on the “bait-and-switch” tactics used by car salespeople. 

Rather than hiding text, use a “read more” link that, when clicked, will make the content visible to the user. 

Furthermore, if you want to hide content from Google, you can use “no-follow” links so that Google won’t index your information. Doing this will tell crawlers not to show your page in search results (SERP). 

7. Don’t Make Your Website Top-Heavy

Have you ever visited a website and been completely overwhelmed by the ads on the page, to the point where you couldn’t get any valuable information? 

That type of web page is called a “top-heavy” page and is something that Google is adamantly against. 

To avoid being penalized, your website should have ads spread out between unique, well-written content. That way, users will see the content they want and be exposed to the ads but won’t be interrupted by them.

Additionally, a big amount of unoptimized images is usually one of the main reasons your website might become slow or heavy. Hi-res images can consume a ton of bandwidth while loading. 

A HubSpot study suggests that website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time. 

That’s why keeping your web pages running smoothly is important. You can use tools such as PageSpeed Insights to help you figure out if your website is fast. 

Google search console also has the option to check for mobile usability. Make sure to check your metrics to make sure your website won’t be hit with any penalties. 

8. Write People-First Content

It is common to experience frustration when landing on a website that isn’t exactly what you’ve searched for. Displaying this type of content can result in feeling like you’ve been penalized. 

Bots may fail to index your website, or you may lose domain authority altogether. 

Additionally, Google’s Helpful Content update is a new signal that is being implemented into Google’s algorithm that evaluates content. 

Crawlers search websites and decide if it was made for people to be helpful or otherwise useful information or if it was created just for Google’s crawlers. 

Webmasters have not experienced massive hits as was reported from the Penguin algorithm update. However, experts are expecting new-future core rollouts to change the way some content is ranked. 

Common Questions and Answers about Google Penalties

It’s one thing to say “do this” or “don’t do that,” but we at The HOTH feel our readers can benefit from knowing a lot about what happens when Google penalizes your content and what it can mean for your long-term sustainability. 

Below are several questions we hear and see all the time about Google penalties and our strategies for avoiding them

What is Google’s algorithm, and why does it penalize websites?

At its core, the Google algorithm is a complex system that Google uses to retrieve data from a search index. 

Once retrieved, it will instantly deliver that data to a searcher who has made a query, giving them the best results it believes for that particular query. 

The Google algorithm uses a wide range of ranking factors so that the relevance of all websites is ranked well, and the results a Searcher gets in the search engine answer their query as best as possible.

What are the types of Google penalties?

There are two types of Google penalties; manual actions and algorithmic changes. Both will cause your rankings to tank and, in most cases, your website to disappear from Google listings. 

As the name suggests, manual penalties are done manually by the team at Google. When that happens, they will issue you a message telling you why you were manually penalized. Hence, it’s imperative you log into your Google webmaster tools and check to see if you have notifications from Google.

Algorithmic penalties typically relate to Panda and Penguin and the fact that your SEO went against their specific rules or regulations. If it’s a panda penalty, Google is likely looking at the quality of your website’s content and has deemed it to be poor. 

A Penguin penalty looks more at the backlink profile of your website and any poor choices you might have made in their respect.

How do I fix my Google penalty?

Fixing any Google penalties depends on the penalty itself and what caused it. For a manual penalty from Google, you need first to fix the issue they stated as the cause of the penalty and then ask them to 3 index your website. 

Algorithm penalties take a little longer because you can’t go directly to Google and ask them what went wrong. You usually have to diagnose the problem yourself, including duplicate content, problems with your backlinks, site security, etc. 

Once you do and you fix the problem, you simply need to wait for Google to re-index your website and for your rankings to start improving.

How long does a Google penalty last?

It’s difficult to say how long an algorithmic penalty from Google can last because there’s no way to have Google intervene manually on the problem. 

For a manual penalty, however, it will usually last for about 30 days if the transgression is slight, including some ranking manipulation or backlink purchase. 

Your search rankings and organic traffic will be affected during that time. You may even notice a large loss of engagement measurements on your Google Analytics. 

Additionally, ensure your backlinks are not from spammy or untrustworthy sites when link building. 

With a more serious offense, however, it may take longer to expire. There have been cases where website owners have reported a Google penalty to have lasted for up to two years.

Let’s Wrap it Up!

Avoiding Google penalties while performing your SEO duties for your website isn’t terribly difficult. 

Most webmasters realize when they are going against Google’s rules and, even if they don’t, can look at historical data to find out what Google has penalized in the past.

You can schedule a 30-minute consultation with The HOTH’s SEO experts and get the best SEO advice, so you never have to worry about Google bringing the hammer down on your website!

Additionally, sign up for free now to take full advantage of our free SEO tools and resources!

The post How To Avoid Google Penalties appeared first on The HOTH.

The amazing part?

Tripadvisor will also rank high for ‘top things to do in New Jersey,’ ‘top things to do in Atlanta,’ and countless others. No matter the city, Tripadvisor always has a landing page ready with unique things to do. 

As you can imagine, that type of SEO dominance requires creating thousands (or even millions) of landing pages for travel-related search queries. 

But how is this possible? Do they have a content creation team on call 24/7 to create all the articles?

Believe it or not, it’s not because of magic, nor is it due to Tripadvisor‘s considerable sphere of influence/budget. 

Instead, it’s because Tripadvisor (and other websites like Yelp and Zapier) use what’s known as programmatic SEO. 

It’s a specialized SEO strategy that uses specialized code to create thousands of landing pages for thousands of keywords. 

Programmatic SEO is a way to release a ton of similar content en masse, such as things to do in certain cities or restaurant reviews. E-commerce websites also make heavy use of the technique. 

When done right, programmatic SEO can help generate a ton of search traffic, leads, and conversions. 

Read on to learn more about programmatic SEO, including its benefits and how you can implement it into your SEO strategy. 

What Is Programmatic SEO?

A website like Yelp has unique needs when it comes to search engine optimization. In essence, Yelp is a gigantic directory of local business information and reviews. 

Their model requires thousands of landing pages, each tailored to a unique local business. Not only that, but to find success, they need to appear at the top of online search results for hyper-specific keywords. 

You can see this in action with a website like Yelp, as they often rank first on Google for keywords like ‘best restaurant in (city name)’ or ‘best activity in (city name).’ 

Programmatic SEO is how they’re able to achieve such an impressive feat. A programmatic SEO strategy involves creating thousands of similar yet different landing pages that cater to user search intent. 

It uses a combination of automation and coding savviness to mass-produce landing pages tailored to different keywords. 

In a nutshell, they gather thousands (often 100,000+) of keywords to use for their generated pages. 

They often have a design template for each type of landing page, meaning only the content itself changes from page to page. 

For example, the Tripadvisor page for The 10 Best Restaurants in Charlotte has the same design and layout as The 10 BEST Restaurants in Atlanta. In fact, all their ‘BEST restaurants in‘ articles copy this same layout. The only thing that changes from page to page is the actual content – which is what programmatic SEO is all about. 

After all, spending the time and resources to handcraft each landing page wouldn’t be feasible, even for websites as large and well-known as Tripadvisor and Yelp. 

Why is Programmatic SEO Important/Valuable?

 The good news is that programmatic SEO isn’t exclusively for enterprise-level companies. Anyone can incorporate the technique with a little know-how and some coding prowess. 

Programmatic SEO is an extremely valuable technique for a variety of reasons, including that it’s a great way to circumvent the traditionally lengthy SEO process. 

By mass-releasing landing pages, you can start to see boosts in traffic and revenue far sooner. 

While there’s plenty of hype surrounding releasing the highest quality content possible, SEO gurus often fail to mention the other side of the coin– quantity. 

To them, quality trumps all, and you shouldn’t focus on releasing large quantities of content. 

But is that always the case?

It turns out that it’s not. 

While it’s true that you shouldn’t release a ton of low-quality articles, publishing a large quantity of high-quality content is a good thing– and programmatic SEO lets you achieve that. 

By using programmatic SEO techniques, you’ll be able to create a page for every product, service, and category on your website – all without manually building each page. 

Since each webpage will be optimized for highly specific search terms (often long-tail keywords), they’ll likely perform very well in the search rankings. 

As a result, all these optimized landing pages will generate a ton of organic traffic for your business. 

Who Benefits from Programmatic SEO Strategies?

Programmatic SEO is also a necessity for many types of websites, such as:

• Ecommerce 
• Review sites 
• Travel sites 
• Q&A forums (Reddit and Quora) 

The nature of these websites requires them to have thousands of specialized landing pages, which is why programmatic SEO is crucial to their business models. 

While each landing page has a similar design and layout, the content on each is relevant, unique, and provides a pleasant user experience. You can attest to this if you’ve ever found a helpful review on Yelp or Tripadvisor. 

Beyond that, any business that has an online presence can use and benefit from programmatic SEO. We’ve already mentioned how you can use it to create webpages with minimal effort, which will help you save valuable resources. 

Programmatic SEO will help you get more of your content ranking in Google search results with minimal effort, which is excellent for small businesses and startups. 

Whether you’re an enterprise-level company or an entrepreneur with an e-commerce site, programmatic techniques have the power to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website without the need for extra busy work from your staff. 

As a rule of thumb, the more landing pages your website needs, the more helpful programmatic SEO will be for you. 

Besides generating massive amounts of traffic, you’ll also enjoy numerous other benefits from implementing programmatic optimization techniques, so let’s look at more. 

Bolsters online presence 

Digital marketing is the way of the future, as there are a whopping 2.14 billion online shoppers – and this number only continues to go up. In fact, the total number of online shoppers continues to increase with every passing year. 

That means if any company wants to survive going forward, they need to have a strong online presence. It also means that your potential audience is continuing to grow, which is a good thing. 

Programmatic SEO is one of the most reliable ways to strengthen your online visibility. 

Fact: Google views websites that don’t have much content as less authoritative than ones that have an extensive library of articles. 

The proof?

Google’s John Mueller has said, “it’s hard to view a website as authoritative if it only has 30 pieces of content.” 

That means Google ranks websites with more pages of content (as long as they’re relevant and high-quality) higher than those with only a few pages (even if their quality is outstanding). 

So if a new company wants to gain visibility on search engines, they’ll need to produce not only quality content but also quite a bit of it. That’s a tall task for a startup that lacks a large content creation team – but programmatic SEO techniques can make producing a ton of unique content feasible. 

With clever keyword research and top-tier copywriting, any sized company can use programmatic SEO to increase its visibility on search engines. 

Internal link building 

A robust internal linking structure is an essential part of any link-building strategy. In short, every page on your website should have another page pointing to it through a link. 

Why is that important?

The reason is two-fold. 

First, a logical internal linking structure is essential for Google’s algorithms and crawlers to properly discover, crawl, and index all the pages on your website. If a page on our website has no links pointing to it, it’s known as an orphan page, and it can wreak havoc on your crawl budget. 

Google will only crawl a given number of pages on your website a day (this number varies heavily). If you have orphan pages hanging around, it causes Google’s crawl rate to slow down because it can’t find the natural connections between pages on your site (internal links). 

That can even cause Google to delay crawling more essential pages on your site while it tries to figure out your orphan pages. 

You also need internal links because they help keep users engaged with your website. Instead of clicking off to another page, they may begin reading another blog post – which increases dwell time and reduces bounce rates. 

Programmatic SEO > Link spam 

Programmatic SEO will allow you to create many high-quality landing pages relevant to your target audience – and you can easily include internal links in them all. 

That’s a far better strategy than creating a ton of low-quality pages that only exist for internal links and backlinks – which won’t get you very far. Users won’t engage with useless content, and they’ll become frustrated at its inclusion. 

Not only that, Google does NOT like link spam, so always ensure the content you release is helpful for your audience. 

Frees up employee time 

Is your staff tied up all day manually updating your existing web pages to improve SEO – such as performing technical tweaks, adding keywords, and targeting SERP features like snippets?

If so, that’s a clear sign you need to find a way to produce new pages that are already optimized for SEO. 

That way, your staff won’t have to go back and optimize them after the fact. 

Programmatic SEO will allow you to create thousands of landing pages that are perfectly optimized for the right keywords straight from the get-go. 

Your content creation team won’t have to manually create each new webpage, either, which is another huge timesaver. 

Programmatic SEO works in tandem with other essential tools, such as automation centers and affiliate tracking programs – so once you get everything set up, it practically runs on autopilot. 

As a result, you’ll be able to free up tons of employee hours that you can use to focus on more pressing tasks, such as brainstorming new ways to scale your business. 

How To Do Programmatic SEO 

Since you know what programmatic SEO is and how it can benefit you, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and learn how to do it yourself. 

It starts with keyword research, as most SEO strategies do, albeit on a bit more of a mass scale. Without further ado, here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing a programmatic SEO strategy. 

Find your essential head terms 

You don’t just need 10 or 20 keywords for programmatic SEO – you need at least 2,000. In fact, it’s common for some websites to target 100,000+ keywords for their strategy. 

How do they find so many keywords to target?

They certainly don’t do it one by one. Instead, they target head terms – which are broad-level categories that encompass a ton of keywords. 

Examples of head terms include:

• Travel sites: Things to do, hotels 
• Review sites: Restaurants, barbershops, gyms, etc.
• Retail sites: Electronics, groceries

Head terms should have a ton of search volume, especially when you pair them with modifiers (i.e., the best restaurant in blank). 

Whenever you’re coming up with head terms, you should double-check their search volume to confirm they’re worth targeting. 

Google Trends and our keyword planner tool from The HOTH are excellent tools you can use for this. If a keyword has a high search volume, check to ensure it’s not dropping off in popularity in Google Trends. 

The last thing you want is to invest time and resources into a head term only to discover that it’s waning in popularity (with no chance of relevancy returning anytime soon). 

If its popularity is trending up, that’s a clear sign it’s a head term worth pursuing. 

How many head terms do you need?

It depends on how many different services you provide through your website. A business review site like Yelp needs lots of head terms, while a travel site such as Tripadvisor doesn’t quite need as many. 

Find modifiers for your head terms 

Now it’s time to start adding modifiers to your head terms. While your head terms will have significant search volume, the real deal comes from combining them with modifiers that also have high search volume. 

You can use the same tools as you did before to learn the search volume for your modifiers (Google Trends and our keyword planner tool). 

There are primary modifiers and secondary modifiers for head terms, so let’s learn the difference. 

A primary modifier creates a new subcategory, while secondary modifiers further describe the head term. 

Here are some examples of primary modifiers:

• Coats: Winter coats, coats with lots of pockets, coats with hoods 
• Bars: Bars with live music, sports bars, bars with poker tournaments 
• Electronics: Prosumer electronics, video games, movies 

As you can see, each modifier creates a subcategory for the head term. Winter coats, for example, would contain all the winter coats you have for sale in your store. 

Here are some examples of secondary modifiers:

• Coats: high-quality coats, affordable coats, expensive coats 
• Bars: Top-tier bars, high-end bars, non-alcoholic bars 
• Electronics: Affordable electronics, unique electronics, computer electronics 

If your business is after local customers, your modifiers should follow the formula of head term + location (i.e., Electronics in Arizona). 

Combine your keywords and modifiers 

Lastly, you need to compile your head terms, primary modifiers, and secondary modifiers into a giant list. 

This is where having some coding knowledge pays off. In particular, Python is a preferred language for coding and organizing programmatic SEO keywords. However, any coding software will get the job done. 

It’s also wise to save a copy of your list in Google Sheets to have a backup. 

How many keywords do you need?

It will depend on the scope of your SEO project. If you’re a gigantic travel site like Tripadvisor, you’ll need something like 100,000 keywords. If you’re a smaller business, 2,000 keywords will suffice. 

Creating landing pages on a large scale 

Now comes the tricky part, creating all your landing pages. Bear in mind that you won’t have to make a landing page for every one of your 100,000 keywords. You’ll still need to figure out a way to build tons of pages, but you won’t quite need 100,000 if you base your landing pages on user search intent. 

For instance, the search intent behind several of your keywords may be exactly the same, requiring the creation of only one landing page for them all. 

As with the Tripadvisor and Yelp pages, programmatic SEO landing pages often contain an identical layout. The pictures, design, and information can remain the same on all of them as long as the primary content changes. (i.e., all the 10 BEST restaurant articles have the same design besides the actual restaurant choices). 

Automation can really save the day here if you’re able to replicate one page en masse with a few distinct changes. 

Some programmatic sites take advantage of the two-sided marketplace method. 

What’s that?

It’s where you design the basic layout of the website, and your vendors/users fill out the rest. An example would be a website like eBay, where users provide product descriptions and images for each item. 

Concluding Thoughts: Programmatic SEO 

By now, you should understand how programmatic SEO works, as well as how you can implement it in your organization. 

Travel and review sites primarily use the technique, but any business can use programmatic SEO. 

It’s a great way to supercharge your content marketing strategy by getting large quantities of high-quality content out there. It can also expedite the traditionally slow SEO process, which is a huge plus. 

Do you not have the time, resources, or expertise to conduct an SEO strategy at your company?

Then you need to try our five-star managed SEO services at HOTH X.     

The post Programmatic SEO: Creating Landing Pages on a Large Scale  appeared first on The HOTH.

SEO and all of its associated algorithms can seem shrouded in mystery even at the best of times. But this 5-step guide to SEO competitor analysis is your key to finally getting it right and consistently ranking top on search engines. 

You’ll find out exactly why your competitors are outranking you, and the exact steps you can take to rise to the top and claim that market share for yourself. 

And no, it doesn’t involve paid tools with hefty price tags. Keep reading to get an in-depth guide on SEO competitor analysis (including some cool free tools).

What is SEO Competitor Analysis?

SEO competitor analysis is the process of researching your competitors’ search engine rankings in order to make your own SEO strategy more successful.

This analysis allows you to identify the backlinks, keywords, and type of content that is helping others in your niche to achieve a high search engine ranking. 

Think of it as reverse-engineering the most successful aspects of industry leaders’ strategies, and bagging a bit of that success for yourself!

Why is SEO competitive research so important?

SEO competitive analysis can offer a plethora of benefits to your business, even going beyond boosting your search engine ranking.

These benefits include:

• Getting a better idea of your competitive landscape and what’s out there.
• Heightening your SEO efforts and finding opportunities to overtake competition on search engines.
• Learning more about what differentiates you from your competition, utilizing that to harness more organic traffic and conversions. 

Easy Step-by-step Guide To SEO Competitive Analysis:

Identifying your competitors

The best place to start is by identifying your competitors in the real world. It’s important to note though that some real-life competitors aren’t necessarily online competitors. SEO and social might not be their focus yet. But by establishing that, you’ve just identified a gap you can exploit. 

Next, if you’ve got a list of your target keywords, begin by typing each of them into Google and seeing who appears on the first page for each one. This gives you a good idea of who you will be going up against. 

Consider the 4 types of competitors:

Direct competitors: Direct competitors are the most obvious ones – the companies that offer the same products or services as you. Think Microsoft and Apple. Or CVS and Walgreens. You probably already know who these direct competitors are.

Indirect competitors: Your indirect competitors are businesses that sell the same products as you, but also operate in other areas. For instance, Canon is an indirect competitor to BestBuy, as they both sell digital cameras, but BestBuy offers them amongst a much wider range of products. Using a competitor analysis tool or a simple keyword research tool will help you identify these indirect targets.

Replacement/perceived: These are the really hard-to-find competitors. They don’t necessarily offer the same product or service as you, but they do compete for the same resources or customer base. 

Mobile phones operate in a different market to digital cameras, and yet the crossover happened the minute the first camera phone was released. Crossover interests can lurk within any market, some analytic tools can help to uncover these, while customer surveys can also help you find out what real people are thinking. 

Get the help of an analysis tool

The HOTH’s Free Search Competition Tool

Of course, we have to start with a cheeky plug for our very own SEO competitor analysis tool. But we promise we wouldn’t be recommending it if we didn’t believe it was one of the handiest and most user-friendly tools on the web!

All you need to do is type in your website’s URL to receive a full competition report that will include:

• Your top competitors.
• Common keywords you share with top competitors.
• Organic keywords.
• Organic traffic.
• Organic cost.
• Adwords keywords.

SEMrush’s Market Explorer Tool

SEMrush’s Market Explorer tool is available for free once you register for an account. Once you’re signed up, you’ll be able to view 10 free Market Explorer reports per day. The tool provides an instant market overview, estimates the division of market share, and provides added customization tools to narrow down your analysis. 

The extent of your report includes:

• Leaders and game-changers in your market.
• The traffic size for the market.
• Traffic trends.
• Audience demographic.
• Key competitors.
• How your competitors generate their traffic.
• Audience gaps.

Ahrefs Batch Analysis Tool

Here comes the paid option! Offering in-depth SEO metrics for up to 200 URLs – it’s certainly worth the investment. If you’re looking to analyze a long list of URLs by bulk, this is the tool for you. The batch analysis provides:

• An Ahrefs rank.
• The domain rating.
• The number of referring domains.
• Number of backlinks.
• Social metrics.
• Organic search traffic.

Depending on the analysis tool you’ve decided to use, your interpretation of the results may be slightly different. Some tools, such as the HOTH and Ahrefs ones provide a list of in-depth rankings and statistics that you may not know what to do with. Whereas the SEMrush tool already divides up your results into groups of established players, leaders, game changers, and niche players. But how should you be interpreting your results?

Just because one company is hogging all the rankings, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are your top competitor. Competitors may vary for different segments of your market. Look at who is ranking high for some of your niche, long-tail keywords. As well as other websites that offer similar services.

How to decide who to compete with

When it comes to outdoing your SEO competitors, you’re going to need to choose your battles wisely. 

Depending on the scale of your business, outranking some top-ranking sites may not even be an option. Ask yourself:

• Are they currently dominating first-page rankings?
• Are they a huge corporation with significantly more resources than you?

If the answer is yes to both of these questions, it probably won’t be worth your time and effort to compete with them.

Instead, decide who to compete with by looking at who is impacting your traffic sources the most – regardless of whether they are actual business competitors. As a general rule, if they are ranking on the first page for your target keywords – they’re a competitor you should be focusing on.

You should also pay close attention to the SERP landscape revealed by this research. Do some of your target keywords offer search results dominated by videos? That means you should be looking to make some video content. 

2. Analyze on-page SEO

With the results of your competitor’s SEO analysis, you are able to take a closer look at your competitor’s on-page and on-site SEO for their top pages.

Pay attention to:

• How often your competitors are putting out content.
• The type of content that they are pushing out.
• The keywords that they are actively targeting.
• The headline lengths, title keywords, and title tags that they are using.
• The metadata that they are using for their pages and posts.
• The internal links that they are using.

Not only does this provide you with an effective template to base your own content and SEO efforts on, but it may also reveal gaps in your competitors’ content that you will be able to exploit with your own content marketing plan.

For instance:

• Do they fail to cover certain topics in significant detail?
• Are they failing to push out certain types of content and media?
• Do some posts and pages have a low word count?

Google’s algorithm pays attention to all of these factors.

3. Competitor keyword analysis

Analyzing competitor keywords is pivotal in evaluating the strength of each of your competitors, and locating the weak points that will offer you a way in. 

In theory, it’s possible to beat any competitor on the market, rising to the top of the rankings for any search. However, this theory relies upon an unstoppable amount of resources, money, time, and expertise. 

Opting to analyze your competitor’s keyword results will help you find more feasible avenues to the top, without breaking the bank. 

This process will require going back to the results offered by your chosen analysis tool, focusing most on the competitors with a lower overall score that is ranking highly for niche keywords.

We’ve broken this keyword analysis down into opportunities and gaps.

Identify keyword opportunities

This part of the process will help you enhance your existing target keyword list, providing you with some new keywords that are working well for your competitors. You can then use these keywords to further optimize your content for search engines.

Now that you have compiled your list of competitors from step 1, you can execute a TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document analysis) to look for the keywords a competitor is using in a page, how often the keyword appears on that page, and discover low-competition keywords that might not already be noted in your strategy.

You can use a free TF-IDF tool to find out how often a keyword appears on a particular page, calculated against how often it is expected to appear on said page. 

The evaluation may reveal that your competitor’s page includes other related terms and phrases that you don’t include on your list. By including these specific keywords and phrases you could boost your position in the rankings. 

Find keyword gaps

When it comes to keyword rankings and solidifying your domain authority, you’re going to need to pay close attention to your own keyword gaps, as well as the keyword gaps in your competitor’s content. 

To do this, you can use a free keyword and content gap tool. These tools usually work by comparing your domain with a competitor’s domain (typically up to 3). You will then receive an analysis of the keywords that you and your competitors have in common, as well as the ones that you do not have in common. 

Where the competitor analysis tools of step 1 provided a high-level view of the competitive landscape, this step offers a more detailed view of the competitive search landscape and potential avenues to rise through the Google search rankings. 

You should use your keyword gap analysis results to note two things:

• See where you are lacking –

Are there any keywords that all of your competitors’ sites are ranking for and you aren’t? To find out why this is you should begin by looking at how much content they offer for those specific keywords. It could be that they offer an exceptional amount of information and resources for the relevant search queries, or have more backlinks leading back to their page. This should offer valuable points of improvement for your own website and digital marketing plan.

• Competitor gaps for top keywords –

Are there any keywords with a high search volume that you are already closing in on with your content? If your analysis reveals weaknesses in competitors’ websites, such as their social signals, backlink data, domain authority, or traffic volume – this opens up a potential avenue for you to pursue and overtake them.

Close keyword gaps

Your identification of keyword gaps may have revealed a number of steps that your competitors are taking to attain and maintain their market share. They could have dedicated landing pages that address searchers’ queries and offer their products or services as a solution. Or they might be presenting their products in more interesting and eye-catching ways. Both of which are sure to not only boost their position in the algorithm but increase conversions and sales too.

Either way, your gap-filling process is likely to involve the development of new content, and liaising with other areas of your business to ensure as many gaps are closed as possible.

4. Reviewing competitor backlinks

Backlink analysis is designed to reveal which competitors have a better backlink profile than you, and how many more high-quality backlinks they have than you. This should then give you the pointers you need to improve your backlink profile and be in a more competitive position for ranking on search engines.

To truly understand how to interpret your competitors’ backlinks, we should first establish a deep understanding of why and how they are an important part of SEO.

How Google’s algorithm uses backlinks

In the up-to-date Google algorithm, backlinks are prioritized in order of the most reputable sources. This is due to Google’s efforts to improve its user experience and provide searchers with the most trustworthy information and resources.

Previously, many digital marketers went down the route of quantity over quality. Directing a plethora of backlinks to their site from social media pages, catalogs, directories, and more. These days, Google’s algorithm will view these links as low-quality and they will serve little to no purpose in their page ranking. 

When reviewing your competitors’ link profiles, beware of any links that lack authority or look like spam. Instead pay attention to links from authorized sources from the media, well-known blogs, publications, and more.

Improving your link building efforts

When you analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles, you will want to pay attention to their quality backlinks and how you can reverse engineer their strategy for yourself.

The questions you should be asking are:

• Have they been recommended and referred to by authorities in their industry? How do they seem to have achieved this and can you do the same?
• Have they appeared in news stories or press releases? How could it be possible to do the same for yourself?
• Have they contributed to reputable articles and received a credit? Are there similar crowdsourced articles that you could contribute to with your expertise?

This backlink analysis could also reveal easy gaps for you to achieve a few quick wins. Are several of your competitors receiving backlinks from a certain article or website? This could be a sign that you might be able to get yourself a link there too. 

Several of the SEO tools mentioned in step 1 offer link profile insights, although you may want to also use a backlink checker tool. 

5. Identifying available gaps in the market

Your analysis should also point out essential differences between you and your competitors. These could be weak points in your competitors’ strategies that you can exploit or USPs that help you stand out in your market.

Try to analyze each of these 6 factors: Brand authority, content marketing, SEO, mobile experience, linking issues, and lost rankings.

Brand authority

The first port of call in comparing your site to that of your competitors is to assess their authority. This includes whether or not they are a known name in the industry, a name that others refer to as a source of news, information, and authoritative resources. 

You may also want to compare how authoritative your site is as opposed to theirs – do you offer more trustworthy, well-researched, fact-based resources than them? As well as other authority factors that the Google algorithm takes into account, like backlinks referring to pages on their site. 

If the answers to these questions conclude that a competitor has far more authority than you, this tells you that it will be harder to beat them in search rankings. The next move here will be to pay closer attention to closing keyword gaps, as mentioned in step 3.

Content marketing

The next step is to analyze the content marketing efforts pursued by your competitors. This step goes beyond the analysis tools used previously in this article, you will need to take time to manually browse your top competitors’ websites and see the types of content they are publishing. 

Ask the questions: Do they create high-quality content backed up by research, authority, and plentiful sources? Is their content thorough, user-friendly, and attentive to all potential browser questions? Do they offer supplementary supporting pages for their product pages? Do they use multiple different content marketing channels?

Make a note of where the weaknesses are in each competitor’s content so that you can fulfill these needs for browsers instead. 

Furthermore, don’t leave yourself out of a content analysis like this. Use these same parameters to measure your own content marketing efforts, noting the gaps that you need to fill. 

eCommerce sites will have different content needs and expectations to those of other types of business. Ensure your products are supported with extensive how-to guides, reviews, and support options.

Technical SEO

Beyond a website’s use of keywords, Google’s crawlers analyze multiple other technical factors to decide which pages to rank highest. Considering technical SEO factors as part of your analysis will help you spot more vulnerable competitors, while also ensuring your own site is up to scratch.

You should take note of the following elements on both your and your competitors’ websites:

• Page speed

The bigger a site gets, and the more laden it becomes with content and product pages, the slower it can become. Google interprets this as a measure of the site’s user-friendliness and is less likely to recommend it to its searchers. 

• Duplicating content

Are you or your competitors duplicating content from elsewhere on the web? This is a big no-no in the algorithm and acts as a negative ranking factor. 

• Broken links

Are there any broken internal and external links on the website’s pages? This is also interpreted by Google as a sign of a site that isn’t user-friendly. 

Make sure your site is as user-friendly and crawl-friendly as possible so that you already have a step up over competitors that are falling behind.

Mobile experience

Did you know 63% of Google visitors are searching from a mobile phone? So there’s no wonder that Google takes your website’s mobile experience seriously! They wouldn’t want to rank a search result in prime position at the top of the page, only for their mobile searcher to have a bad experience navigating the site. 

How do your competitors score in terms of mobile experience? Is their site hard to navigate, slow, or hard to read? If your site is primed and prepped for converting mobile users you will already be one step ahead of them!

Linking issues

As an extension of the technical SEO factors mentioned earlier, internal linking is a crucial factor in the crawlability of a site. 

A website should be structured with easily accessible URLs, the correct meta tags for pages and articles, breadcrumbs, anchor text, and snippets. 

If your site is structured well according to all of those factors, you will be Googlebot-friendly. If you find that your competitors are not matching up to the above criteria, you could stand in good stead to overtake them.

Lost rankings

Your SEO competitor analysis from step 1 will have revealed the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, as well as where they rank and how their rank is trending. This is where you can focus on the keywords they are losing their rank for, and try to investigate why that is. It might be the case that you can take advantage of their declining ranking and steal the prime position for yourself. 

If there’s an easy solution, e.g. they are failing to provide up-to-date content for a keyword. You could provide the up-to-date article on your own site before they even realize they’ve dropped.

Takeaways

A competitor analysis may seem like an exhaustive process, but it is absolutely essential if you want to rise to the top (and stay on top!) of the search engine game. In fact, you should be trying to schedule an analysis like this around every 6 months to ensure you keep up with algorithm changes and fresh competition. 

There are also a range of free tools out there designed to make this process more pain-free, and if you have any additional questions why not schedule a free call with one of our experts today? They’re here to help guide your business to SEO success. 

The post SEO Competitor Analysis: Step-By-Step Guide appeared first on The HOTH.