Our guess is that you wouldn’t go anywhere near it. 

Yet, that’s what it’s like shopping at an online store that doesn’t use SSL/TLS encryption (HTTPS). 

That’s why HTTPS has become the norm for virtually every website online – and you need to get an SSL certificate to use it. 

It’s largely replaced HTTP, although there are still PLENTY of websites online that have yet to make the switch.

How do you know if a website uses HTTP or HTTPS?

All you have to do is check for the tiny padlock symbol in your browser bar next to the URL. 

Besides the padlock, the URL will also begin with ‘https,’ which is how you know your connection is secure. 

If there’s no padlock and you see ‘http,’ your connection isn’t secure. 

HTTP has become so frowned upon that popular web browsers like Google Chrome will flag sites using it as ‘not secure,’ complete with a warning message for users to continue at their own risk.

If you’ve recently started a website or blog, you DEFINITELY want to get an SSL certificate, lest ye be shunned by the internet at large. 

As a bonus, HTTPS is a lightweight ranking factor, so using it will help your SEO. 

Read on to learn how you can get an SSL certificate for your website without paying a dime. 

Understanding SSL, TLS, and HTTPS

Given all the acronyms, it’s easy to become confused when discussing things like SSL certificates, TLS encryption, and HTTP/HTTPS.

Here’s a quick breakdown of each term:

• SSL (Secure Socket Layer). A secure socket layer makes it possible to establish a secure connection between a website and a browser by encrypting the data (scrambling it so it doesn’t make sense). It can also securely connect two servers. With all the data encrypted, hackers won’t be able to access sensitive personal or financial information. 
• TLS (Transport Layer Security). TLS is an updated version of SSL that’s even more secure. However, since SSL is such a common term, everyone still calls them SSL certificates (even though they all use TLS now). 
• HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). HTTPS is the transfer protocol used whenever a website has an SSL certificate, and it appears at the beginning of a URL. Users can also click on the padlock symbol to view more information about the SSL certificate (try it out on this web page if you want). 

To summarize, SSL is now outdated, and all SSL certificates use TLS instead. Since TLS hasn’t entered the lexicon yet, people still stubbornly call them SSL certificates.

Why Do SSL Certificates Matter?

We’ve already mentioned that browsers like Chrome display a warning message before directing users to HTTP websites. 

Despite this, there are still websites that use HTTP even now, especially lots of international websites. 

For example, China’s most popular search engine, Baidu, does not use a secure connection. Whenever you visit the website, you’ll see a padlock with a red line through it next to the URL – meaning that your data is not secure. 

Google doesn’t like HTTP at all, which is why HTTP sites almost never appear on its search engine results pages (SERPs).

They even use what they call default HTTPS indexing, which means if a site has two versions using two different protocols, Google will always index the HTTPS version above all others. 

So, if you want your website to stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ranking in the top 5, an SSL certificate is an absolute necessity. 

Besides improving your SEO, there are plenty of other ways having an SSL certificate will benefit your website.

They’re invaluable for eCommerce stores

Since SSL/TLS ensures a secure connection between your server and your users’ browsers, all their sensitive information gets encrypted. 

That means if a mischievous hacker tries to take a peep at one of your transactions, all they’ll see are scrambled numbers and letters. 

For your own sake, you should never shop at an online store unless you see the padlock symbol next to the URL. Otherwise, any data you enter into the site (credit card numbers, email addresses, social security numbers) is at risk. 

Whenever shoppers see that your connection is secure, it’ll put their minds at ease, and they’ll be far more likely to trust your brand. 

If you try to build an eCommerce store without an SSL certificate, you’ll practically vanish from the SERPs, and your users won’t want to put their data at risk to buy whatever it is that you’re selling. 

Added protection against hackers 

As a site owner, you need to protect your login credentials with your life. Should a hacker uncover your username and password, they could enter your website and do whatever they please. 

Luckily, an SSL certificate drastically reduces the chances of this happening due to encryption. 

If a hacker tries to take a peek at your sensitive information, the TLS encryption will jumble the data to the point that it’s indecipherable. 

Meet PCI standards 

Any website that wants to enable card payments (debit and credit) must first meet the requirements laid out by the PCI (Payment Card Industry) Security Standards Council. 

One of these requirements is that each website must have an SSL certificate for a secure connection. 

If you aren’t using HTTPS, you won’t be able to accept card payments on your website, which is a huge downside. 

Ways to Get an SSL Certificate for Free

Now that you know why SSL certificates are necessary, it’s time to learn how to get one. 

The good news?

Since HTTPS is so widespread now, it’s extremely easy to get an SSL certificate for free. 

While there are still commercial SSL certificates that cost money, they aren’t necessary for most website owners. That’s because the level of encryption you get with a paid SSL certificate is exactly the same as a free one. 

Wait, why would anyone pay for one, then?

Some sites pay for SSL certificates due to other perks, such as better customer support, the ability to secure more complex systems, and more validation options. 

Using CloudFare 

At The HOTH, we use the free SSL certificate we got from CloudFare.

They were actually the first-ever company to offer free SSL certificates, as they launched their Universal SSL back in 2014. 

To claim your certificate, all you have to do is sign up for a free CloudFare account, which will also provide your site with the following performance benefits:

• Protection from DDOS attacks
• Filters out most spam attacks 
• Protects against comment spam (VERY useful for your forum and blog comments section)
• SQL injection protection 

Here’s what you need to do to snag your free SSL certificate. 

First, head over to the CloudFare website and click the Sign Up button. 

Once you’ve created a basic account, it’s time to add your website to CloudFare. 

From there, CloudFare will scan your website to uncover your IP information. 

Next, you’ll need to select a package (select the free version if you don’t want to pay anything).

Lastly, CloudFare may give you some settings that you need to change with your registrar or hosting company for the platform to work correctly. 

Once that’s done, voila! You now have a free SSL certificate, as well as protection from most spam attacks and a rock-solid CDN (content delivery network).

We feel this option is the best for most site owners, as it’s completely free and provides an overall security boost to your website. What’s not to love about that?

Other methods besides CloudFare 

If you don’t feel that CloudFare is a good fit for you, or if you’re already using another CDN – there are other ways to obtain SSL certificates for free. 

Services like ZeroSSL and LetsEncrypt both offer free SSL certificates, and they work with most hosting providers. 

If your website is hosted on cPanel, you’ll get a free certificate from them using AutoSSL. 

You won’t have to worry about filling out forms or copying certificates into place. Instead, AutoSSL takes care of everything for you, including installation and renewal. 

All you have to do is enable AutoSSL, and you’ll automatically have a free, domain-validated SSL certificate for your website. 

The website SSL For Free is another option, and all you have to do is enter your domain name to get started. Their site also contains lots of tutorials covering SSL certificate verification, installation, and renewal – which is a helpful resource. 

It really doesn’t matter which method you use as long as you wind up with a verified SSL certificate for your website. 

Once you have one, you’ll enjoy better visibility on search engines. Also, Google Chrome won’t warn users about your site, and the secure connection will protect your data from hackers. 

Start Protecting Your Website’s Data for Free 

That’s all it takes to start using an SSL certificate on your website, and the benefits of doing so are almost too many to count. 

HTTPS is by far the norm these days, so using HTTP will make you stick out like a sore thumb. Most users won’t trust your site, and there’ll be an unsightly red line through the padlock symbol. 

That’s why it’s worth taking the time to install a free SSL certificate. 

If you need help with the technical side of your SEO strategy, including site security, don’t wait to check out our five-star Technical SEO Services.      

The post Why You Need an SSL Certificate (and How to Get One Free) appeared first on The HOTH.

Illyes touched on many topics during the session, including Google ‘un-launches’ (which apparently happen more than we think), AI content, user click data and algorithm updates. 

Yet, it was the claim he made about link-building that has the SEO world buzzing with speculation right now. 

In particular, someone from the crowd asked if links were still one of the top 3 ranking factors on Google, and Illyes claimed, “I think they are important, but I think people overestimate the importance of links. I don’t agree it’s in the top three. It hasn’t been for some time.”

This is nothing new, as Illyes made a similar claim during a keynote speech at another Pubcon event in February, stating, “Links are important, but not as important as people think.”

In fact, Google has been downplaying the importance of links for several years now. 

In November, Duy Nguyen of Google’s Search Quality Team said links don’t matter as much for SEO as they did when Google first launched. 

Back in 2020, John Mueller proclaimed, “Links are definitely not the most important SEO factor.”

So what gives?

Why is the search platform that invented the concept of links as citations to improve the quality of search results suddenly backing off their importance? 

Do backlinks really not matter as much, or is something else going on? Read on to learn more. 

The HOTH’s Argument on Link-Building for Authority 

As one of the world’s leading SEO companies, we do our fair share of link-building here at The HOTH. 

Our Link Outreach and Link Insertions services are among our most popular (and successful) products. 

In fact, we’ve propelled hundreds of clients to the top of the SERPs by exclusively using link-building tactics. 

As such, we can attest first-hand that links are still a significant ranking factor for Google Search. 

The proof?

Here are metrics for our HOTH website proving that links and traffic still go hand-in-hand:

That’s not to say that Illyes’ claim has no merit or basis in reality, just that you shouldn’t abandon your link-building campaigns anytime soon. 

Also, it’s crucial to note that he didn’t say that links aren’t an important ranking factor, just that he doesn’t feel it’s in the top 3. 

In reference to Duy Nguyen’s comments, it’s definitely true that link-building is a different game than when Google Search first launched, but so is SEO as a whole. 

In the early days, every link counted as a ‘vote,’ making it easier for webmasters to manipulate search rankings by accumulating lots of links from any website they could find.  

Countless algorithm updates have come and gone since then, including many focused on eliminating link spam. 

As time went on, quality came to beat quantity, meaning that links from high-quality, trusted websites mean a lot more than links from subpar domains. 

So it’s not that links don’t matter for SERP rankings anymore, just that link-building as a practice has evolved. 

Content and On-Page SEO as Top Ranking Elements 

Something that no one debates is that content is the #1 most important ranking factor on Google, followed shortly by on-page SEO factors (optimized metadata, headers, readable layout, keywords, etc.). 

Illyes was quick to point out during the AMA that “Without content, it literally is not possible to rank. If you don’t have words on the page, you’re not going to rank for it.”

What’s interesting is that this is nothing new either, as content and on-page SEO factors have always been more important ranking factors than links. 

After all, if you don’t have any content to link to, then links aren’t going to matter anyway. 

On-page SEO and content factors have been more important ranking factors for a long time

The best thing you can do for your website’s search rankings is create engaging, relevant content that your audience wants to consume. 

At the same time, you can’t ignore vital on-page factors like:

• Proper keyword placement (first 100 words of the copy, title tag, several times in the body copy, H1 tag, etc.)
• Engaging headers that summarize each subtopic and follow a logical structure (H1, H2, H3 under H2, H4 under H3, etc.) 
• Meta descriptions that summarize the content and encourage users to click with a CTA
• Keyword-rich metadata 
• Structured data to quality for rich results 
• Internal linking to other relevant pages on your website
• Stellar page content that features short, readable sentences and paragraphs 
• Lines of alt text (containing keywords) that describe all images 

So yes, content and on-page SEO have long been the most important ranking factors for Google Search. 

But does that mean that you can dominate your niche’s SERP rankings with only content and on-page SEO?

No, it does not. 

It’s easy for Google to say “For SEO as a whole, links are not in the top three factors.” because that makes sense. 

However, assuming your site is great, “What are the next biggest factors?” is really the bigger question. There is no specific list that Gary is referring to, but for example:

If the list was:

• SSL
• Site Speed
• Clear title tags
• On Page Content
• Links

It would surprise no one because we take some of those for granted with just following webmaster guidelines.

Trust us, we’ve dealt with countless clients who have had top-tier content and flawless on-page SEO, but they were still getting outranked by competitors (even ones whose content wasn’t as fantastic). 

Why were they getting outranked? How were we able to close the distance?

It was because their competitors had stronger backlink profiles and, thus, more authority in the eyes of Google. 

Only through strategic link-building tactics were we able to close the competitor gap and reach the top of the SERPs. 

Google’s Motivations for Downplaying Links in Search Results 

As mentioned in the intro, Google has been downplaying the importance of links in SEO for years now. 

Yet, as we’ve pointed out, link–building is still one of the most effective ways to bridge the competitive gap and reach top-ranked positions. 

Just to reiterate that point, here’s one of our clients that’s seen massive benefits (more traffic and better SERP rankings) from just using our link-building services (no content creation):

HOTH Client Case Study:

One of our clients, who has been on our managed link-building service, HOTH X since May of last year, runs an e-commerce shop with over 400 different pages, all properly optimized with e-commerce Onpage SEO best practices. 

The consistent link-building is really what allowed them to grow their authority and overall trust in Google’s eyes allowing them to outrank their competitors in the long run.

As we built consistent links to their pages every month, they began to rank for more keywords and get more organic search traffic to their product pages. 

This specific page (screenshot above) went from 0 referring domains and about 50 organic visitors in October of 2022 to over 18 referring domains and almost 1,100 monthly organic visits.

Now take a look at the entire domain:

So why do the folks at Google keep telling us that links matter less and less with each passing day?

Is it possible they could have some sort of ulterior motive?

Yes and no. 

We’ve learned something over the years when dealing with statements from Google regarding SEO, and that’s to take what they say with a grain of salt (make sure it’s sea salt, though, for your health).

In other words, they have an incentive not to be entirely truthful when speaking to the public about SEO, and the reason stretches back to when they first began hiding PageRank data. 

Google’s attempts to prevent the manipulation of search results 

PageRank is the algorithm Google uses to rank websites based on user queries, and the data for it used to be public in the very early days of the company. 

However, they quickly discovered that many site owners were using the PageRank data to manipulate the search rankings using less-than-favorable tactics (i.e., link spam, keyword spam, and the like). 

Let’s not forget that Google’s ultimate goal is to match user queries with the most relevant, highest-quality results (literally the reason behind every algorithm update). 

That’s why they now hide PageRank data and why their webmaster guidelines frown on just about every SEO tactic. 

Accordingly, Google has a bit of a love/hate relationship with search engine optimization as a whole. 

If it were up to them, nobody would ever intentionally try to improve their search rankings, and every search result would show up based on its merit and quality alone. 

We live in the real world, though, and Google knows that’s not possible, so they do their best to crack down on spam through algorithm updates – and by not always being completely forthcoming with the public. 

That doesn’t mean that everything out of Google’s mouth is an outright lie, but they have a tendency to be… cagey when it comes to topics about SEO.

Examples of Effective Link-Building Strategies 

During our work with our clients, we can vouch that link-building continues to yield impressive results for our clients every day. 

It’s not by accident, either. 

Through our years of practice, we’ve discovered the most effective ways to build high-authority links, and our tactics are always changing and evolving. 

Here’s a look at some of the link-building strategies we currently utilize:

• Link Outreach. (formerly known as Guest Posts.) A classic technique, the effectiveness of guest posting continues to this very day. The trick is to focus only on writing for trusted, high-quality websites that are relevant to your target audience. 
• Link Insertions. This is a newer technique that involves less outreach than guest posting but still provides excellent results. It involves placing one of your backlinks into an existing piece of content on an authoritative website. 
• Press Releases. We use our massive network of over 300+ media and news outlets to get the word out about new developments at your business, all while accruing valuable backlinks. 
• Article Syndication. Similar to airing repeats of your favorite sitcom, our syndication service involves posting your ‘greatest hits’ to other relevant websites around the web. 

How Link-Building Can Still Improve Your SEO 

While some may misinterpret Illyes’ comments to mean that links don’t matter for SEO at all, don’t forget that he still said they’re important, just that he doesn’t think they’re in the top 3. 

Another interesting comment he made was, “There’s no universal top 3. Every site will have something different as the top 2 or 3 ranking factors.”

If that sounds confusing, don’t worry (it’s likely meant to be anyway). 

At The HOTH, we have one ultimate determining factor for any SEO technique – and that’s the results it’s able to yield. 

The numbers don’t lie, and link-building continues to work its magic for our clients. 

If you want to see drastic improvements in your website’s SERP rankings, referring domains, and organic traffic, don’t wait to check out our Link Outreach services today.

P.S. If you’re still unsure that your site would benefit from Link Outreach services, schedule a free no-pressure 15-minute demo with me here.    

The post Google’s Claim on Link-Building – What Does it Mean for SEO? appeared first on The HOTH.

Their reasoning?

According to Canel, Bing’s AI is now sophisticated enough to understand the context and intent of links, as well as their levels of trustworthiness and authority.

He says, “We can now differentiate between natural and unnatural links, and we can ignore or discount the latter without affecting the former.”

This is great news for webmasters, as this change eliminates the need for manual link profile audits. 

Currently, site owners must use the disavow tool to nullify spammy or unwanted links that could potentially harm their search rankings. 

Next month, Bing will shut down the disavow tool along with its corresponding API. It’s part of the company’s attempt to streamline its services, provide a better user experience, and save resources. 

A question on the minds of many SEO professionals is, “Will Google follow in Bing’s footsteps?” 

After all, Google has been downplaying the need to disavow links for a while now, so getting rid of the tool seems like a natural next step. 

Read on to learn more about this significant change to Bing’s Webmaster Tools, including what we think Google will do next. 

What is the Disavow Tool, Anyway?

First released in June 2012, the disavow tool gives webmasters a way to tell Bing’s search algorithm which inbound links they don’t want it to consider when evaluating their website’s quality, relevance, and trustworthiness. 

It was a necessary tool at the time because, without it, webmasters had no way to distance themselves from low-quality links pointing to their content. 

These undesirable links often come about organically, meaning low-authority websites simply choose to link to a website without contacting the webmaster (meaning the spammy link isn’t due to any of their intentional link-building efforts). 

With the disavow tool, webmasters had a way to control which links would contribute to their search performance and which would not. 

The tool was also crucial for stopping negative SEO attacks. 

What are those?

That’s when an entity (usually a direct competitor) intentionally creates or buys tons of spammy backlinks and points them all at your website in an attempt to wreck your rankings. 

You can imagine the shock if you were to one day check your Bing SEO metrics only to discover thousands of spammy links suddenly pointing at your site. 

The disavow tool is the remedy, as you can tell Bing’s algorithm to simply ignore all those awful links. 

Yet, this requires site owners to perform regular link profile audits, which is a time-consuming task that will no longer be necessary next month. 

Does Google Have a Disavow Tool?

Only a few months after Bing’s unveiling of their disavow tool, Google would follow suit in October 2012. 

However, Google’s disavow tool didn’t have the same warm reception as Bing’s, and it’s been quite a controversial topic over the years. 

For one, Google always viewed its disavow tool as a last-ditch resort for websites to get rid of bad links whenever all other efforts fail. 

In fact, Google’s Help Center at the time stated that “most websites will not need to use this tool.”

Still, that didn’t stop most webmasters from thinking that the disavow tool was a way to negate the painful effects of the infamous Penguin update (AKA the Link Apocalypse) that occurred in 2012. 

The misconception was that they could use the tool to get rid of spammy links and, therefore, rank higher on Google’s search results. 

The only problem is that Google’s disavow tool doesn’t work that way. 

Dispelling link myths that have persisted since Penguin in 2012

The source for all this confusion comes from the lingering effects of the dreaded Penguin update. 

If you weren’t doing SEO in 2012, you may not remember, but it was a BIG deal at the time. 

Google decided they’d had enough of spam, so they cracked down on violations of their guidelines in a big way. They began handing out penalties left and right, so much so that it actually negatively affected the quality of their search results. 

Since their ‘scorched Earth’ policy backfired so hard, they decided to take a different approach to dealing with link spam. 

In particular, they decided to abandon penalizing sites and settled on devaluing them instead. 

That means if you have a ton of spammy links pointing at your site, there’s no need to panic or disavow them – they simply won’t count. 

Remember the malicious SEO attacks we mentioned earlier?

Most Google users never have to worry about those because as long as your site is at least decently secured. Since low-quality links don’t count, there’s no risk of incurring a penalty or losing position rankings if they point at your site. 

The danger of listening to third-party tools 

Many SEOs still use the disavow tool because their automated third-party tools say that they need to. 

The key word there is ‘third-party,’ as these tools are not from Google. 

Yet, that doesn’t stop webmasters from freaking out whenever they see the flashing red sirens and alerts telling them that spammy links are pointing at their site and ruining their domain authority (which is another third-party metric that Google doesn’t use). 

Will Google Get Rid of its Disavow Tool?

Now that Bing’s AI is fully capable of determining which links are natural and which aren’t, webmasters will no longer have to perform manual audits. 

After all, SEOs using the disavow tool are likely eating up Google’s resources, especially when disavowing a link isn’t necessary. That means deleting the tool could free up some resources, but it’s unclear if Google will follow in Bing’s footsteps again. 

The last thing Google wants is for webmasters not to fear buying spammy links, which is why they may choose to keep their disavow tool. 

If you need top-tier link-building services for your business, don’t wait to check out our Link Outreach Service.   

The post Bing Will Nix Disavow Tool in October, Should Google Do the Same? appeared first on The HOTH.

These two statistics alone prove the need for search engine optimization, which is why companies spend more than $79 billion on SEO services each year. 

Without a strong presence in the organic search, companies are missing out on tons of potential revenue, leads, and exposure to new audiences. 

Yet, even organic SEO isn’t free, and convincing decision-makers and stakeholders at your company of its value can be a hard sell. In particular, they’ll want to know that SEO will produce a positive return on investment (ROI) for them. 

As such, calculating SEO ROI is a necessary skill to have, especially for agencies, consultants, and marketers wanting to incorporate it into their company. 

Your stakeholders will want to see a hard bottom line – solid proof that the cost of SEO is worth it, which can be tricky. 

Why is that?

It’s due to the nature of organic SEO, as there’s no direct dollar value tied to it. Also, SEO is notorious for taking a long time to start working, with the general consensus being it takes around 6 – 12 months to start seeing a positive ROI. 

If SEO ROI calculations have you scratching your head, you’ve come to the right place. 

Read on to learn the proper way to uncover the true ROI of SEO. 

The Basic Way to Calculate SEO ROI 

In theory, calculating the ROI for SEO is no different than calculating it for any other type of business. You simply need to deduct the cost of SEO from the revenue you gained. 

Here’s what the formula looks like:

• The value of SEO conversions – SEO costs/SEO investment costs 

Seems simple enough, right? So why is there confusion surrounding SEO ROI?

Well, it primarily has to do with calculating the value of the conversions that you can directly attribute to SEO, as that can get tricky. For the most part, it’s pretty straightforward to determine the total cost of your SEO investments. 

What’s more difficult is determining whether a customer converted due to your SEO efforts or another reason. For example, it may be that a prospect spent weeks reading content about your products that they found in the organic search results. 

Yet, when it comes time to make a purchase, they convert after clicking on a social media ad – which will take full credit for the conversion (despite the obvious attribution your SEO content had on the sale). 

This is nothing new, as attributing conversions to marketing channels has always been a confusing and polarizing issue, but more on that in a bit. 

For now, let’s cover some essential KPIs you can use to come up with the true ROI for your SEO campaign. 

Calculating your SEO strategy costs 

While generating organic traffic through search engines is seen as the ‘free’ way to do SEO (as opposed to pay-per-click (PPC campaigns), the old economics adage rings true here; there’s no such thing as a free lunch. 

While it’s true there’s no direct dollar value tied to ranking in the organic search results, organic SEO is by no means free. Even if you do all the work yourself, there’s still the massive time investment it takes to create and release regular content, make technical SEO tweaks, and conduct keyword research. 

All that SEO work adds up, which is why you need to keep track of your expenses. 

Here’s a common breakdown of the costs associated with organic SEO:

In-house employees 

If your employees handle blog writing, content creation, and other marketing efforts, you need to factor their wages into your costs. 

Besides people directly involved in SEO, don’t forget to include any web developers or designers that you use for image creation/web publishing/technical SEO tweaks. 

SEO agency 

If you outsource your SEO services, you need to include the monthly/annual fees you pay your agency. 

Freelancers

Don’t forget to include the wages you pay any freelance writers, developers, or graphic designers for your content marketing efforts. 

SEO tools

Then there are the monthly subscription fees you likely pay to use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. 

To be accurate, make sure to include fees from programs that aren’t specifically for SEO but are still used for it, such as HARO or PR software. 

Link building and distribution

There are also costs involved with distributing and promoting the content you release. Not only that, but if you pay for your links, you need to include those costs too. 

Besides uncovering all your costs, you’ll also need to choose a time for the calculation. If your stakeholders ask for a specific period, do your best to accommodate them. Yet, monthly comparisons don’t work well for SEO, so try to avoid them if you can. 

Determine the value of your traffic conversions 

Now we get to the tricky part, determining the conversions you can directly attribute to SEO. 

If you aren’t already, you need to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics (GA) or a similar program. Also, ensure the tracker is set to ‘organic’ and not ‘paid’ search results. 

This will provide you with a figure for how many conversions Google believes occurred due to your SEO efforts. Carefully go over each conversion to make sure you can attribute it to SEO. 

Bear in mind that the type of conversions and their values will differ from business to business. 

For e-commerce websites, it’s pretty straightforward as they automatically send sales conversion data to GA. 

Yet, the goal of every business isn’t always a sale. Lead generation businesses, for example, often have a hard time nailing down their traffic conversions, as they aren’t so black and white. For these companies, assigning dollar values to sales-qualified leads can serve as a solution. 

SEO KPIs that convey its value 

Besides traffic conversions, there are some specific KPIs you can measure to prove the value of your SEO campaign. 

Search engine rankings 

Your rankings are arguably the most critical KPI to pay attention to. The higher you rank, the better, and improving your rankings is tangible proof that your optimization efforts are paying off. 

Organic visitors

The number of organic visitors is another way to monitor the effectiveness of your efforts. While more organic visitors don’t always lead to more revenue, they improve brand awareness. 

CTR (click-through-rate)

Your click-through rate refers to how many visitors saw your organic listing and decided to ‘click through’ to your landing page. A high CTR proves that you’re appealing to the right audience. 

Soft conversions

In addition to hard conversions (see above), there are also soft conversions, which usually result in picking up a new lead. 

Examples of soft conversions include newsletter sign-ups, social shares, and downloading content. It’s essential to pay attention to both hard and soft conversions to take in the big picture of your marketing ecosystem as a whole. 

Pages per session

Another SEO KPI is pages per session, which is how many pages a user viewed before exiting your website. 

Multiple pages per session mean you’re engaging with your audience, which is a good thing. 

Organic impressions 

An impression refers to how many times your content showed up in the search engine results. A high number of impressions is excellent for improving brand awareness. 

While these metrics don’t relate to SEO ROI outright, they’re still evidence of its effectiveness, so they’re worth bringing up to stakeholders. 

The value of assisted conversions 

Here’s where it starts to get tricky. It can be challenging to determine which marketing channel scored the traffic conversion. 

Traditionally, conversions were counted by the ‘last non-direct click.’ 

As stated before, it could be that your blog content does the brunt of the heavy lifting, only for a social media ad to take all the credit in the end since it was the closest click to the conversion event. 

Enter assisted conversions, the primary remedy to this frustrating issue. 

This model aims to give each marketing channel its fair amount of credit for each conversion instead of using the ‘last non-direct click method. 

The fact is that visitors will land on your website at all stages of the buyers’ journey, and each piece of content can affect multiple stages of the sales funnel. For example, if a customer is only looking for information at first, your blog content will steal the show. 

With some clever CTAs and product highlights, that can motivate the user to decide to move on to product pages and blogs. 

Then one day, they decide to make a purchase and do so through a retargeting ad, which will receive 100% of the credit for the conversion. Yet, we know that’s not true, as the customer went through an extensive buyer’s journey, all guided by your carefully crafted SEO content. 

So if your blogs aren’t getting any credit for direct conversions, that doesn’t mean they didn’t contribute to the sale. 

That’s why the shift to a data-driven attribution model (DDA) with Google Analytics 4 took place. 

Google Analytics 4 and the data-driven attribution model 

Google’s DDA model uses your existing data for conversion events to attribute a conversion to multiple marketing channels. 

It uses machine learning algorithms to distinguish between conversion paths and non-conversion paths. 

What are those?

A conversion path is a series of touchpoints (ads, clicks, interactions, exposure, and more) that eventually leads to a conversion event. The DDA model will then attribute partial credit to each channel in the path. 

Non-conversion paths are the same, but the touchpoints don’t lead to customer conversion, so the data gets ignored. 

Using conversion paths, the machine algorithm is able to piece together what could have happened that led to the conversion. 

If you’re already using GA4, it uses this data-driven model by default, so the value of your conversions will already have the assists factored into the equation. You can also view an Assisted Conversions Report within Google Analytics by going to Advertising > Attribution > Conversion Paths. 

Here, you can see a detailed breakdown of what Google views as the essential touchpoints for each conversion path. The touchpoints include:

• Organic search
• Referral 
• Email 
• Paid search 
• Organic social 

For each touchpoint, you’ll get to see a graph representing the amount of impact each had on the conversion during each stage of the sales funnel (early, mid, and late). 

For SEO, you only need to pay attention to the organic search for each of the stages to see how impactful it was for each conversion. 

Difficulties of Measuring SEO ROI 

Despite the advancements of the DDA model, calculating SEO ROI still has many gray areas and challenges facing it. 

Here are some of the top challenges you’ll face when attempting to put a concrete number on your return from SEO investments. 

SEO ROI takes a long time to materialize 

Time periods are a tricky issue for SEO ROI due to the nature of the work itself. In today’s age, search engine algorithms have become incredibly complex and sophisticated. 

As a result, tweaks to websites and new content takes a while to materialize in search engine results. New content has to be crawled and indexed, and there’s no shortage of fierce competition out there trying to rank for the same keywords you want. 

In other words, SEO is a long-term marketing strategy, which is why the standard ROI calculation method of comparing investments to monthly gains falls flat on its face with it. 

Since it can take six months or more to start seeing a return, calculating ROI monthly isn’t possible for the first few months. 

The lengthy timeline is a significant factor why SEO can be a hard sell for some, as no one wants to hear that something will take six months to start paying off. Yet, the benefits of SEO are significant once they begin, and they tend to compound with time. 

It has limited testing capabilities 

Running experiments on the effectiveness of SEO is a bit limited in that you can’t test it like you can other channels. 

For instance, if you want to test how effective your PPC ads are, you can simply turn them off for a while and compare your revenue. 

If you stop it for a few months and there’s little to no change to your bottom line, it’s clear that your PPC campaigns aren’t working, and you don’t need to waste money on them anymore. 

You just can’t do that with organic SEO, as removing your website from search engines is not something you can do in today’s age. Not only that, but you’d have to noindex your site for at least six months to see if there’s a change. 

That’s not to say that you can’t run experiments on the effectiveness of SEO, just that they’re more limited than other channels. 

Attribution is flawed by nature 

Even with Google’s DDA model, marketing channel attribution is still inherently flawed, and it’s not just for SEO, either. 

Some go as far as saying that attribution is pointless, as touchpoints are often far more complex than analytical software makes them look. As stated before, one piece of content can have relevance for every stage of the sales funnel for different users. 

As such, it’s near impossible to pinpoint which channel caused the conversion. 

The DDA model is a much-needed advancement in this area, but it’s still far from perfect. For example, there are data from sessions that you’ll never see because the tracking code wasn’t fired. That could be due to an ad blocker, or the user might have bounced before the tracking code got a chance to go off. 

No way to measure retention or the effect of brand-building 

Lastly, SEO metrics can’t measure retention or instances where users were looking for a brand they already knew about. 

On the retention side, SEO content can increase customer lifetime value if they become regular readers. 

Let’s say you regularly blog about digital marketing strategies, and you’ve built up a regular reader base. Therefore, a majority of your blog visits are from your existing customers/readers. While this is a significant benefit of SEO content, it’s impossible to measure. 

Brand awareness is another unmeasurable factor. For instance, if a user already knows about a brand or learned about it elsewhere, SEO shouldn’t get the credit, but it will because they searched for it online. 

For additional help, try out HOTH Technical SEO. 

The Most Valuable Metric for SEO ROI 

Beyond using the ROI formula to get a concrete number, there’s another metric that’s a more accurate predictor of the success of your SEO campaign – search visibility. 

Using a rank tracker, you’ll get to see the search visibility of your website on a graph. If the line starts moving up a few months after starting your SEO efforts, you’ll have clear evidence that they’re paying off. 

Search visibility is similar to the share of voice, which is a metric marketers use to gauge their market share. 

In addition to sharing your ROI, showing decision-makers and stakeholders your search visibility will also show how effective your efforts have been. 

Closing Thoughts: SEO ROI 

By now, you should better understand how to calculate SEO ROI, as well as the challenges involved with it. 

Due to the nature of search engine optimization, it’s hard to encompass all the impact it has on your bottom line. Technical SEO tweaks, user experience enhancements, and helpful user content all have effects that are hard to quantify yet are definitely real. 

By calculating your traffic conversion values and subtracting your investment costs, you can uncover your SEO ROI. Yet, it’s also a good idea to pair that number with specific KPIs, such as search visibility. That will give your clients and stakeholders a more accurate snapshot of the bigger picture. 

Do you need expert help formulating a winning SEO strategy for your company?

Then don’t wait to check out our excellent managed SEO services at HOTH X. Our seasoned experts will handle every aspect of SEO for you, including calculating your ROI, so don’t wait to book a call today.    

The post SEO ROI: Why It’s So Hard to Pin Down (And How To Do It) appeared first on The HOTH.

The main benefit is that such infographics can help to simplify complex information and make it more engaging for audiences, resulting in increased comprehension and retention of key messages.

It also just makes your pages prettier and more shareable.

But today, we’re gonna dive into a huge trend revolving around infographics:

Infographic link building

That’s right, creating your own infographics for the purpose of obtaining high quality backlinks from unique domains.

As an SEO, if you’ve ever done manual or link building campaigns through blogger outreach, you SHOULD KNOW how important it is to make your pitch unique because it can make all the difference in securing high-quality backlinks for your website.

Building links organically is hard.

That’s where infographic link-building changes the game completely.

Trust me, we know how to generate links and improve organic traffic:

Why Use Infographics For Your Link Building Campaign

When you reach out to other websites to request a backlink, you’re essentially asking them to vouch for the quality of your content.

If your pitch is generic and lacks personalization to the website owner, it’s unlikely to stand out from the many other pitches that webmasters receive on a daily basis.

In fact, it might even be seen as spammy or low-quality, which can hurt your chances of getting a backlink.

On the other hand, a unique outreach pitch can help you establish a connection with the webmaster and demonstrate the value that your content can bring to their website.

And many people don’t have the in-house skills to create a stunning and informative infographic to enhance their content. That’s why creating infographics is such a unique opportunity for link-building.

By customizing your pitch and the infographic you can create content more unique to their website and audience, you can show that you’ve done your thorough research and that you genuinely believe that an exchange would be beneficial for both parties.

Additionally, a unique infographic outreach pitch can help you establish a positive and professional relationship with the webmaster, which can lead to future collaboration opportunities.

And maybe even some new friends along the way.

So, take the time to craft a stunning infographic and include a personalized outreach pitch that showcases the value of your content and builds a connection with the webmaster that you want a link from.

But how?

Today I’m gonna show you the exact techniques that us SEO professionals use to create a winning strategy for link-building with infographics.

Let’s jump into it…

Elements of a Infographic Link Building Campaign

You and I both get dozens if not hundreds of spammy outreach emails of either people asking for a backlink or trying to sell links from other sites, that anyone can post on.

So if you’re doing link-building outreach, you need to stand out in order to actually get people to open your email let alone respond to it.

That’s were a strategic and calculated infographic link building strategy can help.

A few of the techniques in this strategy include:

1. Determine your topic and research other infographics used for link building
2. Design a unique and captivating graphic
3. Post with a useful piece of blog content
4. Share the infographic on socials
5. Share on infographic directories
6. Reach out to relevant websites/bloggers and build a relationship

But before we cover how to use these infographics to build links, let’s talk first about the different types of infographics and their unique benefits.

Types of infographics that you can use

If you’re going to create a link-building infographic, there are many types of different styles of infographics that you can use.

Below, I’ll list some of the most common types and a provide a brief explanation and examples of each.

There are a variety of different infographic styles to create for your infographic for link building or link building outreach.

Informational Infographics

An informational infographic is a visual representation of data or information designed to educate or inform the viewer on a specific topic.

It typically includes graphics, charts, and other visual elements to help simplify complex information and make it more easily understandable.

The main goal of an informational infographic is to communicate information in a clear, concise, and visually appealing way, making it an effective tool for content marketing, educational materials, or any situation where information needs to be communicated quickly and effectively.

Source: https://visme.co/blog/types-of-infographics/

Process Infographics

A process infographic image is a visual representation of a series of steps or processes that are involved in completing a task or achieving a specific goal.

Process infographics can be used to communicate complex processes in a simple and easy-to-understand format, providing a clear visual map and guide for the viewer to follow.

They often use arrows, icons, and other graphic elements to visually represent each step, making it easy for the viewer to grasp the flow and sequence of the whole process.

Process infographics can be used for a variety of purposes, such as instructional materials, user guides, and workflow diagrams, and can be an effective way to communicate complex information quickly and clearly.

List infographics

A list infographic is a visual representation of information presented in a list format. It typically includes a series of items or points, each accompanied by a corresponding graphic or icon. List infographics can be used to present a variety of information, including statistics, tips, or features of a product or service.

They create infographics that are often designed to be visually appealing and easy to scan, with bold headlines, clear graphics, and concise descriptions. List infographics can be an effective tool for content marketing, as they can be easily shared on various social media platforms and are often more engaging and shareable than traditional text-based content.

They can also help to break up long blocks of text and make information more digestible for the reader.

Statistical Infographics

Statistical infographics are visual representations of data and statistics that are designed to communicate complex information in a clear and visually appealing way.

They often use charts, graphs, and other visual elements to help simplify and condense large amounts of data into an easily understandable format. Statistical infographics can be used to convey a wide range of information, including trends, patterns, and correlations in data, as well as comparisons between different sets of data.

They are often used in fields such as marketing, finance, and social sciences to help analyze and interpret data and make informed decisions based on all the data and results. Statistical comparison infographics can be an effective tool for content marketing, as they can help to attract and engage audiences, establish thought leadership, and build brand recognition.Comparison Infographics

Hierarchical Infographics

Hierarchical infographics are visual representations of information that are structured in a hierarchical or tree-like format, with the most important or overarching concepts at the top and more detailed or specific information branching out from there.

They are often used to present complex or interconnected ideas in a clear and organized way, making it easier for the viewer to understand the relationships between different elements of the information.

Hierarchical infographics can be used to illustrate a wide range of concepts, such as organizational structures, decision-making processes, or the relationships between different components critical elements of a system.

They are often designed to be visually appealing and easy to navigate, with clear headings, icons, and other graphic design elements used to help guide the viewer through the information.

Hierarchical infographics can be an effective tool for content marketing, as they are visual content can help to communicate complex ideas in a way that is accessible and engaging for audiences.

How to Create a Compelling Infographic

To create a compelling infographic, you need to make sure that you are presenting data in a unique way that hasn’t been done before.

If it’s too basic or not visually appealing, who the hell would want to link to that?

Here is a great example of a compelling infographic that can be used for a link building strategy in-building:

And here is a bad example of what NOT to do.

For even more examples and ideas, check out this post.

How to Build Links With Infographics

In order to build links with infographics, you need to create completely unique infographic that will motivate people to link to it NATURALLY.

For example, if you create a comparison infographic about how fresh, canned dog food is better you should be citing data points from studies that prove your point.

And if that data has never been presented in a visual format like an infographic, you found a great opportunity to generate some juicy backlinks with a HELPFUL piece of content.

Step 1. Determine your objective

What’s the purpose of this infographic?

Are you trying to create a compelling infographic that displays high-level industry data like a map with countries’ GDP trends?

Source: https://advisor.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-gdp-growth-forecasts-by-country-in-2023/

Or are you trying to summarize tips on how to organize your bedroom?

Either way, you need to make sure your infographic content is unique. You can use other infographics as a reference to what guys and not recycling info covered by other popular infographics.

Or at LEAST make it visually unique.

The point is that it needs to AID COMPREHENSION.

People hate reading, it takes work and brain power. The brain likes pretty pictures over reading a long and boring blog post.

Otherwise, it will never get traction and no one will want to link to it.

To get ideas on what type of infographic you should create, I recommend using Pinterest to find infographics that are already popular in your niche:

If I do a search for “marketing infographics” for example, Pinterest will show me results that are heavily engaged with, meaning people are sharing and naturally linking to it.

Now you just need to find an idea that works for your piece of content.

For more idea

Step 2. Know your audience and choose a topic for them

Choosing a topic for your infographic is the first step in creating a compelling visual representation of your data.

To start, if you want links from a certain type of website, think about what those authors would want in an infographic, consider their audience and the purpose of the infographic.

What kind of information will they find most interesting or useful?

Look for data that tells a story or highlights a trend, and make sure that it is relevant to your audience.

One way to find successful infographics besides Pinterest and other sharing sites is by using Ahrefs, an SEO tool.

You can search for infographics related to your topic and start brainstorming ideas.

For example, if you’re doing SEO for a dentist, you might search for things such as ‘dental infographic’.

Next, you want filter results by ‘referring domains’ to find infographics that have attracted a good amount of links

Choose four to five highly successful infographics based on the number of links they have attracted.

Finally, you must decide on your concept and title.

Brainstorm a list of possible topics and then narrow it down based on keyword research and how well it fits with your goals and how feasible it is to create an infographic around that topic.

To improve the effectiveness of link building infographics, we usually merge two or three concepts into a single high-impact infographic.

Consider what types of data would be the most visually interesting and how you can communicate that information in a clear and concise manner.

• Do they need statistical data summarized?
• Do they need a comparison between two methods of writing?
• Do they need a geographic map charts an infographic for data visualization?

Step 3: Conduct Research and Gather Data

Once you have a topic, it’s time to start researching and gathering data. Look for reliable sources of information and make sure that you are collecting data that is accurate and relevant to your topic.

Organize your data in a way that makes sense and is easy to understand.

Consider the visual elements that you might want to use to communicate your data, such as graphs, charts, or maps.

This will help you to determine what kind of data you need to collect in order to create an effective infographic

Step 3. Design the infographic for your audience

Make sure to pick style from the list above that will appeal to your target audience (or the target audience of your link prospect) and make sure that the type of infographic you choose to use makes sense for the data you are using.

For example, you wouldn’t use a comparison infographic if you are trying to show a map of the US.

Step 4. Run an effective outreach campaign

Alright, now that you got yourself a nice fancy new infographic, it’s time to start letting people know and sharing it where you can to get it in front of eyeballs, and get people to link to it or embed it on their website.

Send to infographic directories

You’ll want to make sure that your infographic is shared on infographic directories and image sharing sites like Pinterest and Flickr. Here is a list of the most popular ones:

1. Reddit
2. Pinterest
3. Visual.ly
4. Visualistan
5. Slideshare
6. Infographics Archives
7. Infographic Journal
8. Infographic Bee
9. Graphs.net
10. Flickr
11. eLearning Infographics
12. Cool Infographics
13. Daily Infographic
14. Behance

Share your infographic on social media

Once you’ve created a great infographic, get it out there! Share it through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Reaching out to bloggers and influencers who have written about the same topic can also be effective.

Finally, don’t forget to link back to your website when sharing the infographic – this will help drive traffic back to your site which is great for SEO purposes too!

Publish the Infographic to Your Website

Releasing your infographic on your website is a great way to drive traffic and get quality content noticed. Make sure it’s optimized for SEO by including keywords in the post title, URL and content. Don’t keyword stuff, make it relevant and natural.

This will help make it easier for search engines to index your page, increasing the chances of appearing in relevant Google searches.

Reach out to relevant websites

Just creating the infographic and posting it won’t be enough to generate juicy backlinks

You gotta ask for ’em. Look for relevant influencers and bloggers who would find it useful to use your infographic.

Reaching out to other relevant websites can be a great way to get links back to your website. Look for websites that are related to the topic of your infographic and contact them about including it on their website. Offer a short description of the infographic, why it would be beneficial for their audience, and provide them with an embed code or link back to your site.

Follow-up With Prospects

Finally, don’t forget to follow up with prospects that you’ve sent outreach emails or messages too. It’s important to keep them engaged as they may not have responded right away but could be interested with a gentle reminder. A polite follow-up message can often be enough to secure a link back!

How to Run an Effective Link Outreach Campaign Using Infographics for Link Building

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use Ahrefs to find possible opportunities for a backlink outreach campaign.

1. Use the “Content Explorer” tool to search for topics related to your infographic, such as “marketing recession trends”. This will give you a list of articles and websites that have written about this topic.
2. Look for websites that are relevant to your infographic and have a high DR or amount of traffic. These are potential targets for outreach that will help get some nice authoritative links.
3. Create a list of potential targets and start reaching out to them with your infographic. Personalize your outreach emails and explain why your infographic is relevant and useful to their audience.

By following these steps, you can use Ahrefs to find potential opportunities for link outreach and increase the number of backlinks pointing to your website through your marketing recession trends infographic campaign.

How do you create an original infographic?

If after reading the steps above, you’re still not quite sure how to produce a better infographic, for link building that will help you generate backlinks and add depth to your own content assets, I highly recommend to check out our Done For You Infographic product, HOTH Infographics.

You can provide a topic, title and any specific instructions and our team will create a visually stunning and informative infographic that will not only help improve your content, but will allow you to generate some nice backlinks from relevant domains.

Here is our process:

Why Use Infographics For Link Building – A Summary

There are many ways to build links, and one effective method is to create and share infographics online as detailed above.

For some of our clients, we’ve seen this technique can boost your site’s traffic by up to 12%, in addition to enhancing your site rankings and organic traffic.

Original graphics like infographics are the most successful visual content format. Creating an original infographic that’s visually appealing, informative and entertaining can make your content stand out in a crowded marketplace.

In summary, an effective link building strategy should include both organic and non-organic techniques to generate backlinks

Organic techniques are used to gain naturally occurring links from other websites without manual outreach or link buying.

Non-organic techniques use manual outreach (asking) for backlinks from relevant websites or influencers.

Infographics represent a great opportunity for both organic and non-organic link building strategies.

To ensure your infographic stands out you need to create something interesting, unique and engaging that people will want to share on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

This will help boost its visibility and increase the chances of gaining some valuable backlinks.

Good luck with your infographic link building efforts!

The post How To Use Infographics For Link Building in 2023 appeared first on The HOTH.

If web bots aren’t able to properly crawl & index your web pages, your online visibility will take a serious blow. In fact, you may disappear from the SERPs altogether. 

That’s why technical SEO is equally as important as your on-site and off-site SEO efforts. 

Not only does it ensure your website is optimized for search engine crawler bots, but proper technical SEO will also improve your user experience, page loading times, internal linking structure, and mobile-friendliness. 

Yet, your technical tweaks won’t get far if you don’t have the proper technical SEO tools in place. 

For instance, you need to be able to do the following:

• Conduct SEO audits 
• Check your website’s page loading times
• View crucial SEO metrics 
• Check how Google views your website content 
• Fix broken links 
• Find duplicate content 
• Create & upload XML sitemaps 
• Replace 404 pages with 301 redirects 
• Clean up messy Javascript & CSS 
• Test schema structured data markup
• Optimize your website for mobile devices 

These are just a few of the tasks associated with technical SEO, and you’ll need some free tools to help you complete them all properly. 

Read on to discover the top 11 technical SEO tools that you need to start using today.

Why Do Technical SEO Tools Matter?

Technical SEO involves knocking out a myriad of complicated tasks that are near impossible to complete without helpful testing tools. 

For instance, how are you supposed to know how fast your pages load without using a tool to check them? It’s not something you can eyeball, as you need specific numbers to know if you’ll pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test or not. 

Without using a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to uncover your speed metrics, you’ll just be shooting in the dark. 

That’s why technical SEO tools are necessary because they remove all guesses from the equation. 

The best technical SEO tools will provide you with in-depth metrics that you can use to refine your strategy without leaving anything to chance. They also provide essential functions like creating XML sitemaps, uncovering duplicate content, and fixing indexing errors. 

In short, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from using technical tools, especially since most of them are either free or have free versions. 

The Top 11 Technical SEO Tools Available Right Now

There is no shortage of SEO tools online meant to help fix technical issues, but they aren’t all of equal quality. 

Some tools require expensive memberships yet only provide basic SEO services that you can easily replicate with free tools. 

That’s why we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the 11 highest quality and most useful tools to bolster your technical SEO strategy. 

These tools will handle everything from improving page speed to testing your structured data markup and everything in between – so don’t wait to check them out. 

#1: Google Search Console (GSC)

GSC is an excellent tool for any SEO strategy, and technical SEO is no exception. 

Google Search Console is so useful because it gives you a first-hand view of how Google views your website. 

It also points out any crawling errors that Google bots are experiencing with your pages. 

The Index Coverage Report is one of many helpful performance reports you can run in GSC, and it points out the indexing status for every one of your web pages. 

There are a few statuses available, including the following:

• Error. This means that Google wasn’t able to index your page due to an error, and clicking on the error will identify it and provide suggestions for resolutions. 
• Valid with warnings. Google has indexed these web pages, but there’s still a pressing issue that you should deal with (it’s likely related to essential ranking factors or Google’s policies). 
• Valid. This means that the webpage was successfully indexed and will appear in the SERPs. 
• Excluded. This status appears for web pages with noindex tags, which tells Google that you don’t want the page to appear in the SERPs. 

Another invaluable performance report for technical SEO is the Page Experience Report. 

Running this report will ensure your website can pass the Core Web Vitals test, has HTTPS set up, and is optimized for mobile devices. It’ll also let you know how many pages on your website have an optimal page experience, which will help you improve your UX. 

In short, GSC is an essential tool for its ability to point out indexing errors & problems with your page experience, which will help you refine your technical SEO. 

#2: Google Analytics (GA)

Another one of Google’s essential free tools (there will be many on this list) is Google Analytics. Just like GSC, GA is valuable for your technical SEO due to its reporting capabilities. 

Not only that, but it’s an excellent tool for monitoring your performance in organic search, which is definitely a plus. 

GA will notify you if you’ve incurred any penalties or are experiencing any traffic issues – such as an unexpected dip in organic traffic. 

The great thing about Google Analytics is it provides a real-time view of what’s happening on your website. While website audit tools are excellent (there are a few on this list), they tend to point out problems well after they’ve occurred. Conversely, GA will notify you of important SEO issues as soon as they happen. 

If you do notice a steep dropoff in traffic when you check GA, it’s usually a sign that you have an indexing or tracking issue – which you can use GSC to pinpoint and fix (which is why it’s worth using both tools in tandem). 

Besides traffic issues, keeping an eye on essential metrics like your bounce rate & dwell time will also provide insights into your website’s technical performance. 

For instance, if you notice users are bouncing as soon as they view your page, it’s likely a sign that you have page loading issues. 

Another clue is if your dwell time is extremely short, which could also mean your content isn’t as engaging & hard-hitting as it needs to be. 

#3: HOTH SEO Audit Tool 

Next up is our free SEO Audit Tool from The HOTH, which will provide you with tons of valuable technical SEO insights. 

To run a report, you only need your website URL, name, and email address. From there, you’ll receive a comprehensive report covering the strength of your SEO profile, including essential technical aspects like page speed, performance, and usability. 

You’ll receive an overall grade for your website, as well as individual scores for the following SEO elements:

• On-Page SEO
• Links
• Usability
• Performance 
• Social 

In addition, the reports feature detailed breakdowns of noticeable issues, such as duplicate H1 tags, images missing alt text, Javascript errors, the presence of schema markup, and hreflang attributes. 

Other features of the report include:

• Checking for canonical tags
• Whether your meta descriptions are the optimal length (between 70 and 160 characters)
• Making sure your website isn’t using unwanted noindex tags
• Checking for a robots.txt file
• Ensuring your site uses HTTPS & SSL
• Checking for the presence of an XML sitemap 

As you can see, our site audit tool will inform you of key technical SEO issues, like not having a sitemap or accidentally no-indexing pages that you want to appear in the SERPs. 

You can also check your current keyword rankings, backlink profile, Moz domain authority score, and total organic traffic generated from the search. 

#4: Google PageSpeed Insights 

This tool is one of the best ways to ensure you’ll pass the Google Core Web Vitals Test and that you’ll have an optimal page experience for your users. 

It’s no secret that lightning-fast internet has spoiled everyone for many years now, and modern internet users are anything but patient when it comes to loading times. 

So if your web pages are struggling with their loading speed, users won’t hang around past a few seconds – which will cause your bounce rate to increase & dwell time to go down. 

Google’s PageSpeed Insights provides detailed metrics for your loading times, including how fast your website loads on desktops and mobile devices, which is a plus. 

There is one important note to make about PageSpeed Insights, though. 

It does not use the exact loading speed of your website; it uses approximations instead. 

While these approximations are undoubtedly accurate, you should use more than one tool to get a clearer picture of your loading times. 

However, a stand-out feature of PageSpeed Insights is its ability to point out and recommend potential solutions for problems with your loading times. There will even be a link under each issue it points out that says, “Show how to fix.”

That’s why this tool makes our list, as it’s an excellent way to find & resolve the top errors that are holding your loading times back. 

PageSpeed Insights also provides the specific metrics that the Core Web Vitals test will measure, including your First Input Delay (FID), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCF). 

#5: Screaming Frog 

Do you need a tool to help you uncover duplicate content and improper URL structures?

Then look no further than Screaming Frog, one of the best web crawlers online. It crawls many aspects of domains that affect SEO, including URL structures, canonical tags, page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and images. 

After crawling your website, you’ll know precisely where to focus your technical SEO efforts, which is a huge benefit. 

Screaming Frog will help you quickly identify the following technical issues on your website:

• Images that are too large (which can affect loading speed) 
• Errors in your URLs 
• Canonical tag issues (i.e., more than one canon tag)
• Missing meta descriptions & meta keywords 
• Missing page titles 
• Response code errors 
• Pagination issues 
• Uncovering international SEO issues 

These are all issues that can potentially tank your SEO profile, so it’s worth crawling your website regularly. 

Many SEOs use crawlers like Screaming Frog every single day so they can quickly fix any technical SEO errors as soon as they arise. You can also use it to take a deep dive into your website’s architecture, which is invaluable for your technical SEO. 

Why is that?

It’s because using a flat site architecture is the best way to avoid technical errors, and Screaming Frog can help you understand your current architecture so you can optimize it. 

Not only that, but using Screaming Frog can also pinpoint inconsistencies in your URL structure, which is another no-no for technical SEO. Your URLs need to follow a rigid structure to make it easier for Google’s bots to crawl your site, and Screaming Frog is an excellent tool for spotting any errors. 

#7: Google Webmaster Tools (Google Search Central) 

Next is Google Search Central, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools. It’s another free offering from Google that you can use to bolster your technical SEO efforts. 

Key features include the ability to quickly pinpoint 404 errors, which are disastrous for your SEO and user experience. To fix them, replace any 404 errors with 301 redirects to pages that have similar content (or that can serve as a substitute). 

Without a tool like Google Search Central, you’d have no way of knowing about your 404 errors, which is why it’s worth using. 

It will also check your XML sitemap for errors, which is a unique feature that’s enormously helpful. 

If your sitemap is riddled with errors, it’ll confuse search engines & provide a subpar experience for your users. 

Google Search Central will highlight these errors, such as allowing you to remove duplicate page titles and descriptions. 

You can also check your robots.txt file by using the tool, which will help you avoid no-indexing pages that you want to appear in the SERPs. While it’s crucial to noindex pages that you don’t need to generate organic traffic (i.e., admin pages, thank you pages, log-in pages, etc.), you’ll want to ensure that one of your blogs or product pages isn’t on the list by mistake.  

#8: Google Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool 

Google practices mobile-first indexing, meaning your site needs a responsive design or a mobile version to appear in search results. 

Not only will that ensure that your content displays correctly on mobile devices (which is excellent for your UX), but it’ll also help your SERP rankings. Since Google prioritizes indexing the mobile version of websites, having a site that only works on desktop computers won’t cut it. 

Your best bet is to incorporate a responsive design, where you have one site that’s able to display on both desktop computers and mobile devices. It works by using a combination of flexible grids & layouts that are able to adapt to different screen sizes in real time. 

Google rolled out mobile-first indexing in 2015, and they released their Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to go along with it. 

Using the tool is an excellent way to determine if your website is properly formatted for mobile devices, which will help you out in the SERPs. 

A great feature of the tool is that it will provide recommendations for fixing any issues your site has with mobile optimization. Since the tool is straight from Google, passing its mobile-friendly test is a must. 

Even if you’re confident in the reliability of your website design, double-checking that you pass the test is worth it. Otherwise, you may experience lower rankings than you would have if your website was fully responsive. 

#9: Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool 

Targeting SERP features is a popular SEO strategy, but it requires proper structured data to pull off. 

SERP features (also called rich results) are experiences that go beyond traditional blue hyperlinks, such as image carousels, eCommerce products, local businesses, and featured snippets. 

Rich results appear above the organic search results in what’s called position zero. 

It’s the holy grail of SERP rankings, which is why so many SEOs target rich results as part of their strategies. 

However, if you don’t format your structured data properly, you won’t qualify for any rich results – meaning you’ll have wasted your efforts. 

The solution?

Make use of Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool, which will let you know which SERP features can be generated (if any) from the structured data markup on your page. 

After you input your data, the tool will let you know how many valid items it detects that are eligible for Google’s rich results. Additionally, the tool lets you preview how the rich results will look when they show up in Google search, granting you control over the appearance of your SERP features. 

The primary reason to use the tool is to confirm with no uncertainty that you’ve formatted your structured data properly – and that your content has the potential to generate rich results. Without taking this step, you’ll leave your ability to appear in position zero up to chance. 

While the Rich Results Testing Tool is Google-specific, the company also offers generic schema validation through its Schema Markup Validator, which is useful for validating Schema.org-based structured data embedded in web pages across the internet. 

#10: Siteliner 

Do you have a serious problem with duplicate content that you’re trying to fix?

Then Siteliner is the tool to use, as it specializes in uncovering duplicate website content. Enter your domain, and the tool will crawl up to 250 pages at once, notifying you of all the duplicate content that it finds. 

Duplicate content is a huge detriment to any SEO profile, as it confuses crawlers on which version they need to index & include in the SERP results. 

Siteliner will help you quickly & easily identify duplicate pages that could cause such confusion, and it even allows you to analyze each page to determine what you need to do to avoid duplications. It could be that you need to designate specific pages as ‘canon’ by using canonical tags or get rid of the duplicate pages altogether. 

Besides uncovering duplicate content, Siteliner has other useful features for technical SEO. 

The Broken Links tab will help you uncover any broken links on your website at the click of a button. You’ll get to see a complete breakdown of all the broken links on your site, as well as page summaries for each (where the broken links are highlighted). 

Once you uncover them, you can fix them by either adding a new hyperlink or using a 301 redirect. 

You can also use Siteliner as a way to double-check your loading times & page sizes. Siteliner will display your average page speed and average page size in comparison to other websites – which is a great way to see how you stack up with the competition. 

#11: HOTH SSL Certificate Checker 

Do you run an eCommerce store or sell goods through your website?

Then an up-to-date SSL certificate is a must, not only for the security of your customers but also for your SERP rankings. 

Google announced HTTPS as an official ranking factor in 2014, which uses SSL certificates as its protocol. Having an SSL certificate means all the data moving between your web server and browser stays private and secure. 

That’s why websites that handle sensitive user information (like credit card numbers and medical files) need SSL certificates to keep their websites safe. 

As a bonus, websites that use HTTPS/SSL certificates enjoy higher rankings on Google. 

Even if you don’t run an eCommerce store or handle sensitive medical information, using HTTPS with an SSL certificate is still a good idea – as it’s a great security practice. SSL certificates will protect your websites from hackers, which is why they’re worth your time. 

Yet, you need to make sure that your SSL certificate is still valid, which is where our free SSL Certificate Checker comes into the picture. 

Enter your URL to quickly discover if you have an up-to-date SSL certificate or not. Google announced that they’d shut down any expired SSL certificates, which is why using this tool is a must. 

Wrapping Up: The 11 Best Technical SEO Tools 

The tools on this list will make performing an in-depth technical SEO audit on your website far easier. 

From identifying duplicate content to fixing indexing errors, these tools will ensure all the technical aspects of your SEO strategy work flawlessly – making it effortless for web bots to crawl your website. 

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

Then don’t wait to check out our extensive technical SEO services at The HOTH. Our digital marketing gurus know everything there is to know about technical SEO. Book a call today! 

The post 11 Integral Technical SEO Tools You Need to Use  appeared first on The HOTH.

Two of the most prominent tools used to measure the authority and quality of websites are Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) and Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (DR).

Although both of these tools provide insights into the overall performance of a website, it’s essential to know the differences between them to make well-informed decisions.

…and how they come up short sometimes.

In this blog post, we will dive deep into the key aspects of Moz Domain Authority and Ahrefs Domain Rating, comparing their functionalities and discussing how you can leverage these metrics to bolster your SEO campaigns.

The problem is, these metrics alone are flawed

When you are trying to determine how much other search engines, like Google trust certain websites, it’s useful to use third-party metrics.

This is because Google will never reveal the direct factors that influence ranking websites, so it became necessary for SEOs to create some sort of standard to differentiate the ranking power of a website.

That’s where metrics like Moz’ DA and Ahrefs’ DR come into play. They are wonderful metrics that help us everyday as SEOs

But keep in mind that just like Google, these companies have bots that crawl the internet and collect data from websites and SERPs (search engine result pages).

The crawlers are not perfect nor how DR/DA is calculated.

So until we elaborate on how these scores are calculated and how to responsibly use these metrics to improve your own site’s ranking, take them with a grain of salt:

Domain Authority (DA) – What is it and how is it calculated?

Domain Authority (DA) is calculated by Moz based on a website’s link profile, while also taking into account factors such as the number and quality of links pointing to the site, the age of the domain, and the size of the website.

The score is then presented on a logarithmic scale of 0 to 100.

It was first introduced by Moz in 2004 as a way to predict how well a website would rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

The HOTH has been around since 2010, so I have witnessed the evolution of Moz DA firsthand.

When Moz first introduced DA, it was a relatively new metric that was not widely adopted by the SEO community.

However, as more and more SEO professionals began to use it, it quickly gained popularity as a useful tool for evaluating the strength of a website’s backlink profile.

Moz DA became a key metric for SEO professionals to use in their link building strategies.

Over the years, Moz has made several updates to the DA algorithm, which has made it a more accurate measure of a website’s authority. In 2011, Moz introduced the concept of “Linking Root Domains,” which meant that links from the same domain were no longer counted multiple times.

This helped to reduce the impact of link spam and made DA a more reliable metric.

In 2015, Moz introduced another major update to the DA algorithm, which incorporated machine learning. This update made the algorithm more sophisticated and better able to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality spam links above.

It also made the algorithm more resistant to manipulation, which further improved its reliability.

Today, Moz DA remains one of the most widely used metrics in the SEO industry.

While it is not a perfect metric by any means and should be used in conjunction with other metrics, it remains a valuable tool for SEO professionals to evaluate the authority of a website and make informed decisions about their link building strategies.

How to increase a website’s Domain Authority (DA)?

As an SEO professional who works for a company that sells backlinks, I understand that backlinks are one of the most important factors that can influence a website’s domain authority.

However, it’s important to note that not all backlinks are created equal, and there are certain strategies that are more effective than others when it comes to increasing domain authority.

Here are some of the best ways to increase a website’s domain authority:

Build high-quality backlinks: As mentioned, backlinks from authoritative sites are crucial to increasing domain authority. However, it’s important to focus on only building links with high-quality backlinks from reputable and relevant websites.

These links should be from sites with a high domain authority themselves. You also want to focus on do follow links, which will give more power to your web pages by passing that sweet old “link juice”.

You can utilize a link-building provider like the HOTH to help with this and scale your SEO campaign, site authority, and, ultimately, your rankings.

Improve on-page optimization: On-page optimization is also an important factor that can influence domain authority. Ensuring that your website has high-quality content, relevant keywords, and a well-optimized site structure can help to improve your website’s domain authority scores.

Remove toxic backlinks: Toxic backlinks can negatively impact your website’s authority, so it’s important to regularly audit your backlink profile and remove any toxic links that could be hurting your website’s authority.

Increase social media engagement: Social media engagement can also play a role in improving your website’s domain rating and authority.

By creating high-quality content and engaging with your audience on social media, you can build a following and increase the visibility of your website, which can ultimately lead to more backlinks and higher domain authority.

Utilize internal linking: Internal linking can also help to improve domain authority by distributing link equity across your website.

By linking to high-quality pages within your own website, you can help to boost their authority, which can in turn improve the authority of your entire website.

When it comes to buying backlinks, it’s important to ensure that you are getting high-quality links that are relevant to the client’s website and are not spammy or low-quality.

Additionally, it’s important to be transparent with clients about the risks and potential downsides of buying backlinks, and to educate them about the importance of building high-quality backlinks naturally.

(If you’re looking for help with this, book a call with me to talk about HOTH Link Outreach.)

What is a good DA score?

A good Domain Authority (DA) score depends on a variety of factors, including the industry, niche, and competition level of the website.

For example, our website, thehoth.com, has a DA of 61.

In general, a DA score of 50 or above is considered “good”, while a score of 60 or above is considered excellent.

But what do you actually mean by “good” or “excellent”?

Good question, reader.

DA is a RELATIVE metric, meaning that it should be used to compare websites within the same industry or niche.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that high DA score is just one of many third-party metrics that can gauge how likely a website will rank on search engines.

While a higher DA score can indicate a stronger link profile, it does not guarantee that a website’s pages will rank higher in search results.

Ultimately, the best way to determine whether a website has a good DA score is to compare it to other websites in the same industry or niche and to evaluate its overall link profile and search engine rankings.

What you should actually care about is how you stack against your competitors and where they are relative to your website in the SERPs

After all, that’s what DA was originally created to measure.

How Does Domain Authority (DA) Impact SEO?

While Domain Authority (DA) is a useful metric for evaluating a website’s ability to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s important to note that DA does not directly impact rankings. Instead, it’s a measurement of the website’s overall authority and link profile, which can influence its ability to rank well in search results.

For example, having a low DA score does not necessarily mean a website won’t rank well in search results.

Think about it like a rookie NFL quarterback making a great play. Just because he is new doesn’t mean it kind wipe the floor with his competitors.

There are many other factors that can impact search engine rankings, such as the relevance and quality of the website’s content, the website’s technical SEO, and the competition level for the targeted keywords.

However, a higher DA score can indicate that a website has a stronger link profile and is more likely to rank well in search results.

This is because search engines view websites with higher authority as more trustworthy and credible, which can lead to better visibility in search results.

Ultimately, while DA is an important metric for evaluating a website’s authority and potential to rank well in search results, it’s just one of many factors that can impact SEO performance.

Businesses should focus on building a strong, high-quality website with relevant, engaging content and a well-optimized technical structure in order to improve their chances of ranking well in search results.

Domain Rating (DR)

Ahrefs DR (Domain Rating) is a metric that measures the authority of a website’s backlink profile on a scale of 0 to 100. It was developed by Ahrefs, a popular SEO tool provider, and was first introduced in 2016 as an alternative to other domain authority metrics like Moz’s Domain Authority.

Ahrefs DR is based on the number and quality of external backlinks pointing to a website. The more high-quality backlinks a website has, the higher its DR score will be.

A website’s DR score is updated on a regular basis to reflect changes in its backlink profile.

Since its introduction, Ahrefs DR has become a popular metric among SEO professionals and website owners for evaluating a website’s link profile and authority.

It’s often used as a benchmark for comparing websites within the same industry or niche, and can be a useful tool for identifying link building opportunities and evaluating the competitiveness of specific keywords, just like DA.

However, again, it’s important to note that Ahrefs DR is just one of many metrics that can be used to evaluate a website’s authority and potential to rank in search results.

While a higher DR score can indicate a stronger link profile, it does not guarantee that a website will rank higher in search results.

Other factors, such as the relevance and quality of the website’s content, the website’s technical SEO, and the competition level for targeted keywords, can also impact SEO performance.

Overall, Ahrefs DR has become a widely-used metric for evaluating a website’s link profile and authority, and has helped many SEO professionals and website owners to improve their search engine rankings and visibility.

How To Increase Domain Rating

As a seasoned SEO professional working for the HOTH, a white-label SEO solutions provider, there are several effective strategies that can be used to increase a website’s Ahrefs DR:

1. Create high-quality, relevant content: Creating high-quality, relevant content that provides value to your audience can help to attract natural backlinks from other websites. This can help to improve your website’s authority and increase its Ahrefs DR.
2. Build high-quality backlinks: Building high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in your niche is one of the most effective ways to increase your website’s Ahrefs DR. This can be achieved through tactics such as guest blogging, broken link building, and outreach to other website owners in your industry. Or you can use a paid service like the HOTH to build high-quality backlinks.
3. Improve the quality of existing backlinks: It’s not just about the quantity of backlinks, but also the quality. Improving the quality of existing backlinks by removing low-quality or spammy links can help to improve your website’s Ahrefs DR.
4. Optimize on-page SEO: Optimizing your website’s on-page SEO, including elements such as meta tags, header tags, and internal linking, can help to improve the relevance and quality of your website’s content, which can in turn improve its authority and chance of generating natural backlinks, and in turn, Ahrefs DR.
5. Monitor and track progress: Regularly monitoring your website’s backlink profile and Ahrefs DR can help you to identify areas for improvement and track the effectiveness of your link building and content marketing efforts.

Overall, by implementing these strategies and focusing on building high-quality backlinks, creating valuable content, and optimizing on-page SEO, you can improve your website’s Ahrefs DR and enhance its overall search engine optimization performance.

What is a good Domain Rating (DR)?

A good Domain Rating (DR) will vary depending on the industry and niche of the website. In general, a higher DR score indicates a stronger link profile and more authoritative website, which can lead to better visibility and higher search engine rankings.

According to Ahrefs, a DR score of 50 or above is considered to be strong, while a score of 60 or above is considered to be excellent.

However, it’s important to note that DR is just one metric among many that can be used to evaluate a website’s authority and potential to rank in search results.

Other factors, such as the relevance and quality of the website’s content, the website’s technical SEO, and the competition level for targeted keywords, can also impact SEO performance.

Therefore, it’s important to use DR as a benchmark for comparing websites within the same industry or niche, rather than as an absolute measure of a website’s overall authority. Ultimately, the goal should be to continually improve a website’s link profile and authority over time, regardless of its current DR score.

How Does Domain Rating (DR) Impact SEO?

While DR doesn’t directly impact SEO, it can be a useful tool for evaluating a website’s potential to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).

A higher DR score generally indicates a stronger link profile, which can improve a website’s search engine visibility and rankings.

Other important factors that impact SEO include the relevance and quality of a website’s content, its technical SEO, user experience, and the competition level for targeted keywords.

Therefore, while a higher DR score can be a positive indicator of a website’s authority and potential to rank, it’s not a guarantee of success in search engine rankings.

For example, Google.com itself has a much higher DR than TheHOTH.com, but we are outranking them for keywords like “google rank website”

In order to improve a website’s SEO performance, it’s important to focus on a holistic approach that includes creating high-quality, relevant content, building a strong link profile, optimizing for technical SEO factors, and providing a positive user experience for visitors.

The difference between DA vs DR

Many people use the terms Domain Authority and Domain Rating interchangeably, but they are two very different metrics from two different companies.

Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) are both metrics used to evaluate the authority of a website, but they are calculated differently.

DA is a metric developed by Moz that measures the overall authority of a website based on its link profile.

DA is calculated by evaluating factors such as the number and quality of links pointing to a website, as well as other factors such as the age of the domain and the size of the website. DA is calculated on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating a stronger link profile and more authoritative website.

DR, on the other hand, is a metric developed by Ahrefs that measures the strength of a website’s backlink profile on a scale of 0 to 100.

DR is calculated based on the number and quality of backlinks pointing to a website, as well as other factors such as the diversity of the backlink profile and the strength of the referring domains.

While both metrics are used to evaluate a website’s authority, they are calculated differently and can sometimes provide different results.

For example, a website may have a high DR score but a lower DA score, or vice versa, depending on the specific factors used in each calculation.

It’s important to use both metrics in conjunction with other SEO factors to gain a more complete picture of a website’s authority and potential to rank in search engine results pages.

Similarities Between Domain Rating vs Domain Authority

Your domain authority score and domain rating might have a correlation, but the odds of them being the exact same is pretty small. As discussed, they are calculated very differently.

That being said, there are some similarities.

1) BOTH DA and DR are relative metrics based on the entire databases that Moz and Ahrefs have, meaning it’s important to note that a change in other websites’ DA and DR can have an effect on your DA and DR as well.

For example, if Facebook.com were to get a billions of new backlinks, the DA/DR of every other website would drop in relation to Facebook’s DA/DR.

2) Neither are direct ranking factors as previously discussed in this article.

3) They are on logarithmic scales. This means it’s harder to get from a DA 50 to DA 260 compared to going from a DA 10 to Da 20.

Under the Hood: How Moz Domain Authority and Ahrefs Domain Rating are Calculated

Let’s take a look under the hood to see how these metrics are calculated.

Moz Domain Authority is based on a machine-learning model that considers over 40 factors, such as the number of total backlinks, the quality of backlinks, and the overall linking root domains.

This information is used to calculate the likelihood of a website’s ranking potential.

It’s important to note that Moz DA is a relative metric, meaning that it should be used for comparing websites against each other rather than aiming for a specific score.

Ahrefs Domain Rating, on the other hand, primarily focuses on a website’s backlink profile. The metric takes into account the number of other unique domains’ backlinks, the quality of linking websites, and the overall strength of the site’s backlink profile.

Like Moz DA, Ahrefs DR is also a relative metric, and should be used to gauge the performance of websites against competitors.

Applications: How to Use Moz Domain Authority and Ahrefs Domain Rating

Both Moz DA and Ahrefs DR can be used to perform competitor analysis and identify potential backlink opportunities.

By comparing your website’s own DA scores or DR against the scores of your competitors, you can gauge your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement.

Back in 2018, we started making even more of a coordinated effort to work on our DR:

Now in 2023, we are at at 75 and still growing:

The point I’m trying to make here is that these metrics are a great tool, but don’t obsess and be patient.

Additionally, these metrics can help you uncover high-authority websites in your niche, presenting opportunities to build high-quality backlinks and improve your search engine rankings.

Limitations: What Moz Domain Authority and Ahrefs Domain Rating Don’t Tell You

It’s important to remember that both Moz DA and Ahrefs DR are third-party metrics and do not directly influence search engine rankings.

Furthermore, these metrics only provide a partial view of a website’s SEO performance, meaning other factors such as on-page optimization, content quality, and user engagement should not be ignored.

While it’s useful to know your website’s DA or DR score, obsessing over these numbers can be counterproductive.

Instead of aiming for a higher score, focus on building a diversified and high-quality backlink profile that caters to your target audience and drives your organic traffic growth.

In other words…

Neither Is a Direct Ranking Factor

As mentioned earlier, Domain Authority and Domain Rating are both third-party metrics developed for SEOs in order to measure how strong a website’s popularity is in Search Engine’s eyes in comparison to other websites.

So take them with a grain of salt, please. I gave you some earlier in this post.

Most SEOs who have been in the game for a while care about much more than these metrics.

Think about it, Google has thousands of ranking factors that are not available to the public eye. There is no way that one (or two metrics) developed by a third-party can 100% accurately replicate how strong a website is and how likely it will show up in the SERPs.

Confusions Regarding These Third-Party Metrics

Here are some common confusions regarding Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA):

Confusing DR and DA: Many people confuse DR and DA, thinking they are the same metric. While they are both used to evaluate a website’s authority, they are calculated differently and can sometimes provide different results.

Believing that DA and DR directly impact SEO rankings: While DR and DA can be useful metrics for evaluating a website’s authority and potential to rank, they do not directly impact SEO rankings.

There are many other factors that impact SEO performance, such as the relevance and quality of a website’s content, technical SEO, user experience, and the competition level for targeted keywords.

Focusing too much on DR or DA: Some people focus too much on DR or DA as the sole measure of a website’s authority and potential to rank.

While these metrics can be helpful, they should be used in conjunction with other SEO factors to gain a more complete picture of a website’s authority and potential to rank.

Assuming that a high DR or DA score guarantees success: While a high DR or DA score can be a positive indicator of a website’s authority, it does not guarantee success in search engine rankings.

SEO success requires a holistic approach that includes creating high-quality, relevant content, building a strong link profile, optimizing for technical SEO factors, and providing a positive user experience for visitors.

You know what they say about assuming:

Not understanding how DR or DA are calculated: Many people do not fully understand how DR or DA are calculated, leading to confusion about what these metrics represent and how they should be used.

It’s important to have a clear understanding of how these metrics are calculated and what factors are included in the calculation to use them effectively.

Looking beyond DA and DR

Alright, so you might be thinking:

“Jake, you just told me these are great metrics to use as tools, but you also said they are flawed. So what actually matters for SEO?”

Great question. I can’t say for sure.

No one can.

Besides an event like the Yandex leak that happened in early 2023, we don’t have much insight into EXACTLY what exact ranking factors are and how much they actually influence rankings.

The original purpose of DA was to measure how a website stacks up against its competitors and where it ranks relative to them in the SERPs. Therefore, it is important to focus on this aspect rather than solely on your own DA score.

That’s why through testing and observing data and trends, we use tools like DA and DR to improve the functionality of the internet by creating useful, intuitive and accessible content to connect searchers with information and businesses that offer solutions to their queries.

That’s what being a real SEO is all about.

So besides DA and DR, what other metrics can we use to determine if search engines like a website?

Well, an easy one is the amount of traffic that Search Engines actually send to that website monthly.

Think about it.

If Google is showing a website for users in search results and people are visiting that website, that’s a pretty good clue that Google likes the website and its content.

So, it makes sense that a backlink from that site to yours would help Google view your website as more authoritative and trustworthy, right?

That’s why we also provide our link outreach product based on the minimum amount of estimated organic traffic a domain gets.

The Bigger Picture: Integrating Moz Domain Authority and Ahrefs Domain Rating into Your SEO Strategy

Both Moz DA and Ahrefs DR are valuable tools that can help you understand the performance of your website and identify opportunities for improvement. To effectively harness their potential, align these metrics with your overall SEO strategy, consider other key SEO factors, and stay up-to-date with industry trends and algorithm updates.

DA Vs DR: Final Thoughts

Moz Domain Authority and Ahrefs Domain Rating are powerful tools that offer insights into the authority, performance, and backlink profile of a website.

But by no means are they an end-all, be-all of how search engines prefer websites.

By understanding the differences between these metrics, you can make informed decisions that will help elevate your website’s SEO performance.

Remember to view these metrics as just one piece of the larger SEO puzzle and pair them with a comprehensive, ongoing SEO strategy to truly unlock your website’s ranking potential.

And if you need help from an expert in scaling your link-building strategy, book a call with me today.

The post Moz Domain Authority Vs. Ahrefs Domain Rating: Decoding the Metrics appeared first on The HOTH.

Still, most business owners don’t have a yearly budget for it when planning for their yearly expenses. Why?

Partially because of the lack of standardization for SEO pricing. Along with this comes the uncertainty of what they will actually receive from their investment.

Here at the HOTH, we know firsthand that this is one of the biggest pain points before a business owner decides to invest in an SEO strategy.

More on this later.

If you’re looking to talk to an expert about ideal SEO pricing for your business, I encourage you to book a free consultation with one of our account managers.

So how much should you be paying for SEO services?

This isn’t an easy question to answer. SEO pricing can vary depending on many different factors.

How much does SEO Cost?

The price of SEO services varies depending on the size and scope of your business, as well as the competition in your industry.

The most common pricing model is Monthly SEO pricing.

According to a survey from our friends at Ahrefs, the most common price from SEOs is $500-$1000/month.

Instead of asking how much does SEO Cost, you should be thinking about how much does it cost based on your goals? The needs of your website to show up in search results for your market can vary.

So this isn’t an easy question to answer without doing some basic research. That’s why we encourage you to book a call with one of our experts.

However, there are some general trends that can give you an idea of how much you can expect to pay for SEO services in 2022.

Here are some general rules of thumb based on the size of a company.

Small Business SEO

For small businesses, the average cost of SEO services is around $750 to $2000 per month. This price includes basic keyword research and optimization, as well as link building and other essential tasks.

A common rule of thumb for a good managed SEO solution is at least $500/month for small businesses but even that budget can be very limited for some businesses. The more competitive the digital marketplace becomes, the higher SEO costs.

Most local SEO campaigns we run see better results at $1000/month due to the increased competition for ranking on search engines.

But the pricing of SEO is not uniform, it depends on your website, industry and business as a whole.

For example, if you are trying to rank for “cbd oil” you aren’t going to get there at $500/month based on what your competitors are doing, it could take you years to establish your authority.

Same thing with “personal injury lawyer New York”. Even though that’s a local SEO keyword, it’s an extremely competitive market.

A $500/month budget is too small to compete for the organic traffic from those searches.

You don’t have to be an SEO expert to understand the image above. This is showing us that this keyword is EXTREMELY competitive to rank for organically.

Most Local SEO strategies fall into this price range, but again, it depends on your market.

Think of it like this: a billboard on a busy highway with lots of traffic near a city is going to be a lot more expensive than a billboard on a one lane road in a small town.

Luckily for you, we offer free consultations in order to audit your website and search competitors and suggest a budget that will be realistic for you to reach your goals.

Medium Sized Businesses

For medium-sized businesses, the average cost is around $2,000 per month. This price includes more comprehensive keyword research, on-page optimization, content marketing, and more aggressive link-building.

A competitive national SEO or international SEO campaign could require at least $2500 to $10,000 a month.

Ultimately, it depends on where you’re starting and the competition of your industry.

Large Businesses

For large businesses, the average cost of SEO services is around $5,000 per month. This price covers all aspects of SEO, including advanced keyword research, competitive analysis, website architecture optimization, very aggressive link-building strategies and overall brand awareness/visibility.

SEO pricing for large businesses can be drastically different due to the competitiveness of the market

Enterprise SEO Services

The cost of enterprise SEO services varies depending on the size and scope of the project. However, enterprise level projects typically start at $10,000 per month.

Please keep in mind that these prices are just averages and will vary depending on your specific needs.

Before talking to an SEO agency or consultant, be sure to be familiar with these pricing estimates so you can find the best fit for your goals.

However, not all SEO costs come in the form of monthly retainers. It’s also possible to pay per task or pay an hourly rate instead of a monthly retainer.

Common SEO Pricing Models

There are a variety of ways that agencies and SEO Professionals will structure the price for their services.

Your overall SEO cost can vary based on which of these different SEO pricing models work best for your specific needs.

The main SEO pricing models are:

1. Monthly Retainer Based on Deliverables
2. Monthly Retainer without Deliverables (no good)
3. Hourly rates
4. Project based

Monthly Retainer Based on Deliverables

Here at the HOTH we focus on itemized deliverables for your SEO campaign and many agencies who resell our services send those deliverables to their clients each month.

Most agencies follow this monthly retainer SEO pricing model.

What are we delivering?

Mainly Content and Backlinks.

You’ll often find full service agencies that lump SEO pricing into other services. Or a web design agency might charge for ongoing SEO work and “maintenance”.

This makes it easier for them to not report on actual SEO deliverables/reporting or get away with not actually doing SEO work.

That’s why we focus on itemized deliverables, so you can see exactly where your SEO budget is going for your customized SEO package.

Cost of Keyword Research and SEO audits

Specific SEO services like keyword research and an initial SEO audit of the website is normally how most SEO campaigns should start.

Standalone services for these can ranch from $500-$2000.

If you pay for a standalone keyword research project, it often doesn’t include any content creation or backlinks.

Content and links are what you need if your goal is to actually get organic traffic and want to do SEO correctly.

Cost of content Creation for SEO

Getting your site to rank for certain keywords is the first goal for many SEO campaigns.

To do this, you need helpful content that matches the user’s search intent of the keywords that you are trying to rank for.

How much does it cost to write content for SEO?

The infamous answer from SEOs:

“It depends.”

Google might prefer a certain word count for your content. Depending on the optimal length of your web page, you might need to pay more for longer content.

Once you have content for your main service/sales pages, you also need to focus on creating consistent blog content to rank for other related keywords with certain search intent.

Content creation has evolved tremendously over this past decade. It’s becoming harder and harder to rank content that isn’t written by someone who is knowledgable and has done research on the topic.

Here is a great graphic from PeakFreelance.com.

The average freelance copywriter charges $350 -$399 for a 1500 word blog post according to this survey.

You could pay thousands of dollars for peer-reviewed content from a seasoned expert in their field or you could write content yourself.

Both strategies work when done correctly.

At the end of the day, optimized content costs are a big part of SEO pricing.

Cost of Link building services

The average price of a link by doing blogger outreach can range from as little as $100 – to over $4000 depending on the website you are getting a link from and the industry you are in.

Here is a great graph from the lovely folks at Ahrefs.

SEO prices depend on your company’s needs, goals and dreams. The majority of your monthly SEO costs generally goes towards link-building once your site is set up well from a content perspective.

If you’re looking to be a bit more knowledgable about the value of link-building, check out this other article I wrote for the HOTH blog: How to Identify Quality Backlinks

All SEO strategies require monthly attention, including linking and content creation. When done right, search engine optimization can’t be a single project.

It will require continuous improvements to the contents of the website. That’s why a monthly retainer is the most common SEO pricing model for SEO agencies.

It’s also why all of our customers at the HOTH have a personal SEO account manager to make sure we understand your goals.

Cost of on page SEO and technical SEO

Onpage SEO is making sure that the content on your pages can be understood by Search engines and users alike. This includes:

• Heading optimization (H1, H2, H3) and Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Image alt tags
• Internal links and more!

Technical optimization or Technical SEO involves optimizing your website and pages so that Google and crawl, index and understand the purpose of your pages.

Common technical SEO tasks include:

• XML sitemap audits in Google Search Console,
• Making sure Robots.txt isn’t blocking important pages,
• Checking error status codes
• Making sure the site uses HTTPS
• Other tasks to improve the site speed

Our SEO experts always check for technical and onpage SEO red flags before starting a managed SEO plan for our clients.

Monthly Retainer Without Deliverables

When an SEO agency provides ‘monthly SEO services” but doesn’t report on the work that they are doing each month, that’s a problem.

We’ve seen many business owners who were paying for SEO for years but weren’t aware of the actual work being done to improve their rankings. This creates distrust and doubt in the SEO service provider and often results in cancellation.

That’s not to say that they weren’t actually doing any work, they very well could have been and just not communicating it to their client.

But, who knows?

This is a huge red flag when looking at SEO pricing packages.

SEO Hourly rates/Consulting

Some SEO consultants will work on an hourly basis and charge you for the individual work that they do on your website.

Here at the HOTH, we don’t charge by hourly rates because we mainly focus on off-page SEO and creating content, we don’t make any onsite changes to your site.

Therefore, this structure doesn’t make much sense for us. But many small SEO agencies and SEO specialists use this pricing model.

Most consults who know what they’re doing charge $75-$150/hour.

Project Based SEO Services Pricing

Sometimes, an SEO company might charge only for a specific project related to a business’ SEO.

For example, they might just charge for redesigning your site structure for SEO, launching a blog section, Google Business Profile optimization for Local SEO or even a technical SEO overhaul.

Or perhaps just something simple keyword research and SEO copywriting for webpages to help get you ranking.

Project based SEO services usually don’t have much ongoing support. Once the project is done, the SEO company isn’t involved anymore after that.

Some SEO agencies provide SEO packages that contain a few basic tasks like a technical audit, keyword research and setting up tracking in Google Analytics.

An individual SEO Project could cost anywhere from $1,000 – $5,000 and is usually a one time payment.

Is there a standard for SEO prices in 2022?

In short, no. The cost of SEO in 2023 has no real standard.

This is partially due to the fact that the actual details of the services provided for “SEO” can be vague itself.

In the section above, I covered the most common SEO packages and those pricing model structures.

You could pay a SEO consultant hourly, or you could pay based on specific tasks like an audit or keyword research.

For example, you can pay $5 on Fiverr to get SEO keyword research. But it definitely won’t be all you need to do to see results.

And keep in mind, you get what you pay for.

SEO Agencies have no standardization in pricing, but that also means what there is no standardization when it comes to the quality of your SEO campaign.

If you’re not seeing the results you’re looking for, it’s EXTREMELY possible you are getting undercharged AND underdelivered on what’s needed to see results.

SEO costs can be as low as someone is willing to charge you in order for you to pay them.

How much does the average SEO services cost?

Because SEO offers a wide variety of services for digital marketers and business owners, there may be difficulty in estimating typical prices. Many SEO projects can cost up to $10,000 depending on the services provided and competition for that industry. SEO for a small local business costs a lot different than a multi-national corporation as discussed earlier in this post.

An SEO agency may also include consulting for an hourly fee or management fees.

Generally a 15-page website will have a lower price point while the E-Commerce site that sells more than 50,000 different products will typically need extra money to invest in SEO.

Most agencies will have a variety of SEO pricing packages based on the most common budgets.

The SEO pricing model of the agency you work with is one of the first clues to determine if they actually know what they’re doing.

If someone tells you that they can get you ranking #1 within 30 days with a budget less than $500/month, run.

Or you should already be working with them if they are telling the truth.

Why are you searching for other pricing options for SEO?

Just kidding.

But odds are, a month from now, you’ll have wasted some money and won’t be any closer to the top of Google than your are now.

SEO Pricing Objections

Search engine optimization is an essential aspect in digital marketing for most websites.

It’s a long-term strategy that, when done right, becomes a permanent part of your yearly marketing budget.

So why are decision makers reluctant to have a dedicated SEO budget?

To be honest, a few reasons:

1. They have been burned in the past and are hesitant to invest in SEO again.
   1. They were overcharged and the agency underdelivered (or didn’t do anything)
   2. The SEO agency didn’t report on progress
   3. They were given unrealistic expectations when it comes to budget or timeframe.
2. They don’t think of SEO as a long-term marketing investment for your brand. They are expecting an “ROI” immediately. (more on this later)
3. Both reasons 1 and 2

SEO costs are not uniform, so marketing agencies and SEO companies can charge what they wish. This causes a lot of confusion when trying to figure out how much to budget for your own SEO plan.

If a business owner doesn’t know better, they end up getting overcharged and the agency under-delivers.

Worst case scenario: Many people who are being charged for “SEO services” don’t receive any deliverables or reporting about the work that is being done because no work is actually being done.

Months later, when no progress is made, the business owner gets mad which leaves a bad taste in their mouth about SEO.

Every single day, I talk to business owners who have been in this same exact situation and think SEO is some “mumbo jumbo” made up by agencies to steal more money from businesses.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

A solid SEO strategy can end up saving you countless dollars on paid ads and other marketing efforts.

Let’s say I’m a roofer in Lakeland Florida.

When I search for my potential customers would search for, I’m not in the first 3 results.

In fact, my website is showing up on the fourth page of Google.

Who goes to the fourth page for ANYTHING?

That means I’m missing out on tons of valuable traffic, leads and ultimately, sales.

Local SEO services for small businesses can take those businesses to the next level.

If I get even 5 more roofing jobs per month because I’m on the first page of Google, that means I could hire new employees, buy a new truck or finally take some time off to spend with my family.

In other words, I would spend about $1000/month for at least 6 months to get 5 more roofing customers with a customer lifetime value of $8,000-$9,000 each.

I’d be crazy to not take advantage of that marketing investment.

The cost to get those leads via paid search require a much larger monthly investment, but it’s easier to track your return on investment.

If you’re worried about seeing a return before investing in an SEO campaign, you should check out this article about SEO ROI.

It can be hard to measure but you can’t argue the lasting value of showing up when your potential customers search for you.

The truth is, many business owners give up because they get impatient and opt for more short term digital marketing services like PPC (pay-per-click) ads before they can even see a return.

It is up to a business owner to do their due diligence to make sure that they find an SEO company that has proven success with clients so that they can focus their business. Sometimes that can be hard to find among SEO professionals.

SEO Pricing vs Paid Search Pricing

Getting traffic through organic search requires some investment and time. But it’s worth the patience.

Think about it – people pay upwards of $8-$30 dollars per click for an industry like Roofing when advertising on Google. This is known as Search Engine Marketing or SEM.

What if – instead, you were to rank in the organic results for that search and you didn’t have to pay per click for running ads?

That’s where SEO investment comes in.

Your SEO spend won’t bring in leads directly like your paid ads. But that’s ok! SEO is a long term investment strategy compared to running PPC ads.

You might not see much of an increase in traffic for 6-12 months with SEO depending on your competition and where you’re currently ranking.

But when you get to the top 3 positions for your main keywords, you’ll be receiving traffic and leads organically and your monthly SEO investment will start paying for itself.

You’re investing in your brand awareness and online presence for the long term.

Choosing an SEO Agency

As you can see, the cost of SEO services can vary widely depending on a number of factors. If you’re on a tight budget, you may want to consider doing some of the work yourself or hiring an inexpensive freelancer. However, if you have the money to invest and you want to make sure your website is ranking as high as possible in the search reuslts, it’s worth considering hiring a professional SEO agency.

Of course, the price is always subject to change as the industry evolves, but this should give you a general idea of what you can expect to spend in 2023.

Finding an SEO agency that charges a reasonable amount for an SEO audit, link building and general consulting can be difficult.

SEO Agency pricing models are all at least a little unique. As stated before, SEO pricing varies. And as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. Quality SEO services can be pricey if you’re in a competitive market. That’s just the name of game to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO companies often times are looked at in a bad light because the industry was plagued with providers who would over promise and under deliver.

In 2010, that all started to change with the birth of The HOTH.

Most SEO companies back then provided little to no customer support and often disappeared over night, leaving their customers in the dark.

HOTH stands for Hittem’ over the Head. In other words, to bludgeon with awesomeness.

Our job is to provide you with top-tier support and transparency when working on your SEO. That’s why over 1400+ businesses currently trust us with their managed SEO plan.

We have to price SEO services low because a big bulk of our clients are agencies that white-label and markup our services to their clients.

So rest assured that with us, you are getting the most bang for your buck

You can waste lots of resources on SEO efforts trying to learn it yourself. And frankly, most business owners don’t want to spend their time learning SEO anyways, they’d much rather be focusing on what they are good at – running their business.

That’s why you need to find a proven partner who knows what strategies will work for you.

If you need someone who will tell it to you straight and figure out how much SEO costs based on your business’ goals, book a call with me here.

The post How Much Does SEO Cost? The Price of SEO Services in 2023 appeared first on The HOTH.

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

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

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

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

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

9 Red Flags to Look for when Vetting Guest Posting Sites

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

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

Metrics: Website Authority vs. Traffic

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

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

Google is very upfront with this.

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

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

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

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

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

Why? 

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

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

What’s the difference?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traffic

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

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

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

Both?

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

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

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

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

This led us to experiment with stricter criteria…

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

Eye Test (How does it look?)

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

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

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

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

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

Too Many Ads

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

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

Here is an example:

Updated Content

How often is the domain posting new content?

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

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

Irrelevant site categories

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

That being said, here’s a little secret…

General sites are ok!

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

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

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

Do-follow vs No-follow

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

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

You can also use Ahrefs site explorer.

First, put the URL of the domain into site explorer

Next, scroll down and click “linked domains”:

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

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

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

Sponsored Tags/Sponsored Messages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PBNs

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

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

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

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

No Forum-only sites

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

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

Extra tips:

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

Make sure YOUR content is quality

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

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

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

Do lots of outreach (and follow up)

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

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

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

Conclusion:

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

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

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

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

You can sign up for a free HOTH account here.

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

Just the term over-optimization seems counter-intuitive. You can’t optimize anything TOO MUCH. Optimized should be optimal – right? 

Over-Optimization Affects How You Rank

We’ve been monitoring several orders lately and noticing a glaring mistake in people’s backlink profiles. This mistake is absolutely holding these sites back. 

Although it’s an easy enough mistake to make, once you know exactly what it is, you can fix it fairly easily. It might save your site and give you an edge on your competition.

Google has algorithms that affect your SEO results. We all know that. And an important one to know about is Penguin. It’s important because it’s critical to know what Penguin is up to and how to ensure your site is safe.

Back in 2012, Google came out with this algorithm update to punish sites that had used too many exact match anchors when building links. And punish they did.

Suddenly, sites that had ranked stopped ranking. Penguin rewarded high-quality websites. And Penguin minimized the search engine results page (SERP) presence for websites that appeared to use keyword stuffing or manipulative link schemes.

But how does Penguin decide if you were a “good guy” or a “bad guy?” Does your site deserve to rank high on that SERP? Or should Penguin punish your site by lowering your rankings?

Where to start? Let’s begin with Exact Anchors and how they impact what Penguin thinks of your site.

Exact Anchors for Building Links

An anchor is the highlighted text on your webpage that includes the hyperlink. When a visitor clicks on the link, they go to the other page. 

The system is the same for both internal and external links. Internal links point to other pages on your site, like your blog. External links take the visitor to another website. 

And these links are great for SEO. Like really great!

• Internal links help search engines clarify your site’s structure and topic. So, when someone searches for “air conditioning systems,” for example, they don’t get results about “car exhaust systems” or “new iPhone models.” Internal links help tell Google (and the other search engines) what you do. 
• External links provide authority. That’s why it is so critical to link to solid, relevant sources. Avoid external links that might get taken down and stick to trusted sites. 
• Anchor text explains the topic on the linked page, so your visitors are not led astray. If you have ever clicked on some anchor text and ended up on some page that surprised you, the site did not do a good job deciding on anchor text. The anchor text helps your ranking because it also provides context for search engines.  
• “Exact match” refers to your anchor text (the hyperlink words) matching exactly with keywords.

So, this sounds like a good way to optimize your site. Just stick in a bunch of internal and external links that match what people might type into the search bar. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. 

Because Google knows. Google can sniff out unnatural linking if you try too hard. And trying too hard has never been attractive… 

Where the Need to Penguin Proof Your Site Began

It was over a decade ago, so like a century in internet time. First, Google created Penguin to check your profile, and if 30% of your profile was one anchor, your rankings were at risk. 

Within a year, in 2013, Google shifted the Penguin algorithm to penalize more sites. So, only 5-10% of your profile could be exact match anchors. Alas, even more sites were penalized.

You would think that by now, how to work within Penguin’s rules would be clear. But it’s hard to say exactly what anchor text percentage you should have because it varies by industry and by SERP. 

You can check your Search Engine Rankings easily. CLICK HERE

We’ve looked into lots of sites, and you can DEFINITELY see sites with higher anchor text percentages still ranking… but it’s still something you have to look out for.

The thing is, Penguin runs constantly – so just because you’re ranking today doesn’t mean you’ll be ranking 3 weeks for now.

The Present and Future of Over-Optimization 

None of this is new, but when we looked at some of our customers’ sites, we still see tons of over-optimized profiles!

In the past, Google would try to get the best answers for queries using both keywords and links. And that hasn’t completely changed. But they do have some newer approaches that make optimizing content touchier. 

Sometimes the best content just didn’t show up at the top of page one of the search results.

Some people follow some of our advice to build anchors like “click here” and naked URLS – that’s all great… But for a lot of sites, they are already over-optimized, and it’s simply not enough.

How do you know how many is too many links?

The number of backlinks you need goes up faster than the difficulty ranking. Like, if your keyword difficulty is 10, 10 backlinks are probably enough to rank. But with a keyword difficulty of 50, you might need100 or more backlinks to rank.

What happens…?

If your site is already over-optimized, what happens when the NEXT Google update comes around, and they lower the acceptable percentage again?

Your site could be in danger!

But how do you know if a site is over-optimized? Or in danger of being in danger with the next Penguin algorithm change?

Now is the time to make sure your site is not already over-optimized and prepare for the future. 

What to Do? – What to Do!

It sounds dreadful (and it is), but the fix for this is pretty straightforward. 

The EASY way to avoid this is just to get a TON of non-optimized links. You want to really “pad” your site so that over-optimization isn’t even a question.

An optimal profile would have lots of links with brand anchors like “Starbucks” or with naked URLs like http://www.starbucks.com – so these are the types of links you want to be creating. If you can achieve that, you’ll be in a really good place to avoid over-optimization!

Sounds easy enough, right?

But where do you get these links?

When you build these links, you want to get them from quality, authoritative sites. And one of the best places to get them is through social media profiles.

You want to send REAL brand signals from good sites back to your money site.

You see, social profiles are the PERFECT solution. 

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn are all high authority domains. Using social media profiles means that you send real links and real BRAND signals and diversity back to your site… all with NON-optimized anchors. 

Plus, you can build as many social media profiles as you want! (Or that you have the time and patience for…)

Now, these sites aren’t going to RANK you, but they will protect you… And you definitely need that.

So, these additional links serve multiple purposes:

• They diversify your link profile
• They send brand / social signals to your website
• You can use them to seed your content across the web so more people will see it

Still sounds pretty great, right? But…

What to Do If You Have Other Things to Do

You can obviously do this yourself, but it takes quite a bit of time to register 50+ social profiles.

And you probably have something else to do. Specifically, something better to do! 

As critical as this is for your website, you can delegate this. A good link-building strategy is vital these days, but few companies have the personnel in-house to spend the time it takes. 

So, we created a service to do this for you if you don’t have the time… and we streamlined it, so it’s very affordable ($1 or less per profile!).

Your brand is hand-registered on the top social sites in the world. We’ll fill out your profile, upload a picture, and create a non-optimized link on the page back to your site. 

Problem solved. 

Put your mind at ease about the whole Penguin / over-optimization issue. The place to start is by scheduling a consultation for an SEO Audit HERE. 

If you have any questions, just leave them in the comments!

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