All Things SEO Column

Content strategy is an essential part of SEO — after all, content and links are among the top three ranking factors in search. However, you can’t simply create content for content’s sake and expect to achieve any results. Millions of blog posts are published each day, so you need to create content that stands out and earns worthwhile links. This is where the strategy part comes into play. Strategic content planning and execution involves: prioritizing lower difficulty topics and themes. content layering and optimal internal linking. understanding linkability and identifying opportunities. regular upkeep and maintenance of existing content. A complete SEO content strategy will include these processes. With the glut of content published daily online, you must be strategic to garner the attention needed for success. Many brands believe publishing blog post after blog post will lead to more links, higher rankings and increased website visitors. However, SEO is not so … [Read more...] about SEO content strategy: How to grow visits by 300% in one year

Search engines have a peculiar business model: They exist to quickly direct you somewhere else. This is in direct contrast to your typical web business or social platform, where they do everything they can to keep you engaged and on that platform. This can’t have escaped the notice of the good folks at Google. And now, many questions are answered directly on the search engine. This keeps you on the page a little longer and (I would imagine) ups the likelihood of your conducting another search or — shock, horror! — even clicking on a search ad. You have probably seen this a million times, but the following searches should all provide some form of answer directly in the search results. “What is my IP?” “Calculator” “What is the square root of 196?” “Telephone number for Bowler Hat SEO” For these kinds of queries, there is no longer a need to actually visit a third-party website — even when they are … [Read more...] about Targeting featured snippet and ‘People also ask’ SERP features

Not long ago, I talked about 16 very specific on-site SEO mistakes that I see very often, and how to fix those issues. Today, I want to shift the focus toward problems that plague e-commerce sites specifically. I’ll also be addressing on-site problems that have a bit more to do with strategy and a bit less to do with specific technical mistakes. Finally, I wanted to make sure we had some real-world examples to refer to, so I mined case studies from the industry to demonstrate the concrete impact these changes can have on your search traffic. Let’s take a look at these problems and what you can do to resolve them. Since e-commerce sites usually have a very large number of products, it’s common for product descriptions to be short, automated and provided by the manufacturer. Unfortunately, this creates a few problems for SEO: Short descriptions give the search engines very little content to work with, and this is a problem. After analyzing 1 million search … [Read more...] about 7 on-site SEO problems that hold back e-commerce sites

Despite the many ways Google has changed the search game over the last five years, one truth remains: content is the vehicle that drives your consumer interactions, engagements, experiences and, ultimately, conversions. However, only 41 percent of marketers think their organization is clear on what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). Marketers aren’t just lacking confidence in their efforts; these are real and measurable deficits. In fact, only 20 percent of B2C and 50 percent of B2B content earns any engagement at all, my company’s research has found. That’s a lot of wasted effort and resources invested in content that ends up just floating around the web, winning zero business benefit for its creators. In this post, we’re going to take a look at content through the SMART lens. SMART is a goal-setting framework in which S stands for Specific, M for measurable, A for … [Read more...] about 14 ways to get smarter with your content and SEO

Most SEOs have heard by now that moving web pages with forms to HTTPS is necessary to avoid being shown as “not secure” in Chrome 62. Moving to HTTPS is a good step to take for a number of reasons, but there is also an unique SEO opportunity which is often overlooked — an opportunity that can significantly help your website with its SEO rankings, if done properly. So, what is the opportunity? Moving to HTTPS will encourage Googlebot to recrawl most of your URLs. Googlebot has its own mechanism for determining and prioritizing which URLs to recrawl; however, when Googlebot detects a move to HTTPS, it tends to temporarily increase the crawl rate in an attempt to crawl as many URLs as possible within a short time frame. As such, this is a unique, one-time opportunity to improve your overall website’s signals in the Google Index. Most sites have a certain crawl rate, based on a number of factors such as page speed, internal linking, external linking and popularity. … [Read more...] about Moving to HTTPS? Don’t miss this unique opportunity!

Google has long stressed the importance of “high-quality content” but has provided little, if any, help for those seeking to create it. Until now. Last month, Google’s Developer Relations Group publicly published five different guides aimed at helping its own creators “striving for high-quality documentation.” And “documentation,” when posted online, means digital content. Now available: Developer Documentation Style Guide HTML/CSS Style Guide JavaScript Style Guide Java Style Guide To put this in context, consider that these documents represent just a few of the many guides Google uses internally. The information provided is not new, unique, original, or even complete. That said, Google’s Developer Documentation Style Guides are an excellent resource for anyone interested in creating the type of high-quality content that users value and search engines reward. Each guide reinforces the idea that high-quality pages — … [Read more...] about ‘High-quality content’ tips from Google’s own style guides

The website conversion process starts with driving traffic to your site, but not just any traffic — it needs to be targeted traffic. That’s a small, but crucial, detail. What’s the danger of “untargeted” traffic? Well, for one, it’s a huge waste of time and resources. And two, if the search engines are paying attention (and they are), the untargeted traffic leaving your site can have an impact on your search engine rankings. Untargeted traffic is lose-lose. But let’s get back to the good kind of traffic. No matter what form of online marketing you are engaged with, all of them should have a primary goal to drive targeted traffic to your site. And there are a lot of ways to do that. SEO immediately comes to mind, but that may or may not be a driving factor in generating traffic to your business. You can make a lot of headway with brand engagement by developing content that satisfies what people are looking for, and then optimizing and sharing … [Read more...] about 4 (not so) ordinary conversion elements you may be abusing

They say a picture is worth a thousand words — and wow, are they correct! Today, I’m going to illustrate powerful ways to visualize your site structure, specifically as it relates to pages that acquire incoming links; however, we’ll also discuss other applications of this technique using analytics metrics or other third-party data. There are a number of reasons you would want to do this, among them to provide a visual context to data. As we will see below, visual representations of data can assist in quickly identifying patterns in site structures that may not be evident when viewed as a spreadsheet or as raw data. You can also use these visuals to explain to clients and other stakeholders what’s going on in a site structure. To build a visual representation of our site structure as it relates to incoming links, we will be: running Screaming Frog to gather internal page data and link structure. adding the number of backlinks each page has to the page’s … [Read more...] about Visually understanding your site structure and external link weight impact

Disclaimer: All criticism of Google spokespeople contained herein is impersonal in nature. I know they are only representing the internal direction of the company and not acting independently. They do strive to be as helpful as they can. When former head of web spam Matt Cutts was at Google, he spent a lot of time communicating with webmasters/site owners about updates. We knew what was coming, when it might be coming, and how severe it would possibly be. If you woke up in the morning and your traffic had fallen off a proverbial cliff, you could go to Twitter and, based on what Cutts was posting, usually determine if Google had run an update. You could even tell how severe the rollout was, as Cutts would typically give you percentage of queries affected. Although some believe Cutts was more about misinformation than information, when it came to updates, most would agree he was on point. So if a site fell off that cliff, you could learn from Cutts what happened, what the update was … [Read more...] about The trouble with ‘Fred’

With Google’s continued focus on user experience and engagement metrics in recent algorithm updates, it’s become even more important for marketers to pay attention to how fast their sites are. Page speed has long been a ranking factor for desktop search results, and it may soon impact mobile rankings as well. The benefits of improved load times go well beyond their impact on SEO and your site’s organic rankings, however. Consider recent Google data, which shows that “53 percent of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load,” or that “for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20 percent.” So, how do you actually go about speeding up your site? For many non-technical marketers, trying to figure out how to improve page speed can be a daunting task. Which levers should you actually be pulling to generate a result? And how do you get those changes implemented on your … [Read more...] about The non-developer’s guide to reducing WordPress load times up to 2 seconds (with data)