The best marketing strategies will take into account the current trends and statistics that have become key indicators for what is currently producing results. The following is a list of 60 SEO statistics indicating some of the most important trends and facts to assist in creating an effective marketing strategy in 2020.
Google generates 5.8 billion searches a day (Market.us)
Google handles 1.9 trillion searches per year (Intenet Live Stats, 2019)
Less than half of the total searches made on Google results in a click (Sparktoro, 2019)
16-20% of the searches performed on a daily basis have never been searched before on Google (Search Engine Land)
The typical user types in a search phrase of 3 words or more (Hubspot)
As of December 2019, 94% of all searches are made on Google product(Sparktoro)
There are over 200 ranking factors that are accounted for in Google’s search algorithm (Backlinko)
Top three ranking signals are content (satisfying search intent), backlinks and Rankbrain (Search Engine Land, 2018)
Only 9.12% of web pages receive traffic and the other 90.88% get zero visitors because they have no backlinks (Ahrefs, 2018)
Increase traffic 106% by updating and republishing blog posts with new content and images (Hubspot)
HTTPS pages (ranking factor since 2014) account for approximately 90% of browsing time on Chrome (HostingTribunal.com)
38% of people will leave a site if the user experience is unenjoyable and the format and content is unattractive (Search Engine Journal, 2019)
Page speed is an official ranking factor as of July 2019 on mobile devices and has been a factor for desktop since 2010 (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/)
On-page optimization has a huge effect on your ability to rank (Moz)
The first five results on the first page of Google accounts for 67% of the clicks from the total search traffic of a keyword. (Zero Limit Web)
70-80% of all searches are long-tail key phrases (search engine land, 2018)
In a study of 1.9 Billion keywords in Ahrefs database, it was discovered that 92.42% of keywords receive less than 10 searches/month (Ahrefs)
Keyword/topic clusters are your most powerful SEO weapon (SearchEngineJournal)
61% of businesses have declared SEO as their top inbound marketing strategy for 2020
Over 4.4 million blog posts are published every day (Statista, 2020)
Google-owned 95% of search volume from mobile devices as of September 2019 (Statista)
More than half of all video streaming comes from a mobile device. (Hostingtribunal.com)
Mobile searches for “image search” have grown by over 60% in the past two years. (Google, 2019)
Mobile searches for personalized have grown by over 60% in the past two years (Google, 2019)
Mobile searches for “podcasts” have grown 80% from 2016-2018 (Google, 2019)
“Best” + “right now” mobile queries have grown by over 125% in the last two years (e.g., best online sales right now, the best phone out right now).(Google, 2019)
Mobile searches for “stores open near me” have grown 250% from 2017-2019 (Google, 2019)
Searches that include the phrase “Where to buy” + “near me” have grown 200% from 2017-2019 (Google, 2019)
“on-sale” + “near me” have grown 200% YOY since 2017 (Google, 2019)
82% of people will use their phone to make an in-store purchase (Omnicore)
In almost every survey on link building methods, guest blogging ranks among the top three most popular choices. One of the burning questions that many business owners and SEOs want to know is “How effective is guest posting in 2020?”
What is guest blogging?
Guest posting, or guest blogging, is publishing content on a third-party website and linking back to your own website from that content. The process is usually initiated by the guest author pitching a website a content idea, or the hosting website asks a guest author to contribute content.
A brief history leading up to guest posting in 2020
In 2010, it wasn’t uncommon to see a 300-500-word article that linked to completely unrelated content. Like every link building tactic that worked to improve ranking, guest posting was heavily abused with low-quality guest posts because it worked where you could publish any piece of content and like to any type of website.
You might land on a post about banking trends that had a link to a cookware website. To top off the terrible contextually unrelated link, the article would offer little to no value to anyone who even bothered to give it a read. And yet, the cookware website would rank highly from the link regardless of the lack of contextual relationship and low-quality content.
The effectiveness of low-quality guest posting was for the most part eliminated in a series of Google Updates. The Panda update enforced better quality content. The Hummingbird update allowed Google to understand the context of a page more accurately. The Penguin update killed a lot of the link building manipulation that people were using to achieve high rankings.
It seemed that guest posting was one of the few methods of link building that wasn’t completely doomed by Google. Then the cryptic message from ex-Google employee Matt Cutts, who headed the web spam team:
Despite the ominous warning about guest posting, it has continued to prove effective over the last few years. One of the most recent success stories that were solely based on guest posting is Adam Enfroy’s story and his short rise to riches.
Guest posting has its success stories
In a 15 day experiment, Adam was able to secure 8 high-authority guest post links to his website. Although he continued to publish over 80 guest posts in a year’s time, his blog traffic increased to over 200k/month and his website hit a record high revenue of roughly $30k/month.
The most recent update was that he was able to get as high as $80k/month this year. So what’s the debate about the effectiveness of guest posting? Well, it’s not entirely a clear cut and dry case about how Google is viewing the SEO value of guest post links.
We’ve seen numerous warnings about guest posting
SEO software giant, SEMRush announced that they would be launching a guest posting service that would identify websites willing to accept guest posts, write the articles on your behalf and publish them with a link back to your site.
It was made clear by John Mueller that this service violated Google’s best practice guidelines in that it was essentially a service that accepted money for links.
That’s an unnatural link – the kind the webspam team might take action on. https://t.co/kfQQithCnK & https://t.co/q5GmAxx2YM have more. Making sure the links use rel=nofollow / rel=sponsored would still allow sites to get visibility without having to worry about manual actions.
Whether SEMRush saw it the same way or not, they kiboshed the service as it was clear there would be penalties issued. This controversial service rehashed many of the questions, doubts and fears about how Google views guest posting.
The other thing is that because this is so old, we have a lot of training data for our algorithms. I wouldn’t be surprised if the largest part of those links are just ignored automatically. If all that work is for ignored links, why not just do something useful instead?
He further indicates that there is a problem with the system for guest posting for links that improve SEO value. If you’re the author of an article and award yourself links to your own site, how can that possibly be viewed as earned links?
The part that’s problematic is the links — if you’re providing the content/the links, then those links shouldn’t be passing signals & should have the rel-sponsored / rel-nofollow attached. It’s fine to see it as a way of reaching a broader audience.
Hence the guest posting dilemma regarding whether guest posting for links improves ranking or has any SEO value.
Does guest posting work as an effective method of building links in 2020?
The short answer to this question is yes, guest posting is and will remain an effective method of building links. The longer answer is that it depends on what goal you hope to accomplish with your link building since some guest post links have less SEO value than others.
Guest posting is confirmed by Google to be good for branding and search visibility.
Guest posting will always remain an excellent way to gain search visibility and brand your business. Google has agreed on this. There are guest-posting sites that have a large readership and will send tons of referral traffic to your site (assuming you write a great article).
According to Google’s best practices, you can drive traffic to your site through guest posting and linking to content assets on your site with nofollow links. This will increase search visibility and attract backlinks to your outstanding content. In theory.
Guest post links are being devalued under certain circumstances
The reason for doubt in the effectiveness of guest posting are speculations on the SEO value that is gained from a guest post link. But what about when your website is mentioned in someone else’s guest posting article?
How does Google know whether your site is being used as a resource, or whether you’re awarding yourself links from your own guest posts?
To get the most SEO value out of guest post links it would seem that you’d need to mentioned or not be attached as the author of the guest post. The following is a detailed guide on how to guest post in 2020 and beyond.
How to effectively build links using guest posts in 2020
Many different guides will tell you much of the same information on how to go about the process of pitching and writing guest posts, however, it should be clear about what will really move the needle from your efforts.
Keeping in mind what has happened this year, it would seem to me that the most effective method of building links by guest posts cannot be done alone. You need either a) the help of a personal influencer network b) strategize how you acquire your guest posting links by avoiding the author link in the bio or c) Guest post for nofollow links with the goal of referral traffic to pages that people will link to because they have present high value as a resource worth sharing and referencing.
Form a PIN
A typical link strategy doesn’t end with one link to your website. In most cases you’ll need a few different websites linking to your page to get it moving in rank. If you’re going to be actively guest posting on a few different websites seek out those whoa re also guest posting actively.
Contact good authors or content writers who publishes content in your niche. Propose that for every link you send to their website, they send one to yours. This way you’re able to maximize on the number of links you acquire per guest post.
If you have 4 or 5 people you work with that means you would include 4 or 5 links in a guest post article to each of their websites. That also means for every article you publish, you would receive a link from your article, plus 4 or 5 links coming from your personal influencer network.
Working with a PIN makes guest posting more efficient and it builds valuable links that Google won’t devalue from the association of you as the author.
Avoid the connection as the author of a guest post
There are many websites that have manipulated guest posting by using fake names to make it appear that someone else is linking to their site. This circumvents the connection Google makes to you awarding yourself links in a guest post and results in a link that has more SEO value for your website.
I’m not recommending using fake names, merely stating a fact. This is also a reason why link building services will get you results as well as hiring a freelance content writer.
Google’s principle behind links as a ranking signal is based on the concept of votes and/or referrals be websites that have the credibility to impact your authority. By this understanding, guest post links to your website have SEO value as linked mentions.
Choose website’s where a nofollow link is valuable
It’s a hard pill to swallow, however, since John Mueller has recommended that all guest posting links be marked as nofollow but the upside is you have to consider guest posting on sites with relevant traffic. This perspective forces you to consider what websites have traffic that’s actually good for your website-all SEO metrics aside.
Why is this a good thing? Instead of posting to a website because of its authority, you’ll be looking for websites with real traffic that are highly targeted to your content. This is one of the best reasons to go after a link in the first place.
Keep in mind that Google has also stated that they are treating the nofollow attribute as a recommendation. Whether that means SEO value could be awarded or not isn’t clear. The fact that Google wants to have the option may point to some future changes in how links are viewed.
How to land a high authority guest post in 2020 and beyond
It seems like a lot to digest, but the truth is that guest posting is still working as an effective way to build links and get your website more search visibility. In order to have the most impact as a link building method, you want to stick to the websites that will have the most positive influence on ranking and referral traffic to your website.
Set your standards for quality guest posting websites
If you follow a set of guidelines for how to guest post, you can streamline the process of finding websites, pitching and writing content.
The first area that takes a large amount of time is prospecting your websites. Establish a minimum domain authority for the websites that you intend to pitch. The domain authority isn’t the most important aspect, but it can be used as an effective filter for sorting out who you spend time prospecting.
An effective tool for identifying a website’s domain authority is the Mozbar. It’s free to download as a browser extension and all you need to is an account on Moz (also free). This allows you to see the page authority, the number of links, domain authority and spam score directly from the search results.
Another valuable tool to use is SEMRush for identifying the organic traffic a website has flowing through it. This is important because it cuts through the vanity of domain authority and tells you whether the website is ranking for organic keywords and driving traffic. This is important if you’re going to benefit from any referral traffic offered by guest posting on the website.
In the following segments, you’ll learn how to prospect potential guest posting websites, pitch the editors and write guest posts that improve your search visibility.
How to find websites that accept guest posts
There are three ways to find websites that accept guest posts; browse published lists of websites that appear in the search results; search using command operatives and plain old outreach.
There are literally thousands, if not millions of websites that accept guest posts, but not all of them will be good for your website. For a guest post to have a positive influence on your business, it needs to improve the authority of your website and/or send you traffic that engages with your content.
Browse published lists of sites that accept guest posts
If you simply type in the search phrase “[your keyword] websites that accept guest posts” you’ll produce a lot of search results of published lists of guest posting sites related to your keyword. This isn’t the best way of finding guest blogging prospects, but it can definitely help identify some high authority websites that would be beneficial to your content.
The benefit of using a published list to prospect websites is that it’s already made for you, so it saves time searching. You can cut and paste the list to an excel sheet and work systematically through the list. Working on a spreadsheet allows you to make notes as you go.
The downside to using a published list is that it can be inaccurate with the information it provides. Many of the websites may have changed their guest posting policy or may no longer exist.
Some of the websites may not even be related to your industry or niche.
Regardless of the results you find, you’ll still need to qualify any potential prospects according to your own set of standards for quality. This can be done equally as effectively by using command operatives.
Search guest post sites using command operatives
Command operatives can be used to instruct Google to search for specific websites that contain keywords in specific places. To find relevant guest posting sites you can use the commands inurl and intitle to find websites that have your keyword in the URL or the title respectively.
One of the most popular command operatives used to find sites that accept guest posts is looking for the words “write for us” in the url or the title of the page. Adding the keyword in front of the search string makes the results keyword related:
[your keyword] + inurl: write for us[your keyword] + intitle: write for us
Here’s an example of a command operative you could use to find a dog training website that accepts guest posts:
Dog training + inurl:contributor
This method is preferable because more often than not you’re getting websites that are actively accepting guest posts. If you have the Mozbar setup, you can quickly browse through the websites that meet your minimum DA.
Plain old outreach
The goal for every website owner is to achieve a level of search visibility that allows more potential clients to find their website. Considering that publishing SEO content is one of the best methods for driving targeted traffic, it’s reasonable to pitch websites that aren’t publicly offering guest posts as well.
Most editors and website owners will publish content if it benefits their audience and represents an asset to their content strategy. Don’t limit the websites you pitch to just those that publicly accept guest posts. If there are websites you know that would make a huge impact on your search visibility, add them to your list of prospects and make them an offer they can’t refuse.
How to pitch content to editors and website owners
The email you send to editors will likely determine whether your pitch gets any attention or is handily ignored along with the rest of the guest posting requests. In order to craft the ultimate approach to a high authority website, you need to make a really good first impression. Here are some tips to improve the acceptance rate you get from high authority websites.
Make contact before pitching
If you really want to make a good impression, do some research on the website that you’d like to get your content on. Find out who the content editor is, or people in charge that could help you get published, like the owner or executive officers.
Linkedin is pretty good for finding out general details about a company. You can find just about any company on Linkedin and once you do, click on people to see a list of the staff working there. Pick the most appropriate person/people to make contact with before sending them a “cold outreach email”.
You can vary this tactic by commenting on articles on the company blog or on guest posts when you see them. Follow the company on social media and make comments and share their posts. Your efforts will surely be noticed when you’ve made four or five attempts to comment and share their content.
By making yourself more familiar you improve your chances of your email being noticed and taken more seriously than the rest of the email from other gust authors.
Read a few articles from the prospective blog
You can’t craft the perfect pitch without reading the blog itself. In order to offer something of value, you need to figure out what that is for the blog you’re pitching. One of the top reasons articles are rejected (other than low quality) is because the content isn’t a good fit for the website.
Read a few articles to get a feel for the content being produced along with the style, tone and topics that match your prospects’ blog.
Create catchy headlines
Think about it. The first thing you’re presenting to an editor is the possibility of writing an article based on the headline. In order for there to spark any interest in your article, your headline has to instantly appeal to the editor.
There’s a lot of rehashed content that lives on the internet so try not to be boring by putting a twist on your topic. For example, instead of Website Traffic Creation, try using How To Generate Explosive Traffic To Your Shopify Store.
The second title is more descriptive, more focused and more interesting than the first. Brainstorm title ideas by writing down a list of 20 different headlines. You can use tools like Coschedule’s headline analyzer to gauge how effective it is. Or just apply some headline strategies that are known to improve click-through rate.
Include a brief outline of your proposed article
Include, at a minimum, four to five bullet points on what you plan on discussing within your proposed article. This gives editors a sneak peek at the content you’re going to send them-which hopefully makes your article more appealing.
Include some title options
It’s best practice to send along a few other title options of another article idea you’d like to write about. Not every website owner will want the exact article you’re pitching. Giving them a few other options opens the door to more ideas, rather than shutting down your pitch completely.
Always include a few links to writing samples
Even if you’ve never published a single guest post, you can include links to content on your own blog. This establishes some credibility and proves to the editor that you’re capable of putting together a good article.
If you have previously published articles, send links to your best work on the most well known websites.
Write an article that will represent your business
Upon acceptance, write an article that will be an excellent representation of your business. Approach guest posting the same way you would write an SEO optimized blog post for your own website.
It’s not just about getting the link. The goal is to attract readers to click-through to your site. Whether you get a high volume of traffic from the article or not, the article itself is a form of advertising your company and teaching people what you offer as a business.
This is a form of branding for your company so treat it as a presentation to inform, enlighten and engage your readers.
Quality is key
To get the most of guest posting, you need to commit to publishing quality content on the hosting website as well as your own. There are no shortcuts to this. In order to get people to click on a link that goes to your site, they have to read and trust the content your publishing as a guest author.
Once they’re on your website, the content on your site needs to be link-worthy and should engage your ideal audience. The ideal outcome to guest posting is twofold; you receive traffic interested in what your business offers; you receive traffic that likes your content so much they share it within their network and link to it in their own writing.
To do this, make sure you’re publishing well researched, well-written content that links to content assets on your website.
Don’t forget your PIN
Remember to add links to your personal influencer network in order to get links from them.
Link to internal articles
It’s not always required but it’s always a nice touch to include a few internal links to the hosting site’s content. It shows you’re interested in improving their blog and that you’re willing to help out where you can. Building relationships with the editors and website owners you submit to can go a long way in your link building career.
8 benefits of guest blogging
#1-Increased referral traffic
As a guest author, you have the opportunity to publish an article on a website within your niche, with a link pointing back to your site.
A link on a popular blog site provides you with targeted referral traffic. These visitors are obviously interested in reading your content if they read your guest post and clicked on your link.
Keep in mind that the number of visitors that click through to your site largely depends on how much traffic the hosting site receives.
#2-Provides a targeted audience
Guest posting puts your content in front of readers who are interested in your niche. Aim to publish a guest post on a site that your potential clients visit. By limiting your guest posting prospects to highly relevant sites within your industry (or a direct parallel) you improve the impact your link building strategy has on your ranking.
This also improves the chances your guest posts will be read by visitors interested in the solutions your business offers.
#3-Promotes better branding
This form of link building is considered a branding opportunity because it allows you to demonstrate the expertise of your company. Problem-solving content can be a powerful way for people to learn about your business and compel readers to click through to your site.
A well-written guest post can communicate to people how your company is capable of solving problems related to their own. Successful guest posting strategies promote awareness of your brand and establish thought leadership within your industry.
#4-Increases visibility
As a guest author, you are allowed the opportunity to tap into a third party’s traffic resources. Many blogs have a subscribership/email list that receives every new article that gets published.
Your article gets sent to that audience and you can get your site in front of a whole new network you wouldn’t have normally had access to.
#5-Develops authority
A link from a guest post will pass authority to your site when it’s acquired correctly. A major reason for posting on a blog site is to gain access to traffic that is a good match for your website. The relationship between your site and the guest posting site should be clearly identifiable.
Acquiring links from sites within your niche will improve your site’s credibility and ranking ability if they are followed links and preferably awarded by anyone but yourself.
#6-Enhances optimization
Its best practice to link to the inner pages of your site with anchor text links.
In fact, you enhance the optimization of your pages by using your target keyword in a select number of your anchor text links.
This creates stronger relevance signals for keyword related searches.
Typically you want to use exact match anchor text sparingly to avoid any signs of rank manipulation.
Using a good blend of long-tail keywords, brand links and naked URLs is the best form of implementing a safe backlinking strategy.
#7-Improves ranking
The strength of a backlink profile plays a major contributing role in the ranking your page receives for your target keyword. Quality links will go a long way for moving the needle in the competitive placement of your page.
The more high-quality sites that link back to your page, the more authority and ranking ability your page accumulates.
High authority domains have more impact on your domain authority and ranking ability. The more popular the blog site, the more traffic and the more authority that is passed through to yours.
#8-Builds more entry points to your content
The more links that lead. to your website the better. Each link you build creates a bridge allowing more visitors to find your website. As long as you’re linking from relevant content on websites that receive a healthy flow of traffic you’re improving the number of entry points to your content.
As a method of link building, this is among the most popular because it allows you to cover the basic three essentials of acquiring quality links.
Links are most beneficial when they are:
Highly relevant to the content hosting the link. Since the article is being written on behalf of your company, it’s obviously going to have strong relevance to the content in which you’re linking.
The health of the site in which your link resides is another criteria for acquiring a quality link.
Choosing websites that have established traffic and strong readership is the third part of the criteria for acquiring quality backlinks.
Make the most of a linking opportunity
Although the linking criteria will differ from site to site,
be sure to fully understand what the site is allowing in terms of providing a
linking opportunity.
A contextual link is the most valuable type of link you can acquire because it provides a reference to related content. As far as search engines go, the sole purpose of linking is to share content that is deemed worthy of sharing.
If the editors allow you to link to your site within the body of your article, take advantage by linking to the inner pages of your site. Your links should be natural, meaning they are not forced and are referencing a relevant page on your site.
Try to incorporate as many relevant links to previous guest
posts since you can build on their authority and boost the value of the links
to your site.
Answer comments and responses
Respond to any comments or questions your article generates.
User interaction provides good ranking signals that give your article more
traction in the search results. Many webmasters will actually ask you to
respond under penalty of having your links removed from your article!
6 Tips & Tactics For Guest Blogging
#1-Summarize your article with subtitles
Use creative subtitles to separate your article into segments that give the reader an accurate summary of what your article is communicating. Many people (editors included) who read online tend to scan through content and if your subtitles can paint an attractive or interesting enough picture you can capture their attention to read further.
A good article will segment your thoughts and ideas into
easier to digest blocks of text. The added ease of comprehension is an asset to
any article and makes your article a more attractive possibility for
publication.
#2-Use Grammarly to proof your article
This app is extremely easy to use and highlights all of your spelling and grammatical errors. The corrections are as simple as hovering over the highlighted text and clicking on the option that is the most suitable correction.
This app is functional on an HTML editor or Google Docs, which makes it ideal for blogging. There is nothing more unprofessional than spelling mistakes and poor grammar. Use a tool like Grammarly to eliminate those errors. and raise your level of professionalism.
Even if you’re a great writer this tool will catch a lot of mistakes you might otherwise miss. Your writing becomes much more appealing to editors when submitting content for publication.
#3-Use images & media at every opportunity
It should go without saying how important images are to incorporate in your articles. People retain 60% more information when there is an image to associate with the text. Since some blogs will require images for your article and in most cases, they will add images to your article, you can save them time and include them yourself.
Make your article more enticing by posting some related images to prove points or illustrate examples. If you don’t own the rights to the image be sure to credit the source of the image with a link or proper attribution.
#4-Read a few articles from the blog
Many blogs have a specific style that can be discerned by reading a few of their blog posts. Get a feel for that style so you can incorporate it within your content. If you can nail the blog’s tone and format you’ll always be invited back to write gain for the blog.
#5-Read the guest posting guidelines for each submission
There is always valuable information that each site will offer in their guest posting guidelines-which is different for every blog site.
The linking policies are a major issue that should be understood before you pitch or submit an article to a site. If they are only offering nofollow links, it may affect your link building strategy as well as your contribution to your PIN.
Some sites will enforce strict protocols when accepting submissions. There are sites that won’t consider your article if you’ve missed one of their requirements. Editors will literally dismiss your article without notification.
For every website you consider, read the submission guidelines as a non-negotiable part of your routine. It will save you time and resources in the long run by having a clear idea of what you’re getting as well as what you need to provide.
Conclusion
When done correctly, guest blogging is one of many strategies for building backlinks that are considered safe and effective for branding, improving authority and building the strength of your backlink profile.
As long as guest blogging continues to get great results within an SEO campaign it will remain one of the most popular methods of link building in 2020 and beyond.
Link building is an essential part of improving the competitiveness of your website. Build links from the most credible, high-authority websites. The quality of the links you build trumps the quantity. Implement proven backlinking strategies for 2020 to produce quality links that increase your search visibility and create highly targeted streams of traffic from websites your clients visit.
Bet you didn’t see this one coming! Of all the backlinking strategies in this article, this method is a way to place your backlink in a place that your competition can’t find or exploit-a newsletter.
Subscribe to every newsletter that publishes content within your niche. Once you get a feel for the tone and the type of audience it appeals to, you can work on a way to present your link within its content.
Make contact with the site owner and keep the thought of building a relationship a priority, meaning don’t come right out in asking for a link to your site.
Keep in mind that the best link building is done without search engines in mind. In other words, effective link building is getting your link in places where there’s a good audience for your content.
This method of link building is simple in the sense that it’s a two-step process.
The first step is to find a newsletter that is distributed to a large subscribership that would respond well to one of your offerings.
The second step is to convince the owner/editor of the newsletter to include your link within the newsletter.
Kelly Felix claims this tactic launched his career and made his program featuring “The Rich Jerk” an overnight success. The newsletter that carried his link was sent out to hundreds of thousands of people overnight. Following its publication, Kelly was inundated with people excited to hand him money to be a part of his program.
One newsletter to a massive audience was enough to give him his first taste of being a millionaire.
You don’t need to be an SEO consultant to implement this method effectively.
Guest posting
As mentioned before, effective backlinking strategies are those that get your link in front of a large audience that will engage with your content. The only thing that makes a link even better is if it’s a followed link on a high authority website. Guest posting allows you to acquire links with all three positive attributes.
What is guest posting or guest blogging?
For those of you that have been living in a cave for the last 10 years, guest posting is when you publish an article on a third party website as a guest author. Most websites that offer guest posting will allow you to link to websites within your content, which is where you can link to your site and other relevant resources.
More often than not, you will be afforded an author box where you can tell the audience about yourself in a few sentences and link to your social profiles and company website.
Not all guest posting websites are created equal
The rules and guidelines can vary greatly between websites that offer guest posting. Some websites will only offer nofollow links, some will have a minimum or maximum word count for articles.
Some websites are better for your website than others. It’s important to vet the quality of the website before agreeing to be published. There are many websites that have been exposed and penalized for accepting money for links and any links from those websites will do more damage than good.
Integrate guest posting with other methods of link building
Although guest posting is without a doubt a method of link building that will benefit your website, it should be implemented with other forms of link building. If your site has solely acquired links from guest posts, it may be deemed unnatural and the links will be devalued.
John Mueller has stated that all links in a guest post should be nofollowed-or mark them as sponsored. Keep in mind that Google has also stated that they will be interpreting the nofollow attribute as a recommendation rather than a command. It can only be surmised that Google would like to credit guest post links with authority according to its own interpretation of quality.
One of the biggest sources of traffic generation is blogging and publishing content that ranks highly in the search results. The more quality content your website can produce, the more keywords you’re able to target. Inviting guest authors to publish content on your website can allow you to publish quality content at a higher frequency than if you were to do it yourself.
One of the benefits of inviting guest authors to publish content on your site is that they are likely to link to their own article, or at the very least, share it on their social media profiles. This additional article promotion can generate new traffic from untapped sources that you otherwise would never have been able to acquire.
Recruit and hand pick your writers
Websites that offer guest posting will typically publish a “write for us” page to attract writers looking for guest posting opportunities. This is effective for having people send you proposals and articles but you will undoubtedly receive more low-quality offers than what you’d like to publish.
A solution is to reach out to authors who are publishing frequently and have a style of writing that matches your brand and quality of writing. This is one way to get good content since these are writers who are actually producing quality articles.
Invite authors, influencers and great writers to publish content on your blog. Provide a good proposal for promoting their article to entice the best writers in your niche. Make sure they understand your offer as an opportunity to access your network, which will provide more traffic to their site.
Publish linkable assets
When you’re creating content for your site, publish content that others will be happy to link to. Publish white papers, statistics, infographics or entertaining opinion pieces that provide value to your audience as well as amplifiers in your industry.
If you were going to share an article or use it as a reference in an article you’re writing yourself, think of the level of quality, credibility and authority it would need to demonstrate. No one voluntarily links to garbage articles or share’s them with their social network. Creating linkable content assets gives people a reason to link to your website.
If you’re just starting a business and all you have on your website is the service page, about page and an empty blog there’s absolutely no reason your website will acquire backlinks. You need to publish content that serves a purpose and provides value to those reading it. This is where a solid SEO content strategy comes into play.
Create value by solving problems
People search online because they’re looking for information on how to solve a problem. If they have a need to purchase a product, that product is to solve a particular problem. You can drive a ton of traffic by publishing content that addresses and solves the problems that people are experiencing.
Strategize on the type of content you can publish that will appeal to your prospective clients. Show them how to do something using your product that solves a problem.
Every article on the Ahrefs blog is focused on solving SEO issues while incorporating their software. There is a ton of value in their articles that teach people about SEO and every article. Take a look at their growth in traffic over the last few years from providing actionable advice.
Create shareable content that offers value so it’s shared and used as a resource to attract more visitors and backlinks. Keep in mind that no matter how valuable your content, you’ll still need to get it in front of an audience for people to know about it. Once you’ve started the ball rolling by getting people to read your content, it continues to attract backlinks over time.
Outreach campaigns
An outreach campaign is basically just reaching out to website owners and asking them to link to your content. When your content is absolutely top-notch, this method of link building can be effective in acquiring backlinks.
If you’re reaching out to editors to inform them of the most fantastic article they’ve ever laid their eyes on (and it’s true), the average conversion rate is roughly 8%. This means that 8 out of 100 websites you contact about a link will respond favourably.
The success of a cold email outreach campaign depends heavily on the value proposition. That’s why it’s a huge advantage to publish great content that people are likely to share. With top-notch, unique, evergreen content it makes sense to use this type of backlinking strategy.
If your content isn’t that exciting, you’ll need to consider mixing up your approach to how you accumulate backlinks in order to offer more value as an incentive for the link. Building relationships before asking site owners to link to your content is highly recommended for optimal results.
Unlinked brand mentions
This method of link building will only be effective if you’ve established a recognizable brand. The concept is to find where people have mentioned your brand but haven’t linked to your website. You would then reach out to them to ask for a link to your website.
This method of outreach gets a slightly higher success rate than a cold email outreach campaign. If a publisher has already mentioned your brand, they are most likely happy with your product or service (or very displeased!) Asking them to add a link to your company name so people can find your site more easily is usually not a far stretch and will often result in you getting the link.
Link reclamation
Link reclamation is reaching out to website owners to replace the links you’ve already had but for some reason have been deleted and lost. The success of this backlinking campaign strongly depends on the reason your links were lost in the first place.
Scenario 1: Link lost after content update or website redesign
Many companies will drop links because they’ve redesigned their website and for one reason or another the link was lost in the redesigned page. The same applies to a page that has had its content updated. The editor may have just forgotten to add the link back to your page.
In situations like this, a simple email asking to have your link replaced is enough. If the website was linked to your website before, the editor shouldn’t have a problem giving you the link again if it was simply forgotten.
Scenario 2: Link awarded to better content
In this scenario, the website owner has linked to another website because the content outperforms your own. Obviously, before you can ask for the link to be replaced, you’ll need to update your content to be a better version of the article that replaced you.
It’s also advisable to come up with an alternative page to link to in case the owner doesn’t feel your page is better quality. If they linked to your site once, they are likely to link to you again. You just need to give them a reason to give you the link by offering another liankble content asset.
Repairing broken links
Broken link building is a strategy that’s become an insanely popular type of outreach campaign. The success rate is higher than just asking people to link to your site for the simple reason it’s easier to approach website owners with a value proposition.
Broken links are considered to be a source of bad user experience. When a link leads a user to a missing page it can be frustrating and slightly annoying. Too many of those on your site can negatively affect your SEO.
By letting the website owner know about any broken links on their site you’re doing them a favour because it’s a way of improving the performance of their site.
This aligns perfectly with your link request because the site owner will need another page to link to in order to fix the situation (or remove the link altogether). Have content ready to replace the link, all you need is to mention your URL as a replacement.
You can use The Wayback Machine (archive.org) to see what content the link was pointed to in order to make a better, more updated version.
The appreciation for improving their site plus the convenience of having content to immediately replace the broken link contributes to raising the likelihood of acquiring the link.
Find backlinking opportunities in your competitor’s link profile
Find valuable backlinks by analyzing the top-ranking pages backlink profile. You can run a backlink report using the tool of your choice and get a list of potential link prospects for your own website.
Keep in mind that not every backlink on your competitor’s profile will also be good for your website. There may be links that are actually hurting their ranking ability more than helping. This requires careful analysis before blindly linking to every link on your competitor’s profile.
Start with the high DA sites first (if you’re using Moz) and work your way down the list. A link from a domain with high authority will provide the most benefit to your site if it is relevant and the site is healthy.
Publish a press release
The linkerati is a term coined by Rand Fishkin for those that are most likely to link to your content. They are essentially the “amplifiers” who will, as the term suggests, amplify your content. You can get your content in front of a large audience of linkerati by issuing a press release.
Your content needs to be news worthy to get enough traction with the linkerati. This means it needs to be worth writing about, not just a boring company update that no one cares about.
Although you don’t get any followed links from the press release itself, some journalists and websites will syndicate your story or rewrite it. This will often result in followed links to your website from several high-authority websites for every press release.
Charity link building
Donating to a charity can land you some great links on high authority websites. As a sponsor/donor, your donation gets you on the list of sponsors with a link to your website.
Keep in mind this tactic has been ousted by Google as way to manipulate ranking through link building, and therefore should not be done in excess. In fact, you should limit the links you have from charities to a very select few websites that have high authority in order to make it worth the effort.
Qualify whether the link prospect is a viable candidate by noting the page authority you link would go on as well the number of existing outbound links on the page. If there are too many links to too many low quality websites, the links from the page may be devalued and in an extreme case, cause more harm than good to your ranking. Choose a charity with fewer than 15 outbound links on the page to make sure your links aren’t categorized as spam.
Resource page link building
The backlinking tactic involves finding companies and websites that have published a page where they link to recommended resources and websites. As one of the most popular methods of backlinking tactics used by small business owners, you need to tread cautiously when you’re prospecting your links.
Beware the ever-popular “link exchange.” Many business owners who offer resource pages are also aware of the value of links. As a result, they ask for a link from everyone who gets listed on their resource page. A few exchanges won’t hurt your site, but if every link you acquire is a reciprocal link (you link back) those links will be devalued for unnatural link building.
Find link prospects that are using resource pages as a legitimate resource for their visitors. This way you can offer your content asset as a legitimate resource they’ll link to.
Avoid pages with too many unrelated outbound links. You won’t get any value from a link that originates on a spammy page. Choose resource pages that are groomed, procured and the owner qualifies the resources they link to as bonified resource links.
Scholarship link building
You may have heard that this method of link building died a long time ago. Then again, people say guest posting is dead too and yet, it remains the most popular of all backlinking tactics. If you’re offering a legitimate scholarship with a theme that compliments your content, a link from a university could be an excellent addition to boost your authority.
A perfect example of a high-quality scholarship link building campaign would be a law firm that offers to pay for a chunk of tuition for a law school student. The offer gets posted on the law school website and links back to the law firm’s website. The links are highly contextual and from a trusted, high authority website.
This type of strategy is perfect to combine with a press release since other local websites would love to pick up the story.
Scholarship link building done in excess no longer works, but when it’s done with the right prospects, it results in valuable links that add to the ranking ability of your website.
Citations and directory link building
Local link building plays a vital role in a local SEO strategy for business websites to establish and confirm NAP details, mainly through citations and directory link building. They can also influence more appearances in localized search results. Directory submissions are essential in providing a link foundation necessary to promote higher local rankings and can also act as a substantial source of referral traffic.
For example, in Canada, Yellow Pages plays a vital role in establishing a new local business website. Once your company is listed in Yellow Pages the information is syndicated across many other local websites.
This image was created in 2018, so things have changed a bit, however it gives you an idea of the way information is distributed and syndicated by public information websites in Canada.
Sponsor or host events
As a sponsor or host of an event, you can acquire some quality backlinks from hosting websites as well as local links from promoting local events.
Websites like Meetup, allow you to create your own group and hold events for anyone interested in attending.
You can also look through existing events and offer to sponsor a meeting in exchange for a link to your website. The details would need to be negotiated with the host, but for the most part, local events incur the cost of the venue and any refreshments that might be offered.
Crowdfunding link building
There are a number of crowdfunding websites that offer link building opportunities. Many of these sites won’t have a lot of domain authority, but you can still find some great links on websites that are getting a lot of traffic.
What’s more, is that if these websites end up receiving the funding they’re looking for they have the potential to explode with authority. Of course, there’s a great deal of speculation that goes into choosing the websites that are right for yours, but you can eliminate the risk by choosing sites that match up well with your content.
There are offers that will allow you to donate an amount of your choice for a link to your site. Some will require a minimum donation. In either case, make sure you’ve selected a website that’s contextually related and relevant to your own.
Paid links
I know, I know… Tsk, tsk right? Paid links are somewhat painted in a light where they are thought of as bad practice, but the truth is there are links you would absolutely pay to have.
First off, the ONLY reason paid links will sabotage your site is if they’re not marked as sponsored or nofollow and the linking site is identified as offering links for money. Apart from the aspect of rank manipulation, there are plenty of websites where you can use paid links to your advantage.
Wouldn’t you pay for a nofollow link on a site that sends you an amazing amount of targeted traffic that has a high chance of converting to clients?
If you’ve found a place where your potential clients are spending time, it doesn’t matter whether the link improves your domain authority because it sends you potential clients!
What makes a quality backlink?
Ideally you want to find backlinks that have a high domain authority. Moz uses this metric as way of measuring the quality of the backlinks that at website has acquired. Ahrefs uses domain rating as their metric. This isn’t the only thing you need to consider.
Look at the content that’s linking to the page. Is there a relationship between the two pieces of content? You’ll get the most impact from a backlink when it’s an editorial backlink (link within the body of an article) and that link has strong contextual relationship with the content it’s linking.
Your next quality assessment is to see the volume of traffic that a website has flowing through it. You want links from websites that have organic traffic from keywords that are related to your business.
The best types of links will send visitors to your site that will engage with your content and be interested in what you have to offer.
Relevance
The relevance linked content has to the linking content is
the number one factor for contributing value. When exploring link opportunities,
an identifiable relationship between the two pages is required to demonstrate
relevance. Does the site offer a quality referral based on the content that
would be linking to yours? Is the site in the same industry or an appropriate
vertical that has the authority to make a quality referral?
Health
The second factor to establish is whether the site is
healthy. There should be a healthy volume of traffic that is flowing through
the site to indicate good search visibility.
If the site is ranking for multiple keywords it indicates that it is providing value to its audience. This also indicates a link from that site will send traffic to benefit your site with like-minded visitors who have an interest in the content you’re providing.
Authority
Lastly, the metrics the site possesses can impact your site. If it is an established authority in your niche and has a high domain authority (or domain rating or trust flow) there will be authority passed on to your domain. With all other things being equal, a link from a high authority domain will improve your site’s ability to rank more than that of a low authority domain.
Links should be viewed as referrals
One of the defining components of Google’s algorithm is the strength of a website’s backlink profile. A strong analogy to this is that links are supposed to serve as referrals from other websites. The whole concept of a link is to share the content of another website because it will enhance the user’s experience, which credits the site being linked.
From this perspective, it’s easy to see how the relationship between two pages plays a major role in determining the quality of a link. If a website operates within the same niche to yours they are most likely publishing similar content, which increases the likelihood of a link from this site being relevant.
After the hummingbird update and every update since Google’s ability to determine the meaning of content has become incredibly accurate and has changed link building forever. The relationship between the two pages is an extremely important part of establishing what determines a quality link. Without a contextual connection, links are meaningless and can even be harmful.
PageRank vs. authority
PageRank is a value that Google assigns to pages that represent the ability to rank. Since Google stopped publishing PageRank we have relied on third-party tools to help assign values based on the link attributes of the page.
Domain authority is a widely accepted term used by Moz that is used to measure the number of linking domains and their quality. In addition to Moz, Ahrefs and Majestic provide popular ways of measuring the ranking attributes of domains, which we commonly refer to as “authority”.
This indicates that no one tool can properly assess what Google uses to determine PageRank and should only be used as a clue in determining the value of a link. Although many people heavily rely on these tools to discover link opportunities, none of these tools represent what Google uses as PageRank. Each tool is merely a measure of how each company has defined the ranking ability a domain possesses.
Responsible linking is an asset to your success
Backlinks are a crucial aspect of creating search visibility
for every website. Quality trumps quantity every time making link building as
much an art as it is a science. Finding ways for websites to link to you with
creative, outside the box thinking can lead to acquiring high-quality links.
Always keep in mind that a large part of link building is public relations. Build relationships with those who will help you the most in your efforts and reciprocate where it’s needed to maintain a mutually beneficial relationship.
Choose the link building strategies that best suits your website
At the end of the day, you need to choose the methods of link building that will get the type of links that mirror the backlink profiles of top-ranking websites.
If you’re a local business and try to build all of your links with guest posts, you won’t rank with the top local business sites. Top local business sites might have a healthy mix of guest posts but the most natural links for a local business will be directory links, review site links and local website links.
Make sure your linking strategy matches the type of website you own.
Keep in mind that every type of link building strategy has the potential to work against you. You’ll need to create links that make sense to users, which in turn makes sense for search engines as well. Create a link building strategy that’s natural to ensure you won’t be penalized for unnatural links.
Although building links has become highly scrutinized it still remains one of the top-ranking factors that search engines use to determine a website’s rank. In order to outrank your competition, use a blend of these proven backlinking strategies for 2020 and beyond.
The quality of your links outweighs the quantity so link responsibly to promote long-lasting success and increased search visibility.
For the best SEO Toronto offers, call us for a consultation. Please share this article with your social netowrk!
Of all the marketing strategies to increase your customer base, there’s no doubt that inbound marketing has a major impact on the number of clients you receive from your website. Maximize the traffic your site receives by continually improving your website’s performance and adding additional sources of traffic.
Optimize for performance
There are hundreds of things to consider when you’re trying
to rank your website. Running a site audit will uncover errors and performance
issues that you can correct to make your site rank higher in the search
results.
The ranking algorithm accounts for hundreds of factors in the overall placement of your website. It’s not just the large and blatant errors that will drag your websites ranking down. If your site errors only account for a small percentage of the performance of your site, correcting a large number of them can move the needle in your site’s ranking.
Improve site speed
The significance of the time it takes to load your pages can
vary across industries. The retail industry is an example where site speed can
play a direct role in the ranking of your website. A faster load time results
in a reduced bounce rate, which on the first page of results is a metric that
Rankbrain measures as a ranking factor.
The recommended time to load a page is around three seconds to get the first meaningful content on your screen. Many industry averages are still nowhere near the three-second mark. This presents an opportunity for a competitive advantage that results in an improvement in ranking.
Duplicate content
Search engines absolutely hate duplicate content. There are
penalties dedicated to reducing ranking for any type of content that is copied
or repeated on your site.
The main concern is plagiarism but because the penalty is algorithmic, any canonical errors will trigger a Panda penalty. If one of your articles is being displayed on more than one of your pages without a canonical tag it will count adversely against your website.
Thin content
The Panda update was initiated to address poor quality content. It targeted sites that had duplicate content, spun content and thin content. If your pages fall under any of those three possibilities, Google has penalized your site through an algorithmic filter and you’re suffering a demotion in the ranking.
It would benefit your site to update poor performing pages with more content to boost traffic. If the pages are not salvageable it would make your website more streamlined to delete them altogether.
Make video a regular part of your content
Over 87% of marketers would agree that using video is one of the marketing strategies to increase your customer base. The use of video increases the length of time visitors spend on your site. Increasing the average time on site is considered a ranking factor because it shows the level of engagement between visitors and your content.
Using video allows you to build a channel, subscribers and generate another stream of traffic from YouTube. Since 2017 video has experienced exponential growth in the number of shares, and the number of YouTube users creating a massive traffic opportunity from the number of searches performed daily.
YouTube is officially the second most popular website in the world, recently surpassing Facebook who formerly held the #2 position. People will search YouTube for product reviews and find out how to learn a skill or accomplish a task. By optimizing your videos on YouTube you drive traffic from a completely separate search engine to supplement your overall monthly traffic.
Capitalize on features being displayed on the first page of results
The emergence of SERP features (search engine results page) has been a controversial occurrence that Google has implemented over the years.
These Google products (ads, local listings, featured snippets, etc.) have steadily chipped away at the available traffic to organic search results by absorbing the available clicks. Your company can increase its customer base by optimizing the appropriate feature.
The features that appear in the SERP entirely depend on the search intent behind the keyword being typed. If a user searches for a product, the SERP feature that appears could be a product carousel of ads, a list of Google Ads, local listings and in most cases a People Also Ask Box. If a user types in an informational query it could trigger a featured snippet, knowledge panel and PAA box.
Companies can benefit from the different streams of traffic from each of these Google features, however, each requires a separate method of SEO to be featured in the top positions.
The featured snippet is a Google product in which your website can compete if it currently ranks within the top 10 results on the first page. By optimizing the HTML for the snippet that exists you can win the snippet position as well as be listed in the organic results. The snippet represents approximately an 8% gain in the volume of traffic your site receives.
The Local Finder is an additional source of traffic that can
provide high converting visitors to your site. The finder will list the
companies that operate within your city and display the company information you
provide in your Google My Business profile.
By optimizing your website for localized search results you
can not only place your business in the organic results but in the local pack
as well. The additional position on the first page of results can make a
significant difference in the quality of leads your company receives.
The PAA boxes are also a good source of additional traffic. To appear in the PAA boxes your content should be optimized to answer questions that are currently being displayed in your keyword search.
Increase your client base
A top position on the first page of organic search results
is definitely the goal for your company. Improve the performance of your site
to continue your upward climb to the top of the first page. No matter how small
the improvements, nothing is too insignificant when every jump in ranking will
increase the traffic your website receives.
Take advantage of every opportunity to implement effective
marketing strategies to increase your customer base and provide more revenue
for your company.
The difference between SEO and PPC is that search engine optimization is used to improve your position in the organic search results to receive unlimited free traffic, whereas PPC is paying Google for a designated spot on the first page and you pay for every click made to your website.
There are so many options to advertise your business online that knowing which way to go about it requires having clearly defined goals in order to develop the best strategy for your company. One major decision your company may be considering is whether to use paid advertisements or invest in search engine optimization.
On one hand, you have a paid version that puts you on the first page of Google immediately. On the other hand, you have a major portion of traffic that heads to the organic results. Which one is the right option for your company?
The organic results are all of the websites listed as Google’s top choices, which they base primarily on a website’s ability to answer search intent. Websites compete with one another trying to earn the highest-ranked position in the organic results.
Investing in SEO improves the quality of your content, website optimization and increases backlinks to improve your website’s ability to rank. The organic results are everything that’s not a paid result or a Google SERP feature (local listings, featured snippet, knowledge panel, etc.)
What are the paid results?
The paid results are usually the first listings in a search result at the top of the page that is labelled “Ad” to the left of the URL. To be placed in this position companies will set up a PPC campaign (pay-per-click) and whenever a user clicks on the listing they pay a fee for a person to visit their site.
How much does PPC cost?
The CPC (cost-per-click) is determined through a bidding
system. Your campaign is set up to pay within a certain range for every click
made to your site. You determine the maximum amount you are willing to pay for
each click.
If the keyword that you’re bidding on is making people
money, the CPC will be driven up higher because people are willing to pay more
for keywords with high commercial value.
It’s not uncommon to see CPC’s of $80 per click in the bail bonds industry due to the nature of the business. For keywords like “fidget spinners,” you could expect something less than a $1 per click.
PPC campaigns can be capped at a monthly limit of your choice. If your budget only allows $1000 a month then you will as many clicks as $1000 affords. If your keywords are $20/click you will only get 50 clicks to your website for the month.
How much does organic traffic cost?
Optimizing for organic search results represents a different approach to generating traffic. The initial cost per visitor starts higher because of the investment required to rank your site.
Let’s assume the average cost of SEO is $1000/month for one keyword and the average time it takes to see results in 6 months.
This means that by each month your cost per visitor start to declines as the volume of your site is increasing.
Advantages of organic traffic
On average, 1 out of 10 blog posts are compounding posts. That means that the older the post gets the more links, the more shares, the more traffic it builds over time. (~Hubspot)
The cost per visitor is constantly being reduced with the increase in traffic
Organic traffic accounts for 60% of desktop searches and 40% of mobile searches so there are more available clicks to your site
33% of people will recognize paid ads and purposely skip over the ads to the organic results.
Ranking your site organically increases your digital footprint within your industry and improves brand recognition
A strong organic presence will influence the frequency of appearances in localized searches.
Higher conversion rates from organic results
People research companies from the organic results
Traffic continues well after you stop SEO services
Advantages of PPC campaigns
Puts your site on the first page immediately
Places your listing at the top of search results
Immune to Google updates
Mobile search results have a growing click-through rate
Mobile has a growing percentage of conversions
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that both strategies to drive traffic are
able to increase the revenue your site produces.
If your strategy demands quick short-term results, a PPC campaign can provide that solution at a higher price than what you would pay for organic traffic.
If you’re interested in making more money in the long term,
organic SEO has the potential to drive higher volumes of traffic at a much
lower price.
For long-lasting results and high volumes of traffic that continues flow to your site even after you stop paying, choose SEO. Invest in the development of your website to appear in the organic results to receive a higher return on your investment.
Featured snippets are Google’s way of delivering what it perceives to be the most accurate response to a search query. Most would consider the featured snippet an improvement in user experience because it directly answers a search query with highlighted information.
Some consider it a negative feature because it provides the information a user wants directly on the result page resulting in a lower click-through rate to your website.
While in any given circumstance, both beliefs are true, the majority of snippets have proven to increase traffic rather than keep it on the SERP.
In 99% of all instances when the featured snippet is triggered in a search result, it appears at the top of the page. Since it appears ahead of the organic results, marketers often refer to the featured snippet as Position Zero.
Recently, Position Zero became the new number one organic listing on the SERP (although it is still referred to as position zero). The old version of snippets allowed a website to win position zero as well as have a position as a blue link in the organic results.
Now, the featured snippet repositions your website position from the organic results with traditional blue links to the top position as an enhanced search result (referred to as a rich result).
What are the advantages of a featured snippet?
Your listing holds the top SERP position
The featured snippet is a coveted position because of its prime location. Your website receives the highest click-through rate and therefore the most traffic from winning the position. This is especially dominant on mobile screens, where the feature takes up most of the screen.
Your search listing becomes and enticing, attractive rich result
What’s more, your website is featured as a rich result. The added markup to displaying your page makes for a more attractive search engine listing. Look at how much more your attention this feature demands compared to the organic blue links.
The featured snippet is considered to brand your website as an expert since Google is featuring you as the top result. This is something that no other feature can do for you regardless if you pay or not.
Organic results are the most trusted in comparison to paid results and so acquiring this position is a major benefit to branding your company as an authority in your niche.
Increased likliehood of being selected for a voice search result
Voice search and featured snippets are linked because the results from voice are often displayed from featured snippets.
In fact, 80% of Google home results are pulled directly from featured snippets. Snippets are considered to be the best answer to a search query, so it makes sense that they would be the first choice in a voice search. The use of structured data also makes it easy for voice assistants to pull information quickly and provide quick and accurate answers.
The different types of snippets
There are four major types of featured snippets that have become regular features on the SERP.
The most common is the paragraph snippet that is seen in approximately 70% of all featured snippets.
The list snippet is the second most common type and accounts for 19.1% of all snippets:
Table snippets account for roughly 6.3%
And videos have slowly been gaining ground, but are still only around 4.6% of all featured snippets.
How do you win position zero?
A function of SEO content writing is to make content “snippable.” It helps to know whether a snippet appears for the keywords you’re targeting. The most common searches that trigger a snippet are searches that begin with can, how, what, who, when, why.
Rather than search manually for every possibility, it’s best to use software to streamline your efforts when researching keywords. When you’re assessing the potential of a keyword you can see what features appear on the SERP and make sure your content is optimized to appear for the question.
Another way to go about identifying opportunities is to search the keywords in which your website holds a position in the top 10 results. You can then toggle the filter to show which of those search terms display a featured snippet on the SERP.
Analyze the current snippet holders content
Although no one has the exact recipe for how Google decides what website to place as the featured snippet, the best practice is to include the major characteristics common among snippet holders.
Secure Socket Layer
It should be a given that your website uses HTTPS. If you haven’t got onboard yet, you’re way behind. Google has made it clear that HTTPS offers a slight ranking advantage over HTTP. Regardless of search engines, consider the fact that users don’t want to visit a website that is marked as “not secure.”
Chrome labels domains not secure whenever the SSL certificate is missing. In order to get to the site, you need to click on the advanced setting, and then click proceed to the website. This definitely plays a role in how users perceive your website and will contribute to higher bounce rates and a decrease in traffic.
Depth of content
The content on your page should have some substance to it. The depth of your content should be adequate enough to pass as authoritative. If you have a flimsy page with 200 words there’s no chance you could cover any topic in depth or detail. The average word count on pages with featured snippets are over 1100 words.
Title tags
Always use headings and subheadings to segment your content and highlight the most important aspects. This provides clarity to the content your page covers and is often used in snippets.
Tag your titles and subtitles in the proper hierarchy and if possible, provide a summary answer to your h1 title tag with the subsequent subheadings (h2-h6). The average number of headings on a page that has won the snippet is 14.
Images
The images that are featured in a snippet are not always taken from the page whose answer is being featured. Using images in your content gives your page context and enhances optimization. Let’s face it, content with more images is considered to provide a better user experience and therefore considered higher quality.
The average snippet holder has 8 images on their page with the alt tags completed.
Duplicate the optimization being used to win the feature
To win the snippet, you’ll need to understand what Google likes about the content that’s already being featured. Here are a few major characteristics that are common among the different types of snippets.
Paragraph snippets
A featured snippet in paragraph form is most commonly found to have between 40-50 words explaining the snippet question.
Tag your snippet question and provide the most detailed, comprehensive summary of the answer immediately following the heading.
Keep in mind that Google will use subtitles to form a paragraph in a featured snippet.
List snippets
Always analyze the snippet holders’ content to see the best way to optimize for the featured snippets. The list snippet can be won by using an ordered list but it can also be displayed as a collection of subtitles from your content.
The best practice is to create lists with 9 or more lines in order to increase the click-through rate to your website. There’s less incentive for a user to click-through to your website if a full list is displayed that answers their intent for the search.
Table snippets
Give your table a title and make sure you phrase the heading using your keyword. Tag the title using h-tags to highlight the questions your table can answer.
Video snippets
Use your snippet question in the title of the video. All YouTube videos are already marked with structured data, however, you should include a transcript of your video in the description. This gives search engines the exact content in the video (which is more than most people provide) creating a competitive ranking advantage.
Increase your traffic with the featured snippet
Featured snippets have become extremely common for answering questions directly on the SERP. Aim to improve the traffic your website receives by winning position zero when your content ranks in the top 10 search results.
The effect of branding your company as an authority combined with the additional traffic will be worth its rewards in new clients and increased revenue.
Want to get your site featured in position zero? Speak to a consultant about including featured snippets in your SEO service package for additional traffic to your website.
Scholarship link building is a widely practiced link strategy to acquire .edu links from schools and universities by offering an outside scholarship to students.
The strategy became extremely popular because of the success that websites were experiencing ranking for competitive terms from the links they received from universities.
Although some of the criteria have changed offering scholarships to schools and universities can be an excellent way to brand your business and acquire powerful links to your website.
What makes a quality backlink?
The best backlinks are those that come from trusted sites from within your niche. That’s it, bottom line. Preferably those sites will have high domain authority.
Domains that have a strong backlink profile will pass on more
authority to your site than that which has a low domain authority.
Before search engines could determine the context of the content, a link from any high authority domain would improve the ranking of your site-no questions asked.
Today search engines are extremely efficient at establishing the relationship between pages that are linked making the relevance of your links a much stronger ranking signal.
Establish link relevance
To illustrate this further let’s use two websites as an example. The first is the iron chef’s blog with a DA of 83 and the second is a local web development company that has a new website with a DA of 23.
If you’re a software developer, the link from the newer company within your niche will count for more than from a cooking blog-no matter how juicy its metrics are. The relevance of the link is the most important aspect of link building.
When a link has no relevance to the content it points to search engines will assign low value, ignore it completely, or devalue your websites domain authority if there is obvious evidence of link manipulation.
Are all links are created equal?
There has been a long-standing assumption that .edu links hold more inherent value than a regular link. This dates back to a time before search engines had the ability to determine context. A .edu link was considered an incredibly powerful link because they are from schools and universities and were typically hard to come by.
John Mueller made a statement that busted the myth that .edu links were better than other top-level domains.
The underlying truth to this misconception of .edu links being higher quality wasn’t just because they were “.edu” but because they were from trusted websites. A link from a .edu was associated with great metrics.
Universities tend to have thousands of links and are high authority domains. Although the domain extension is not the reason, there are massive amounts of high-quality links in the education industry that will provide a competitive advantage because of great metrics.
Use scholarship link building to acquire high-quality backlinks
The strategy is to offer scholarships to universities who in return post your offer on their website with a link to your site. This tactic emerged when companies were able to successfully acquire .edu links for a reasonably cheap price. This tactic is still working to provide a safe and competitive link building strategy when it is from a site that will benefit your own.
The concept is simple. Your company offers a $1000 scholarship to a student. The scholarship is awarded to the winner of a competition for who can write the best essay for a topic in your niche.
How to make a scholarship offer
For example, if you were in the software business, a page would be built on your site specifically detailing your scholarship offer. The offer would be sent to schools that offered tech-related courses to compliment your industry. The offer might read like this:
“Software Tech believes that the best solution to living a good life is through secondary education. We are awarding a $1000 dollar scholarship to the student who writes the best essay for how accounting software is changing the way we do business.”
If a university accepts your offer, it will be listed on your site as an outside resource that provides financial assistance. You get a link from their page to your scholarship offer and your site receives a boost in ranking from a link related to your industry with great metrics.
Keep in mind that before you offer any school this offer, you will need to vet each website. The same rules apply to .edu sites just as they would to any other website that you would consider as a link opportunity.
For example, the number of outbound links that are on a page will affect the link quality. Pages that look like low-quality directories might be under fire and closely scrutinized by search engines so they would need to be avoided.
Scholarship link building is still an effective link building strategy
Finding quality school websites that will agree to a
scholarship offer has become more difficult but there are still many link opportunities
that exist that will add value to your backlink profile.
Scholarship link building can be used as a way to brand your business and create newsworthy information your company can use for press releases, which will provide additional links to your site.
When this strategy is executed according to the best practices, you acquire powerful backlinks that provide a competitive edge in the search results.
Imagine you fell from Google’s good graces. What then? Would your website be doomed to a life of mediocrity or are there alternative traffic sources you could use to bridge the gap?
Luckily for all of us, Google isn’t the only source of traffic for finding streams of interested visitors. It does however account for 86.86% of the global search traffic making it the largest source of traffic available.
Can a business survive without tapping into Google at all?
Although it’s been a top choice as a marketing tool for many years, the momentum YouTube has gained in the last few years has been formidable. YouTube officially passed Facebook and is now the second most popular website in the world, with approximately 2 billion users.
YouTube is no longer just a way to supplement the traffic to your website, it’s now become an entire business model.
Here are a few stats that prove the value of using YouTube for traffic:
96% of people between the ages of 19-24 use YouTube (~Statistica, 2018)
Traditional TV is on the decline down 12% with 18-34 year-olds (~Marketing Charts, 2018)
1.9 Billion logged in users every month (~YouTube, 2019)
During 2017-2018 people have watched over 50000 years of product review videos (~Think with Google, 2018)
Search engines are listing videos more frequently as the best solution to answering search intent. This presents opportunities in driving traffic from both Google search as well as YouTube.
The fact is that YouTube is being used as a search engine for people looking for “how-to” videos and product reviews. For many businesses, this aligns perfectly with building brand recognition and driving traffic with visitors who are already in the buyer’s journey. Tapping into this market to generate more leads is an option that cannot be ignored.
Most shared form of content
As the most shared form of content, videos can generate traffic from YouTube itself as well as be shared on multiple social platforms and websites.
This is a powerful quality for driving traffic and getting your content in front of a larger audience. If someone likes your video and shares it on their Facebook network, you’ve exponentially increased the reach your video has just from one person.
YouTube is a search engine itself
With over 2 billion users on YouTube, there is already plenty of traffic on-site that you can take advantage of. People go directly to YouTube to learn more about a brand, watch a product review or even just to learn how to do something.
The fact that there are fewer videos than web pages also makes ranking on YouTube considerably easier for a lot of keywords. You can optimize for non-competitive phrases and begin ranking for those terms in less than 24 hours.
How many words is a video worth?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? The truth is many people prefer video to any other content type. There’s more descriptive value, brand recognition and users can digest a lot of information with less effort than reading.
Gen X and the Millennial generation have traditionally leaned towards watching videos as a personal preference. This should be enough for publishers to reconsider their marketing strategy when videos will continue to play a larger role in driving traffic and conversions.
#2-Influencer marketing
An influencer is a person who has the power to influence a large audience to make a purchase decision. By simply reviewing a product provides a company with added exposure to drive traffic. A mention on a video or social media post can lead thousands of curious followers to flock to a website. With power like this, influencers have become a viable option as a source of traffic and conversions.
To illustrate the power of influencers the royal family serves as a perfect example. When Prince William and Kate Middleton presented their baby to the public for the first time, the baby was wearing a swaddling blanket from Aden and Anais.
Neither Prince William nor Kate had any monetary motivation and didn’t mention the blanket and yet Aden and Annais went from 14k searches to 70k searches within a month. The increase in traffic was so sudden that it crashed their servers on several occasions.
The one event with their product on a major influencer has made millions of dollars for the company Aden and Anais.
How to get mentioned by an influencer
For the most part, influencer marketing requires money in the budget to pay for a post or mention. Generally, the bigger the influencer, the more money they ask for since they have more people in their network.
Take a look at Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s followers sitting at 204 million. One mention from him could send your sales through the roof, however, it probably costs quite a lot to get your product in his hands and in front of his audience.
Approach micro-influencers
A more cost-effective strategy is to approach micro-influencers in your niche. A micro-influencer has around 10-15K followers and is a lot more accessible than a celebrity or major influencer. They also cost a lot less than those with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers.
Mention influencers in your content
It’s not always feasible to pay influencers for a mention but if you’re smart about your posts and strategically include them in your content, you’re more likely to get mentioned.
For example, Jetish Patil was able to get a mention on Twitter by simply quoting Robbie Richards and then tagging him in the tweet. Robbie happened to notice it and retweet his quote to his audience. Bam! Now he’s in front of Robbie Richards massive social network.
Measure the impact influencers have on your traffic
It’s important to have a way to measure and track the success of influencer marketing. It’s hard to know whether your success is directly coming from the influencer’s network without having a system in place for measuring results.
One way where you can save money on the cost and measure direct results is to pay Instagram influencers to publish a story on your company or product. An Instagram story only lasts 24 hours but if people swipe up they are taken directly to your website.
This approach can give you an excellent idea of the success of your campaign since it only runs 24 hours. Any additional traffic and conversions that you receive during that time can largely be accredited to the impact of your influencer.
#3-Guest post with a Personal Influencer Network (P.I.N.)
Guest blogging can land you some high-quality links on high traffic websites. This strategy alone is ideal for generating referral traffic when your content is being featured on websites that generate large volumes of traffic.
Combine guest posting with a team of partners to multiply your guest posting efforts and generate more traffic than if you were doing it all yourself.
The simplest approach is to reach out to the authors that have already been published on top sites in your niche. You want to make sure they’re publishing quality work on websites that have a good readership and are writing about topics directly related to your business.
The deal is to provide a mention for a mention. Keep track of the links you’re giving and receiving on a shared Google spreadsheet so you can monitor how much weight everyone is pulling in comparison to yourself.
With five people in your network, every article you publish is worth 6 links. The link you include on your guest post and the five links that are coming back to you because you linked to your partners’ websites.
Not everyone will hold their weight so when you find partners who are active and do keep up their side of the bargain-take care of them. A good team is hard to find.
#4-Paid ads & retargeting
It’s not the cheapest source of traffic, but using paid ads with retargeting can be a powerful way to drive converting visitors to your website. You don’t need to use Google Adwords, when you have other options such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and even other search engines to choose from.
Paid advertising is a way to instantly get your website in front of an audience in a top position. You will pay to get the traffic to your site, but if you’ve managed your campaigns widely, there is still money to be made from these programs.
Cut costs and increase conversion with retargeting
Use a retargeting pixel to reduce the cost per click and increase your conversions. If you select this strategy in your campaign setup, you can get your ad to appear in front of anyone who visits your site a set number of times.
It takes an average of 7-12 points of contact to get a person comfortable enough to purchase from you without knowing who you are. Retargeting allows you to hit these numbers by uploading a cookie into your visitors’ browser whenever they visit your website.
If someone shows interest by clicking on an ad and visiting your site, your ad will continue to appear whenever they search to continue to remind them of your brand.
This form of marketing is proven to reduce the cost per click in your PPC campaigns and increase the number of conversions.
#5-Provide expert solutions on forums and discussion groups
Although Google has become somewhat of a knowledge centre, there are still many forums that attract visitors who are looking for niche-specific answers based on other people’s experiences. Be the expert who answers people’s questions and drop links to your site strategically to further explain topics that your site already answers.
Quora
Considering that over 300 million people use Quora every month, it stands to be that you can find a considerable number of questions to answer to brand your business and drive referral traffic.
Look for questions that are already followed by at least 15 people so there is an audience for your response.
People who follow questions receive an email whenever a new response comes in. If your answer is upvoted it moves up ahead of other responses.
If it has the most votes, it’s featured at the top of the list of responses that have been submitted by other users.
Drop your links strategically, which is whenever it makes sense to link to additional content for reference. Avoid directly promoting a product within your answer. You risk being banned if your responses are overly promotional.
Reddit
At 430 million users a month, Reddit has a lower number of users than Google or YouTube, however, it still represents a large traffic opportunity if you play the game right. Build an audience for your content by joining niche groups and sharing quality information about your expertise.
Take note, that Reddit is known to be stricter than Quora or other sites about self-promotional content. It isn’t uncommon to be kicked out of a group or banned for linking to your website to promote products or services.
Be a contributor when you’re participating in discussions. Establish yourself as such by commenting and contributing to discussions before posting any links to your site. People will be skeptical if you’re new to a group and come in with your guns blazing, posting links to your website left, right and centre.
When you do post links, make sure they’re relevant to the discussion and provide value to those involved. As a valued Reddit contributor your input will be granted an audience and you can pick and choose the moments where it’s appropriate to post a link to your website.
Facebook groups
This also falls under the same guidelines as posting in forums and discussion groups. Join industry-related groups to discuss niche-specific content and promote your business along with other members’ content.
Aim to join smaller groups that don’t hit the million mark with the number of members. This way you have an easier time getting noticed. When there are too many members in a niche-group, your posts tend to be drowned out by the millions of other posts, making it hard to build any traction.
#6-Comment on new articles on high-authority websites
Every niche has an established list of top websites that are well known in the industry and drive a lot of traffic. Whenever a new article is published there are thousands of people that read the article within the first few weeks. Be the first person to read and comment on the article to drive referral traffic to your website.
Be the first to comment
If you’re among the first to leave a comment, you’re in the best position possible to be seen by the most visitors who finish reading the article.
When you comment, make sure you leave a response that is insightful or provokes thought. You want to grab the attention of those reading or at the very least make an impression on their minds so they click-through to your website.
Attach a link to your website from your name
Most websites that have the option to comment on articles will allow you to attach a link to your website to your name. If people like what you’ve posted they’ll end up clicking on your name and landing on your website.
As the first comment on a high traffic website, you divert a small percentage of the thousands of visitors reading the article to your website for the life of the article.
#7-Get listed in relevant, high-quality directories
Every industry operates differently than others and in the same respect, people will search differently. A high-quality niche directory provides users with niche-specific businesses that have been qualified and vetted as legitimate businesses. This gives users more confidence in choosing a business from their directory.
An excellent example of this is Clutch.co that vets companies they list on their directory. Not only do they make sure you’re a legitimate business, but they call your clients (with your permission) to obtain an original and legitimate review of your services and products.
Apart from high-quality directories, there are major directories that people use (even if it’s from old habits) like Yellow Pages. It wasn’t too long ago that Yellow Pages was handing out those huge yellow books to homes and businesses for people to find each other.
That’s ancient history now, but many will automatically search for a local business using yellow pages because they are so well known.
City directories and major directories all represent streams of referral traffic that can be used to direct visitors to your website. The following is a visualized ecosystem of how information was shared across the internet in Canada.
#8 Alternate search engines
With so much emphasis on Google, the other search engines are so easily forgotten. Google dominates the global search engine market, but there are still pockets of opportunities that exist.
Bing, for example, owns more than 10% of the desktop search traffic in the American search engine market and 9% of the Canadian.
Yahoo! Is the third largest search engine but consider that even companies that DuckDuckGo have a very small share in terms of the global market, 1% of billions of searches are still millions of searches being made every day and is worth the attention.
#9-Social media networks
There’s already been discussion about YouTube and influencer marketing but we haven’t touched on the topic of being your influencer on social media. There are so many social media users that you have several options to choose from that are more appropriately suited to your niche.
It’s obvious that Facebook offers the largest number of users, but there should be more focus on what type of social website your ideal client is using. If you’re selling high-ticket items or are a B2B service provider, LinkedIn is a good match for finding an audience that is more suited to what you offer.
Whenever your products are image-based, retail items, Instagram and Pinterest are undoubtedly among the most powerful websites to attract high converting visitors.
People like to interact with their favourite brands. They remain more loyal and are more likely to purchase from your company once they’re following you.
Choose 1 to 3 social media websites at most to build a presence where you can interact with users regularly.
Posting content once a week isn’t good enough. To successfully build a loyal and interested audience you need to comment, respond and share relevant content with your network.
#10-Email marketing
How could we end a list without including email marketing. This is one of the oldest forms of online marketing and yet it is still among one of the most effective.
Did you know that the average conversion rate from an email list is 3%, while paid ads are somewhere around 0.9%? This means that if you’re getting people to opt into your email campaign, you’re collecting a group of people with more interest in your content than the average person who clicks on a paid ad.
As an alternate source of traffic, you are in complete control over when you send people to your website. Even if Google blew up, with a big enough list you would still be able to get people reading your content and buying your products.
An email list is the perfect Google-proof solution to maintaining high volumes of traffic as well as increasing the sales and revenue you generate regularly.
There are more sources of traffic than just Google
As you can see, there are a lot of different options when it comes to driving traffic. Google owns the lion’s share of searches, but it doesn’t mean you can’t operate a business with a full-time income through alternate sources of traffic.
The way people search and interact with brands online has evolved dramatically over the years and will continue to do so. Make sure you have your hands in a few different cookie jars to maximize the traffic your website receives regularly.
Although alternative traffic sources exist, it’s nice to have the best of all worlds and keep your website in Google’s good graces.
The key performance indicators found in the reports from your SEO consultant should be assessed for how visitors are responding to your site.
The information your site generates can be used to determine whether you’re on track in achieving specific campaign goals as well as indicate its strengths and weaknesses in achieving specific goals.
Google Analytics is a commonly used tool to track the performance data of your website. An analytics report will indicate where your website is falling short and how you can improve in those areas.
Sources of traffic
The traffic your site generates comes from multiple channels, which are separated, into paid, organic, social media and referral traffic. When assessing the traffic your site is receiving it’s important to understand how each channel performs individually to evaluate the effectiveness of each source.
Monthly search volume
When you’re engaged in SEO you should be aware of the traffic your site is generating. Are you getting the monthly traffic from the right channels? Is your monthly search volume declining or rising each month? Is this in line with the expected results of your SEO campaign?
Keep in mind that if your campaign targets low volume keywords that convert higher than it would be expected to have a lower search volume. In this case, the volume isn’t a KPI in your campaign, and you would want to see improvement from your engagement statistics.
Average time spent on page
The time a user spends on your page can be a good indication of their level of interest. If the overall time of your average user is increasing, this is a sign your visitors are spending more time engaging with your content.
The longer you can keep a visitor on your site, the more
likely you are to convert them to a client. This is why the average time spent
on a page, or dwell time is statistic your SEO consultant will try to improve.
Average pages viewed per session
A higher value indicates that your visitors like what they
are finding on your site. If they are exploring page after page, your content
is obviously on track in providing user intent.
When there are fewer pages viewed per session this could
mean your internal linking strategy and navigation needs improvement. Connect
your pages with links to related content to see an improvement in this metric.
Make your content accessible and easy to find starting on
your homepage. If your visitor has topic options to choose from they are more
likely to explore more pages on your site.
Conversions
Conversions are the goals you set up that you want visitors
to accomplish on your website. The conversions you set up in Analytics can be
anything from calling your business, filling out a contact form, subscribing to
a newsletter, downloading upgraded content or making a purchase.
Your conversion rates give you insight into the flow of your
content and how you funnel your visitors. Are you gently urging users towards
your goals? Are you using an effective call to action for completing those
conversions?
You can see where your users are exiting your website to
make changes to pages that are not effective in guiding or converting your
visitors to achieve your on-site goals.
New users vs. returning visitors
This is a useful metric to know whether your campaign efforts are reaching new users and driving traffic that will help to grow your business. Growth through new clients and more sales is the end goal, which means your site; needs to be attracting new users in order to contribute to the bottom line.
Bounce rate
When a user lands on your site and backs out, this increases your bounce rate. Analytics will measure the bounce rate based on whether a user clicks on any other pages on your site.
Although this indicator can show how well your site is being
matched with your traffic, it won’t indicate whether you are providing exactly
what the user needs-making there no reason for them to click further.
The lower your bounce rate, the better indication of higher levels of engagement. Keep your bounce rate under 50% and you’re in the average bracket for most websites. Here is an infographic from Crazy Egg showing the average bounce rate by industry.
Search Console
The statistics in your search console will vary from your
Analytics account. Here you can find stats and information that can provide you
with more insight on how your website is performing.
Impressions vs. clicks
It’s important to know how many times your website is being displayed for specific queries. In the search console, you can see what keywords your site is being displayed for as well as how many clicks it’s receiving.
Understand your key performance indicators
In order to know how your website is progressing, you need an awareness of what it is doing now. Get familiar with the key performance indicators that apply to your campaign goals. Take the next step to increase the size of your business with our SEO services.
Every small business needs SEO as part of its growth strategy. The search results are much too competitive to avoid search engine optimization completely and there’s way too much money to be made from an optimized website for SEO to be ignored. The truth is small business SEO is a complete game-changer if your website hasn’t been optimized to appear for important keywords to your business.
The opportunity exists in many industries where many small businesses haven’t taken the time or spent any resources on improving the optimization of their website. If your business is in one of these niches, a little goes a long way. Capitalize on the traffic opportunities Google provides where other businesses have not yet taken the initiative.
The reason these opportunities exist is that many small business owners either don’t have the time to optimize their site themselves or they don’t have the resources (not in the budget). What many small business owners don’t understand (or don’t believe) is that small business SEO leads to massive gains in your yearly income.
How can you afford NOT to optimize your website?!
This guide covers the basics of small business SEO. If you’re competing locally or target keywords in a moderately competitive search environment, this guide will teach you how to improve the search visibility of your website. The improved rankings, enhanced optimization ultimately generates more leads and traffic on a regular basis.
Are your pages indexed?
One of the first things you’re going to check is whether the pages on your website are indexed. You’d be surprised at the number of things that could happen that lead to a company’s website being removed from Google’s index. You’ll want to eliminate that possibility before doing any work on your site.
If your pages aren’t indexed, you won’t show up anywhere on Google. Use the site search operator to tell Google to list the pages of your website by entering the following in the search box:
Site:[your domain.com]
This command will look for and list every page on your domain that Google has indexed.
It’s a bad sign if your homepage doesn’t appear at the top of the search results.
It’s even worse if none of your pages show up!
In the event your pages aren’t being listed, you’ll need to dig further to find out what exactly is happening with your website.
Google’s Search Console
If you haven’t signed up for the search console, you should do that immediately by clicking here. The search console is your way of looking into most of the issues that go wrong with your website. The search console can provide you with unique insights regarding the inner workings of your site.
There is a tab on the left menu that specifically shows you how many pages your website has on Google’s index. This tab also shows you how many pages have errors that need attention.
Check for manual actions
If your pages are not indexed one of the first areas you should check is the manual actions tab. This is probably the worst thing that could happen to your website since it means Google has issued a penalty for violating its Webmaster guidelines.
Most penalties are based on exposing specific types of ranking manipulation. If your website has accumulated too many unnatural links it’s cause for google to cite you with a manual action penalty. Manual actions will in almost every case result in the removal of your website from Google’s index.
If you don’t have any manual actions, you’re going to need to check your website for any mistakes that could have been made.
Check your general settings from WordPress
WordPress has a setting you can find under Settings, Reading, where there’s a radial button you can select that tells search engines to ignore your website. If it has been selected, none of your pages will be indexed. Make sure the setting is unchecked.
The last place you’ll need to check is your robot.txt file. This is a file on your site that instructs search engines which pages to ignore. If there is a command on this file that shouldn’t be there, your pages may not be indexed.
If your pages are indexed, let’s move on to the next part of optimizing your website.
Technical performance
It’s important to get an overview of the technical performance of your website. Use SEMRush, Ahrefs or Moz to scan your site for any issues that could be affecting your overall ranking such as page speed and missing pages.
Missing pages (404 errors codes)
Too many errors on your website is never a good thing. Missing pages contribute to a poor user experience. When a user clicks on a link and is taken to missing pages it can be frustrating and lead to them completely abandon your site altogether.
You can discover the missing pages on your site that are generating a 404 code by running a site audit using a number of different tools. Here’s an example of a SEMRush report on the overall site health of a website.
You can discover the missing pages on your site that are generating a 404 code by running a site audit using a number of different tools. Here’s an example of a SEMRush report on the overall site health of a website.
The report will list the missing pages on your site so you can correct the problem. The options you have for fixing the issue is to either:
A) Redirect the old URL to another page with similar content
B) Republish a page with the same URL.
C) Change the links that are pointing to the deleted page (could be internal or external)
Check for slow page speed
Slow page speed is bad for business. It was declared an official ranking factor by Google itself back in 2013 and apart from that can repel visitors from your site if your page takes too long to load (known as the bounce rate).
Slow page speed is bad for business. It was declared an official ranking factor by Google itself back in 2013 and apart from that can repel visitors from your site if your page takes too long to load (known as the bounce rate).
You have a variety of tools to choose from to test your page speed such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, GT Metrix.
Enter your URL in any one of these tools and get a page speed score. Each one of these tools also provides you with a report that will detail the reasons your page is loading in the time that it is.
Enter your URL in any one of these tools and get a page speed score. Each one of these tools also provides you with a report that will detail the reasons your page is loading in the time that it is.
Identify, assess and prioritize keywords
Choosing the keywords your website targets is an important part of strategizing the traffic your website generates. The keywords you select impact the quality of traffic your website receives, so it’s important to make sure that you have a good grasp of the terms that represent the most value.
Brainstorm your top search terms
List the major services, products or topics of your website. These will represent the major pillars that are essentially the most important aspects of your business. Break down each topic with a list of keywords that contribute to providing an accurate description of the topic.
There are dozens of tools to use where you can generate relevant search terms. Eventually, you’ll need to assess the metrics of each keyword to choose search terms that have an appropriate volume of monthly searches and are not overly competitive.
By establishing your major keywords early on in your website development you can incorporate those terms in the metadata of your pages from the start. Going back to correct these types of issues after publishing your pages can cost you time, resources and search visibility.
Identifying the best keywords for your site in a topical manner establishes a direction for your blog content. Publish related articles that contribute to a better understanding of your major keyword topics, the stronger your website becomes in this area.
Establish search intent
In order to publish content that ranks for a keyword, you need to know exactly what users are looking for when they use that keyword in a search. Enter your keyword in Google and survey the 10 organic results. Make sure they are websites similar to your own and you’re offering a better version to what’s on the first page of results.
Assign value
Qualify your keyword selection by assigning commercial value to each search term. Use the cost-per-click value as an indication of commercial value. If there are. a lot of publishers bidding on this keyword, it drives the price up. A high CPC value indicates people are making money on the traffic from your keyword.
Check for a minimum volume of monthly searches
If your keyword gets zero searches a month-what’s the point of ranking for it?! Choose keywords that have enough volume to drive traffic that converts. Remember that the total search volume doesn’t mean your website will receive it all. You may be looking at getting a small percentage of that traffic since it gets divided amongst the SERP features and 9 other websites competing for your keyword.
Filter out high competition keywords
Part of the keyword selection process is to recognize the terms that will take too long to rank for on the first page of results. Highly competitive terms are usually dominated by high authority websites. If you don’t own a high authority website, or your domain authority is dwarfed by the competition, avoid that keyword.
Consider keyword variations or long-tail keywords as alternative solutions where you can capitalize on traffic in a shorter and less labour intensive period of time.
Long-tail keywords
Create a short term goal and a long term goal for every page that points to your pillar page by targeting long-tail keywords. Over 50% of all search terms are more than four words. By creating a longer search term you will reduce the competition that’s optimized for the key phrase. Adding more descriptive terms to your keyword will drive more targeted traffic to your site.
Create long-tail keywords by forming a question using your seed keyword. This will set the stage to optimize for featured snippets, PAA boxes (People Also Ask) and voice search. Over 80% of Google home results are displayed from featured snippets.
Ask your question in every form of “who, what, where, when, why and how.” You can make your own list or seek the assistance of Answer The Public. By typing in your keyword on the dashboard of this site it will return a list of questions using who, what, where, when, why and how.
Additionally, Answer The Public will also produce reports on
what words are most often combined with your keyword, what phrases are most
typed and offers this info in as a visual display or in list format. You can
export all of the results generated but keep in mind you have a daily limit for
how many reports you can generate.
Local keywords
If you’re a local business, choosing your keywords can be fairly simple for appearing in localized searches. Most businesses optimize for their service (or product) + city or vice versa.
If you’re a plumber in Toronto your top keywords are going to be plumber Toronto and Toronto plumber.
Where you can accelerate the traffic your website generates is to break down your major keywords into as many subtopics as possible to create more traffic opportunities.
Identify additional search terms that your clients are searching as a way to expand your reach and get more people on your website. Some of the top plumbing terms that plumbers in Toronto would consider are:
Emergency plumber in Toronto
Cheap Toronto plumber
Plumbing company Toronto
Plumbing services Toronto
Map out content that satisfies the search intent for each of your major search terms. Use a combination of blog posts and service pages, to come up with the keyword strategy that drives local traffic at each stage of the buyer journey.
Content creation
Every page you publish on your site should have a specific purpose. As a small business, you should be using content to move your visitors closer to making a purchase. This process is otherwise known as the marketing funnel which lists the stages of the buyer journey.
Marketing funnel/buyer journey
The buyer journey or marketing funnel concept suggests that people go through a series of stages before actually making a purchase. Create content to address each stage of this journey to equip your website with the ability to satisfy multiple search intents.
No matter what stage of the journey a visitor is on when they land on your site, you can guide users further along in their journey and get them closer to making a purchase.
The decision stage
Visitors in the decision stage know exactly what they’re searching for and are ready to make a purchase. These users are considered to be at the bottom of the funnel and have likely searched Google using brand searches, product descriptions, service searches, etc.
These keywords are transactional in nature and your service pages should target these phrases since users are looking to buy what they need.
The consideration stage
The consideration phase is where users may know what they need, but they’re comparing the products and services from different companies. They’re exploring their options by researching the advantages and disadvantages offered between competitors.
Content that addresses this stage can be case studies, independent research, reviews and any type of content that convince a user to purchase a product or service.
The awareness stage
At this stage, users are searching for information, however, they may or may not know what the solution is to their problem, or what their problem even is. Content that targets the awareness stage is basic explanations of products and services or solutions to common problems.
For example, someone who has psoriasis may be searching the symptoms they’re having, not really knowing how their condition can be solved.
If your website offers skin hydrating solutions, then publishing an article about the symptoms of psoriasis and how it is treated would be ideal for making people aware of your product.
Not only do they become educated about their condition, but they learn how your product is a solution for it as well.
This concept of building awareness is how many websites are able to grow your business. It allows you to target a much broader audience than would never find your website without being made aware of what their problems are and how they are solved.
How to create content that outranks the competition
Search engines aim to display the best answer to search intent. If your page is not one of the 10 best pages to answer the users’ intent of the search, you’re not going to drive any traffic from that keyword. To create content that outranks the competition, publish versions of content that are superior to anything that ranks on the first page. This is where SEO content writing is extremely advantageous.
Satisfy search intent
Scanning the first page of results is a practice that will reveal similar characteristics in the content that’s being published. Check for a dominant type of content that ranks highly to determine what will give you the best chance of ranking on the first page.
Go through each page to assess the topics that are covered. By scanning the headings you should get a good idea of the topics that have been highlighted. It will be important that your page addresses everything the top-ranking pages cover, and more.
You can add more value to your content by extracting clues that hint at search intent from the SERP features that are present. Use questions from the PAA box to expand on your content. If Google has these questions listed in the box, it’s a way of suggesting that they are relevant questions related to your keyword.
If specific types of multimedia appear on the SERP, be sure to incorporate these forms of multimedia within your content.
The idea behind answering search intent is that you provide the best response to the keyword search by demonstrating your page has the ability to cover the most important aspects of the keyword topic.
Implement the skyscraper technique with 10X content
The skyscraper technique and 10X content refer to the same concept of publishing a page that is better than what ranks in every way. Aim to be more detailed, cover more topics, add more multimedia and provide a better user experience than the competing pages.
Optimize your pages
At the most fundamental level of on-page optimization, your page needs to be optimized to appear for the keywords you target in the organic search results. You can also optimize your pages to drive more traffic from additional features and positions in the SERP.
Basic on-page optimization
The metadata is the information the search engines will receive first. Place your keyword within the H1 tag on your page to tell search engines it’s one of the most important descriptive words for your content.
The title that’s framed in H1 tags is what shows up on the search engine result page. If you’re using a CMS then it’s more than likely your page title is automatically tagged for you. WordPress handles this for you.
The URL is also a major descriptive element of the content on your page. It’s important to keep your URL short and descriptive. Your keyword alone will often be the perfect solution to an optimized URL.
Avoid auto-generated URLs that make no sense to users or search engines. Even using dates and times is problematic if you ever want to update content. Plus they don’t help with optimizing your page for your keyword.
Use your keyword in your meta description to attract users. The meta description is not specifically used by search engines for determining optimization, but it can influence whether a user clicks on your page from the SERP.
Incorporate your keyword and its variations within the alt tags of your images. Search engines put the most emphasis on how to categorize your images by what’s written in the alt tags.
The filename and captions are also additional hints for optimization so make use of them as well with descriptive keywords and synonyms.
Structured data markup
Implement structured data markup whenever the opportunity presents itself. This form of metadata is invisible to users but is useful for search engines. The added markup makes information more readily available and provides additional context to your page.
Rich results are also attainable with structured data markup. If you can enhance your search result listing with a rich result, you can increase the traffic your site receives from higher click-through rates.
Enhanced search results capture more attention from users who are scanning the results. The increased click-through rates ultimately can lead to an improved position on the SERP since it happens to be a metric measured and monitored by Rankbrain, (Google’s AI program for determining website ranking).
Optimize for SERP features
Google will display different SERP features depending on the keyword used in a search. For instance, if you add near me at the end of a search, Google recognizes you’re looking for a local business and will display the local finder.
Optimize for the features that appear on the SERP to give your content more ways to drive traffic from keyword related searches.
Featured snippets give your business an advantage over other search results by being the first item at the top of the page as well as the fact that it’s an enhanced search result.
Appearing in a featured snippet contributes to branding your company as an expert in addition to driving the most traffic from the keyword search.
PAA boxes are also another feature in which you can optimize your content and drive additional traffic to your website. Answer the questions you find in the PAA box by keeping your answers short and direct.
Link building for small business owners
It needs to be made very clear that backlinks can and do play a very important role in providing your content with credibility, authority and overall ranking ability. Although it may not be extremely necessary to engage in advanced link building tactics, you can implement basic tactics that can result in some high-quality links to your website.
A quality backlink is one that comes from a website within your niche, industry or a close vertical to it. You want the link to represent a vote of credibility for your content. In other words, it’s like getting other companies to vouch for you.
Link relevance is the most important aspect of how much positive impact a link has on your website.
The second aspect of a quality backlink is that the website who links to you also has quality backlinks. Search engines will assess the credibility and authority of every website that links to you-which are done by checking their backlinks.
The higher the authority in your niche, the more impact the link has on your website. Therefore if you want to acquire the best backlinks possible for your website, look for the most trusted names in your niche/industry with the most domain authority.
Find client/vendor links
Considering that relevance is the most relevant factor, one of the first places you should look for a link is from your vendors and clients. Their websites don’t get much more relevant than that.
Many companies have published pages in which they link to their clients and vendors and list them as resources or useful links. You can also find these types of pages on your vendors’ websites that would be published as stocklists or pages titled “where to buy.”
You can search your client websites by using the following search operators on Google:
Site:yourclient.com + inurl:”links”
Site:yourclient.com + intitle:”resources”
Site:yourclient.com + intitle:”links”
Site:yourclient.com + inurl: “resources”
Search your vendors’ website by using the following searches:
Site:yourvendor.com + intitle: “stocklists”
Site:yourvendor.com + intitle:“where to buy”
Site:yourvendor.com + inurl:“stocklists”
Site:yourvendor.com + inurl:“where to buy”
You may have noticed that the commands can be mixed to tell Google to look into either the URL or title.
Your first tier of links should always reflect credible sources that have some sort of authority in your niche/industry.
Look on both your clients and vendor’s websites to find relevant link opportunities from those who are the most likely to give you the link.
Whether your business has a physical location or not, you should definitely be listed in Google’s local finder. The local pack is often triggered in searches for products and services if local businesses are optimized for those keywords. Optimize for local SEO to drive high-converting traffic with less competition.
Approximately 45% of searches are made to obtain information on a local business. Capitalize on the traffic this feature can provide by signing up for Google My Business.
Once you’ve registered, you will need to verify your listing by postcard.
Use your home address if you’re a service area business. If you’re a partner in a business, use the person address that is closest to the centre of the city you’re optimizing for.
You’ll get the most impressions when you’re business address in the most densely populated areas.
Use every opportunity to enter your information into the fields that Google My Business offers.
Enter your address (if you service a large area and do not have a brick and mortar address you should leave the address field blank)
Upload images.
Add your logo.
Post content on Google posts.
Answer questions on the knowledge panel.
Include the most appropriate categories.
Google will extract that information when a local search is made in your area. You want to have as many reasons as possible to be listed in the top ranking positions of a keyword related search.
Encourage reviews
Reviews are a ranking factor that will contribute to where
your company is displayed in the local finder. The more five star reviews your
company receives the more likely you are to appear in the local pack (top three
sites listed on the first page of search results).
Detailed, keyword-rich reviews will go a much longer way than short reviews. Encourage your customers to talk about their experience with your company to get the most of reviews as a ranking signal.
Extend your reach through social media
There is no denying the power of networking through social media. The goal of your company is to get as many people on your website as possible. Post your content and be engaged in sharing people’s content, and commenting as much as possible to continue building a following.
Choose one or two sites that you will be engaged in making your presence felt. This doesn’t mean to limit the number of profiles you create- it helps you to be more consistent in commenting and responding to comments and questions.
Include as much video as possible when posting to your networks. Video gets the most shares and produces the highest levels of engagement. People prefer to watch a video than read a long block of text.
Share other members posts to show support and encourage them to share your content as well. Leave a call to action on all of your posts as well as links to your website.
A large social network can create a surge in the traffic your site receives when you share high-quality content. The more people that are on your site create more opportunities for people to link to your site and improve your ranking. Entire businesses are made from the traffic social media provides so maintain a constant presence a continuous effort to build a network that becomes a valuable asset.
Increase revenue with SEO for small businesses
Search engine optimization is undoubtedly the most powerful inbound marketing strategy you can implement for your business. Google provides the largest source of high converting traffic that you can receive on a regular basis.
Incorporate SEO into your growth strategy. Whether it means making room for it in your own busy schedule or making room for it in your marketing budget, the ROI you receive is well worth the effort.
Our company specializes in small business SEO services and will cover everything mentioned in this guide and more. To get started with a website audit, contact us for a free consultation.
