December 2020

5 SEO Tactics To Use During Quarantine

With the world going crazy with COVID-19 there have been many restrictions that have affected the way we live dramatically. Many businesses have been hit hard, while some are thriving because they’re positioned correctly for online sales and/or sell popular products people are buying curbside. No matter what industry your business competes in, here are five SEO tactics to implement during this economic quarantine.

Sharpen up your local SEO strategy

Whether you’re a small business or not, local SEO is a pretty big factor for increasing revenue during the quarantine. Many people are working remotely from home and are more inclined to be looking for solutions that are closer to them.

State any changes in policy & daily operations

Update your Google My Business profile to reflect any new policies you might have on how your business is running. There’s a section specifically for COVID-19 updates you can find within your dashboard under posts.

Many people are concerned about their safety and the safety of their families. Publish a message that directly addresses what your business is doing to ensure the safety of your customers is being taken seriously.

Update your hours

It sounds simple, but many businesses forget to keep their hours updated to reflect the changes they’ve made since COVID-19 became a serious threat. There’s nothing more frustrating than showing up to a business that said it was open online but is closed when you get there.

It’s bad branding for your business to have inaccurate information posted online. It’s fairly simple to change from your dashboard, so make sure you’ve taken the time to let people know what hours you’re operating.

Make use of the Q & A section

Are people asking many of the same questions about your business? You don’t need to wait for someone to post a question on your profile, you can take the initiative and do it yourself.

After you ask the question you can write the response directly following which will appear on the knowledge card whenever your business is searched on Google.

Make use of this feature to make more information more accessible as well as promote user engagement. When people see questions being answered it encourages them to ask questions as well. 

Although it’s not a major ranking factor, it’s still a positive signal that search engines take into account.

Target new streams of website visitors

When things are slow it’s the perfect time to target new keywords. You may need to completely revamp the way you attract new clients, or perhaps you can just add another stream of traffic to your monthly search volume.

After the first wave of COVID-19 many businesses in the service industry had to quickly rethink their strategy. In-person meetings were no longer an option, which meant finding a way to continue online.

Gyms, for example, began offering online fitness classes in order to maintain a percentage of their clients.

Coaches and tutors have been forced to shift to online classes as well.

The movement is now shifting to a virtual environment. Make sure your keyword strategy reflects the shift in demand. Whether it’s online services or contactless delivery, your website needs to be optimized to reflect the changes that have become essential for survival.

Publish more content, more frequently

There are more people searching for Google during the pandemic than ever before. People have more time on their hands plus they’re being forced to find online solutions to minimize the risk of being exposed to COVID-19.

Publish more content to support the depth of your keyword topics. More information that you can provide on your products, services and the topics that surround them, the more expertise your website builds in your niche.

Plan your content topically

If you haven’t already, break down your main keyword topic into smaller subtopics. Make sure these subtopics are something that people would want to read or are solutions to commonly asked questions.

Provide detailed solutions to demonstrate more ability to answer any question a user may have on a keyword related topic.

The more content your build around important keyword topics the more your website can be considered an expert resource in your niche.

This builds authority and ranking ability around the major core topic from which your business benefits the most.

Form clustered content

The subtopics that are related to each other should be interlinked as much as possible. An internal link from one article to another allows users to navigate through your content and learn more about the topic they’re interested in.

When each article within the clustered content links to the core topic, it forms a pillar page for your main keyword theme. A large number of internal links highlight the importance of the keyword theme to your site and raises the ranking ability of every page within your topic cluster.

Publish for the freshness factor

Google loves fresh content. When there’s new content being published on your site you create positive ranking signals.

In a time when people are online now more than ever, create as much content around your main keyword themes as possible to give people more reason to visit your website.

Address technical website errors

Improve the functionality of your website piece by piece by tackling some of the technical errors that inevitably crop up throughout its lifetime. Even if you’re not super tech-savvy you can still get rid of some of the major errors like broken links or even work on improving page speed.

Start by checking Google Search Console for errors that are appearing on your pages by clicking on the Core Web Vitals tab.

Anything that needs attention will be reported in more detail by clicking “open report” and then clicking on the detail line with the type of error.

If you’re error-free, go over to page speed insights and enter your URL.

Page speed is a constant maintenance issue so you’ll need to check periodically how your pages are doing with load time (major page speed issues will be reported in the search console).

The faster your page loads, the more visitors you keep on your website and it’s not a one and done type of deal. Constant vigilance needs to be maintained in order for your pages to get under the recommended speed of two seconds.

Work on compressing images on your site before you upload them to your content. If your page is slow on specific pages that have images, consider replacing the images for smaller, compressed versions. 

Use Google’s free online tool called Squoosh to compress images to sizes up to 99% smaller than the original.

This tool also resizes images to your specifications which is perfect for reducing server response time if your images are not scaled to fit in the space you need them for.

Guest author on a popular website

Promote your company and get more people to your website by applying to be a guest author on a popular website. There are dozens of high traffic blogs in your niche guaranteed to help you improve the traffic you receive on our website.

As a guest author, you’re able to brand your business and generate more awareness of your company. Your article should be an example of the expertise you have in your field and inspire interested readers to click through to your website.

Use the triple P process for guest posting: prospect, pitch & publish. There are important aspects you need to be aware of within each of these steps in order to make the most of being a guest author.

Prospect

Guest posting sites can easily be found with a quick Google search. You can type in “[your keyword] guest posting websites” to get pages with lists of candidates.

You need to find websites with a minimum authority of 30 DA to qualify as decent prospects to publish content. Higher domain authority will have a greater impact on improving the domain authority of your website.

You can use the Mozbar extension for your browser to filter out websites that are lower than 30 DA.

Make sure you’re going to be able to link to your content within the body of the article. If they only allow nofollow links then make sure the website gets enough traffic to be worth it. 

Enter the URL on SEMRush to see the keywords that drive organic traffic for the website.

You can find details on the writing requirements by reading the Contributor Guidelines. Be sure to read this before writing your article to avoid any surprises in what’s required, allowed and disallowed. 

Many websites are different so it’s important to read this for every website you’re writing an article for. This will save you time from making a mistake or writing an article for nothing because it gets rejected for not following the guidelines.

Pitch

When you approach a website with a pitch you want to do all of the following:

• Introduce yourself
• Pitch a catchy title idea for an article
• Provide a short outline
• Supply a few links to other content you’ve published
• List a few additional title options

Publish

When you publish your article on another website make sure it’s at the level of quality where you can say you’re putting your best foot forward. You’re representing your company and brand so make your content the highest quality possible.

Link to relevant content on your site where it makes sense. Send readers to content assets on your site that will engage visitors and encourage them to click-through to more pages on your site.

SEO strategies take time

Stay consistent with your efforts. Remember that SEO is a strategy that’s most effective in the long run. Follow these five SEO tactics for some quick wins and long term gains.

Most content you publish today doesn’t provide a return for a few months. It takes time to be indexed and gain momentum with ranking and traffic. With more and more people staying indoors, take advantage of the additional search volume.

Capitalize on the opportunities here and strengthen your online presence in a time when it counts the most. For more information read about Toronto SEO services that enhance your online presence.

How To Pick A Good SEO Company For Your Business

Choosing an SEO company for your business is not a decision to be taken lightly. When you work with an SEO expert, you’re usually in for the long haul, so you want to be sure that they’re not just a good SEO agency but that they’re the right SEO firm for you. Learn how to pick a good SEO company to maximize your results in developing your website.

The SEO industry has grown dramatically in the last few years. Companies are realizing how much money there is to be made from being in a position to be found by people searching on Google for the products and services they offer. The industry is estimated to have grown to almost 80 billion in spending.

This has translated to floods of people becoming “SEO professionals” in an attempt to get a piece of that 80 billion dollar pie. This wouldn’t be an issue if every SEO agency and SEO expert were able to do a great job for your business.

The problem faced is not just knowing how to pick a good SEO company, but how to choose an SEO company that’s right for your business.

Here are a few ways to get you on the right track for choosing from the SEO providers you’re considering hiring.

Find a business like yours that can refer you

Most SEO companies acquire new clients because the clients were referred. This accounts for about 45% of the new business an SEO company generates.

Considering the number of self-proclaimed “SEO professionals” in the business, it puts your mind at ease by having someone vouch for a company that you’re about to invest a considerable amount of money in.

Referrals from family and friends of the company or employees of the company will need further investigation. Don’t just blindly jump into an SEO company because your buddy’s friend works there.

It’s a good start, but you need to dig deeper into the company before making any decisions.

Getting a referral from an existing client of the company would be the best-case situation. You can hear from them first hand what the SEO Company has done for their business and get an idea of what to expect.

Read the reviews on your prospective SEO agency

The service industry is littered with companies that don’t treat their customers right and those that provide the best customer experience. Reading through the reviews of a prospective SEO company is a start for getting some insight into the credibility of the business.

Most people will immediately read any reviews that suggest a terrible experience. This is probably the best place to start because you may want to move on if there are too many of these.

Read the five-star reviews as well to get a sense of what the company is about and whether customers are talking about similar situations you want to find yourself in. There may be a lot of dentists that have reviewed a company that suggests they specialize in that niche.

If you’re a dentist, it’s probably a great fit for you. It’s probably a great fit if you’re a physiotherapist or any type of doctor since the company has experience working with businesses like yours.

Scan objective lists and recommendations on credible websites

Find objective opinions by reading the reviews on different platforms. The first obvious reviews are those on Google. Rather than solely rely on Google reviews, visit Clutch.co to see more reviews on SEO companies from legitimate businesses.

Clutch is a directory for digital marketing companies that conducts interviews with the clients of these companies. The reviews you read on Clutch.io have been written by the Clutch employees based on the interview they have with the clients.

Other sources of reliable lists can be on websites that don’t accept payment to be on the lists. The source is only credible when they aren’t being paid to tell people that the SEO firms on their list do a good job with their clients. 

Interview your top choices

After searching for an SEO service provider, you should easily be able to come up with a list of three to five prospective companies. You won’t know exactly what each company has to offer without speaking to them first. 

Of course, some have their programs and pricing listed on their website, but the truth is every website has a unique set of needs and may not require the same type of service.

To be sure you’re getting someone who understands your business and knows how to generate more income from your website, you need to speak to an SEO consultant.

Make sure the lines of communication are open

Even if you’re not familiar with SEO terminology, you should be able to understand what your SEO company is proposing for your business. If the SEO expert you’re talking to is worth their salt, they should be able to explain the answers to your questions in a way that makes sense.

It may not be important to every business owner, but for those who like to be kept up to speed, your SEO consultant will need to report to you and communicate what’s happening with your site. If there are some communication issues or it’s a cultural mismatch you may want to reconsider going into business with this person since SEO is all about the long game.

If you feel frustrated after talking to an SEO it’s a bad sign that you’re not getting the answers you’re looking to hear. Make sure you’re able to communicate freely and you’re comfortable with entering a business arrangement that will most likely be a minimum of 6-9 months (if not as an on-going service).

Questions to ask your SEO consultant

You can qualify your SEO agent by asking questions that show whether they’re on the right track with their business and whether they can help yours. Here are a few suggestions to ask your SEO expert during your consultation meetings.

What KPIs would you use to benchmark performance?

Ask your SEO which key performance indicators they’ll use to benchmark your progress. The answer they provide should include the values that will make a difference in the revenue your website generates.

Does your business rely on more subscriptions? Then you need to know whether your SEO is going to increase the number of unique visitors and track goal conversions.

Do you use your website to generate more leads from phone calls? Your SEO should be talking about installing a call tracker or setting up conversion goals on your site that count how many visitors press the click to call button.

Rankings and traffic on their own are not an indication of success. True success is being able to get your content in front of the right audience and inspiring them to complete the desired action that results in increased revenue.

Ultimately, increased revenue is every business’s goal. Find out how your SEO can benchmark performance and measure the progress of your SEO campaigns.

What is your process and how will it help my business?

Any upstanding SEO company will not have a problem explaining to you how they intend to develop your website. The process for implementing SEO tactics is not proprietary or a heavily guarded secret. 

Search engine optimization is a combination of many different tactics and strategies to increase the search visibility of your business. Most strategies are well-known across every legitimate SEO company and it should be an easy conversation that follows the question.

The proposal that your consultant provides should make sense to you and match your business goals. If the search engine optimization professional you’re talking to you can’t disclose a method for how they intend to make you more money, time to move on.

Ask about the areas they excel in with their clients

Most SEO companies are capable of performing most aspects of SEO but you want to find out whether your prospect is a specialist in a specific area of SEO. The perfect match for your company is one that specializes in the exact services you need.

Some companies are extremely good at SEM and PPC campaigns. 

Some companies don’t offer that service at all. 

If paid ads are a big part of your strategy, you’re going to want a company that can fine-tune your campaigns to get the highest conversion rates at the lowest price per click.

Alternatively, may find a company that specializes heavily in content and can effectively target and generate organic traffic. The content writers in this SEO firm may produce better results with content than any other firm.

If your company needs more branding and exposure across a large audience, finding a company that specializes in SEO content creation and marketing is your best bet.

Finding the right fit for your business means more money for your company in the long run.

What’s your method for reporting?

Ask your SEO how they intend to report the progress of your SEO services. Are they using tools that will provide you with clear data as evidence of the status of your website? Do they set aside the time to explain any questions you have about the data you’re being presented with every month?

The SEO consultant you hire can be considered an extension of your in-house team. Make sure that you’re able to agree on seamless integration of how data is reported that fits into your decision-making process.

Can I speak to one of your clients as a reference?

If you’re dealing with a successful SEO company that’s capable of helping your business, they should have no problem referring you to a happy client. If a consultant says no they may have something to hide and you’re going to want to move on to the next option.

Common mistakes when choosing an SEO company

It’s easy to make the mistake of trusting the wrong information when deciding on an SEO company. The following are a few common mistakes that you can avoid to make more informed decisions.

Avoid “best SEO lists”

There are a lot of companies that build directory sites specifically for selling SEO companies a spot as the “best SEO company in [city]” Avoid making decisions based on these types of sites.

The motivation for these websites is not to help you find “the best SEO company” but to make money from the SEO companies who need more clients. 

It’s not to say the SEO firms listed won’t be credible, but you should still go through your due diligence in qualifying the SEO company for your business.

Avoid mass email marketing

Be skeptical of the “SEO professional” that’s cold emailing you to tell you about your website. These emails are sent out to thousands of people and businesses and are not sent by credible companies.

In many cases, these emails are sent by lead generation businesses who sell your contact information to companies that are looking for new clients. 

If you want to get a good SEO company to work on your site, do your homework.

If it’s too good to be true it probably isn’t true

Anyone offering SEO services for a few hundred bucks a month is not going to do the same type of work as real, qualified SEO. The average costs for SEO services range between  $750-$2000/month.

Anyone who offers to do your SEO for anything less than $500 is more than likely very risky services and can end up doing more harm than good to your website. Google penalizes websites with unnatural linking patterns, over-optimized content and anchors text backlinks-and that’s just the beginning of the things that can go wrong.

If you let someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing you may end up paying more to recover your site by a real SEO, or need to start over if your website sustains too much damage.

Location

The location of your SEO company shouldn’t be the only deciding factor that you’re using to make your decision. Although you may like the idea of an SEO company being local, it’s not a requirement to get the best service for your website.

If one of your competitors is hiring a talented SEO agency in another city to handle their website, why would you settle for a company just because they’re closer? At the end of the day, you want someone who understands your business and can deliver on their services.

You can circumvent problems with distance by holding virtual meetings, phone conferences and the occasional in-person visit. It’s not necessary to meet every month anyway so if your SEO firm happens to be close to your business it’s a bonus.

Ranking alone doesn’t tell you the whole story

Just because a website ranks number 1 or doesn’t rank at all isn’t an indication of the quality of work they do as SEO providers.

You can look at it from both ends of the scope. If a company doesn’t have any clients, they spend all of their efforts on their ranking on Google. It’s not that it doesn’t count for some credibility but it doesn’t necessarily make them the best choice for your company.

Many of the best SEO companies constantly have clients referred to them. They don’t need to invest time in ranking their website for “best SEO Toronto” because they have long-standing relationships with their clients, a high retention rate and are more than likely struggling with an overloaded schedule.

Choose the best SEO firm that’s right for you

It’s not easy to know exactly which SEO agency will be the best fit for your business but you can increase the odds of success by following the advice in this article. Learn how to choose a good SEO company and get on the right track for dominating your competition in the search results.

Is SEO Dead For Small Businesses In 2021?

While it may seem a ridiculous question to some, there are some aspects of SEO that have died. For those who practice out-dated tactics, SEO is dead. If your skillset is limited to SEO strategies that are short-lived and ineffective, then it would make sense why someone might think SEO is a dying practice. However, for those who implement white hat tactics, it’s a ridiculous question. For a reliable SEO company, SEO is still very much alive and more important now than ever.

Why do people ask “Is SEO dead?!” It could be because a widespread SEO tactic was exposed by Google and has become ineffective after an update. Many of the Google updates literally turned the SEO world upside down. So when a popular tactic stops working people start sounding the alarms and making all kinds of noise.

The reality is that Google has vigilantly made an effort to eliminate any type of tactics that could be used to manipulate ranking. Updates to the algorithm aren’t just an attack on SEOs but an attempt to produce the best search results for users. 

And so far it’s working.

The search engines have steadily reduced the amount of low-quality pages that surface near the top of the search results. Even if they do manage to make it to the first page, their stay is short-lived if it’s apparent that users are not engaging with the content.

SEO is not dead.

It remains an important catalyst for growth. Millions of businesses depend on website traffic to survive and grow. Ranking for keywords without strategy or optimization is like trying to win a race blindfolded. You need to know the direction you’re headed, what you’re up against and what strategies and tactics that will get you there.

Here are a few major changes to the algorithm that most likely account for the bee in the bonnet of those who claim SEO is dead.

Keyword stuffing

One of the most common practices that were put to rest was the art of keyword stuffing. The truth is there was no real art to it at all. The trick was to repeat your keyword throughout your content as an attempt to trick search engines into ranking your page highly for that keyword.

That meant that no matter how bad your text read and regardless of whether it even made sense, you could get away with a ranking if you had your keyword repeated enough times.

This practice evolved into attempting to manage specific ratios of your target keyword. Over-optimization became a thing and many SEO’s maintained a 1-3% keyword density to maximize on-page optimization. 

Finally, this practice has also become obsolete since search engines no longer rank solely on keywords but rather by keyword topics. If you repeat your keyword an unnatural amount of times you may be priming yourself for an algorithmic filter penalty. Over-optimization will cost your website search visibility.

Link building tactics

The links that point to your page make up one of the largest ranking factors that search engines take into account when they display a website in the search results. They provide ranking ability, credibility and authority. As a result, there have been multiple link building practices that became popular, only to become obsolete after Google became wise to the tactic.

(Related reading: 17 Effective Backlinking Strategies)

As stated in the Google best practices for web development, it is against the rules to manipulate links for ranking.

Every link building method you implement, should look as natural as possible and be from websites related to your business. The filters Google has put into place are designed to identify and penalize websites that are engaging in the following practices.

PBN link building

A PBN link is a link from a website that has been created solely to pass on PageRank (authority metrics or more loosely known as “link juice”). There were two major types of PBN links that have been exposed and devalued.

The first to go down in flames was the big networks of websites that were built to sell links. The digital footprint was easy to trace. Google was able to identify websites that were involved and penalize every website that was linked to the network.

Many companies who had built hundreds of websites and sold links were deindexed overnight. Websites who had acquired a lot of their backlinks from PBN sites were also penalized and forced to rebuild their backlink profile, or start a new website from scratch (if the damage was too heavy).

PBNs part Deux

This update spawned a new generation of PBN sites where SEOs were much careful at covering the digital footprint. Rather than linking PBN sites together, you could build a single website and send your website a money link from the home page.

The process involved buying an expired domain that already had backlinks and good authority metrics. 

Domains were registered under different names, email addresses and built on different servers and hosting accounts. 

The content was in many cases considered “thin content” and Google had another field day targeting websites that had one or a few pages of content with links from the homepage. It doesn’t take much to spot a PBN website and once again, many people suffered the consequences of a link manipulation penalty.

PBNs are still used today, but the number of resources that go into hiding them makes them much less effective to produce at scale. You have to build and develop a legitimate website to avoid being penalized and when it’s all said and done, you still risk a penalty. 

PBNs are considered a black hat SEO tactic.

Guest comment link building

Another popular method of link building that has been devalued was linking from the guest comments section on blogs and articles. Several companies developed automated software that allowed the user to target thousands of websites and leave spun content messages with a link back to their site.

Google devalued this form of link building and what’s more, penalizes any form of link building that looks unnatural. When your website acquires 10k links overnight it’s enough to raise a red flag and put your site on Google’s radar.

Link building in mass quantity

Before the algorithm filters and more advanced systems for identifying quality backlinks, the general rule was that the more links you built, the higher you ranked. If you had the most links, no matter where they came from, you could rank on the first page of Google.

Search engines can determine context and put more emphasis on quality backlinks over the number of backlinks. 

If the links pointing to your website are not from relevant and contextually related websites, they are ignored. Too many unrelated links may also work against your search visibility.

Welcome to an evolved way of search engine optimization

Today, quality websites that have top-notch content are what’s moving the needle the most. Search engines are assessing websites using hundreds of factors that affect how to display their top results. 

It’s fair to say that over the years, the quality of content that appears in the search results has gone in the right direction and improved dramatically. Having said that, this also proves how much search engine optimization plays a role in driving traffic, leads and revenue. 

The number of users and total searches performed daily are higher than they’ve ever been. And the trend seems to continue.

To capitalize on the growing dependency on search engines like Google, you have to make your website easy to find for keywords that affect your business. Here are a few reasons why SEO is NOT dead and what tactics are working to drive real results.

Targeting keyword themes

A major shift in the way search engines rank was when they stopped ranking based on keywords alone and started ranking according to keyword topics. 

This has been an evolution that includes many different updates that allow search engines to understand more about what users want and how to answer that intent. 

Topic clusters have emerged as a way to establish a website’s ability to cover an entire topic with authority. The emergence of topic clusters has contributed not only to top rankings for a keyword topic but also hundreds of other keywords that come with creating a strong presence in a specific topic.

A topic cluster is a collection of related articles and blog posts that are linked together internally. The internal links provide the user with a way to navigate to additional content that provides more information on the topic of interest.

This structure not only provides a better user experience (as seen in the rise in user engagement statistics) but also raises the level of expertise a website demonstrates in a specific topic.

The most infamous implementation of a topic cluster is the use of a pillar page model that incorporates clustered content. The pillar page provides broad sweeping coverage of an entire topic. 

Rather than going too deep into detail on any particular subtopic, the pillar page will link out to blog posts and articles that provide more in-depth coverage.

Every page in the cluster links to the pillar page as well as the content within its cluster. 

This internal linking strategy raises the profile of your pillar page within your website and communicates the major keyword topics to search engines and users. Whether a user lands on a pillar page or one of the cluster content articles, they can navigate throughout the topic learning more about it as they go. 

This is extremely helpful to users at all stages of the buyer journey.

And what’s good for users is good for search engines. 

Topic clusters can make your website known for a specific keyword topic so that pages in your cluster appear for keyword related searches. The internal linking strategy and strategic content lead to higher click-through rates, longer dwell time and reduced bounce rates.

These are all major indications of popular websites that users are enjoying. And what’s good for users, is good for search engines.

Optimize for search intent

Underlying every first-page ranking is the ability to satisfy search intent. Your content needs to match the true intent a user has when they type in a specific keyword. If visitors land on your page and then immediately back out, it’s obvious they aren’t liking what they’re finding. 

The assumption would then be that you’re not providing them with everything they need and as a result, your ranking will suffer. 

Search intent has been a concept from the beginning of the internet. After all, the idea is to supply what searchers are asking for by matching the right content to the keyword.

Since there are fewer ways to game the algorithm and more ways to measure user engagement, it has made the issue of user intent/search intent vastly more important. If you’re truly looking to achieve long-lasting results by staying on the first page, you have to provide the exact solution to the true intent of the search.

So much of Google’s efforts are to provide the most accurate information in the easiest way possible. We’ve seen this through the variety of SERP features that have developed over the years. 

Giving users exactly what they need to satisfy their search ensures your website stays on the first page of search results.

SERP marketing

The features that appear on the first page of results have become numerous and frequent in appearance. You no longer see a few ads and a list of 10 blue links on the first page of results. Here is what it used to look like: 

Today we can expect to see featured snippets, PAA boxes, local packs, images and videos in addition to the organic search listings. Here is the SERP for the keyword french press:

It’s important to optimize for SERP features whenever the opportunity presents itself. For the first time, less than 50% of the total clicks made on Google are going to websites. 

Google has developed ways of answering intent that has eliminated the need to click on websites and therefore resulted in zero-click searches.

There are many searches where you don’t see an organic search result without scrolling way down the page. Although this translates to less organic click-through rates, it also means you need to adapt to the trend and optimize the features that appear.

Position zero

The number one position used to be the goal, but today the real prize has become position zero. The featured snippet is an enhanced search result that is most often positioned as the first feature on a search engine result page.

Being featured in this box is an excellent source of traffic, branding and increased click-through rates. Winning position zero makes your website look like an expert in your field and attracts the most attention as it is used to directly answer search intent.

Related questions

The related questions box (or People Also Ask box) is another way to drive more traffic to your website from a different position on the SERP. Adding questions that people commonly ask to your content is a way of creating more relevance to your keywords as well.

When your website appears for one question, it also appears for several variations of that question. Similarly to how pages rank, Google will display your website as the solution to questions with the same intent.

Local pack

The local pack is another Google feature that needs to be considered if it appears when searches are made for your keywords. The advantage of appearing in the local pack is that you can attract more local clients who convert at a higher rate.

The local pack is another Google feature that needs to be considered if it appears when searches are made for your keywords. The advantage of appearing in the local pack is that you can attract more local clients who convert at a higher rate.

The local pack means you’re in the top three positions of the local finder. Many users will use this feature when they need to buy something relatively soon. 

If you offer products and services to local traffic, develop a local SEO strategy to appear at the top of the local finder, and therefore the first page of Google.

Many companies depend on local businesses to survive which makes this feature crucial for maximizing growth and new client acquisition.

Video is on the rise

As a form of content, video is on the rise in popularity and should be incorporated into your digital marketing strategy. So many people will search YouTube itself to find answers, which creates an additional stream of traffic. Many of these videos will show up in a Google search as well because they are the best answer to search intent.

If you’re seeing videos show up in the SERP, it’s an indication that people are clicking on them for answers, which will generate more traffic to your site. The advantage of publishing a video is that they are generally less competitive to rank than a webpage since they are much fewer videos than websites.

Rich results

The first page of results is getting crowded. With more features to contend with, getting your organic listing to stand out as a rich result can mean the difference in winning the click.

Rich results are much more attractive search result listings because there are additional features added to make them stand out. Different types of content qualify for different types of markup.

One of the more recent types to be released was the FAQ markup that allows websites to display a series of frequently asked questions underneath their search results listing.

One of the more recent types to be released was the FAQ markup that allows websites to display a series of frequently asked questions underneath their search results listing.

This feature improves the click-through rate of your website by attracting more attention as well as pushing your competitors further down the page. You can even add links to pages within your answers to promote more pages directly from the SERP.

More popular forms of rich results include recipe and review snippets.

This SEO tactic is an advanced method of improving the traffic to your site by creating a more competitive, more attractive search result.

The importance of user engagement

Search engines have always rewarded user-centric websites. Publish your content with users in mind since it’s the only way to ensure your pages appear on the first page of search results. There are so many ways to enhance the optimization of your page and improve the user experience and ranking at the same time.

There are multiple metrics for measuring the level of user engagement a web page demonstrates. Google’s Rankbrain is an AI program that is specifically designed to measure the user engagement statistics that websites generate.

For example, each position in the top ten results has an expected percentage of clicks it should receive. If your website receives more than the expected amount of clicks it produces a positive ranking signal and maybe moved ahead of a website that’s receiving lower than the expected amount of clicks.

Search engines will also monitor the length of time a visitor stays on a website compared to the other sites ranking for the same keyword. If users love the content on a website, they tend to spend more time and click through to more pages.

On the flip side, it would only make sense that a user who doesn’t enjoy the content on a website will be quick to back out and spend less time and view fewer pages.

Monitoring, maintaining and improving these statistics are becoming a larger factor in the position your website holds on the SERP.

SEO will never die

The SEO industry is growing at a rapid pace. The industry has grown to 70 billion in just a short period.

Companies are investing a significantly larger portion of their marketing budgets into search engine optimization because it produces one of the best returns on investment.

If your competitors are ranking ahead of you with inferior content or products, they’re stealing new client opportunities. SEO gives your business the competitive edge that’s needed to generate more traffic, leads, new clients and revenue.

That’s just not going to change anytime soon.

Long live SEO.

How To Perform An SEO Competition Analysis

One of the biggest components of search engine optimization is being able to perform an SEO competition analysis. It is a necessary evil of SEO that must exist in order to identify what it takes to rank in the top positions.

Analyzing your competitor’s can reveal an incredible amount of information about what is being used to rank highly. Search intent is a major point to tackle when it comes to providing content that ranks highly. If you can identify what it is and how it is being answered you have a major ranking factor taken care of.

Part of that process is also identifying the keywords and backlinks that your competition is using to fuel a top ranking in the SERPs.

This article details the various tools, strategies and steps in an SEO competition analysis that are used to uncover information about the websites that are ranking for your target search terms. 

Perform a SERP Analysis

When you want to rank for a specific keyword one of the first things you want to do is get an idea of the competitive landscape. Your competition in the real world may not be an exact reflection of who you’re competing with online.

SEO can be an area that some companies pursue more aggressively than others. It’s possible there are major competitors in your industry that could have a location on the same block as you and yet they’re not ranking for the same keywords.

The flipside of the coin is that there may be companies you haven’t heard of that are on the first page of Google for important keywords to your business.

The point is that you need to look at the search engine results page for important search phrases to get an idea of who you’re competing against.

Assess the authority of your competition

The authority of a website refers to the level of trust, credibility and overall ranking ability it has in your industry. When a website has a lot of backlinks pointing to its domain, it will have high domain authority. You’ll need to compare the authority of the domains that rank in the top 10 positions to your own domain authority for every SEO competition analysis you perform.

What is domain authority?

Domain authority refers to a website’s ability to rank based on the number of links it has acquired from credible websites. It’s important to understand that Google uses what’s called PageRank to assign a value to a page based on its ability to rank.

Although no one knows for sure how PageRank is determined, we know that a good deal of it is based on the quantity and quality of the backlinks pointing to the page.

Google’s patent states that the popularity of a website can be determined by how much it is being shared on the web by other websites. The number of backlinks from related websites speaks to the credibility of the content.

Therefore, links from websites that have accumulated a large number of backlinks from other websites with high volumes of backlinks (authority websites) will have the most impact on a website’s authority rating (or PageRank) and ranking ability.

How do you measure domain authority?

Google stopped publicly displaying PageRank in 2016 in an effort to reduce page sculpting tactics and rank manipulation. In the absence of PageRank, companies like Moz, Ahrefs and Majestic developed their own system for assigning authority.

Moz: Domain Authority and Page Authority (DA and PA)

Ahrefs: Domain Rating and URL rating (DR and UR)

Majestic: Trust Flow and Citation Flow (TF and CF)

Although none of these units of measurement is the exact formula Google uses to determine PageRank, they provide a gauge for determining the authority of a site. Each authority rating is based on the quality and quantity of the linking websites. Whichever form of measurement you use it’s wise to keep it consistance in an SEO competition analysis.

What’s the difference between domain authority and page authority?

Domain authority refers to the strength of the domain as a whole. It’s a measure of the total backlinks that are pointing to all of its pages.

Page authority refers to the strength of a page only. Page authority is derived from the backlinks that are pointing to it as well as the inherent authority passed on from the domain.

The advantage of high domain authority is its ability to rank. As a result, its pages will inherit a minimum amount of authority when they are published which means because of the authority the domain carries, the pages will not need as many backlinks (if any at all) to rank for a keyword it’s targeting.

Related reading: How to Make Your Site Appear First On Google

For example, brand new websites start with a DA of 1 (using Moz system of measuring domain authority). When it first publishes a page, it will need to acquire backlinks to compete with a website that has a DA of 50 since it’s newly published pages mostly likely start with a page authority with a DA between 20 or 30.

Websites with high domain authority rank for more keywords mainly because they have more backlinks.

Tools to compare domain authority

One of the most convenient ways to compare domain authority directly from the results page is to use a plugin that gives you a quick summary of the pages on the SERP. Each of the major analytic tool companies offers their own version but Mozbar seems to be among the most popular because they offer a free version that gives you the DA, PA and number of backlinks, which is exactly what you need to start your comparisons for your SEO competition analysis.

Use plugins for a high-level SERP assessment

Here is an example of how the SERP looks when using the Mozbar.

You can immediately get an idea of the domain authority, page authority and the number of backlinks for each website in the top 10 results. Of course, this is at a high level to give you an idea of whether you should look deeper into detail.

Ahrefs also provides a toolbar with more capabilities; however, you need to subscribe to their service to get the features.

If the websites on the SERP are comparable to your own, you can look at the top five domains individually to come to a greater understanding of what types of links are being used to rank the page. 

Backlink Analysis

Whenever you’re assessing a competitor’s backlink profile, you should take note of the referring domains, the types of links and the domain authority of the linking sites. You’re looking for possible opportunities to get these links yourself, while also trying to establish a strategy for your own link building campaign.

Referring domains

The number of referring domains is an important metric in your SEO competition analysis because it paints a clearer picture of the strength of the domain. In the situation where two domains have the same number of backlinks, the one that has more referring domains is going to have more authority (depending on the quality of the links of course). The website with less referring domains means they received multiple backlinks from one site in particular, which wouldn’t be as strong an indication of the popularity of the website.

Gauge the number of backlinks needed in your link building campaign

This aspect is important to note when assessing your competitors link profile. If there are a high number of referring domains, you’re going to need to build a prospect list that yields comparable numbers. Surpassing the number of referring domains can put your website out in front of the ranking.

Find likely linkers

Another aspect of comparing referring domains to the total number of backlinks is determining who are the websites most likely to link to your content. When there is a high number of backlinks compared to referring domains, it means there are websites linking more than once to your competition.

You may be able to reach out to websites that are linking multiple times to your competitor’s pages since you share the same topics. If they are enjoying your competitors’ content you can look up the pages that they’ve linked to and use the skyscraper method to publish something similar but better.

You would then reach out to the likely linkers and them about your improved version of content and ask them to give you a link.

Identify low-quality links

Although you never aim to use low-quality websites in your link building campaign it’s important to identify them during an SEO competition analysis to uncover opportunities. If you find that a page is ranking from a lot of low-quality links, you may be able to outrank it with just a few quality links.

Reverse engineering how your competition is maintaining their top ranking provides insight into how you strategize your SEO campaign.

Content gap analysis by keywords

One of the best ways to identify relevant content to rank a page is to find the keywords that a competing page ranks for that you don’t. In order for a page to rank for a keyword, it has to have content that satisfies the intent of the search.

 When you find unique keywords a competing page ranks for and you don’t it’s an opportunity to optimize for that term to improve your page’s ability to satisfy search intent. The additional content will not only add another keyword to rank for but create more relevance for your initial target keyword.

Traffic analysis

The traffic a website receives determines the success of generating leads and revenue. You can learn a lot about how a company generates revenue by analyzing both their organic and paid traffic.

Organic traffic

Organic traffic mainly comes from content that ranks, as well as direct searches for a business. Run a report on the non-branded terms that a website ranks for to see whether there are new opportunities for your website to rank.

You can run a keyword gap analysis on the top 5 domains you compete with in order to streamline this process. Most major analytic tools offer this option. Here’s a screenshot from SEMRush on their version.

Paid traffic

Here you will find some of the highest converting terms that you may not find from a regular keyword report. Look to see what keywords are in your competition’s paid traffic report because they are obviously making money on those keywords if they’re paying for every click to their website.

You may want to create a landing page optimized to target these terms as they’re usually transactional terms that users are typing into search engines. 

Sales script

One of the things to look out for is the way your competition is writing ads. If an ad is successful in attracting a high number of clicks, it most likely has wording that’s working to attract users’ attention. Promote a higher click-through rate by using similar phrases to generate a higher CTR.

Identify and duplicate content type

It’s advisable to follow the most predominant type of content that ranks on the first page of the search results. Remember that search engines place a high priority on a website’s ability to answer search intent. If there is a popular content type that populates the first page, it’s because search engines are favouring that format.

For example, if 5 of the top 10 results are list-styled forms of content, you would improve your page’s chance of ranking if you followed suit. If you search the term “How to drive traffic to your website” you would see that 8/10 pages are numbered lists. 

If you wanted to rank for this keyword, you would have the best chance at ranking by writing a list-style piece of content, like 33 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website.

Similarly, if you’re seeing guides or in-depth pieces of content being published, it’s a clue to the level of detail you need to commit to your content.

It’s next to impossible to rank a 300-word article when every page on the top 10 is over 3000. There’s obviously content being covered in a long-form article that would be impossible to cover in a few paragraphs.

Exceed the standard of quality set by an SEO competitive analysis

If you’re not familiar with 10X content, it basically is content that is 10 times better than anything else on the SERP. Aim to produce 10X content in every aspect of your website’s development to destroy your competition.

A strong analysis of your competition provides insight into how to overtake their positions. Follow the step outlined and you’re well on your way to enjoying the success top rankings bring to your business.

If you don’t have time and want to know how we would do it, give us a call or email us for a proposal. We provide a thorough competitive analysis as part of our SEO services for each of our clients.

How To Find & Fix 404 Error Codes

The technical performance of your website is one of the many moving parts that play a role in search engine optimization. An error-free website that functions on a high level is a strong characteristic shared among top-ranking websites. At some point in time, every website will show a page not found 404-error code. This article will show you how to find and fix 404 error codes. 

What is a 404 error code?

Whenever a link points to a URL whose page does not exist, a 404 error code is generated. The result is usually a page that tells the user that the content no longer exists or cannot be found.

404s are generated from one of three reasons:

1. The page was deleted
2. The page was updated or moved to a new URL
3. The page does not exist

What is the significance of a broken link/missing page on your website?

Like most things in search engine optimization, the main underlying issues are related to user experience and authority.

Reduced user experience

Developing a website that is user friendly and provides an enjoyable user experience should be a priority for publishers and site owners to ensure your site demonstrates higher user engagement.

User engagement statistics include the bounce rate, length of time spent on your website and the click-through rate (if you’re reading an Analytics report it would be average pages per session). 

Missing pages are considered to contribute to a poor user experience because of the impact it has on these statistics.

When a visitor lands on a page that informs them the content is missing it contributes to higher bounce rates. Users will leave a website when they can’t find the information they’re looking for. This eliminates any possibility of clicking further within the website and reduces the average time spent on the website.

These statistics are measured by search engines and contribute to the position a website holds on the search engine results page.

Reduced domain authority

One of the three most important ranking factors in SEO is the authority a website builds from the backlinks it acquires. If an external website is linking to a missing page on your website, you’re losing the opportunity to improve your ranking ability.

Every backlink acts as a vote of credibility to your content. If an external link points to a page that does not exist, there is no authority and improved ranking ability transferred to your website.

Tools to Identify broken links and missing pages

Finding broken links is a relatively straightforward process that can be accomplished with a variety of tools. You can use one or all of the following to identify what pages are missing, as well as where the requests for those pages are coming from (broken links).

Search console

Google’s search console is an absolute necessity when it comes to managing the health of your website. If you haven’t submitted your domain to gain access to this data you should do so immediately to identify any type of errors being generated on your website.

Go to search console. Click on converge to see the pages that are generating errors. If your website is generating 404s you will see the pages being listed in the report.

SEMRush

Using a third-party tool can streamline your efforts because they are designed to specifically help you find and replace 404 error codes.

Run a site audit. The report that’s generated will look like this:

Click on the errors link to get a summary of errors on your site. The broken links will appear at the top of the list if your website does in fact have broken links.

The beauty of this report is that it shows you the internal pages linking to missing content as well as the target URL that’s actually missing.

Solutions for repairing 404 errors

There are three possible solutions to eliminate 404 error codes from your website:

1. Delete the link pointing to the page
2. Create new content in the URL that’s missing
3. Redirect the old URL to a new URL

Delete the broken link

An error code is only generated when a request for a page is being made. It’s important to understand that if you delete a page it doesn’t constitute a 404 if there are no further requests to load the page. Therefore if you delete any internal (or external) links that are pointing to the page, there won’t be any further requests.

Create new content

The possibility exists that the page may have been deleted by accident. In the event that the URL does in fact present value to your website, you can publish a page with the same URL.

This is a solution that many SEOs use as a link building strategy when they find broken links on a website that represents value as a link prospect.

Redirect the old URL to a new URL

This solution is ideal when the old URL has external links pointing to it, but you’ve updated content to a new URL. A 301 or 302 redirect is a code written into your .htaccess files that tells your website to skip loading the old URL and load the target URL instead.

Redirecting a page to a new page allows link authority to transfer to the new target. This makes using a 301 ideal when external sites are linking to a missing page. If you can’t get the external websites to change the links, this is a solution to preserve the authority the old URL is generating.

If you’re using WordPress, a simple solution is to install a plugin. Redirection allows you the convenience of entering the old and new URLs on one interface.

Create user-friendly 404 pages to improve the user experience

It’s only natural for people to land on missing content. If a user mistypes a URL, it will generate a 404 error code. This type of situation is unavoidable, however, you can improve your user engagement by creating creative and helpful 404 pages.

Create a page that’s in line with your brand. For example, some websites make light of landing on missing pages and can add some humour to the situation. If you’re familiar with Lionel Richie’s music, you might find this 404 page entertaining:

Create a page that at the very least has a search bar so users can type in exactly what they were looking for. If you want to guide them even further, offer additional links that they are most likely to click on, such as the homepage, your blog page, product or service pages.

Improve user experience by fixing 404 error codes

Generating 404s is not something you need to be overly worried about if there aren’t many instances of them.

If your website is accumulating a high number of 404s you need to investigate to make sure there aren’t serious issues that are causing them such as indexing problems or pages being deleted.

Find and repair 404 error codes to create a more enjoyable user experience. Fixing errors that exist contribute to higher user engagement statistics and better performance in the SERPs.

SEO KPIs To Benchmark Campaign Performance

Ultimately, the goal of every SEO campaign is to increase the revenue that a company receives from its website. Unfortunately, hitting that goal can take upwards of a year to see real results. Establishing SEO KPIs help you understand whether your SEO campaign is moving in the right direction.

There are several different aspects to tracking your website’s progress, but the most important metrics will be those that are in line with your website’s overarching goals. The following is a list of SEO KPIs that you can use to monitor your site’s performance and benchmark the progress of your SEO campaigns.

Organic traffic by source

The source of your traffic is an important SEO KPI because it’s necessary to know exactly where your traffic is coming from and what’s working to increase the volume of monthly visitors to your site. This can be traffic from social media, organic search, direct (when people enter your URL directly) or referral traffic (when users follow a link to your site).

The idea is to build the volume of your organic traffic up to tap into the largest source, Google search. You want the flow to come from users who are looking for businesses like yours. 

Measuring the increase in organic search volume gives you insight into improved SERP position on existing pages and/or an increased number of keywords ranking.

Best performing pages

You can identify the best-performing pages of your site by comparing the traffic that each page receives. This can be important information for guiding your decisions on what topics to build around as well as where you need to improve.

The best pages are typically the ones with the most traffic, although if you have high converting pages, it’s also another way of looking at which pages perform.

Go to behaviour, site content and all pages in Google Analytics. Here you can select the number of pages you want to be displayed and sort the results from largest to smallest volume of visitor’s traffic.

Conversions by source

This KPI is important to note because you want to see what pages are converting the most visitors to clients. To measure conversion, you need to set it up in your analytics.

Select how you want to classify a conversion by choosing the pages or buttons that need to be pushed to consider a conversion completed. For example, if you want to track sales, then you would need to assign the PAY button on your checkout page as a completed conversion.

You can also use contact forms, contact pages and click to call buttons as completed conversions.

Knowing which pages convert at the highest rate will also give you an idea of how to guide the traffic on your site. 

Build more internal links to the pages that convert the highest from the pages that receive the most volume to increase conversion rates.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate refers to the number of visitors that land on your site and leave without interacting further with your website. This is a measurement that’s usually associated with poor user experience, poor page speed, poor content and demonstrates low user engagement.

Lowering your bounce rate can be done by guiding users to more relevant pages within your website. Adding more internal links will immediately give visitors more options to choose from when they land on your page, rather than backing out of it.

Improving page speed is proven to reduce the bounce rate.

Page speed

If you’re in the retail business this is an important KPI because it directly affects sales. Improving page speed for Amazon resulted in saving millions of dollars in abandoned checkouts.

The page speed of your page is an indication of the overall performance it has for providing a good user experience. The faster your page loads, the more you’re going to make from visitors staying on your site.

Average time per session

The length of time a user spends on your page is also a KPI for user engagement. If the dwell time on your pages is much longer than your competitors, it shows that you’re able to hold your audience’s attention and therefore have content that satisfies search intent.

In the same respect, if the dwell time on your page is shorter than the competing pages, you’ll need to consider updating pages to compete at a higher level.

If you’ve implemented a new content strategy and are updating pages on your site, then the length of time that visitors are spending can be an indication of the effectiveness of your campaign.

Click-through rate

Here is an important KPI to watch for since this is a measurement of the number of clicks your site receives based on the number of impressions your site generates in the search results. In other words, if you’re ranking for a keyword, whenever a search is made on Google using that keyword, it would count as an impression.

To improve the click-through rate, you need to improve your page’s position in the search results. For example, if you’re on the third or fourth page of Google, you may get thousands of impressions. However, your click through rate would be extremely low because barely anyone ever makes it past the first page of results.

When your goal is to improve the traffic your website receives, the click-through rate can be an indication of the progress you’re making in the SERPS.

You can find your click-through rate in Google Search Console.

Referring domains

A measure of site popularity can be made from the number of websites that link to your content. This has been an established ranking factor that promotes more search visibility and improves SERP position (when the links are from quality, relevant websites).

If the goal is to improve authority and ranking ability, you can use the number of referring domains your website is accumulating as an SEO performance indicator. The more quality website you have linking to yours, the more ranking ability you develop.

Domain authority

The domain authority is an important SEO KPI because it indicates the strength of your backlink profile. If you’re engaged in a link building strategy, you want to see the domain authority gradually rise.

Of course, domain authority can be measured as DA by Moz, DR (domain rating) by Ahrefs, Trust and Citation Flow (TF and CF) by Majestic and SEMRush also has its rating system for measuring the strength of a URL.

Whichever system you use, stay consistent with it when comparing progress. Each company has its methods and formula, but at the end of the day, they are primarily based on the quality of backlinks your site had pointing to it.

“Compare to” function

Using the compare to option on Analytics can help put things into perspective on how your site is performing based on specific periods.

Comparing the previous year’s data to the current year is good for avoiding seasonal or cyclical differences that may occur naturally in your industry.

For example, if you sell outdoor furniture in a country that has four seasons, your sales in each season will vary greatly. You can’t accurately compare traffic reports from spring to winter months because the winter months will naturally have a much lower search volume.

Comparing the current year vs. the previous year gives you an idea of how much your website has improved its performance. You can compare the data from previous years’ traffic, conversions, bouncer rates or any SEO KPIs relevant to your current SEO campaign.

Benchmark your progress with key performance indicators

It can be frustrating when you’re paying for results without seeing any. Establish the SEO KPIs that are most relevant to your SEO campaign to make things clearer on the different stages of the development of your website.

Knowing what to expect and when to expect it can make things much easier to manage and create more confidence in the plans you’ve set into motion. Without signs of progress, playing the long game can be extremely frustrating.

Give us a call to help develop an SEO strategy that will drive more traffic and increase the revenue your site generates regularly. We promise to have a set of SEO KPIs you can monitor throughout your website’s development.

How To Develop An SEO Content Marketing Strategy

Content is king. It doesn’t get more cliché than that but it needs to be said because it is a major truism in the SEO industry. Without content, SEO doesn’t exist. Developing an SEO content marketing strategy is your blueprint to communicating, convincing and converting visitors into clients.

What is an SEO content marketing strategy?

An SEO content marketing strategy is a plan that strategizes on how to publish and promote content that guides an audience to take action. It’s not only targeted to the visitors on your website, but to those off-site that you want to educate, convince and convert into clients.

Your SEO content marketing strategy establishes the topics, keywords and content tilt to break through your competition and guide visitors to purchasing from your company.

What are the advantages of an SEO content strategy?

Developing an SEO content strategy establishes a measurable goal and a plan for how to achieve it. Publishing content without an SEO strategy can be compared to the likes of throwing darts with a blindfold on. Your content may be high quality but if it’s aimed at the wrong target, its impact will have a minimal effect on your business.

Developing an SEO content strategy establishes your goals, audience, strengths, opportunities and a way of measuring your success. Use the following as a way to develop an SEO content strategy that has a maximum impact on how you drive traffic to your site and convert those visitors into clients.

Set your goal

There’s no point in randomly producing content without having a specific goal in mind. Establish a specific goal from the onset of your SEO content strategy to define your purpose for publishing content. A goal also allows you to refer back to an overarching purpose to clarify the decisions you need to make when developing your SEO content strategy.

If you know that your goal is to get people to purchase more products on a retail website, the content strategy will be different than getting visitors to leave their contact information or subscribe to a newsletter.

Clearly define the goals you have for your company so you can effectively create content that moves visitors further along the marketing funnel.

Target a specific audience

Take the time to carve out a very defined group that you can confidently point to as your target audience. This can be done effectively by creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona allows you to brainstorm the characteristics of your ideal client with greater accuracy by identifying the pain points that are most common within that group.

Determine the larger divisions of your target audience first such as the primary age group that your product or service is most well-received. You can further break your target audience down by the current characteristics your clients share as well as the general commonalities associated with their generation.

The more detailed you are in creating your buyer persona, the more information you have on what they find important in their lives.

Your buyer persona will set the tone for how you communicate your message regarding language and content type. 

If your target group is mostly teenagers, your content should be more visual with a lean on images and videos.

If your target group is middle-aged businessmen, your content would be more long-form, in-depth articles that provide insight into the topics that matter most.

Identify your unique selling point

There are millions of businesses and even more websites to compete within every industry. What sets you apart from the competition? Identify the USP of your company in order to highlight what you’re offering to those in need of your services.

Every company is faced with competition that more or less offers the same product or service. What is the expertise your company offers that no other company does? What can you promote that will convince prospective clients that your company is the best choice for their needs?

Pricing, superior customer service and convenience are commonly promoted by businesses. However, having a unique skillset or offering that no other business offers will generate the most revenue.

In Canada, Pizza Pizza was able to promote their brand by offering a 30 min or it’s free policy. No other pizza delivery service (at the time) offered the convenience of such prompt service with a guaranteed delivery time.

The recognition that delivery time is one of the most important aspects of choosing a pizza place for delivery, gave rise to the idea of guaranteeing delivery time. Pizza Pizza addressed the pain point of waiting long periods of time for delivery with a guarantee of 30 min or it’s free. 

This USP contributed to them becoming one of the largest pizza chains in Canada.

Find the sweet spot in your industry

Brainstorm topics that are related to your business but have no competition, which is also referred to as finding your content tilt. These topics represent the sweet spot in your industry since you can create high impact content that cuts through the competition and reaches your audience.

The content tilt your company uses can be found by addressing your target audience’s pain points with your unique selling points and expertise. 

Research keywords

The next step in creating your SEO content marketing strategy is to create a list of keywords your audience uses to find solutions to their pain points. Your research should include prioritizing search terms for landing pages, blog content and any gated content or specialized types you’ll use within your strategy..

You should already have your list of topics that represent your content tilt. Break down each topic into a list of pain points and problems most commonly faced by your target audience.

Establish search intent

A major function of keyword research is to make sure that the keywords you choose to target align with the user’s intent of the search and the topics you’ve outlined in your strategy. A common mistake made by business owners is to focus on the metrics of a keyword rather than target terms that are audience-centric. 

Search engines place a heavy emphasis on the ability of a page/website to adequately satisfy the intent of a search. Establish exactly what the user needs to know in order to become the final destination of their search. If your content doesn’t satisfy the user, it results in them returning to the sea of search results to look for another website that has what they need.

Establish the true intent of a search through comparative and competitive analysis. Make sure the search results are filled with pages similar to your own and the content type is a match for what you have planned.

Compare important metrics 

Run each of your ideas through the keyword tool of your choice to identify the terms that have low competition and high search volume. At this point, most of the keywords you’re researching should represent business value since they are all targeted at addressing the issues that are most important to your audience.

Keep in mind that high search volume doesn’t trump business value. You’ll need to establish that a keyword does in fact generate a minimum number of searches, but apart from that if your topic is important to your audience, the volume is merely a vanity metric.

As you identify keywords and add them to your list, keep them separated in groups of intent. You’ll avoid targeting the most competitive phrases or find alternatives and long-tail versions to get your message to the right audience.

Create a content schedule

It’s important to get a general outline of when you’re publishing the content you’ve chosen. By creating an editorial calendar, you’re not left trying to decide what to publish at the last minute, since it has been scheduled ahead of time.

An editorial calendar allows you to plan the content you need to adequately cover a topic. This gives you a broad perspective on how to layer your content from the bottom of the funnel, middle of the funnel to the top of the funnel.

Cluster your content

The end result should be a topic cluster to establish the importance of your main keyword theme to search engines and users. A topic cluster is composed of a pillar page and cluster content.

The pillar page covers a broad range of subtopics that represent one major keyword theme. It will touch upon the topic in its entirety, but not go deep into detail on the subtopics, as this will be the purpose for your cluster content.

Pillar pages link out to cluster content in order to give your audience the option of exploring a specific aspect within the broader topic. Cluster content typically targets long-tail keywords because of the narrow focus they have on exploring a specific area.

Cluster content links back to the pillar page as well as related content within the topic cluster.

This structure generates smaller volumes of traffic from the cluster content, which leads visitors to the pillar page and other pages further within your marketing funnel. 

As more pages rank within the topic cluster, they transfer authority to the pillar page and your website gains more ranking ability for the keyword topic.

Track, measure, analyze and adapt

Establish a way to measure the success of your SEO content marketing strategy. In order to grow and amplify the efforts that made the most impact, it’s important to know what worked the best and what efforts did not work very well.

If your goal is more sales conversions, you’ll need to track the flow of your visitors from your landing pages. Determine the content that leads visitors to more conversions as well as the content that results in the most exits.

Build more content around the keywords that are converting and try to guide visitors away from the pages that result in a bounce or exit.

Gated content can be used as a way of measuring the interest that your articles are garnering. Have visitors enter their email addresses to receive whitepapers or guides on the topic that they’ve been reading about.

A high number of conversions of visitors accessing your gated content is an easy way to tell whether your content is on target.

Build an email list

If you’ve come this far in building an effective SEO content marketing strategy, you should be building an email list. No matter what your industry, a list of interested people is a welcome asset to have for instant traffic to new content as well as to promote sales and discounts on services.

An email list is an excellent source for finding more out about your prospective clients. Segment your list through a series of questions on what your audience would like to receive in their inbox and then send them the goods!

Use your email list to gain more insight into the interests of your target audience. You can use split-tests that measure the open rates of emails you send to determine catchy subject lines. By seeing which email gets opened the most you identify catchy headlines that will grab the attention of your audience.

Use split tests on the click-through rate from the email to your website to see how engaged your audience is in the content you send. A high click-through rate will indicate the topic is worth exploring and building more content around on your website.

All of these decisions need to be made before you set your plan into effect. When you know exactly what you’re going to need to execute the plan, you’re ready for the last stage of your SEO content strategy.

Publish SEO content

Execute the final stage of your SEO content marketing strategy by publishing the content you need for each area of your plan. Your strategy already details the most important topics, the layered content, your target keywords and an established goal with a method for tracking results.

Approach every content piece with a 10X mentality, where your content will be 10 times better than anything already published. Make sure your content includes every topic and subtopic that is being covered in the top ten search results. Add additional content to make sure your pages outperform the competition through your own additional research.

Your finished product should be a compilation of the best of all worlds. There shouldn’t be a reason that a visitor could leave your page to find something better. SEO content writing accomplishes this task since the process makes sure all bases are covered.

Optimize your page for maximum results

In order to maximize the traffic, your page can receive you want to have all of your basic on-page optimization aspects covered. In addition, explore every opportunity you have to drive traffic from featured snippets, PAA boxes, videos, images and rich results.

Capitalize on every traffic opportunity available by analyzing the SERP for features your content can appear in. Simple formatting and publishing your answers to commonly asked questions can result in being featured in a snippet and PAA box.

It should be clear that the higher up on the SERP the higher your click-through rate will be. The top positions receive the most traffic from any given search term. Place your keyword in the expected places to clearly demonstrate to search engines what search terms your page should appear for.

Rich results will also contribute to a higher click-through rate to your website. Consult with the list of available features your website is eligible to implement the structured data markup required.

Strategize and optimize your content production

The content on your website is a reflection of your business and a tool for educating visitors and moving them closer to making a purchase decision with your company. The content you produce has a major impact on your website’s ability to generate traffic that converts.

In order to maximize the revenue, your company generates, establish an SEO content strategy. It is only when you’ve defined your goals that you’re able to achieve them. Use the strengths of your business to solve your audience’s problems and publish content that educates visitors on how that works.

When people understand what you have to offer that no other company has, they are more likely to side with your cause. Give people a reason to choose your business over the competition.

An effective SEO content marketing strategy is the blueprint for your success in driving traffic that converts and amplifying those results.

14 Benefits Of An Infographic

Infographics may have seen the height of their popularity but don’t underestimate the power they have on your SEO content strategy. In head to head comparisons with text articles, there is no doubt that infographics outperform in every category. The benefits of an infographic include more links, increased traffic and higher levels of engagement by incorporating visually appealing forms of content.

What is an infographic?

An infographic is a collection of visualized data that uses charts, images and graphs with minimal text. Infographics can tell a story, explain instructions or act as a resource that summarizes data-driven facts and statistics. Infographics are used to communicate large amounts of information that is more easily understood through the use of visualized data.

The following infographic lists 14 benefits of an infographic as it pertains to an SEO content strategy.

Infographics are an excellent SEO content strategy for creating backlinks and brand awareness. Before the rise of video, infographics were the most widely shared pieces of content. They combine imagery with statistics and facts for a more enhanced and enjoyable learning experience.

Additionally, the benefits of using an infographic are as follows:

Undeniable popularity

One benefit of an infographic that there is a high demand for quotable resources. People are always looking for hard facts to back up an opinion and add credibility to their content. Infographics are ideal as resources since they provide an easy way to navigate through a collection of facts and data points.

With over 2 million blog posts being published a day, there will be no shortage of the demand for statistical resources.

The brain retains more information

According to Brainrules.net after three days of reading a text article a person will retain 10% of what they read. When placing an image in a text article that percentage jumps to allow 65% retention of the same content. This can be attributed to the fact that 40% are visual learners.

Infographics can literally be described as visualized data. Pairing images with the main data points makes up 95% of the entire infographic. They can be used as the ultimate tool for not only getting your message across to an audience but having that message retained for a few days after receiving it.

Get more Facebook likes

Your social network will give you much more traffic and exposure by using infographics over text. Infographics get approximately 200% more likes compared to text articles on Facebook. (~Wave Video)

Better performance with directions

When presented with driving directions that included images, people performed 323% better than those who had directions with text only. It’s a natural tendency for the brain to attach relevant images to text, which would explain the difference in performance.

Consider using infographics for how-to pieces of content. Users will have a higher success ratio for learning and completing a task when there are images to support each instruction. As you are well aware, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Widely used strategy

It’s comforting to know you’re employing a strategy that is proven to be effective. 65% of businesses are using infographics as part of their SEO content strategy because of the benefits gained.

Infographics serve as an excellent tool for B2B marketing because it’s easier to convey large sums of information in a visual display. Using visualized data is also improves the conversion rate to build local links.

Higher user engagement (dwell time)

Engagement is one of the factors that site owners can improve on to boost ranking in the search results. When you know that a high-quality infographic is 30X more likely to be read than a text article, how could you not use infographics?

Now that you know users are much more likely to read visualized data, as opposed to a list of stats and facts., improve the time visitors spend on your page by using engaging images with data-driven facts.

The length of time that visitors spend on your page is an engagement statistic known as dwell time. Increased dwell time contributes to a higher ranking in the SERP.

Enhanced link building capabilities

As a link building strategy, infographics can be a powerful tactic to land you a lot of high-quality backlinks. Infographics generate 178% more inbound links and 72% more views (Hubspot) than content with just text.

Guest posting on high traffic websites can get your image in front of a large audience. It only takes a quality infographic to start the ball rolling for attracting backlinks.

Here at Digital Ducats Inc., we used an infographic on website design trends to generate thousands of backlinks. The project was aimed at acquiring local backlinks from Toronto experts but became one of the most linked pages on the site.

The backlinks we acquired came from a few different sources: Local companies linking to the page, guest posts that linked to the page and were syndicated across hundreds of other websites, and people landing on the page and linking to it after it ranked for a number of keywords. 

We also submitted the image to a few of the most popular infographic directories to get the ball rolling with a few starter links.

Drive more traffic from improved search visibility

One of the three largest ranking factors search engines use is backlinks. It should be no surprise that once your infographic starts accumulating backlinks it’s going to start ranking for a number of different keywords, which drives organic traffic.

More backlinks also equate to more entry points for visitors to find your website. If your article is syndicated across a large number of websites, the backlinks alone will drive significant volumes of traffic.

Optimize your page for phrases that represent business value. Increase the number of keywords your page ranks for by including an explanation of your data point as a text portion within your post. 

Including text on your page (as opposed to only posting the image) provides search engines with the content and context to rank for keyword related phrases.

More engagement, more links, more views lead to more visitors. On average, infographics generate 12% more traffic to your website. (Demand Gen Report)

Gain journalistic attention

Journalists will follow press release sites for interesting stories that they can publish on their blogs. Consider the heightened engagement that infographics generate and it makes sense why journalists are more open to republishing a high-quality infographic.

Colour attracts attention

Use the psychology of colour to your advantage. Colour increases the willingness to read by 50% so make your infographics visually stunning and full of colour. (Neomam)

Increase social engagement

Before video made its big surge in popularity, infographics were the most shared form of content on Facebook. As the second most shared form of content, take advantage of the ability to expand your audience and increase social engagement.

Rather than firing off your entire infographic into your network, use snippets of your image as teasers. Chop your infographic up into multiple pieces of content to create more opportunities to drive traffic and build your audience. 

Using pieces of your infographic also meshes better with the format for Facebook and Instagram. Facebook uses rectangle images and on Instagram, you should try to make each snippet a square so users are able to see the entire image.

Infographics increase your pages marketability

Add value to your content by creating an infographic. Whether you’re engaged in a link building outreach campaign or you’re publishing content on your website for a specific audience, elevate the quality of your content by incorporating data-driven images.

You can improve the success rate of your outreach with infographics by making your value proposition more enticing. Website owners are much more open to sharing an infographic on their website as opposed to publishing an article.

Assist with processing information

Reading straight facts and data can eventually lead to a reader completely tuning out their attention and losing their focus. An infographic helps readers digest data-driven facts and information in bite-sized chunks.

The fact that there’s an image to help break the monotony of numbers and text contributes to an understanding beyond words. Seeing a comparison chart will immediately get the message across as opposed to reading the comparison statistics.

When you want your audience to be able to get through large amounts of data, using infographics makes it easier to accomplish.

Excellent sales and marketing tool

Based on increased data processing and retention, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that infographics are excellent sales and marketing tools. Use infographics in sales meetings, product pitches or project proposals to get your message across more emphatically.

The use of infographics on a sales page within your website works to can keep your company in a prospective client’s mind for a longer period of time. Data-driven images are the perfect tool to help increase sales.

What are the disadvantages of infographics?

Not to be a Debbie downer, but nothing is all rainbows and sunshine. There are always a few clouds that loom on the horizon…

You can’t dive headfirst into creating an infographic without knowing the downside. Here are a few things to consider before deciding on whether you’ll use an infographic or not.

Time consuming to build

Infographics are extremely time-consuming to create when you compare them to publishing your typical blog post with images. The amount of energy and resources that go into creating an infographic can dwarf regular blog content when you consider the research you need or coming up with effective data points.

An infographic isn’t very effective unless it serves a purpose really well. Original research is ideal, which in itself is an entire project. Otherwise, you’ll need to come up with line items in which you can’t take everything from one source. You need to mix up your sources and make sure they get the proper attribution.

The design is also a time-consuming aspect. Original images are preferred which means you’ll need to come up with an image for each data point in your image. Don’t forget to customize the background, the text and header to create something unique.

Not ideal format for social media

Most infographics with a lot of information are long and skinny, which is not ideal for social sharing. Of course you can make infographics specifically for social media, but again, your images won’t be able to pack as much information when you’re limited to a square or rectangle.

Generic templates bore people

There are a few companies that you can turn to for the software to create infographics. What happens when thousands of people are using the same software? You start to see the same generic templates and the same icons and images which devalues the level of professionalism your infographic exudes.

In order to separate yourself from the masses, you need to customize your projects as much as possible. A unique design will be much more appealing to your audience and impressive to prospective clients.

There’s risk associate with your investment in resources

Creating a unique and effective infographic is not something to take lightly. You’ll need to invest the time to make it something that looks professional enough to grab the attention of your audience. There is always an implied risk that your infographic doesn’t live up to expectations.

Suppose you’ve decided to use an infographic as a link building method. After hours of labour-intensive work, you begin a massive outreach to companies and website owners you thought would love your idea. If no one wants to put your infographic on their website or link to yours then you’ve wasted a lot of time in resources on a project with minimal results.

Harder to edit and update

Once your infographic is posted on your website, you already have a URL assigned to it. In order to update your image, you need to go back to the infographic editor, make changes, save, optimize the image, edit the name and upload back to your site with the same URL so you don’t lose any backlinks. It’s a bit of a process….

Enjoy the advantages of using infographics

There’s a lot of publishers that write about the rise and fall of infographics but don’t be fooled into thinking they are an ineffective marketing tool. The truth is that infographics had their golden era and now that they aren’t being glorified, it takes useful data and a well-planned infographic to have the same impact on your website.

If you’ve been in the SEO business since 2013, would know that this was the year the popularity of infographics went absolutely through the charts. If you had an infographic you could get it published on some of the top names in the industry and earn high-quality backlinks.

IN 2016, however, when the industry became saturated with low-quality images, publishers stopped publishing them and journalists stopped sharing them in their columns. That didn’t put an end to infographics, but just made the data that they hosted the main selling point.

The point is that at the end of the day, original data reigns supreme and a well thought out and carefully planned infographic can generate traffic, backlinks and contribute to new sales.

One thing that remains constant is high-quality content translates into more traffic, backlinks and credibility. Incorporate infographics in your content strategy for added value and new sources of backlinks and increased search visibility.

How To Perform An SEO Site Analysis

One of the first steps to improving the traffic your website generates is running an SEO site analysis. We’re not talking about an SEO audit that takes a few days where your analyst is digging up the body of Jimmy Hoffa, which is called a forensic SEO audit. The SEO site analysis you need will report the overall health status of your website in terms of performance, keywords, content and backlinks.

This is an important step in the process of ranking your website since a Google SEO audit can uncover issues that may affect future efforts to improve search visibility.

Can you imagine going through months of work on your keyword research and then publishing content and building links to find out that it all could have been avoided? If your pages are taking 30 seconds to load, it doesn’t matter how good your keywords, content or backlinks are-the page will never rank in a top position because it’s super slow.

There are often underlying issues on a website that drag down a website’s overall performance. By eliminating those issues before starting a campaign, you get a more accurate glimpse into your website’s current status.

Cleansing your site of these technical issues also gives you a better idea of the impact your efforts will have on developing your website.

If you’re wondering how to audit a website, the following is a collection of procedures we use here at Digital Ducats in order to get a clear picture of a client’s website status. Most of these tools you can use to check your SEO yourself as they all offer a free trial or version. 

Check for indexing issues

A major function of SEO is making sure that the pages of a website are actually listed on Google. If your pages are not being indexed it means you have absolutely no chance to appear for keywords because none of your pages are even being shown on Google’s index.

One of the simplest ways to see if your pages are indexed properly is to check in Google Search Console. If you haven’t registered your website in Google Search Console, you should stop reading and do this now.

I’ll wait.

The reason this is so important is that the information about your website that’s found in the search console is equivalent to looking under the hood of a car. You can get loads of information about how your website is functioning and find important data-like in this case, how many pages are properly indexed.

If your website were to receive a manual action (Google penalty) your pages would be removed from Google’s index. You would receive the notification of a manual action here in the search console.

You can also check on your pages to make sure there are no errors being generated, but we’ll touch on that subject later in this article. The focus now is confirming you have indexed pages. There is also a quick way to do this with a Google “site search.”

Type in the following: site:[yourdomain.com] to see how many results are produced in the search results. The number of results indicates how many pages of your site are indexed. This should match what you found in the search console.

If for any reason (after performing a site search for your domain)you don’t see your pages showing up that would indicate an indexing issue. This would mean you’re not anywhere on Google and you would need to dig deeper into finding out why. 

In this case, everything looks good but we’re going to crawl the site to make sure that Google’s data matches up with a third-party crawler. Use SEMRush, Moz or Ahrefs to get a full site analysis and report on your website’s overall health.

Website health check with third party crawler

The bonus to using software like SEMRush is that you have a lot of information available at your fingertips. Running a simple audit will report the issues that need repairing and report the number of pages that were crawled. Additionally, the report generates a list of sitewide status code errors (broken links, unavailable pages, etc) so you can easily find and fix each issue. 

As it turns out, there are 16 more pages on Google that SEMRush didn’t find. If we look deeper into that we can probably chalk it up to pages that were deleted and redirected as well as blog and category archives. 

We can finally conclude there are no indexing issues.

Check my website SEO 

The report will also list whether there are other site errors that may or may not affect ranking. A large number of 404 (broken links) would be a problem that needs attention.

A broken link presents a problem because when a user clicks on a link and is taken to an error page, it’s considered to provide a poor user experience. 

So many ranking factors are based on the idea of promoting a more enjoyable user experience. Therefore, a bunch of broken links will drag down the overall quality of your user experience.

This can affect how search engines view your site and result in a drop in search visibility.

Other insights gained from the site audit include reporting problems with your structured data markup, internal linking, HTTPS status which results in a score for your overall site performance.

Test page speed

The time it takes your pages to load can impact the search visibility of your website. Let’s revisit that issue about user experience for a minute. Search engines want to display the BEST websites on their first page of search results. If users have to wait 30 seconds for your pages to load there are most certainly better options than yours.

In fact, the goal for every website should be to load the first contentful paint in 2 seconds or faster.

XXX

Any additional time your pages are taking to load will in fact cost you a big percentage of the visitors that land on your page. Here are the actual stats for the percentage of people that leave your site when it takes too long to load ( measured as the bounce rate).

Despite the fact that search engines will drop your site if it’s excessively slow, you have to consider the actual number of people you’re losing to user experience. Page speed is an SEO issue that should constantly be tested and maintained.

You can check the page speed of your website by using any of the following tools:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• GT Metrix
• Pingdom

Every issue that’s slowing down your pages is listed in the report that’s generated once you run an URL through these tools. Unfortunately, the free tools often require you to run one page at a time. If you’re using a paid version you can get a report on the speed of each individual page in one shot.

Keyword rankings/Organic traffic generation

If you want to improve the quality of traffic your site generates, you need to know what keywords are generating its current organic traffic. An organic keywords report will show you the pages that currently hold positions in the top 100 search results.

Identifying the keywords that are ranking will give you an idea of how to focus your optimization efforts. If your site ranks in the top 5 for a high volume keyword, every spot you move up towards the top position means a massive increase in traffic.

By identifying the current rankings you can prioritize efforts on the keywords that will make the most impact for both short-term wins and long-term goals.

Compare keywords with competing websites

In order to get a more accurate glimpse into the niche in which you compete, use the URLs of the top ranking websites in your industry. You can either search for your top keyword and use the URLs of the website that appear in the top 5 positions.

By discovering unique keywords your competition ranks for in which your website does not, you can get an idea of any gaps in content your site has compared to theirs. The logic behind this analysis is that if your competition is ranking for keywords that are also important to your business, there is either content or backlinks that are getting them that keyword ranking.

Many tools offer a content gap analysis function to make it easy to highlight the unique keywords your competition ranks for, rather than slugging it out in an excel spreadsheet.

Review general on-page optimization factors

Sometimes the simplest answers are the most effective. You can check for simple on-page optimization errors to see whether there are some quick wins available that would change the keyword target for each page.

Screaming Frog reports any missing or duplicate metadata so you can have a quick list of items to go in and fix.

You can also get this information from SEMRush and similar software.

Topical organization

The topical organization of a website can be an asset/strategy for improving your search visibility. By structuring your website in an easy to understand format, you can highlight the most important categories, services and products on your website.

Sitebulb is software that generates a visual image of your website’s topical organization. This can be extremely beneficial for understanding where there are any inconsistencies, orphaned pages or lack of organization.

Using the radial view makes it easier to see whether the pages on your site are within 4 clicks of the homepage.

The topical organization of your site will often reflect the quality of your internal links. It’s best practice to link related content to cluster your topics. Pillar pages are those that are most linked to and serve as a hub of information between clustered content.

Pillar pages also end up ranking for competitive phrases and a larger number of keywords because they cover a wide range of subtopics within a keyword theme. The topical organization of your site can change the depth and level of expertise that is assigned to a website, creating more ranking ability from increased authority.

Backlink audit

Link building has seen quite a few drastic changes over the course of time. There have been so many link manipulation filters baked into the search algorithm that auditing your backlinks are a necessary part of identifying any causes that would decrease search visibility.

Running a backlink report will list all of the links that are attached to your domain both the homepage and inner pages. Here’s a report from SEMRush that lists the link toxicity of a domain.

You can also pull up your links on Google search console, however, they report that they only list a sample of links. You may not see every backlink listed on their report.

Ahrefs seems to be the best at detecting backlinks. Their crawl rate is higher than any other software so they seem to have the freshest and most accurate reports on backlinks.

A backlink audit is simply looking for any low-quality links that would adversely affect ranking. The typical characteristics of a low-quality backlink the following:

• Low domain authority
• Little to no backlinks
• Unrelated to your content
• Unrelated to the theme of your website
• Advertises paid options

Toxic links will affect your search visibility but you have to also factor in poor link building practices. Google’s stance on link building is essential that it should not be manipulated for the purpose of improving ranking.

This covers a wide range of practices that can be used to influence the optimization and authority of a website. Evidence of poor link building that can result in a loss of search visibility are:

Excessively repeated anchor text

• Excessive linking from one website
• The primary source of links come from one method of link building
• Lack of variation in anchors 
• Lack of variety of link type
• Anything that looks fabricated or automated

If your website has been exposed for participating in what Google has deemed a “link scheme” or your website has too many low-quality links, your website will most likely be suffering an algorithmic filter penalty.

Google has historically come out with many different updates that specifically target the different forms of content and link manipulation. If the algorithm detects any type of suspicious links or link building your site is automatically pushed down in the search results. When you reverse what you’ve done, your rankings will return to where it was previously.

For this reason, a backlink audit becomes absolutely necessary before starting any type of SEO campaign or strategy. Many sites have been able to improve traffic exponentially by lifting an algorithmic penalty that was imposed due to poor link building.

Perform an SEO website audit periodically

It’s best practice to periodically check on the health of your website. Changes happen all the time as links are lost and added and content is published and deleted. It’s important to know what your site’s status is at all times to prevent any losses in search visibility.

Start every SEO campaign with an SEO audit to ensure your efforts are accurate and don’t end up in vain. The more information you have about the inner workings of your website, the more impact you have on increasing traffic and lead generation.