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Anchor Text Optimization – Everything You Need to Know

This article was originally published as a part of the mddigitalgraphicdesigns Inner Circle.

It’s the private newsletter for our clients, partners, and friends, where we share one super actionable SEO tip that has worked well for us, every week.

If you’d like to get these months before the public, you now have the chance to do so by filling out the form below.

WTF is Anchor Text?

If you’ve done any link building to grow your business, you’ve undoubtedly heard of anchor text.

Anchor text is the clickable part of a link (the bit that is usually blue in color and underlined) and it has been a part of Google’s search algorithm since the very beginning.

Why? Because anchor text is an outside signal to Google that may indicate what a specific page is about.

When 6 different websites link to a page with the anchor text “SEO guide” – it’s quite likely that that page is, in fact, about how to do SEO.

Does that mean you should be smashing all of your links with the keyword you’d like to rank for?

That’s what we’re going to talk about today…

Time to learn: 5-10 minutes

Impact (1-10): 8

Tools required: None

Tools suggested: None

Now, let’s get to it…

A Bit of Background on Anchor Text

As mentioned earlier, anchor text has historically been a major way for Google to understand what a page is about and was a major contributor to their success as a search engine in the early days.

Unsurprisingly, SEOs were quick to start manipulating this and things went a bit sideways.

Back in the day, you could even rank pages for keywords that didn’t exist on the page itself by using targeted anchor text – click here to read about Google bombing for some extreme (and hilarious) examples.

You may have heard of the Google Penguin update that first got rolled out in 2012 – anchor text manipulation was one of the main things they targeted with that and a lot of websites got penalized because of it.

Ever since then, they’ve gotten more and more strict with anchor text usage and the risk of getting your site slapped is real.

Before we dive into the actual usage of anchor texts…

Types of Anchor Text

Because you can set whatever you’d like as the anchor text, categorizing them makes it a lot easier to process the data around them.

Generally we divide them into six primary categories.

Let’s pretend we’re trying to rank SmashDigital.com for the keyword “SEO agency” and use that as an example.

Exact Match – This would mean linking to our website with the anchor text SEO agency.

Partial match – Contains the keywords but not in the exact order.

“For growing search traffic, we recommend working with an SEO expert or agency.”

Phrase match – Contains the exact keyword but also additional phrases.

“mddigitalgraphicdesigns is an SEO agency run by unicorns.”

Branded – When you link back with the brand name or a variation of it.

“We’ve heard mddigitalgraphicdesigns has an awesome newsletter, you should check it out!”

URL – A link back with the URL or a variation of it.

“Want to learn more about our link building services? Have a look here: https://mddigitalgraphicdesigns.net/ link-building-service”

Misc – This includes everything generic that doesn’t include the keyword itself. Common examples are:

• Click here
• Check out the case studies
• This case study
• Travis Jamison’s company
• On their website

Optimizing Your Anchor Text

If you’re taking SEO seriously, you’re most likely actively building links and not waiting for them to magically appear. This means you’ll also have control over the anchor text (e.g. in a guest post).

Because exact match anchor text used to be super effective, a lot of SEOs are still using them quite aggressively – but is this the right play?

I’m confident in saying that about half of the websites we’ve seen with Google penalties in recent years have overly aggressive anchor text to blame for it.

On the other hand, while some case studies show that there is no correlation between using exact match anchor text and higher rankings – our experience shows that they still work.

So what should you be doing?

A lot of SEO experts will recommend you to optimize it on a case-by-case basis.

This means that if we wanted to rank for “SEO agency”, we’d have to Google the keyword, analyze the anchor texts of the top ranking pages, categorize them and calculate the percentages of each group and try to replicate that.

While this sounds great in theory and makes for a great article… The reality is that there is going to be so much variance from site to site and more often than not you won’t even have enough data.

We’ve tried doing this in the past and saw no difference in results.

Our general approach is on the safer side and we like to diversify it as much as possible, especially throughout the site.

This is often a 40-60% split between keyword-oriented and generic anchor texts.

On the keyword side we would use one or two exact match anchors at most and balance the rest between longer (3-6 words) phrase and partial match keywords. Add in some long-tail/related keywords to the mix and you’ll be good.

The other half is going to be generic texts and this is where you can get creative and try to make it look as natural as possible.

Some examples: 

• Call-to-actions
  • Read this guide
  • Check out the study
  • Find out more here
  • Compare the pricing
  • In this post
• Branded and alike
  • Smash Digital
  • SmashDigital
  • Smash agency
  • A study by Smash Digital
  • Travis Jamison’s company
  • Article by Travis Jamison
  • Travis has written
• Thematic
  • 91% of successful companies do link building
  • By having an optimized website
  • Building better quality links
  • Can improve organic rankings
  • Links with a relevant anchor text
• URLs
  • https://mddigitalgraphicdesigns.net/fully-managed-seo-services
  • mddigitalgraphicdesigns.net/fully-managed-seo-services

When in doubt, just use existing words in an article instead of trying to stuff your link in.

You can also use a tool such as Ahrefs to draw ideas from your competitors’ links (hey, look at how natural that anchor text is!)

It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

I’d say the main advice we have for this is to diversify as much as possible and try to stay contextual and natural.

Surrounding Content

Lastly, keep in mind that Google doesn’t just look at the anchor text itself to evaluate the relevance of your link. They also use the page as a whole and the surrounding content.

As an extreme example, if the page you’re getting a link from is about childcare but the anchor text is about electronic cigarettes, that’s going to raise some red flags.

So instead of stuffing your anchor text with keywords, try to get your link placed on pages relevant to your article and ideally have partial match or phrase keywords within the same paragraph as your link.

Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll see you next week with yet another actionable SEO strategy.

Link Reclamation and 3 Highly-Effective Link Building Tips

Welcome back to mddigitalgraphicdesigns’ weekly content series, where we give you actionable SEO strategies and tips that you can implement today and start seeing results.

While the original plan was to share one actionable SEO tip with you every week…

I’m a little too excited to share these with you so you’re going to get four from me today.

We’re going to talk about one highly effective link building strategy and three simple ways to get more out of your existing links.

Time to learn: 20 minutes

Impact (1-10): 8

Tools required: Ahrefs

Tools suggested: Archive.org

Now, let’s get to it…

Tip #1 – Link Reclamation

Just like we talked about in our broken link building guide, the internet is fickle and things can break fairly easily.

Not only do things break all the time, people change their opinions, update old content, and do all kinds of weird things that don’t necessarily make sense.

Point being? The internet changes rapidly.

Unfortunately this also means that a good chunk of your hard earned backlinks are also vanishing every single month.

The good news is that this means your competitors are also losing links but probably don’t know that these are often quite easy to recover!

P.S. While this is completely unscientific and just a gut feeling based on my observations…

I believe that when you lose links, you’re not only missing out on the lost “link juice”. You’re also getting additional negative effects because your website appears to be declining in quality.

Enter Link Reclamation – The Theory

As you’ve probably already guessed, link reclamation is the process of tracking the backlinks your site has lost and trying to recover them.

Before I show you how to find lost links…

The primary thing we’re going to have to figure out to reclaim your links is why they were removed in the first place. This’ll help us decide which angle and strategy to use.

Here are some of the most common reasons I’ve seen for links get removed AND potential angles we could take to recover them:

Page deleted on purpose – Perhaps they’ve changed their opinions on a topic or followed our content audit process to improve their rankings. Either way, they’ve decided that the page that was linking to you shouldn’t exist anymore for whatever reason and you’ll likely have a hard time convincing them otherwise.

Page deleted by accident – I don’t know about you but in the last decade, I’ve probably accidentally deleted at least 100 high performing pages by accident before my morning coffee. It happens and I’ll be super grateful if you let me know by email when you find one of these pages (and your link will be live again, too!).

How do you tell the difference between this and a page deleted on purpose? I generally check for these three things:

1. Use Archive.org’s Wayback Machine to see what content used to exist on the URL. Was it a high-quality or important-looking page? If it was your site, would you have a reason to delete it?
2. Use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to see how many backlinks the page has – if there’s a decent amount, no sane webmaster (with basic SEO experience) would let the page go dead. If it has a lot of links, you could even use it as an angle to convince them to restore the page.
3. Use Ahrefs’ Internal Backlinks feature to see if they are linking to this page from other pages on their site. If there’s a lot of internal links, it was probably an important page to them.

Either way – with deleted pages I always like to email the site owner from a personal (non-work) email and take a stab at getting it live again.

“Hey, I was trying to access XXX page while looking for YYY but it seems like the page doesn’t load? Do you have another link for this?”

Updated content – There’s a ton of reasons for web masters to update existing pages on their site. Not only does Google prefer up-to-date articles and fresher content, your competitors might have one-upped you and started outranking.

When we update content, we generally don’t just add a few sentences and call it a day. We look at how competitors have approached things and most likely re-do the entire page from scratch.

This means there’s a solid chance I don’t even know your link existed and doesn’t mean they don’t like you or your content. It simply didn’t come to mind for the new article.

While reclaiming the exact link won’t be possible in this case, you can treat it as a traditional outreach email.

Write a few paragraphs or sections that’d make their article better and use your own page as a source or place to refer to for additional information.

Ideally this would be the same page you had a link from in the past, but if the new page is on a different topic, you could use a different article to try and nab the link.

Competitors doing outreach – “I noticed you link to X’s article about Y. We have a similar article over at Z with fresh data from 2020 and a ton of helpful graphics. Do you think your readers might find it a more useful resource?”

If you haven’t received one of these emails yourself, you’ve probably heard us or other SEOs talk about this link building strategy.

Well, outreach link building definitely works because fairly often you’ll find your link replaced by a competitors article, likely due to an outreach email similar to the above.

Outreach links aren’t that easy to score so this is a moment to reflect on your own content – are your competitors really doing that much better that someone is willing to take time out of their day to replace an old link?

P.S. They might have also paid to place that link 🙂

In this case, you’ll likely have to either take the loss or severely update your content and try to earn it back the hard way.

I recommend the latter for a variety of reasons.

New SEO team – Sometimes the website will hire a new marketing or SEO person.

And let me tell ya… there’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with inexperienced in-house SEOs.

This may lead to odd policies such as not linking to websites under a certain domain rating, limiting the number of external links per page, and so on.

If it’s a site-wide policy they’ve decided on, your chances of changing their minds are quite slim so I generally don’t bother with these.

Page redirected – If the linking page has been redirected to another URL, it’ll be marked as a lost link by Ahrefs but this might not always be the case.

You’ll want to check for your link on the new page – perhaps they’ve simply updated the URL and the content is the same. In this case, you’ve got nothing to worry about as the link wasn’t actually lost.

If the page has been redirected to another piece of content, you’ll want to take the same approach as you would with content that has been updated.

Check to see if you have anything relevant to add to the page that would act as a reason to link to you, do the work for the site owner, and then reach out to them.

How to Actually Find Lost Links

Now that we’ve covered the primary types of lost links and how you might go about regaining them, you’re probably wondering how you’d even know which links have vanished.

Unless you’re new to these guides, you won’t be a stranger to Ahrefs and that’s exactly the tool we’re going to use today.

Head over to their Site Explorer, type in your domain, and click on “Lost” under the “Backlinks” tab.

This defaults to links lost in the last 7 days but using the calendar you can set and custom date range.

You’ll see that they also make your life just a bit easier by flagging the cause for the link being dropped – whether the link has been removed, the page deleted, redirected, etc.

Not only that, you’re able to set filters in the top menu for specific link types, minimum domain rating requirements, traffic, and so on and so forth.

As a final note – you can also use the Ahrefs Alerts feature to keep track of lost backlinks automatically in the future.

You’ll get either a daily or weekly email with all of the lost links and be able to act on them fast.

If you have any questions about this approach, don’t hesitate to drop us an email, but now on to the other two tips.

Tip #2 – Ask Existing Links to be Changed

Let’s face it.

Most website owners know very little about SEO and don’t exactly have a plan when it comes to linking to you.

You know how media sites and big publications have processes for these things?… Quotes generally link back to the exact source, company names to the website, people’s names to their social handles, etc?

Well, a lot of website owners will just toss in a link to your homepage and be done with it, even if there was a more appropriate place for it.

While high quality links pointing to anywhere on your site are a good thing, the more links you can get to a page you’re actually trying to rank, the better.

Every month we have our team go through new links and see if anyone has linked to the wrong place or if there’d be a more appropriate place.

Just recently, there was a post that mentioned our link building service but then linked to our homepage with a branded anchor instead.

We sent them an email and asked them to switch it over and they complied without any questions asked.

The same approach could be taken with your services, products, or even blog posts.

Tip #3 – Check for Dead Pages

One of the first things I like to check for when we start doing link building for clients is if they have backlinks to any 404 pages.

People with no SEO experience will not think twice about deleting a page with dozens of links and not redirecting it… We know this is a massive waste of links.

So head over to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, look for the “Best by Links” report, and set a filter to only display 404 pages.

There’s no one single way to address this, but I’d advise you to start with the same process we described in tip #1 and figure out why you’ve deleted these pages in the first place.

Then, from there on out you can decide whether you should be restoring the page or redirecting it somewhere else.

This doesn’t make a huge difference but I’m not a huge fan of redirected links as it’s something SEOs have been abusing for close to a decade. It’s only a matter of time until Google (further) cracks down on these.

So even if you set up a redirect, if the link was legitimate, reach out to the site owner and let them know that the page is now up in a different place and ask them if they’d be able to update it on their site.

This is the same thing I recommend people do when they rebrand their site.

Sure, if you redirect to your new brand you’ll probably maintain your rankings decently but I believe Google is going to take it as a massive positive signal if these sites reinforce that by updating their links from “Old Brand and Redirect” to “New Brand”.

Tip #4 –  Get Internal Links to Your Backlinks

Before we get into this one…

This is a strategy that generally works best if you’re willing to pay sites for their effort and time.

Keep in mind that this may be frowned upon by Google and it’s also not something that we condone.

Now…

The more internal links a page has, the more important it is in the eyes of Google, and the more value you’ll get from having a backlink from those pages.

It’s obviously difficult to convince someone to link to your website. But how difficult is it to convince someone to keep their visitors on their site longer, help their own content rank better, and get more traffic?

Well, it’s actually proven to be a bit more difficult than we originally thought, but it’s an effective strategy nonetheless. A lot of people will comply, but a decent chunk will also ask for money as they know you’re trying to gain something from it.

But if you’ve got the resources to add it to your toolkit, the process is quite simple.

Choose a backlink you’ve attained from a relatively large site (in terms of number of pages) and then use the “site:” search function in Google to find other pages that have covered the same topic. Then see if there’s a contextual way to link to the other article and note it down for your email.

For example, if I did a guest post on Smash Digital about keyword research, I’d do a Google search for: “site:smashdigital.com keyword research” and find every other post that could link to the guide.

If you find yourself having to convince site owners that internal links are beneficial to their site, you could send them this article

How to Do SEO Keyword Research (The Easy Way)

Welcome back to Mddigitalgraphicdesigns’ weekly content series, where we give you actionable SEO strategies and tips that you can implement today and start seeing results.

I’ve been talking a lot about the best ways to get backlinks and improve your rankings.

But after speaking to some of you and digging deeper into your sites, it seems like a lot of people still struggle with figuring out what they should be trying to rank for in the first place.

Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of SEO and can make or break your campaigns.

You could be doing everything right with on-page and technical stuff and killing it with link building, but if you’re targeting keywords no one is searching for (or keywords that you’ll never rank for) – you won’t see any traffic or business impact from it.

Keyword research gives you the data and insights you need to improve your bottom line and do so in the most efficient way possible.

Today I’m going to show you how I do keyword research for our businesses. You’ll see the ins and outs of each process and understand why we do it that way.

Time to learn: 20 minutes

Impact (1-10): 10

Tools required: Ahrefs

Tools suggested: UberSuggest

Now, let’s get to it…

Our 4-Step Keyword Research Process

The most difficult parts of keyword research are evaluating the competitiveness, assessing the search intent, and actually choosing your target words and phrases for each page.

Before we get to the theory behind that, we need to first come up with a massive list of keywords to choose from with all the appropriate data.

Here’s how we do it.

Step 1. Brainstorming Seed Keywords

The most efficient way to do keyword research is using dedicated software tools for it, which we’re going to cover in a second.

The way these work is that you’re required to enter a few “seed keywords” as a starting point and the tool will generate similar ideas and variations of it.

For example, I could type in “earphones” and it’d spit out:

• Bose headphones
• Wireless headphones
• Bluetooth headphones
• Noise cancelling headphones
• Best wireless headphones
• Bone conduction headphones
• And a million other results

Along with these millions of variations, topic ideas, and questions you’ll also be able to get a ton of relevant SEO data to help you decide whether these keywords are worth targeting. More on that later.

So how do you come up with these seed keywords?

There’s a myriad of little tricks and hacks you can use to find these, ranging from looking at the table of contents of the Wikipedia page of your topic to looking at niche forums and their sub-sections.

In my opinion, these are gimmicks developed by SEOs to create more content.

If you’re doing SEO for your business or a client, you should have enough knowledge of the business to brainstorm this initial list on your own and use that as a starting point.

For example, if I were to do this for SEO, I might start with:

• SEO
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO
• Ranking on Google
• Google optimization
• Get first on Google
• Content optimization
• Keyword research
• Link building
• Etc

Make a list of topics within your business you’ve got a lot of knowledge about, different services and products you offer, frequently asked questions or concerns by customers and try to think what they might search for when looking for your business.

How many should you have? There really isn’t a right answer because it’s going to depend so much on how big your industry and business are.

In general, the more seed keywords you start with, the more you’re going to get out of the process.

This means higher chances of finding the most profitable keywords.

Step 2. Expanding Your Keyword List

Now that you’ve got a solid list of ideas to start with, we’re going to use tools to expand this.

The best tool for this is Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer, especially considering you need the tool anyway if you’re going to take SEO seriously.

It works exactly like we’d explained earlier – you type in your list of seed keywords and then it’ll give you millions of additional ideas that you can sort and filter in various ways.

Let’s see it in action using the seed keywords I’d listed earlier.

Now, there’s a lot going on in this screenshot.

Let’s break it down a bit.

Ahrefs has already done all of the leg work for us and found hundreds of thousands of keywords opportunities for us.

Obviously, this would take a lifetime for us to go through and filter so we have some additional filtering options to simplify things.

Types of Keyword Searches

In the left sidebar, we have the following options:
All keyword ideas – this is every single keyword Ahrefs has found in their database that may be relevant to your seed keywords.

This is useful if you’re starting with a very specific seed keyword or are in a very small market with not a lot of variations.

In our case, this would show 413,308 results so we’re going to skip this one.

Phrase match – you’ll see keywords that contain your entire seed keyword in that specific order but it may have anything before or after it as well.

So if you were to enter “SEO agency”, it might show you “best SEO agency” or “Smash Digital SEO agency” but it would not show you “SEO for agency business”.

Having same terms – same as the previous except it’ll show you keywords that contain your seed keyword in any order. So entering “SEO agency” would also display keywords like “agency SEO vs affiliate SEO”.

Also rank for – a list of keywords that the top pages ranking for your seed keyword also rank for. So if you search for “SEO agency” and the top results are also optimized for “SEO company” or “Marketing agency” – you’ll also see these.

This is super helpful and probably one of my favorite reports here.

Search suggestions – I’m sure you’re familiar with Google trying to finish your sentences when you’re searching for things.

This is a great way of finding additional keyword ideas and this report automatically gathers all of these variations for you for the seed keywords entered.

Newly discovered – a list of keywords that have recently been added to the Ahrefs’ database. This could help you find keywords based on a new trend or newfound demand for something.

To be honest, I’ve never found anything useful because of this so don’t ponder on it too much.

Questions – this shows keywords that are phrased as a question:

• How to start an SEO agency
• How to choose an SEO agency
• Why use an SEO agency
• Etc

Not only is this a great way to come up with great keywords that are often easy to rank for, it’s an amazing way to understand your target audience better and see what concerns them.

Which one should I use?

While each of these is useful for different purposes and scenarios, I’ll be honest and say that I don’t have a magical process for this bit.

I start with my seed keywords and then click through each of the reports to see which one is displaying the most relevant results for the keywords I’m looking for.

Generally this will be the “Having same terms” or “Also rank for” reports.

Keywords, Metrics, and Filtering Options

Let’s look at the actual keywords section of the report, there’s a lot going on.

Let’s start with the various columns.

Keyword – I think this one should be self-explanatory at this point.

KD – This stands for keyword difficulty and is Ahrefs’ own metric to try and give you an idea of what it would take to rank for this term.

It’s a logarithmic score that goes from zero to 100 based on the number of referring domains to the top 10 pages ranking for this keyword.

Now, you already know that there’s a bit more to SEO than just the number of links to a page so take this metric with a grain of salt and use it as a general guideline.

We’ll talk more about how to actually evaluate keyword competitiveness later on.

Volume – this is the average number of people searching for this keyword, per month.

One of the more common complaints or concerns I hear from small business owners are how “low” these search volumes can be in some cases.

What they don’t realize is that a page never ranks for one single keyword. It’ll likely rank for hundreds of variations that all have search volume that adds up.

Not only that, 16-20% of daily queries have never been searched for before. This is more data that you won’t be able to account for when assessing traffic potential.

Clicks – search volume is a great way to assess potential but Ahrefs takes it a step further by estimating the amount of actual clicks per month.

See, not every search results in a click on the Google results.

For example, when you search for “the CEO of Apple”, Google will present the answer within the SERPs immediately. This means that even if you’re ranking #1, you’re unlikely to get much traffic from this keyword.

Since this is an estimate based on external data, I don’t expect this to be super accurate. I’ll glance over it while doing research and if there’s a lot less clicks than searches, I’ll take a look at the search results and see if there’s an obvious reason (like the knowledge panel example above).

CPC – this is how much it would cost you for each click if you were to buy ads for this keyword using Google Ads. For SEO this is largely irrelevant, although a higher CPC price may indicate that it’s a profitable/valuable keyword.

CPS – or clicks per search. The ratio between search volume and the clicks estimate. Again, I don’t really use this metric much.

RR – or return rate. This estimates how often the same people will be searching for the keyword. It’s a relative value which means if the score is 26, it doesn’t necessarily mean people search for it 26 times a month – you’ll have to compare the RR number to other keywords.

Here’s an example of “SEO speed test” having super high search volume but a ridiculously high return rate compared to other keywords. This means the search volume is largely inflated.

SF – this indicates how many unique serp features there are for this keyword, meaning things like the knowledge panel above, a featured snippet, YouTube carousel, or something similar.

Parent topic – this is the keyword that brings the most traffic to the top ranking pages for your keyword. This can be useful for categorizing keywords into target pages.

For example, the keyword “London seo expert” has the parent topic as “seo consultant london”.

This means that you won’t need to make a dedicated page targeting the “expert” keyword – you’ll be able to rank for it with your normal “consultant” page.

SERP – I think this is the most useful feature out of all of them. One click and it’ll show you the top ten ranking pages for the keyword along with all of the necessary SEO metrics.

This is a huge time saver when it comes to assessing competition, search intent, and ultimately deciding whether a keyword is worth pursuing or not.

Updated – last but not least, the updated column shows you when Ahrefs last updated the SERPs for this keyword. Next to it you also have a refresh button to get the latest results.

Now… I know that was a lot but hopefully it was simple enough.

Based on what these metrics mean and the keywords Ahrefs has presented you with, you should already start to see some opportunities and be able to jot down keywords to target in the future.

If not, don’t sweat it – I’ll be talking a lot more about the keyword selection process, assessing competitiveness, and more.

But first, let’s look at ways to make this list even bigger and more comprehensive.

Step 3. Look at Competing Pages’ Rankings

This is my absolute favorite step of the process and the highlight of every SEO campaign.

You’re going to get dozens of hours worth of work done in a dozen minutes and feel like an absolute genius.

Let’s pretend I really liked a keyword and decided it was worth targeting – SEO services, for example.

I’m going to use the SERPs feature to look at the top ten results already ranking for this term and then click on the keyword column for each result.

Clicking on that will show us every single keyword these competing pages rank for and as you can see, each of them ranks for hundreds.

So with just a few clicks, we have hundreds of unique keywords to target that are highly relevant to SEO services.

Step 4. Check Other Top Pages

Yeah, yeah… Cool, but not that impressive.

Well, Ahrefs can take it up another notch.

Not only do we have all of the keywords these guys spent hours researching and optimizing their pages with…

I’m going to take each of the top 10 results of my target keyword and put their domains in the Ahrefs Site Explorer and use the “Top Pages” report.

Why? Well, if these guys are ranking well for keywords you want to rank for, that didn’t happen by accident.

There’s a good chance these guys have done their keyword research already and are also pumping out optimized pages for other great keywords.

The “Top Pages” report shows us all of these additional topic ideas that our competitors are using to get clients. And of course, we can again click on the “Organic Keywords” button to see exactly which keywords are bringing in the traffic.

P.S. The SEO industry isn’t the best example as there aren’t a lot of unique keywords for people who want to hire an agency. However, this is by far the most effective keyword research strategy out there (and it’s stupid easy!)

Additional Keyword Research Tools

Ahrefs is by far the best SEO tool out there and that includes keyword research.

But I know a lot of you aren’t willing to spend that much money on it, so here are a few alternatives that at least kind of help you do the same for free.

However… I strongly encourage you to invest in Ahrefs if you’re going to take SEO seriously. If you’re on a tight budget, plan all your activities that require Ahrefs ahead of time, sign up for a month, and get it all done.

It’ll be way more effective than trying to do the same with free tools.

UberSuggest seems to be the best free keyword research tool out there and I’ve used it a fair bit myself.

You’ll be able to find keyword ideas, get insights into search volume, and they even have a keyword difficulty score, although I can’t tell you whether it’s accurate or not.

As far as my knowledge goes, you’ll be limited to basic keyword research using seed keywords.

This means you’re going to miss out on the best strategy of reverse engineering your competitors keywords and top pages…

Another alternative you’ll see touted a lot is the official Google Keyword Planner.

This used to be a decent way to do keyword research but it was originally developed for people looking to buy Google Ads. In recent years they’ve made it even more focused on that and it has really lost its place.

The user experience is poor, the data is inaccurate and highly limited, and anything you’d want it to do, Ahrefs and UberSuggest can do better.

Avoid it.

Searches related to are the search suggestions below the actual results, as we saw earlier. This is another great way to come up with additional keywords.

But there’s no need to go through these manually, not only does Ahrefs cover them, there’s also…

AnswerThePublic – this handy tool goes through the entire alphabet collecting search suggestions for you as well as various questions related to your keyword.

Now, there’s a myriad of other keyword research tools out there, both free and paid. These will be enough to get the job done efficiently, but if you don’t like any of them for some reason, feel free to Google around more.

How to Choose Your Keywords

Finding a massive list of keywords is a critical step of the process but it’s by far the easiest.

Where most people get stuck is actually making sense of all the numbers involved and deciding which keywords to pursue.

That’s what you’re going to learn next.

Can I Actually Rank for This Keyword?

Before we take on a new client, we generally ask them what keywords they’re trying to rank for.

I’d estimate at least 25% of the time we get responses along the lines of: credit cards, fitness, vitamin C, green tea

In case you don’t have a ton of SEO experience, you might want to Google these keywords and look at the websites that are ranking for these terms.

They’re all giants like Wikipedia, Amazon, HealthLine, and so on.

The average (or even, an exceptional) business owner will not stand a chance trying to rank for these keywords.

I’m confident in saying that this is one of the most common SEO mistakes we see people making – targeting keywords that are far too competitive.

What you need to keep in mind is that almost no one visits the second page of Google, let alone the seventh page.

In fact, close to 75% of the clicks are most likely going to the top three results. Ranking “okay” for a big keyword is unlikely to make any difference in your traffic or more importantly, revenue.

How to Assess Keyword Difficulty

Assessing keyword difficulty is super difficult.

I’ve been doing SEO for over a decade and there’s still plenty of times I underestimate the competition of a keyword or rank easily for something that seemed impossible. It’s not an exact science.

KD in Ahrefs

I briefly talked about the KD metric you’ll see for keyword difficulty within Ahrefs but let’s dig a little deeper.

It’s a logarithmic score from 0-100 that is calculated based on the number of referring domains to the top ranking pages for your keyword. If you dig deeper into a keyword within Ahrefs, they’ll even give you an estimate that “you’ll need approximately XX links to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.”

There’s two massive issues with using this as your primary way to assess keyword competitiveness.

First of all, it’s calculated based on what it’ll take to get on the first page, not the first position.

As we mentioned earlier, almost all of the traffic goes to the top three spots.

Not only that, in most search results, it’s much more difficult to move from #2 to #1 than it would be to go from #10 to #4.

Secondly, there’s a lot more that goes into ranking on Google than just links to the page.

If the competition has tons of links to the page, but they’re all low quality, the domain has little authority, and the content is crap… Well, it might not be that hard after all.

Next up, I’m going to talk about how I manually assess the search results to decide how competitive a keyword is.

This’ll also help you understand why Ahrefs’ KD may not be the best metric to base your decisions on.

Manual Keyword Difficulty Assessment

Here are the five primary factors I take into consideration when looking at a keyword. These are in no particular order and estimating each of their importance is, well… Damn near impossible.

1. Domain Authority – You VS Competitors

Google has denied that they use domain authority as a ranking factor, but it’s quite clear that they do use some sort of domain-level metrics to come up with the search results.

All you need to do is look at the search results to see this in effect.

It’s why you see 1,000 word articles by Forbes, that literally say nothing, outrank comprehensive guides created by industry experts.

If I show these two articles to 100 people and ask them, which page deserves to rank better, I’m quite confident that very few would respond with Forbes.

For the same reason, when you see the Amazons, Walmarts, and Targets in the search results for an eCommerce keyword, you’re unlikely to see a small or medium-sized online store on the first page.

So how do you actually look at domain authority and how does that play into competitiveness?

In my experience the DR (Domain Rating) metric that you see in Ahrefs paints the best picture when it comes to authority and the rankability of a site.

Yet again, it’s a logarithmic score from 0-100, with 0 being a brand new site and 100 being Facebook, currently the most authoritative site on the internet.

Logarithmic means that when the score is low, it takes a lot less effort to move up and vice versa. To go from a DR0 site to DR30 might be a matter of getting 100 high quality links. To go from DR45 to 50, that number might be closer to 300.

Take these numbers with a grain of salt but I generalize websites into the following categories in my head:

• DR 0-19 – Effectively brand new, very unlikely to get much organic traffic
• DR 20-29 – Developing site that is starting to get traction in search engines, some traffic.
• DR 30-44 – A decently established site that can rank for a good amount of keywords and likely gets good traffic.
• DR 45-59 – A proper site that is likely seeing success both in the search engines and elsewhere, a lot of traffic and a lot of ranking opportunities.
• DR 60-80 – In most industries there are very few keywords you won’t be able to rank for with focused effort.
• DR 80+ – You’re the giant, stop reading this.

So how does this play into assessing competitiveness?

You’ll want to look at the top ten results for the keyword you’re trying to rank for and compare your DR to the competitors.

As an example, if you exclusively see DR60+ sites on the first page but you’re sitting at DR35 – there’s a very slim chance you’re going to rank, even if you do everything right.

I’d say you’re able to shoot 15-20 points above your own DR when you’re killing it with other ranking factors such as content and links.

This means a DR45 site may be able to compete with DR60s with effort (read as link building). But doing the same against DR 70-80s is going to be a longshot.

2. On-Page SEO

This one is elementary.

If the pages you’re competing against don’t have proper on-page SEO done, it’s most likely a great opportunity for you.

The most important things to check for would be:

• Keyword in title
• Keyword in URL
• Optimized meta description
• Use of headings (H1/H2/H3)
• Use of images and alt tags
• Internal links to the page
• Keyword density (is it overoptimized?)
• Page loading speed

Even authority sites need to have the basics covered, unless they’re keen on you stealing their rankings 🙂

3. Content Quality

Content quality is an interesting topic when it comes to ranking on Google.

Sometimes you’ll look at the search results and wonder if the ranking page even matters or is it just about links and authority?!

Other times you’ll see a DR5 website outranking 9 gigantic sites with a 8,000 word in-depth guide.

To summarize… Having amazing content doesn’t always work, but when it does, the results are quite exceptional.

Content quality is a super subjective topic and there’s no real way to measure it but a few things to consider are.

Content length – How long are the articles ranking in the top five? Are they long enough to cover the topic in depth? Would you be able to write a slightly longer piece without sacrificing quality or adding fluff?

Content value – Does the page actually solve the problem the reader was searching for? If you were looking for “the best standing desk” – could you confidently decide which one to go for when finishing reading the article?

Content depth – Are there additional topics that should be covered on this page? Are the frequently asked questions on this topic addressed in the content?

All of these questions can help you figure out whether you’d be able to create something better than the competition and potentially get an edge in ranking for this keyword (and tons of long-tail variations of it).

4. Search Intent

Search intent is a huge ranking factor nowadays.

See, Google already knows what users want for each query and they’re only going to show the most relevant results.

Let me give you an example…

Let’s pretend you’re trying to market a Shopify app that helps people do email marketing.

Naturally, the first keyword you’d love to rank for is “best email marketing app for shopify”.

But when you open up the search results for this keyword…

Every single article Google finds relevant for this keyword is a listicle covering several apps.

This means that if you were planning to rank your home or product page for this, you wouldn’t stand a chance.

So the question is… Do you want to have a round-up-style article on your site that also promotes your competitors? Or perhaps you’d want to target other keywords.

The same goes for other industries:

• Whey protein – only shows informational articles, not product pages or stores
• Link building – only shows tutorials, not services
• Outdoor fire pits – mostly shows ecommerce stores, not articles or round-ups

You get the point.

5. Number of Links

I’ve probably said this a few times already but… Backlinks are the number one ranking factor when it comes to SEO.

While backlinks to your site in general are super helpful – they help you increase your authority and thus, as discussed, your ability to rank – links to the specific page you’re trying to rank are even more important.

So if there’s a bunch of sites in the search results that are more authoritative than you, but don’t have any links to the page – that’s an opportunity.

On the flip side, if everyone is of equal authority or lower but have dozens or hundreds of high-quality links pointing to the ranking page, that’s going to be difficult to fight.

That’s pretty much all you need to figure out whether you can rank for a keyword and what it’d take to get there. It’s not an exact science but it’s the best we can do against the big G.

Now, back to assessing other factors…

Monthly Search Volume and Number of Keywords

I can’t tell you what a good monthly search volume to aim for is because it’s going to vary so much from business to business.

If you’re selling ten dollar iPhone accessories, fifty searches a month probably will not sound super appealing to you. But for someone who’s trying to land enterprise clients who might sign multi-million dollar contracts – that’s plenty.

So you’re going to have to decide on “worthy” search volumes based on your own business insights.

But I want to tell you to use this as a veeeeeery conservative compass of the potential of the topic.

Why?

Like I mentioned before, the average page ranks for hundreds if not thousands of keywords, not just the one word you’re trying to optimize it for.

Just look at Shopify’s podcasting guide that ranks for over 3,500 unique keywords.

How in the world would you guess all of these before actually creating the page and add up the search volume potential?

You could look at competitors but even then, you’re going to look at wild guesstimates.

Another aspect to consider here is that 16-20% of the daily search queries have never been searched for in the past.

Sure – a huge chunk of these are going to be new products, happenings in the world etc (especially in 2020 – sheesh…)

But there’s also going to be a solid amount of variations of YOUR keywords from people typing it in a weird way or being oddly specific.

Good luck adding these to your traffic estimation  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Let me put it this way… Even after more than a decade of doing SEO day in and day out, I almost always underestimate the amount of traffic I’m getting from hitting #1 for my targeted keywords.

Buyer Intent, Business Impact and Your Goals

Let’s pretend you have an auto shop.

You’ve been sending Smash Digital SO many referrals that they decide to grant your one SEO wish…

Would you prefer to rank #1 for “car tires” with 14,000 searches a month OR “best place to buy tires” with 8,100 monthly searches?

I’m guessing the answer is quite obvious but in case you’re hesitant… I’m confident in saying you’d make a lot more money by ranking for “best place to buy tires”.

We call this voodoo buyer intent keywords.

People could be Googling for car tires for a myriad of reasons.

Perhaps they want to show someone a photo to illustrate a point, communicate when they don’t speak the language, see the history of them, or learn about different types.

Whereas with “best place to buy tires” they’ve clearly made a decision that they are going to buy tires and are looking to give their money to someone.

Target buyer intent keywords and that could be your money…

So don’t just look at raw search volume when deciding which keywords to target or prioritize. Ask yourself what is more likely to have an impact on your business.

Here are just some variations of keywords that indicate buyer intent:

• Best X
• Best X for Y
• X Reviews
• Top X
• Top X for Y
• Buy X online
• Affordable X
• Best price X
• Cheapest X
• Compare X

Sometimes the intent isn’t 100% clear from the word itself, in which case you’ll want to Google your keywords and look at the type of pages that Google is ranking.

For example, if I wanted to buy a simple supplement, I’d probably Google something like “magnesium supplement”.

While there’s no buyer intent modifier, personally I’d be expecting at least some shopping results and a place to buy them.

Google doesn’t seem to agree with me and only shows articles by giant publications that explain what Magnesium is… Real helpful.

Traditional buyer intent isn’t everything.

This doesn’t mean that you should only try to rank for keywords that show a very clear intent to buy.

I think it’s more important to understand how you’re going to convert this potential traffic into actual sales once you rank.

With the aforementioned Magnesium supplement, I’d be more than happy to rank for “how to sleep better” which may not even seem related… But I know I could use copywriting to convince people to buy the supplement.

SERP Real Estate

WTF is SERP real estate?

Well, it’s anything that’s happening on the first page of Google and it’s expensive stuff.

Unfortunately, gone are the days where ranking #1 meant that you’re on top of Google.

That’s all that fits on my screen – a bunch of ads and some YouTube videos.

In fact, when I scroll down further I get a “People Also Ask” box with a bunch of questions and THEN we see the first organic result.

This can get way worse for some keywords and is an important thing to take into consideration, especially if it’s a more competitive keyword.

The more features they use, the less clicks you’re likely to get in the first position.

You might encounter:

• Google Ads
• Map results
• Knowledge panels
• Google Shopping results
• The Google News box
• An image pack
• Related questions
• A YouTube carousel
• And a few other things

Of course, you could wiggle into some of these yourself but that’s beyond the scope of this guide.

Now, you might’ve noticed we left out one SERP feature – the featured snippet.

That’s because this is a SERP feature I actually look forward to seeing in the search results.

Anyone who ranks on the first page may be selected for this and it’s displayed above the first result. This means that if you’re good at SEO, you only have to make it to the first page and then you may be able to steal the featured snippet from whoever currently has it.

I’ll teach you that in a future post 🙂

How Much Work Is It?

The last question you’re going to want to ask yourself is how much is it going to cost me to get all of this done? That includes money, time, and other resources.

While getting links from 15 different websites may not seem super difficult or expensive and you know you’re able to do it… If the keyword only has 300 searches a month and sells a cheap product, I’d bet there are better keywords to invest in and prioritize.

Whereas maybe for another post you’ll need a 8,000 word, highly technical article and at least 60 referring domains from super high quality sites… But if the potential returns are high enough, it just may be worth all that work.

That’ll be on you to assess.

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES NAIL THE F.A.C.T.S.

F.A.C.T.S. – Found, Accessible, Content, Trust, Synced

In a previous life, I worked for a home service company. We had a fleet of more than 25 trucks and a 40,000-square-foot facility full of equipment. It was an impressive operation, and I frequently gave tours to new employees, partners, etc.

There was one vantage point where you could look down and see our entire operation, and I often paused there to give people a chance to take it all in. Without fail, someone would always say something like, “Wow, there must be millions of dollars in equipment down there!” And sometimes I would respond with something like, “That’s true, but our single most valuable asset isn’t down there—it’s in the cloud.”

“WOW, THERE MUST BE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN EQUIPMENT DOWN THERE!”

“THAT’S TRUE, BUT OUR SINGLE MOST VALUABLE ASSET ISN’T DOWN THERE—IT’S IN THE CLOUD.”

People would give me a puzzled look. That asset was our company website. Millions of dollars in physical equipment and, aside from our brand, our company’s most valuable asset was nothing more than some pixels on a web server somewhere. It is incredible when you think about it, but the same is almost certainly true for your business (and if it isn’t, you have an opportunity on your hands).

It doesn’t matter whether you own an electrical, HVAC, painting, pest control, plumbing, or roofing business—your website is your most valuable asset. A great website will accelerate your business growth, reduce service delivery costs, differentiate your brand online, and more.

What Exactly Makes a Great Home Service Company Website?

If you ask the typical digital marketing guru that question, odds are you will quickly be drowning in a sea of technical jargon and mumbo-jumbo. Not helpful, and that is why I’ve written this post.

Let me give you a simple and easy way to determine whether a website is great or not. A great home service website has the F.A.C.T.S. right. Of course, F.A.C.T.S. is an acronym, and we all love those because they are so easy to remember.

F.A.C.T.S. STANDS FOR:

• Found
• Accessible
• Content
• Trust
• Synced

Easy, right? Let me quickly walk you through the meaning of each word within the context of what makes for a great home service contractor website.

Found

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES ARE EASILY FOUND

The best home service company websites are found on the first page of Google’s organic search results. Let’s say you own a residential HVAC company servicing Greenville, S.C. Your website should be listed multiple times on Google’s first page when a homeowner searches furnace replacement Greenville, SC.

You can pay for Google Ads and Google Local Service ads and ensure this happens, but having your website listed multiple times in the organic search results will offer your business the best long-term ROI.

You achieve this by having a website that leverages all the best search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Make no mistake, you should also run pay per click (PPC) and Local Service ads, but SEO continues to offer the best long-term marketing ROI for home service contractors.

If you want to learn more about SEO’s ins and outs, we have written lots of content over the years about every aspect of it.

For example:

• What Is SEO?
• 10 Ways Contractors Can Improve Google Rankings
• Contractor Marketing Ideas, Strategies, and Tips

If it were me, I would not waste time trying to learn SEO—you will never catch up to the best and the brightest who have been studying it for more than a decade ship has sailed.

Instead, take these steps:

1. Evaluate your current website. Does your site show up on the first page of Google in the organic search results for keyword phrases related to your company—other than your company’s name? If the answer is, “no,” your website doesn’t have the F.A.C.T.S. right. Consult with an expert.
2. If you are going to engage a web design or digital marketing company to build you a new website, make sure they are also well-versed in home services SEO. Ask them for case studies and references to that end. How well a website ranks has little to do with aesthetics, so you’ve got to dig deeper.
3. In competitive markets, ranking on the first page of Google will require an ongoing investment in SEO, but your website is the foundation and therefore the starting point. (And even with an ongoing investment, SEO will still offer the best return on investment.)

And remember, a great home service contractor website is easily FOUND.

Accessible

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES ARE ACCESSIBLE

The best home service contractor websites are accessible. Accessibility comes down to two things:

1. Speed
2. User Experience

Speed is obvious. When someone clicks on your website, your site must load quickly. Patience today is non-existent, and nowhere is this more true than online!

Think about it—have you ever searched on your phone, clicked on a site only to find that the site takes forever to display? Of course, you have! And what you did next is the same as everyone else—you clicked the back arrow and went to the next site listed on Google!

User experience means that your site looks and functions properly across all devices. It should not matter whether someone uses a desktop computer, a laptop, tablet, or phone. Your site needs to load quickly and be easy to read and use.

As a consumer, nothing is worse than grabbing your phone, finding a site that appears to have what you need, and then trying to click the phone number to call or complete the website form only to have it not work. It is beyond frustrating.

As with SEO, we have written tons of content about the importance of website speed and usability. If you want to learn more, here are some to get you started:

• How Fast Should A Website Load?
• Mobile-Friendly Website Design: The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need

Again, if I were in your shoes, I would NOT attempt to become an expert on website speed and user experience. You are a business owner, and this is a waste of your time.

Instead, I recommend you do/think about the following:

1. Test your current website. You can test the speed here or here. If you want to test usability, get a bottle of wine and a few friends, and pull out your phones. Visit your website and try to find various things or perform certain functions. Have your friends call attention to things that are difficult to find or use.
2. If you’re going to engage a company to build you a new website, make sure you spend some time interviewing them about their philosophy when it comes to website speed and usability. Ask them what percentage of website visitors in your industry use mobile devices (we have these stats because we work with hundreds of home service contractors).

Content

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES DELIVER AWESOME CONTENT

The home service company websites that perform the best have awesome content. Some contractors think of your website as an interactive brochure or maybe a virtual customer service representative.

We suggest home service contractors think of their website as if it were a virtual sales rep. The good news is, if you have any of these perspectives, you’re right! Your website is all of those things, and your site must have excellent content to be effective.

Awesome website content establishes your company as an authority. It also effectively conveys lots of information quickly to:

• Connect with visitors
• Convince visitors that your company is the best choice for their needs and
• Convert them into a lead – something on which you can act (e.g., a call, web form, or webchat)

Connecting with visitors comes down to two things: answering their questions and creating trust. Think about it—when someone visits your site, what questions are going through their mind?

The following questions are common to virtually all home service companies:

• Does this company service my area?
• Do they do the type of work I need? How often do they do it (i.e., is it your specialty)?
• How quickly can I get someone to my house?
• Is the company locally owned and operated?
• Have I ever seen this company before?
• Do I know anyone who has used them or recommends them?
• Does the company seem reputable and trustworthy?
• Why should I hire this company over the next one down the list?

Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Answer their questions in a way that builds trust and creates confidence. Differentiate your company with your answers. This is how you quickly connect, convince, and convert visitors.

CONTENT & SEO

Google doesn’t rank websites; Google ranks website pages. Content is a key component of each website page. The quality of the content on each page of your website plays a critical role in how your website ranks organically.

Consider the following example. Imagine you own a pest control company. On your website, there is a page called “Services We Provide.” That page lists the different types of pests you eliminate or remove.

One of your nearby competitors has a page on their website also called “Services We Provide,” but, on their page, in addition to summarizing all their services, they link to additional pages on their site—a page for each specific pest.

All things being equal, your competitor’s page will almost certainly outrank yours for a particular search (e.g., yellow jacket nest removal Charlotte, NC).

Do not make the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that lots of pages or lots of text on your pages equates to a cluttered, difficult to navigate site. A website design company specializing in home service websites will use design and coding techniques and technology to make your site easy to read and navigate—no matter how many pages or how much content you have.

You also do not want to make the mistake of buying a website with templatized content. Your content also needs to be unique to your business. Your content must differentiate you from your competitors—and again, it only has a few seconds to do this.

MORE THAN WORDS

Great content extends beyond website pages with a few paragraphs on each page. To be effective, you (or whoever builds your website) must carefully consider other types of content—for example, images and video.

When it comes to communicating a lot of information quickly, images are often superior to words—just take a look at the image above. What does it tell you?

If you have branded, nicely wrapped service vehicles, work those into your website, so visitors see them right away. Familiarity can build trust. If the person visiting your site has seen your vehicles around town or, even better, at their neighbor’s house, it is a huge trust-builder.

If you want to improve your site’s content on your own, here is a good exercise. Visit one of your site’s service pages, and ask:

• Why would someone have ended up on this page?
• What problem are they facing?
• What questions would they naturally have?
• What images could you display that would immediately form a connection?
• What could you put in your content to differentiate from your competition?

The questions above are part of a process we use when working to improve site content. No matter how well optimized a site is, asking these questions will almost always result in additional improvement.

Like the other topics above, we have lots of information about website content:

• How Much Content Do I Need on My Website?
• How Google Recognizes and Rewards Quality Content
• How to Write Website Content That Ranks Well on Google
• Is Content Really King?

My recommendation is that you:

• Evaluate your current website:
  • How many pages does your site have?
  • Use your website analytics to figure out how well your content does at attracting visitors, connecting with them, and converting them into leads? (If you don’t know how to do this, contact us—we do it all the time!)
• If you’ve already made the decision to hire a company to build you a new site, make sure you:
  • Ask them lots of questions about the content that will go on your new site
  • Ask their sales team how important content is
  • When you review their proposal, consider how much content they will move from your old site to the new site
  • Will they be creating any new pages or content?
  • Recognize that all of these answers factor into the cost of your new website (Read: you get what you pay for!)

Trust

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES BUILD TRUST

Content and trust are closely related. The best home service company websites quickly create a sense of trust with visitors. In addition to some of the tactics mentioned above, here are a few additional ways to create trust with your website visitors:

• Make your contact information and license number prominent throughout the site
• Use real images of your service vehicles
• Put images of your staff (vs. stock photos) throughout the site
• Use logos for the forms of payment you accept
• Include the logos of the major brands you represent or service
• Feature reviews and testimonials throughout your site—this is exceptionally powerful IF they are NOT anonymous
• Prominently display your service areas across the website
• Place award badges in a high visibility section of your website
• Add your financing options in an easy-to-find location on your website

Synced

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES ARE SYNCED WITH SALES & SERVICE

While you might have been able to guess what I meant by each of the previous four words, this last one is not so obvious.

The best home service company websites are synced with sales and service. In other words, there is a seamless transition between someone who reaches out via your website with a service or sales request.

Here are some examples of what I mean by this:

• Your website’s content must mirror the language used by your team
• If your site has coupons or offers, they must be kept current, and your sales and customer service team must know them
• When someone calls the number on your site, the call must go to the right team
• When someone fills out a website form, it must get routed to the right person, and that person must reply quickly (the faster you respond, the higher the booking rate)

The best home service company websites are aligned and tightly-synced with sales and service.

A great way to see how well your site is synced is to mystery shop your company (or have a friend do it for you). Have them fill out a service request form on the website, and note how quickly someone followed up. Have them call the number on your site with a sales inquiry and see how quickly they get in touch with a live person. Review the coupons and offers on your site to make sure they aren’t expired.

Make someone accountable, and remember, you must regularly review your company’s systems. You can expect what you inspect!

Conclusion

There is a lot of technology under the hood of the modern home service contractor website, and it is easy to get overwhelmed by it all. It doesn’t help that many web marketer gurus use a jargon-rich language that almost seems designed to complicate and confuse, but do not get discouraged.

Press on, because a great website can catapult your home service company to new levels of growth. A great website can improve your customer service while simultaneously reducing costs. A great website can differentiate your brand—something that is increasingly important as companies like Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and, to a different degree, Google attempt to commodify various home services.

Visualize your website as one of your most valuable assets, and do not let the fact that it exists as pixels in the proverbial cloud obscure your vision for what it could be. The quality of your website and your company’s overall performance go hand in hand, so it is crucial to critically evaluate your site.

32 SEO STATISTICS YOU SHOULD KNOW IN 2021

SEO Stats for Local Businesses

Search engines utilize powerful algorithms to deliver content that meets the needs of the searcher. With these powerful algorithms comes a lot of uncertainty from digital marketers and business owners alike. SEO, or search engine optimization, is all about adjusting content and code on your website and optimizing local and off-site elements like Google My Business to try to perform better in search.

According to Hubspot, about 64% of digital marketers invest time in SEO. The following stats will give you insight into the influence of SEO and how your digital marketing efforts can impact your business:

Organic Search Statistics

Investing in organic search performance is vital to make the most of digital marketing. When competing for a spot in the 10 blue links, understanding what performs on search and how it influences consumer behavior can make the difference between making and breaking your SEO strategy.

1. Globally, Bing accounts for 6.7% of the desktop search market, while Google took 86.6%. (Statista, 2021)
2. Google dominates mobile in the United States with over 94% of mobile search engine market share. (StatCounter, 2021) – Even more than desktop, Google is the preferred search engine of mobile users in the U.S.
3. 85% of Google users find an answer to their query with their initial search term. (Backlinko, 2020)
4. Title tags that contain a question have a 14.1% higher CTR vs. pages that don’t have a question in their title. (Backlinko, 2019) – Searchers are looking for answers to their questions, so keep this in mind when writing content!
5. Mobile searches containing “not working” have grown by over 65% in the past two years (Google, 2018) – These searches can include valuable keywords like “ac not working” that have a high indication someone needs repair.
6. The average top-ranking page also ranks in the top 10 search results for nearly 1,000 other relevant keywords. (Ahrefs)
7. The #1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click compared to a page in the #10 spot. (Backlinko, 2019) – Where you rank on search matters! The closer you are to the number one organic position, the more likely you are to gather clicks.
8. Only 0.78% of Google searchers will click on the second page. (Backlinko, 2019) – It’s no surprise many users don’t navigate to the second page, but this number tends to surprise people. Those top 10 spots tend to be very competitive, but they can make a huge difference when it comes to your traffic.
9. On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67.6% of all the clicks. (Impact, 2020)
10. 50% of people are more likely to click on a particular brand name if that brand name shows up more than once on the search results. (Omnicore, 2020) – SEO is not just to strengthen your appearance for non-branded keywords. Your branded keywords depend on high-quality SEO too!
11. 29% of search queries have featured snippets in their search results. (Ahrefs) – These helpful blocks of information pull from pages within Google’s index automatically. Featured snippets are often found for queries that contain questions.
12. In the majority of home services verticals, over 55% of consumers run a search before scheduling an appointment (Source: LSA) – Consumers researching services like moving, locksmiths, lawn care, and pest control are the most likely to use search engines.
13. Callers convert 30% faster than web leads. (Source: Forrester) – When a user needs emergency service or wants an immediate response, they tend to call. This is increasingly important to remember for home service brands where emergency and same-day service are a significant part of their business.
14. On average, ranking in position #1 on mobile gets you 27.7% of the clicks. Ranking in position #1 on desktop gets you an average of 19.3% of the clicks. (SEOClarity) – Where you rank matters, and it matters even more on mobile!

Page Speed Statistics

Google is often elusive about directly saying metrics are ranking factors, but Page Speed is an exception. Page speed’s direct contribution to your site’s performance has an impact beyond your rankings, as it can often be indicative of much more.

1. As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by 123%. (Google, 2017)
2. Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. (Unbounce, 2019) – If you want to keep customers, fast page speed is a major factor.
3. Sites that load in five seconds (compared to those that load in 19) see 70% longer average sessions. (Think with Google. 2016) – With Google’s Core Web Vitals, your site experience is not just a tool to keep users on your site; now it’s a ranking factor.
4. The first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. (Portent, 2019) – When sites load quickly and users stay on the site longer, conversion rates tend to rise.

Content Statistics

There’s a saying in SEO that “content is king.” High-quality content is a major pillar of SEO performance and should be seen as an investment in your business’s success. Creating quality content isn’t rocket science, it can even begin with insights found right on Google.

1. Companies that blog have 55% more visitors on average (HubSpot) – Looking to drive traffic to your site? Start a blog with high-quality content that solves problems and answers questions.
2. The average Google first page result contains 1,447 words. (Backlinko, 2020) – Word count does not have a direct influence over where on page one you rank, but what we can tell from this average is that Google and users alike love comprehensive content that matches user intent.
3. 61% of pages have meta descriptions that truncate. (Ahrefs) – Don’t bury your lead in your meta description! Highlight competitive differentiators and value propositions early in your meta to prevent the valuable info from being cut off by Google.
4. Google rewrites meta descriptions 62.78% of the time. (Ahrefs, 2020) – As Google gets better at understanding search intent, it changes meta descriptions to try to emulate what a user is looking for. So no, you aren’t crazy, you didn’t write that meta description, Google did.
5. 23% of searchers use autocomplete suggestions to complete their Google Searches. (Backlinko, 2020) – Need new content ideas? Check out autocomplete for frequently asked questions and related topics.
6. 7% of all voice search answers came from a featured snippet. (Backlinko, 2018). – Content creation like blog posts can help capture voice search users as they often rank for featured snippets.

Local SEO Statistics

Local SEO efforts help capture traffic from people looking for services in their immediate area. Customer intent is everything, and when your business serves a local customer base, understanding that intent can drive results at a greater rate than you might guess.

1. 40% of mobile searches have local intent. (Think with Google) – User intent is everything, so when performing SEO for local businesses, be sure to keep your mobile site in mind.
2. 57% of consumers will only use a business if it has 4 or more stars on local reviews. (BrightLocal) – Home services marketers need to have a strong review management strategy in place to secure and maintain a good star rating.
3. Google saw 350 times more searches for the keywords “local” and “near me” in 2019 than in 2009. (Google) – If you have a local business, these types of keywords are going to drive essential leads for you, as they reflect a desire to convert.
4. Local and “near me” searches are especially common on mobile. Among the fastest-growing search terms are “HVAC repair,” “landscaping near me,” “plumbers near me,” and “roofing companies” (Google).
5. 88% of searches for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours. (Nectafy, 2019) – Want your rankings to convert to leads? Invest in Local SEO efforts including a Google My Business profile, which encourages users to call from search.
6. For local queries, 42% of searchers click on results inside of the Google Maps Pack. (Backlinko, 2020)
7. Whether it’s by visiting the business or contacting them by phone, a combined 47% of consumers get in touch with a business after making a local voice search. (BrightLocal) – Voice search often provides users with local pack results. Is your business likely to appear in voice search for local searches?
8. 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase. (BrightLocal) – When users are looking for local businesses, they tend to be closer to the purchase stage in the sales funnel. Gaining visibility in your area means gaining traffic from those customers that are likely to convert.

How to “SEO” Optimize a Page For Keywords

Welcome back to mddigitalgraphicdesigns’ weekly content series, where we give you actionable SEO strategies and tips that you can implement today and start seeing results.

In my previous guide, I went deep on why keyword research is critical and how to actually go about doing it for your own website.

The response was unanimous.

Karl, What the Hell Do I Do With All These Keywords?!

Relaaaaxx. 

You’ve heard it a million times: make sure your page is optimized for the target keyword.

Well, today I’m going to cut the bullshit and show you how to actually optimize a page for keywords.

Time to learn: 10 minutes

Impact (1-10): 10

Tools required: None

Tools suggested: SurferSEO, Ahrefs

Now, let’s get to it…

How to Optimize Pages for Keywords

Before any of what I’m going to teach you has any relevance, you need to figure out what the keywords are that you’d like to rank for on Google.

After all, if you don’t know where you’re trying to go, I can’t help you get there.

Check out our keyword research guide from last week and I’ll show you exactly how to do that.

When you’ve done that, you should end up with a massive list of keywords related to your business, and even more keywords related to those keywords.

Now you’re going to learn what to do with your pages to actually rank for these terms.

Terms and Concepts

Before we start talking about the different ways to utilize your keywords, there are a few general concepts we need to get out of the way.

Like I mentioned in our keyword research guide, a page never just ranks for one single keyword. It’ll likely rank for hundreds of them, whether you’re trying to do so or not.

But for each page we’re going to target, you’ll need to decide on a primary keyword. That is the most important keyword you’re going to try and rank for and most likely best reflects what the topic of the page is.

For example, coming back to our keyword research piece: “How to Do Keyword Research – the Ultimate Guide”, the primary keyword would be “how to do keyword research”.

Not only is it reflective of what we’re talking about, it has the highest search volume out of all the keywords we were able to find, other than “keyword research”.

Next up we have secondary keywords. These are keywords that reflect the same topic and are highly related to your primary keyword.

Continuing with the same example, our secondary keywords would be:

• Keyword analysis
• How to find keywords for seo
• How to research keywords
• What is keyword research
• Keyword research guide
• Keyword research checklist
• Seed keywords
• Etc

The last thing you’re going to need to know is how to categorize keywords.

Let’s say I’m talking about the best keyword research tools – I could easily include a massive section on this in my keyword research guide…. Or I could create a separate post about it?

What about for keyword research vs keyword analysis?

Which way is correct? Should each target keyword have a separate page targeting it?

Fortunately, there is no right answer for this.

Why fortunately? Well, because that means 90% of your competitors are probably going to screw this up and you’re about to know “the secret”!

And it’s stupid simple.

Any time you’re faced with this type of question, simply Google your keyword, and look at the top results and it becomes clear.

You’re either going to see that all the top 10 posts are about the “parent topic” (e.g. keyword research guide) or that Google treats it as a separate topic.

You’re going to want to repeat this for every single keyword and based on the results, categorize your secondary keywords under primary keywords.

If you’ve got access to Ahrefs, this process becomes much easier because you can already see which keywords your competitors (optimized) posts rank for. Not only that, you’ve also got the “parent topic” feature to assist you in your research.

To learn more about the above, check out our keyword research guide.

How to Keyword Optimize Titles

The page title is one of the first places Google is going to look to try and understand what a page is about and thus, what it should rank for. It’s also the bit that is actually displayed in the search results and convinces your potential customers to come to your site.

Back in the day, we used to stuff as many keywords as possible into these and that was a massive chunk of our SEO efforts… and it worked.

Nowadays, I encourage you to include your primary keyword in the title but put the vast majority of your focus on creating the most clickable and compelling title for the user.

This is because evidence shows click-through rates (CTRs) are now a part of the algorithm and also determine rankings. So even if you make it to #1 with all of your other SEO efforts, if users are clicking less frequently on your result than the previous top position, it just may drop you down a few spots due to the “negative feedback”.

You’ll also see a lot of SEOs insist on the importance of having the primary keyword towards the beginning of the title tag. I’ve seen little to no benefit from this and prefer to focus on the CTR instead. But if it makes sense, you could try and take advantage of that.

The last thing I want you to think about is whether there’s additional keywords you can include in your title tag.

Sure, like I said before, the primary keyword should be your number one focus and everything else is a bonus… But if people search for your keyword + 2020, it only takes a second to add the year in and potentially benefit from that.

Optimizing Your Permalinks

A permalink is the address of a page on any website on the internet. Essentially it consists of two parts – your domain name (smashdigital.com) and the slug (anything that comes after – e.g. /blog/).

Permalink optimization is super simple on a page level. There are also site-wide considerations but we’ll leave those for another time.

When it comes to optimizing your URLs for a specific page, you’re going to want to follow three super simple rules.

First, you want to include your primary keyword in there. So if you’re trying to rank for “best SEO agency”, you’ll want to have “best-seo-agency” in the URL.

Secondly, you want to keep it as short as possible and cut out all the fluff. Often times I’ll even leave it as just the primary keyword and maybe a modifier (e.g. for sale, best, reviews, etc). This means that “the-best-seo-agency-in-the-world-2020” is not okay.

Lastly, you want to make sure URLs are evergreen (last forever). So if your post is about the 11 best keyword research tools, you’ll leave the URL as “best-keyword-research-tools” because the amount of tools might change in the future. The same applies for the current year and other similar variables.

SEO and the Meta Description

The meta description is the little box you see below the title tag in search results.

While this used to be a direct ranking factor, Google hasn’t been using it as such for a long time now.

In spite of that, the meta description is still one of the first things we optimize as SEOs.

Guess how that works…

If you said something along the lines of “put your primary keyword in there” – you were right.

But unlike every other time, we’re not placing the keyword there because Google is going to better understand what the page is about (they claim they don’t use it for that but I really don’t believe them 100%).

Like I mentioned earlier, a ranking factor that has been growing in importance is the clickthrough rate from Google to your site.

That’s why we always try to get the keyword in there – if people search for that term, it’ll get bolded in the meta description and help us stand out just a little bit more. 

But other than that, I try and optimize our meta descriptions for the highest clickthrough rate (while still including the keyword).

In general, it ends up something along the lines of:
“Looking to solve the problem of primary keyword? We offer X, Y, and Z things and that is our unique selling proposition. Click here for a special offer/to read more.”

The maximum length of a meta description is 156 characters so these only take a minute or two.

Content Optimization

This is the most important part of optimizing a page.

“Yeah, yeah, I know – put your primary keywords in the content”.

Well, yes…

But there’s more to it than that.

You’ve got the first part right – you’ll want to include your primary keyword (probably more than once) as well as your secondary keywords.

You should already have a list of both of these. If that’s not the case yet, the best way to do this is look at the competing pages and see what keywords they rank for using Ahrefs – you can see a full guide here.

What keyword density to use?

Fine… Use keywords, but how many times? This is probably one of the most common questions I get.

As SEOs love to say… It depends.

Back in the day, it was a lot simpler – a looong looooong time ago, the more you used a keyword, the better you ranked for that term. As Google advanced, 1-2% keyword density became the new standard.

Nowadays there’s no magic number and it seems to change from keyword to keyword, which means you have to adapt accordingly.

Naturally, you take your most important keywords, look at the top five results for them, and look at how often they use the keywords in relation to their body word count.

While it’s totally fine to do this by hand as well, the tool we’re going to talk about for the next optimization factor will also take care of this for you.

Which brings me to… related words and phrases.

The reason we don’t have fixed keyword densities anymore is because Google has gotten smarter. The algorithm is now capable of understanding the meaning behind content and how different words, phrases, and entities are connected.

In other words, they know that if I’m writing an article about “how cars work”, I probably can’t get by without using the words: engine, tires, petrol, etc.

This also happens beyond the meaning of the words.

While this is a massive exaggeration, it gets the point across quite well. If everyone on the first page of Google for “best restaurant in New York” mentions Lombardi’s, but your article doesn’t – it might give Google a hint that you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

When you start creating an outline for your article, always read through the top ranking pages and figure out which topics they cover as well as which questions remain unanswered. This’ll help you create the best possible content for both Google and your users.

To see our exact process for this, also check out our guide to creating content that ranks.

Beyond the topics, you also need to figure out what secondary keywords to include and with what frequency – that’s where Surfer SEO comes into play.

Surfer is a correlational analysis tool that was created to make on-page and content optimization easier. Instead of guessing, they crunch the numbers and give you actual data to work with.

And it’s super easy to use – you type in a keyword, it analyzes the top 50 results for that in your desired location, and then clearly displays what is working for pages that rank and what doesn’t seem to matter…

While there’s insane amounts of on-page optimization data there, the most powerful feature is called “True Density” and helps us optimize the two things I’ve just covered – keyword densities and related words and phrases you need to be using.

I entered “link building service” as an example keyword and hit the “Audit” button to see what Surfer suggests.

Immediately I know that my page should be between 3,220 and 6,734 words long and that it should include these 52 phrases in these quantities. Not only does it show phrases, we also have 219 words that should be included as well as their “relevance” and frequency.

No guessing, no math – just data.

Is this 100% accurate? Of course not, but it’s a hell of a lot better than creating pages based on your intuition and gut feeling.

I generally try to follow their recommendations for any words and phrases that have a relevance of up to 70%, anything beyond that is a bonus.

Optimize Images

The next bit of content you’re going to want to optimize is the images on your page.

Google doesn’t see images the way that we do, they just see what is in the website’s code and usually, that’s something along the lines of:

<img src=”https://smashdigital.com/images/photo-3523.png“>

That tells us absolutely nothing about what’s on the image and the same goes for Google…

However, if we change the file name from “photo-3523” to “link building service pricing”, it’s a bit clearer to Google what that image might be about. Not only that, that gives the page overall a bit more context as well.

Beyond the file name, we can also  add an ” alt tag” to further describe the images on a page.

Now, this doesn’t mean that every single image on your page should be named and alt-tagged based on your primary and secondary keywords.

Generally I make sure to use the primary keyword on both of them at least once but then in the rest of the cases, try to make them descriptive and relevant to the actual content, while using related words and phrases in a natural way.

Make sure to check out our full guide to image optimization for some additional tips on this.

Internal Links to Page

Last but not least, the last critical thing you’ll want to do to optimize a page for specific keywords is to build internal links to them.

Google crawls the internet by clicking on every single link it can find and then making connections between those pages.

The same is happening within your own website. Through the structure of the website, Google will understand which pages are more important, which ones are related to each other, and so on.

Just by having any internal links going to a page, you’re already going to help it rank way better.

But links also come with anchor text and that’s a great way to put more emphasis on what the page is about and use your primary and secondary keywords.

When it comes to internal links, currently, there has been zero evidence of over optimization happening due to anchor text so feel free to just use the primary keyword all the time. If you want to err on the more natural and safer side, mix it up with variations and secondary keywords (I do).

9 CTR Optimization Strategies To Grow Your Organic SEO Traffic

Welcome back to mddigitalgraphicdesigns’ weekly content series, where we give you actionable SEO strategies and tips that you can implement today and start seeing results.

Let’s kick today’s lesson off with a quick screenshot.

That’s a keyword with 3,600 monthly searches jumping from #5 to #1 and staying there.

What did we do to make this happen?

If you guessed link building… You know us well, but not this time.

Keep reading and I’ll show you the strategies we used to optimize this page and many others to double the site’s traffic.

Time to learn: 15 minutes

Impact (1-10): 8

Tools required: Google Search Console

Tools suggested: None

Now, let’s get to it…

Working With What You Have

You’ve probably heard of this concept in a few different ways. It goes along the lines of…

“It’s a lot easier to make more money off existing customers than to acquire new ones.”

Or…

“It’s easier to make more money with your existing business than start a new venture from scratch.”

The same holds true for SEO. It’s often going to be a lot easier to increase traffic on your existing pages instead of going after new keywords, creating more content, and building more links to a fresh page.

That’s exactly what we did in this case and we used the power of copywriting to do it.

Enter Clickthrough Rate (CTR) Optimization

If you’ve read a few of our previous SEO guides, you’ll already know that your CTR is going to affect search engine rankings.

In other words, even if you’re able to rank #2 with great on-page optimization and high-quality backlinks, if people are clicking on the #3 result more often than usual, Google might drop you further down for being irrelevant and not meeting the expected CTR.

Obviously, the opposite also holds true and that’s what we’re going to use to our advantage to improve our rankings and get more traffic

We’re going to find pages that are close to getting some traction but have a poor CTR and then I’m going to show you how to fix that up and hopefully climb to higher positions.

Not only that… Increasing your CTR literally means getting more people to visit your site.

How to Find Underperforming Pages

First up you’re going to head to Google Search Console and their “Performance” report. You’ll want to click on the CTR and average position boxes to get some additional data.

You’re going to have a nice overview of thousands of keywords that are bringing you traffic, what position you’re ranking in for these terms, and what kind of CTR you’re seeing.

Our goal is to find pages that are already doing well but have a poor CTR in relation to the position you’re ranking in.

According to data from 2019, the CTRs for the top 10 positions look something along the lines of:

1. 32.58%
2. 16.69%
3. 10.34%
4. 7.24%
5. 5.27%
6. 3.93%
7. 3.02%
8. 2.35%
9. 1.86%
10. 1.53%

These are averages and are going to vary massively from search to search, but they give you a pretty good idea of what is acceptable and what is not.

To actually find these pages, I recommend sorting the data by either the highest number of impressions or highest average position and then looking for odd CTRs.

Sorting by position, we can clearly see that there’s a bunch of keywords that have CTRs way below the average for #1 rankings.

We’re going to be optimizing these on a page-level, not for specific keywords, but you’ll want to save down any and all opportunities you see for later reference.

When sorting by impressions, you’re going to see much lower CTRs across the board because the average positions will likely be lower and the queries more generic.

Nonetheless, you can find some pretty amazing, high-impact opportunities from here.

How to Improve Your Organic CTR

Let’s talk about how to actually go about increasing your clickthrough rate for a page.

To do that, let’s first look at the Google search results.
There are really only two things we’re able to influence when it comes to our results – the meta title (purple on the image) and the meta description (the paragraph below it).

While the meta description definitely has an impact on the CTRs, it’s going to be quite insignificant when compared to changes you can see from improving the title. So that’s what we’re going to be focusing on.

Think about it… Unless you’re doing a highly important or specific search, you’ll likely simply skim through the top 5 results by looking at the titles and choosing the most compelling one.

I’m going to share 9 strategies and tips you can use to stand out in the search results and increase your CTR.

1. Assess Your Relevance to the Search Results

Google’s gotten pretty damn good at making search results relevant. In fact, it’s one of the most important ranking factors – if your pages serve a different intent than what is currently on Google’s first page, you’re probably not going to rank well.

But… There are also search results that display mixed intent.

You might see some e-commerce stores and some product reviews… Or how-to style articles and listicles.

This is the first question you’re going to want to ask yourself when it comes to both improving your position by being more relevant as well as increasing your CTR – what does the average searcher actually want?

If you’re ranking #7 for a keyword with a product page while everyone above you has informational content – you won’t really have anything to optimize for. You’re irrelevant.

It’s time to decide whether to create a new page and angle to rank with or move on to the next keyword.

Other times it may be as simple as shifting the angle of your page. Maybe you’re ranking with a listicle style post (15 tips for achieving X) but everyone ranking above you (and what the searchers want) are “how to achieve X”.

In summary – give people what they want and Google might give you what you want.

2. Change Your Title to Stand Out From the Crowd

I always try and read through the top three ranking pages and try to put myself in the searchers shoes on a deeper level… Beyond whether they want to see some reviews or to buy a product.

Let’s say I had an article reviewing the email marketing tool ActiveCampaign and was ranked #4 but not getting very many clicks.

The top three results are titled:

1. ActiveCampaign Review 2020 – When (and when not to) use it
2. ActiveCampaign Review
3. ActiveCampaign Reviews and Pricing – 2020

These titles don’t set the bar too high but let’s roll with it…

One of the best ways to increase our CTR is going to be standing out from the search results and doing something unique.

If everyone else is putting pricing, features, comparisons, and other boring stuff in the title tags, I need to find a different angle.

From experience as well as reading through the top pages, I know that this is more of an advanced tool. This means that the searcher likely doesn’t need to be convinced that this is a good tool or that email marketing is necessary.

What they really need to be convinced of is to ditch their old email marketing provider and make the switch over to ActiveCampaign.

This is something we can take advantage of.

I might call the page something along the lines of:
ActiveCampaign Review – Why I Switched Over From Mailchimp

This is just an example but there are a million other angles you could take with it, that create a lot more curiosity and interest than a generic “when to use it” or “why it’s good” title.

Some additional ideas:
ActiveCampaign Review – How We Grew Our Store 157%
ActiveCampaign Review – Is It Really Worth $XXX/mo?
ActiveCampaign Review – Best Email Solution for eCom?

So simply doing something different from your competitors is going to be one side of it and the other goes back to our previous point about matching the searchers intent and what might compel them most.

To give you another example… We had a website ranking for a keyword where the top five results were all listicles along the lines of…

• 6 Steps to Sleep Better
• 15 Proven Tips to Sleep Better
• 6 Secrets to a Good Night’s Sleep

We tested several titles that were radically different from this, but they ended up going a bit too far from the searchers intent.

The winner of the test?

X Strategies to Improve Your Sleep [TRIED AND TESTED]

The hypothesis for the page was that we all had already heard of tips for sleeping better – sleep in a cold room, stop using screens before bed, etc… But what people really wanted to know was which ones are actually important and make a difference.

3. Look at Similar Niches for Ideas

This is probably one of my favorite little tricks when it comes to SEO (and it applies to more than just titles…)

Whatever you’re trying to achieve – in this case – a better title tag… Someone has already put countless hours into doing it the right way and finding the best approach.

I like to look at other similar niches or markets and see how they’re optimizing their title tags.

This becomes even more efficient if you can look at much more competitive or lucrative areas that are similar.

Let’s say you’re ranking for the best law firm in Charlotte (that’s a US city) and want a better title tag.

I would start to Google for law firms in some of the bigger and more competitive cities. See how other law firms have approached this in New York, California, Chicago, San Diego, San Francisco, London, etc.

If you’re an online business, the same logic applies but on an industry level.

Ranking for best facebook ad agency? Look at the SEO agencies, marketing agencies, Google Ads agencies etc.

Ranking for the best coq10 supplement? Try searching for magnesium, fiber, fish oil, calcium, and other way more popular supplement types.

An affiliate site ranking for long-tail tech stuff? Look at the most popular titles in tech and how they do it – best bluetooth earbuds, best wireless headphones, best gaming laptops etc.

Sometimes you’ll see the same formulas repeated over and over that you can implement in your own business.. Other times you’ll just get one word that’ll help you turn things around.

Either way it’s super easy and you’ll learn a lot by doing it (and not just in terms of titles).

4. How to Write a Well-Optimized Title Tag

Other than the above points and SEO best practice in general, you’re going to benefit from learning more about copywriting and headlines.

Here are five principles I try to follow with each title tag:

Be Specific

While it’s great if your headline creates some curiosity, it shouldn’t be regarding what the page is about or what value you’re going to add to the reader’s life.

The more specific you can be about what they have to gain from reading it, the more likely you are to get the click.

Here are a few examples I found on Google 🙂

Problem: How to fix your posture
Title: Good Posture in 30 Days: Exercises, Calendar Plan, and More

Problem: Improve copywriting
Title: 75 Resources for Writing Incredible Copy that Converts

Problem: Creating an SEO strategy
Title: How to Create an SEO Strategy for 2020 [Template Included]

Problem: Learn guitar
Title: How To Learn Guitar: An 11-Step Programme For Beginners

Whether it’s discussing additional tools you provide on your page to solve the readers problem (e.g. templates, calendars, exercises) or simply indicating that this is targeted to them (beginners, experts, kids, old folks) – the more detailed you get, the more attention you’ll receive.

Avoid Neutral Titles

Have you ever searched for a product review for “final confirmation” only to see that the first Google result calling it a scam?

You get a strange feeling in your gut, quickly click the result to see what the fuss is about, only to see the article conclude… “No, it’s not a scam – here’s my (affiliate) link to go buy it.”

While that’s one of the worst examples of this, it’s also the best proof that this strategy works.

You want your titles to have either positive or negative sentiment – avoid anything neutral if your goal is to get as much traffic as possible.

Tell people about:

• Things they have to try
• Mistakes to avoid
• Negative feelings they can get rid of (Stuck in a rut? Feeling broke?)
• Positive outcomes (5 steps to getting your dream job)
• Potential scares (Still building backlinks through blog comments? Watch out!)

Headline and Subtitle

Traditionally great headlines come in two parts – the headline itself and a subtitle.

With meta titles we don’t always have the luxury of fitting that in due to character limitations but for some topics, it’s still a great strategy to keep in mind.

The only difference is that in search results, the first part will often be your target keyword. This’ll ensure you rank well while also establishing some relevance for the query.

The subtitle will help you convince people to actually click on the result and differentiate yourself from competitors.

An example from our own site:
Using FAQ Schema– Double Your Search Visibility in 5 Minutes

Include Numbers

Using numbers in headlines to increase interest is probably one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Hell, I used in for the guide you’re reading now!

BECAUSE IT WORKS.

While behavioral psychology is much more complex, the simplest explanation is that it creates curiosity (can there really be 65 ways to walk your pug?!) and has the potential to deliver a lot of value in a compressed format (I’m going to skim the headings and learn all 65 ways, fast.)

There have also been studies conducted that show that headlines with odd numbers in them generate more clicks.

I’ve never noticed a huge difference in this and recommend you do the same. Write the best damn content possible and go with whatever number of items you end up having.

Point being – some numbers > no numbers.

Keep It Short

According to The Psychological Review, people can keep seven, plus or minus two, objects in their working memory at a given time.

In other words, we’re not great at paying attention when too much is going on.

While it’s critical to have your headlines be concise and clear, you’ll want to stick between 5-9 words for the best CTR.

Try Stealing the Featured Snippet

You’ve probably seen featured snippets in search results. Google has been making them more frequent for the last few years.

What’s a featured snippet? Here’s a screenshot of a featured snippet explaining and showing it.

Featured snippets provide an answer to the searchers query straight within Google, without having to visit a website. While it’s great for a quick overview, most searches are far more complex than the limited amount of space in a featured snippet – this means they still get a myriad of clicks, especially considering they rank above all the other search results.

Why are these a big deal?

Well, because you don’t really have to “earn” that ranking in the traditional way. Anyone who ranks on the first page may be selected for the featured snippet instead. It’s a lot easier to rank within the top ten than to lock down the first position PLUS this ranks even higher than that.

So how does Google choose who gets the featured snippet?

They algorithmically choose “the best answer” to the search query, which effectively means that they mostly focus on the content itself and its relevance (as long as you’re on the first page already.)

The best tip I can give you to score more featured snippets is to be a lot more concise with your writing. Instead of writing sentences along the lines of “To summarize things, featured snippets are basically blah blah” you’d do better with “Featured snippets are X.”

Beyond the words on the page, it’s clear that Google also takes on-page SEO into consideration when it comes to selecting the featured snippet. This includes the use of things like numbered lists, use of headings (and doing so in the right order and a logical way), the cleanliness of your code and much more.

What if the search results already have a featured snippet but a competitor has it? 

Well, that’s the best part,

It’s possible to steal featured snippets from your competitors and do so instantly by asking Google to reindex the page using Google Search Console.

I’m going to write a dedicated guide about this in the future that’ll walk you through the entire process. To give you an idea though, it mostly revolves around analyzing what the current featured snippet has done to obtain it (their length, format, structure, etc).

Increase Your SERP Real Estate Using FAQ Schema

What better way to get more attention than to take up more space?

That’s exactly what you’re able to do by using FAQ schema.

Here’s a screenshot of a blog post that has FAQ schema attached to it and as you can see, it takes up nearly double the space of a traditional search result.

People can also click on the “Show more button” to see even more questions.

The best part? You have 100% control over what the questions and answers are and you can make this appear for almost any page, instantly with some simple code.

Click here to check out our detailed guide on how to implement this, step-by-step.

Add Other Relevant Schema

Beyond the FAQ schema, there’s a bunch of other types of page-level markup you can use to get Google to enhance the search results and stand out more.

I’m sure you’ve seen the recipe snippet, which displays user ratings, their count, cooking time, and nutritional information:

Or the fancy star-ratings under product reviews, along with the reviewers name:

Of course, there’s a lot more out there – ranging from event details to product stock levels.

To learn more about these, check out the official mddigitalgraphicdesigns’ website

Update Your Content and Publish Date

This used to be one of the most effective SEO “tricks” just a few years ago. While Google has made it a lot harder to abuse, it’s still an amazing strategy.

Google absolutely loves fresh content because in many industries, that’s a sign of a high-quality page and website. Who’d want to read an outdated guide?

Simply by keeping all of your most successful pages fresh and up to date, you’ll often be able to jump a few positions in the search results. It’s usually not enough to just change from 2020 to 2021 though – we recommend adding a few paragraphs of text at least and ensuring you also update the publish date.

The other aspect to consider for this is your competition.

While your article or page may have been the best out there when you initially published it, your competitors are also trying to grow and improve and may have overtaken you.

Google the top keywords your page should be ranking for and compare your content to the competitors – is it as long, detailed, and helpful?

If not, that’s a perfect opportunity to give it a refresh and also increase your traffic.

Build. More. Links.

Cmon, you knew this one was coming.

In fact, I really struggled when trying to not list this as the number one tip in this (and every other) guide.

Want to get a page ranking from #7 to #1?

Considering the number one ranking factor in Google is backlinks, the most efficient way to get there is going to be to  score more high -quality backlinks.

There are extremely few instances where building more links is not the right way to go.

Wrapping Up

I hope you found this weeks guide helpful and as always, if anything was unclear don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll help you out.

I’ll see you next week with some more SEO valuebombs.

WHY YOUR MOBILE SITE EXPERIENCE MATTERS NOW MORE THAN EVER

In 2021, Your Mobile Website Experience Is Critical to Marketing Success

Mobile website experience has mattered for quite some time now, but the importance of a strong mobile experience only continues to rise. What is mobile site experience, exactly? Your site needs to be:

• Mobile-friendly – Can the site be navigated without needing to pinch to zoom or scroll sideways?
• Fast to load – Will your site load before users are compelled to click back to their search?
• Easy to use – Can users find what they’re looking for?

Good mobile site experience is no longer a competitive advantage, it’s essential to your performance in search.

Mobile Is the New Desktop

It’s no surprise with as much as we’re all connected to our phones that a lot of searches occur from mobile devices. As early as 2015, desktop traffic was surpassed by mobile device traffic, and it hasn’t slowed down since. As of February 2021, mobile devices make up over 54% of traffic worldwide:

Source: StatCounter

In 2015, 61% of mobile device users were more likely to contact a local business if their site was mobile-friendly. Nowadays, if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, not only are you less likely to get leads, you’re less likely to appear in search to begin with.

From Mobile-Friendly to Mobile-First

Google first clearly indicated that mobile experience impacted search results with their mobile-friendly update that rolled out in April 2015. At this point in time, users began to see different search results on desktop and mobile devices to cater to users’ needs. Site content was still number one, so sites with poor mobile performance could still rank well, even number one, without a mobile-friendly site.

Taking it to the next level, Google began experimenting with mobile-first indexing in 2016. That essentially means Google looks at the mobile version of sites when evaluating content to rank and appear on Google. By December 2018, half of the pages shown in results globally used mobile-first indexing. Prior to this shift, Google was looking at the desktop version of sites when ranking content, but because the majority of Google users were now accessing Google search on a mobile device, the mobile experience became a priority.

The default for new sites switched to mobile-first indexing in July 2019, but the transition for existing sites was significantly less immediate. Switching the entirety of the web to mobile-first indexing has taken years. In mid-2020, Google announced they experienced setbacks from their original goal of mobile-first indexing for all sites across the web by September 2020. As of the end of March 2021, Google’s rollout should be complete, and desktop-only sites will be dropped from Google’s index.

Unsure if your site is mobile-friendly? Check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

So, What Makes a Good Mobile Site Experience?

Having a mobile site is not enough anymore. Instead, you have to have a site that is truly optimized for mobile devices. Many elements contribute to the overall experience on your mobile site:

CONTENT IS KEY

When mobile sites first gained popularity, it wasn’t uncommon to provide users different (or less) content on mobile compared to desktop to keep mobile sites simple. But with the complete rollout of mobile-first indexing, your mobile site’s content now needs to take precedence.

Google’s John Mueller has made it clear that Google is indexing only the content that exists on the mobile version of a site, and desktop content will essentially be ignored. Want your site’s content to rank in Google search? Ensure the mobile version of your site reflects that content, or Google will gloss over it.

If you employ less content on your mobile site and your site has made the switch to mobile-first indexing, you may have seen a decline in rankings or overall site performance, as Google is no longer seeing the additional content on your desktop site. Essentially, your mobile site is now the primary version of your site, and you should treat it as such.

MOBILE-FIRST DESIGN

Sites optimized for mobile come in different shapes and sizes. Both mobile-friendly and responsive site designs are characterized by the ease with which one can use them from a mobile device. A mobile-friendly site functions the exact same on desktop and mobile devices. While you may be able to click on elements easily, sites that are only mobile-friendly aren’t designed with the mobile user in mind. These sites meet Google’s standards and can be less time-consuming to build.

Responsive site design varies the appearance of a site based on the size of the browser or device it is viewed on. Responsive sites reformat the content on a desktop site to accommodate the needs of mobile device users because the behavior of mobile device users is different than that of desktop users. Responsive sites not only meet Google’s standards for mobile sites, but they utilize their layout to appeal to mobile users. With today’s shifting landscape, many design teams have started to employ a “mobile-first” approach to designing websites, focusing on elements like conversion rate.

Flash plugins, pop-ups, and elements that are too hard to reach on a mobile device can ruin your site’s mobile experience for a user. Not convinced your mobile experience matters? 75% of smartphone users expect to get immediate information while using their smartphone. If your site doesn’t measure up or is too difficult to navigate, users are likely to hit “back” and choose your competitor instead.

Core Web Vitals: Google’s Latest Ranking Factor

We’ve all done it – gotten frustrated by how long a site takes to load, and simply given up. Google’s newest update looks at just that. Google’s Page Experience Update, coming in May 2021, pairs existing user experience metrics (mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitials) with new metrics called “Core Web Vitals.”

Core Web Vitals metrics measure how long it takes to achieve three factors on your site: loading, interactivity, and visual stability. The measure of those factors are as follows:

1. LARGEST CONTENTFUL PAINT (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint measures how long it takes for the largest content element (e.g., a banner image, video, contact form, etc.) on your page to become visible in the users’ viewport. Put simply, LCP measures how quickly your web page loads.

2. FIRST INPUT DELAY (FID)

First Input Delay measures how quickly users can interact with your website in their browser. Keeping your website’s code lean by reducing third-party scripts will improve your site against FID.

3. CUMULATIVE LAYOUT SHIFT (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift measures the amount of visual change to your web page after a user starts interacting with it. The lower the score, the better the experience for your website visitors.

Core Web Vitals, combined with existing page experience metrics, will contribute to Google’s rankings to fulfill Google’s goal of helping users find the most relevant and quality sites for their queries.

Stand Out in SERPs

Mobile users often conduct localized searches from their devices, looking for “________ near me” and other similar queries. Google is constantly looking to serve the most relevant results, so those localized queries can help bring you business. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you can be missing out on valuable leads that are likely to convert.

When optimizing your site for search, think like a mobile user. SEO elements like title tags and meta descriptions should be optimized for what shows on mobile results, ensuring the most valuable information about your page isn’t cut off when viewing from the confined space on mobile. If you save a competitive differentiator, like offering 24/7 service, until the end, it’s likely mobile users won’t even get to see it.

Once your mobile site experience is up to par, it’s important to remember your mobile search strategy only begins with your site. Combining onsite optimization tactics like meta data optimization and structured data use with local SEO efforts can really help your brand appearance on mobile devices.

Marketing with Mobile in Mind

From mobile-first, responsive site design to search engine optimization services, the team at Blue Corona is equipped to help improve your mobile site experience and drive results.

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