SEO

Best Content, Internal Linking, A Horrifying Google SERP, & More!

What Content Performs Best for Getting Links: A Study

This is an interesting, but far from scientifically rigorous study on what kind of content gets links. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is how it could be replicated within the niches that matter most to you, since it is more art than science (but, I would argue, still gives you a solid 80/20 of what content does well in your niche and why).

I manually analysed with my eyes the “top” (as defined by Trust Flow and Citation Flow) 100ish links for 2 random well ranking sites in Insurance, Ecom in an interesting niche, Ecom in a dry niche, Travel and Finance. I only really cared about links that looked, to me, to have been strategically built through the active creation and distribution of a thing. That thing can be as involved as huge scale video production, right to a simple Tweet sharing a quote with a journalist. I ignored links that looked, to me, to have occurred entirely naturally such as genuine forum discussions, certain reviews and so on. I did this because I am interested primarily in understanding what strategies are most effective in order to ensure I am doing the best shit now, and for the future.

This is a long, thoughtful piece that I’d highly recommend reading through. The author goes through what kinds of content were most “paid for,” what kind of content got the best (most authoritative) links, and what content got the flat-out most links:

A Brief Content Study of Things You Probably Already Knew

This classic Backlinko style post ticks all the boxes:
✅analyzes an absurd amount of data
✅partners with a best-in-class big business
✅lots of numbers and statistics
✅more than 50% of the content on the page is comments

Classic.

The post itself is quality, but mainly serves to back up common SEOisms with data generated from articles in Buzzsumo’s database, such as:

• Most articles generate zero backlinks
• Long content generates more backlinks than shorter content

This post is probably of most interest if your site relies on social media more so than backlinks, but if that’s the case, you probably knew most of this anyway…

Why Google Doesn’t Use CTR and E-A-T Like You Think

Why Google Does Not Use CTR, Bounce Rate, and E-A-T The Way You Think It Does

An SEO think-piece (rant) on how many SEOs are full of shit and correlation does not imply causation, and how, with cherry-picked data, some SEOs spread misinformation that refuses to die because it gets caught in viral feedback loop.

Google does NOT use E-A-T as a ranking signal.

It doesn’t matter how often Googlers reject that belief. It doesn’t matter how much they debunk it. The same people come back time and again and proclaim their correctness, asserting they finally have proof that the E-A-T- Fairy is real and bestowing blessings upon everyone.

Wikipedia alone proves there is no E-A-T ranking signal. Wikipedia is not only NOT an expert Website, the news media has published many stories about subject-matter experts being driven away from Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia’s community has responded to these criticisms and attempted to adjust their policies through the years to promote better editing, their fundamental principle of allowing consensus from the unwashed masses to make decisions has led to many potentially good articles being edited into mediocrity. In some cases outright false information persists in Wikipedia articles because their rules against “edit wars” favor the people who are clever enough to revert accurate corrections.

You’ll most likely have a strong reaction to this post–whether for or against, but that’s a good thing. On the one hand, it’s important to try and validate on your own the kinds of things some very visible SEOs claim. On the other, Google has zero interest in having any of us really understand their algorithms work (outside of making sure they can be easily crawled for maximum indexing and scraping, but that’s a story of another day).

So, I mean, you’ve got to accept SOME advice eventually. Probably helpful to read something from both sides of the SEO aisle as much as possible. For every Marie Haynes theory read something from Michael Martinez.

Then start drinking…

Decentralized vs Centralized Internal Linking

https://www.kevin-indig.com/the-best-internal-linking-structure-depends-on-your-business-model/

Interesting post from a really smart SEO about the two main ways you can approach internal linking. A bit of an advanced post, but one you shouldn’t miss.

Websites vary by the point of conversion, depending on what business model they follow. One type of site leads all users to one or a few landing pages, the other has users sign up on almost every page. Should the approach to internal link optimization be the same for both? Of course, not!

Sites that have a few points of conversion are what I call “centralized”. They don’t have scalable page templates, in most cases. Instead, they consist of landing pages, a blog, and some other pages. Centralized sites are often used by SaaS, app, and enterprise companies like Atlassian, UBER, or Salesforce.

The opposite is sites with many points of conversion, used by Ecommerce businesses, social networks, and marketplaces. They are “decentralized” sites with page templates they can scale, such as public instances, user profiles, apartment listings, products, or categories. Examples are Pinterest, Airbnb, and Amazon.

The Definitive Guide to Internal Links for SEO

Backlinks are the backbone of ranking in Google. There’s an army of SEOs spending tens of thousands of dollars on acquiring backlinks every single month.

Everyone knows this but most SEOs overlook the power of strategic internal linking.

Internal links are just as important and best of all, they’re free.

What if I told you that instead of launching yet another guest posting campaign for a page that is stuck in the third position, you could use internal links to work your way to the top?

That’s exactly what you’re going to learn today.

How Links Work

Your website’s homepage is almost always going to be the strongest page.

It likely gets the most visitors and attracts the most backlinks.

Well, Google discovers the web through links and that’s why backlinks are valuable in the first place.

The same logic applies to internal links.

Let’s pretend the homepage is worth 100 points and has links to ten other pages on your site.

Assuming they have no external links to them and no other internal links, they would in theory carry a value of 10 points.

If you now link to another 10 pages from any of those, they would have a value of 1 point each.

The Value of Internal Links

Here are just a few reasons both Google and your users need internal links:

• Provide navigation options for both users and search spiders
• Via the anchor text, they tell them what a page is about (e.g. topic)
• Pass “link power” to other pages, indicating their importance
• Help understand which pages are related to each other

Internal links are critical for ranking. Look at any successful site and I can guarantee they’re heavily linking to their other content pages.

(Source: Author’s screenshot)

Internal links are also split into two categories. Contextual links are more powerful and are present in your main content (e.g. the majority of examples in the example above) and then there are navigational internal links (the box on the right side).

These strategies are best used to:

• Boost up pages that are close to the top 3
• Funnel link juice to pages that don’t attract many links (e.g. product pages)
• Help Google index new pages faster and give them a quick boost

Now let’s get into how to actually implement internal links on your own site for a nice ranking boost to your most important pages.

A word of warning: As with anything, you don’t want to go crazy with this. Just because these strategies work, doesn’t mean you’re going to want to link out with every single word in an article. Keep the user in mind and use common sense.

5 Internal Linking Strategies That You Can Use Today

1. Keep Valuable Pages Close to Your Homepage

With your homepage likely being the strongest page and passing the most value, you want to keep your most important pages as close to it as possible.

This means that whether you’re trying to rank a service page or a comprehensive guide on your blog, you’ll want to feature it either in your menu, sidebar, footer, or homepage.

Here are some of the most effective ways we’ve done it:

• Use comprehensive, layered dropdown menus
• Use your footer as a “mini sitemap”
• Have long-form pages – more words means more linking opportunities

2. Build Links From Your Top Pages

We get it. Sometimes a page is important but not necessarily a great fit for your homepage or your main menus.

In this case, you can make use of other high authority pages on your site.

You can use a tool such as Ahrefs to determine the highest value pages on your site by clicking on either “Top Pages” for highest traffic pages or “Best by Links” for the pages with the most backlinks.

(Source: Author’s screenshot)

Both of these will include super important pages on your site.

Go through all of the most notable pages in these categories and try to look for opportunities to link to the pages you’re trying to rank.

If there is no “natural way” there already, you can modify the content to make it work.

As a simple example, you could do something like:
“If you’ve enjoyed reading this guide, you can also check out our 7-chapter image SEO guide.”

Get creative and combine search engine optimization with providing value for your users.

3. Create Internal Links From Relevant Pages

Once you’ve been through the strongest pages on your site, the authority site is covered.

Now it’s time to focus on relevance.

Do a Google search with “site:yourdomain.com YOUR TARGET KEYWORD” to see what other pages Google deems most relevant to that topic.

Go through these pages and ensure they also link to your target page.

4. Use a Related Posts Plugin

For WordPress sites, there are plugins out there that show users “related posts” after each article. Not only will these help you decrease bounce rates and help users stay on your site longer, these also count as internal links and can help with rankings.

You’ll want to ensure these plugins are configured properly and only show posts that are actually related, not just a random shuffle.

Another thing to note here is that some of the more common plugins for this slow down your site massively, an example of this is the “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin”.

The plugin that we use and recommend is Related Posts for WordPress.

It’s fast and allows for great customization.

5. Do a Scan for Orphan Pages

Orphan pages are a common issue with bigger sites. These are pages that exist on your site but don’t have any internal links pointing to them. This means Google probably won’t find them and neither will your users.

You can find these pages on your site with most SEO auditing software.

We like to use Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

They have a free version that is more than enough for most people and it is also blazing fast.

Plug in your domain, have it scan your site, and then sort it by the number of “inlinks” to find pages with no internal links to them.

You can also use the tool to review your site structure and get an overview of how many pages have a click-depth (how many clicks it takes to get to a page from the homepage) of 3 or more and try to bring them closer using internal links.

Tools to Help Manage Internal Links

This FREE Excel Template

For smaller sites, we like to keep an Excel sheet with every single page on the site, where the internal links go to, and what anchor text they use.

This gives you a nice overview of where you might be erring on the side of over-optimization.

It also helps keep things future proof. One day you might delete a page and even though you’d redirect it after, you don’t want other pages to link to it anymore.

This keeps a nice and organized directory you can reference at any time.

Yoast SEO Premium Plugin

Yoast’s SEO plugin is one of the most common solutions for WordPress SEO and for a good reason. It’s simple to use and it covers most of your bases.

By upgrading to their premium version ($89 one time fee), you also get access to their internal linking tool.

This lists the most prominent words on a page and automatically gives you recommendations on pages on your site these could link to.

It’s semi-automated and provides highly relevant results.

Not only that, they also give you a nice and convenient overview of how many internal pages an article links to and how many they have coming in.

FAQ

What Anchor Text Should I Use for Internal Links?

The anchor text is the clickable part of a link that your users can see.

It’s how users know what to expect from a link and it tells Google what the page is about.

Although over-optimization of anchor texts is something that can hurt your rankings with external links, they are a bit more lenient when it comes to internal links.

Still, you don’t want to overdo it. Make it easy for the readers and try to include a keyword or two when it makes sense.

Should I Ever Nofollow Internal Links?

The nofollow tag tells Google to not pass any “link value“ when it is present. You’ll often see people use this for either paid links or affiliate links.

Although it’s best practice to not use them on your own site, there are some instances where this is OK.

Warning: Do not mess around with nofollowing links unless you know what you’re doing and have some SEO experience. It’s easy to do some damage with them.

If you have pages such as a members area or login page, it’s best to nofollow links to these, especially from major places such as the header.

How Many Links Should You Have Per Page?

Okay, so internal links clearly have a ton of power and can help you rank.

When we’ve told our clients about this strategy, some of them have gone bonkers and started linking out with almost every other word on a page.

Don’t.

Google’s webmaster guidelines say that a page should have a “reasonable amount of links”

According to Google’s Matt Cutt’s, around 100 is a safe number. This is the total number of links on a page – internal, external, navigation, and the whole nine yards.

Now, keep in mind that this does (generally) not mean that if you have more than 100 links you’re going to lose rankings and traffic.

This simply means that beyond a hundred, each link carries less weight.

The Ultimate SEO Guide to Image Optimization

Get your on-page in order. Optimize the titles, write unique meta descriptions, ensure you’re using all your keywords, and optimize your images.“

I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times.

Well, how the heck do you do it? What is image optimization and how does it work?

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

The Basics

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

The old English proverb is more true than ever when it comes to digital content.

No one wants to read through a 5,000-word guide that is simply a wall of text.

Images are great for illustrating your points, explaining complex concepts, or just entertainment value.

*Insert silly meme*

We probably don’t have to convince you to start using images in your content as the benefits are obvious.

Just one small issue…

Google cannot see images the way we do and thus generally have no idea what’s on them.

That’s why we need image optimization.

(Editors Note: Thanks to AI and machine learning, Google now does have technology that can understand images. However, the accuracy is nowhere close to where it needs to be so the following is still critical for optimal results.)

Here are the key ways we can optimize images:

Table of Contents [show]

Optimizing Images With Text

There are some super easy ways to give Google (and your visitors) additional context about your images. These help you rank better in Google Images and also create additional keyword relevance for the pages you have the images on.

Alt Tags and Title Tags

The HTML “alt” attribute is the alternate text for an image in the event that it cannot be displayed. This could be due to a browser configuration, accessibility reasons (e.g. blind users), or other technical faults.

It allows the user to understand what the image would’ve been about.

Tech has gotten far enough where images not loading aren’t a major concern so users don’t have a lot to benefit from this but search engines use it as a way to understand what the image is about.

The tag is implemented within the image as such:

<img src=”optimizing-images-for-search-engines.png” alt=”How to create proper alt text for images” />

The image title tag is another way to tell Google what your image is about. It’s also what you see when you hover over an image for more than two seconds.

It’s best practice for this to be slightly different than the alt text as this may allow you to target more keywords.

What Do You Write as the Alt Text?

You’ll want to write 3-7 words describing the image and using a relevant keyword within that.

Please note that this should NOT be the main keyword of your post, but one relevant to the image. You also do NOT want to stuff this full of keywords.

“Image SEO guide – optimizing images” is not okay.

Let’s use an SEO-related example here.

Pretend we have an article about keyword research.

The first image will likely be the “header” image with the blog post title and it’d be great to add the alt text of that as something that contains your main keyword “The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research“.

Next up we’ll have a photo of us analyzing some keywords in a section of the article about buyer intent. We might set the alt text to “How to use Ahrefs to identify buyer intent keywords”

And so on and so forth.

Each image is supposed to supplement the content around it and the alt text supports those long-tail keywords and topics.

Optimizing Image File Names

File names are just another way of letting Google know what the image is about.

As per their Webmaster Guidelines:
“The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is better than IMG00023.JPG.”

Keep it simple, utilize keywords, and keep them short.

Generally, we keep all three – alt tags, titles, and the file name – quite similar and rewritten versions of each other.

Surrounding Text

The content around your image is a great indication of what it is about.

If your file name, alt text, and title indicate that the image is about SEO but the surrounding text is about the best restaurants in New York – what do you reckon Google is going to think?

This is a great tactic to utilize to rank in Google Images.

We had a client who was ranking number one with a “blood sugar chart” and raking in tens of thousands of visitors a month just from one image that was well optimized for that exact term.

Captions

Captions are generally the best example of “surrounding text” for images but here’s one place where we urge you to actually ignore search engines.

Sure, having a keyword in there would be great but captions are one of the best ways to try and engage with your readers.

Get creative and toss a joke in there instead.

Image Speed Optimizations

Images are one of the biggest contributors to how long your website takes to load.

Site speed is not only an important ranking factor but it is also critical for conversions.

According to Kissmetrics, a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

The Best Image Size for Blog Posts

Even though my computer runs at a high resolution and I have a big 32-inch screen, websites generally load a lot smaller than that.

As you can see on the image below – the total width of my screen is 2670 pixels but the content from our blog is only displayed across 770 for the sake of people with smaller screens as well as readability.

The same goes for images. Since our blog can only display things at a maximum width of 770 pixels, we should resize every image larger than that before uploading it.

Otherwise, we might upload an image that’s 4,000 pixels wide and has a file size of 5,3 MB. Not only will it take a lot longer to load for the user but your CMS will have to change the display to 770 pixels anyway.

Resizing your images to the size they’re actually going to be displayed at is one of the best ways to increase your site speed.

The Best Image File Formats for Web

The three most common file types for saving images are JPEG, PNG, and GIF, and the file size differences them can be huge.

Here’s an example:

As you can see, the comparative file size differences are quite significant and they can be even bigger depending on the image type. You’ll also notice small quality differences.

So which one should you use?

Here’s the mini reference list we use for our team.

Pros and Cons of JPEG Images

• The best option for photos (e.g. stock, social media, etc)
• Three compression options for quality
• Great color quality
• Generally smallest file sizes

Pros and Cons of PNG Images

• Allows transparent backgrounds and shadows
• Highest quality images
• Good for small images
• File size can be a bit bigger

Pros and Cons of GIF Images

• Allows animations
• Transparent backgrounds
• Lower color quality
• Small file sizes

Use Image Compression

There’s software out to compress images and reduce their file size. Here’s an example of what happens:

There’s a 29.2% reduction in file size and I cannot see any difference in the quality.

Now imagine the impact of this on-page speed if you do it for 25 images in a long guide.

It’s massive.

There’s a software called ImageOptim for Mac, which is what we use, and it lets you compress images within seconds.

If you’re a Windows user, we can recommend an online tool such as ShortPixel.

Compress your images, folks.

Utilize Responsive Images

As discussed earlier, in spite of what size images are displayed at, they generally have to be loaded at the full size first.

Meaning that if your blog is 770 pixels wide like ours and you have an image with the same width, but someone views it on mobile at 240 pixels, they have to wait for the whole thing to load.

Responsive images take care of this by automatically creating small, medium, and large versions of an image.

Some content management systems, such as WordPress, take care of this automatically.

If you’re using another CMS, you’ll want to find an extension or plugin that allows you to do the same.

Additional Optimizations

Structured Data

Structured data was created to standardize common information about online content.

Ever notice that when you Google for recipes, it might provide you with the cooking time and nutrient information? Or when Googling for reviews, you’ll see little stars for the ratings?

That’s structured data.

In terms of structured data for Google Images, there are currently three main options:

Videos – Optimize the thumbnail image, modify the duration, list views, etc.
Recipes – Choose the image displayed in search results, add user ratings, cooking time, nutrition information, preparation time, and more.
Products – Add product images, list prices, availability, and reviews.

Twitter Cards and OpenGraph

Using the OpenGraph protocol and Twitter Cards allows you to choose the image that is displayed on social media when a page is shared:

Although these do not have a direct impact on SEO, having a custom image will help you appear more appealing and can lead to higher traffic and thus, more links.

If you’re a WordPress user, this is super easy to do with the Yoast SEO plugin by going to the “Social” section. For the Shopify folks out there – check out this guide on the Shopify blog.

Valuable Content in Images

One common mistake we’ve seen dozens of our clients make is putting important content on images.

There are a lot of designers out there that know nothing about SEO and how search engines work and they may design your site in a way where critical information, such as your headlines or the content itself are actually images.

As discussed earlier, this is a huge issue as Google cannot accurately process this information and is currently not using it to rank websites.

Ensure any and all content that can be expressed in words, are actually present as words.

Set Up an Image Sitemap

A sitemap is an overview of all of the content on your site, generally used to index articles. Well, you can also create an image sitemap which tells Google about all of the media files on your site.

This can help index new pages and images faster and ensure nothing gets missed (e.g. images that are loaded via javascript).

Here’s the WordPress plugin we recommend for image sitemaps.

Image SEO FAQ

We update this post once a month with any changes to the main content and also add additional questions from both our clients and readers.

Here’s what others have asked:

How Many Images Should I Have on Each Page?

Just like with word counts, keyword densities, or anchor text ratios – there’s no one magical answer in 2019.

Your best bet is going to be reverse-engineering the top five results for your main keyword.

Pull up articles that are already ranking and take a look at how many images they are using in their content.

While this isn’t a super scientific approach, it may show that for some topics, Google prefers image-rich or video-rich content.

At the same time, if you feel like a post would be more valuable with additional images or media, don’t be afraid to deviate from this number.

Use it as a guideline.

Does Image Metadata Affect SEO?

All image files contain metadata (EXIF and IPTC) that stores information about how the photo was taken (camera, focal length, etc) as well as things like the date it was taken, the location, and copyrights.

Google’s statement on this has been that it may or may not be a ranking factor but they reserve the right to use it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lucky for you, most image compressors (discussed above) strip this data for you and this is the way I prefer to go for the majority of businesses.

But I also reckon there’s a small chance that if you’re trying to rank for local terms (such as Charlotte SEO company) you may benefit from having real photos taken in the area that contains the metadata.

On Page SEO Guide – The 80/20 Of optimizing your site for on-page seo

The theory behind on-page SEO is simple: make your site easier for search engines to understand and rank.

This can be taken literally: don’t block search engine spiders from your site; and a bit more philosophically: create a site that search engines want to rank highly and serve to their users.

The number one problem I see with sites trying to rank in Google for even medium-difficulty keywords is content. Google doesn’t want to serve your super thin, short, repurposed content site to its users.

The reason they’ve become the biggest search engine (by far) is that they have been capable of providing the best, most relevant results for users problems.

As we’ve shown before, in previous on-page related posts, just improving and optimizing your existing pages can create massive improvements.

Use this guide to crush your site’s on-page SEO and watch the rankings improve (especially if you’re using our services).

Content

Create Unique content on all pages

You must write unique content for your site. Stop stealing other people’s content. Google does not rank stolen/scraped content unless your site is CNN or Amazon.

You need unique content on all of your pages. A Panda Penalty can be tripped if even 30% of the pages on your site are low quality (FYI, panda is a site-wide penalty, so you can kill your entire site–or never even rank in the first place if you get a penalty like this.)

It’s like your grandma always said…

Write Longer Content

The days of ranking for keywords with 500-word articles are long go. In fact, these will likely do more harm than good.

In the last few years, SEOs have started to notice that longer content ranks better. This has led to people pushing it further and further, with some guides going over 10,000 words.

However, the truth is that longer content isn’t always better.

Instead of just pushing out “2,000 word articles” like everyone in the industry is preaching, take a look at what is already working.

Google the keyword you’re attempting to rank for and look at the length of content (and format!) of the top five articles.

If each of them are around 1,350 words and in the form of a listicle – go for a 1,500 word listicle.

When all you’re presented with is 5,000 word behemoths with videos and images, you’ll want to do the same thing.

Check out our full-guide on creating content that ranks.

Utilize Related Keywords

Use industry related keywords within your content: if you’re trying to rank for “Apple computers,” then be sure to include related keywords in your content (Steve Jobs, iMac, iOS, better than a PC, etc)

Here are some ways to find related keywords:

Google Autosuggest:

If you navigate to Google.com and start typing in your main keyword (in this case, “Apple“) Google will supply a short list of related words:

Searches Related To

Once you actually perform the search scroll down to the bottom of the page for some related searches:

Answer The Public

Answer The Public does all of the work for you by automagically mining Google’s auto-suggest results for additional ideas.

It takes common question words, along with your keyword, and then looks at what Google suggests:

Not only that, it will do the same with common prepositions, comparisons, related searches, and every single letter from the alphabet.

Pretty cool, huh?

Premium – See What Competitors Rank For

This is my absolute favorite SEO strategy.

There’s a catch though, you need a paid piece of software called Ahrefs. It can do a million and one useful things when it comes to SEO.

For now, we’re going to use it to see which keywords our competitors’ article ranks for, so we can ensure to target the same, proven keywords with our own content piece.

You simply plug in the URL of the competing page and click on “Organic Keywords” in the sidebar.

We can quickly see that our competitors’ on-page SEO guide is ranking well for terms like “on page SEO checklist” and “on-page SEO techniques” so it’d be wise for us to include those in our piece.

Need more help with this? We’ve got a massive guide on keyword research that’ll cover every strategy we use at Smash Digital and the exact processes and logic behind them.

Stop Keyword Stuffing

You do not need to mention your target keyword over and over again.

You can, and will, get penalized for doing this. Use your keyword naturally a few times within your content, that’s it!

Again, if you’d like a guideline for this, reverse engineer what is specifically happening for this keyword in the search result.

How many words of content does the number one page for this result have on their site and how many times do they use various keywords?

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when you can see exactly what is working.

Build a Big Site

You need a healthy-size site. Your website should have at least 20 pages of quality content. This is the bare minimum.

The more the merrier applies as long as you are able to maintain high-quality content.

If your site is only 1-5 pages, you will have an uphill battle trying to rank, and when you DO rank, getting any results will take 3x as long.

Create Engaging Content

Making a big site of boring stuff is not the answer.

Google is smarter than you. It can tell if the content you are writing is engaging or not. In fact, it tests your site anytime anyone visits it. It’s testing the user metrics (and that is not only time on site).

If you are not creating good, quality, engaging content, your users will peace out and Google will never rank your site.

In fact, I would say you could ignore half of this guide if you would only create hyper-engaging super ninja awesome content that people would love.

If you get people to engage, you will always win.

Theme and Intent of your Content

When you’re looking to rank for a certain term, I recommend Googling the keyword. Look at the type of content that is currently ranking.

It should be very easy to see if Google is treating it as an informational query or a buying query (commercial).

Tailor your content to match what Google shows.

If Google treats it as an informational query (the results aren’t trying to sell you anything), then you will have a hard time trying to rank a site that doesn’t fit in with that intent.

The opposite is true as well. If Google is only showing you product pages and e-commerce stores, you’re not going to rank your 5,000 word article about “the best wireless headphones”.

Example of an Informational Query:

Here’s an example of an informational query, where Google is ranking pages that convey information.  You’d have a hard time ranking a page that was explicitly trying to sell something for this keyword:

Example of a Buying Query:

Here’s an example of a buying query, where Google is ranking pages that are pushing products. You can more easily rank a page trying to sell something for this query, and, as you can see, you’d have a better chance of ranking a page trying to sell something than not:

Meta Data

Meta data serves two important functions:

1) It helps to tell the search engines what your site is about
2) When your site shows up in the SERPs, it helps convince people to click on your site instead of your competitors

Meta Title Optimization

The meta title should sum up what your page is about. You could also try to add in a unique selling proposition to stand out and attracts more clicks thank your competitors.

Example: Apple Computers – Buy Them Here

It’s short, simple, and to the point.

Meta Description Optimization

The meta description gives more details as to what your page is about. Use this text to convince people to click on your site instead of your competitors.

A high click-through rate will increase and solidify your rankings. Make it sexy!

Examples: Save up to 45% on all Apple products. All iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers on sale. Free shipping limited time!

See how you are giving the searcher an incentive to click on your site? That’s what you want.

You can use your main keyword in the meta description or not. I personally like to use variations of the main keyword combined with buying keywords.

Here’s an example with some meta descriptions:

How to Edit Meta Data on WordPress

You can easily start customizing the meta title and meta description if you’re using WordPress by installing one of these two plugins:

All in One SEO – use this if you’re an SEO rookie.

Here’s how to install and setup All in One SEO Pack:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/gwB8cVgrbW0

Yoast WordPress SEO – use this if you’ve got a decent understanding of SEO

Here’s how to set up the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin (produced by the Yoast.com team):
https://www.youtube.com/embed/i3E_dkxib4M

Heading Tags

Headings on your website shouldn’t just be bold. There are specific HTML tags to indicate the importance of different titles and headings. These are a ranking factor for search engines:

• <H1>Very Important Title</H1>
• <H2>Important Title</H2>
• <H3>Less Important Title</H3>

These go down all the way to H6.

How to Structure Your Posts Using Heading Tags

You want to treat each piece of content you are creating as if it was a book, separated into chapters and subchapters.

This helps you keep longer posts skimmable and also give readers a heads up of what’s coming in the next chapter.

Also, when a longer, more comprehensive guide is ranking for hundreds of different keywords, headings are a great way to rank for additional keywords as well as featured snippets.

Keep your headings descriptive, keyword rich, and compelling to the user.

Note: You should only have one H1 tag per page and depending on the content management system (CMS) you are using (e.g. WordPress) this may already be the title of your article.

Example of a Page with Optimized Heading Tags

To give you an example of how we optimize headings, take a look at the table of contents for our image optimization guide.

URL Structure

Whenever possible, keep your permalinks short and simple, preferably with a main keyword in it as long as it’s not spammy looking.

Permalink Example

Let’s use our own site as an example.

Fully Managed SEO Service

“Fully managed SEO services” is not only easier for users to understand and remember, but also give search engines an idea of what the page is about.

A bad example would be something like “smash.digital/what-we-do/”

Ranking Homepages vs. Inner pages

Do a search for your main keyword and make note of the type of pages Google is ranking. Are the majority of the pages homepages or inner pages? If the top 10 is currently full of inner page blog posts from sites, and you’re trying to rank your homepage, you’ll have a much more difficult time making it work.

Here’s an example of a search query where the majority of the results are the homepage.  In this situation, you should try ranking your homepage for this keyword if you were targeting “carpet cleaning service”

Here’s an example of a search query where the majority of the results for the search “woodworking tools” are inner pages:

Media Files

This refers mainly to the images and videos found on any given page of your website. You definitely want images and videos to be present. It absolutely helps with ranking sites.

Videos

Using videos for SEO is simple: embed a relevant YouTube video. This is one of the best things you can do to improve relevancy of a page AND improve on-page metrics like time on page!

Simply search for something relevant on YouTube (e.g. “apple iMac review”) and click “Share” below the video.

Next up, click on “Embed” and simply copy the code that it gives you. It should start with “<iframe…”

In the WordPress post editor, click “text” then paste it in:

Easy!

Image Optimization

We’ve just published a 2,000+ word image optimization guide you should check out. It covers both the SEO side as well as speed optimizations.

But here are some of the key principles…

File Name

Google cannot understand images the way we do, but they can read text…

Change the file name to something descriptive before uploading your image to WordPress.

Example: Refurbished-Apple-iMac-2019.jpg is better than IMG-4322.jpg

Alt Tags

Use an “alt tag” for each image that you upload. This is another easy way to tell Google what this image is about and show them that it is relevant to the page.

You’ll want to write something that includes a keyword that people might search for, but also describes the image.

In WordPress, you can edit alt tags when you upload an image to a post:

For example, the alt text on the image above could be “how to add alt text to images on WordPress”.

Image Over Optimization

The majority of people who read about image optimization start to massively over-do it and risk getting penalized.

No, you don’t want to call all 21 images on your blog post “apple computers” and “apple computers reviews”.

Sure, it’s great if you can include a keyword in the file name and alt tag, but they should be related to the image and the text around it, not your main keyword for the page.

Image Size and Speed Optimizations

You want to “compress” the image file size before posting. This will make your site load faster.

If you have a Mac, you can use a piece of free software called ImageOptim.

For the Windows folks, you can use the online version of ShortPixel.

This is a super easy way to make image file sizes up to 90% smaller and skyrocket your site speed.

Which leads us to…

Site Speed Optimization

Fast sites rank better.

More importantly, your potential customers won’t wait for a slow site to load and will hit the back button instead.

These are two of the reasons why I suggested compressing your images. Huge images take a lot more time to load than smaller or compressed (size) ones.

Site Speed Testing Tools

The two tools we use the most to test site speed are Pingdom and GTMetrix.

Both are great and give you different insights into why your site is loading at the speed it is.

How Fast Should My Website Be?

Make sure your site is at least in the 80th percentile for load time and loads under two seconds. Having a site in the 90th-100th percentile and a sub-one second load time is definitely better, but I personally don’t see evidence of needing to be higher in the 80s to get the benefit.

If your site is coming back as SLOW, follow the advice that Pingdom and GTmetrix give you.

If you’re using WordPress there are some very simple steps you can take to speed up your WordPress site with just a few minutes of work.

W3 Cache Plugin

Install the W3 Cache Plugin and activate it (unless you’re using WPEngine as your host).

In the WP dashboard, go to Performance > General Settings

Enable “Page Cache” and “Minify” and then save the settings.

Now, check to make sure your site is working properly.

“Minify” can sometimes mess up a site. If it did mess it up, deactivate it and the problem should be solved instantly.

After you’re done, check your page speed again to see how much it has improved.

Lazy Load Plugin

If your site is displaying a lot of images, try the “lazy load” plugin.

It delays the loading of an image until the visitor scrolls to that part of the page. So, if your article uses 10 images in a long post, it will only load the first few images, and will load each image after that as the visitor scrolls down.

Here’s the link: Lazy Load.

Plugin Relation to Site Speed

Keep an eye on your plugins. If you’re not using a plugin, deactivate AND delete it. Plugins, even deactivated ones, can slow your site WAY down.

You can also see from Pingdom and GTMetrix if a specific plugin is slowing your site down significantly. If this is the case, it may make sense to find a faster alternative.

Cloudflare

Feeling adventurous?

If you’re comfortable using WordPress and are a bit more tech-savvy than a beginner, check out Cloudflare – a content delivery network (CDN).

It distributes your content to multiple servers around the world, delivering your site faster to your visitors.

It’s really not complicated, and I recommend that you use it. It’ll take you about five minutes to set up.

If you’re a media-rich site, it can cut your load time in half.

Half!

Here’s a quick tutorial if you want to give it a try:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-FWhBwEeDls
Fastest Website Hosting Companies

If you’re using WordPress, then I cannot recommend enough that you use WPEngine.

It’s an all-in-one WordPress managed hosting solution. In my experience, it’s the easiest way to speed up your site instantly! It has a built-in CDN and is completely managed for you (updates are automatically downloaded and installed).

Another highly recommended managed WordPress host is Traffic Planet Hosting. It offers the same quickly-loading site as WP Engine (probably faster actually), but is much cheaper.

I will say that if I wasn’t already on WPEngine that I would go with Traffic Planet.

Want more? Surprise, surprise – we’ve got a full guide on optimizing site speed ready for ya.

Schema Markup (for Local Sites)

If you’re targeting a specific location, you need to use a “schema markup” to give the search engines information about what you are and what locations are relevant to your business.

Schema is an accepted form of structuring data that our search engine friends can use to understand your site.

Schema markup is very easy to add. If you’re like most local businesses, you have your name/address/phone number/website (NAPW) in your footer. Just replace it with the following code.

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/LocalBusiness”>

<h1><span itemprop=”name”>Your Biz Name</span></h1>

<span itemprop=”description”> Service description with some keywords sprinkled in.</span>

<div itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>

<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>Your Address</span>

<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Locality/City</span>,

<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>Region</span>

</div>

Phone: <span itemprop=”telephone”>523-355-3222</span>

</div>

Replace all the info with relevant info to your own business in the above example

There are actually countless things that you can markup if you’re feeling adventurous (videos, images, etc), but the above code for local sites is a must.

Testing Schema Markup

Once you’ve added the markup, test it to make sure it is implemented properly by visiting http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Crawl Your Site Using Screaming Frog

Finally, check your site for major errors by running a search using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool. It’s free, and an awesome, powerful tool.

There’s TONS of things you can look for, but the most important will be making sure the status codes say either “200” or “301.” If you see anything else, then you or someone you know more knowledgeable should take a look at getting those fixed. They can cause really big problems.

So, this concludes the 80/20 of On-page SEO.

Kinda simple huh?

I should probably put some sort of catchy ending and a call to action, but instead…

How to Find Long Tail Keywords With NO SEO Competition

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.

Let’s get straight into it…

Our Go-To Strategy For Finding Easy Keywords to Target

We’re going to kick things off with one of my favorite strategies for finding super low competition topics that bring in tons of organic traffic.

I can already hear you saying “this cannot work for my industry because of X, Y, and Z”.

It can and it will.

In fact, we use this strategy ourselves to find topic ideas in one of the most competitive niches out there – SEO.

Is the suspense killing you yet? Let’s dig in.

Time to learn: 5 minutes

Impact (1-10): 7

Tools required: Ahrefs

If you’ve spent any time at all in the SEO world, you’ll know that backlinks are by far the most important thing when it comes to increasing your traffic.

You could have the greatest content in the world, perfect on-page SEO, and a bunch of social media activity but if your site doesn’t have any links to it, it’s not going to get much traffic.

Unless…

Once a website has a significant amount of links pointing to it as a whole, Google will start to trust it more and more.

This is what we call being an “authority”.

These authority sites will often be able to rank for low competition keywords without having to do any link building or sometimes even proper on-page SEO.

Awful, isn’t it? All these big brands stealing all of our traffic…

Not quite!

In most cases, this is a great opportunity for us to jump in with a highly-optimized page, with better content, and some backlinks to the page.

How to Find These “Unicorn” Keywords

As mentioned in the introduction, you’re going to need a tool called Ahrefs for this.

They’re the second most active web crawler in the world, after Google, and their only objective is to give SEOs and marketers data.

We’re going to use their computing power to our advantage.

You’ll want to head over to their Content Explorer and type in a keyword related to your site.

In this case, we’re working on an eCommerce site that sells outdoors equipment such as tents, hiking boots, and other gear.

I’m going to type in hiking as the keyword and then apply the following filters:

• Change search “Everywhere” to “In title” next to your keyword
• Set the language filter to “English
• Add a new filter for “Organic Traffic” for a minimum of 400
• Add a new filter for “Referring Domains” at 0

What comes up is a list of 32 different articles that are really low competition but getting a great amount of traffic.

Here are just a few topic ideas I covered that may be a fit for our eCommerce store and what keywords they rank for.

1. Hiking in Iceland | Iceland’s Best Hiking Routes

• Hiking in Iceland
• Best hikes in Iceland

Estimated traffic: 457

2. The Best Hiking Trails Near Sacramento, CA

• Hiking near Sacramento
• Best hikes near Sacramento
• Hiking trails near Sacramento

Estimated traffic: 860

3. Every Hiking Spot Near Cleveland You Need To Explore

• Hiking in Cleveland
• Best hiking in northeast Ohio
  ‘Cleveland hiking trails

Estimated traffic: 2,300

“Yeah but none of these keywords is going to get me any sales!!!!!”

That’s a whole other debate but here are some points to consider:

• Some will convert
• Ahrefs generally underestimates traffic by a third
• These pages will stay live and rank for months or years (it compounds)
• Most of these topics are 600 words and don’t take much time

But to counter your argument…

4. Best Hiking Pants for Women (Plus 8 Hiking Leggings)

I’m sorry but this one just screams money…

• Hiking leggings
• Hiking tights
• Best hiking pants for women
• Waterproof leggings
• Best hiking pants
• Best hiking leggings

More? Sure thing.

5. The 10 Best Hiking Sandals in 2019

• Best hiking sandals
• Closed-toe hiking sandals
• Best hiking sandals for men
• Best hiking sandals for women

Estimated traffic: 465

I’m going to stop now but here are a few more results I found just by typing in ONE keyword and going through ONE page of results (along with the ones mentioned before):

• The Best Hiking Shorts for Women of 2019
• The Best Waterproof Women’s Hiking Pants
• 10 best men’s waterproof trousers for walking and hiking
• The Best Hiking Shorts for Men of 2019
• This Hiking-Inspired Modular Backpack from Japan Sold out Instantly

Now go out there and start experimenting with different keywords and see what you can dig up.

Next time, I’m going to show you how to analyze your competitors’ articles to create an outline for an article that’s going to rank well in Google.

How to Create Content That Ranks in Google [Step-By-Step Blueprint]

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.

Create “Good Content” and the Results Will Roll In

You’ve heard it a million times… 

Well, what the hell is good content anyway?

That’s exactly what you’re going to learn today and it’s probably not what you think it is.

Time to learn: 10-15 minutes

Impact (1-10): 9

Tools required: Text editor

Tools recommended: SurferSEO, Ahrefs

Let’s get to it…

Why You NEED To Have a Content Creation Process

The days of choosing a low-competition keyword, tossing up a 500-word article, and watching the traffic roll in are (mostly) over.

Google has gotten better than ever at evaluating content quality, relevance, and even the intent behind it. 

It knows exactly what people want when searching for the best hiking boots. 

Whether it should be:

• A commercial or informational page
• 700 or 3,000 words long
• A listicle of products or a how-to choose type guide

This sucks for true industry experts who are looking to create unique content using their expertise because Google has already made up their mind on what content should rank. 

There’s a “bubble” in the top 10 results of the same types of content.

On the other hand… This is amazing for us as marketers and business owners.

We can see exactly what Google likes to see for our target keywords and then give them just that.

Here’s our 5-step process to creating content that ranks.

P.S. We’re going to cover two approaches. One is more efficient but requires premium tools (SurferSEO and Ahrefs). The other is completely free but less reliable and more time-consuming.

Method #1 – Using SurferSEO and Ahrefs

The first step to creating any content should be deciding on the main keyword you’re going to try and rank for. You should already have a list of these from our previous guide.

Our goal is going to be to create the best piece of content on the topic and for that, we’re going to need to figure out three things:

• What is the intent behind the search?
• How long should the page be?
• What topics and keywords do we need to cover on that page?

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use a fairly broad keyword as an example here: “seo strategy”.

Step 1. Open up SurferSEO

SurferSEO is a super handy SEO tool that does correlational analysis of the top 50 pages that rank for a given keyword. 

It’ll give you exact data on how long posts are in various positions, what type of words and phrases they use and at which densities, how fast their sites load, and a million other on-page factors.

Let’s load up SurferSEO and type in our target keyword: seo strategy.

Step 2. Decide on the Intent

The first thing we’re going to figure out is the intent behind the search.

Is Google showing services that offer SEO strategies? Are people sharing case studies of their strategies working? Are they how-to types?

Looking at the results, it’s clear Google is only looking for educational posts that show you how to come up with an SEO strategy.

Based on this I can already start planning for the headline of the article, perhaps something along the lines of: “Our X-Step Blueprint to Create an Effective SEO Strategy”

Step 3. Set a Word Count Goal

The next question is, how long should this article be?

In the sidebar of Surfer SEO, I selected “Words in paragraphs” and this is the chart they present us with:

Setting aside the outliers in positions #3 and #5, the ideal word count range seems to be between 2,000-3,000 words.

You can see that there’s a lot of lengthy content hidden on the second page by super authoritative sites, but they’re not ranking that well.

Based on this, I’ll set myself a goal to go write around 2,600 words.

Step 4. Create an Outline

We already know that Google has made up their mind that this needs to be a how-to article that is at most 3,000 words long.

Guess what? 

While we may think the best SEO strategy is going to involve extensive link building, I’m certain Google has already decided what it wants to see in the article itself as well.

Again, we’re simply going to look at the top-ranking results and what they are talking about. 

SurferSEO makes this super easy because by clicking on the “A” button, we can see any competitors heading tags, effectively giving us their outline.

What I’m going to do next is go through each of the results in the top 10, repeat this process, and look for recurring themes.

After I’ve got a master list, I’ll combine similar headings, remove things I think are irrelevant (e.g. HubSpot’s talk about SEO executives), and structure it according to what I think should be covered in an “SEO strategy” article.

This allows me to match the topics that Google is looking for and then craft my own “seo strategy” to match that intent. Which in this case means a bit less talking about links, and more about the big picture.

Here’s what I ended up with:

• Intro – What is SEO
  • On-Site SEO
  • Content Optimization
  • Off-site SEO and Link Building
• Our 9-Step SEO Strategy Broken Down
  • Perform a site-wide SEO audit
  • Conduct keyword research
  • Competitive analysis
  • Create optimized content
  • Optimize on-page factors
  • Develop a link building strategy
  • Begin outreach
  • Set up rank tracking
  • Audit results and adjust strategy as needed
• Conclusion

This gives me a nice little game-plan on what to write about. I also adapted the actual steps to match our internal process at mddigitalgraphicdesigns.

So now we’ve covered most of the topics we know Google is looking for… Next up we need to look at the exact keywords and phrases that top-ranking pages are using.

Step 5. Get a list of related keywords to use within the post

Google doesn’t just look at the headings we cover but also knows what other words we need to be using when talking about SEO strategy. As an example, you can’t talk about on-page SEO without covering meta titles and headings.

We’re going to use Surfer for this again and find a post of similar length (2,500-3,000 words) that isn’t ranking in the top results.

Click on “Audit” and you’ll be presented with ways they can improve their rankings.

The main thing we’re going to look at is “True Density”.

This gives us an exact list of what related keywords we should be using in the article and how many times they should be used.

As you can see, Neil Patel has some work to do.

Work these into your article as you’re writing it.

Bonus: Find Keywords Your Competitors Also Rank For

When you have a lengthy piece of content such as the one we are writing, it’s not just going to rank for one keyword. It’s probably going to rank for hundreds if not thousands of long-tail keywords.

Just look at HubSpot, they rank for 761 keywords with that one post:

Now, if you click on that number, you can see every single keyword that post shows up for and ensure you include them in your own post. You’ll likely pick up long-tail traffic from them as well.

Here’s a few variations that stood out to me, that I wasn’t intending to include originally:

• SEO strategy template
• SEO action plan
• How to implement SEO

We’re effectively done… Except we’re not.

Now comes the hardest part – writing the actual content.

At this stage I’d urge you to read through the top 5 articles to get some additional insights and see how deep they go into each topic. 

Take notes on what stands out to you, what you like, what you don’t like and try to stand out in those areas in your own content.

Method #2 – Doing It Manually

I promised at the beginning of the article that you’re going to have two options on how to do this.

The premium, efficient way… And the free way.

Well to be honest there’s not that much to it, you just have to go do all of this by hand. 

To recap, you need to:

• Identify the intent of the keyword
• Set a word count goal based on the average body content in the top five articles (Body content means you just look at the article itself, not the comments, not the sidebar, not the header etc. Do not just select the entire page.)
• Identify the topics your competitors cover by looking at their headings

You’re going to miss out on the correlational analysis regarding keyword densities from Surfer, which is quite critical, but there’s really no efficient workaround for that.

There are some free tools out there for it, but I’ve personally never used them. I believe Website Auditor by Link-Assistant does this to some extent.

Finishing Up

Try this out the next time you write an article for your blog and report back with the results. I can almost guarantee it will be one of your best performing articles.

We’ve used this approach hundreds of times and it works like a charm.

To finish off, I’d highly recommend you take the “Premium” route and sign up for Surfer SEO at a minimum. Ahrefs is a slight bonus but doesn’t make that huge of a difference for this specific strategy.

Surfer SEO starts at $59/mo but will pay dividends fast. You’ll also be able to use it to improve your existing pages.

They’ve also got a 7-day trial for $1 that you can check out. I’m pretty sure it’ll have full capabilities to do everything we outlined here.

See you next week with yet another actionable SEO strategy.

Using FAQ Schema for SEODouble Your Search Visibility in 5 Minutes (or Less)

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.

The Greatest SEO Hack Since… Ever?

There is an amazing SEO hack that has been spread around massively in the last couple of months and today we’re going to show you exactly how to implement it for your own business.

What makes this strategy so special compared to everything shared in the SEO world?

• It is practically instant
• It doubles the real-estate you take up in the search results
• Increases your branding
• It actually helps your readers!

Let’s get straight to it.

Time to learn: 5-10 minutes

Impact (1-10): 8

Tools required: Rich Snippet Generator (it’s free)

Introducing FAQ Schema

Take a look at this search result.

See anything different from your average Google search?

DreamGrow takes up nearly half of the page with their frequently asked questions. 

Today I’m going to show you, real-time, how to implement this on your own site in under five minutes.

Want to know the best part about this? 

YOU decide what the questions are and what you write in the answer box and Google displays them near instantly.

As they say… With great power comes great search traffic – or something along those lines…

Before you proceed with this, I highly encourage you to check out Google’s guidelines on using the FAQ schema and don’t abuse it. This way we can all reap (moderate) benefits from this for years to come.

If the page doesn’t have any relevant questions to be covered, don’t use the schema.

Another no-go solution would be implementing it on one of your product pages and only using questions to hype up your own stuff.

Use common sense and ask yourself – would Google users actually benefit from this?

Getting Started – Coming Up With The Questions

First of all, you’re going to need a list of frequently asked questions to use.

There are a few ways you can go about this, but here are my favorite strategies:

1. Look at the “People Also Ask” section

Naturally, being in the SEO game, my first choice for questions is going to be what Google already thinks is relevant for my queries.

Let’s say I had a post about the best protein powders, here’s what Google shows me that “People Also Ask”:

Not only does Google think these are relevant, but I could also see these being quite helpful for our content. 

2. Use Answer The Public 

Answer The Public is a handy tool that finds every question possible related to your keyword.

Here’s just a glimpse into what it gives us when we type in “link building”:

Now just use your head to figure out what’d be the best fit for your users.

3. Come Up With Them Yourself

If you’re the one creating the content, it’ll probably be really easy to come up with the questions on your own and just make it a part of the article itself.

For example, if I’m writing an article about link building, I would already know that most people will ask me about how many links to build, what types to use, and whether buying them is OK.

But still… I like to draw inspiration from what Google gives us on a silver platter with the People Also Ask feature 🙂

Tips For Writing The Answers

While you can write whatever you want as the answer, I’ve got two main tips for this:

1. Actually answer the question and be useful

Quite self-explanatory, huh?

2. Create curiosity and encourage people to read the article

If you look back at the FAQ example given above, it is generally going to be plain text which means there is no way to click to the actual page. 

Since our goal is to get people on the site, answer the question to some extent but hint that there are more details in the article itself.

Here’s an example of how I might do it for: “What’s the best link building strategy?”

“There are dozens of link building strategies outlined in this post and they all work, but ultimately, the best strategy is going vary for every industry. What works well in sports, may not work in digital marketing. Overall, we’ve had the best success rate with strategy #4.”

We start off by mentioning that our actual post has a list of strategies they can use and finish off by recommending a specific strategy they can only learn by reading the article.

Curious? I would be!

Another, slightly shadier strategy you can use here is to pretend the results are getting cut off.

Something along the lines of:
“In our case study of building 5,325 links using 7 of the most popular link building strategies, there was a clear winner. Assuming you follow best practices, the most effective link building strategy is…”

Now, we don’t recommend the second approach but it might just get your creative juices flowing 🙂

How to Actually Implement The Results

As a recurring theme in these inner circle emails, there’s a bunch of ways you can implement this…

There’s a slightly harder way, by following the Schema markup provided by Google on their guidelines page.

And then there’s the easy way…

SEO blogger Matthew Woodward has been kind of to create a free FAQ rich snippet generator on his site that’ll automagically make the code for you. 

Simply fill in your questions and answers and it’ll give you a piece of code to put into the header of the page you’re trying to get a snippet for.

I like to use the Insert Headers and Footers WordPress plugin for this as I already had it installed on my site.

If you’re using Matt’s tool, he also lists a bunch of other ways to implement the code, so check that out.

Let’s See It In Action

Now, I promised you that this would work in less than five minutes so let’s see how it works.

First, here’s a screenshot of the results for “Dropship Lifestyle Review” at 2:46 PM.

To be fair, I did write up the questions and answers before that, but it’s fast none-the-less.

Next up, I went into WordPress, edited the post to actually have the FAQ text on the page itself, and added the code to the header of the page.

Now we need to let Google know that the page has been updated and ask them to recrawl it.

To do this, you can head to Google Search Console, navigate to “Coverage” and then look for pages that are “Submitted and indexed”.

Now on the bottom of the page, you’ll find a list of all of your indexed posts. 

Find the one you just updated, click on it the result, and choose “Inspect URL” from the right-hand sidebar.

As the last step, on that final page, you’ll see a button for “Request Indexing” which tells Google that the page has been updated and puts it on their priority list.

Now we wait for Google to go over it…

And voila, just 5 minutes later, the search results look like this:

Try it out and report back on how it goes – we’re looking forward to your success stories!

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

How to Build Guest Post Links (The Right Way) for SEO Dominance

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.

Our Go-To Link Building Strategy

The number one link building strategy we use for Smash Digital, our portfolio of businesses, our investments, and of course, our clients – is guest posting.

But there’s a major flaw with the way most people are taught how to do it.

Today, we’re going to show you how to do it right.

Time to learn: 5-10 minutes

Impact (1-10): 10

Tools required: None

Tools suggested: ahrefs

Now, let’s get to it…

What’s Wrong With Guest Posting Tutorials?

If you’ve ever tried to do guest posting on your own, you’ve probably seen these tutorials already.

They go something along the lines of:

1. List down some keywords related to your industry
2. Combine them with search parameters such as:
   1. “Write for us”
   2. “Submit a guest post”
   3. “Guest post guidelines”
   4. Etc
3. Pull all the results together
4. Add SEO metrics (domain rating, number of links, etc)
5. Find the owners email or the guest posting page
6. Start pitching

While this is an acceptable approach, it’s got two glaring issues with it.

First of all, this is the way every newbie SEO has been taught to do guest posts. In fact, they probably all send the same email templates as well.

Not only that, spammers have been automating these queries for close to a decade now which means…

This is the best way to find guest posts… that have been spammed to death and have no quality standards.

There, I said it.

Sure, you can find some acceptable sites using this way and get some results.

But there’s a better way.

How We Find High-Quality Guest Post Opportunities

If you’ve read any of our other actionable SEO tips, you can already guess which tool we’re going to use to make this happen.

Let’s open up Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and we’re effectively going to use the same approach as the previously mentioned guides do.

You’ll want to type in phrases related to your industry.

I’m going to use email marketing as an example, so I might type in something like “email subject line”.

That presents us with every single article Ahrefs has ever crawled related to email subject lines, which is about 63,000 pages.

Since we’re going to be guest posting on websites, not pages, we’ll want to add some filters:

• Show one page per domain
• Only show English results
• Pages that are live
• Minimum domain rating of 30

This narrows it down “just” to around 10,000 guest posting opportunities for us.

You’re probably wondering why we’re assuming these websites accept guest posts in the first place?

The truth is that we never do but all it takes to find out is to send them an email. Any type of outreach-based link building is generally a numbers game, but a good pitch goes a long way (more on that shortly).

While this means it might take a few extra emails until someone accepts your pitch, these sites are also going to be much higher quality.

P.S. You can technically apply the exact same strategy without Ahrefs but it’ll be a lot of work.

Additional Guest Posting Tips

Different strokes for different folks…

If you already have a super authoritative website (let’s say DR65+) with tons of links, you’ll want to focus your efforts on getting higher authority links.

This means you’ll also have to create much higher quality guest articles and put more effort into your outreach emails. Higher authority sites tend to have higher standards and can be harder to reach.

For those of you with a newer website or simply a weak backlink profile, even an “average” link can go a long way in improving your results.

In this case, you might want to set an additional domain rating filter – to only show sites between say DR25 and DR50. They will be less strict with the content required and easier to reach. You’ll be able to attract a whole lot more links as you build up your authority.

That’s all from me for this week.

Next week, I’m going to show you how to write the perfect guest post pitch.

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

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.

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.