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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.

8 SEO Strategies to Get Google to Trust Your Site

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.

Does Google TRUST You?

This probably doesn’t come as a surprise but Google owns more than 20,000 patents and they’re registering around 10 new ones every day.

Among them, we have this patent from 2006 for “search result ranking based on trust”

What a shocker! To decide whether you should be ranking or not, they are looking at whether your site is trustworthy.

Today we’re going to look at some of the factors they are likely putting into consideration when making this decision.

Time to learn: 5-10 minutes

Impact (1-10): 9

Tools required: None

What Are Trust Signals?

For anyone who has ever put up more than one website, you’ll likely notice that you put different amounts of effort into them, depending on how seriously you took the project.

When we start our more important businesses, such as Smash Digital, some of the first things we did were to ensure we own all of the social media handles, have a registered entity, and register with Google My Business.

Do we do the same when starting a new affiliate website or side project? Hell no, it takes too much time.

Now if you were Google… A technology company specializing in algorithms and analyzing over a billion pages – do you reckon you could see a pattern with this?

Now, I’m no mathematician but I’m going to say this is fairly easy for them to do.

Even for ourselves, just by looking at a website for less than five seconds, we can get a pretty accurate gauge of whether they’re legit or not.

So what can we do to prove to Google that we’re legit?

8 Easy Ways to Increase Your Trust With Google

This is going to sound obvious but to sum up this whole topic – you need to act like a real business and show that to Google.

Here are some suggestions on things that may help you with this and fuel some additional ideas – in no particular order:

1. Social Media Presence

Social media is dominating the modern world. I see entrepreneurs registering their businesses social handles before even figuring out what they’re going to sell, buying a domain, or setting up a website.

This is one of the biggest red flags in my head.

I challenge you to find some truly successful companies that don’t have any kind of social presence.

This doesn’t mean that you need to focus on getting a million followers or churning out content like a madman.

Simply register them, link them to your website, fill out the profiles properly, and share something every now and then.

2. Google My Business

If your goal is to get visitors from Google, does it sound like it may be a good idea to create… a business profile with Google?

For most real businesses, especially local ones, this is one of the first things they do when getting their website up.

A super easy way to instantly get more search visibility, give Google information about what your business does, and show that you’re serious about this.

As always, the more information you can provide on your profile, the better.

It doesn’t take long, put in the work.

3. Business Citations

While business directories and citations have become slightly less popular with the growth of social media, they still matter.

Get your business set up on any relevant business directories, both for your niche and locally.

This might include things like:

• Yellowpages
• Yelp
• TripAdvisor
• Apple Maps
• FourSquare
• Capterra (software specific)
• Clutch.co (agencies)
• Angel.co (tech)

The same tip applies as for Google My Business – take the profiles seriously and fill them out with unique information.

Not only do these count as a trust signal and help grow your backlink profile, they provide:

4. NAP and Consistency

NAP stands for name, address, phone number – the essentials of what you’d expect from a business you’re giving money to. A massive signal of trust.

You need to have these present on your website and you also want to use them on your various profiles – social, citations, Google My Business, etc.

The other important thing is to keep them consistent. Always ensure your address is written in the same exact way, the phone number follows the same format, etc.

This is especially crucial for local businesses.

5. Brand Mentions

While backlinks (links from other websites pointing to yours) are the main ranking factor in Google, they are not stupid.

Unlinked mentions of your company and brand are just as important and often serve as justification for other ranking signals you may have acquired, such as links.

Is it not weird that 300 websites have linked to your website with the words “buy laptops online” but the name of your company has never been mentioned on the internet?

To me, that’s quite a clear signal of some sort of manipulation.

I’m betting Google will agree with me here.

6. HTTPS

While having a secure website is a ranking factor in itself, I think it ties in pretty well with trust as well.

Real companies value the security and safety of their customers and that’s what using HTTPS gives you.

Hell, Google Chrome even gives you a massive red warning when trying to access un-secure websites now – it’s clear Google cares about this.

7. Terms of Service/Privacy Policy

Yet again, I encourage you to try and find a legitimate business that does not follow privacy law.

You need to have these key trust pages on your website:

• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service
• Any necessary disclaimers (e.g. affiliate)
• A contact page

8. Who Do You Link To?

Legitimate businesses are there to help their visitors find solutions to their problems, not just promote their own products.

If the only sources of information on your website are your own articles – it’s a red flag.

Real authorities have references to various case studies, statistics, or research.

You should be doing the same.

Wrapping Up

This is not a definitive list but it should be enough to get Google to trust you to a large extent and perhaps even inspire additional ideas.

What else do you think Google looks at to figure out if you’re trustworthy? Send us your theories – whether proven or wild! 🙂

That’s all from me for this week.

I’ll see you next week with yet another actionable SEO strategy.

Site Speed Optimization 101 – An Easy Blueprint to Increase SEO Traffic and Leads

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 strategy.

Link Reclamation and 3 Highly-Effective Link Building Tips

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

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

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

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

Time to learn: 20 minutes

Impact (1-10): 8

Tools required: Ahrefs

Tools suggested: Archive.org

Now, let’s get to it…

Tip #1 – Link Reclamation

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

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

Point being? The internet changes rapidly.

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

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

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

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

Enter Link Reclamation – The Theory

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

Before I show you how to find lost links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I recommend the latter for a variety of reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Actually Find Lost Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tip #2 – Ask Existing Links to be Changed

Let’s face it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tip #3 – Check for Dead Pages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tip #4 –  Get Internal Links to Your Backlinks

Before we get into this one…

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

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

Now…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Exactly Makes a Great Home Service Company Website?

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

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

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

• Found
• Accessible
• Content
• Trust
• Synced

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

Found

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES ARE EASILY FOUND

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

Instead, take these steps:

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

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

Accessible

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES ARE ACCESSIBLE

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

1. Speed
2. User Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES DELIVER AWESOME CONTENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONTENT & SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

MORE THAN WORDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My recommendation is that you:

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

Trust

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES BUILD TRUST

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

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

Synced

GREAT HOME SERVICE COMPANY WEBSITES ARE SYNCED WITH SALES & SERVICE

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

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

Here are some examples of what I mean by this:

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

WHY YOUR MOBILE SITE EXPERIENCE MATTERS NOW MORE THAN EVER

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

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

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

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

Mobile Is the New Desktop

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

Source: StatCounter

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

From Mobile-Friendly to Mobile-First

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

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

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

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

So, What Makes a Good Mobile Site Experience?

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

CONTENT IS KEY

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

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

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

MOBILE-FIRST DESIGN

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

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

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

Core Web Vitals: Google’s Latest Ranking Factor

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

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

1. LARGEST CONTENTFUL PAINT (LCP)

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

2. FIRST INPUT DELAY (FID)

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

3. CUMULATIVE LAYOUT SHIFT (CLS)

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

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

Stand Out in SERPs

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

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

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

Marketing with Mobile in Mind

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

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