Companies like Zapier have seen significant increases in traffic by using advanced SEO tools. This method goes beyond basic SEO strategies.

This post will look at our top eleven programmatic SEO tools (or pSEO tools) in 2024, showing how they can significantly boost your web traffic and improve your online presence.

Boost SEO Automation

First Off, What is Programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO or pSEO is a means for producing website pages at scale using automation. It differs from traditional SEO, which optimizes one page at a time by automating and expanding this effort to thousands of pages.

Programmatic SEO involves the use of data, templates, and algorithms to generate a large volume of content that targets specific keywords and search intents. This method allows for the rapid creation of pages tailored to different variations of search queries, often leveraging databases to populate content dynamically:

The key advantage is its ability to scale SEO efforts efficiently, making it possible to dominate search results across a broad spectrum of topics and keywords in a short amount of time. 

This approach is particularly useful for websites with a vast array of similar yet distinct pages, such as e-commerce sites, directories, travel portals, or real estate listings. Programmatic SEO helps capture long-tail keywords and niche markets that might be overlooked with traditional methods by systematically creating content and optimizing pages based on user intent and search behavior.

The main conceivable drawback with programmatic SEO is the upkeep. When you create hundreds or thousands of pages on your website, you then have to maintain and update those pages or else risk them growing stale. If the content quality of your pages declines over time, you risk your whole website being downranked because a larger density of your pages are decaying in relevance. 

The key to optimizing programmatic SEO effectively is maintaining or removing pages on your site that begin to lose quality.

If you’d like an even more in-depth explanation of Programmatic SEO, you can check out our full guide here.

We’ve flipped every stone to find some of the most potent programmatic SEO solutions out there, and here’s what we found.

Quick Note: The assumption is that most of these tools will include a free plan you can use to try them out. We simply noted the basic/starter plan pricing for each tool. Of course, your programmatic SEO needs may warrant a higher-tier plan, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. 

With that said, here are some of the best pSEO tools that can help scale your SEO efforts: 

1) byword.ai ($99/mo)

Byword.ai is an advanced tool that automates content creation, making it indispensable for a successful SEO strategy. It generates thousands of SEO-optimized programmatic pages efficiently, using natural language processing to ensure high-quality content: 

Byword.ai helps improve search rankings and drive organic traffic, making it ideal for creating landing pages and large volumes of content. This tool is a powerful asset for any content marketing strategy, especially for businesses aiming to enhance their search visibility and dominate search results.

Pros:

• Automated Content Generation: Byword.ai excels at generating high-quality, SEO-optimized content automatically, saving significant time and effort.
• Natural Language Processing: Uses advanced NLP to create content that reads naturally and engages readers.
• Scalability: Can produce large volumes of content quickly, ideal for scaling SEO efforts.

Cons:

• Customization Limitations: May require manual tweaking to align perfectly with specific brand voices or nuanced topics.
• Dependence on AI: The quality of content can sometimes vary, necessitating human review to ensure consistency.

Verdict: Essential for scaling content creation in programmatic SEO. Quickly generates high-quality content and efficiently optimizes for SEO.

2) Keyword Chef ($20/mo, credit-based)

Keyword Chef is a powerful keyword research tool tailored for programmatic SEO. It helps uncover low-competition keywords and search intents, driving more traffic to your programmatic pages: 

Keyword Chef helps users identify high-search-intent, long-tail keywords that can improve SERP rankings and visibility. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to use, even for those with limited SEO experience, ensuring that your SEO strategy effectively targets relevant keywords and specific search queries.

Pros:

• Keyword Research: Provides in-depth keyword analysis and research, helping to identify lucrative long-tail keywords.
• User-Friendly Interface: Easy to use, even for those with limited SEO knowledge.
• Niche Focus: Effective in discovering keywords for niche markets, enhancing targeted content strategies.

Cons:

• Limited Features: Primarily focuses on keyword research, lacking broader SEO functionalities like content generation or backlink analysis.
• Subscription Cost: Can be expensive for small businesses or individual users.

Verdict: Great for discovering low-competition keywords. Provides in-depth keyword analysis and helps improve search rankings.

3) PageFactory ($39/mo)

PageFactory is designed for the bulk creation of SEO-optimized web pages, making it essential for a comprehensive programmatic SEO strategy. Using a single-page template approach, PageFactory allows users to create thousands of pages quickly, each tailored to specific search queries and search intents: 

This tool is particularly useful for e-commerce sites and directories that require a high volume of content. Focusing on scalability and consistency, PageFactory helps truncate the SEO process, improving search visibility and driving organic traffic to your landing pages.

Pros:

• Bulk Page Creation: Facilitates the creation of multiple pages at once, each optimized for specific keywords.
• Template-Based: Utilizes templates to ensure consistency and quality across all generated pages.
• SEO Integration: Seamlessly integrates SEO best practices into each page, enhancing search engine visibility.

Cons:

• Template Reliance: Heavy reliance on templates can lead to repetitive content if not carefully managed.
• Initial Setup: Requires a learning curve and setup time to effectively use the tool.

Verdict: Ideal for bulk creating SEO-optimized pages. Streamlines the creation of large volumes of content and ensures consistency.

4) Engyne ($49/mo)

Engyne is a comprehensive programmatic SEO tool that combines data-driven insights with automation to optimize various aspects of search engine optimization. Engyne offers a wide range of features to enhance your site’s rankings, from keyword research to content creation and optimization: 

Its extensive capabilities make it suitable for small and large businesses looking to scale their SEO efforts efficiently. Engyne’s ability to create programmatic content helps companies gain organic traffic, improve search visibility, and dominate search results.

Pros:

• Data-Driven: Utilizes extensive data to inform and optimize content creation, ensuring high relevance and effectiveness.
• Automation: Streamlines many aspects of SEO, from keyword research to content generation and optimization.
• Comprehensive Toolset: Offers a wide range of SEO tools, making it a versatile option for various SEO tasks.

Cons:

• Complexity: May be overwhelming for beginners due to its extensive features and capabilities.
• Cost: Higher price point compared to some other tools, potentially limiting accessibility for smaller budgets.

Verdict: Comprehensive tool for scaling SEO efforts. Automates various SEO tasks and provides data-driven insights.

5) Bardeen AI ($10/mo + free plan)

Bardeen AI is an automation tool designed to handle repetitive SEO tasks, making it crucial for any programmatic SEO project. It easily integrates with various other tools and platforms, including Google Sheets and Google Search Console, enhancing workflow efficiency and productivity: 

Its intuitive interface makes it easy to set up and use, even for those new to automation. This tool is ideal for businesses looking to optimize their SEO processes, freeing up time for strategic activities like content marketing and keyword research, ultimately driving more traffic and improving rankings.

Pros:

• Task Automation: Excels in automating repetitive SEO tasks, freeing up time for strategic planning.
• Integration Capabilities: Integrates with various other tools and platforms, enhancing workflow efficiency.
• User-Friendly: The intuitive interface makes it easy to set up and use.

Cons:

• Specific Use Cases: Primarily focuses on task automation, so it may only cover some SEO needs comprehensively.
• Learning Curve: Some advanced features may require time to master.

Verdict: Excellent for automating repetitive SEO tasks. Enhances workflow efficiency and integrates well with other tools.

6) Ahrefs ($249/mo)

The well-established Ahrefs is known for its comprehensive suite of features, making it invaluable for any programmatic SEO strategy. It provides high-quality, reliable data for keyword research, backlink analysis, and site audits, which is crucial for creating effective SEO pages: 

Ahrefs supports both beginners and experienced SEO professionals in optimizing their websites for better search rankings and search traffic. With its capabilities in finding keywords and analyzing search volume, Ahrefs is vital to any content creation and marketing strategy, helping drive organic traffic and improve search visibility.

Pros:

• Comprehensive SEO Suite: Offers a wide range of tools, including backlink analysis, keyword research, and site audits.
• High-Quality Data: Provides reliable and up-to-date data, crucial for effective SEO strategies.
• User Community: Extensive resources and community support for troubleshooting and learning.

Cons:

• Cost: One of the more expensive SEO tools on the market, which might be a barrier for small businesses.
• Complexity: The breadth of features can be daunting for new users, requiring a lot of time to realize its full functions.

Verdict: Must-have for reliable data and SEO features. Offers comprehensive keyword research and backlink analysis.

7) Typemat ($59 one-time fee)

Typemat is ideal for content optimization, which is essential for programmatic SEO. It creates and refines content to improve search engine visibility, targeting specific search intents and driving organic traffic:

Typemat’s user-friendly design makes it accessible to users with varying levels of SEO expertise, focusing on enhancing the quality and effectiveness of website content. This tool is ideal for creating landing pages that address a wide range of search queries, making it a valuable asset in any content marketing strategy.

Pros:

• Content Optimization: Focuses on creating and optimizing content for better search engine performance.
• AI-Powered: Uses AI to enhance content quality and relevance, making it more likely to rank well.
• Ease of Use: Designed to be user-friendly, even for those with minimal SEO experience.

Cons:

• Feature Limitations: Primarily geared toward content optimization, lacking broader SEO capabilities like backlink tracking.
• Dependence on AI: May require human intervention to ensure content quality and accuracy.

Verdict: Effective for optimizing content and landing pages. Typemat uses AI to improve content relevance and drive organic traffic.

8) WP All Import ($99 standalone import)

WP All Import is a versatile WordPress plugin designed specifically for importing large amounts of data into WordPress sites. It handily supports programmatic SEO by automating the creation of SEO pages. It handles various data types, including custom fields and taxonomies, and offers high customization to fit different use cases: 

WP All Import automates the import process, making it easier for users to manage and update their content efficiently. This tool is perfect for WordPress users who need to handle extensive data imports regularly, ensuring their web pages are optimized for search engines and improving search visibility.

Pros:

• Versatile Imports: Excellent for importing large amounts of data into WordPress, including custom fields and taxonomies.
• Flexibility: Highly flexible, allowing customization to fit various use cases and data structures.
• Automation: Can automate the import process, saving significant time and effort.

Cons:

• WordPress Specific: Only useful for WordPress sites, limiting its applicability for users on other platforms.
• Technical Knowledge: Requires some technical know-how to set up and use effectively.

Verdict: Perfect for automating large data imports in WordPress. Handles various data types and simplifies content updates.

9) Airtable ($20/mo)

Similar to WP All Import, Airtable is flexible when managing and organizing large sets of data, making it suitable for programmatic SEO applications. Its customizable interface allows users to tailor their data management to specific needs, facilitating team collaboration and project management:

While not exclusively an SEO tool, Airtable’s capabilities in organizing content and data points make it a valuable asset for executing a successful programmatic SEO strategy. It helps drive organic traffic, improve search visibility, and support the overall SEO efforts of your business, ensuring that your programmatic pages are well-optimized and effective.

Pros:

• Data Management: Excellent for managing and organizing large sets of data, crucial for programmatic SEO.
• Customizable: Highly customizable, allowing users to tailor it to their specific needs and workflows.
• Collaboration: Facilitates team collaboration, making it easy to share and manage SEO projects.

Cons:

• Learning Curve: Can be complex to learn, especially for users unfamiliar with database management.
• SEO-Specific Features: Not designed specifically for SEO, so it may lack some specialized functionalities compared to dedicated SEO tools.

Verdict: Versatile for managing data in SEO projects. Customizable for different needs and facilitates team collaboration.

10) ChatGPT ($20/mo)

ChatGPT can assist in generating content for programmatic SEO strategies. It excels at creating high-quality, relevant content tailored to specific search intents, making it super handy when you build landing pages and SEO pages. ChatGPT can help businesses produce thousands of pages efficiently, enhancing search rankings and driving organic traffic.

Here’s an example of how the prompt might begin with a page derived by ChatGPT:

Pros:

• High-Quality Content: Generates engaging, SEO-optimized content tailored to search intents.
• Scalability: Can produce large volumes of content quickly, suitable for programmatic SEO.
• Customization: Allows for detailed prompts to generate content specific to your needs.

Cons:

• Manual Input Needed: Requires detailed prompts to ensure the content aligns with specific goals.
• Cost: Can be expensive for extensive use, especially for small businesses.
• Dependence on AI: Quality can vary, necessitating human review and editing.

Verdict: Valuable for generating high-quality SEO content. Tailors content to specific search intents and scales content production.

11) Plausible ($9/mo)

Plausible is a simple, privacy-focused web analytics tool that provides insights essential for programmatic SEO. It helps track key metrics like search volume and organic traffic, offering data-driven insights to optimize SEO strategies. Plausible’s straightforward interface makes it easy to monitor the performance of programmatic pages and adjust tactics accordingly:

Pros:

• Privacy-Focused: Prioritizes user privacy, complying with regulations like GDPR.
• User-Friendly: Easy to set up and use, even for those with limited technical skills.
• Real-Time Insights: Provides actionable data to optimize SEO strategies and improve search rankings.

Cons:

• Limited Features: Lacks some advanced analytics features found in other tools.
• No Free Plan: Requires a subscription, which might be a barrier for small websites.
• Basic Reporting: May not offer the depth of analysis needed for complex SEO projects.

Verdict: User-friendly tool for essential web analytics. Prioritizes user privacy and provides actionable insights for SEO.

How Zapier Boosted SEO Results With Programmatic SEO

We’ve covered all of our recommended pSEO tools, but let’s go through a quick example of how Zapier applied programmatic SEO methods to their existing pages to increase site visits.

Zapier jumped its traffic from 1.2 million to 4.8 million monthly visits in three years:

And it’s all thanks to their clever execution of programmatic SEO focused on a couple of core areas:

1) Internationalization of Pages

Zapier expanded its reach by adding various international pages, including French, Spanish, and Dutch versions of their content. This approach not only made their content accessible to a broader audience but also capitalized on the demand for localized content in different languages. 

By catering to non-English speaking users, they significantly increased their traffic from these regions.

But beyond just using automation to translate their pages, they also programmatically transcribed their content to match popular keywords in each specific area outside of the U.S.

2) Programmatic Content Creation

In addition to internationalization, Zapier implemented a robust programmatic SEO strategy. They created a vast amount of content automatically, focusing on relevant topics like AI templates and workflow automation. 

This method allowed them to scale their content production efficiently and effectively, driving more organic traffic to their site.

Key Takeaway: Smart use of pSEO tools can significantly boost visitors and actions tied to revenue when used wisely. Consider ways it can adapt and improve upon your existing content, as it did with Zapier.

Last Thoughts on Our Top Programmatic SEO Tool Picks

Programmatic SEO tools have changed the way we handle organic search engine marketing. They help us improve and automate SEO strategies on an immense scale.

Using the right pSEO tools can increase traffic and make your SEO strategy more effective since you’ll be able to experiment with more things in a shorter span of time.

Just remember to stay on top of what you produce automatically at scale. Things can quickly get out of hand if you’re mass-producing site pages and aren’t maintaining them. And before you know it, you’ll be swimming in a sea of pages that are dragging down the quality of your site.

To implement these tools to their fullest potential, check out our Programmatic SEO starter guide.

Related Video

If you’re ready to level up your programmatic SEO, Single Grain’s SEO experts can help!👇

Boost SEO Automation

For more insights and lessons about marketing, check out our Marketing School podcast on YouTube.

The post Unlocking Web Traffic: 11 Best Programmatic SEO Tools appeared first on Single Grain.

Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box WordPress installation isn’t that great when it comes to search engine optimization. Although there are some tweaks you can make to improve this situation from within the WordPress Dashboard (such as updating your permalinks and ensuring that search engine visibility is turned on), you’re going to want to install some SEO plugins to help with these issues as well.

We have created a list of the best WordPress SEO plugins that are highly regarded within the SEO community. Although we can’t guarantee they’ll skyrocket your website to the first page of Google SERPs, they’ll definitely help your search engine optimization efforts.

Yoast SEO

What It Does: This all-inclusive plugin allows you to easily edit SEO settings and it guides you through the best practices for SEO. The wizard will walk you through any technical aspects as well as help you to optimize for better keywords, title tags, meta descriptions and much more.

Skill Level: Beginner-Advanced

Free or Paid: Both, though we find the free one sufficient.

The Yoast SEO plugin has long since been regarded as one of the best WordPress SEO plugins. It isn’t that hard for a beginner to set up plus it offers a simple design that helps save the advanced marketer some time.

It includes a readability analysis, which will tell you if there is an error with a red light, making it easy to fix any issues. Look how simple this is:

Learning how to optimize a website for search engines takes years to learn, and even then it is always changing. Nowadays, it’s a lot more than just putting some keywords in the title tag. Yoast will help you along the way and the wizard will give you advice in plain English, not complicated technical jargon.

This is how it looks when you’re working on it:

It gives you a preview of what your title and meta description look like in Google as well as giving you feedback on what Google with probably pick up as your main keyword.

Features:

• Canonical URLs
• Open graph tags for every URL
• Internal and outbound link analysis

• Overall analysis for the keywords, including previously used keyphrases
• Snippet preview
• Advice specific to your title, meta and URL

Dive Deeper:

• 10 SEO Approaches to Bring Traffic to a WordPress Site
• 9 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023
• Overlooked SEO: Optimizing Images and Video For Search

SEO Image Optimizer

What It Does: Increases search traffic from Google Images by automating SEO for your images.

Skill Level: Beginner-Advanced

Free or Paid: Both, though we find the free one sufficient.

Did you know that Google Images is the second-most-used search engine? So if you haven’t optimized for images, particularly if you are an e-commerce store, you are really missing out on a lot of search traffic!

The SEO Image Optimizer plugin is essential because it is a great option for minimizing the amount of work needed to actively manage your on-page search engine optimization. We all know that using keyword-rich alt text for the images on our sites is good standard practice, but taking the time to develop this text and code it into your image files can be frustrating. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a plugin for this?

Fortunately, there is!

The SEO Image Optimizer plugin eliminates this extra effort by setting your alt text and image title tags automatically based on criteria specified in the plugin.

For example, using the following settings, you can set the plugin to automatically create alt text for your images by using the file name and the name of the post that the image is attached to. You can also set the title tag to pull information from a number of different parameters, including the post title (as pictured below), the image file name, the post category or the post name:

Don’t worry though – you can choose in your settings if you would rather keep some of your old titles or alts. Even better, you can customize any generated tags:

Features:

• Generates title/alt tags that are SEO friendly
• Compresses images
• User-friendly design
• Translation ready (multilingual)
• Upload resized images

Social Snap

What It Does: Helps you drive more traffic and increase engagement by leveraging the power of social media.

Skill Level: Beginner-Advanced

Free or Paid: Paid plans start at $39 per year

If you’re wondering why a plugin devoted to social sharing is in an article on WordPress SEO plugins, keep in mind that one of Google’s ranking factors is “Legitimacy of Social Media Accounts”.

In response to the following question from Search Engine Land years ago:

 “If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?”

Google responded:

“Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.”

Although there are hundreds of different plugins out there that are designed to encourage the sharing of your web content on social networking sites, Social Snap really takes the cake in terms of functionality and effectiveness.

The easiest way to get your readers to share your content on social networking sites is to use a plugin that actively encourages it.

Social Snap allows you to put over 30 different social media icons on your site, and you can customize the shape, animation, color and placement – plus it counts the number of shares and likes you get:

It also offers analytics, which is essential for any marketer, and some incredible features like automatically posting blogs to Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. It will also repost old posts automatically if you so choose.

Here is an inside look at Social Snap’s analytics (if you’re wondering what you should do with social media analytics, check out this article):

It’s super easy to set up and doesn’t slow down your site the way that some social media plugins do. They don’t offer a demo, but they do offer a 100% refund within the first 30 days.

Features:

• Customize social buttons/bars
• Counts shares
• Analytics information
• Auto posting to Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook
• Minimum share count rule
• Top performing post widget
• Boosts old posts
• Social content locker

Dive Deeper:

• 7 Dead Simple Social Media Marketing Tactics That Still Work Today
• How to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Efforts with Content Marketing Tools
• The Beginner’s Guide to Crafting a Highly Effective Social Media Strategy in 2023

W3 Total Cache

What It Does: Improves the site speed of your website (remember that site speed is a Google ranking factor!).

Skill Level: Intermediate-Advanced

Free or Paid: Free

The W3 Total Cache is an essential SEO WordPress plugin because page speed is another important ranking factor. Google has made no secret about the fact that it prefers faster pages that enhance the user experience and it can estimate your site speed fairly accurately based on your page’s HTML code.

Unfortunately, WordPress blogs can be notoriously slow, considering all of the extra plugins and theme files needed to make it run effectively. This is why installing a caching plugin – which serves up stored versions of a site’s pages instead of dynamically generating them each time a repeat visitor returns – is so important.

When a person visits your website, the site’s pages have to be dynamically generated. That means it has to go through four steps to generate the page. When you use a plugin like W3 Total Cache, any returning user will just be served a cached version. That means the site only needs to go through a two-step process to serve the user a page. Therefore, the site speed becomes much faster.

And though there are plenty of different caching plugin options out here, W3 Total Cache is the industry leader in terms of the different features and functionalities offered.

Since the number of settings available may actually be overwhelming to beginning webmasters, the W3 Total Cache recommends setting the plugin to the following options (although more advanced site owners should certainly feel free to experiment with the additional options the plugin provides):

“In most cases, ‘disk enhanced’ mode for page cache, ‘disk’ mode for minify and ‘disk’ mode for database caching are ‘good’ settings.”

Features:

• Improvements in search engine result page rankings
• At least 10x improvement in overall site performance
• Improved conversion rates and site performance
• Instant repeat page views: browser caching
• Optimized progressive render (pages start rendering quickly and can be interacted with more quickly)
• Reduced page load time (increased visitor time on site)
• Improved web server performance
• Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds

Broken Link Checker

What It Does: Generates a list of all the broken links on your site. From there, you are able to redirect, delete or fix links.

Skill Level: Beginner-Advanced

Free or Paid: Free

Have you ever been driving somewhere and take a wrong turn only to find yourself on a deadend street? Broken links are like that.

They’re annoying and they make for a poor user experience. Unfortunately, as website owners continue to update their sites, broken links are inevitable. In fact, it is so annoying that most SEOers will even use this inevitability as a tool to get more links.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Broken Link Checker is one of the best kept secrets. This tool will scan your site (which may take some time – even a matter of days) and then provide a list of all the broken links and their error codes:

Once you find that you have broken links, you can do a couple of things. Broken Link Checker will allow you to redirect, update or delete them depending on your situation.

From there you can select the redirected links from the list that you want to change and then fix them all with just one click. Here’s how you can do that:

Take advantage of this tool. Broken links create a poor user experience and will annoy readers enough to force them to look for another result and, at the same time, decrease dwell time on your site.

Google follows your broken links, but this tool will automatically tell search engines not to follow those broken links. If there is a functioning link accidentally labeled as broken, you will be able to manually mark it as a functioning link.

If nothing else, if you are annoyed by people emailing you about broken links on your site, this should solve your inbox problem!

Features:

• Generates list of broken links
• Notifies you via email
• Offers bulk redirections and deletions
• Offers unlinking
• Prevents search engines from following broken links

Dive Deeper:

• The Easy Guide to Broken Link Building for SEO
• What Is A/B SEO Testing?
• The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Content for SEO

Google XML Sitemap

What It Does: Provides a sitemap so that Google has a better crawling experience.

Skill Level: Beginner-Advanced

Free or Paid: Free

Have you ever tried to get through a maze or labyrinth? It’s nearly impossible to figure out where to turn and which paths leads where. It sure would be helpful to have a map!

What about your website? How does Google crawl that maze? The answer is to use an XML sitemap. That sounds super technical, but it actually isn’t if you use the Google XML Sitemap Plugin.

Having a sitemap is good for SEO, even if your site is well organized, because a sitemap is essentially a map of your website that contains a list of your URLs.

If your internal linking is so-so or if your overall site structure is not very clear, then search engines won’t be able to understand your structure and it will be much more difficult to rank any of your pages.

This plugin is a great way to help out Google and it won’t slow down your site or negatively affect it in any way. It has some great features, including automatically notifying Google when you post a new page and generating the sitemap.xml.

It is also perfect for non-tech people, because the default values for the configuration options are fine for the majority of sites:

Features:

• Sitemap generation
• Multi-language translations
• Custom URL support
• Improve crawl times
• Prioritize content
• Create a separate sitemap to improve image indexation
• Monitor search engine performance

Dive Deeper:

• 17 Best Free (or Freemium) SEO Tools to Improve Your Ranking
• 12 Quick Fixes to Make Your Mobile Traffic Convert
• Top 10 Mobile Optimization Best Practices For E-commerce Sites

WPtouch Mobile Plugin

What It Does: Automatically adds a mobile theme for visitors to your WordPress website.

Skill Level: Beginner-Advanced

Free or Paid: Free with paid options

If you haven’t optimized your website for mobile yet, you’re missing out on a lot of great traffic because you’ll be driving your site visitors away with your hard-to-read or maneuver site.

In fact, you are missing out on 52.2% of the traffic available:

Not only are you missing out on half of all Internet traffic, but your mobile version is a direct ranking factor in Google, so this should be at the top of any marketer’s to-do list. Thankfully, this plugin can help.

WPtouch provides a much faster response time than a responsive design or desktop:

It is easy enough to set up and will also satisfy the advanced SEOer, as it is highly customizable. From choosing the homepage of your mobile site to customizing the theme, it is ideal for targeting mobile-specific users.

Features:

• Faster response time
• Customizable theme
• Choose the device to show your site to (iOS, Android)
• Seamless integration
• Improves SEO rankings
• Easy installation

Conclusion

When it comes to optimizing your WordPress site for search engine optimization, there are hundreds of plugins that can provide a better experience for users and search engine spiders alike.

However, if your time is limited and you’d rather not sift through page after page of the WordPress plugin directory, consider adding these recommended plugins right away. They may not skyrocket your site to a #1 ranking right away, but they will go a long way towards correcting some of the SEO deficiencies that are native to the WordPress platform.

The post Essential WordPress SEO Plugins: The Marketer’s Toolkit appeared first on Single Grain.

Though it can be tempting to explain away your website’s failure to advance in the organic SERPs as being caused by factors outside of your control, the reality is that there are plenty of much more mundane reasons that SEO campaigns fail.

Take a look at the following list and apply them to your own campaign frustrations before jumping on the “bash Google” bandwagon!

Boost SEO Now

1) You’re Using Outdated Tactics

SEO changes every day because Google and the other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms. So if you think your SEO strategy isn’t working, take a look at the tactics you’re using and see if they’re simply out-of-date.

Here are some examples of outdated SEO tactics:

• Content Machines. That’s right. I’m not saying that content marketing doesn’t work anymore, but cranking out large quantities of low-quality content for $5 per post doesn’t work anymore. If you aren’t addressing your users’ burning questions, don’t expect Google to show your page in the SERPs.
• Long-Tail Keywords Only. If you are creating lots of little pages to rank for one specific long-tail keyword, you are going to get crushed. As brands rise to the top, using the skyscraper technique is a better bet. Check out one of Brian Dean’s (who came up with the term/technique) skyscraper posts:This is an individual post on his website and it generates over 1,000 visits per month and ranks for over 450 keywords. How many blog posts have you seen generating that much traffic and ranking for so many terms?!

• Keyword Stuffing. This has been outdated for a long time now. If you are just repeating a keyword over and over again on a page without it being placed in a useful context, it will not only fail to help, but could also land you with a Google Penalty.
• Building Poor Links. You can’t just buy links. They must be high-quality and from an authoritative source. Number 7 below discusses what a good link looks like – as well as a bad one!

If you want all the best SEO tactics that still work in 2019, make sure to check out the ultimate guide to SEO Techniques that we have created!

Dive Deeper: The Skyscraper Technique: How to Build High-Quality Backlinks to Your Content

2) Your Website User Experience (UX) Is Poor

SEO is about more than onsite tricks and inbound links. To win Google’s attention in 2019, your customers need to love your website.

So if your SEO strategy is failing, check your site dwell time. If your average customer spends at least 10 minutes on your website, Google will rank you a lot higher than your competitor whose audience only stays for 10 seconds.

Here are some super easy ways to increase your UX:

• Improve Site Speed. Did you know that for every second an Amazon page takes to load they lose $1.6 billion in sales? So speed up your page load time! This is such an easy win, it would seem silly not to do it. You can check your site speed using a tool Google developed called PageSpeed Insights, which is free:

• Use More Media. If there aren’t any interactive or otherwise engaging images on your website, your SEO efforts will be hurt. Including videos, images and charts as well as taking advantage of white space will help increase the user experience (which, in turn, improves dwell time).
• Optimize Your Headlines. Your article headline needs to describe what the page is about, so don’t have a title called The 10 Best Bakeries in Los Angeles and then have a reader click through to an article that describes the ten best baked goods in Los Angeles. Give them exactly what you say you will.

If your website is optimized for Google rather than customers, you’re going to struggle to achieve any of these three factors, as consumers have a sixth sense for filtering out sites that are in it for the wrong reasons. Remember, your consumers are buying from you, not Google!

Dive Deeper:

• How to Write Content for People and Optimize It for Google
• Overlooked SEO: Optimizing Images and Video For Search

3) You Don’t Have Analytics and Goal Tracking Installed

If you haven’t even bothered to set up website analytics, how can you be surprised that your SEO campaign is failing?! Analytics and goal tracking programs give you all the information you need to determine what’s working – and what isn’t – on your site.

Start with setting up Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

(If you aren’t sure how to set up Google Analytics check out this guide. If you don’t know how to set up Search Console, here is a guide on that.)

Once you have done that, make sure that you are tracking these elements in Google Analytics:

• New or unique visitor conversion
• Sources for incoming traffic
• Interactions per visit (pages/sessions)
• Return visitor conversion
• Value per visit
• Bounce rate
• Lead generation costs (costs per conversion)
• Exit pages
• Page views
• Average session duration

Operating in the absence of this information is akin to driving a car without the rear view mirror – you won’t know why your campaign is failing until you look into the past to see how earlier choices have affected your current performance!

So make sure that you are taking advantage of your Google Analytics account. Once you feel comfortable with it, you can also begin to learn about advanced settings and other cool tools to grow your business.

Dive Deeper: Creating Google Analytics Funnels and Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide

4) Your Niche Is too Competitive

You can plug away for years trying to get a site in the competitive financial and wellness industries to rank well amongst its better-established competitors, but – unfortunately – you may never see your efforts pay off. While you might think your SEO strategy is failing, the problem may be that SEO isn’t a tactic you can use to grow.

So doesn’t that mean it’s time to throw in the towel and say forget it to SEO? Well, not exactly. You still need to have a quality website that is well optimized and offers a friendly and helpful user experience.

You still need to have all these things in place, only now you need to shift your thinking from “SEO is the key to my success” to “SEO is a platform I can start to build success upon”:

Now that you have a user-friendly website, you can implement some content marketing in the form of blog posts, podcasts, videos, etc..

You used to just be able to optimize a website for SEO to get tons of traffic, but now you actually have to be your customer’s hero to rank. The good news is that once you are able to build a loyal following, you will not have to worry about constantly generating new leads.

Boost SEO Now

5) You’re too Keyword Focused

We used to be able to throw up a page about a super specific long-tail keyword and see it rank in no time – even if we were competing against big brands.

If you are still doing this, no wonder your SEO strategy is failing. Things have changed. Now it’s the big brands that always end up on top no matter how specific your post is.

The brands will rise to the top. How many times have you heard that? Guess what? It’s true!

If you are focusing on ranking for long-tail keywords, you are going to suffer. Sure, you might have a great article on the keyword “women’s blue shoes for sale” and your title might even be an exact match. But that doesn’t mean you will rank for it.

Check out the SERP for that keyword. Not a single one of the results are exact matches. Instead, Google chooses to show big brands:

So what can you do to become a big brand? Here are a few ways to do this:

• Produce Great Content. If you can answer all the questions that your customers are asking in a thorough, up-to-date and personal style, you shouldn’t have too much trouble gaining a following which will help grow your brand. Try using our content sprouting technique to create endless pieces of amazing content.
• Associate with Bigger Brands. This can be done through guest posting on the sites of industry leaders, having an influencer on your podcast or other creative ways. If you don’t have an even trade to offer (they might not want to give away their time), think of how you can make it valuable for that person. Can you offer them free content marketing? What do you do well?
• Be a Great Storyteller. YouTube sensation Tim Schmoyer shared in a Growth Everywhere podcast that the best way to build a following is by telling super relatable stories. Even if your competition has a better SEO strategy or a more in-depth guide, you might still be able to beat them if you can build a stronger bond with your audience.

Dive Deeper:

• The Power of Guest Blogging (And How to Get Started!)
• Influencer Marketing for SEO: How to Build Links with Influencer Outreach

6) Your Target Keywords Don’t Receive Enough Search Volume

Keyword search volume is tricky to measure accurately – but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t measure it at all! Let me tell you a story about when I failed at SEO (you can listen to it on Marketing School, too).

I wanted to create a website about light shows, so I built it and it was only a month old when it ranked for the term “lightshow videos”. But guess what? It didn’t get any traffic!

Why? Because nobody was searching for the term “lightshow videos”. It doesn’t matter if you have an 8,000-word blog post of the most amazing content if nobody is searching for what you are talking about.

It might not be that the SEO tactics you’re using are failing. Plenty of campaigns fail because the high rankings their managers sought come from keywords that simply aren’t searched for by regular users. It can be easy to jump to the top of the SERPs for these queries, but if you want these top rankings to turn into actual traffic, be sure that each of the keywords you’re targeting has a search volume that’s consistent with your website goals before you start working on your campaign.

But keywords with high search volume usually have a very high keyword difficulty score, so isn’t it better to stick to low-search-volume keywords?

Well, in 2019, you are better off creating a super thorough guide that targets a high-volume keyword, even if it is a fairly high-difficulty keyword. If it’s really detailed, then it should rank for some keywords even if it doesn’t land the high-difficulty keyword. Revisit your post in about six months and see what keywords have stuck. Then try using a content revamp strategy to upgrade them and reoptimize for those keywords.

That’s how Brian Dean of Backlinko became successful. He only has about 50 blog posts, but they are extremely thorough and therefore cover a lot of keywords.

Boost SEO Now

7) You’re Building the Wrong Links

Yes, you’re building links. That’s great. But in the wake of the Panda and Penguin updates, it’s important to be aware that you can’t just build any old links you please.

Those “10,000 links for $10” promotions you used to buy? Out. The spammy profile links that shot your old sites up to the top of the SERPs? Also out.

Here are some link tactics that you should avoid in your SEO strategy:

• Link Directories. Google isn’t a fool. It won’t value a link placed in a directory with hundreds of other links.

• Links in Footers. If you have a website linking to you externally from the footer, this could potentially harm you. If you see a large number of these kinds of links or any other spammy links, feel free to disavow them in your Google Search Console (instructions on how to do that here). However, Google states that “In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use this tool.”
• NoFollow Links. If someone drops your link, but then “no follows” it, your website will unfortunately not receive much of a boost. It is important to ask if your link will be followed before doing a guest post. How do you check if a link is followed or nofollowed? Just download the Chrome extension “NoFollow” and it will box in red any nofollow links. Here’s an example:
• Low DA Website. If you have a lot of links from websites with low domain authorities, this won’t necessarily hurt you, but it won’t exactly boost your website either. If you are building links and want to check the DA of a website, download the MozBar Chrome extension which will allow you to see it in Google’s SERPs:

You can also see the DA under the URL at the top of a website’s page – just make sure you are logged in to see it:

If you want to see the links you already have, login to SEMrush and type in the domain name. Then go to Backlinks > Referring Domains > under authority score drop-down arrow next to number > DA

• Irrelevant Topic. If you are a bakery and have a  link pointing to your website from Apple (the electronics store), it isn’t going to help you. Why? Sure they have a great DA and are famous, but the topics are completely different so it won’t make Google see you as a major authority in the bakery space.
• Reciprocal Links. A study done by Ahrefs shows that while reciprocal links are common amongst top ranking pages, this is often something that occurs naturally within an industry. Nonetheless, reciprocal links are indeed against Google’s guidelines and, therefore, sending emails like “If you link to me I’ll link to you” should be avoided at all cost.        

The name of the game now is high-quality, natural-looking links, so if you aren’t willing to put in the necessary time (or pay someone else to do so), don’t be surprised when your SEO campaigns eventually fail.

Dive Deeper:

• The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Content for SEO
• How to Squeeze the Most Value Out of Nofollow Backlinks from High-Authority Sites
• The Easy Guide to Broken Link Building for SEO

8) You’re Over-Optimizing Your Anchor Text

Another post-Penguin lesson that all SEOs need to take to heart is the prohibition against excessively optimized anchor text. Although there’s no hard-and-fast rule about the level of optimization that’s acceptable these days, it’s a good idea to use SEO keywords in no more than 50% of your anchor text. And even then, the specific keywords you use should vary widely in order to prevent the search engines from dinging your website and your SEO strategy for manipulation.

Here are some specific examples of BAD anchor texts:

We sell the best blue mattress in the USA at the best price ever!

Link to www.example.com/best-blue-mattress-in-the-USA

Why is this one bad? Well, it is over optimized! If your anchor text is an exact match with the URL or title, you might have problems.

How could this be done safely yet still include keywords?

We sell some of the highest quality blue mattresses at competitive pricing.

Link to www.example.com/best-blue-mattress-in-the-USA

See how I expanded it so that now the keywords are only taking up a percentage of the anchor text?

9) You Don’t Understand Your Target Audience

While plenty of webmasters think of SEO as a “step-by-step” process in which specific actions are undertaken in order to guarantee good results in the SERPs, good SEO is much more nuanced.

In fact, good a SEO strategy begins with a solid understanding of who your target audience is and what they’re looking for online. Getting to know your ideal customers on an intimate and personal basis is key to selecting the appropriate keywords to target and the right SEO techniques to bring about the results you desire. Merely gleaning a few data points from your favorite SEO tool simply won’t give you the complete picture needed to ensure campaign success.

So how can you get to know your customer better? Build a couple of buyer personas around your ideal customers (generally, you should have more than one “type” who buys your products). Learn how to do that here:

Learn More: Attract the Right Prospects With Buyer Personas (Includes Step-by-Step Templates!)

10) You Aren’t Using Social Media

Really, it’s 2019. So if you aren’t using social media as part of your SEO campaigns, you’re being willfully ignorant. The relative weight given to social shares and relative user authority in the Google ranking algorithms is increasing every day, which means that you’re missing out if you’ve decided not to invest in these powerful sites.

But let’s put Google aside for a minute. As of April 2019, Bing controls about 24% of the search traffic, and social media is a direct ranking factor for them. So you might be leaving a lot of search traffic on the table without a social media account!

Social media also helps to improve brand search volume. Even if people fail to click on your social media post, they may remember it and go back and Google it.

Dive Deeper:

• The Beginner’s Guide to Crafting a Highly Effective Social Media Strategy
• How to Increase Website Traffic through Social Media
• 7 Dead Simple Social Media Marketing Tactics That Still Work Today

11) You’re Ignoring Your Customers

Pursuing SEO to the exclusion of serving your customers is a recipe for disaster.

The way that your customers engage with your website and talk about your brand in the social sphere can give you a tremendous amount of valuable information for use in your SEO strategy – but only if you listen!

In fact, HubSpot did a case study about writing copy in the language of your customer. When they made a few simple adjustments, take a look at what happened:

That’s pretty powerful!

Pay special attention to the keywords that people are using to describe your brand and the ways they navigate through your website, as each of these particular elements may dictate the keywords you target in both your internal and external link-building campaigns.

12) You’re Being Impatient

Unfortunately, SEO results don’t happen overnight. You can plug away for weeks or months at a time without seeing improvements, only to have your rankings jump a few places just before you were about to give up all hope of ever experiencing success with your SEO strategy.

There’s no way to predict when your SEO strategy will pay off, which means that patience is a virtue that all SEOs and webmasters must practice. Even if you don’t see results in the timeframe that you expect, keep plugging away at the best practices described above. Sooner or later, your results are bound to be rewarded.

Boost SEO Now

The post 12 Reasons Your SEO Strategy Is Failing appeared first on Single Grain.

But ever since Google’s Penguin update, fewer and fewer opportunities exist to obtain backlinks that meet these criteria. If you’ve exhausted your email link building and guest posting efforts, another option to consider is broken link building.

What Is a Broken Link?

A broken link is when you click on a link and it takes you to a 404 page. Broken links are also often referred to as “dead links,” as the page you were directed to is now dead.

Even if you have tried broken link building in the past and say it doesn’t work, you probably weren’t doing it correctly. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you why in this article.

The process of broken link building involves seeking out website pages in your industry with broken links in their content and then contacting their webmasters to offer your own content or link as a replacement for these dead URLs. If you’ve struggled to find new link building opportunities in the past, read on to find out exactly how this useful process can be implemented on your own website.

Dive Deeper:

• How to Make Broken Link Building 10x Easier
• The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Content for SEO
• 5 Types of Guest-Post Content that Support Your Link-Building Efforts

1) How to Find Broken Links: Identifying Web Pages

The first step in the broken link building process is figuring out how to find broken links. It’s not as hard as you might think.

If you’re going to contact webmasters with broken links and recommend that your own URL replace the dead references you’ve identified, the obvious first step in this process is to find web pages that contain these outdated links. There are a few different ways you can do this depending on your time constraints and budget.

CitationLab’s Broken Link Finder (Big Budget)

If you’re short on time and long on extra cash, CitationLab’s Broken Link Finder tool will automate the entire process of identifying dead links on pages throughout your industry. Depending on your marketing budget, investing in a program like this can be a great way to build the largest possible number of links in the smallest amount of time.

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer (Small/Medium Budget)

If you already have access to Ahrefs, you are all set. First, create a list of your biggest competitors.

Next, head over to Ahrefs’ site explorer and type in the name of one of your top competitors. Let’s say you have a plant blog and one of your competitors is Growing With Plants. Now click on “best by links” under the heading “Pages” in the left column.

Once you have that, make sure to filter by “404 not found” on the top, drop-down menu. This is where the real gold is.

Look under the “Referring domains” column on the right. See that number 5 for the first entry? That is the number of sites pointing to the page that no longer exists on Growing With Plants.

One column over you’ll see “Dofollow” under “External links”. That number 6 is what you want to click on. It will reveal the exact URL that has a link pointing to the broken link from your competitor. It will look like this:

You can even see the anchor text that was used to link to your competitor. This can be helpful when trying to understand what the broken page was about, though you can usually tell based on its URL.

If you don’t have access to Ahrefs and are working on a shoestring budget, don’t lose hope! Here is how you can do this by manually.

Dive Deeper:

• How – And Why – To Build A Backlink Portfolio
• The Marketer’s Guide to Link Building
• How to Sustainably Build Quality Links by Building Relationships

Manually (Shoestring Budget)

To start, generate a list of broad industry keywords. If, for example, you run a dog training tips website, the phrases “pet training” or “dog training” could be useful to this process, while long-tail keywords like “dog training classes San Francisco” should be avoided.

Next, you’ll need to pair your broad keyword phrases with broken link prospecting phrases and enter them into Google in order to discover potential sites that could offer dead URL link building opportunities. Possible prospecting phrases could include (among hundreds of other variations):

• “Suggested sites”
• “Recommended links”
• “Resources list”
• “Favorite links”

In this example, I typed in “best dog training websites to follow” and these were the results.

Now I can go through all of these results and see if they have broken links. So I might click on the second result, “Top 15 Best Dog Training Sites of 2019 – Pup Junkies”. I used Check My Links (it’s a free extension that you can download that will highlight any links that are broken) and it showed that “Love That Pet” is a dead link. So this would be a great opportunity for my post.

In general, the best place to find broken links is in the “recommended links” section that many sites have, so carrying out these search variations using different combinations of your generic keywords and prospecting phrases should turn up a number of websites that host link lists on their pages.

Keep in mind, though, that these aren’t the only broken link building opportunities that exist. You may also find dead URLs in the editorial content of other sites within your industry, which presents you with the chance to rewrite outdated content that the sites you contact can use freely in exchange for a link back to your website.

Finding Outdated Linking Opportunities

These opportunities are a little more difficult to identify and don’t scale as easily, though they may have bigger rewards in the long run. This is where you find a website that offers a link to an outdated piece of content. Sure, the link still works, but the information is no longer relevant or perhaps even incorrect. If you have a better piece of content that touches on the same topic but with a more updated solution, the site owner may be willing to swap out the links.

Neil describes how he goes about link building in this episode of marketing school. He uses the example of if Website A is linking to an article on Website B about how to use Vine to get more social shares, you might want to reach out to Website A. You can say something like:

“Hey, I saw your link to Website B about getting more social shares on Vine. Now that Vine doesn’t exist anymore it won’t really help your readers get more social shares. However, we do have an article about how to get more shares on Instagram. Do you want to swap the link to Website B for this one?”

2) Evaluate Linking Opportunities

Once you’ve completed step one in this process, you should have a list of individual web pages within your industry that contain at least one outgoing dead link. However, be aware that not all of these links are created equally.

The best broken link building opportunities are those that:

• Are still actively managed by their webmasters
• Are relevant to your website’s subject
• Have backlinks pointing at them

Is the Website Still Actively Managed?

Seeing evidence that a webmaster still updates his link page increases the likelihood that your broken link building request will be responded to, compared to pages that have long since been abandoned.

If the first newsletter listed on a web page is from 2008, do you think it is an actively managed website? Probably not.

To get a feel for whether or not your prospective link building opportunities are still actively managed, take a look around the site in general. If you can’t find any recent blog posts, news articles or other “dated” changes, consider pursuing other broken link building opportunities first.

Is the Subject Relevant to Your Topic?

At the same time, ensuring that the broken links you choose to target are found on pages that relate to your own website’s content will increase the overall SEO value of any links that you’re able to create. For the most part, this is a judgment call that’s up to you – though you should keep in mind that links don’t need to be perfectly related to be useful.

As an example, a broken link found on a dog breeding website still generally relates to your dog training tips content, even if your subject matter isn’t exactly the same.

Does It Have Backlinks Pointing to It?

Finally, as a link from a page with several external links pointing back to it will serve your own site’s SEO better than a link from a page without any inbound links, it’s a good idea to filter your broken link building opportunities to pursue those that offer the greatest possible benefit to your site.

Any SEO tool should be able to give you this information, though the Majestic SEO Bulk Backlink Checker is a lightweight, easy-to-use option for identifying this data:

Dive Deeper:

• The Skyscraper Technique: How to Build High-Quality Backlinks to Your Content
• Build Backlinks – and Website Traffic – with Blogger Outreach
• Influencer Marketing for SEO: How to Build Links with Influencer Outreach

3) Find Webmaster Contact Information

Once you’ve prioritized the broken link building opportunities you identified in step one, you’ll need to find the webmaster’s contact information in order to send your request that your own link be added to the pages you’ve found.

If you’re lucky, the websites on which you’ve identified pages with broken links will have separate “Contact” pages that enable you to reach out to site owners or managers directly.

Email Finding Tools

Hunter.io is a great tool for finding email addresses. It is a Chrome extension that you can use for any website and can even sometimes be able to scrape not only the email address, but also the person’s role. If you don’t want the Chrome extension, you can simply go to the website and just type in the website domain. The free plan allows 100 searches per month.

With the Chrome extension, just go to any website and click the little “hunter” icon. It will drop down like this:

VoilaNorbert is another email finder that can help you collect contact information:

The first 50 leads are free and then it starts at $49 per month.

Link Research Tool’s Contact Finder can also be used to scrape email addresses automatically:

You might not have had success in the past with broken link building because you did not follow this one very simple step: Make sure you are contacting the correct person.

Unless it is a personal blog or a small enough company that the founder is also running the website, don’t reach out to the CEO. On the other hand, if the only email address you find is generic or for an unrelated department, you may want to try the CEO or skip that one all together, depending on how big it is.

Dive Deeper: Top 8 Tools to Improve Customer Experience Using Heat Maps, Feedback and Links

Other Ways to Find Emails

If you still can’t find any email addresses using these tools, you can also search social media or Google the person’s contact info. Or if you know what the email format in the company looks like, try using that formula with your contact person’s name. Hunter.io will tell you exactly what the pattern is:

If you don’t know the name of the webmaster, I’ll show you where you can find that later.

As soon as you’ve compiled your webmaster contact information, you can move on to the next step…

Dive Deeper:

• 4 Ways to Create Great Links that Boost Your Website’s Ranking
• How to Get Premium Backlinks When No One Knows Who You Are

4) Create Your Broken Link Building Offer

Now, when it comes to contacting the owner of the pages you’ve identified as hosting broken links, you have a number of different options. For example, you can:

• Alert the webmaster to the presence of dead links to external resources and request that your own URL be substituted in its place
• Point out outdated content on the webmaster’s website and offer to rewrite it or provide better text in exchange for the inclusion of your website’s URL
• Tell the webmaster that you’ve found broken links on their site, but will only reveal them if they agree to post your link instead

Obviously, the path you decide to take will be up to you, based on both your own desire to be helpful and the type of broken link you’ve identified. Once you’ve made this decision, you’ll need to compose a message to your target webmaster, as described in the next step.

5) Contact the Webmaster

When it comes to sending out broken link notifications to the webmasters you’ve identified throughout this process, you’ll find that it’s easy to have a series of templates on hand that enable you to compose and send your messages as quickly as possible.

Here is an example template that we will break down together:

Here are some components of a great outreach email for broken link building:

Subject Line

Do not include “broken link” or “dead link” anywhere in the subject. I would try something like the title of the blog post. Imagine what the subject lines from their readers look like and try to put yourself in their shoes.

Name

Please make sure you find at least the webmaster’s first name if possible. It is a major turnoff and spam alert if your email begins with “Dear Mr/Ms Last name,” or even worse, no name at all. Here are some ways you can find the webmaster’s name.

• Check the “Contact” page. Many times the name will be listed on the contact page like this:

• Use Hunter.io:

• Try Google’s “Whois” search:

In fact, contacting the webmaster and getting his/her first name correct is so important that even Google chimes in with some very specific info on finding the webmaster:

Starting the Email with Familiarity

When you begin the email, make sure that you are not saying in the first or second sentence anything about a broken link. Bloggers and websites are used to getting broken link emails by now, and since you can see the first sentence in your Gmail inbox’s preview, this is a great way to make sure your email is deleted before it is ever opened.

Instead, make an effort to connect with the blog by mentioning a post that you really liked or something to demonstrate that you actually read the blog.

✖ “I found a broken link on page X…”

✖ “I noticed that on page X there is a broken link…”

✅ “I love your blog, particularly the post How to Train a Dog to Sit. In fact, I was able to teach my dog to sit in 1 day!”

This means that if you do decide to use a Pitchbox or other automated tool for broken link building, you are going to have to customize this line on every email before you send it out. This is also why it is important to vet the site and make sure it is worth it before reaching out to swap the dead link.

Your Pitch

Keep it short and simple. Just include the bare minimum. There are a few things you must include to make it super easy for the webmaster to find the broken link and switch it to yours:

• The name of the blog post with a link to it (you can just put a hyperlink on the title of the blog post as I have done in my example above with Blog Post X)
• The anchor text (I say “…the link that says “learn more about grooming”)
• The dead link (in my email example it is www.deadpage.com)
• Your link to replace it (mention that your page also talks about grooming)

Bonus Tip: End with a Question

If you aren’t doing this as a mass email and want to really skyrocket your conversion rate, end with a question for the webmaster. This will give them a greater incentive to respond as they don’t want to disappoint their reader base.

“I heard that you are releasing an ebook on the 5 Smartest Dog Breeds. What day will it come out?”

Who wouldn’t respond to a question like that? You are actually demonstrating an interest in them and a desire to learn more about their products. This will set you very far apart from spam and other broken link builders.

Final Step: Tracking

Think you are done? Not quite. If you really want to succeed with broken link building, you need to follow up with people. Generally 1-2 follow-up emails is reasonable. More than that can get your email marked as junk.

Make sure that you have a spreadsheet that lists the date of when you sent out the original email and the first follow up. You will probably want to wait 3-4 days before sending the first follow-up email.

How to Streamline the Process

Because this process has to be personalized, you can’t use Pitchbox or any other automated email software. Obviously, this means it will be very time consuming. So how can you streamline it? Hiring a virtual assistant is a great option. Just give him/her a clear process to follow.

I would also recommend that if you do have to do it by hand yourself, really vetting the websites and making sure that your article is truly an appropriate replacement will save you a lot of time writing emails. You have to shift your mind from playing a numbers game to playing a quality game. Sending five targeted and appropriate emails will yield better results than 100 inappropriate emails.

Why the Broken Link Building Method Often Fails

Broken link building still works. So why is it that so many people have no success with it? Here are the top reasons:

• The replacement link isn’t the same topic
• The email is generic and is obviously a blast email
• It isn’t focused on helping the blog owner

Conclusion

If you follow this guide you should have much more success with your broken link building process. No, you won’t win every single link, but I’ll bet that you will lift your conversion rate with these tactics. Make sure that you are always providing value to the other person so that it is an equal trade. Give it a try and I’m sure you will find that it is well worth your time!

The post The Easy Guide to Broken Link Building for SEO appeared first on Single Grain.

Although, to be fair, as Moz puts it:

“Google doesn’t try and go out and say, ‘How well known is Coca-Cola versus Pepsi versus 7 Up versus Sprite versus Jones Cola? Hey, let’s rank Coca-Cola a little higher because they seem to have greater brand awareness, brand affinity than Pepsi.’…. That’s not something that’s in their algorithm. However… many things that are in Google’s ranking algorithm correlate very well with brands.”

From Google’s standpoint, this practice makes sense.  The search engine’s goal is to provide users with the best possible results and there’s no doubt that some users prefer the “known quantity” of a brand website than the potential risk of an unknown competitor.

If you aren’t sold on the importance of branded keywords, check out a study that Tom Capper did on Moz’s blog about links (a huge factor in domain authority) versus brand awareness:

Capper states:

“Here’s the main story: branded search volume is better correlated with rankings than Domain Authority is.”

So if you want better rankings and higher conversions, owning your branded keywords and/or generating searches for your brand is crucial.

However, simply jumping to optimize branded search terms might not be the best strategy for your specific situation. For some, staying with SEO keywords might be best. I’ll tell you how you can discover which strategy is right for you and how to execute it.

First, though, let’s get on the same page about what the difference between branded keywords and SEO keywords are.

What’s the Difference Between Branded and SEO Keywords?

Traditional SEO Keywords

SEO keywords represent the phrases you’ve chosen to target on your website based on their search volume and competition. You’ve chosen traditional queries like “online camera review” or “best women’s shoes” because your keyword research indicates that you’ll be able to get your website ranked well in the corresponding SERPs and that you’ll see an influx of natural search traffic as a result of your optimization efforts.

Here are some examples:

• Table for sale
• Best water glasses
• Buy pillows online

Notice how in most of the search results of a traditional SEO keyword, like “electric fireplace for sale online,” a number of different brands will be shown.

Dive Deeper: The Best Way to Track Your Keyword Rankings in 2023

Branded Keywords

On the other hand, branded keywords include search queries that reference your company’s name or other branded elements. Here are some examples:

• Single Grain marketing
• Single Grain blog
• Eric Siu Single Grain

Notice that in the branded search, all the real estate is owned by that one particular brand. In the example of “fireplacepro blower kit,” every single result has the domain “fireplacepro.com”.

With Google’s focus on brands, companies are now responsible for including both of these keyword groups (branded keywords & SEO keywords) in their marketing plans.
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In fact, bidding on your own keywords in PPC is common practice. Why? If you don’t, one of your competitors could bid on your brand and technically rank above you as ads are listed above organic listings.

Here’s an example. The brand Black Forest Gifts sells cuckoo clocks. So if you put in the keyword plus the brand – “black forest gifts cuckoo clocks” – you will find that although Black Forest Gifts are listed first organically, they are actually the fourth listing on the page, because they are not bidding on their own brand name.

While branded keywords are important, depending on where you are in your business, you don’t necessarily need to start targeting your brand keywords. Here’s why.

Dive Deeper:

• Anatomy of the SERPs (And How to Get on Page 1!)
• SEO Keyword Research Made Easy in 2023
• How to Optimize Your Brand for Search Engines

Targeting Branded Keywords vs. SEO Keywords

If branding matters so much, should you abandon your traditional SEO keywords altogether in order to focus your efforts on branded phrases? If you’re a new brand, should you make this change even if search volume doesn’t exist for your brand keywords?

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution that will provide the ideal balance of branded and traditional keywords for all websites. However, I am going to give you some tools you can use to craft a strategy for your company.

This is one question that I still get asked a lot: If I’m already ranking for SEO keywords, does it matter if I’m ranking for branded keywords?

Yes. Not only does it reflect poorly on your site if you come up below your competitors for a branded search, but these are also searches made by people who like and trust you. They have already passed the awareness part of the sales funnel and are interested enough in what you have to offer to type your name into Google.

Not only is this theory logical, but it is proven as well. A study called “The Evolving Path of Today’s B2B Customer” shows that brand keywords convert twice as well:

Make it as easy as possible for these people to click on your link by optimizing it to be first in the SERP (more later about how you can optimize for branded keywords).

Determine Your Branded Keyword’s Search Volume

If you aren’t getting search volume for those branded keywords, jumping in and optimizing for branded search terms won’t be of much use to you. How can you tell if you are getting search volume for branded keywords?

Head over to SEMrush and type in your website’s domain:

• Click Organic Research on the left side bar
• Then click the Positions tab next to Overview
• Click the Advanced Filters tab
• Under Keyword, scroll down to click Keyword Type
• Next to that, you can filter by “Branded”

See the volume column? That’s your gold. 

If you have a lot of search volume, it might be time for you to start optimizing for some of these branded searches. I’ll discuss that soon, but first, let’s talk about what you should do if you did not have many branded keywords listed.

If you don’t have a lot of branded keywords, it might be time to figure out how to grow your brand. Maybe you are a startup or still growing. This is what you should do.

Dive Deeper:

• Should a Blog Post Focus on One Keyword or Multiple Keywords for SEO?
• The Complete Guide to Brand Building (Must-Read for Digital Marketers)
• 7 SEO Hacks to Boost Your Ranking in 2019

How to Grow Your Branded Keyword’s Search Volume

1) Targeting Traditional SEO Keywords

If you don’t have a lot of search volume for your brand keywords, targeting them within your SEO efforts won’t make sense at this point. Instead, focus your energy on targeting traditional SEO keywords.

For example, if you’ve launched a startup in the personal finance space, you might target the phrases “personal finance tool” or “online savings tool” (depending on your startup’s business objectives).

If you want a complete guide on SEO keyword research, we have already written it!

By targeting the phrases that you anticipate your users will be entering into the search engines with both your on-site and off-site SEO activities, you’ll get the momentum needed in order to build familiarity with your brand.

2) Building Brand Recognition with Other Types of Marketing

At the same time, though, you’ll want to put some effort into carrying out branding activities on other web properties in order to begin generating the branded search traffic needed to win in the SERPs over time.

There are dozens of ways to do this, but a few places to start include (remember that it takes about 7 touches before a customer buys):

• Writing and submitting press releases detailing your startup’s launch and benefits. Wondering how you can go about doing that? We actually already did the heavy lifting in this step-by-step article that will show you exactly how to land a top publication without a PR firm.
• Setting up social media profiles and optimizing them with branded imagery.
• Claiming any local business profiles (as found on Google+, Yelp and similar sites) that are applicable to your business.
• Creating (and sharing) content marketing articles that capture your audience’s attention and provide value to them with no strings attached while promoting your brand.

We even did a video with Adrian Saluminovic, a master at PR, to discover the best ways to get more press for your company. We discuss finding the best publications for your niche, pitching to that company and listing some tools you may need along the way.

Adrian provides another three strategies that you can use to build brand recognition:

• Get reviews from top-tier publications on your products/services without using a PR service.
• Get on podcasts – he mentions how to figure out which podcasts you should target.
• Pitch journalists directly by email – we go into how to warm them up, what to say and a general timeline for the correspondence.

3) Super Creative Ways to Build a Brand

Give Value Away for Free

Do you know why Neil Patel acquired Ubersuggest for six figures and then turned around and provided access for free? It wasn’t for links or for the traffic – it was to build his brand.

After all, when most people were paying $100 per month for this information that suddenly became available for free, why wouldn’t it become popular? Do you think it worked? You bet it did!

Buy More Real Estate

If you have some cash to spend and you are in a position to grow, you might want to consider buying other websites in your space and then redirect all their traffic. Boom! Now all of their customers will begin searching for your brand instead.

Over time, as consumers become used to seeing your brand name mentioned on the web properties they frequent, they’ll be more apt to use your brand name in association with the queries they enter into the search engines.

So make sure to keep checking your keyword tools to watch the search volumes start to increase.

Dive Deeper:

• What Is A/B SEO Testing?
• 17 Best Free (or Freemium) SEO Tools to Improve Your Ranking
• How to Build a High-Performance Content Marketing Strategy

How to Optimize for Branded Keywords with SEO

Let’s say you do have search volume for some branded keywords. How do you optimize for them?

First, go back to your SEMrush page that we already looked at. Now sort those branded terms by position (second column) backwards and it will show you your lowest to highest rankings.

If you don’t have any below the first position, you are good to go. However, if you have a branded keyword that is ranking in position two or lower, let’s optimize it.

Penalties

First go into your Google Search Console and see if that page has any penalties. If not, go onto the next step. If it does, make sure you fix it and then learn how to recover from it.

Create a Page

Sometimes you have to create a page for that branded keyword. For example, if you don’t have a customer service page, but a lot of people are Googling “[brand] customer service,” then there’s a good chance that Google would prefer to show another more established brand’s customer service page. So make sure to add one.

Also be sure that whatever page you create is helpful to the audience. Notice how this page makes it easy for the user to find answers depending on the category of problem that he or she has:

Optimization for Branded Keywords in Google Images

Google Images should not be overlooked. Depending on your industry, this has the potential to drive you a lot of traffic. Make sure that you have optimized the:

• Alt tag
• Title
• File name

To optimize them, just make sure that you have included your brand name plus keyword that you are trying to rank for. If this is an e-commerce store, also include the name of the product, model, size, color, and anything else that is relevant.

If you still aren’t sure if you have enough branded keywords to start optimizing for them (maybe only a handful of keywords are showing up), consider the following scenarios.

1) Launch an Entirely New Brand

In most cases, optimizing for branded keywords with little search volume shouldn’t be a priority.

Suppose that you’ve recently launched a new startup. People aren’t Googling your name because they don’t know who you are yet. So is it worth creating content around the branded keywords? Not really.

Instead, focus on creating a search volume for those branded keywords. Part of this can be done on your website, but part of it must be done on other websites.

In this case, your ideal SEO scenario involves the following two major tactics.

2) Realign Your Keyword Strategy for an Existing Website

Now, suppose you aren’t a startup. Instead, you’re an established company that’s been carrying out digital marketing campaigns according to previously known SEO best practices. You’ve heard that branding is becoming more and more important in terms of natural search performance, but you aren’t sure how to alter your current marketing strategy in order to satisfy both of these requirements.

Chances are, if you’re in this position, you aren’t currently targeting any branded keywords – unless they happened to come up in your traditional keyword research. So should you really give up your existing keyword priorities in order to chase after branded search queries?

Well, yes and no. First, it’s back to the drawing board to research exactly how much search volume any existing branded queries are receiving. You can use any keyword research tool to uncover this data, simply by generating keyword ideas based off of your brand name.

As an example, if we put “Click Funnels” into a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest or Ahrefs, we’d likely get a handful of phrases that include the company name and monthly search volume:

If you do see instances of branded keywords receiving existing search traffic, consider optimizing different parts of your website for these keywords. One simple way to do that is to see if that branded keyword even appears on the page. It reflects poorly on your company to appear below others in these SERPs!

However, if you do decide to replace traditional keywords in order to make room for branded queries, be careful to monitor your results to ensure that you don’t see a reduction in natural search traffic or overall conversions.

At the same time, consider optimizing a few instances of your branded keywords both on your website or on external web properties – even if these phrases don’t have any meaningful search volume yet. Building links that showcase your branded keywords will help prove to Google that you’re a known brand, regardless of whether your branding efforts have caught up to your aspirations yet.

Dive Deeper:

• The Best Way to Track Your Keyword Rankings: An SEO Expert’s Strategy
• 30 Brands with the Best Digital Marketing Campaigns
• [Case Study] The Content Sprout Method: How to Use Strategic Content Marketing to Grow Your Traffic From 0 to Millions

3) Compete in a Market Full of Established Brands

Finally, what are you supposed to do if you’re a small fish trying to compete against known entities like Amazon, Zappos or Best Buy? After all, these companies have a substantial branded advantage over your puny marketing budget.

In these cases, you’ve got to take your branding efforts directly to the people! While you may not be able to command enough of a presence to score points against better branded competitors in the SERPs right away, you can make your case directly to consumers by marketing your business using social channels.

On sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest, the barriers to attracting customer attention are much easier to overcome than trying to secure the same interest through your natural search presence.

Take a look at this example from Zomato Pizza. They aren’t nearly as big as Dominos, but they are still getting a lot of attention on social media:

Final Thoughts

Of course, you should certainly add some branded keywords to the anchor text you use in both internal and external links in order to prove to Google that you’re a branded force to be reckoned with. But at the same time, don’t wait around for these efforts to be noticed. Get out there, start promoting your brand on social networks and, with time, you should see an improvement in both your brand’s recognition and your website’s natural search performance.

Really, no matter what size your business is, the power of branding is something you need to be aware of. Integrating branded keywords into your SEO approach will help your site to build recognition with both visitors and search engines – recognition that is likely to play a larger and larger role in the way your site’s authority is measured by Google in the future.

The post Targeting Branded vs. SEO Keywords: Which Should You Focus On? appeared first on Single Grain.

It’s no surprise why content marketers are spending so much cash, effort and energy into targeting them – and bringing ideal customers to their website via search.

But in order to target them, you need to focus on one thing: keywords.

The words, phrases and sentences that your audience is searching for are critical. By finding the right keywords, understanding them, and using them on your website, you could hit the jackpot: A boost in organic traffic – and content marketing ROI – as a result. Sounds like the dream, right?

In this guide, we’ll explain everything you need to know about SEO keyword research from a content marketer’s point of view, from finding “good” keywords to using them on your website.

The Different Types of Keywords

The keywords you’re choosing are just as important as the words you’re selecting. Pick the wrong keyword – one that fails to drive the right traffic to your content – and you could drop to the bottom of the SERPs faster than you can say the word “Google”.

Pick a good keyword that attracts the right audience and there’s no reason why your content marketing strategy can't be the largest driver of new customers for your business.
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So, let’s iron out the basics and get to grips with the different types of keywords that you can target.

Dive Deeper: How to Build a High-Performance Content Marketing Strategy

Competitive Keywords

It can be difficult to make yourself heard in Google’s SERPs. Only ten businesses are rewarded with an organic first-page result. But combine that with the ~3 paid ads and featured snippet boxes that often crop up, and you’ll quickly understand why 91% of content gets zero organic search traffic.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to reach the top spots. It does mean, however, that you’ll need to think about the competitiveness of each keyword before you go full force with targeting it.

The competition score of a keyword tells you how difficult it will be to rank in Google for a specific keyword. It’s based on several factors, including:

• Which websites are targeting it
• The Domain Authority (DA) of those websites
• The number of links that each page targeting that phrase has
• The average bid price for the keyword in paid search

So, for each keyword you find, plug it into Ubersuggest and take note of the score:

A competitive keyword (with a score of 89) might be trickier to target. Smaller websites without established credibility or current keyword rankings should steer clear of them. Only the most powerful websites with existing SEO power are likely to rank for that keyword.

A keyword with a lower competition score of 18, however, is a fantastic option for smaller websites. The lower score indicates that not many authority-rich websites are targeting the phrase, meaning that it’s easier to rank for.

Dive Deeper: How to Use Google Keyword Planner for Content Creation

Brand vs. SEO Keywords

Keywords typically fall under two umbrella categories:

• Traditional SEO keywords: The phrases you’ve chosen to target on your website based on their search volume and competition alone. Examples include “keyword research tips” or “how to do SEO”.
• Branded keywords: Search queries that reference your company’s name or other branded elements specifically, such as “Single Grain”.

The bad news? There’s no “one size fits all” solution that will provide the ideal balance of branded and traditional keywords for all websites.

However, you can tweak your targeting strategy depending on your business:

New Businesses

Suppose that you’ve recently launched a new startup. There isn’t any existing search volume for your company’s branded keywords because your brand name is new.

In this case, your ideal SEO scenario involves two major tactics:

• Targeting traditional SEO keywords
• Building up brand recognition using other types of marketing

Since targeting branded keywords within your SEO efforts won’t make sense at this point, focus your energies instead on targeting traditional SEO keywords. For example: If you’ve launched a startup in the personal finance space, you might target the phrases “personal finance tool” or “online savings tool” (depending on your startup’s business objectives).

By targeting the phrases that you anticipate your users will be entering into the search engines with both your on-site and off-site SEO activities, you’ll begin to build up the momentum needed in order to build familiarity with your brand.

At the same time, though, you’ll want to put some effort into carrying out branding activities on other web properties to begin generating the branded search traffic needed to win in the SERPs over time.

There are dozens of ways to do this, but here a few places to start:

• Writing and submitting press releases detailing your startup’s launch and benefits
• Setting up social media profiles and optimizing them with branded imagery
• Claiming any local business profiles (as found on Google+, Yelp and similar sites) that are applicable to your business
• Releasing content marketing pieces that capture your audience’s attention while promoting your brand

Businesses with Brand Recognition

Single Grain has a range of clients, and we’re ranking well for keywords in organic search (like this post on “SEO techniques”:

As consumers become used to seeing your brand name mentioned on the web properties they frequent, they’ll be more likely to use your brand name in association with the queries that they enter into the search engines.

That’s why businesses with some brand recognition should begin targeting branded keywords more heavily throughout their website.

So, instead of relying solely on traditional SEO keywords to drive organic traffic, we’re optimizing our content for our brand name to boost recognition. And really, no matter what size your business is, the power of branding is something you need to be aware of.

Integrating branded keywords into your SEO approach will help your site to build recognition with both visitors and the search engines – recognition which is likely to play a larger and larger role in the way your site’s authority is measured by Google in the future.

Learn More: 

• Should a Blog Post Focus on One Keyword or Multiple Keywords for SEO?
• Quality Over Quantity: The Balance of Keyword USAge
• The Best Way to Track Your Keyword Rankings: An SEO Expert’s Strategy

A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Keywords

Chances are, these questions are whizzing around in your head:

• What are people who are interested in my niche looking for?
• What questions do they have?
• What do they like?
• What do they read?
• What type of content are they searching for?

Keywords offer a lot of insight into these factors, giving you a glimpse into the common searches that your audience is performing. The goal is to see what they want and then provide it.

Here’s a step-by-step guide you can use to find keywords:

1) Start with What You Know

What are the core terms that your business focuses on?

Sit down and make a list of all the terms your site is about, but don’t get too specific. At this point, you’re simply working on the list of your core terms – i.e. those common-knowledge terms for which you are building a business.

For a SaaS tool that helps small businesses break down their expenses, that might be:

• Small business accounting
• Expenses
• Tax returns
• Receipts
• Invoicing

A word of warning here: If you try to come up with hundreds of terms, you will only become overwhelmed. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of time to expand your list as you progress!

But more importantly, remember that these core terms won’t give a content marketer actionable content ideas because they’re too generic. You’ll be able to discover content topics to develop further by expanding your core list.

Start by modifying your terms. These are add-on words to the core (or primary) keyword that help give you an edge. So going back to the accounting software example, you could use something like “filing receipts” or “organizing tax return”. (The bold indicates the core; the italics the modifier.)

You’re able to use these longer variations on your website and have an easier time ranking for them because the modifier makes them less competitive.

2) Go Straight to the Source with Google Suggest

Remember what we said about highly competitive keywords?

Trying to compete in the natural search rankings for a general term like “SaaS” is going to be an uphill battle, requiring substantial investment of time (or cash) in order to see results. So instead, look for the low-hanging fruit of sub-niches using Google’s Related Searches feature.

Simply head over to Google and type a general keyword or an evergreen keyword phrase into the search bar without pressing enter. You’ll find a list of recommendations based on the queries that people are searching for:

If you’ve got the Keyword Keg Chrome extension installed, you’ll be able to view the search volume and competition score for each phrase (like the screenshot above).

Simply whittle down the suggestions into a list of keywords that:

• Don’t have too high of a competition score
• Have a medium-low search volume

Keywords fitting that criteria means they’re easier for new sites to rank for, without much existing SEO power.

3) Use Google Trends to Discover More Core Terms

Google Trends is a fantastic resource that shows the popularity of a keyword. You can use it to check whether the phrases you’re using are increasing or decreasing in usage, allowing you to write content around trending topics. But you might be surprised to learn that it’s also a great resource for finding related keywords.

Type your core topic into the search bar and scroll to the Related Queries report. This shows which queries users searching for your term also searched for:

Notice the “Top” button towards the right-hand side of the screenshot? Click this button and select one of these options:

• Top: These are the most popular search queries and, in many cases, the core terms you’ll be breaking down into more specific article ideas.
• Rising: These are queries with the biggest recent increase in search frequency, along with the percentage increase in search.

4) See What Your Competitors Are Targeting

You want to save time when doing keyword research – I get it. Why not take a shortcut and see which keywords your competitors are already targeting and ranking for?

This tactic is fantastic for two reasons:

• You can find long-tail phrases that other keyword research tools might not have picked up on, but still drive qualified traffic.
• Your competitors are not only researching keywords, but are molding their strategy to fit them. You can see the end result, which can be awesome for figuring out what it is that your mutual audience is responding to (or not responding to) without risking it first-hand.

Let’s say, for example, that Single Grain was your competitor. Simply type your URL into SpyFu and find a list of keywords we’re ranking for, alongside our ranking positions, search volume, and estimated clicks per month:

There’s no way around it: This data is a goldmine for content marketers.

But the beauty of this tool is that it provides a page-level report too, not just domain-level like most of its alternatives. I can research any competitor’s article and drill down to how it is performing in search…

…Giving me a whole host of long-tail keywords to draw inspiration from, and create content around.

A word of warning: Don’t directly copy everything you find here. Competitors should give you inspiration, not the basis for a copy and paste job. Try to put your own spin on everything; it’s the best way to create content that ranks without regurgitating the same, tired content. Neither Google nor your audience will be impressed.

5) Research the Question-Type Queries

Question-type queries are often straightforward content ideas. Why? The answer is simple:

Knowing which questions people are asking in your niche gives you valuable insight into their struggles.

You can then mould your content around your queries to make sure you’re driving the right kind of search traffic to your website – and helping them navigate through your marketing funnel.

Here are three tools you can use to find question-based keywords:

• AnswerThePublic is a free keyword research tool that crawls Google’s search suggestions, finds questions among them, and visualizes the results. Take a look at the results for “content marketing” (this data will easily inspire tons of content ideas!):

• Serpstat Questions, like AnswerThePublic, uses Google’s Suggest database to identify question-type queries. This keyword research tool will also analyze the results, and create a list of related questions you could use to form your editorial calendar:

• Buzzsumo’s Question Analyzer is not an official keyword research tool because it doesn’t show you keyword sets. Instead, it crawls forums and Q&A databases (including Amazon’s Q&A section) and shows you related discussions:

The beauty of this tool is that it won’t limit itself to your core term. Instead, it will use semantic analysis to find related words and discussions around them.

Learn More: 

• 9 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic
• What Is the Difference Between SEM and SEO?
• What Are the Biggest Website Mistakes that Are Lowering My SEO Ranking?

6) Listen to Your Customers

Listening to real people in your industry is the best source of inspiration.

The same applies for keyword research; nothing else will better arm your content marketing team than productive interactions with people who actually talk to their direct audience on a daily basis. Sales departments speak to customers day-in and day-out. They understand their pain points, goals and challenges more than anyone else, and answer lots of questions on a daily basis.

Here’s how you can listen to your customers and generate keyword ideas at the same time:

a) Get Ideas from Your Sales Team Using Your CRM

Go straight to the source and ask your sales team to list the common pain points, challenges and objections your typical customer has. Regardless of the questions being asked, make sure they’re all recorded properly and passed on to your content team, to be addressed through the content being published on your website.

The best part? Your sales team may not even need separate software to record those questions. Many project management platforms like Asana, Teamwork and Wrike already have note-taking spaces for sales reps to drop questions that content marketers can view.

b) Create Simple Customer Surveys

Different words mean different things to different people. For example: You might interpret the word “pound” as a type of cake. But to me, it represents a form of currency.

Seed Keywords is a simple tool that lets you find related keywords with help from your followers, and highlight what people interpret that word to mean. Just create a search scenario and ask your followers and friends to type in the keywords they’d use to solve it.

Try not to be too leading with your search scenario. Ask open-ended questions and don’t guide people to the search phrase you think they should be explaining.

Here’s an example of a scenario:

And here are the suggestions from real people:

You can create similar surveys with SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, too, though you’ll have to manually send the survey to your network with the latter.

7) Insider Data from Google Analytics

Keyword research for SEO is an ongoing process. You can come up with a list of quality keywords when you first launch your website, but there are likely tons of related phrases you never would have considered in the first place.

That’s where Google Search Console comes in.

You can use the data collected about site visitors to determine which keywords people are searching for to find your website. This could uncover a sub-niche you hadn’t previously considered, as well as help you determine which subsets of keyword phrases are most valuable for you to pursue.

To find specific keyword data for your website:

• Open up your Google Search Console account
• Click your Performance report
• Select the Average Position filter
• Scroll down to find a list of keywords you’re ranking for, alongside their average position

Take a good look at the data and highlight the search phrases you’d like to increase ranking positions for.

• Do you see a keyword phrase that’s been used multiple times to access your website? They often just take a little re-optimization before climbing higher in the SERPs. You can also perform additional SEO keyword research on that specific phrase to uncover more opportunities within your niche.
• Do you see a number of similar keyword phrases you haven’t targeted heavily? If so, you may want to create a new page or post on your website revolving around these terms.

In a nutshell: Performing good SEO keyword research isn’t always fun, but it’s well worth the time invested when achieving strong SERP rankings and sending a steady stream of targeted traffic to your website.

Customers find a solution to problem, and you boost credibility by providing them with the answer. It’s a win-win situation all round!

How to Create a Keyword-Focused Content Strategy

With so many sources to find keywords, there’s a good chance you’ll quickly get overwhelmed. But the good thing is that keywords don’t only inspire; they help you get your entire content marketing strategy organized.

The first step is to identify keywords with “informational” search intent. People searching for them don’t intend to buy just yet, but they’re interested in learning more and researching further. AKA, they’re lingering in the top of the marketing funnel:

Unfortunately, there’s no golden tool to determine search intent. It takes common sense. For example: People searching for “healthy snacks recipe” are probably not looking to buy anything yet. Instead, they need a recipe to cook at home.

Ann Smarty, founder of MyBlogU, built a multi-level keyword organization strategy to overcome this:

Step 1: Identifying High-Level Content Structure

She says that usually, she organizes her keyword lists the following way:

• Core terms (i.e. competitive, generic keywords): Categories and content sections
• Modified keywords: Ideas for articles, lists, FAQ sections, product reviews, etc.
  • Modifying the modifier: Some keywords are so specific that they will only work as part of a larger article (a subsection)

Step 2: Identifying Content Types

Use your best judgment to organize keywords by which type of content you think will fit best:

• Blog posts: These are usually filled with the most specific keywords.
• FAQ pages: If your brand page is in the query, you may want to create a new section in your frequently asked questions to address it.
• On-site glossaries: If it looks like a user needs a simple explanation of the term.
• Various types of cornerstone content (i.e. “content upgrades”): If you feel like there’s a lot to say about the search term, you may want to create a huge PDF guide or an infographic to give your customers something to download and take home.

Step 3: Identifying Seasonal Content

Again, your common sense will help you find keywords that should be implemented by a certain date. For example, “halloween snacks” is a pretty straightforward keyword showing you that related content should be published at least a week prior to the holiday.

Google Trends can also help you prepare your editorial calendar to publish new articles right in time for holidays and seasonal trends (back to school, national holidays, etc.):

Step 4: Identifying the Required Action

Some keywords are action items for creating new content; some keywords may be used to optimize or update old articles.

Here’s what using keyword research to organize your content marketing strategy might look like in the end:

How to Optimize Your Content for SEO Keywords

What I’m about to say might come as a shock: Forget about keyword density, and forget about keyword tags. Both of them are outdated SEO concepts that won’t help you to rank in Google’s complex, ever-changing and often-confusing algorithm.

Why? Because they’re teetering on the brink of black hat SEO – a set of tactics that spammers previously used to “hack” their way to the top of the SERPs. But Google is smart, and black hat tactics don’t work anymore. (In fact, they have the opposite effect.) That doesn’t mean you should be wary of including your keyword on the page completely.

Your aim here is to create a piece of content that Google and readers will enjoy. That likely includes using the keywords you’ve found naturally throughout your writing. However, to communicate that your content is related to those search terms, use this keyword checklist for each piece of content you publish:

• Headline and meta title: Google picks this as the clickable link in a user’s search results, so including it in the title helps to boost organic click-through rate (a known ranking factor) because searchers know it’s relevant.
• URL structure: Which also shows up in search results and draws users’ eyes. Try to use the primary keyword as your URL title with dashes for spaces. For example: /blog/keyword-research-guide.
• First paragraph: This is what catches a reader’s eye first after the page headline. Give them a reason to spend more time on your website (another known ranking factor!).
• Subheadings: Hold the reader’s attention while they’re scrolling through your content. Google spiders also use heading tags to quickly understand what a page is discussing, so including keywords here could improve their rankings.
• Image alt text: Google aren’t smart enough to understand images… Yet. Help them out by naming your images with your keyword before uploading them, and setting the alt text as the primary phrase. This can also help you to rank in Image search.

Learn More: 

• Getting Started with SEO: A Guide for Small Businesses
• Overlooked SEO: Optimizing Images and Video For Search
• 9 SEO Areas to Focus On to Boost Your Video’s Visibility

3 Action Steps for Creating an SEO-Boosting Content Plan

By this point, you’ve created a piece of content that’s optimized for a handful of keywords. What happens next?

Spoiler alert: The answer isn’t “sit back and wait for Google to rank me”. You’ll need to constantly work on your content to reach the top spots in your target audience’s SERPs.

Toggl put this to the test when they create their infographic, an image that visualized the different software development methods in a lighthearted way:

Within the first four days, the infographic brought in 56,000 visits (excluding all repeat visits and bot traffic) – and with only one unpaid Facebook post, a single Google+ share, and a couple of Tweets.

And, to their surprise, the infographic page quickly ranked at number five in Google search results for the term “software development” – an extremely competitive keyword.

Here’s what they learned throughout the process:

1) Don’t Underestimate the Power of Social

There are over 200 factors Google considers when ranking URLs. And while social media traffic is one of them, it’s hardly considered the most important signal. Google has directly said that social shares don’t impact rankings:

But that doesn’t mean they’re totally useless when attempting to rank your content higher in search.

Here’s why: When people like something, they’re likely to share it with others. Not only does this drive more traffic to your site, but it can also make more people post your content on other sites, resulting in valuable backlinks.

Toggl say their infographic ranked so well because of this:

“Our infographic has managed only a dozen backlinks (none particularly high in authority) and retains a high bounce rate (upwards of 90%). Neither of these is what SEOs would describe as “great.” At the same time, the high number of people who visit the the page spend an average of nearly 5 minutes on it.

In the interest of fairness, I should add that Toggl also has a high overall domain authority – another important ranking signal in Google’s eyes. Still, getting the infographic to rank well without a significant number of high-authority backlinks goes to show that with enough sharing, search engines take notice.”

So, how do you get enough shares?

2) Make It Viral

According to Toggl’s Mart Virkus: “As naïve as this advice sounds, making something viral isn’t as difficult as people make it out to be. Keep in mind that virality doesn’t need to mean international news coverage. Creating buzz in a specific community may just be enough.”

He recommends “thinking about a specific audience also helps you be more creative with your ideas. It’s much more fruitful to think about what a group of people would find interesting than about how to make an arbitrary viral ‘thing.’”

As we’ve previously pointed out:

“Marketers who are sending advertising messages into the void without knowing your exact wants, needs, preferences and experiences must use vague language in their ads in the hopes of connecting with at least a few of their messages’ recipients.

That is…unless they take advantage of buyer personas.”

Buyer personas are complete documents that detail every shared trait, behavior, interest, challenge and pain points that your audience share.

Mart says their “infographic worked because our service has a lot of clients from web development agencies. Toggl also grew out of one such agency, so putting the experience into a captivating image wasn’t a huge challenge.”

3) For Serious Results, Take Content Seriously

From start to finish, Mart reports the entire infographic taking over 23 hours to create. (43 minutes and 9 seconds to complete, to be exact.)

But he doesn’t think this is a waste of time–nor that you should try to find shortcuts: “You might think you could do it faster and cheaper, but the problem is that you’d be thinking the same way as everybody else.” In an SEO world where Google wants to rank the best, most-unique content on the first page, it’s a great train of thought.

Use Mart’s advice to always create new, exciting content, just like we explained how competitors shouldn’t be copied throughout your keyword research attempts.

Granted, it takes more time. But it’s worth it when you’re rewarded with higher keyword rankings, as Mart has proven!

Final Thoughts on Keyword Research

There’s no doubting that keyword research is the most essential part of content marketing.

It helps content marketers on so many levels, from understanding your reader and brainstorming, to organizing and structuring your content. It’d be pointless to publish a single piece without knowing your audience want to consume it, first.

The same kind of thinking applies to blog posts, videos and all other forms of content. But whichever way you choose to do your keyword research, never drop it from your content marketing to-do list.

The post SEO Keyword Research Made Easy in 2024 appeared first on Single Grain.

However, generating high-quality traffic is one of the biggest challenges faced by new bloggers, especially when each niche has thousands of blogs shouting for attention. According to data from Statista, the cumulative number of blog accounts on Tumblr alone is more than 456 million:

Developing your blog’s content and credibility in the cut-throat blogging domain can be challenging. Here are seven smart ways to boost your new blog’s readership and attract the audience you want.

1) Publish Relevant Content

Interesting and value-adding content is one of the primary reasons people follow blogs. Successful blogs cater to the specific needs of their audience and offer articles, videos, infographics, etc. that inspires their readers to trust and follow them.

It is wise to have a solid content marketing strategy in place to help you attract a steady stream of organic traffic, thereby establishing you as an authority in your domain. Further, an infographic shared by Demand Metric reveals that every dollar spent on effective content marketing generates 3x as many leads as traditional marketing:

The quality of content depends on three parameters:

• The headline
• The content length
• The content quality

On an average, 80% of readers will read your blog post’s headline, and a compelling title can lead to 500% more page views. Therefore, your post title should grab the readers’ attention, persuading them to read the entire post or article.

A compelling blog post title with a relevant header image is sure to hook readers looking for effective content marketing advice:

Further, long blog posts offer more opportunity for implementing effective SEO tactics and are given a high ranking by Google, thereby improving the blog’s results in the SERPs. According to OkDork, a marketing and business blog, successful blog posts range from 3,000 to 10,000 words:

Lastly, pay attention to the quality of content being published on your blog. Find out what your audience is passionate about by using effective keyword research (more about this in the next section). Once you know what your audience is looking for, use blogging tools like Buzzsumo and Ubersuggest to generate relevant content ideas.

The audience comments on Quora are also a great way to research the hot topics being discussed in a particular domain. For instance, a blogger writing for men’s fashion brands like Ralph Lauren or Nordstrom can browse through the relevant section on Quora to learn about the target audience’s opinions and preferences:

Remember: your blog post is competing against two million posts being written each day. Therefore, creating high-quality and relevant content is a critical step towards attracting traffic to your blog.

Dive Deeper:

• How to Build a High-Performance Content Marketing Strategy
• The Content Marketer’s Guide to Keyword Research
• Never Run Out of Ideas: 7 Content Creation Strategies for Your Blog
• Why Content Marketing Should Always Be 20% Creation and 80% Promotion

2) Optimize Your Blog’s Content

In order to find informative content, readers type a particular phrase or question into a search engine, so search engine optimizing your content will help make your blog visible to readers who are entering keywords pertaining to your domain.

Effective keyword marketing can help you identify and focus on the keywords used by your audience and avoid keyword stuffing, which is harmful to your blog and can earn you a penalty by Google. Google’s tool, Keyword Planner, does not display all the terms used by people to search for content, and since this tool is used by most bloggers, they end up competing with established blogs for the same obvious keywords, preventing new bloggers from getting a higher SERP.

Therefore, besides Google Trends, Google Analytics, and Google Ads, it is wise to depend on a few under-the-radar keyword research tools like these ones to generate effective keywords:

SEMrush

iSpionage

WordStream

Moz’ Keyword Explorer 

Once you have done your research, include a few long-tail keywords in the content’s headline, main body, meta description, and URL. Long-tail keywords have a high chance of being read by your target audience, drawing them towards your blog.

Lastly, make sure that your blog is mobile-friendly. According to Statista, 157.6 million people searched the web on their mobile device in 2015, and that number is expected to hit 215.8 million by the end of 2019.

Google heavily favors mobile-friendly websites, so it is wise to use responsive web design, allowing your blog to have a common URL for desktops and mobiles and thereby improving your blog traffic.

3) Implement a Solid Social Media Promotion Plan

Blogging is not just about writing and publishing. You need to promote your content on the top social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, encouraging your audience to visit your blog for more content in your niche.

Presently, nearly 87% of B2B marketers use an average of five social media sites to promote their content and drive traffic to their site:

What’s more, 81% of bloggers experienced a surge in their blog traffic by spending just six hours per week on social media promotion.

Find out the top social platforms used by your target audience and create multiple social media posts for each blog post:

Encourage your audience to share your posts by including click-to-tweet or share buttons in a prominent place on the page.

Further, tag a brand or a powerful online influencer who can get your content extra exposure, thereby boosting the traffic to your blog. For instance, a blogger in the home décor domain shouldn’t miss an opportunity to tag influencer brands, such as Spruce Home Décor, John Lewis or Martha Stewart in relevant blog posts.

Learn More:

• Paid Content Promotion: A Comparison Of The Different Platforms
• The Beginner’s Guide to Crafting a Highly Effective Social Media Strategy in 2019
• Social Commerce: The Easiest Way to Turn Social Engagement into First-Time Buyers
• Search vs. Social: Why Social Media Still Matters in the SEO Landscape

4) Promote Your Blog through the Community

Use Google Analytics to find the websites, blogs and professional forums that your audience is active on. Engage in social listening and interact with the audience on these forums to improve your image as a valuable member of the community.

Aggregate sites and up-vote communities such as Reddit, BizSugar and Triberr that help bloggers share their content and improve their blog traffic. Quora is a resourceful platform that can give you a pulse of the market and enable you to interact with your audience. Be sure to include your blog link when responding to questions.

Key in the “intitle:forum” + [your niche keyword] in Google to find the top forums in your niche. So, a blogger writing for a women’s fitness apparel brand like Onzie or Aviator Nation can find the best forums in his/her niche using “intitle:forum” + activewear.

Similarly, a blogger writing for fashion and accessories brands like Shein, Urban Outfitters or BlueStone can find the top forums in this domain by typing “intitle:forum” + fashion in the search form.

Lastly, submitting your blog on social bookmarking sites like AllTop, StumbleUpon and Digg can improve the impressions on your posts, thereby boosting the traffic to your new blog.

Dive Deeper: Google Like a Pro: 42 of the Most Useful Google Search Tricks

5) Engage in Guest Blogging

Guest posting or contributing content to major blogs or media outlets is one of the best inbound marketing tactics that can drive qualified traffic to your blog.

The Content Marketing Institute shares that guest blogging (or off-site thought leadership) is at the top of the marketing funnel as it reaches a large audience who isn’t familiar with a brand, thereby drawing them towards your blog to learn more:

Guest blogging not only helps you reach a new audience, but also creates strong social proof for your blog. For instance, if Huffington Post publishes your article, it is telling its subscribers that your blog’s content meets its high standards.

Research the guest-blogging sites that your audience visits and target two types of websites:

• Leading publications like Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, Forbes and TechCrunch
• Major blogs and websites in your niche (Optimize Smart can offer you valuable suggestions for finding the top websites in your domain)

Alternatively, you can use a search query “(topic keyword phrase)” + “write for us” or “(topic keyword phrase)” + “guest post” on Google to find websites that accept guest posts. Thus, a novice fashion blogger can type “fashion” + “write for us” to find the top sites that are open for content contributors:

Compile a list of websites that match your blog’s persona and reach out to the editors to pitch your content.

Learn More: 

• What Is Inbound Marketing?
• The Power of Guest Blogging (And How to Get Started!)
• How to Use Personalization to Increase the Impact of Email Marketing
• 8 Quick Tips to Ensure SEO-Friendly Emails
• How to Get More Responses From Cold Emails

6) Promote Your Blog through Email Marketing

The email list is by far the most valuable asset for any blogger. Email marketing can help you engage your readers and encourage them to come back to your blog when they need the latest content in your domain.

In fact, email marketing is the most profitable online marketing technique, generating a return of $44 for every dollar spent:

First things first – use list-building tools such as SumoMe plugin, Scroll Box, List Builder, and LeadPages to build your initial audience who is likely to read your posts and share it with others.

Next, send your emails on the best day or time when the receivers’ inbox activity is high. Mail Chimp, for instance, has a Send Time Optimization feature that suggests the optimum time when users can send their emails.

For instance, research conducted by Mail Chimp reveals that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days for promoting your blog through emails, and the best time to send an email is between 8-10 am in your time zone.

Lastly, send an email newsletter to your list of readers to share new and old (but successful) blog posts. This will not only increase your page views, but also encourage your loyal audience to share it with their network.

Dive Deeper: [Case Study] The Content Sprout Method: How to Use Strategic Content Marketing to Grow Your Traffic From 0 to Millions

7) Measure Your Success

Blogging constantly without analyzing the key performance metrics is a waste of your time and effort. Measure your blog’s success on a regular basis to identify the weaknesses and modify your blogging strategy.

Use effective online tools that offer traffic data for your blog, like:

• Google Analytics
• Kissmetrics
• Jetpack Plugin
• WP Power Stats
• SEMrush

The critical metrics to keep an eye on are the number of visitors, leads, subscribers, inbound links, and social media shares.

Each of these metrics will offer you valuable insights pertaining to your blog promotion strategy. For instance, a yoga blog getting inbound links from authority sites or brands, namely Yoga Journal, BookYogaRetreats or Green Apple, implies that your content is being perceived as high-quality and is relevant to the target audience.

Related Content: 9 Best Web Hosting Providers

Final Thoughts

Low blog traffic can be frustrating, especially after you have spent months creating your blog. Use the effective tips shared in this post to boost your blog traffic in today’s competitive blogging environment.

The post 7 Steps to Stardom: How to Direct Web Traffic to Your New Blog appeared first on Single Grain.

What Is Enterprise SEO?

It’s quite tricky to pinpoint a universal definition for Enterprise SEO.

However, generally speaking it is: the practice of optimizing a large website, (with thousands or even millions of webpages) whilst navigating the internal politics of the enterprise in a way that keeps stakeholders happy.

With enterprise SEO there is a very  strong emphasis placed upon two elements: scalability, and getting the whole website indexed.

Although the focus and management of enterprise SEO differs somewhat from basic SEO, the two forms  share the same fundamental, well-known  principles in common: use your target keywords in important areas, like your title tag and headline tags, pack your pages with high-value, high-converting content, and encourage backlinks from high-authority websites within your industry.

But while these recommendations are easy to implement on basic startup websites, what happens if you’re an enterprise website? What happens if, instead of needing to optimize five pages, you have nearly 500 to work with? Are you really expected to publish 2,000+ word, keyword-rich articles on each of them, in addition to driving quality backlinks to every page?

The problems and challenges faced by enterprise SEO websites are amplified relative to those experienced in more traditional SEO. Because of that, the challenge of enterprise SEO requires different strategies and a different approach.

It isn’t that the fundamentals of SEO aren’t applicable—they still are, whether your site hosts one page or one million. But the way that you have to apply these fundamental principles changes when you’re adapting SEO best practices to suit large websites. Below, we’ll describe how the two disciplines differ, as well as some recommendations for putting these enterprise level SEO practices to work on your site.

Further Reading:

• 10 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic
• How to Implement a Cost-Effective SEO Strategy in 4 Steps
• Beginner’s Guide to Voice Search SEO 

Key Differences in Enterprise SEO

There are some inherent benefits that come with running an enterprise site that you can capitalize on:

Authority: The majority of enterprise websites have  strong brand recognition, and a high level of authority. These two elements combined are reflected by higher rankings in search engines, enabling enterprise SEO websites to leverage this authority, making the ability to rank for extremely competitive keywords more likely.

Content: Enterprise websites tend to have a large quantity of high quality content, that is extremely valuable to the end-user. These sites are therefore more likely to benefit from more backlinks and higher ranking. Furthermore, as enterprise sites have more pages, even if only a few of the pages acquired top rankings this could still drive significant amounts of organic traffic.

Learn More: LinkedIn Ads for Enterprise B2B SaaS: The Only Guide You’ll Need

Enterprise SEO Case Study: T-Mobile

For the purpose of this article, let’s use T-Mobile as an example. According to Google, the mobile phone giant has more than 25,000 pages indexed in its phones and tablet support section alone—above and beyond the pages listed in the other sales and support sections of its site.

Optimizing this volume of content by hand simply wouldn’t be possible, which is why the company uses a number of enterprise SEO factors and strategies to improve its search results performance.

Keyword-Optimized Template Creation

In constructing enterprise-level sites like T-Mobile’s, creating individual pages by hand isn’t feasible. As a result, websites like this typically run on content management systems (CMSs) that allow for the bulk creation of pages through the use of keyword-optimized templates and data entry en masse.

In this instance, the success or failure of enterprise-level SEO comes down to the creation of the underlying template. To meet on-site optimization standards, the template must:

• Have all proper tags in place (such as the meta description tag, image ALT tag, and machine-readable markup code) to allow for immediate, automated optimization.
• Include all necessary HTML, CSS, and Javascript design code, as well as code “hooks” that determine when the page should grab information from the CMS’s centralized database. For instance, enterprise page templates will include hooks that determine when the site should grab product pictures, product descriptions, product quantity, and more. The code must also be optimized for responsive display so that dynamically-generated pages are presented correctly on desktop and mobile devices.
• Be able to dynamically adjust content on the fly. If information is missing within the database, the template needs to be able to identify its absence and adjust the design accordingly. Similarly, pages need to be able to adjust on the fly for products that include multiple options, as well as product pages that contain a variable number of offerings.

Accurate Data Entry

Because so many enterprise websites rely on a central database from which information can be pulled automatically, it should go without saying that accurate data entry is a must. But in addition to being correct, the content stored in these systems must also:

• Be optimized with keyword-rich categories and subcategories. Not only will you need to apply a consistent categorization scheme to every entry you create, you’ll want to make sure these categories include your target keywords in a thoughtful way in order to optimize the eventual pages they’ll be used on (more on this in a minute).
• Be unique. Many reseller enterprise websites simply upload the stock information given to them by manufacturers. Doing so, of course, makes it difficult for these sites to rank, as they’re then forced to compete against every other merchant with the same website content. Instead, take the time to craft custom descriptions, tags, and other variables to include target keywords, as appropriate.
• Be valuable. Significant research has been done that supports the idea that long-form content performs better in terms of social shares, dwell time on site, and other metrics. And while 2,000+ word posts may not be appropriate as product descriptions, use this opportunity to ensure that the info you enter into your database provides significant value to your end users.

Certainly, all these steps take more time than simply copying and pasting stock information or half-assing the data you create. However, most enterprise-level webmasters will find that a little extra investment up front results in significantly better outcomes over the long run.

Thoughtful Keyword Selection

Above, I mentioned that keywords should be integrated into the categorization and navigation structures that you establish for your enterprise site. But what does that look like in practice, and how can you ensure that the optimization rules you define can be easily implemented across your entire site?

T-Mobile’s website provides a great example. Take a look at the URL for the company’s Apple iPhone 6 support page:

https://support.t-mobile.com/community/phones-tablets-devices/apple/iphone-6

Within the URL, you can see several keywords featured:

• The site’s primary keyword: “phones tablets devices”
• The brand: “Apple”
• The individual product: “iPhone 6”

By developing and implementing this consistent structure, T-Mobile ensures good inclusion rates for its most important keywords, while also requiring no hands-on involvement in optimizing each page for target words and phrases (beyond what went into building out the database’s categorization system in the first place).

Further Reading:

• The Content Marketer’s Guide to Keyword Research
• The Best Way to Track Your Keyword Rankings: An SEO Expert’s Strategy for 2018
• 3 Things We’ve Learned From Ranking For Competitive Keywords With Viral Traffic 

Implementing Enterprise SEO

The recommendations above hint at important principles for implementing enterprise search engine optimization. Assuming that your company is using a database-driven CMS, such things as creating optimized web page templates, managing database information fastidiously, and planning for keyword inclusion are all important.

But beyond these logistics, there are a few organization-wide considerations that enterprise companies must take into account when it comes to effective enterprise SEO management.

Data, Data and More Data

Why is SEO important? Gathering and analyzing data is necessary for all websites, but it’s critical for enterprise SEO management teams because the more specific the data, the easier it is to test, spot trends, and fix problems. A few of the fundamental data priorities to be measured and managed include:

• The search engine rankings of the content. With SEO as the goal, measuring content rankings in the SERPs comes naturally. There are a number of different tools available to measure rank in relation to social shares, content type, device type, markets, and more.
• The performance of the content. Most enterprise companies want to see ROI in terms of the time and money they’ve invested in content creation. As a result, tracking data on the business impact of pages in terms of conversions and revenue is tremendously important. Impact can be measured down to the individual page to provide a granular assessment of what is and isn’t working on the site.
• The performance of conversion funnels. Content alone doesn’t create results. It only drives business performance if it’s integrated within and connected to established conversion funnels. Data regarding the effectiveness of your conversion paths may inform decisions about product offerings, checkout processes, and more.

Enterprise SEO: 2018 Trends

Influencer marketing isn’t a “paid” relationship per se, it is more of a mutually beneficial one.

Historically, large enterprises have focused heavily on paid relationships however, in more recent years large enterprises have begun incorporating influencer marketing.

For example, Gap’s Styld.by campaign harnessed the power of well-known bloggers and influencers, who were photographed wearing Gap clothing that was then posted across social media. Due to diversity of the influencers, Gap was able to expand their reach and to connect with niches they wouldn’t have fit into before.

Influencer marketing has opened up a window of opportunity in 2017 to rapidly expand your search visibility. According to Stacey DeBroff, founder of Influence-central, this year there will be a huge emphasis on genuine storytelling, video and geo-targeting.

Further Reading:

• How to Grow Your Business With Influencer Marketing 
• 6 Tools that Make Tracking Your Influencer Marketing Campaigns Easy 
• How to Get Started With Influencer Marketing 

Featured Snippets

A featured snippet is a brief summary, that directly answers the user’s query. Featured snippets show up before the first search result, and being featured, is perceived by many as a badge of authority.

There are three types of featured snippet: Lists, paragraphs and tables.

If enterprises acknowledge this, and provide users with direct, tailored answers to their queries, the enterprise website will rank higher.

Read more about how to rank for featured snippets.

The Enterprise Team 

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to enterprise SEO is managing the multiple stakeholders that may be involved in the process. In a smaller company, there might be one employee handling SEO as well as content creation, website code, etc.

On an enterprise team, SEO responsibilities may be split among IT/development, marketing, and creative workers—all of whom have different objectives:

• Content creators, for instance, focus on delighting the end user.
• To developers, website efficiency is a key metric.
• Meanwhile, the marketers may be the most concerned about search engine performance, but the least able to affect the changes needed to drive it.
• Even the C-suite needs to be onboard to approve the investment needed in order to do valuable SEO.

Implementing effective enterprise-level SEO requires bringing all these different departments together and allocating responsibilities in a way that ensures that everyone understands both the ultimate goal and their specific involvement in the process.

It’s a challenging feat, and unless your firm is going to hire a professional enterprise SEO company, this undertaking will require a skilled leader with the ability to delegate action items and motivate workers.

2 Key Tips for Getting Your Team on the Same Page

#1: Provide Adequate Training

As SEO responsibilities are shared across departments, SEO is inherently a team effort therefore everyone needs to be fully aware of the company goals and the strategic plan to achieve them.

This training program must be comprehensive, personalized to each department, and must be ongoing, so that every team member is continually updated, and that standards remain constant across the multidisciplinary team.

#2: Encourage Inter-Team Relationships

Many large corporations complain of having a lack of agility. This is due to the fact that when big money is involved, decisions have to be run by several members of the team before they are signed off, drawing out the process.

Communication can be improved by encouraging individuals with different specializations to interact, build relationships and improve communication.  

Ultimately, enterprise SEO services—just like the Google algorithms that drive it—require the correct implementation of a number of moving parts, so you may want to hire an enterprise SEO agency or digital marketing agency to do it for you.

Related Content:

• 6 SEO Tactics for Maximum Customer Acquisition
• [Video] 5 SEO Strategies to Maximize Traffic 
• 4 Ways to Speed Up Your Keyword Research 
• How to Fix 15 Common On-Site Technical SEO Issues

The post Enterprise SEO: How to Skyrocket Your B2B SEO Rankings appeared first on Single Grain.

It’s not difficult to create articles if writing (and the topics about which you write) is your passion. But it takes a lot of time to carry out all the technical steps, from formatting the final product to optimizing the article for Google search.

The good news is that there are a lot of tools that can automate these processes for you so you can concentrate on the fun part: writing.

In this post, I’m going to share the tools that I use to carry out all these elements.

Learn More: 30 Ways to Come Up with Great Ideas for Your Blog Posts

Step 1: Use Buzzsumo to Decide on the Topic

First of all, you need to find an appropriate topic for your article. You can have a bunch of brilliant ideas, but you’ll need to do a little research to make sure that your idea hasn’t been covered by someone else (or hundreds of others).

I use Buzzsumo to do a little research. This tool allows you to find the most-shared content on any topic. It’s useful to:

• Make sure that your idea (or similar) is interesting for people right now
• At the same time — make sure your idea is not overused. There is no need to write content on topics that have been covered to death, especially if the existing articles are comprehensive and excellently written. However, if there are a lot of posts on similar topics that are low quality, then you can give it a try.
• Analyze competitors’ content to find out what they’ve missed as well as what their strong points are. You can brainstorm ideas this way, but make sure that you’re not writing the same article.
• Find bloggers who also are interested in your topic and ask them to share your article (click on “Share” that is listed to the right of the title).

You can choose the date and sort by language, country, type of content, and word count. Also, you can choose certain social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+).

Even if you find articles on your topic, don’t give up hope. Analyze all these posts and figure out how you can write something that is 10x better: update it, add more research and statistics to it, make it twice or five times as long, add your own point of view or expertise, etc. There is always a unique angle you can add to improve it and make it your own.

Once you’ve settled on a great topic and have figured out how you’re going to make it better, go to the next step.

Learn More: The Content Marketer’s Guide to Keyword Research

Step 2: Use Serpstat to Handle the SEO Factors

Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that consists of five modules to help you rank higher. This tool can be useful in the following ways.

Keyword Research

It has a great keyword research tool that makes finding keywords for your post a lot more efficient. It also has additional ways to expand the keyword list, such as Related Keywords and Search Suggestions.

Source

Related Keywords are LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords that can help make your article sound more natural. These keywords are semantically related to the primary keywords for which you are searching.

For example, here is a small list of LSI keywords for a “Windows” query:

The Search Suggestion feature performs queries that pop up under the search bar when you’re typing something into Google, YouTube or Amazon.

This should look very familiar to you:

The tool gathers all these keywords in one place and then you can export this list into a spreadsheet.

With this huge assortment of keywords, you’ll be sure that your content is optimized for the Google bots and readable for the human being.

Competitors’ Articles

Also, you can check if your competitors have successful articles on your topic. This tool sorts the “Top Pages” by number of organic keywords used, which makes it easy to glance through the list to make sure your idea hasn’t been covered. You’ll also see how many Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ shares it’s gotten, as well as Potential Traffic.

In the screenshot below, you can see who’s written on the topic of “content marketing plan.” Buffer and HubSpot both take top place for number of organic keywords used, but HubSpot and Sprout Social take top place for social shares, which means more eyes on the article. Also note that, despite low numbers for keywords and social shares, Wikipedia is up there with Buffer for traffic to its website.

Source

I usually take three direct competitors and check their top pages. If I find something similar to my idea, I read the posts, analyze them, and only then start writing. For your convenience, you can create a spreadsheet for the analysis:

The columns may differ depending on your goals, but the point is to keep track of what’s been written so you can improve upon it!

Article Structure

Once you’ve finally decided on which topic to write and how you’ll create better content than the competition, you need to find out what exactly people want to know on this issue. I use the Search Questions feature for this purpose:

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It lists the top questions that people are typing into Google, YouTube and Amazon. Honing in on exactly what people want to know on your topic will allow you to answer those questions in your article, as well as in your title, making it easy for people to find your content after searching for this query. This huge list can help you create the structure for your article by using additional, similar titles as subheaders.

Also, you can check question-and-answer platforms like Quora and Reddit, or Google “best SEO forums” to discover valuable resources. I suggest choosing only those questions which haven’t been answered in depth yet to make sure that your article stands out.

Learn More: How to Write Hero Headlines to Skyrocket Click-Through Rates

Step 3: Use Grammarly to Check Mistakes and Avoid Plagiarism

You’ve decided on a great topic and after doing your research have written a unique, 10x article. Now it’s a good idea to set it aside for a day or two to clear your head before going back and editing it. You may think it’s a perfect article after only one draft, but I can assure you that it is laden with mistakes. You just can’t see them yet because you’re too close to it.

When you’re ready to go back and edit your article, I suggest checking it with Grammarly, a free grammar, spelling and syntax tool. It will also let you know if you’ve overused some words (and offer synonyms) or if a sentence is too long and difficult to read.

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It also has a plagiarism checker which crosschecks your text against over 8 billion web pages and highlights all parts that you should change in order to avoid being accused of stealing.

Even if you’re a native English speaker, this is a useful tool although, as with any tool, you shouldn’t rely on it entirely.

I also recommend Ginger Page, a similar app, to check for spelling and grammar mistakes, sentence rephrasing, and translating. It can also help you improve your English with a personal trainer.

STEP 4: Use Hemingway to Be Brief

We all know best practices for online writing: short sentences, short paragraphs, subheadings, bulleted lists, etc. As of 2016, more people are surfing the web via mobile phone than desktop, and when one long, rambling sentence occupies the entire screen, you don’t really want to keep reading.

You might never be as great a writer as Ernest Hemingway, but the Hemingway App can help you write in simple, direct and clear language.

It provides you with suggestions on how to make your article as easy to read as possible by highlighting specific errors and explaining the mistake with color coding. For example, in the screenshot above, yellow means that the sentence is difficult to read, pink lets you know that there’s a simpler alternative, green means you’ve used the passive voice, and so on.

It also gives your content a readability grade. Again, don’t rely on it entirely. If you think your sentence should be a bit longer than this tool suggests, just leave it. Believe me, sometimes you do know better than Hemingway.

Related Content: How to Write Content for People and Optimize It for Google

Step 5: Use Keyword Density Checker to Avoid Being Spammy

A while ago, you could rank higher if you used as many of your keywords as possible. But these days, that is considered keyword stuffing and could get you penalized. It’s important to maintain a balance when optimizing your article. Unfortunately, there are still such websites:

I always check my content with Keyword Density Checker:

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It shows how many times you have used certain keywords on the page. To avoid using the same words within the article, you can use LSI keywords (from step number two above) or even just an online Thesaurus.

I don’t use this tool every time I edit an article because Grammarly helps me handle this issue, too, but if the post is super important, it’s always a good idea to double check.

Summing Up

This is the list of necessary tools I always use when creating content. With these simple steps, you can save a lot of time and hassle when coming up with and creating great, unique content. To sum up, these tools will help you with the following:

• Good topic (up to date, popular, but not overused)
• Keyword research, competitors’ top articles
• Grammar, spelling, and plagiarism
• Short, clear, easy-to-read sentences
• Avoiding keyword stuffing and possible penalization

Writing is much more pleasurable when you can use these simple tools to carry out the boring or technical elements of creating good content. Use these tips to make your content SEO friendly for Google and interesting for the reader.

The post 5 Tools to Create SEO-Friendly Content Step-by-Step appeared first on Single Grain.

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Over the past year or so, we at Toggl have been making comics and infographics as part of our marketing efforts, attracting quite a lot of attention along the way and picking up some interesting lessons in the process.

One of those lessons was that even though the Internet is louder than ever before, you can still push through and rank your content high – and fast.

One of the first infographics we did was this piece, visualizing the different software development methods in a lighthearted way.

Within the first four days, it brought in 56,000 visits (excluding all repeat visits and bot traffic) – and with only one unpaid Facebook post, a single Google+ share, and a couple of tweets.

To our surprise, the infographic page quickly ranked at number five in Google search results for the term “software development.” As it’s a competitive keyword, we were understandably pretty happy.

In the weeks since posting it, the page dropped in the SERPs for the development term, but its strong position and signals have helped us rank our domain for related keywords that are more relevant to our business.

Anybody who knows anything about SEO can tell you that ranking high in the search results quickly is no easy feat – especially for a competitive keyword. So how did we manage to do this in such a short time?

Learn More:

• How to Use Google Keyword Planner for Content Creation
• Effective SEO Techniques that Work

Here are three things we learned from ranking for competitive keywords with viral traffic:

#1 – Don’t Underestimate the Power of Social

There are around 200 factors Google considers when ranking web pages. While social media traffic is one of them, it’s hardly considered the most important signal.

Social sharing, however, is a different game.

Quality content can result in a lot of social shares across many different media – and this is where you find a whole new range of possibilities. When people like something, they are more apt to share it with others. Not only does this drive more traffic to your site, but it can also make more people post your content on other sites, resulting in valuable backlinks.

Learn More: A Guide to Using Blogger Outreach to Earn Links and Social Shares

In our case, the page ranked very quickly before significant linking happened, meaning that organic sharing alone can be a strong signal, provided that the volume is high enough. And there is another crucial factor: dwell time, or the amount of time that people spend on your page engaging with your content.

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Case in point: our infographic has managed only a dozen backlinks (none particularly high in authority) and retains a high bounce rate (upwards of 90%). Neither of these is what SEOs would describe as “great.” At the same time, the high number of people who visit the the page spend an average of nearly 5 minutes on it.

In the interest of fairness, I should add that Toggl also has a high overall domain authority – another important ranking signal in Google’s eyes. Still, getting the infographic to rank well without a significant number of high-authority backlinks goes to show that with enough sharing, search engines take notice.

So how do you get enough shares?

# 2 – Make It Viral

If they gave out Oscars for useless marketing advice, I’d have mine in the bag.

As naïve as this advice sounds, making something viral isn’t as difficult as people make it out to be. Keep in mind that virality doesn’t need to mean international news coverage. Creating buzz in a specific community may just be enough.

The key word here is “targeting.” Smart targeting brings in meaningful traffic. Animal babies are great at melting hearts, but they’re not so good at attracting pragmatic B2B customers.

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Thinking about a specific audience also helps you be more creative with your ideas. It’s much more fruitful to think about what a group of people would find interesting than about how to make an arbitrary viral “thing.”

As Single Grain points out: “Marketers who are sending advertising messages into the void without knowing your exact wants, needs, preferences and experiences must use vague language in their ads in the hopes of connecting with at least a few of their messages’ recipients. That is…unless they take advantage of buyer personas.”

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Learn More: The Complete Guide to Developing and Using Buyer Personas

Our infographic worked because our service has a lot of clients from web development agencies. Toggl also grew out of one such agency, so putting the experience into a captivating image wasn’t a huge challenge.

# 3 – For Serious Results, Take Content Seriously

It’s not just about the money. If you want big numbers, you’ll have to put in some love (and, more importantly, time).

Between coming up with the copy, sketching ideas, researching and drawing, the whole infographic took me 23 hours, 43 minutes and 9 seconds to complete (yes, I tracked it with Toggl!). Add to that several occurrences of thinking in the shower and it’s fair to say that I spent a lot of time and energy crafting the piece.

You might think you could do it faster and cheaper, but the problem is that you’d be thinking the same way as everybody else. Making content isn’t all that difficult these days.

Cloud-based design software like Canva, free infographic sites like Venngage or Piktochart, or the newly introduced Adobe Post promise to bring creativity to the masses. But that doesn’t necessarily make the masses more creative. I’m not saying solutions like these can’t produce great results, but you shouldn’t use them just to cut costs and reduce effort.

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Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, people appreciate genuine effort. I don’t have a particularly broad set of artistic skills nor are my methods always smart, but I never produce something reluctantly.

The same kind of thinking applies to blog posts, videos and other forms of content – even with “content shock” looming, meaningful efforts can still gain attention. How that works exactly is a longer story and there are many detailed guides out here (reading Neil Patel’s guides is usually a safe bet).

Whichever way you choose to go, always start from the audience.

The post 3 Things We’ve Learned From Ranking For Competitive Keywords With Viral Traffic appeared first on Single Grain.