Cornelia Cozmiuc – SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies

Do Hashtags Influence SEO? Here’s How to Rank High Using Hashtags

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:23:18 +0000

Hashtags have become a powerful tool in digital marketing, with their roots deeply embedded in today’s pop culture. Some love them, others totally don’t. Few know how to use them strategically, while the majority just think it’s cool to throw in 1, 2, 5… or 50 hashtags in a post. While some play around with fun, embedded words following a hashtag, others focus on getting the most out of these little social media wonders. Whether you’re using related hashtags or just experimenting, they have become a staple in every marketer’s toolbox.

But how did this happen? Why has everyone started using them like crazy over the past few years? And why is there still so little intelligence on how hashtags work within search engines or on the algorithms of a marketing platform? Despite their popularity, there’s a surprising lack of tips and educated advice on how to rank higher on social platform hashtag pages.

These questions, along with many more, have led us to dive deep into each platform. We aim to uncover what algorithm lies behind hashtagged posts, how keywords and hashtags interplay, and why some posts soar while others fall flat.

The thing is though, there aren’t many of us who know the hashtag game through and through. First, we need to understand the role of hashtags in social media. Second, we have to grasp how they work. And third, we should determine whether they can actually benefit our SEO campaigns in the long run. In short, are they any good for us? And most importantly, how can we go all out on them to see results?

Hashtags can play a key role in driving visibility, but to truly harness their power, you’ll want to integrate them with your SEO keyword strategy. By doing so, you can align your hashtag usage with the efforts you’re already putting into various SEO tools. This combined approach can elevate both your social media presence and your overall search engine rankings.

What Is a Hashtag and How It Was Born
How To Rank High on Social Media Using Hashtags
Why You Should Double Down On Hashtags

1. What Is a Hashtag and How It Was Born

A hashtag is a discovery tool, heavily used by both social media users and brands. It’s essentially a new function of search—a stream of conversation used by those with a mutual interest in something. Hashtags usually cover contemporary trends, known facts, niche hashtags, particular interests, or simply anything you write after the pound symbol.

All major search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, index hashtags. They’re a great invention of the 21st century, helping people come together, share common interests, and inspire one another. Hashtags for Instagram, for example, allow users to jump into discussions by following hashtag feeds or pages, which enhances communication, bonding, and growth.

Hashtags can even boost traffic and engagement for marketing campaigns.

The hashtag is a word or phrase following a hash/pound mark (#), widely used on social media channels such as Twitter and Instagram. It helps identify, gather, and generate conversations around a specific topic. Instagram’s SEO can benefit from a well-chosen hashtag strategy, especially when paired with a good hashtags generator to find trending and niche terms.

In the beginning, hashtags were used only by social media early adopters, but they quickly caught the attention of advertisers and brands. Now, hashtags have become central to marketing campaigns, whether they’re used in a video description or as part of broader customer care initiatives. By leveraging social media analytics and social listening, brands can engage with accounts more effectively and refine their hashtag strategies for maximum impact. Even choosing the right Instagram name and hashtag can help accounts gain visibility and connect with their audience on a deeper level.

Hashtags are now part of the pop culture.

However, every trend comes with its fair share of madness and blunders. With the current fashion of using hashtags on everything—both online and offline—it’s no surprise that many people don’t really know how to use them properly. As a result, hashtags are often misused, misunderstood, abused, or misplaced.

Also known by their technical name—metadata tags—hashtags are searchable links that can significantly relate to SEO efforts, driving referral traffic to your website. Established in 2007, they have continued to thrive, enchanting users and brands alike. Whether you’re using a caption generator to craft engaging posts or a name generator to brand your content, the right hashtags can make all the difference.

Many people overlook that hashtags related to their niche can help boost visibility, especially when optimized in places like the search bar or when monitored with tools like Google Analytics. Beethoven might disagree, but for today’s marketers, hashtags are a powerful tool for enhancing searchability and engagement.

IRC (Internet Relay Chats) were the first to use hashtags, establishing themselves as a precursor of today’s social platforms. Resembling in form and style with today’s social websites, IRCs were live chats and messaging means where people could gather and share similar interests. When adopted by Twitter, hashtags were initially used for tweet chats, running like open groups where people could talk about a particular topic. Chris Messina was the mastermind behind the hashtag integration on Twitter. His idea was to incorporate a tracking tool on the platform, one that could be easily accessed by people in, say, the tweet itself.

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

Although Twitter initially rejected the idea, Messina’s followers and other users embraced hashtags immediately. Thanks to them, Twitter became the first platform where hashtags gained traction (and let’s not forget that Twitter was also one of the first major mobile-friendly sites). Just a couple of decades earlier, the pound symbol was merely a way to navigate phone systems or return to the main menu. Now, the hash sign has taken on a new life, allowing people with similar interests to connect in evergreen groups where posts stay live and fresh.

Today, hashtags are essential for increasing brand awareness and reaching broader audiences. The Instagram algorithm, for example, uses hashtags as one of its key ranking factors to determine how well posts perform. By using AI social media tools and AI social algorithms, brands can target specific keywords more effectively, optimizing their content to appear in searches or even through Instagram’s search function. This helps brands expand beyond niche markets and engage broader audiences. Whether your goal is brand visibility or SEO, hashtags remain a crucial tool in the digital marketing arsenal.

Remember when we said marketers were drawn to this new social media invention? The thing with the hashtag is that, whenever you want to optimize conversations, titles, content and any other type of text form with hashtags, your activity will get more visible to the audiences both on social media and on search engines. For marketers, hashtags are a way to engage their brand with their market, and they usually deploy 3 types of marketing strategies:

brand or campaign hashtags – create a hashtag for your particular brand/campaign (#CocaCola)
trending hashtags – seize the trends of the moment and post content related to them (#WinterOlympics)
content hashtags (hashtag random words in your post).

Hashtag words work as brand mentions if you want. Marketers all over the world use them to gather and analyze what others are talking about their brands. Hashtags track conversations and keep them safe on pages. Hashtagged-words are like long-tail keywords – when spot on, they promise low search traffic, (sometimes) low competition, and high conversion.

As already mentioned before, Google crawls and indexes hashtags, be they from Twitter, Google+, or blog posts – they’re all there.

source: intelligenthq.com

Although listed first in the image, Facebook is not the most popular social platform for using hashtags. In the beginning, Facebook was against the idea of hashtags, but eventually adopted them after seeing Twitter’s engagement success. Most marketers and SEO experts viewed hashtags as a smart alternative to paid ads that appeared out of nowhere. Hashtags, by contrast, were relevant and organic, which led to better results in driving traffic to your website.

Slowly but steadily, Google+ followed suit, incorporating hashtags on their platform in May 2013. Looking back, Google+ and Google as a search engine did a much better job with hashtags than Facebook. While Facebook lacks depth, Google integrated hashtags into the SERPs, making them an essential part of SEO strategy and social media strategy alike. For example, SEO for Instagram relies heavily on hashtag optimization to boost increased visibility, while Google uses them in search to improve website traffic.

Hashtags depend on different rules dictated by each social platform. You can’t apply the same SEO guide to all of them because each platform has a unique approach. On Instagram, the Instagram search bar and hashtag search are critical for ranking higher. Incorporating the right Instagram keyword or targeted keyword into your Instagram content can make a big difference, especially when using tools like a description generator or video description generator to refine your captions. This is crucial because hashtags affect SEO, influencing user activity and how often your posts appear in hashtag feeds.

Writing alt text for images, using a specific word or phrase in your content, or optimizing your YouTube video description can all contribute to ranking higher in search results. A well-rounded social media strategy that takes into account these factors will help you see better results in terms of both hashtag rankings and overall website traffic.

2. How To Rank High on Social Media Using Hashtags

It’s a good habit to clear the clutter from our lives, and the same principle applies to hashtags. We need to ignore the spammers who use popular hashtags that have nothing to do with their content or those randomly playing with words after the hash mark. Instead, we should focus on what truly makes a hashtag post successful. This means choosing relevant hashtags, especially since they have a short lifespan—though their impact on search engine optimization (SEO) can be long-lasting.

How does a word or phrase preceded by a pound symbol influence SEO and search results? What’s the algorithm behind hashtags that makes some posts rank in Instagram’s Top Stories while others show up in Most Recent? Why does the Twitter hashtag feed often seem chaotic, not following a clear set of ranking factors like engagement, page authority, or followers? Could it be that hashtagged posts are ordered based on a mix of your search, location, and interests?

These are common questions, echoing what you’ll find in SEO FAQs and online discussions. Hashtags are central to any strong SEO strategy, driving traffic and boosting online presence. Platforms like Instagram use branded hashtags and tools like an Instagram hashtag generator to help users optimize their posts for better reach. If you’re crafting an Instagram caption or generating hashtags for a YouTube video, tools like these can be essential for success.

Instagram recommendations guidelines highlight the importance of using hashtags that align with your content and audience, while the Instagram search feature helps users find posts with the most relevant hashtags. Employee advocacy can also play a role, as staff members can boost branded hashtags across their networks, further enhancing visibility.

Ultimately, a well-planned SEO strategy that uses targeted hashtags, whether generated by an Instagram search or a dedicated tool, can significantly improve search results and online engagement.

On our way to finding the answers to our questions, we realized we can’t take more than an educated guess on how social platforms rank hashtag posts on their timeline and what you should do in order to succeed with your hashtag marketing strategy. Afterall, this would be a guess made on other guesses, since nobody actually knows social media/search engines algorithms, but only try to read their behaviors and changes. Plus, we wouldn’t be the only ones to try:

source: makelight.com

How To Use Hashtags on Twitter for Maximum Engagement

Given the little information we could find about what’s the algorithm behind hashtag pages, we had to look at the algorithm Twitter uses for their usual posts. However twisted and complicated it seems, one thing is certain: Twitter’s really secretive and stingy when they’re to give information on their workings. There are many educated assumptions on how Twitter might rank tweets and display them on the feed – so our first thought was that maybe the same situation stands for hashtags a well.

As if things weren’t tangled enough, on March 15, 2016, Twitter changed to a new algorithm that displayed a non-chronological selection of tweets on the top feed.

Tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline. We choose them based on accounts you interact with most, Tweets you engage with, and much more.
	Twitter team

Just like on any other major social media platform, engagement is a key factor in the Twitter timeline algorithm. It not only impacts your online relationship with your followers but also determines what content you’ll see first. In addition, tweets follow the rule of thumb—relevancy. This includes factors like freshness, overall engagement (likes, retweets, clicks, favorites, external shares, and time spent on the post), as well as the author of the post (your relationship with them, how often you’ve interacted), and your activity (how often you log in and how much time you spend on the platform).

For social media marketing, integrating hashtags for SEO into your posts can help improve visibility. Proper keyword research, including the use of keyword tools, is essential to ensure you’re using the right terms to drive engagement. Optimizing with alt text for images and linking content to your YouTube channel can further boost reach across platforms. By applying these SEO techniques, you can enhance your overall social presence and achieve better results on Twitter and beyond.

When you open Twitter after being away for a while, the Tweets you’re most likely to care about will appear at the top of your timeline – still recent and in reverse chronological order. The rest of the Tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order, as always.
	Mike jahr
	Former Senior Engineering Manager at Twitter @mjahr

So, the logic is this: should you have skipped a few days or months since you last visited Twitter, once you eventually sign in, Twitter will show you posts in reverse-chronological order so that you’d be taking things over from where you last left them. These being said, is’ obvious – it all looks natural and clear now: Twitter doesn’t want you to miss on anything that might impact you. Twitter is faithful.

However, if you’re not really in the mood of revising everything you’ve been missing out while you were “outside Twitter”, you can always click “Happening Now” and check what’s cooking at that very moment on your timeline.

Anyways, if you want to rank high with your tweets, then you’d better start using hashtags. The thing is though, you cannot apply any rule comes to your mind, or those that work on other social websites. You need to know the game. And studies show that tweets with hashtags had 2 times more engagement than those without, plus 55% more retweets.

Employing a seo guide and keyword tools can aid in finding the best seo keyword combinations that boost brand awareness. For companies using employee advocacy, encouraging employees to share posts with popular hashtags can expand reach. Additionally, social listening and social media analytics provide deeper insights into how hashtags affect SEO and allow you to engage with accounts more meaningfully.

Speaking of Twitter hashtag techniques, the most effective tweets include not one thousand or one hundred, but 1-2 hashtags. Avoid adding too many or else you can ruin the audience flow to your post. The former 140, now 280 character-limit should make it obvious that hashtags should engage too much space. You are allowed to use as many you wish in your post, but hashtags won’t perform as good as you’d expect them to.

source: searchenginewatch.com

Last but not least, make your hashtags relevant and a natural part of your tweet or post on Instagram. Hashtags should align with your content and, if possible, summarize the topic of the post. Avoid spamming with irrelevant hashtags, such as attaching a popular but unrelated hashtag on Instagram just for more visibility. This can irritate your audience rather than inspire them.

For a more effective approach, follow recommendations guidelines and incorporate Instagram SEO tips to ensure your hashtags improve your reach. Crafting a well-optimized Instagram bio with the right keywords can also enhance your visibility, helping your posts gain traction and making your account more discoverable.

Instagram and Hashtags – A Story of Power and Charm

If we were to make a top listing how hard it is for marketers to nail the hashtag ranking algorithm on various social platforms, Twitter would be head of the list, closely followed by Instagram, then Google+, and Facebook.

The Instagram hashtag pages can be divided into two sections: “Top Posts” and “Most Recent.

Instagram is a little bit easier to navigate, especially when looking at the “Most Recent” section of a hashtag page. I conducted an experiment by posting a random photo from my phone on Instagram using the #healthyeating and #butterchicken hashtags. And voila! They appeared in the Most Recent section. However, in the second screenshot, my post didn’t show up in the top three posts but was instead pushed down by others. The reason? That particular SEO hashtag is highly trending, so new posts appear just seconds apart.

This highlights that hashtags and visibility on social media platforms like Instagram have a very short lifespan unless a post has a large, engaged audience consistently voting, commenting, liking, and saving it. For social media managers, this is where effective use of Instagram Reels and optimizing SEO on Instagram becomes crucial.

Following community guidelines and leveraging the right strategy can help boost a post’s staying power in the feed. Implementing these tactics can ensure that your content continues to gain traction beyond the initial post window.

Today, Instagram is probably the best place to use hashtags in. It is heaven to hashtags. The more pound marks a post has, the bigger the audience. And digital marketers know it and use them to their maximum potential. The success recipe is to use 9 hashtags – these bring the best engagement ( studies show a rise of 28,548 interactions per post).

source: searchenginewatch.com

Even stories marked with a hashtag can get on the hashtag pages.

The good thing is that there’s no character or hashtag limit, hence you can add up to 30 hashtags per post. You have the chance to rapidly expand your audience, provided you have attractive content. You know it already – content is king. Along with many other factors that might matter only if you want to get a spot in Top Posts.

source: https://blog.bufferapp.com/instagram-algorithm

Longer hashtags have higher engagement. Just as with long-tail keywords, the more specific hashtags are, the better. Usually, the more generic and simpler ones bring less traffic.

Instagram doesn’t like giving specific information on how hashtags work on their platform, opting for neutrality in answers.

Do Facebook Hashtags Offer Enough Exposure?

When it comes to Facebook, there very little we can say in regard to their hashtag approach. They were the last ones to adopt this social media invention and didn’t seem to be willing to invest too much in it, like the two aforementioned social platforms did, creating a whole religion around it.

Similar to Instagram, people are able to see only posts either from their friends or coming from profile pages with public settings. So one step would be to set your brand page as visible as possible, that is to promote it. Then, pair your highly-engaging and attractive posts with brand/campaign, trending, or content hashtags.

There’s no limitation as to how many hashtags a post should have, hence, the increased interaction depends only on the right choice of numbers. The same Trackmaven studies show that more hashtags a Facebook post has, the weaker the engagement will be. If you want to score big from the very beginning, keep in mind that one hashtag brings more traffic than more – approximately 1,771.

source: searchenginewatch.com

On Instagram, using hashtags effectively is key to boosting SEO for Instagram. Instagram SEO tips suggest that optimizing instagram posts, instagram captions, and even instagram reels with hashtags for seo can enhance user activity and increase social media analytics insights. Tools like an instagram hashtag generator or hashtag generator tool help you find keywords and hashtags that drive traffic and engagement. These hashtags also impact the Instagram algorithm, influencing where your content appears in the instagram search bar or during a hashtag search. Adding a specific keyword or instagram keyword into your bio generator or instagram content further strengthens your online presence.

When it comes to the order algorithm behind how Facebook displays hashtag results, most probably it would be a mix of the following:

source: https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-news-feed-algorithm

Google+ Only Shows You Posts From Your Agenda

A quick search shows that Google is no longer displaying Google+ hashtag results in their SERPs. There’s no official press release from Google announcing this, but it appears you can now only see hashtagged posts shared directly on the Google+ platform.

Google+ operates similarly to Instagram and Facebook—you can only view posts from your connections and other public content. Truth be told, Facebook and Google+ are the least targeted platforms among the big four. However, you can still perform a hashtag search for any keyword that comes to mind, and also see trending hashtags by checking the “Hot Topics” section.

For platforms like Instagram, social media tools and Instagram SEO tools can help optimize your strategy to reach target audiences. Instagram recommends using relevant hashtags to boost visibility. By applying SEO tips and keeping an eye on what’s trending, you can maximize your post’s reach and engagement on social media.

Why You Should Double Down On Hashtags

Hashtags mean networking, discovering, community building opportunities, popularity, advertising, and loads of traffic. They work somehow as a library where you can find everything related to a certain subject (e.g. #Grammys, #Oscars). They do work but they show results only when you’re not doing overkill.

Knowing that Google indexes tweets, you should double down on using hashtags that can boost brand visibility and impact your SEO strategy by increasing awareness and brand searches. By incorporating hashtags into your social marketing strategy, you’ll create more opportunities for your brand name, content, and social media activity to appear in Google search results.

Utilizing a hashtag generator tool can help you find the most relevant and trending hashtags for your Instagram posts, ensuring better visibility. This is crucial, as the right specific hashtag can enhance social media engagement and drive traffic to your site. Whether you’re posting on Twitter, Instagram, Google+, or Facebook, using the hash mark properly allows users to discover your brand based on their interests and needs.

Speed is important for maximizing engagement, as a hashtagged post has a short lifespan, but when done right, hashtags can generate long-term traffic. Monitoring trends and being the first to post on a trending topic is key to visibility. For this, a tool like Hashtagify.me can be useful in identifying the most popular and relevant hashtags for your posts.

Finally, don’t forget to optimize other elements of your social media presence, such as using a bio generator to create a compelling Instagram bio. If you have insights into how hashtags work or how to rank higher in SERPs and timelines, feel free to leave a comment—we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Conclusion

Hashtags have evolved into a powerful tool that goes beyond simple social media posts, playing a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO) and increasing brand visibility. For social media managers, understanding the nuances of using related hashtags, niche hashtags, and targeted keywords can greatly improve their overall social media marketing strategy. Hashtags help to boost social media engagement and connect with target audiences, making them indispensable in modern social media platforms like Instagram.

Adhering to instagram recommendations guidelines and community guidelines is also crucial for long-term success. Proper use of writing alt text, thoughtful youtube video description writing, and incorporating video description generators can further enhance visibility across platforms like Instagram and YouTube. For businesses leveraging AI social media tools, generating hashtags strategically helps amplify content reach and social media engagement.

Ultimately, the right combination of SEO on Instagram, hashtag on Instagram, and marketing platform integration can help you achieve increased visibility, drive traffic, and sustain a strong online presence. By optimizing content with SEO tools and applying Instagram SEO tips, businesses can elevate their brand’s performance across social media.

Article reviewed by Catalin Dracsineanu

The post Do Hashtags Influence SEO? Here’s How to Rank High Using Hashtags appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

13 Things We Learned from 10 Years of Writing SEO Friendly Blog Posts

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 16:03:13 +0000

We have written and optimized – for our own blog or other pages – thousands of articles and SEO friendly blog posts in the last 10 years. What better way to learn from past successes and mistakes? We’d like to share them with you, not just as a holiday gift, but mostly because sharing our insights with others is what makes us and the people around us stronger and more resilient.

Google’s rules and updates changed way too many times to be worth counting and the content writers on this blog have changed a lot as well, trying to uncover Google’s mystery box. We’ve lost weight, hair, nerves, and money in the process but believe us, we have learned a lot and most of the times the hard way.

So, we’re going to expose ourselves in a vulnerable matter; yet, if this article saves you from repeating some mistakes we did, we declare ourselves happy. 🙂

The end of the year is usually a time to reminisce and reflect on the time that has passed and hopefully extract some amount of wisdom – no matter how small – to take into the new year. For many of us, 2021 will be different, since we’ve likely had to go through this exercise a lot earlier than the end of the year.

So, we decided to look even further back, in hopes that the lessons we find will speak to something greater than the general terribleness of this year.

We’ve run an SEO blog for ten years now. And we’ve learned one or two things along the way. Here are 13 of them (yes 13, in 2020):

Optimize Everything from URLs to Conclusions
Don’t Assume Anything! Check Grammar, Facts, Quotes
Being Consistent Is Difficult. It’s Also the Key to Success
Originality Is Good, but so Is Content Update
Google Algorithms Come and Go, Quality Content Stays
Creativity Is A Lot of Hard Work
Questions Are More Useful than Answers
Forget Academic Writing
Solve Your Readers’ Problems, not Your Dilemmas
The Title of the Article Will Influence Its Performance
Write Less but Write Better
Write Less, Promote More
Stick to Your Principles

Optimize Everything from URLs to Conclusions

I know, you already got this: you know that you need to have well optimized content, meaning that you need to use your targeted keyword within the title once and the body content at least ten times and Google will have no other choice than rank your content. And if it doesn’t, well, we all know that Google sucks so, it’s their fault.

Of course, this is an exaggeration. But it has a grain of truth in it.

As search marketing changed, we have evolved as well as learned what both our readers and Google expect from us.

We all know that optimized content is the key to success. But optimization shouldn’t stop at the body of the content. You should also optimize:

The Title
The URL
The Meta Description
The Slug
The Images
The Internal Links
The Outbound Links
The Text Length
The Article Main Image

We used to overlook some of these items. Or, at least we did not give them the right importance. This is how we ended up with URLs like this: https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/26/the-best-link-building-blogs-experts-and-their-tutorials-from-2011/ or with three articles published one after another having the titles: How to Get Links, How to Earn Links and How to Acquire Links.

You’ll find plenty of material on this blog on how to optimize all of those reminded above, so we won’t insist too much here. But here are some resources you might find useful:

SEO Writing for Copywriters

Internal Linking Strategy

Title & URL Influence on Rankings Research

Link Building Campaigns

How to Write SEO Friendly Titles

Don’t Assume Anything! Check Grammar, Facts, Quotes

Do you know what Euripides and my manager have in common? They are both stuck in my head repeating this sentence: Question everything!

While this might be an obvious one, take a sincerity test: when was the last time you double or triple checked a well-known fact? Even the basic ones like: cracking your knuckles will give you arthritis or Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. You know this, so you use them in your content without checking them again.

Whether it’s a well-known SEO fact, a very famous quote or an obvious grammar rule, double check it.

Some time ago we published an article that talked about Wikipedia and whether advertising can be made on the big encyclopedia’s site. And as an example, we offered Gibraltar.

We were super excited about the article and we thought it would stir a lot of controversies. And it did. Yet, the apple of discord wasn’t whether you can inject advertising, but whether Gibraltar is a country or not. It is a territory disputed between UK and Spain, we knew that, but we assumed that if it has its own capital and currency, it must be a country. Well, it’s not and we had to stop and moderate the comments section due to this issue. We changed the screenshot and transformed “country” into “territory” but, too little too late.

We also had our share of “grammar shaming” from our users. Some more years ago, we published a few pieces (that we assumed were written correctly from a grammar point of view) and we got some emails from our readers that weren’t so flattering.

We had spent so much time in doing research, documenting and reading a lot, and what people noticed first were the grammar mistakes.

Of course, we were proud enough to assume that we knew grammar, and that it wasn’t what should have mattered first. But a few emails from our users later, we decided to collaborate with an English teacher. And that was one of the best decisions we took.

When it comes to grammar, things are a bit tricky, we know. If your first language is not English, chances are you’ll need someone to look over your content. At least in the beginning, to give you some guidance. Even if you’re one of those who goes overboard when correcting grammar mistakes, a fresh eye is always a good idea.

Because you want your articles, your research, your blog to become an authority in your market, and this would be almost impossible with typos or style errors in your masterpiece.

If someone else is checking your work, that doesn’t make you less of a content writer or copywriter. It will make you a better one.

Being Consistent Is Difficult. It’s Also the Key to Success

Ever wondered why so many TV shows which go on forever sooner or later have a significant drop in quality?

Coming up with a good idea can happen to any of us. Coming up with a good idea every week for years and years? That takes more than creativity.

It takes hard work and discipline and accepting the fact that some weeks it’s going to be a lot harder than others. But the important thing is to keep going and keep wanting to put out good work. Things aren’t always going to be in a straight line. Difficult times are followed by better ones. And sometimes the best rewards come after a period of struggling and pushing through.

Do you see the screenshot below? It’s a pretty nice growth, isn’t it? It’s a screenshot of cognitiveSEO’s visibility taken from our Site Explorer.

The chart below looks this good because what we did two things:

We published constantly (we published at least once a week)
We optimized everything mentioned in the previous chapter, from URLs to conclusions.

(I admit that I gaze at this chart from time to time when my motivation is gone, or I procrastinate too much.)

Yes, we also used our Content Optimizer a lot and it worked great for us. But we were consistent most of all.

We published frequently and we optimized everything for each and every article, be it an in-depth research or a short case study.

And it did pay off.

Originality Is Good, but so Is Content Update

Coming up with original ideas is no doubt key to progress. But so is updating existing ones, despite being less glamorous.

Gaining knowledge tends to happen in small and uncertain steps, rather than in leaps and bounds. Part of the process is refining and testing existing knowledge. Which is why we’ve often opted to update articles and research rather than start from scratch.

And it turned out to be a very good decision. We even made an article on how content optimization increased our SEO visibility big time.

The results are summed up in the chart below.

You surely have articles that are not relevant anymore. Or research you’ve worked so hard on, but now it is not bringing anything in terms of traffic.

Instead of letting them rot, try to resuscitate them, if it makes sense. You’ll win more traffic and improve your overall blog quality.

Worst case scenario, this strategy won’t bring you much more traffic but at least you’ll have your blog articles up to date.

Google Algorithms Come and Go, Quality Content Stays

This is similar to the one hit wonder music bands.

We all remember the musical hit, we sing it at birthday parties for a period of time, yet we probably won’t buy the album just for that tune.

Same thing may happen to your content. If you want your readers to look at your blog/brand/name with respect and put you in the trustworthy content category, make a habit out of delivering quality.

As the saying goes, we are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence is not an act, but a habit.

You’ve written a blog post and you have thousands of shares and appreciations? That’s a great. Yet, that one-time performance won’t keep you on the top for long. On the contrary, once you’ve set the bar high, you need to keep up with it to have killer content.

And yes, Google Updates are a harsh reality. Yet, we have thousands of readers, clients, users, and it rarely happened for very good quality content to be penalized.

We’re not saying that it didn’t happen. Unfortunately, we’ve seen good quality being penalized. Yet, take this as a prevention measure.

If a policeman stopped you in traffic, would you be super confident that you did nothing wrong, or would you feel a bit panicked as you know you probably broke a few rules here and there?

Same with content and updates. I know, it’s waaaaaaay easier said than done, but try to write content in such manner, that if a quality update pops out, you won’t feel that scared.

But don’t take our word for granted. Here’s what Google says about what you should do when they update their algorithm.

Creativity Is A Lot of Hard Work

The famous American television and radio host Larry King used to say to his audience a very witty story about his father.

He says that his father, of Ukrainian origins, came to the US thinking that America was the greatest land of all, where even the streets were paved with gold. However, shortly after arriving, his father realized three things:

The streets weren’t paved with gold.
The streets weren’t paved at all.
He was the one to pave the streets.

There’s a dangerous cliche about creativity being the sort of lightning in a bottle phenomenon, young hip creatives staying late at night and coming up with wild ideas out of thin air. And that’s… definitely a more exciting version than reality.

But the truth is that so many times creativity is time and patience and incremental progress.

And it’s a collaborative effort more than it is an individual one. Ultimately, you discover there is truth in the adage that spontaneous things take a lot of preparation.

Don’t pressure yourself in being creative 100% of the time. You might be creative most of the time, without even noticing.

And we know it’s easier said than done but even if you don’t feel like, start writing. Just start, and the rest will follow.

Larry’s King father was a great man, we’re sure of it. Yet, as inspirational as these success stories are, this is what they tend to remain: stories.

Of course, not all of them. Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

Questions Are More Useful than Answers

We’ve asked a lot of questions along the years and we haven’t always been able to answer all of them.

Understanding the right question to ask is, more often than not, the more challenging task.

Getting access to large amounts of data is no longer a serious problem. What to do with the data will largely remain one for years to come.

So, whenever you want to perform research, or elaborate on some stats, please remember: it’s not just that statistical interpretation and analysis requires a certain skillset. There are also strategic and sometimes even ethical choices to be made about how to frame the results or even what to look at in the first place.

Over the years, we have performed research on billions of data points. And no, there is no exaggeration here. Literally billions of data points.

Each and every time we started having a question in mind we wanted to get an answer for; yet, almost each and every time we realized along the way that we had asked the wrong question.

Of course, this is the beauty of research. But don’t be too proud when performing research. Even if your computer blocks after tens of Excel documents open, even if your stats software crashes, never ignore the other questions that will pop up from the research.

Take from instance this research on the infuence of Title and URLs on rankings. The initial plan was to analyze a few hundred article titles and see if and how a title can influence rankings.

We ended up analyzing 35k keywords in both Titles and URLs because we realized that what we should actually look for is the importance of a keyword’s occurrence in a title, URL, domain, subdomain and URI.

And as you can see in the chart below, in some cases, that huge amount of analyzed data told us…well…nothing relevant. Yet, it was still worth discovering it.

Forget Academic Writing

We’re going to keep this short. When we talk about academic writing, we don’t necessarily mean scientific articles.

But there’s a certain rigor to that writing which might not appeal to the general audience. This is not to say you should dumb things down.

There’s a simple, two-step approach for making this happen:

Read what you’ve written out loud. If some parts don’t sound like something you’d say to a friend in real life, then change it.

Solve Your Readers’ Problems, not Your Dilemmas

A lot of content comes from wanting to share experience. You know something most other people – even those in your field – might not know. You are excited about that and want to make them aware of your newly gained wisdom. The important thing to remember is that the focus should stay on sharing and not on you as the source of wisdom. That’s not to say your opinions have no place in your writing, on the contrary.

But always ask yourself these 3 questions:

Will this info help my readers better understand the subject?
Will this info help my readers better apply this knowledge for doing something practical?
Will this info help me look cool but not add anything valuable to this piece?

If the answer to the first two questions is a resounding “Yes”, then you should definitely include that piece of information in your copy. If the answer to these questions is “No” and the only “Yes” comes from the third question, well… you’ve got yourself a pretty good conversation opener for the next party.

The Title of the Article Will Influence Its Performance

We’re not talking here only about the fact that keywords used in the titles of your copy have a high ranking importance. We’ve conducted a study where it seems that keyword appearance in the title makes a clear difference between ranking 1st or 2nd. But also about the “catchiness” factor. And no, I am not talking about click bite titles, but about titles that are relevant in your industry.

We’ve published so much, and some content registered success while some didn’t, but one thing is sure: if it has anything related to Google in the title, it’s going to perform pretty well.

When comparing any study, research, opinion article that we’ve published to one that has “Google” in the title, chances are that the latter will get the most traffic, shares, links, etc.

So, you might be thinking: why don’t you add “Google” in all titles? And now we come back to the previous points mentioned here: we don’t want to do click bait only; we want to be relevant, to offer quality and respect for our readers.

When creating the title of your content, you should really think things through, as the title must not be only relevant and attractive but also SERP friendly.

Write Less but Write Better

I am sure you’ve noticed this as well for years: fluff content in most of the industries (especially digital marketing).

There seems to be very little focus on SEO, audiences, conversions, and how articles/content will be helpful for the readers. All of these things should be figured out BEFORE you write anything. It is obvious when something was written strictly for an SEO goal;

Without value, fluff content isn’t going to help you even if you rank well for it.

There is no reason to create content so that you have it. You have to plan each piece of content based on which audience(s) you want to reach, what goals you have for each piece of content, how you will use it in social media to further your goals, and how you are hoping to rank.

This takes a lot of time and effort, but it is better than wasting time and resources on content that brings nothing to your company. Without showing the ROI for your work, your job becomes expendable.

Write Less, Promote More

Don’t neglect content promotion. You might be overly focused on content marketing processes. And that’s definitely a good investment!

However, a lot of content marketers tend to skip the steps related to content promotion. We know, we did.

Without promotion, the majority of your work never reaches your targeted audience.

We recommend writing less and devoting more time to content promotion. Start your content plan by writing a list of channels and influencers that can help you reach more relevant users and will allow you to start getting traffic and leads from each published post.

source: multichannelmerchant.com

Stick to Your Principles

There will be many cases when you might be tempted to write click-bait articles or write just for the sake of writing, without offering real value.

Because you’ll be looking at your competitors, and you’ll see that they might get results even with not-so-qualitative content. You’ll invest time, money, and nerves in well-documented researches that will not always perform the way you want. You will get angry, and you will swear you won’t spend another night trying to bring quality to the Internet world.

I am sure this happens to any content writer at least once. Yet, if you do stick to your principles, if you do invest time and quality in each and every article you write, it does pay off. These are not just empty words. Long time effort in content writing does pay off.

Don’t write anything you wouldn’t read.

There are no easy gains, indeed. Yet, what matters at the end of the day is to have good long-term performances.

You might have read this article thoroughly, or you’ve just browsed the main titles, saying to yourself: I knew that. Knowledge is power. But what matters at the end of the day is what you do with that knowledge. All the actions you perform daily define who you are as a person, a marketer, or a business owner. So make sure your actions have an impact on something, no matter how big or small.

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood once said that the internet is 95 percent porn and spam. So, let’s make that 5% be damn good.

The post 13 Things We Learned from 10 Years of Writing SEO Friendly Blog Posts appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

40 Most Effective Digital Marketing Tactics and Techniques in 2024

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 11:19:33 +0000

Everybody wants to have the possibility of choice, but the paradox is that no one wants to be some random “one” in a crowd of a hundred. With this need of any digital marketer in mind, we’ve thought of giving you the opportunity of being just that marketer who stands out. The new year of H2H (human-to-human) approach is here and we should focusing our attention to build meaningful relationships with audiences in a creative way. After extensive research, we’ve put together a list with the top efficient digital marketing tactics and techniques, backed by some great case studies.

Below you can find the most effective 40 digital marketing tactics and techniques for a kickass start in 2022:

1. Re-optimize Your Content to Gain 70% SEO Visibility Increase

Top positions in Google, Bing or any search engine are a pinnacle of today’s online success. After a lot of research and content experiments, we discovered that there is a strong correlation between content performance and rankings. So a few time ago, we decided to evaluate our content and re-optimize it.

We analyzed the positions and engagement for each article and decided which content needs to be refreshed and re-optimized. We proceeded with the keyword research using the Keyword Tool and Content Optimizer for the whole process:

Firstly, do keyword research: we looked at keyword recommendations, volume, type of query and other relevant keywords for double optimization the same piece.

Secondly, we added the keywords into Rank Tracking before re-optimizing to have an accurate view of where we started and how it improves after the re-optimization.
Third, we started adding the content into the Content optimizer to see the performance score and find out how much we’ll have to optimize. We added the keyword recommendations and check it at the end by clicking on Check Score.

Fourthly, we searched for the page in Google Search Console to make sure it is indexed, do a live test just to be sure everything is ok. We kept tracking of the keyword’s evolution in search engines.

After the keyword optimization was finished we saw a big increase overall for our whole website. Our rankings improved and our traffic increased by almost 70%. Below you can see a printscreen with our search visibility in Google from Site Explorer:

2. Boost traffic by 300% While Using Editorial Calendars

New content appears daily. You must bring something fresh every time. Investing in social media, sales funnel, conversion rate optimization, customer relationships, marketing budgets, web analytics; they are all keywords that pops in your head all the time. Yet, which are the most effective tactics one should use?

Scheduling your blog posts is mandatory, especially if you work with multiples copywriters. Make sure your marketing plan includes an editorial calendar for improving your results. Creating an editorial calendar is easier than you think. There are lots of apps that can help you with that. Meistertask is a task management app you could use to drag and drop tasks for each participant and create an editorial calendar easily. Below you can see a screenshot with an editorial calendar created in Meistertask:

Source: https://www.meistertask.com

Trello gives us another digital marketing technique example you could use to create editorial campaigns. CoSchedule has a Content Marketing Calendar component.

Source: coschedule.com

They used a process that helped them to increase traffic by 299%. Follow the next steps to achieve similar results:

have a broad goal behind your calendar;
set metrics to measure your goal;
find your baseline performance of an average month for that metric;
establish smart objectives for each blog post from your calendar;
find out how many blog posts you’ll need to meet your aspirational goal;

3. Use Content Syndication & Get a Constant Traffic of 250,000 Unique Visitors

Content syndication is the process of publishing your content on third party sites. You need to find authoritative publications. The idea behind is to drive more engagement for your content. Outbrain and Taboola power your content on their marketing channel. Once you republish your article on a big site like those two, you are exposed to a new audience and could reach a higher traffic.

James Clear used this digital marketing tactic and built an email list of more than 100,000 with a constant traffic of 250,000 unique visitors per month on the blog. He republished a blog post on Lifehacker and got almost 99k views as you can see in the next photo. Quick tip: If you have an account on Google Analytics you can easily track your performance and see how many unique visitors you have.

4. Promote Your Business with SlideShare to Drive 20% More Organic Traffic

Slideshare is the largest marketing platform for sharing presentations and it’s best suited for B2B companies. Didit Marketing, an advertising agency from New York, conducted a study showing that SlideShare gets 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter or Youtube.

An important fact you need to keep in mind is that SlideShare received billions of viewers every month and it’s a great way to connect with different specialists and find quality information in a friendly format.

Ana Hoffman, blogger at Traffic Generation Cafe, conducted a study showing how she received from 0 to 243,000 views in 30 days on Slideshare. The fun part is that you don’t need entirely new content to do a presentation, you can work through your old content displayed in a visual form to be easy to read.

20% of the SlideShare visitors come directly from Google. The rest come from social media and other SlideShare presentations. Always keep on eye on your metrics from Google Aalytics to see how are you performing in terms of organic traffic, paid traffic, visitors and so on.

5. Sales Growth with 185% by Offering Highly Qualitative Case Studies

Smart and effective digital tactics are a gold mine. Case studies as well. Not to mention the conversion optimization rates you can get with them. Case studies have a huge potential to grow traffic, sales, and revenue if you offer quality results and show your product brings value. The Content Marketing Institute conducted a research where they saw that 63% of UK marketers believe that case studies are an effective digital marketing tactic. Case studies are the fifth most popular marketing tactic used out of 12, after social media, newsletters, blogs and blog posts.

Neil Patel, one of the top 10 marketers according to Forbes, conducted a study to see the influence of the use of case studies on his own site. He witnessed a growth in his revenue by 185%.

6. Build a Network of Partner Websites to Get Influence on the SERP and Jump up to 30+ Positions

Brand mentions on well-known publications are important and hard to get. They could lift you up in ranking on the search engines for the right keyword phrases and you could improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. Usually, startups collaborate with content marketing specialists or firms because some of them don’t have the budget for a full-time person. Building a network of partner websites for a short period of time is an effective digital marketing technique to bring awareness and traffic to your site. The profile of the website could include publications, edu websites, web directory, blogs, forums, e-commerce and so on.

OutreachMama employed a study to see the results after their partnership with publisher Companies like Forbes and Huffington Post. In only 2 months they received 350 total backlinks from over 100 domains. Besides that, they saw a natural increase in their backlink profile.

www.outreachmama.com

In the second month of the partnership, they saw that they money keywords jumped up to 30 positions in the search engine result page.

7. Rank Higher on Review Sites to Have an Average 18% Uplift in Sales

9 out of 10 people look at online product reviews before they make a purchase decision. According to BrightLocal, 72% of Consumers say positive reviews make them trust a business more. Other 88% say they trust customer reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Source: http://searchengineland.com

Reevoo discovered through an in-house case study that online reviews bring an average 18% uplift in sales. In 2015, US e-commerce sales were about $341.7 billion showing an increase of almost 15% over 2014.

Source: http://images.internetretailer.com

With a continuous growth in e-commerce sale, customer reviews (all reviews, not necessary the ones coming from some ideal customers) are a major factor, an efficient trigger and quite essential tools nowadays for e-commerce websites.

8. Be Part of the 90% of Marketers Who Saw a Significant Increase in ROI by Taking Advantage of Trends for Traffic Generation

Google Trends is a pocket of gold. You’ll find a lot of data to help you to generate content and see what’s trending to stay on top of your competitors. The particularity of this tool is that you’ll find real-time search data or help to gauge consumer search behaviors over time. Below you can see a screenshot from Google Trends with searches for 3 holidays: Halloween, Christmas and Thanksgiving.

You need to keep your eyes open for the marketing trends that will come. The marketing trends that will dominate 2022 include the Internet of Things, virtual and augmented reality, live streaming video, visual storytelling, native advertising, marketing automation, influencer marketing, mobile marketing.

Adopting multiple of these emerging trends is a smart move, and many digital marketers are syndicating content to make the most of the trends. For example, music photographer Matt Walter syndicates his photography podcast to audio platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify, while also covering podcast content in different methods including dedicated live streams and through other visual mediums to maximise digital marketing effectiveness.

In 2016, video content was very popular and still is. Fire Brand proved that following trends can bring growth. The results showed that 90% of marketers have noticed significant increase in Return on Investment (ROI) through video content.

9. Gain a Higher Advantage in Front of Your Competitors with AMP Receiving 40% Organic Traffic from the Whole Site Traffic

AMP is a simpler and easier way to built light-weight web pages with static content that loads faster on mobile devices, due to its technology. The project is based on AMP HTML, new open framework built of existing web technologies.

The pages with an AMP version see a 2% higher CTR, which translates to more clicks, as you can see in the next screenshot.

Source: https://www.2dogsdesign.com

AMP version has 40% of all the traffic for a page. It is an utterly amazing improvement for many sites because the content renders faster. The project comes to the rescue for a large number of publishers.

10. Write on Medium to Get Awareness Through 6.2 Million Pageviews

Medium is a network built out for people from people and offers a new kind of content – publishing, and social media synergy. Every day, there are newly published articles that could get you over 45,000 views.

Publishers can see 3 stats graphs on Medium for 30 days, minutes read, views and visitors. Ali Mese, startup marketer at GrowthSupply.com, created a report with the statistic for his best traffic-generator article. For an article of about 1,000-1,500 words, he received over 4 million pageviews and 144,920 followers on Medium as you can see in the next picture.

Source: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com

For a global audience, it’s best to publish your piece of content on Sunday at 0:00 GMT, because people look forward to reading something new as the week starts. To give it a kick, you should use an A/B emailing test sent at different hours to see which hour has the best open rate.

11. Develop a Facebook Customized Page Tab to Engage 40% of Fans

Investing in social media is a must. Yet, don’t know if you knew that a customized page tab gives you the advantage to offer exclusive information to fans. A personalized page tab can be used to promote registration for upcoming events, to bring fans to your website, to promote an app or a contest, create a content library, feature customers reviews or case studies and so on.

Socially Stacked demonstrated that a customized page for a discount can influence the engagement for that page. In the end, 42% fans liked the page to get a coupon or discount. On the same side, a case study by Wildfire Interactive showed that a Facebook coupon-based page tab received the highest engagement rates beside giveaways, sweepstakes, trivia Contests, Sweepstakes, Contest essays, photo contest, coupons, and video contest as you can see in the next graph.

12. Write Valuable Content on Linkedin Pulse and win up to 1,900 Social Shares in 30 Days

LinkedIn Pulse is a professional self-publishing platform. At first, everyone could write and publish content without any approval. Currently, it is composed of 500 selected experts. According to Kapko, LinkedIn Pulse “lies somewhere between blog and social network”. Authors add a number of 50,000 articles on the platform every week.

Brian Lang, blogger at Small Business Ideas, conducted quite an interesting study on 300 posts featured on LinkedIn Pulse. Most articles from Pulse were about careers (42%), then about business (15%) and self improvement (9.33%) and other (33.67%) which includes technology, sales & marketing, current events, and productivity.

On average, the articles from Pulse got 1,843 social shares, and only 10% had less than 500 social shares, which leaves almost 90% with more than 500 social shares. If you are featured on LinkedIn Pulse, it can bring you a good amount of social exposure. From now on, writing on Linkedin Plan should be a part of your marketing plan.

13. Use Reddit to Grow Your Business & Generate $6,188 in 3 Months

Reddit is a community that has been growing since 2005. Here you can meet people with similar interests. It’s a place where you could follow news in a thread categorized in “hot”, ”new”, ”rising”, ”controversial”, ”top”, ”gilded”, ”wiki” and “promoted”. The nice part is you could follow lots of subreddits depending on the industry you’re interested. There were numerous cases when different stories from Reddit became famous and gained many upvotes.

If you choose to post a link instead of a text you can link to your business and bring visitors to your website. Scott Keyes is an example of best practice in this case. He is a reporter for Think Progress and founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights. He turned an obsession with cheap plane tickets into a $1 million business in under 2 years. In 3 months he managed to make $6,188 only by posting on Reddit. According to what he said, his posting got him 1,000 free subscribers and 250+ premium subscribers.

14. Target the Online Communities and Hit 10.000 Monthly Unique Visitors

Online communities are a great way to grow your online presence and to catch insights. Being apart of an online community has its perks. Being around by people with similar interests and exchanging knowledge is a good way to develop yourself and the company you are working at.

The best online marketing communities you need to join are LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, Slack, GrowthHackers and, Inbound.org, ordered in chronological order. A good example of using the last two comes from Grow and Convert. The company was born when Devesh Khanal and Benji Hyam met a few years ago. Since they launched their site, they were active in online marketing communities, Devesh Khanal on GrowthHackers, on the one side, and Benji Hyam on Inbound.org, on the other side.

They set up a goal of bringing 40,000 monthly unique visitors in 30 days. As you can see in the next picture it is not quite like that, but they were able to bring more visitors from online communities than from organic searches. That is a good start!

15. Get Social Influence to Receive Higher Rankings by 15%

There is a lot of fuss around the subject about the importance of social signals in rankings. We already know that investing in social media is an effective digital tactic that can help out with the conversion rate optimization. Moz study says that Google doesn’t use social share counts directly in its algorithm. Neil Patel, on the other hand, claims that there might be a connection between social shares and rankings as you can see in the next screenshot from a Quick Sprout gifographic.

A huge lift of almost 15% in rankings was the result of an increase of 100 Google Plus followers for a business page. Facebook brought a 6,9% increase in ranking from 70 shares and 50 likes. Lastly, 50 Tweets lift rankings with only 2,88%.

16. Design a Smart Automated Reactivation Campaign and Boost Sales by 164%

Each business makes its own format for newsletters, but designing a segmentation for customers that interacted with the site is a guaranteed path to lift the reactivation of inactive subscribers. The ideal customer will open all emails and buy your products every time, but that will happen in a month of Sundays.

The email marketing platform PostUp created an in-house case study for one of their clients to convert inactive subscribers. They built up an automated reactivation campaign and succeeded in boosting email-related sales by 164%. This is a great example of improving the conversion optimization of your inactive subscribers.

Eventful created a new approach to automated reactivation campaign where emails included recommended news based on the previous behavior of the users. Below, you can see an example of an email from them:

Source: https://assets.econsultancy.com

This campaign was a success. The recommendation performer alert produces 15% median open rate, 3% median click rate and the spike was a 400% increase in reactivation rates.

17. Get Personalized Emails to See an Average of a 19% Increase in Sales

Over the years there have been numerous studies showing that email marketing is the most effective digital marketing tactic for lead nurturing in your digital strategy. Personalized emails are more efficient than non-personalized emails and can bring relevant results. Personalized emails are based on a more in-depth research and understanding of customer behavior and marketing trends. Most important of all, it requires you to know your buyer persona to deliver relevant information.

You can see a comparison between segmentation and personalization below:

Source: http://blog.revampcrm.com

Dropbox uses personalized emails. See an example of this kind below:

According to a study from CMO.com, marketers who use personalized email see an average 19% increase in sale. Personalized emails have a 600% conversion rate, but the sad part is that only 30% of brands can use them.

18. Reduce Friction and Increase by 100% Your Email Sign-Up Rate

In marketing, friction means everything that slows down the process of a user to convert. The ideal marketing planning is not to have friction at all, but since that’s almost impossible, it’s best to have less friction so you could convert your leads easily.

The news company Quartz leads a research by reducing friction in email sign-ups. The changes they made to the sign-up process was to simplify it by using only an email address for subscription and moving to double opt-in (the user had to click on a link in the first email they received to activate subscription) to opt-out. When visitors want to subscribe, they go to a new landing page.

The results were quite satisfying; the daily subscriber rate has doubled. You can see a screenshot of their growth below:

Source: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com

Besides that, Quartz increased the number of people who subscribed on the weekend, when the activity was very week.

19. Use Segmentation to Increase Deliverability & Experience 141% Increase in Revenue per Campaign

If you aren’t able to use segmentation to target your audience, you won’t succeed in writing relevant subject lines. You can use segmentation based on interests, location behavior consumption, mobile marketing, keyword phrases, lifestyle or other factors.

There’s plenty of email marketing software on the market to help you segment your database faster and easier by connecting an individual’s social media profiles with their email address. MailChimp is a well-known option, but you may also want to check out the most popular alternatives.

Lyrics discovered that 4 out of 10 marketers who used segmentation experienced a higher open rate, 3 out of 10 marketers saw a lower unsubscribe rate and 2 out of 10 experienced better deliverability and greater revenue. Below, you can see the graph with all the segmentation results from the research.

Source: http://www.emailonacid.com

Another research worth mentioning is the Johnny Cupcakes emailing campaign. within their digital marketing technique they used a segmentation for gender, customers interests, brand preferences and media habits and for the first time ran a product launch campaign with different emails for men and women. See below a screenshot of the email sent to women:

Source: http://content.marketingsherpa.com

After they analyzed the results, they saw an increase of 42% in CTR, of 123% in conversion rate and 141% in revenue per campaign. These are quite some results for such small improvement.

Make sure you use segmentation in your digital marketing strategy.

20. Increase Your Email Open Rate by 33% with a Subject Line That Triggers Curiosity

Your subject lines are everything when you’re thinking about the email open rates. Everything comes from there. The call to action from the subject line must be relevant to your audience. Before you send the message to your list, think you’re sending the message to one person, someone you know. Keep in mind that your message shouldn’t be cold, no matter the industry you’re in.

A study from Informz shows how important a subject line is. 33% of email recipients open email are based on the subject line alone. So you can put your creativity to work or look for specialist advises making sure that your letter is well written, you are concise, you don’t use buzzwords and test.

Make sure you are concise, you don’t use buzzwords and test.

21. Collaborate with Influencers to Write About Your Product to Generate Over $300.000 in 3 Months

To create and maintain an online presence you must be one step ahead of the game and reach people.And influencer marketing can be of a real help in this situation. To create buzz in the online media, you should use influencers to help you to promote your business. A creative campaign with influencers was realized by Neil Patel, online marketing consultant. He spent $57,000 to models who posted a picture on Instagram with the message “Who is Neil Patel” and the hashtag #whoisneilpatel and earned $332,640 in three months.

This is just an example of a picture posted during the campaign:

Another example of influencers comes from people from your field of interest, specialists and experts in your industry. Another example of influencer marketing would be to use specialists from your field of interest, and experts in your industry.

22. Have an Integrated Approach about Paid Promotion on Social Media

Even though paid promotion is a digital marketing tactic used by numerous businesses, not everyone knows how to do it right. Having a large promotional budget is not a guarantee of success. The key is to address the right audience and engage with it.

In the 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report from Content Marketing Institute, you can see that 51% of B2B marketers say social ads are an effective paid advertising method.

47% of B2B marketers consider that promoted posts are also effective, as you can see in the picture above. The results show that more and more marketers consider paid promotion on social media a must. You should focus your attention on your paid social campaigns since those efforts could see high returns, as expressed in the example above. To keep up, digital specialists should look for new ways of investing in social platforms to reach new audiences.

To get yourself ahead of the game you could start taking an interest in mobility marketing if you’re using mobile advertising. Mobility is a way of fulfilling customer’s needs to get tasks done on the move. Let’s take Facebook as an example. Has it ever happened to you to visit a new city and receive notifications in the app with recommendations of places to visit and restaurants where you could eat near you? Connecting with the user on the go through an mobile app is a great way to push them down the funnel.

23. Increase CTR with 64% in PPC Ads with Site-Links Extentions

Site-links extensions are a path to lead visitors to specific pages from your website directly from a PPC ad. They look something like this:

Source: https://lseo.com

PPC Hero did an experiment to see the results after they added site links to their paid search ad. They saw an improvement; their CTR grew up from 1.16% to 1.9%. Only by adding site links, the CTR experiences an increase of 64%. Below, you can see the results before adding the site links and after adding them.

Source: http://www.ppchero.com

The case study also showed that there are situations where the site links have a lower CTR compared with the headline of the ad, but the CPA has a lower value. Even if the site links don’t get clicks near as much as the headlines, they do produce additional CTR and conversions.

24. Use Emotion Triggers in Headline Ads to Get 6x Above Average CTR

Either we are talking about a headline from a blog post, a newspaper, a book, a billboard, a PPC ad or a newsletter, headlines have a decisive impact whether the piece of content gets clicked or not.

Brainstorming for compelling headlines is mandatory. Copyblogger said that on average, 8 out of 10 people read the headline, and the rest 2 out of 10 read the rest.

Larry Kim, founder WordStream, saw that using negative emotional triggers in a PPC ad can score impressive results. By using the hero/villain persona to express anger/revenge, the next ad got 6x above average CTR.

Source: http://blog.ezanga.com

If you use fear, you could see a 125% increase in appointments booked, and 170% increase in call volumes. See the paid search ad used for this experiment below:

Source: http://blog.ezanga.com

Wordstream offers a free version of the tool Adwords Performance Grader to see how your ads are performing. You can use it to make a test before the changes you make in Google AdWords and after, based on the recommendations you receive.

25. See a 32% Return on Investment for a Promoted Twitter Account

Nowadays, everyone knows about Twitter. If you want to run an advertising campaign on Twitter, there are three ways to do it: promoted trends, promoted accounts and promoted tweets.

Hubspot, inbound marketing pioneer, wanted to find a more effective way to:

generate new leads;
engage existing followers;
grow the sales conversion rate;
improve ROI.

The solution was to use the promoted accounts advertising type from Twitter to target B2B decision-marketing users that are interested in marketing subjects. To deliver better results, the campaign included promoted tweets with a specific call to action such as webinar invitations, free e-books. After the campaign had ended, it resulted in 150% increase sales, 46% lower cost-per-read and 32% ROI.

Reaching new customers with Twitter promoted accounts is an effective digital marketing technique indeed.

26. Set Up Automated Behavioral Triggered Emails to Get 71% Higher Open Rates

For an email to be effective, marketers knew that emails see a better open rate if they follow the behavior of the users on the website.

According to Unbounce, automated behavioral emails are triggered by multiple events:

a user abandoning the products from their cart;
a subscriber becoming inactive;
a subscriber purchasing a product that needs a replenishment.

See an example of this kind below:

Emails that use automated behavioral triggers have 71% higher open rates and 102% higher clicks than non-triggered emails.

This technique delivers value because it’s sent in the moment of utmost relevance and needs to your prospect. 39% of marketers say “automatically sending emails based on triggers” is the most effective technique for having a higher email engagement.

27. Collect Customer Data Through a Transparent and Unique System to Gain Trust of 44% of Customers

Along the years, studies reported a decrease in the visitors’ level of trust in brands and companies. Edelman Trust Barometer showed that 44% of customers express trust in business, which is almost a half of the audience.

When you can demonstrate how the data you gather is kept secure, you’ll see improvements. State of the Data Nation showed that a clear privacy policy (43%) earns consumer trust.

Informatica surveyed 2,000 UK adults and found out that almost 6 out of 10 people are concerned about the use of the personal information they shared with brands. Another interesting result from Informatica shows 7 out of 9 people admitted they were cautious with the information they share with brands.

Thread, U.K. online personal styling service for men and women, has a unique and transparent system of collecting customer data. Now it is available only for men. After you enter the site you select menswear:

They use this system to offer custom product to help your stylist find the best clothes for you, such as which trouser fits you like or how open are you to try more daring clothes or how much you usually spend on clothes and other specific questions.

In the end, you’ll be asked to leave your email address for further actions.

28. Make use of retargeting & Experience a 400% Increase On ROI

The retargeting method is used when you want to convert a user after entering the site. The process is quite easy; the user comes to your site, a cookie is set to their browsers. Afterward, you can track him to show him ads on the website he’s visiting. Based on the activity he had on your site you can deliver specific display ads. Below you can see the most effective types of retargeting:

Source: http://thumbnails-visually.netdna-ssl.com

Niche Hacks tried retargeting pixel to send visitors back to the email opt-in page. They converted 51,54% of all retargeted visitors into new subscribers, even though the ads were basic, landing page was basic, the stock images were simple. Basically, everything was average. In spite of all of this, they converted quite a large number of people.

American Apparel used Perfect Audience platform on Facebook retargeting and saw a 400% increase in ROI, converted new customers and increased the revenue.

29. Develop a Lead Scoring System to Generate 50% More Sales at Half of Costs

Lead Scoring is a system where every company can rank prospects according to a scale based on the value they represent for that company. Lead scoring can be implemented in numerous marketing automated platforms. For example, you can to assign a value to social media interactions or specific website behavior. Based on the results, you can see which lead must be pushed down the funnel or contacted directly by a sales representative.

By integrating your CRM system with a lead scoring system, you can create advanced sales analytics reports that reveal which channels produce the most lucrative leads, and which bring mostly useless ones. While setting up lead scoring can be a complicated process, it’s definitely worth your time and effort. Once you have lead scoring analytics in place, your sales team can stop wasting their time on prospects who are not likely to convert and focus instead on those who are more likely to buy now.

Studies revealed that companies with well-put lead nurturing system see 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost. Lead Generation Marketing Effectiveness Study showed that 68% of successful marketers say lead scoring is the most effective method to improve the revenue contribution from lead nurturing.

30. Get More Social Exposure Through the Social Media Automation

As the name says it, social media automation means using tools to automate the social marketing process by making your account stay active without manual posting and monitoring. On January 2016, We are Social said that 31% of world’s population (7.395 billion) were active social media users. With such a large audience you can’t stay up all night to make sure you post at the current local time when there is a peak of your audience. The automation appears at a time of need to make things easier.

A unique approach to the automation process on social media platforms happened in 2012 when Barack Obama’s social campaign used the Dashboard.

It was an online registration platform where volunteers could make an account to support Obama’s candidacy. Everybody with an email address could register and see news, political and election events. Through that platform, Obama’s team collected data about the activity of the volunteers such as phone calls, donations, and tasks. Afterward, it was very easy for the team to target only the volunteers that were interested. The results of the automation process were remarkable not to mention that in the end, Obama became president. Great digital marketing technique, isn’t it?

31. Encourage Brand Lovers to Support You Against Trolls

Brand lovers are those who play the role of brand advocates and define the term evangelism marketing. They are highly satisfied customers and identify themselves with the brand. They are an asset because they promote the brand waiting for nothing in return. McKinsey and Company say 70% of purchase experiences are based on how the customer feels. It is bloody important to provide value and customer fulfillment.

Besides the fact that brand lovers will make sure to tell everyone your product is the best, they will support you against trolls. Nowadays, people on social platforms are very critical, and a single wrong comment or tweet can ruin you. Some haters and trolls can make your life a living hell on the social media. But, thank God for brand advocates!

OldNavy, an American retailer, got socially trolled. The company tweeted an upcoming sale with an interracial couple image, and then a group of racist people started posting negative tweets about the brand with hashtags #whitegenocide and #miscegenation. Before the team from Old Navy began to respond, some advocates of the brand started supporting the company by posting their own pictures with interracial couples they have in the family. In times of crisis, it is best to have your brand lovers that can make a powerful statement.

32. Built a Strong Customer Following & Get Free Endorsement

Millennials are a socially conscious generation. Embracing a cause might be just the answer you’re looking for if your brand addresses the Y generations. If they believe in a cause, they are willing to pay more and even a premium price. Knowing they give something for a better cause makes them feel valuable.

The shoe brand TOMS created a campaign based on a cause that brought endorsement from celebrities and famous people. They created a new concept ‘One Day without shoes’, meaning that for each purchased pair of shoes, another pair goes to a child in need. People from all over the Globe started a word of mouth campaign and even walk without shoes the whole day.

Charlize Theron became a strong supporter of the cause, alongside a lot of other celebrities, such as Lenny Kravitz, Chaske Spence and Julia Jones from Twilight, Dawn Olivieri from the Vampire Diaries, plus Cheryl Tiegs, Gillian Zinser, Jason Mraz, Tara Mercurio and Lacey Chabert, Thomas Jane, Matisyahu, Living Things and Tory Burch.

33. Gain Free Media to Get Everyone Talk About You on News and Get 5 Million Views on YouTube

Earned media or free media is a term that describes all the publicity that is not paid but rather gained through promotional efforts. Earned media happens when you make people talk about your brand no matter where it appears. Earned media happens after you make smart and creative ads or involved in successful real marketing actions, created impactful events and so on.

Avon used a digital marketing tactic that generated massive amounts of earned media. “Choose Beautiful” reached over 5 million of views on YouTube and the term received more than a million entries on Google. Hundreds of media outlets covered the video; numerous news websites claimed that “proves beauty is a choice”.

Source: http://delamanoconvenezuela.com

The ad received a lot of free media. Ad Age named it the best advertising campaign of the 21st century. People started to talk about it on Buzzfeed saying “Not everyone is beautiful and that is perfectly okay”. Some of them were encouraging the message “I find it odd that people disapprove of an ad whose whole purpose was to get women to all realize that they were beautiful”.

The psychologist Nancy Etcoff and self-esteem expert Dr. Tara Cousineau, together with Dove, created a toolkit named “Mindful Me” designed to help women manage thoughts and feelings in order to offer them the confidence to feel beautiful.

Send a powerful message to your audience and then expect to gain free media.

34. Create Fascinating Video Content to Attract Native Customers & Increase the Conversion Rate by 80%

Video content started to gain a lot of attention in the past few years. Almost 1 billion unique monthly visitors are on YouTube, 130 million on Vimeo, 100 million on Dailymotion, 45 million on LiveLeak and 42 million on Vine. That is a lot of viewers! Let’s not forget the social video part, 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook, and 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter. In 2013, Instagram introduced videos in addition to photos and more than 5 million videos were shared in the first 24 hours. Video consumption on Instagram has increased by 40% in 2016.

According to Hyperfine Media, 90% of users say that product videos are helping them in the decision process and almost 40% of online consumer trust video ads as you can see in next infographic.

Source: http://www.hyperfinemedia.co.uk

Most recent studies show that a video placed on the landing page can increase conversion rate by 80%. 96% of B2B companies use videos in their marketing campaign, and 73% say this improved their ROI.

35. Use Webinars to Gain 16,394 new leads

Organizing webinars can produce juicy content. They are great to deliver useful content to your readers and engage with them. Practically you can give a presentation to them and then discuss to see their main points. This is a great way to receive hot information, smart insights and see what topics you can debate on the blog in order to push the leads down the funnel.

Basically you need a microphone, a PC/laptop, and you’re set. Then use a service like AnyMeeting or GoToWebinar to connect with your viewers.

Webinars are such and effective digital marketing technique that could bring you 518,399 visitors and 16,394 leads from 77 webinars as KISSmetrics experienced. Neil Patel, founder at KISSmetrics, estimated that those webinars generated $1,638,000.

36. Start Running an Affiliate Program to Monetize Your Website & Get Extra $4500 Monthly Profit

There are upsides and downsides of an affiliate program in your digital strategy. The upside of this marketing technique is that it can generate high revenue and the downside is that it doesn’t work for all kinds of business.

For example, the popular web hosting service Bluehost gets new customers through its affiliates. Shopify uses an affiliate program that rewards its affiliates with $2,400 per sale.

A study from NichePie by Luqman Khan shows how you can generate a monthly profit of $4,500 in 4 months. See the statistics in the next screenshot.

Source: http://nichepie.com

He posted 8 articles and 1 infographic and received 14,206 unique visitors in 4 months.

37. Generate Product Order Increase by 9.8% Through Voucher and Reward Sites

In 2015, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) released the Online Performance Marketing study showing that 57% of product orders were through voucher and reward sites. Thomas Cook, one of the world’s leading leisure travel, developed a campaign based on the use of voucher codes to encourage users to buy online tickets. They wanted to keep the cost-per-order (CPO) lower than £65. As a result, the orders increased by 9.8% while the CPO decreased, thus keeping it under £65.

38. Map out the Affiliates’ Value to Increase the Long Haul Share by 19%

Thomas Cook Airlines has a long activity in the affiliate marketing area, and this led the company to always improve their marketing strategy. They learned that knowing the values of their affiliates is highly important. One of their affiliate campaigns had the next objectives:

minimize the average cost-per-sale (CPS);
increase the number of long-haul bookings (meaning the bookings for travelers that last a long period of time);

A way to do that was to map out the affiliate’s value. For that, all the bookings from 2014 were analyzed to see the path to conversion for each affiliate. This helped the company to discover the CPS and the contribution brought by each affiliate. The results were quite impressive: they kept the average CPS below 2% of revenue and reduced the cost-per-click by 73% while increasing the long haul share by 19%. On top of that, they sold thousands of seats from routes that weren’t performing well at all.

39. Reach Over 60% Social Engagement and Advocacy for the Brand with Respected Influencers Through an Affiliate Program

The affiliate agency Schaaf-PartnerCentric conducted an in-house study based on REACH (Relations, Exposure, Advocacy, Connection, Hype) program that provides customized outreach and guarantees placement on influencer websites for a boutique fashion retailer. The client has proposed to increase the exposure and advocacy within a short period of time with the help of influencers.

The campaign raised 63% social engagement in the first week after the big launch. Instagram saw the highest engagement, with 92% of the social interactions. Pinterest increased up to 6% social interactions.

40. Implement a Publisher Strategy to See a Monthly Revenue Growth Rate of 177%

Cost Plus World Market is a furniture store that implemented a publisher campaign through an affiliate program. The online retailer has been in the furniture market for almost 30 years now and has had more than 100 brands and thousands of products. They implemented a publisher program with the help of Schaaf-PartnerCentric team. Only after 90 days, the company’s results were highly visible. The monthly traffic increased by 100.7%, the monthly sales increased by 257%, and the monthly revenue grew by 177%.

Conclusion

Creating engaging content with relevant data and juicy tips will always be effective. Let’s face it – we crave creativity. Creativity in all forms: for making your business better, for getting everyone to talk about you, for inspiring others, for earning free advertising, for becoming an asset in your industry. If you follow some of the digital marketing tactics and techniques from the list we’ve created, you should see improvements shortly.

Create a list of the most important digital marketing tactics for you. Chose those that are easy for you to implement, and then take action. Embrace the fact that you need to make changes to deliver higher CTR, higher open rate, revenue growth, higher conversion rate, more unique daily viewers, more leads and so on.

Good luck! Maybe you will be the next case study for an effective digital marketing technique.

The post 40 Most Effective Digital Marketing Tactics and Techniques in 2024 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Content Marketing Services | The Complete List for a Successful Digital Strategy

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 10:04:46 +0000

As your online business grows, it becomes obvious how important content marketing is for your business. And even if you’re the one working on your business’ strategy or you hire an agency to help you out, one thing is clear: you need to know the full list of content marketing services your company needs.

Before saying that you don’t need to bother with this because you will hire a specialized digital agency to take care of all this, take this scenario: You get a great offer for a freelance or an agency, saying that they will take care of everything content related for you. That sounds appealing, yet, how can you hire them if you don’t know what they are supposed to deliver? Once you know what a complete list of content marketing services looks like, you’ll be able to set expectations, measure the efforts of the company you hired, and better understand the results.

So, here are the top content marketing services business owners should be aware of:

Content Marketing Strategy
Content Creation
Content Distribution
Constant Content Update
Content Analytics Reporting

Content Marketing Strategy

A good content marketing strategy should respond to the question why.

Why do you want to create content? For whom? Why will your content be different than what already exists?

Content marketing strategy means more than a content strategy. This last one is focused more on content creation, which we are going to talk about later.

First thing first, you need to clarify what do you want to achieve with content marketing: Increased traffic? More leads? Educate customers? Increase online presence?

If you’ve been watching the trends lately, you’ve seen articles piling up about content marketing and how it’s changing the SEO game forever.

It seems that Google is dead set on providing visitors with pages that have the most relevant content to their search and the trend of creating quality content to be more relevant to your target audience seems to become more of a need than a game played only by the cool kids.

More and more SEO professionals are boarding this train and it’s no longer to be believed a hype and a way to reinvent the so-called “dead SEO”.

Once you got the “why” question responded, you can go to the next step within any content marketing strategy, the keyword research. You don’t want to write just for the sake of writing, right?

You want to create good content that will reach your audience. But to do so, you need to know what topics to tackle and what keywords you can create content for. So, check out the next steps, which are foundation stones for all the other content marketing services.

Use Keyword Research Tools

Finding keywords shouldn’t be hard, yet it’s not a walk in the park either. In the modern SEO landscape, a keyword research tool is not just a passing trend but a must.

The Keyword Tool and Content Optimizer is an awesome helper on this matter. It’s like your best buddy you can call in the middle of the night to get you out of trouble. You can find new topic ideas and keywords related to the one you are targeting.

You’ll be able to make an idea of how difficult it is to rank for those particular keywords. It also shows you how relevant other keywords are compared to the current ones.

When you perform the market research, it’s best if the keywords you’re trying to rank for have a high search volume and a low difficulty. High search volume means the phrase is popular and many people are typing it in their browsers. Low content and links difficulty means that it is fairly easy to rank on that keyword without many links or highly competitive content. Combining these three metrics will result in profitable phrases that are easy to rank for.

Why any analysis should start with a keyword research?

Because if you don’t know the keywords you want to target, you can’t possibly know your true SEO competition.
This step will also determine what level of difficulty you wish to perform the analysis at.

For example, let’s assume that we’re performing online marketing in the shoe business and wish to open a web store. Depending on our budget, we can either start targeting very high search volume keywords or lower search volume keywords. Keep it realistic.

It either takes money or time to get there. In fact, it takes time in both cases given you’re working with organic search.

Without a strategy, content is just stuff, and the world has enough stuff.
	ARJUN BASU
	Award-nominated author

The trick with ranking is not to force it. When everybody’s trying to rank for the same keywords, there’s not much room for long-term development. This is where you can improve and find keywords semantically related to your niche, but not necessarily used by your competitors.

Check the Top-of-mind Keywords

Top-of-mind keywords are phrases that pop up in your head right away when you think about a niche. It’s like a brainstorming process. They are also frequently called seed keywords.

You can use the Google search engine to get real-time suggestions. Simply go on Google and start typing your keywords, and new ideas will appear right under the search bar. A highly competitive keyword would be, in this case, “buy shoes online”.

Phrases with the word “buy” in them are called buyer’s keywords or transactional keywords. They are usually the most competitive, as we know from the phrase itself that people are already set to buy the product. Ranking for those keywords practically guarantees that some sales will indeed be made. Where sales are guaranteed, big players come.

A lower competition keyword can be “best shoes for …”.

More niched phrases tend to be less competitive. One reason might be the fact that they are untapped, meaning that not many people actually discovered them. They are called longtail keywords. Review and comparison sites often try to rank here. People are still inclined to buy, but for he moment, they might just be looking to compare products or find ideas.

Look for Seed Keywords to the Keyword Explorer or Google Keyword Planner to Get New Ideas

Use the seed keywords you acquired from the previous step to generate a list of keywords.

You can go classic and use the Google Keyword Planner, though data is limited if you don’t have a paying PPC management account.

You can try multiple keywords here, export the data as CSV, sort the keywords, and add some to your list.

cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool can give you tons of keyword opportunities. It works like a content marketing agency that will work on most of your marketing plans, your pieces of content…you got the idea your whole marketing effort in general.

You can check out for questions people are looking for an answer on Google. You can filter the keywords ideas by volume, relevancy and so on, so you can find the best keyword opportunities for you.

Prioritize the Keywords You Want to Rank For

Now comes the more difficult part.

For which of those keywords can you realistically rank in top Google search?

After you’ve determined a list of keywords you’ll go after, you have to take a look at two things:

Content Performance and Domain Performance.

You can use the Ranking Analysis section of the Content Optimizer Tool.

Let’s take as example the keyword this article is talking about: content marketing services.

You can easily see a lot of important metrics, just one click away:

how many links would this article need to be competitive?
what is the monthly search for this keyword and how’s the searching trend for it?
who is ranking in top 10 and how do their content looks like?
how old/fresh is the content already ranking?
what focus keywords did my competitor use within their content?

While the Content Performance is something that we have control over and will improve in a future step, backlinks aren’t something we have that much control over.

So, you want to see websites with as few referring domains as possible compared to your site (which you can check with the Site Explorer).

Of course, if you see a lower content score and/or word count, those are also good indicators that it will be easier to create content for or improve existing content.

Select Top Keywords Based on Relevancy and Search Volume

For the purpose of this analysis example, we’ll just stick to these keywords: “buy shoes online” and “best shoes for”. One is broader and the other is narrower, but both are attractive in terms of relevance and search volume. Let’s assume that we start from the bottom (narrower keywords), but leave room for expansion in the future (broader keywords).

From these two keywords, we can observe that the broader ones tend to return root domains as results, while narrower ones return pages from websites. This is a good indication of what our homepage should be targeting, and what we should target with pages.

The final list should include keywords around your general niche and some current or possible (future) sub-niches. You can group them into separate sheets. This way you’ll be able to select top competitors from multiple sub-niches easier. The more keywords you’re willing to analyze, the better you’ll understand what you’re dealing with in the long run.

You can use the Google Search Console to easily determine the keyword you’re already ranking for. (the below screenshot is taken in June 2020).

Can you improve this existing content? Or should you target new keywords? These are questions you should ask yourself when putting together your SEO content marketing strategy.

Content Creation

No worries, comparing to the previous section, content creation will feel like a breeze among the content marketing services list.

First, consider that it’s always best to consider landing page optimization for a single main keyword and a single search intent per page.

You can sometimes combine very similar keywords, but try as much as possible to stick to one main keyword and one search intent. Feel free to find out more about search intent here.

A great way to do this is to write content about questions that are very often asked in your industry, or case studies.

For example, this article about meta descriptions affect SEO or not has been linked to multiple times by other SEO blogs trying to make a quick point without getting into too much detail.

Write content that stands out and is share worthy.

While doing so, also make sure to:

Have great Titles, Headlines and Descriptions.
Optimize your titles with keywords for SEO, but also keep them catchy for Social Media.
Use the Open Graph property to set different titles for SEO and Social Media.

Longform content tends to perform better in organic search results. Yet, look at what type of content your competitor have. Is it long, short? What type of content is Google serving within its first page for the type of content you want to rank?

You keep on hearing: write content having readers, but also SEO in mind. But what does this really mean?

We can spend a lot of time on debating that, or we can use a tool that will help us write that exact type of content. As time is so precious these days, I’ll choose the second option.

Open the Content Assistant section from the cognitiveSEO’s content optimizer and hit Start Optimizing.

Once you do so, you’ll get everything you need there:

the keywords you should use in your content
the content score you should reach
keywords ideas to use in your content
the focus keywords that might help your content with ranking
the keywords you shouldn’t use that much to avoid stuffing

Basically, you’ll get all the resources you need to write content that is relevant for your users first of all, but also SEO oriented.

The idea is to think of the recommended keywords as subtopics or areas of interest that you should cover in your content.

When people search for something, you already know they are interested in it. That’s why SEM has such a high conversion rate and people spend time reading in-depth articles.

Regardless of the tools you’d be using, keep in mind that the best tool you have at your disposal is your own knowledge.

You should keep in mind that writing naturally is the best way to go.

I know: writing original content regularly might not be easy. Moreover optimized content. Even if you’re a marketing expert that wants to improve brand awareness, an account manager or a search engine optimization, writing with SEO in mind is never easy. There are no perfect marketing guides that will drive results in no time. And copywriting implies extra marketing costs, video content creation costs, maybe website design, content promotion and so on. Yet, when creating your monthly reporting, you’ll check the return on investment and you’ll see that those marketing efforts did pay off. That monthly content and those business goals you struggle with, those SEO audits, they all bring great results.

Content Distribution

The journey shouldn’t stop when the article goes live. On the contrary, you should carry on with the process of boosting your content. You need to understand that content distribution isn’t a single technique or a one-time thing. It incorporates an umbrella of multiple unique techniques you need to follow in order to get better results.

We all had that moment when we gave our soul into a post and made it so shiny, with thorough research, relevant visuals but nobody read it.
And then you start wondering what went wrong. What in the name of God happened? Or why did it happen to you? And the questions could go on.

But there is something that you missed. And that “something” could be content distribution and amplification.

Content distribution is a powerful method to reach a wider audience.

Amplifying your content should be mandatory if you want people to know about it and increase your website traffic.

You can look at the distribution process as a way of strengthening the signals of your post. And here are some channels to do so:

Link Building

If, in the past, the traditional ways of building links meant to meaninglessly spread out all over the internet, without thinking of relevance and essence, through the help of web directories, blogrolls, keyword stuffing and others, now we need to think of our target audience.

Things have changed now, but links are still an important ranking signal and they are very helpful when trying to rank high in the search engines.

It’s a harsh reality but link generating through content marketing will surely become harder and harder.

Yet, harder doesn’t mean impossible. Use blog posts, videos, infographics, eBooks and so on. Create resources that are valuable and that will earn links.

Also, don’t forget about internal linking.

If you’re looking for an SEO move that can quickly boost the position of your website, then internal linking is the move you want to make.

A proper internal linking strategy can really boost your ranking power because it does two things:

#1: It helps search engines understand the structure of your website, how different pages interact with one another and which pages are truly important withing the structure of your website.

#2: It helps users navigate the website and it keeps users on the website by providing relevant content through links that can be followed. This ultimately sends search engines another signal that your website is great, because it provides a good user experience.

If you’re interested in some valuable link building lessons, wrote from experience, check out this article.

Social Media

I know it and you know it. The internet has become so fed up with marketing strategies, that people become immune to content in its mediocre form.

Influencers from all marketing channels are no longer impressed so easily, and in order to put your brand “in their mouth” you need to do some wheel greasing.

So that’s why super important to create content that it’s worth sharing; content that “has something to say”, that brings added value.

Invest in social media marketing as much as you can. Get dedicated account managers or marketing manager if possible. There are many social content marketing companies that are offering good services, just make sure to get the right one to grow your business.

There a lot of tips and tricks on how to perform better on social media. You can consult blogs like BrandMentions‘ one for this.

Promote your content as much as possible but on the right social media channels for your niche.

Use paid media and social media advertising (like Twitter or Facebook advertising) if needed. Make use of partner programs, press releases, custom content, go for influencer marketing if needed.
Yet, it is highly important to make yourself visible on social media. Even if this implies some graphic design activities or video production to steal your potential customers’ attention. Here’s a video production tool you can check it out.

Social media management is as important as writing optimized pieces of content when it comes to building your brand.

Community & Relations

When I think of content marketing, a line from the movie Jerry Maguire comes to mind – Help me, help you!

We’ve seen common outreach methods of content marketing like guest blogging being abused in the past, because people misunderstood the idea behind it.

Generating links through content marketing is not about trying to beg for them, it’s about creating relationships with other businesses and people that reside in the online medium.

You can no longer strive for the number one spot in Google’s eyes if you can’t create new pals that are willing to talk about you and share your content or vice versa.

“Link begging” your way out of a situation will do you more harm than good so we don’t recommend that.

There’s one way out of it and that’s creating content that others might find interesting enough to share it with their audience.
Organic Links are a “hard to get” commodity these days and you’ll be happy to find and keep connections with influencers that like and distribute the content that you create.

In order to help yourself, you need to attend to the needs and interests of others first!

When you can’t create engaging content on your side of the street, try going to the place where the discussion is currently happening.

It may sound like a cheesy tactic but I assure you it’s not a laughing matter. You may include comments in your content marketing strategy as you can generate links and help the community at the same time, in real time.

Comments are a great way to:

create meaningful content
connect and engage with your target audience
create links pointing to your site in a natural manner.

Comments can prove to be a blade with two edges and you need to treat it with care.

Try and find the most important forums in your niche and where the discussions are taking place.

Look at what people are asking and what questions they have.

As long as you stay on topic and your comments are not only meant for link building, then you won’t have nothing to worry about.

Above are just a few content distribution ideas. For even more ideas for amplification, check out this article.

Constant Content Update

What if I were to tell you there’s another way, besides tapping into that creative juice barrel?

Nobody expects you to create original and engaging content all the time.

You just can’t create quality content on an assembly line and everybody knows that, and no, you shouldn’t resort to gimmick techniques to win your target audience’s attention.

What you can do is to recycle outdated content that may still be of interest to your target audience.

Some content has been geniously created in the past and widely distributed, but that doesn’t mean you cannot use that already developed interest to your advantage.

Those infographics that were widely distributed and shared, which created a lot of discussions over the internet can be refurbished using the same layout and the same structure but with fresher and more relevant data.

You can also improve old content by adding more information and thus more value for the viewer.

While this might be appealing for those looking for a shortcut method of generating content, it should be part of a balanced diet.

It seems easily exploitable, but if done improperly, you might end up feeding your site with low quality content.

We’ve done an interested experiment some time ago: We’ve updated 40 blog posts with fresh, updated information.

The result? 70% SEO visibility increase. So, it could be a tactic that could work for you to. You can check out the case study here.

Content Analytics Reporting

You know the saying. No job is done until the paperwork is done.

In our case, not literally paper, but reporting the results. This is an equally important part of the content marketing services list.

So, you’ve created a content marketing strategy; you’ve written awesome content or updated the existing one, you’ve highly distributed.

Now, what’s to do?

Check out the result!

But what should you check?

Measuring content marketing and SEO efforts is often easier said than done.

Yet, here are some metrics you should definitely look at.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic refers to website visits that originated from search engine results and not through ads. Organic search traffic is a highly effective indicator of overall success. When a website’s content includes keywords that frequently match what users are searching for, that website is likely to appear in a larger number of search engine results pages (SERPs) than competing websites.

Using Google Analytics, open the Acquisition menu. From there, select All Traffic, then select Channels.

You’ll now be presented with a view of a website’s sources of traffic, which are sorted by channel.
Select the Organic Search channel for a useful report that displays a site’s organic traffic stats.

This report is a versatile one. It gives SEO practitioners the ability to uncover critical information such as:

Which landing pages are the most effective at attracting traffic
Which keywords are delivering the highest amounts of traffic
Which of the search engines are directing the highest amount of organic traffic to a website
What pages are frequently the biggest exit pages (or the last page a visitor views before leaving the website)
And many other vital stats

Keyword Rankings

Keyword Ranking is how well or how poorly your content ranks in SERPs for a given search term.

Google analytics isn’t as helpful as some SEO practitioners would like it to be as far as tracking keyword rankings.
Its keyword tab (within the campaign tab) often displays the phrase “not provided.”

Instead of Google analytics, consider the rank tracker provided by cognitiveSEO.
One of its advantages is that it allows you to track keywords at a universal level as well as at a local level. It also allows you to analyze the keyword performance of competitors.

So, add your keywords you created content for within the Rank Tracker and constantly check out the evolution.

Social Shares

Social shares can be defined simply as the sharing of your content by social media users.
While it’s generally thought that Google does not take social signals and shares into consideration when ranking SERP results, social shares are still very important to your SEO efforts.

Tracking your social shares is beneficial because of the important impact social media plays in content marketing strategies.

As more people share your content with their followers, the higher the chances that more people will view it and ultimately migrate over to your website.
More visits to your website means a boost in organic search ranking.

Backlink Volume

Useful for measuring the authority and popularity of your website, backlinks (often referred to as inbound links) are links to your website that originate from someone else’s website.
Backlinks to your site can also originate from other pages on your own site.

Measuring this performance indicator will go a long way in helping you rank higher.

By tracking it, you’ll always know where you stand with what some in the SEO industry view as the most important ranking factor used by Google.

When you know whether you’re succeeding with your backlinks, you know how much you need to improve by.

Using Google Analytics, open the Acquisition menu. From there, select All Traffic, then select Referrals.

You can now look at your referral traffic, which is Google’s way of saying “backlinks.”

Also, for a comprehensive backlink analysis tool, cognitiveSEO aggregates backlink data from trusted link databases and analyzes the links on demand for each of their clients.

I know, there are a lot of information from the digital marketing area to deal with.

But even if you’re one the one who’ll be implementing all the content marketing services above, even if you’re hiring marketing agencys, it’s important to know what’s all about.

If you or your marketing team are out of breath after reading this post (or worse yet, discouraged,) don’t be overwhelmed!
Take heart, force a smile, and accept the fact that victory never comes easy. I know, lots of things are involved: technical SEO, marketing budget, web design, content calendars or advertising costs. But it does pay off in the attempt of building brand that is strong and competitive.

Success and competitiveness are for those who are willing to work harder and get their hands dirtier.

The bottom line here is that you can do this, and it will be worth it.

The post Content Marketing Services | The Complete List for a Successful Digital Strategy appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Why Your Pages Aren’t Indexed by Google – Confirmed Indexing Issues

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 07:54:25 +0000

Google is facing serious indexation issues these days, affecting countless businesses all over the world. Despite the official announcements that the indexation issues have been fixed, the problems seem to persist.

With great power comes great responsibility. Therefore, we can only hope these issues will be solved as fast as possible for all webmasters and company owners that are already facing a difficult year for their businesses.

Google is undoubtedly one of the largest and clearest monopolies in the world. Bing, its closest search competitor, has just 2 percent of the market — hardly a significant threat to Google’s 90 percent. So, what happens when Google’s SERP is not working accordingly?

Let’s see!

Google Indexing Problem – Confirmed on October 1, 2020

It all started at the end of September when a number of complaints related to pages being dropped from Google’s search index appeared. Lots of people started reporting index coverage issues and crawl errors on forums, Facebook groups, etc..

Twitter was the most popular channel for this type of issues, as usual, as it’s the only place where there is a chance that a Google representative might actually respond to the issue.

The same happened in this case, with the mention that this time, Google’s representative John Mueller wasn’t aware of the issue, as stated in the screenshot below.

Of course, this leaves a lot of room for speculations on this matter, yet we prefer to leave those thoughts on you and present you only the facts for now.

Lots of other discussions were generated on this matter all over the places, Search Console Help and Black Hat World to mention just a few. Below you can get an idea of the vibe that was on Twitter regarding this matter.

On October 1st, 24 hours later, Google officially announced that some indexing issues do exist and they are working on solving them.

We are currently working to resolve two separate indexing issues that have impacted some URLs. One is with mobile-indexing. The other is with canonicalization, how we detect and handle duplicate content. In either case, pages might not be indexed….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 1, 2020

For the following three weeks, they kept on communicating updates on the problems and how they were fixing them. The most recent and important updates on this matter are the following:

October 9: the mobile indexing was effectively resolved yesterday, with about 99% of the URLs restored.

October 20: the canonical issue was effectively resolved last Wednesday (Oct. 14), with about 99% of the URLs restored. We expect the remaining edge cases will be restored within a week or two.

Meanwhile, Google communication revolved around this type of messages:

There’s no action to take with these issues on the part of site owners.
We apologize for the issues here and are working rapidly to resolve them.
We’ll update this thread as each is corrected.
It may take days to fully resolve both these issues completely, but we have restored many URLs already and are working quickly to process more.

All good in the hood, you might be tempted to say. Google had a bug, they fixed it three weeks after.

Just that things are not exactly like that. Beside the fact that three weeks of not indexing new content or de-indexing old one is a very big amount of time in Internet days measure, the problem is still on, as several webmasters reported.

We have two examples of our own that confirm the issue is still on. Not sure if you know, but the same hard-working team that developed cognitiveSEO, crafted the brand monitoring tool BrandMentions.com as well. Both examples will be from this website.

The first one is a really cool research on best time to post on Instagram (I might be subjective here, but you can check it out to see for yourself).

It doesn’t seem that the URL has crawl issue, yet, it is not indexed by Google. It is a unique content piece, with no special indications (it doesn’t have noindex directive).

The article was published on the BrandMentions’ blog on October 13. I don’t believe it was a “Tuesday, the 13th” bad luck. Most likely, Google didn’t manage to fix the issues for 99% of the URLs as they were claiming. And yes, there might be the chance that the article is within that 1% of not-fixed URLs. But this is not the only example.

The second example is a page that presents info on brand tracking, also belonging to brandmentions.com. This time, the page seems to be crawled (on the same unlucky Tuesday, 13) but today, 20th of October, is nowhere to be found within the SERP.

Of course, we hope that this will change and by the time you’re reading this article the page will be indexed and ranking pretty well. Yet, for the moment, the Google Indexing issue seems to be persisting.

What Is the Google Canonicalization Issue

Google stated in a Tweet from October 2nd that “ […] If the canonical issue is involved, URL Inspector may show the URL as a duplicate & the Google-selected canonical will be different from it. The issue with canonicals impacted roughly about 0.02% of our index, beginning around Sept. 20 until late yesterday around 4:30pm PT. We’ve since restored about 10% of those URLs and keep reprocessing more.”

What does this exactly mean?

It’s somehow a duplicate content issue. Let’s say that you’d publish a fresh article and soon after a scraper copies your entire article and publishes it just the same.

The canonical tag added on your site would tell Google that your article is the original one and that it is the one that should be ranked first. You can basically tell Google “Instead of this page, show this page.” So, if you have page B ranking on some keyword, you can basically tell Google to show page A instead.

Yet, once the canonicalization issue appeared, Google would not show the original content, but the syndicated one (the one that it’s a copy of the original one).

Canonical tags are Google’s recommendation for several situations, as you can see on their page or on the image below.

There are billions of web pages, and Google has the job of ranking them. Ideally, all websites should have unique pages. Each and every page should contain original content. In reality, however, duplicate pages are to be found more often than you’d think.

So, Google crawls your website and finds 3 pages trying to rank for the exact same keyword. Not only that Google has to pick between billions of different websites, it now also has to choose between duplicate pages on the same website. That seems tough indeed, so that’s why the canonical tag is there, to tell Google what is the original piece that should be ranked.

And when an issue of this size appears, you remember how important it is for the search engine to do their job correctly, but also for the webmasters to have everything set up correctly.
Yes, it seems that even with even if you have everything alright on your side, issues can still appear.

At the time you are reading this post, this type of issues shouldn’t appear anymore as Google stated that they have been fixed. Yet, given the current situation and the fact that webmasters are still complaining about it, let’s hope for the best and expect the worst.

What Is the Google Mobile Indexing Issue

The Mobile indexing issue caused new web pages to take a very long time to get indexed and appear in Google’s index. Some of the new published content is still not indexed.

Even the big sites where affected by these issues. Below you can see some screenshots made by Ewdison Then. He reported this issue on September 29, as he found it really strange that all these sites posting news every couple of minutes have nothing indexed from the past hour.

Google stated that “if a previously indexed page has gone, it might be the mobile-indexing issue, where we’re failing to select any page at all to index.”

As you could see in the screenshots above, lots of webmasters complained that they simply vanished from the index. As you can see in the screenshot below, Google stated that the issue impacted just a few websites (roughly 0.2%).

This may sound like a small number but remember that Google’s index is huge and 0.2% of it is still a big number. The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. Therefore, 0.2% of all this enormous amount of data doesn’t feel that small of a percentage anymore.

The mobile indexing issue was the first to be fixed according to Google, with almost two weeks before the canonicalization one. Yet, hopefully this issue won’t appear anymore in the future as this is impacting the search and people’s businesses big time.

Google faced indexing issue in the past as well. Last year, for instance, a similar problem happened, with people facing indexing issues from all domains and countries. Let’s hope that this time the fix is for good and these types of issues won’t appear anymore.

We’re aware of indexing issues that impacted some sites beginning on Friday. We believe the issues are mostly resolved and don’t require any special efforts on the part of site owners. We’ll provide another update when the issues are considered fully resolved.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 7, 2019

How Does Google Indexation Issue Affect Your Business

The short answer to this would be: BIG TIME.

Home pages, articles, product pages were de-indexed all of sudden. Imagine your business’s site not appearing in searches anymore, at all.
The errors in Google search will cause massive drop in organic traffic, your content marketing strategy will not be useful anymore

It’s already a difficult year, and the indexing issue is making business lose even more.

It’s easy to forget that, at the end of the day, Google is just a private business, like any other. One that has a worldwide monopoly on search engines, with a staggering 92.27% market share that we all depend on, and that has managed to insert its namesake as a common word in the dictionary. But a private company, nonetheless. So, while we would all like to understand what has and is happening and move on with our virtual lives, it might not be as easy as that.

Yet, with great power comes great responsibility. Or at least, it should.

Whom should the businesses losing their income for over two weeks blame? Yes, bugs happen all the time and all apps, be them big or small have them. And yes, we tend to misuse the Google engine as a “reality interface”. But Google has their reponsibilites as well.

For instance, Google is influencing economy by the way ads are ranked right now: the more a company pays, the more often the add will be visible. Google answers that result from queries are also already ranked when searches are conducted. And Google is responsible (on a certain percentage, of course) for a company’s value. Google is of course doing this already for ads, but it does that for the whole SERP already.

A sudden disappearance, or more generally a dramatic and sudden change event is an often-used narrative device in much of literature and film. It is sometimes left unexplained, but always manages to elicit a strong emotion. Such is the mass disappearance of 2% of the world’s population in TV series “The Leftovers”, or the sudden stop of any death for an entire country in Jose Saramago’s “Death with Interruptions” novel.

In real life, such events are usually much smaller and less dramatic in scale, but they are not without consequence.

We will probably never know the real number of impacted businesses.

What we do know is that an issue of this amplitude translates in very stressful situations for business owners and their employees, for companies’ general well-being and profit, in a year that is already difficult enough for so many.

Can You Do Anything in This Situation?

The short answer is no. We just need to wait and hope for things to get back to normal, a phrase we are sure you’ve heard way too many times lately.

On September 30th, Google announced it had suspended the request indexing feature temporarily from their webmaster tool.

There were no detailed explanations as to why, just a vague mention of infrastructure changes.

As days went by, company officials insisted that things were fine, while complaints around Google indexing issues persisted as more and more businesses seemed to be impacted.

Google is so ubiquitous nowadays that most of the time we do not even think of it as a private company. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary added “to google” as a transitive verb back in 2006. It is so common that it is just… there. And with an over 90% market share, this way of thinking is no surprise.

The problem with all of this is that we tend to think of common nouns as more trustworthy, for some reason. Like Google were no longer a company, but some public utility service, whose only intention is to help its users, rather than trying to balance that and make a profit as a market-leading private company.

And companies sometimes will be more interested in profit than in other things, like fairness or truth. Which is not to say that Google has purposefully lied in the past or did not put enough effort in fixing their bugs. But it has, at times, told it in ways that were profitable: not telling the whole truth about the impact of links from press releases, not disclosing anything about the Hummingbird algorithm update except long after its effects had already taken place, or not mentioning the current submit URLs and indexation bugs from the very beginning.

Even if all of this is true, though, it is what companies tend to do. They keep a little to themselves, they over or undersell, as it fits their purpose. But due to Google’s quasi-monopoly, they are also able to bend the playing field, not just accuracy or truth. Of course, the search engine giant is under no obligation to play nice. As a private company, they do not need to tell anyone how they update their algorithms, when they have bugs, what is the intended impact of their actions or what their strategy is. And yet there is a whole industry that is trying to figure out these exact things.

With the hope that this article will be indexed and you’ll get to find it easily within the SERP, we’re looking forward for your opinion on it.

The post Why Your Pages Aren’t Indexed by Google – Confirmed Indexing Issues appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

How a Digital Marketer Ranked in Google Featured Snippet in Less Than 48 Hours

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 08:40:58 +0000

This is a TRUE SUCCESS story from Rafael Alencar, a Brazilian digital marketer and founder of Imigrar, written and documented by himself, at his initiative.

After using the Content Assistant Tool, in less than 48 hours my post went from 14-16 place in search results straight within the featured snippet.

Background

I have good quality content on my site – Imigração para o Canadá e Quebec. For instance, my bounce rate so far this year is 3.30%. All 2019 my bounce rate was 14%, but there’s was still room for improvement. Below you can see a print screen from my Google Analytics account with the results for my website performance.

It doesn’t matter if the content is good, if the targeted audience doesn’t come to my website.

If they don’t know about the existence of my amazing website and its content… what’s the point?

After reading some of my main competitors’ content I was asking myself: how the hell Google ranks this above my piece? Seriously! And then I realized it must have something else I was missing. And we are of course talking about SEO.

I know that SEO is very important and can help any website grow if the principles are correct. The sad part of the story is that I never paid too much attention. So knowing I was behind my foes, I started to sign up for a lot of famous SEO’s websites. (Neil Patel, SemRush, Moz, etc).

They were helpful to give me some advice but to be honest it was too general and vague. I wanted help to move my awesome content to the very top! I have no idea how I came across cognitiveSEO. With all due respect, I’ve never heard about them.

I’ve had tested so many tools that I decided to try this one too. You know what they say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before finding your prince.

The Content Optimization Process

When I found cognitiveSEO and looked on the website, I saw a bunch of useful tools, but not what I was looking for, at my first sight (real help to move my content higher in Google). But, that was a mistake which I found out afterward.

I closed the cognitiveSEO’s website and went to look for more options. Then I got an email from the team and I saw a mention about the Keyword Tool & Content Assistant. And that’s how I started using the tool.

I already had in mind the keyword I want to rank for (Nova Scotia immigration – the Portuguese version ) and I already had some content, so my main purpose was to improve that content. And it was way easier than expected.

Firstly, I imported the URL of my existing content. A few seconds later I got a lot of recommendations and MOST IMPORTANT for me, keywords suggestions.

This was the tool that I was looking for to bring my content higher on the Google search results page.

The Content Optimizer Tool told me which keywords I have to use more, those I must include, topics suggestions and more.

I will be 100% honest: At first, I was completely skeptical. Some keywords although had some connection to the content it was very weird to use it.

But I decided to go ahead. So, I used almost all the keywords recommended by cognitiveSEO. Even some that I would never think about it. I managed to bring the Content Performance score to 97.

Right after I finished all the changes, the tool showed me on a yellow box: “This content can rank in the top 10 Google results“. I literally said to myself: “Oh yeah! Really?”. Come on! This tool knows nothing about Brazil, immigration to Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada (trending right now among Brazilians). And it’s in English! I’m writing in Portuguese.

I knew it would help me in some way. But rank in top 10? No way… I was not prepared for what was coming …

The Results After Using cognitiveSEO’s Content Assistant

Before using the cognitiveSEO tool, my content was ranking in position 14-16 on the search engines for my targeted keyword – imigração nova scotia.

After all the changes using the Optimize Content Tool in less than 48 hours my post went from 14-16 place in search results for that keyword to the VERY FIRST ONE!

Not only that but now my website ranks in Google Answer Box, on position zero in search results. We all know how hard is to win the Answer box. Google is literally telling people: Don’t look any further, it’s here you are going to find all your answers.

You can see that I’m ranking higher than the official website of the Nova Scotia Government. You can take a look at the screenshot below with the featured snippet and find my website in Google Featured Snippet. Their Domain authority rate is 60% higher than mine. But the Content Optimizer Tool just made sure that Google knows my content is better.

I was so amazed that I did two things:

First, I searched for that keyword in three different computers making sure to use different networks! I couldn’t believe my eyes.
And second, I took the initiative to contact cognitiveSEO and tell them about my results!

I will never publish another post before getting the Optimize Content Tool’s help!

Thanks, cognitiveSEO team. You really provided what I was looking for in my content strategy!

I hope these kinds of examples can help you understand how to use cognitiveSEO Content Optimizer Tool, how it can help you and see third-party, no-strings-attached results.

Disclosure

This is not a paid post and cognitiveSEO didn’t make any kind of agreement with the author. This is Rafael Alencar’s success story, written and documented by himself. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.

The post How a Digital Marketer Ranked in Google Featured Snippet in Less Than 48 Hours appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

How to Win the Google Answer Box → The Ultimate Guide

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 09:50:38 +0000

Ranking number one on Google is great. But ranking in a Google answer box, on position zero, is even better. Google answer boxes might be a blessing for both users (they get the desired info instantly) and webmasters (their website is in the foreground, above the top ranking websites).

But what steps do you need to take to make sure you get featured in Google’s rich answer box? Everything you need to know about answer boxes, from what they are to how to win them, is thoroughly detailed below in a step by step guide.

What Is a Google Answer Box?
Why Are Google Answer Boxes Important?
Google Answer Box Takeaways – TL;DR
How Does the Google Answer Box Work?
What Types of Google Answer Boxes Exist?
How to Optimize for Google Answer Box?
How to Check Your Google Answer Box Rankings
Google Answer Box Strategy & Statistics – A Research on 10k Keywords
Can I Advertise in the Google Answers Box?
Can Any Site Appear in Google’s Direct Answer Box?
Does Google Answer All Questions?
How Do You Delete an Answer Box?
Is Google Ever Wrong? Google Answer Box Failures
Does a Google Answer Box API Exist?

Important Google Answer Box Updates

Google keeps on updating its algorithm and search results, and answer boxes make no exception. At the beginning of May 2020, a big answer box update has come along: double Google answer boxes. These fat-rich snippets show not one, but two direct answers within the answer box, from two different sites.

As you can see in the screenshot below, when searching for “best digital marketing tactics,” Google returned a big featured snippet who covers almost entirely the first page of results.

This means that now it’s more important than ever to appear not only on top Google rankings but within the answer box. You will get great coverage as Google will push your result to the user, massively increasing your click-through rate. Also, keep in mind that these double answer boxes are covering a huge part of the SERP, leaving little room for other top-ranking sites.

Like any other update, this one has a lot of pros and cons, yet, what is important to focus on now is how to get your site on the Google Answer Box.

This update comes after another one that happened at the beginning of 2020, on January 22, when Google representatives announced that pages with answer boxes wouldn’t appear twice on page one.

This means that Google is no longer allowing sites to enjoy the benefits of “double-dipping” in the SERPs, which until the beginning of the year had allowed webpages that appeared in featured snippets to have additional listings on the first page of Google.

If a web page listing is elevated into the featured snippet position, we no longer repeat the listing in the search results. This declutters the results & helps users locate relevant information more easily. Featured snippets count as one of the ten web page listings we show.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 22, 2020

As mentioned above, these updates might interfere with your current SEO strategies, yet, keep on reading this article so you can better understand what answer boxes are, what type of content does Google want to rank there and how you can dominate the SERP by winning those featured snippets.

What Is a Google Answer Box?

Google’s answer box is a type of result that is usually displayed at the top of the search engine results page.

You may have noticed that when you use Google to search for a certain answer to a question, a lot of times you actually get some sort of answer and not just a series of search results.

Google Answers Boxes are a SERP feature powered by the knowledge graph or scraped from different sites that provide fit answers to a specific query. Other terms used for Google’s rich answer box are position zero, direct answers, instant or quick answers or featured snippets.

For instance, if you’ve just recently made a terrible decision about changing your go-to barber’s shop and would like to find out how soon the damage will fade away, you might ask Google “how fast does hair grow”, to which the famed oracle of wisdom will give an actual answer, in what we will refer to as an answer box. Of course, it hasn’t come up with the answer on its own, but knowing what to look for is pretty cool in itself.

Answer boxes can contain text, graphs, maps, images or even videos.

So it’s not just showing up in the results, it’s showing up in the answer box, which has a different status in the mind of the searcher. Being there can get a lot of SERP “landscape”, especially if you own some important keywords in your niche.

Thanks to the Google Hummingbird algorithm from 2013 and the Google BERT update from 2019, Google is a lot savvier when it comes to interpreting things in context. And if it doesn’t have enough information to figure out what you actually want, like when we’re simply searching for “hummingbird”, it displays the most likely result, with an answer box containing text and images, but also a feedback option, right below the answer one, just in case you were thinking about something else. This is all pretty smart and very much related to the knowledge graph concept Google has been toying around with for a while.

Why Are Google Answer Boxes Important?

Being on the Google’s answer box will do you a big favor, making you appear on Google’s first page in the limelight.

From an SEO perspective, being listed within Google’s rich answer boxes will offer you a lot of SERP “landscape”. If you “own” answer boxes on the important keywords in your niche, you will most likely dominate your business field, from an SEO point of view.

Being number one in searches no longer means the best position you can have.
Sure, being number 1 in the results for a search is still good. Yet, in a time where the number of ads on page have increased, to make sure your site is the one Google gets the answer for its answer box is very beneficial for you. So no need to highlight the strong connection between Google answer box and SEO.

You’ve probably got it: the SERP landscape has changed and having the chances of getting listed within an answer box can get you serious traffic to your site.

While knowing the SEO fact that only 2 of the top 10 most popular sites on the web are content sites, there is no need to advocate why ranking on position zero is more important than ever.

Google Answer Box Takeaways – TL;DR

Google’s answer box is a type of result that is usually displayed at the top of the search engine results page.
Being on the Google’s answer box will do you a big favor, making you appear on Google’s first page not once, but twice.
The content in an answer box does not necessarily come from the first result on the page, but from the result which Google considers that it answers the question best.
Google answer boxes are a certain type of rich answers and can come in many shapes and sizes.
Three tactics that will help you rank on position zero & perform Google answer box optimization: identify keywords that Google may provide answers for, segment keywords based on current answer box relevancy and write website content optimized for the Google answer box
The easiest and fastest way to check if you’re ranking in an answer box is to go straight to your Google Search Console.
According to Google, you cannot advertise on answer boxes as their purpose is informational and not commercial.
Any site can appear in Google’s answer box if it offers a fit answer for the query and if it’s considered to be a topical authority in the field.
The percentage of search results with answer boxes out of the total number of search results is fairly small.
You can opt out of Google’s special boxes by preventing snippets on your page.
While the algorithm is quite impressive, it’s not 100% reliable yet.

How Does the Google Answer Box Work?

Google actually “gets” you. It knows “what you’re saying’”.

The content in an answer box does not necessarily come from the first result on the page, but from the result which Google considers that it answers the question best.

But how does Google decide which answer deserves to be listed within the direct answers?

Here comes the technical SEO part: according to some patents from Google, it assumes that one element of the search query will be an entity, and the other will be a certain attribute of the said entity.

For instance, if I were to search “Ukraine’s GDP”, “Ukraine” would be my entity and “GDP” would be the attribute. This is what the algorithm would identify as a “E’s A” type of query . It works similarly with a series of other phrasings, such as “what is the A of E”, “who is the A of E” (e.g.: “who is the husband of angelina jolie”) , “the A of E” or “who is the E’s A”.

Google has a database of entities with their potential looked for attributes. This means that you won’t find an answer for every question, but you should find answers for the most popular questions.

Similar patents are in place to further searches about specific facts. Google has patents for extracting entities from queries (US80058524 B2) , returning factual answers in response to queries (US8655866 B1) or for retrieval of information items (US8719244 B1). And although they look hard to digest, we will try to simplify the process and explain them.

The key elements in these are selecting the representative phrase/search fragment to then match with information and determining whether a certain fragment of the search query is, in fact, a fact query. Google then identifies potential results and ranks them according to an unknown scoring system, presenting to you the highest scoring results in the answer box.

So, when we asked the classical question “why is the sky blue”, we got an answer not from Wikipedia, as one might expect, but from a page on the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Riverside website (sometimes, an answer from NASA Space Place is also listed within Google’s instant answers).

At least one of the things that this site did well to get the highest score was having the question in the title of an article and the answer in the very first paragraph. Belonging to a .edu domain probably helped as well.

While researching this Google feature, an interesting thing caught our attention and we thought it was interesting enough to share it with you. For certain queries, attributes extraction is based on user location.

In the screenshot below, we can see that for the search query “how much does a passport cost”, using a USA IP we’ll have a different answer box than for the same search query with a UK IP. We cannot extrapolate this situation and use it as a general rule regarding how Google extracts the answers but it’s important to mention this:

Google seems to take into consideration the user’s location.

Furthermore, we’ve found another interesting example that enforces this matter. If I search for a conversion from Colombian pesos into dollars (“transformar pesos colombianos a dolares”), Google takes into consideration my IP and local search so it displays the result adapted to that knowledge.

Only now it’s adapted the result so much that it doesn’t really answer my question. It is indeed evidence of the highly advanced technology that Google uses but as long as it doesn’t provide an answer for my query it is not much of a help.

Yet, it is important to mention that Google keeps on updating its algorithm constantly, and some of the examples provided within this article might have changed meanwhile.

So, where do all these answers come from? A variety of places, really. Two factors seem important:

that the page selected for the answer contains the question in a very similar (if not exact) form, along with the answer, at a short distance from the question (repeating at least some of the words from the question) and
that the page selected for the answer belongs to a trustworthy website. So, most of the times, if it’s not Wikipedia, it will be a site that it can consider a non biased third party, such as is the case with a lot of “.edu” sites, or news organization websites.

That, of course, changes if you are purposefully looking for specific brand information, in which case the most trustworthy information might come straight from that brand’s site.

What Types of Google Answer Boxes Exist?

Google answer boxes are a certain type of rich answers and can come in many shapes and sizes.

To better understand what type of instant answers appear more often in SERP, a few years ago we made a research based on answer boxes generated by approximately 10,000 queries. From the total data we received, we wanted to see what types of answer boxes were most common.

In the chart above, you can see the results of the research we made.

It seems that most of the answer boxes included definitions or descriptions that were the result of various website extractions.
From the total of answer boxes we got, content extracted from websites summed up 69% of the answer boxes. All the other types of answer boxes – Web Definitions, Video Widgets, Google Widgets (conversions, maps) or Google Dictionary Definitions – taken together amounted for less than a third of the answer boxes.

This is good news for SEO. This means that if your content is relevant and very well structured, it has lots of chances to appear in answer boxes.

If the answers only consisted of Google widgets, Google definitions or web definitions, you would have little to contribute to the landscape. As things are now, your website could be the source of a definition or description for the vast majority of the answers in the box.

We’re not going to list all the content types of answer boxes there are out there; however, below we’ll highlight the most common and interesting ones.

Google Dictionary Definition

Google Dictionary was an online dictionary service of Google, originating in its Google Translate service. The Dictionary website was terminated on 2011 but after that, part of its functionality was integrated into Google Search and now it looks like it’s integrated in the paragraph snippet.

When it provides the direct answers from the Google Dictionary, you won’t see any URL near the generated content. It answers the question and it kind of gives you the feeling that Google “knows for sure” that the info is accurate and doesn’t need to give any extra explanation.

Google Answer Boxes with No Source

Google has quite an impressive and helpful number of widgets, including translating, weather, driving directions or currency converter services. These widgets really improve the user’s experience, sparing them lots of clicks and time invested.

For instance, if a user needs to find out how much 300 meters mean, reported to kilometers, they don’t have to go on several sites to find out how much one meter means and multiply it by 300. All they have to do is “ask” Google “how long is 300 meters” and they will get an answer instantly.

Google Video Widget

If you want to impress your friends with some new move dances or you are looking for a particular type of moves that you want to reproduce, Google understands this need and gives you a video result directly in the answer box.

Google Web Extraction

The definitions provided in the answer box from web extractions usually come from sites that have high authority and also include the search query on their site. For instance, in the example below, if we want to find out what an atom is composed of, the answer box extracted the information from education.jlab.org/qa/atom.html. As we follow this site, we will see that on the landing page we will have a dedicated content to this matter, with the matching title “What is an atom? What are atoms made of?”

Google Answer Boxes with Real Time Results

There are many instances where Google provides real time results for many events or competitions. From sports to concerts or any other important event happening in the world, most likely the answer box gets you covered. Usually, the results are updated and on time so that the searcher may not need any additional info. From an SEO point of view, that’s not necessary good, because if you want to get people to your website, you have a few options, under the high quality info from the direct answer.

Google Answer Boxes with Company Information

Far will be the days when you’ll have to browse through a company’s website, looking for the about page to find out info about how or when that company was founded. A searcher can found out instantly mostly anything about a business. And even if a specific piece of data is not listed on the business’s site, most likely the most relevant piece of information that will answer that query will be listed.

Let’s take for instance the first case. From the “about” page from cognitiveSEO we get the info about when the tool took birth. When it comes to the second example, Google decided that the most relevant data for the BrandMentions tool was not the site’s “about” page, but a third party website that made a review on that tool. The founding data of BrandMentions can be found on its site as well, yet, Google found it easier probably to extract it from another source.

Google Answer Boxes for Stocks

Google, Yahoo, and MSN have the authority for the time being when it comes to Google stocks info. What is particularly interesting when it comes to this answer widget is that it is highly complex, offering in-depth info that can be sorted by time, including an interactive chart.

Google Answer Boxes with Multiple Sources

There are instances where Google consults multiple sources to offer an answer.

For instance, in the example below, both Eurostat and Bureau of Labor Statistics (highly authoritative sources) are mentioned as sources for the unemployment rate in the UK. What is interesting is that once you check out the mentioned sources, none of them offers the rate mentioned in the answer box on their landing pages. If you dig into the data on those sites, you’ll get the info; yet, it is not listed “one click away” on their site. Therefore, a bit of research work has been made here to offer this kind of data.

How to Optimize for Google Answer Box?

Ranking in position zero, on the top of Google search results, is the best position one can have.

It is the holy grail of the search engine optimization, it is the position that tells Google your content is useful and answering users’ direct questions. There’s no doubt about that. Therefore, you might want to appear there by all means.

Of course, there are a lot of other ranking factors that can influence an answer box result (social media; backlink profile; no. of referring domains, etc. ). Yet, these steps are a traffic hack that will surely help you create a Google answer box strategy that will help you win the answer box.

So, here there are, four tactics that will help you rank on position zero.

Step 1. Identify Keywords That Google May Provide Answers for

As we’ve seen in the examples above, the keywords that are ranking in the instant answers category are usually queries that answer a direct question or solve an immediate need; for example: why did my organic traffic drop, does more traffic increase SEO or list of digital marketing tactics.

Answer boxes are a certain type of rich answers and can come in many shapes and sizes; there are some special featured snippets. Most of the times, Google selects what info considers to be relevant for a specific query.

The really good news is that most of the answer boxes include definitions or descriptions from website extractions.

First things first, identify the keywords that have the potential to have a dedicated answer box.

The easiest way to do this is by using the Content Optimizer and Keyword Tool. Let’s say that we are in the cooking industry (restaurants, cooking blogs, you name it). And let’s say that we want to rank as high as possible on topics related to “rice”. We want to be the “rice queens and kings” (and of search marketing, of course). Trying to rank for the keyword “rice” itself might not be the greatest idea; most likely, it’s a very competitive keyword and it would be very hard to rank on position 0 for it. But we can find “rice-related” keywords that we can rank for, just like in the example below:

“Rice flour recipes” is not only a keyword that you can think about ranking in Google’s answer box but it is also a keyword that is highly searched (it has a monthly search volume between 1,000 and 5,000 and a cost-per-click of $0.23 – in case you’re interested in paid search marketing).

You might wonder, if you own a restaurant or you are a rice producer, how this might be helpful for you or for your targeted keyword rankings. Let me tell you that it is highly beneficial. Content is king, no need to insist more on that, as you’ve probably heard it thousands of time. So, even if you have a rice factory or you are into the rice agriculture, that doesn’t mean you cannot get creative and directly answer to the users with awesome pieces of content.

Google Answer Boxes provide mostly information content.

Therefore, don’t create content that will be beneficial only for you; instead, create content that might actually help your users. Once you offer them something valuable, once you bring them to your website, they might reward with a purchase afterwards.

Step 2. Segment Keywords Based on Current Answer Box Relevancy

It probably happened to you as well to be served by Google with irrelevant or incomplete info in the answer box. I know but, as striking as this might seem, just like anything else in life, Google is not perfect. But can we “take advantage” of these small imperfections and use them in favor of our own Google Answer box strategy?

Yes, we can. And we can do it not only for our own benefit, but for the search community as well.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Google answer box mixed things up (as the search engine is updating all the time, this answer box may change at the moment you perform a similar search). But the big G is aware of the search imperfections that can appear from time to time and this is why it allows us to offer feedback if the results are inaccurate.

So, what’s left for you to do? (except improving the search community by offering feedback).

Search the answer boxes from your own niche that offer inaccurate or incomplete responses and try to create the proper content to rank with.

A simple way to find answer box opportunities is with the help of our best friend, the cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Explorer.

We are not saying that the examples below are offering inaccurate answer box responses, or offer a bad user experience; we are just showing you a way to identify answer box opportunities.

Being in your niche, you (should) know everything that is being said or talked about your niche and the topics you are most interested in. If not, there are monitoring tools that can help you out with this matter.

cognitiveSEO’s content tool gives you info on the frequently asked questions from Google as well as the most popular users questions so you can find adapt your SEO strategies and find new answer box ideas.

We know that it’s easier said than done, but what you should to at this point is try creating the content that will actually rank on the position zero. Which led us straight to step three.

Step 3. Write Website Content Optimized for the Google Answer Box

Google likes content to be arranged neatly and in order. Keep in mind that you need to create content for the user but also to be on the top of the SERP. You need to write for SEO.

So, structuring your content is highly important. The tidier you write content, the higher the chances to rank to the very top.

As you can see in the examples below, Google likes bullets, numbers, structured data and very straightforward answers. So, when aiming for your position zero and you optimize your site, always keep that in mind. In our case, almost all the answer boxes we’re ranking for have very clear steps, definitions, ordered lists and simple to follow instructions.

Therefore, if you want to get featured in Google’s answers, try to write clearly, easy to understand and on the subject. As much as possible, try creating numbered lists or steps that respond directly to a query. And also try optimizing your content as much as possible so you can make sure you’ll rank right on the top. You can use our Content Assistant for this job.

Let’s say that we want to have direct answers in the SERPs for the query: “how to figure out sales tax “. Add the piece of content that you want to rank high with (arranged neatly and in order, just like Google likes it) and let the tool tell you what keywords you should use in your content to get a big chance of ranking to the very top.

Step 4. Quick Tips to Rank in Google Answer Boxes on Position Zero

When creating content with the purpose of targeting Google Answer Boxes, make sure it is using the correct markup.
Try to use the query that a user would search to find the Google Answer Box within your title or meta description.
Try to earn links or to some link building to your Google Answer Box content using anchor text that matches the Google Answer Box call to action.

If the answer box has accurate information, they provide the user with better usability by sparing them another click or providing a shortcut to the final action they need to do. Not to mention that being there can get a lot of SERP “landscape”, especially if you own some important keywords in your niche.

How to Check Your Google Answer Box Rankings?

The easiest and fastest way to check if you’re ranking in an answer box is to go straight to your Google Search Console.

You might be inclined to say that a manual check among the search engines is the way to figure out if your website is listed in an answer box. We are not saying that this wouldn’t be a way to do things, but it takes way too much time and energy.

Two clicks away and there you are, face to face with your best rankings. So, let’s see the exact steps you need to take in order to identify your winning keywords and to see if you appear in Google’s answers.

Step 1. Filter the Data You Need in Google Search Console

Google Search Console –> Performance –>Queries –>Filter CTR & Position

Starting with January 2018, Google released the beta version of its tool to all users of Search Console. Not all the features have been added in the beta version of Search Console yet, for our current needs, this version works wonders. So, once you’ve logged in within your Search Console (we used the beta version), you need to filter the data so you can find the much desired answer box search results rankings.

First things first, go to the Performance Section. Once you’re here, you’ll see a list of queries, along with data such as Total Clicks, Total Impressions, Average CTR (click-through-rate) and Average Position. What we are interested in are the last two elements: Average CTR and Average Position. The bigger these two, the higher chance of ranking in an answer box.

If you are having a click-trough-rate of 60 and you’re ranking on position one or two, it’s very likely that for that query you are ranked in an answer box.

Therefore, we filter the data so that we’ll see only the queries that have an average CTR greater than 30 (let’s say) and an average position smaller than 3. If these two conditions meet, chances are that those queries will rank in an answer box.

Step 2. Instantly Identify Your Answer Box Rankings

After the filtering was done, all you need to do is check those queries, look and enjoy the results, just like in the screenshots below. Appearing in Google rankings never felt better, right?

Indeed, considering Google Algorithm updates, the knowledge graph, it’s very likely that you’ll see different boxes results than your neighbor living next door, who might be seeing different answer box displays. This is why we always recommend using a rank tracker when monitoring your keywords.

But besides the fact that it’s time and money consuming, the personalized results issue is another reason why we don’t recommend doing a manual search to check for the keywords ranking on position zero. Peeking at the data coming straight from the Search Console, we can do a bit of keyword research and look at those queries which we know for sure that have a well-performing CTR (click-through rate) and positions. Just like in Shakira’s most famous song, data don’t lie.

The examples can continue but we think you got the main idea and we wouldn’t want to get you bored you with examples from our own SEO tips blogspot. We recommend you to discover your own Google rankings on position 0 and enjoy the feeling of seeing your piece of content within any type of answer box.

Google Answer Box Strategy & Statistics – A Research on 10k Keywords

As mentioned before, to figure out what it takes to get your website on position zero and perform an efficient Google answer box optimization, we set out to find out more about the issue, with a more scientific outlook on things.

This is how, a few years ago (in 2015 to be more precisely), we came up looking at about 10,000 queries. We looked for phrases such as “what is…” and “who is…”, adding just one letter after the phrase ( “what is a”, “what is b”, and so on up to “what is z”) and taking into account the autocomplete suggestions (since those are supposed to be most popular searches, therefore the ones most likely to elicit answer boxes).

To have a standardized cutoff point, we only took into account the first 10 autocomplete suggestions for each generated keyword. Using this method to extract the keywords, we selected a sample of keywords that are most likely to return answer boxes. In the following lines you can read the most interesting findings of this research.

To be able to implement an efficient Google Answer Box strategy, we first need to understand some communalities between the rich answers. And all these because position zero in SERP hilghly higher improves CTR (click through rate), which increases traffic to your website.

Unique Domains Used by Google for Answers

It seems that in the world of the search engines the rich get richer. When we analyzed the answers that were extracted from websites, we found out that they only came from 342 websites. So, on average, about 3.6 answers per website. But averages can be deceiving and in this case they actually are. Of those 342 websites (mainly, Wikipedia, dictionaries or Glossary) not all got the lion’s share.

Top 10 Ranking Position Distribution for the Answer Box

Of the many factors that might influence the “distribution”, one that comes to mind almost instantly is the SERP ranking. So we split the websites according to this criterion, and look and behold, websites that were found on the first position (or position zero) in the organic results accounted for a third (33%) of all answer box information. The top 5 pages accounted for more than three quarters (77%) of the answers.

There was just 1 answer box out of the total 1,236 that came from a page not in the top 10 (statistically, that’s less than 0.1%).

So, rankings matter. You would be right to suggest that the relationship implied by this correlation may be more complicated here than what we are seeing from the numbers. Yet, you’d be taking a pretty serious chance to bet on being that 1 case in 1,236 that doesn’t need to be up high in the rankings to make it to the answer box. Or, to quote XKCD scienc-y web comic creator Randall Munroe, “Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’”

Title vs. No-Title in Google’s Rich Answer Boxes

As you’ll go around searching for different queries on Google, you’ll probably notice that there are two types of answer boxes, if we take into consideration the title: answer boxes which have a title and answer boxes which don’t have one. Just like in the case of any piece of content, the title can make a great difference. Let’s take a look at the screenshot below!

We are not talking only about the title’s purpose to garner attention and entice people to start reading your content, but about the basic purpose of titles: functionality.

Beyond all, people need to know what the content is about. From all the analyzed answer boxes, about 30% have a title, while the rest provide the information directly in the box, without any other introductions. Is a title beneficial? It definitely is, as it highly improves user’s experience.

With a majority of “no title” answer boxes, it has been clear since then where Google was heading with this matter. We are almost in 2020 and things have changed a lot. Having titles in answers box is more of a scarcity these days.

Trusted Sites Distribution in Google Answer Boxes

In all fairness, we are inclined to cut you some slack and say that it’s not necessarily the SERP rankings that matter. But that’s only because the SERP positioning might simply be an indicator of some other measure of your website’s quality: referring domains. This is a case where more is actually more and better.

Sites with 10k referring domains are more likely to have content appearing in answer boxes.

Interestingly enough, a lot more answers (twice the number) come from domains with between 1 and 5,000 referring domains than from domains with between 5 and 10,000 referring domains. That may very well be, though, due to the arbitrary split or due to a lot of the values being around the cutoff point.

Despite this, however, the 1 K mark is a fairly good predictor: more than 80% of all answers come from places that have 1,000 referring domains or more. But that means there’s still a reasonable chance of popping up in answer boxes even with less than that.

However, if you drop under 100, it seems that you are on your own: less than a 3% chance of hitting the jackpot. Or at least this is how things used to be around 2015 when this research was conducted.

Website Extraction vs. Website Definition in Answer Boxes

I invite you to take a look at another interesting finding, regarding the Website Definitions.

As we analyzed other answer boxes extracted from different sites, we find out that a lot of them seemed to be low quality and sometimes even unrelated.

Things have changed a lot along the way and Google has fine-tuned its algorithm and for sure answers are more reliable now. Yet, allow us to share some findings from a few years ago that raised two legit question:

how can a site that Google doesn’t consider worthy to be listed in the first 10 results be given as a resource in the answer box?
shouldn’t we worry about the quality of the information found in the answer box, given this situation?

It was an interesting example that we found then, the query “what is a 360 link”. Even if the web definition provided by the answer box came from Wikipedia (where 51% from all web definitions came from), it cannot be found in the top 10 results. Even more, the content provided is unrelated and has a commercial flavor (it refers to a product from the ProQuest company).

Nevertheless, mysterious are the ways of Google but equally determined are the people from cognitiveSEO to find out answers. As we browsed so many queries with answer boxes, we identified a pattern in the web definitions extraction. It looks like the majority of definitions that are not coming from Wikipedia have a similar URL pattern using the words “glossary” or “dictionary” (and other variations).

Thereby, having issues, answer boxes generated from Web Definitions didn’t look very reliable. Yet, in the case of website extraction things were more settled and we didn’t encounter the same problems. Judging by the fact that the data are shown differently, we assumed that the extraction from web definitions vs. Entity Extraction done using the Knowledge Graph was made totally different.

The Website Extraction seemed more precise, while the Website Definition seemed more basic.

Can I Advertise in the Google Answers Box?

According to Google, the short answer is no, you cannot advertise on answer boxes as their purpose is informational and not commercial.

Here’s what John Muller from Google said about “branding” the answer boxes:

We need to watch out […] so it doesn’t turn out to an advertisement for a web site but rather that it brings more information to the search results about this general topic.
	John Muller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google / @JohnMu

Yet, as one might assume, advertising in answer boxes is something that any business would crave to. Just imagine the opportunities that it may bring.
But as long as there is another online advertising platform developed by Google (Google Ads), most likely advertisement in answer boxes is something that belongs (perhaps) to the future.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that there are no debatable situations on this matter.

Let’s take an example: if you look, for instance, on how much does a dental implant cost.

The answer box I got contains a link to an agency that provides brokerage for dental plans & more. As you can see, the Spirit Dental & Vision Company takes a lot of the search engine ranking page landscape. And although the answer box is not linking directly to a pricing page of a dental office, it does link to a company that sells dental services to a targeted audience, which is pretty much the same.

For this business, showing up in the answer box is most likely more valuable than showing up first in the search results when it comes to traffic and conversions.

Yet, we need to understand that the search engine works on advanced AI algorithms. Even in this case, Google ranked on the position zero an article that is a very informative blog post. It informs the searchers about the cost, giving them lot of additional data on why it costs so much, how much should they expect to pay, what other costs are involved, etc. The blog-post is “answer box friendly”, it has the information well structured, and firstly, it responds to the query; after reading the article, you’ll have a price in mind when thinking about implants.

Screenshot taken from https://www.spiritdental.com/blog/individuals/the-cost-of-dental-implants-broken-down

It’s true that other URLs ranking for how much does a dental implant cost have well structured data as well, a fact that leads us to the conclusion that most likely Google is testing and showing several sites within its direct answer section for the mentioned query.

Screenshot taken from https://www.authoritydental.org/dental-implants-cost

There is another interesting situation when it comes to answer boxes and advertising that caught my attention, and that is the dedicated boxes for pricing.

If you’re interested in finding out “how much does a passport cost”, be advised that the information in the answer box comes from the website of the UK government. We’re not sure whether this is because of the language settings, the IP, the fact that this was the most popular query, or some other factors as well, but even though the source may vary depending on the language settings, it will very likely remain governmental.

So, the landscape is fairly clear for generic products: how much does a gallon of milk cost, how much does a gallon of gas cost, etc., most likely you’ll get answers coming from statistics institutes, news publications or governmental sites.

But what about products of really big brands?

For instance, if you’re giving into the electric car craze and want to find out just “how much does a Tesla cost”, you will get your answer right at the top, in a special box. You will actually get a price in the answer box, alongside with info about their stock.

When it comes to pricing, the information is provided from third party sites, magazines, news websites and not the official selling car lot.

This fact alone says a lot about Google’s position when it comes to advertising in answer boxes.

Whether we are looking for an iphone 5’s price, a google ad or garcinia cambogia weight loss pills, we can get an idea of this item’s prices, though not in a direct marketing-selling approach but from some third parties authorities.

What is Google actually doing here?

Google provides the users with a good experience by trying to offer an answer to the question, while keeping them away from the official advertising sites of these products.

None of the sites we are sent to are selling the products in question nor have a direct connection to the marketing strategy of these items.

Not even when we ask Google how much a Google ad costs, we are not directed to the AdWords page as expected, but to a unbiased blog post that talks about this matter. This “politically correct” Google attitude makes us have a better understanding of the saying “more catholic than the Pope himself”. Yet, Google doesn’t have the price list for all the products as it gets confused when it is asked “how much a nexus 5 costs” (to be mentioned that Nexus is a Google product) or “how much a macbook costs” (a very well-known product).

Can Any Site Appear in Google’s Direct Answer Box?

Any site can appear in Google’s answer box if it offers a fit answer for the query and if it’s considered to be a topical authority in the field.

Let’s dig a bit more into the topical versus generic sites for a better understanding of this matter.

It’s reasonable to assume that when it can’t find its answers on an already trusted-and-verified site, Google will try to take some extra precautions by looking for authority sites or sites that it can trust.

Let’s look at the examples below and try to understand the way Google is making use of topical authority sites and the Generic ones.

If we try to figure out what a quantum computer or back pain is, Google will quote from a generic site (Wikipedia), giving us an overall idea about the computation device or the unpleasant but yet so common back pain.

But what happens when we try to find some info about a headache or a sciatica pain (a condition akin to back pain)?
Apparently, we are led to more specialized sites, to some pages that Google considers to be high authority pages. It is well known that Google’s goal is to return the best possible results that match not just based on the exact match query but on the intent of the user doing the query, boosting sites that offer a more in-depth topic covered than a simple article about the problem.

There’s a special note to make here, namely that medical terms seem to be filtered. For example, for sensitive terms searches, you are very likely to be instructed by Google to “Consult a doctor if you have a medical concern”. It is possible that the big G may have a self-medication monitoring system, giving different results in the answer box according to the severity of the health condition.

Furthermore, the size of a business card or the date of the next solar eclipse are considered to be specific questions that need to be answered by topical sites with high authority in the field. With the risk of redundancy, I am bringing back in discussion the fact that sites which bring “additional value” to the web are considered to be topical authority and promoted as such, whether it comes to SERP or answer boxes.

Therefore, it seems like that for more specific queries, content based Topical Authority Sites are quoted more in answer boxes compared to sites that only cover the topic briefly (even if the site covering the topic briefly has a lot of generic authority).

More articles written on the same topic increase the chances for the site to be treated as a “Topical Authority Content Site” on that specific topic and be listed in the answer box. But what Google considers to be high-quality content might remain a legit question.

Does Google Answer All Questions?

The percentage of search results with answer boxes out of the total number of search results is fairly small.

According to Google results, the short answer is no.

There is a dedicated featured snippet with this exact answer coming from Quora. It’s true that the answer does not refer to answer boxes, but to answers in general. However, even when we’re talking about Google’s rich answers, the answer remains the same, no.

On the research we made a few years ago, research mentioned in a chapter above, we found out that only a small percentage of queries have dedicated answer boxes. We are in 2020 already and it’s very likely that those numbers increased.

Out of 10,353 queries, only 1,792 returned answer boxes, which is roughly only 17% of the total number of searches.

We can say that this claim is true in general, since our sample size of 10,000 is enough to extrapolate for a population of pretty much any size with a high confidence level.

While this may sound pretty unbelievable, that’s just how statistics works. Admittedly, we haven’t really been using a perfectly random sample, so let’s just say that the claim we made earlier is true of all searches that could potentially yield an answer box: off all that could, rather few actually do.

How Do You Delete an Answer Box?

There is no such thing as “delete answer box” button.

If Google considers that a piece of content is relevant enough for a specific query, it can choose to show it within the direct answer box.

Yet, you have the possibility to opt out of direct answer section.

You can opt out of Google’s special boxes by preventing snippets on your page using the tag on your page. This will remove all snippets on your page, including those in regular search results.

However, let’s say that you don’t want to opt out of all snippets but you want to remove just one answer box where the information is inaccurate.

You have two possibilities: check out exactly where the content is extracted from and correct the piece of content; or let Google know that it’s a piece of information that is not accurate or not appropriate to be shown in the special box due to different reasons, even legal ones.

Is Google Ever Wrong? Google Answer Box Failures

Technically speaking, Google is never wrong. Because all Google does is matching the query with an answer that it considers to be the best one.

However, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t mismatching in SERP in general, as well as in the direct answers section.

Of course, you could make the case that not getting an answer box might be preferable to getting one with wrong or misguiding information. And you might be right.

Since we are an SEO blog, let’s look at a couple of examples from our very own field. Again, we need to mention that the search is an ever evolving industry and some of the examples given below might have been corrected meanwhile.

If you’d like to know, for instance, “what is an SEO company”, the information you’ll get in the definition is about SEO in general. Close enough in this case, but not what I asked.

Things get worse down the road if we ask “what is seo company india”. That, you’ll quibble, doesn’t make much sense now, does it? How could we possibly expect to get an answer box for that? Well, we didn’t. But we did get the box anyway. A nonsensical definition from a shady website.
In fairness, the definition was nonsensical because it kind of looked like keyword stuffing. And the site looked shady because… well, it was.

That wasn’t very fair, we’ll admit, but let’s try a query that does make sense: “what is an seo keyword”. Not only does this make sense, but there should be plenty of reasonable, unbiased definitions lying around. And yet Google picked another slew of stuffed keywords from a shady website. There’s probably a bit of irony in there.

One last try: “what is an seo tool”. Again we get an incorrect definition (this one at least is an actual sentence, but not the answer to our query) from a somewhat shady site – or, at the very least, one whose presence in the answer box is shady.

There are other examples as well, from a variety of fields, which highlight the fact that the Feedback button at the bottom right of the search box is not merely a courtesy, but a potentially crucial tool, in a community-effort-buildup kind of way, for the development and improvement of the search box.

Therefore, the answer box algorithm understands almost all of the 5 Ws: “why”, “who”, “what”, “when” and “where”. It doesn’t always get the right interpretation in the context though. For instance, if you’ve become nostalgic and you’re wondering “when the iPhone was released”, you’ll get June 29, 2007 as the date the iPhone was originally introduced, which is correct. Same if your question is about the latest model.

If, however, you’ve suddenly become a more practical, future-oriented person, and want to know“ when the iphone 6 is released”, you’ll only be reminded of the June 29, 2007 date for the introduction of the first iPhone. That’s not very helpful, but maybe Google doesn’t know the exact release date, so it’s understandable. Only that’s not the issue here.

If you were to search “when is the new iphone to be released”, you’ll actually get useful results about the iPhone 6 (which is the new one) release date speculations. Does Google not know that the newest version of the iPhone will be the iPhone 6? It is entirely possible. Further testing the search engine by inquiring about iPhone 8 or iPhone 10 seems to greatly confuse the big G and cause it to return incorrect or misguided results.

If people are searching for some iphone models that are not yet released, the search engine gets confused and doesn’t logically answer to the query. It offers info on some other versions of the phone or worse, for a totally different product.

There are a lot of questions that simply go unanswered.

While the algorithm is quite impressive, it’s not 100% reliable yet.

Which is probably why we can assume that Google presents you with an accurate answer box if the questions are specific enough. It’s a “question and answer” game, where both need to be as specific as possible to be worth for a rich result.

If you’re wondering “how much gold is worth”, you’ll get some search results but no preferred answer. If, however, you’re asking “how much gold is worth per ounce”, then you’ll at least get an estimate in the answer box.

The same goes for the price of milk. If you’re simply asking “how much milk costs”, you’ll get a bunch of results, but no preferred answer in the answer box. This changes, however, if you ask “how much does a gallon of milk cost” as this time you get a preferred answer from a page on a news organization website.

Does a Google Answer Box API Exist?

There is no official Google answer box API available. Yet, there are some workarounds that may help you on this matter.

There were some discussions around the Google answer box API matter in the past, and even if there seemed to be some solutions, they are now deprecated. There is an instant answer API available from the DuckDuckGo search engine, yet, the responses aren’t as robust as Google’s.

To retrieve the information returned from the answer box you can try using the cognitiveSEO API. The API allows you to accurately track all the keywords you or your competitors are ranking on, while also giving you the possibility of “hunting” position zero ranking opportunities.

One of the main factors of your website’s performance is the ability to track its keyword rankings accurately. Once you put a Google answer box strategy to work, you need to see how well your SEO efforts translate into rankings and continue doing the things that work best to keep the progress growing.

Seeing the correlation between your rankings and your Google answer box optimization and SEO efforts will let you easily see which changes have a positive effect (so you can focus more on these areas) and which may have a negative one.

Conclusion

A pretty famous computer scientist said that “the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

Answer box is indeed, as Google stated: much of the work on language, speech, translation and visual processing relies on Machine Learning and AI that raises deep scientific and engineering challenges.

Everyday, Google search finds more “humane” ways to interact with its users and provide more direct answers. With all the strings attached, appearing in the answer boxes is a way new level in the search industry and understanding them shouldn’t be just a recreational hobby but a must if you want your site to be known and ranked the best possible.

SERP landscape has changed a lot, you can see that just by looking at some SEO stats, and mostly because of the highly technological progress, Artificial Intelligence included, of course. Of course, advanced SEO tools like ours and other free SEO tools can help out in this situation. The artificial intelligence process suggests that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity. No matter how much we’d like everything to be standardized, in the search industry results are not based directly on exact rules.

Rich snippets might be quite controversial as the Google Search user interface lets Google’s users view and copy content without visiting the content provider’s website. It can also has a big impact on dwell time. In addition to losing organic traffic, webmasters or content marketers might be also a bit “upset” with the fact that their perfectly well-functioning website doesn’t appear in the answer box while some broken site that doesn’t exist anymore is taking up the space . Double ouch for Google answer boxes!

Answer box results are highly important these days, and the steps to get your site ranking in the answer boxes queries should appear in all SEO training as well as advanced and beginners guide to SEO.

Proving Google that your site is trustworthy and deserves to be on the top of the SERP it’s way harder to be done than to be said. Of course, advanced tools like cognitiveSEO can make your life easier. But it pays off on the long term. Moreover, following the tips that we came up with in this post on how to optimize for the Google Answer Box might be also really helpful.

The post How to Win the Google Answer Box → The Ultimate Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

SEO Writing for Copywriters → The Ultimate Guide

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 09:58:39 +0000

SEO writing has become an adventure, a complicated math problem we are all trying to calculate for finding the secret to get results faster. The number of search engine factors have advanced, the Google algorithm updates has increased, the number of businesses that use SEO have increased, the number of SEO agencies have increased and more and more people have become aware of its importance. That’s how the market got pretty cluttered and the competition very high. And we know how important it is for you to stand up in the crowd.

There are some things that are still available in terms of SEO, and also lots of new ones. We’ve put together a guide to find out how to write for SEO in 2020 and beyond. This way, you can make sure you remain at the top of the pile.

What Is SEO Writing?
Why Is Writing for SEO Important?
Basics of SEO Writing
How to Write for SEO? [TL;DR – Best Tips]
Guidelines for SEO Copywriters
How Important Is It to Update Content on My Website?
Should I Delete Underperforming Content from My Site?

We’ve put or hands to work to let you know everything there’s to know about SEO copywriting, from Q to M (keyboard letters arrangement). Leaving the copywriter jokes aside, let’s focus on the how to write for SEO, the basics, and finally the steps to get the Wonderland of first positions on Google.

1. What Is SEO Writing?

Writing for SEO refers to a technique that pleases not only the reader but the search engines as well. The standard type of copywriting relies on storytelling, on descriptive information, on niched content based on the knowledge of the audience. It is also known as copywriting with SEO in mind.

SEO writing is a process of writing that helps websites rank higher in search engines. By combining copywriter’s creativity with processes website content can stand out quicker in the major search engines.

Writing for SEO is a pretty straightforward process. It requires content strategy, well-researched data and discipline. You’ll have to perform keyword research to understand the intent of your audience searches and find out what type of content your audience consumes, spy your audience and find the competitive advantage – the content gap.

SEO copywriting combines three important elements. Similar to the successful trio – the three wise monkeys 🙈🙉🙊 – it creates a synergy between:

Information Gap
Audience
Google (or other search engines)

There are also other approaches on this matter, like Kim, the Marketing Director of Alexa, has another approach to the essence of SEO copywriting:

SEO copywriting is probably more of an art than a science.
	KIM KOSAKA
	Marketing Director of Alexa

2. Why Is Writing for SEO Important?

Writing for SEO is important because it’s a one of the best ways you can make sure your content will reach your readers. Search engine optimization is the ticket to the Wonderland of first places in Google. Otherwise we would write in vain. People wouldn’t find your content, and it wouldn’t serve anybody, nor the users, nor the search engines (which is the way users get to your content).

So, wouldn’t you want to take part in this beautiful adventure and get there?

Creating SEO friendly content is important to help your audience, build organic traffic to your website and keep your loyal clients. SEO keeps the business running. While other ways of distributing content and paid ads bring you clients as long as you keep investing money, SEO is used for long-time strategies that maintain your website visible in search and needs less financial investment. To reach top positions and remain there, you’ll have to do more than writing content.

Your content needs to:

be optimized;
contain the natural language of your visitors;
understand their pain points and offer solutions, answer their questions.

On the last matter, Google offers directions for every query you search and shows possible questions that people also ask.

To implement a long term strategy for SEO content, you’ll have to understand its basics.

3. Basics of SEO Writing

If you got until this point, you need to understand that we won’t provide secret tactics, shortcut tips that will bring you instant top positions, huge volume of organic traffic or thousands of links. Instead, we provide a well-documented strategy that has worked for us and other SEO pros numerous times, but it requires effort. Results are coming, but not effortlessly.

To get great results, you need not only knowledge, means, tools but also an SEO copywriter, a person that needs to have the skills to do things right.

3.1 What Is an SEO Copywriter?

An SEO copywriter writes content that is optimized for a website to rank on top pages of the search engines. If a copywriter writes copy for the sole purpose of communicating a message, develop an idea, describe a situation or an event, an SEO specialist analyzes, examines and tracks results for a website’s content to boost search engine rankings. His main role is to resolve any issues that might block the website from ranking higher.

The copywriter who writes with SEO in mind combines the jobs of those two players. He uses the means and strategies of the SEO specialist to communicate the way copywriters do and reach lots of readers.

SEO copywriters vs. traditional copywriters write content that also tackles the interest and search intent of a person. This drives more visitors to a page compared to traditional way of writing.

An SEO content marketer has the ability to turn a simple article into a piece that is written for the user and it’s beautifully optimized for Google. For that, an SEO copywriter needs to have lots of skills.

3.2 What Skills Should a Content Writer Have?

Since SEO copywriting combines a more complex strategy, all SEO copywriters should know how to write, have a unique voice and a particular writing style. The SEO content writer needs to understand the audience and spy on the competition.

Becoming an SEO writing expert does require more organizing and management skills because they should know what topics to approach, perform keyword research, competitive analysis, take actions and come up with suggestions. That person should also know what topics were discussed on the blog, come up with re-writing ideas or create fresh content if needed. And that doesn’t stop there. That person should take into consideration all the content on the website – product pages, the homepage, the about page and other category pages. An SEO copywriter should evaluate the whole website.

The content marketers need to come up with ideas and techniques, such as content pruning, content amplification, content syndication, content curation and many more. They can also create hybrid techniques to boost the power of content and make it convertible.

It should come as no surprise to you to learn that blog writing and blog management are some of the most important skills a content writer needs to master. A content writer should develop skills for finding new blog content ideas, listen to the readers, ask questions, accept criticism, answer questions and even come up with ideas to repurpose content.

3.3 How Does Content Performance Impact SEO and Rankings?

Based on a research we’ve made on 3,784,369 pieces of content, it turns out that content impacts SEO and rankings. We discovered that a high Content Performance score is correlated with top rankings in Google. Check out the chart below.

As you can see, there’s a direct connection between the Content Performance Score and the keyword positions in Google. Pages with a higher score experienced higher search positions. And the importance of a well-optimized piece of content increased. At the moment, it has become one of the most important ranking factors.

As you can see in the print screen below, in 2017 the content had a big impact on top Google positions, but in 2019 it seems that content’s importance is bigger than ever.

cognitiveSEO’s Content optimization tool offers a Content Performance score based on how well optimized a piece of content is for a targeted keyword. The content tool is really simple to use. You’ll have to add the focus keyword or phrase that you are targeting and then add your piece of content. Below you can see a printscreen from the Content Optimizer. On the left side, you have the content and on the right side you have:

The content performance score which shows you how well a page is optimized from a content point of view, on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better optimized the content.
The position on which that content might rank given by the content performance metric.
The type of search intent – there are three types of content: informational, navigational and transactional.
The analyzed keywords: displayed in three categories, such as keywords that are already added, keywords you can add once and keywords you should add more than once.
A section on people also ask: extracted from Google search results, as we previously discussed.

The tool is very helpful in optimizing the content for the search engines but also keeping your focus on what users want to find out by looking into “content ideas via questions people ask”.

4. How to Write for SEO [TL;DR – Best Tips]

Now that you’ve understood what does writing for SEO means, it importance, and the influence of content on rankings, it’s time to move forward to the strategy of writing search engine optimization friendly content.

Below you can find some steps to understand how to write for SEO plus some steps to get you going:

For better knowledge of the process, observe the following SEO writing tips:

Elaborate a descriptive terminology and build compelling content by finding topics of interest and the killer questions people ask on specific topics.
Don’t try to build content for topics or noisy environments where there is a saturated niche with way too much content.
Find content gaps by spying your competition in search on certain topics. See what others are writing and come up with better content.
Understand the context of your potential customers’ search and fill in the gaps.
Find out the search intent and deliver appropriate content. For a single keyword, there might be lots of topics. Take, for example, the keyword rock – which can be about music, geology, radio station, and more.
Try as much as possible to find evergreen content topics.
Build various types of content: how-to, video, white papers, lists and more.
Don’t stick to old tricks, but rather look for delivering new content, but also update existing articles.
Make a structure or summary for your content once you decided upon the topic.
Add beautiful visuals to your piece of content.
Make sure you do internal link building within the webpages of your site.
Check your site for duplicate content and other content related problems and fix the issues with an SEO audit tool.
Check user experience and design a fast website, by following Google’s guidelines (using the Google Speed Test Insights and Lighthouse).
Create a mobile-friendly website or use CMS (such as WordPress) that are designed by default to be device friendly.

If you want to go in-depth you can check this big list of copywriting tips that are designed to boost conversion rates.

Before moving to each step and learning how to put into practice those tips, it’s important to understand the role of your audience.

We’ve said it lots of times before, and we’ll continue to say it as long as everybody understands the importance of its meaning:

Content must be written for the user; you should write content for people.

Contextual content is the latest approach in terms of writing for SEO at the moment. It is one of the important changes that took place in the last period. Lots of SEO experts talk about semantic and context-based results.

5. Guidelines for SEO Copywriters

After we’ve got you these preparation steps for gathering all the information and SEO tips that you need to make a great piece, you’ll have to put to work your writing style and skills. Remember the SEO copywriting techniques and write an outstanding article. Here you put your magic into action. The content creation process begins.

Besides the natural language and creative abilities, some SEO technicalities are almost mandatory for success. Writing SEO friendly blog posts can be difficult and time-consuming. However, it’s time well spent, as SEO helps us rank better in the search engines.

Correct grammar, descriptive topic where you reach all the points related, personal opinions, real conclusion and unique content are necessary for creating highly readable web pages.

5.1 Keyword Research for Content & SEO Writers

The first step in SEO content writing should be keyword research. Deploying the topics of interest and the killer questions, we can elaborate a descriptive terminology and build compelling content. Searching for primary or secondary keywords will help us describe the topic at its best for the users and make it optimized for search.

Finding keywords shouldn’t be hard, yet it’s not a walk in the park either. You need to have a starting point and based on the targeted keyword, you can find many derivatives. Some tools can help you find the best examples and generate organic traffic. The Keyword Tool and Content Optimizer is an awesome helper on this matter. It’s like your best buddy you can call in the middle of the night to get you out of trouble. You can find new topics ideas and related keywords to the one you are targeting, as well as the questions that people are asking related to your topic.

We are talking about producing content for SEO, which means valuable, evergreen and quality all-in-one. For that, you need to raise your head up the crowd and don’t get flushed away by all the people that are “writing” and creating worthless content. There are lots of noisy environments with “too much” SEO content.

Without a strategy, content is just stuff, and the world has enough stuff.
	Arjun Basu
	Award-nominated author

You have to become an SEO content writer, not just a simple writer for succeeding at SEO. You need to ask and answer the right questions so that your content helps the users and keeps them on the page.

Valuable content is found at the intersection between your customer’s needs and your business expertise.
	Sonja and Sharon
	Founders of ValuableContent

Source: www.valuablecontent.co.uk

Valuable and quality content breaks the glass and goes beyond the screen. Imagine that your visitors come from all directions and you need to make them feel that they’ve come to the right place. They need trust, so you’ll need to offer the information they need and think: “Wow. This is the place for me. Somebody really understands me.”

5.1.1 Understand the Search Intent of Your Visitors

To get to the previous situation described above, you’ll have to understand the context of your potential customers’ search and fill in the gaps. It’s mandatory to know your potential customers’ needs and interests to understand the search intent afterward.

Google discovered that the conventional keyword search, as we know it, has some limitations and doesn’t offer topical results based on the query search. For a simple keyword, there are lots of related topics and information available online.

Google has developed patents to understand context from knowledge bases for more accurate results. It wants to focus more on topic-related results, so the whole process works based on probabilities. For example, when a user performs a search on Google, the search engine uses a system to return landing pages with topics related to the query by looking at the text on that page.

You may ask how you can take advantage of that and get ideas for contextual keywords. Focus on the user, the user’s search intent and how to steal their heart and convert them.

Let’s take an example. You have a pastry in the US and have a new recipe of cronut. For those who don’t know, a cronut is a croissant-doughnut invented by a pastry from New York City.

We used the Keyword Tool and Content Optimizer for this example. We searched for “cronut” and below you can see the results, starting first with the keyword suggestions:

Based on our example, you can see what people from the US searched for on desktop. Most of the keywords are informational, which means most people want to know and understand what cronuts are. If your target audience already knows about them, then choose directly the keywords that are more relevant and descriptive, such as: “easy cronut recipe from scratch”, “how to make cronuts with puff pastry”. Based on these two keywords, you can perform other searches to find more relevant keywords. Filter the results based on relevancy or volume.

Since we’ve talked about context, then it’s essential to collect as many keywords as possible and select a topic in the second step. When we get to the onpage optimization part, you’ll need focus keywords. Don’t end up with just one keyword, look for a second keyword, similar to the first one.

Since you want to tell the world about your new cronut, there are multiple ways to do so. But first, you need to understand the search intent of your visitor. For that, you’ll have to look into Ranking Analysis. For each type of query, you can see one of the following types of search intent: informational, navigational or transactional. Based on your keyword search, you’ll have to write similar content: informational, navigational or transactional.

It is very important to decide on the keyword before writing the content, to deliver the type of content asked for and needed by the users.

If you go with the navigational type of keyword, then search for the keyword and see the volume and who your competitors are. If you go with the first type of content – informational, then check to see what other people are searching for.

5.1.2 What Type of Content Do People Search in Google?

Before actually starting to so SEO writing, your first step is to understand what type of content users want and Google encourages you to write. SEO and content go hand in hand.Usually, users search for something on search engines because they have a desire, and want to find answers and information.

Finding the reason behind it requires deeper SEO analysis and Google is using context to show better search intent results. And your job is to create the right type of content for your users and for Google to rank it.

We can agree that on a larger scale, there are three types of content:

TOFU content delivers informational content
MOFU content delivers transactional content
BOFU content delivers navigational content

In the screenshot below, you can see what each of these acronyms mean.

What is top of funnel content (TOFU)?

Top of the funnel content is that type of content that offers information and tries to teach the visitors, answers common questions or pain points. At this stage, you don’t try to sell to the visitor because you might risk losing them. At all costs, avoid commercial content for this audience. TOFU content is used mainly for attracting new prospects and build awareness.

What is middle of funnel content (MOFU)?

Middle of the funnel content lays between quality content that keeps the users informed and their understanding and need of your services or products. It is a key piece in your content marketing strategy. You can deliver MOFU content through case studies, personalized white paper that includes your business solutions, product reviews and best practices, discounts, webinars, events, surveys and so on.

What is bottom of funnel content (BOFU)?

Bottom of the funnel content is at the purchase level, where you have brand loyalty and users see in you their loved brand. It comes after TOFU content and MOFU content as validation for delivering valuable content that responded to your clients’ needs. It is the type of content where you nurture and convert your lead magnets into customers. With the right data, you can increase your conversion rate. BOFU content can have different forms, such as live demos, customer stories and personal reviews from clients, comparison products, new product or features launch and so on.

Your audience can be divided into all three stages of the buying funnel: top of funnel (TOFU), middle of funnel (MOFU) and bottom of funnel (BOFU). For each stage, there are specific triggers that pull the visitor down the funnel. And for that, you need to create content that will convert them.

Source: www.aweber.com

The perfect content needs to deliver information based on the stage of the content marketing funnel where your audience is. For that, you need to know what type of content works best for all those three stages.

5.1.3 Find (Evergreen) Content Topics That Pass the Test of Time

The second step in the research phase is finding topics that keep pulling people to your website. Usually, the articles that are evergreen have information that doesn’t alter in time. It is the type of content that solves a problem a lot of people is struggling with.

In the example above, I was talking about cronuts. For some, it might be an old story, but for others a new discovery. It is unique comparing to other types of deserts; it has two things into one. That type of product/topic might be what makes it last. When it first appeared in NYE, people stood in line for this hybrid. Nobody knew how it tasted, but everybody was intrigued. So the mystery draws attention and uniqueness keeps it alive. Word of mouth was a good trigger. The lesson here is that you need a topic that will engage the community.

You can draw attention to a dull product from a boring niche. You just need a creative idea.

There really is no such thing as a boring subject. Just boring, unimaginative writers.
	BEN HURT

You can create a recipe with steps and tips because, according to the research, there were lots of people who want to find out how to make a cronut. The basic recipe won’t change, but there will be variations to it. So people will go to basic before trying something new for the first time.

There are some other tricks you could use to take advantage of content immortality:

appeal to the historical evolution of a certain product/topic/service and so on;
create how-to guides or helpful documents;
make a list of frequently asked questions;
share best practices;
write strategies;
elaborate case studies, studies results and examples;
best of niche blogs, influencers, experts – for outreach;
explain the history of your business or your success story;
create correlations with other industries, find inspiring ideas.

I got my inspiration after I read an interesting blog post on the furniture store Furniture of Dalton’s blog, entitled Sofa Story: A Brief History of Ten Iconic Forms. And after reading it, I thought that article might be a very good example of how content evolved. And the Sofa Story can be correlated to content evolution, with a more visual effect.

In the early days, sofas were hard, harsh supports made out of stone, wood, steel and lots of other material without any cushion. Over time, they gained popularity, and some types of sofas started to become a little too tawdry, with lots of cushions until they made their way to a more contemporary soft seating in a range of styles.

Roman sofa made of Terracotta (form the second half 4th BC) displayed at Louvre

Grecian couch (from 1825) displayed at High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Modern sofa you can find in stores nowadays

If we were to compare it to content, it pretty easy to see the similarities; content started small, then there was the keyword stuffing era, and afterward, it got more accurate and harmonious.

You’ll have to study the competition and see what their focus is, to outrank them. Competition might be very high in some niches. The Keyword Explorer is here to guide you. For a specific query, the ones that we’ve discovered above, we can see the type of query we pursue – and easily get more insights on the user intent.

In our example, we have an informational query. Looking at the competitors, we can see what SEO pages are ranking. Skimming through the first ten pages, we find lots of cooking blogs, a video tutorial for a magazine (that ranks twice – once with the video from Youtube, and secondly with the article published on-site).

In this case, we see what our competitors are and get inspired by them. Since you are a business, you can write your pieces of content using more unconventional methods. Remember how important visuals are in this industry. Numbered, highlighted or bulleted steps make the recipe appear simpler and easier to make.

5.1.4 Double-Check for Duplicate Content on Your Site

Even though there’s no duplicate content penalty caused by content duplicate issues, it is quite damaging for your site. If Google finds duplicate content, it might not feature your piece of content in the search results. Google throws your content into something often called Google Omitted Results.

If you SPAM the web all the time, it might even consider not indexing your site anymore. And since nobody would want that, learn how to avoid having duplicate content on your site.

As a general rule of thumb, Google tries to display only 1 version of the same content.

Unfortunately, Google Search Console no longer allows you to see your duplicate content issues. Some time ago, this was possible, but Google “let go” of this old feature.

One way to detect duplicate content is to use the cognitiveSEO Site Audit Tool. The tool has a special section for that, where it automatically identifies any duplicate content issues. Therefore, you can quickly take a look at your duplicate pages, duplicate titles, descriptions, etc. More than that, the tool has a section that identifies near-duplicate pages and tells you the level of similarity between them.

5.2 Make a Summary List with All the Information Gathered

Once you’ve collected your focus keywords and the words and phrases recommended by the tool for your SEO article, you can make a list. A simple document is enough. My method is pretty simple and you can use it in your own writing process.

First, I write a topic or title (that will be modified when I finish the article).
Then, I add my focus keywords.
I have a section named ideas or a structure of the article, where I use bullet points for all sorts of information that I want to discuss. Here you can add all the ideas that you have and that you’ve discovered by looking at your competitors because our goal is to create the best piece of content there is out there. Use quotes with the source attached, save URLs, images and more.
Conclusion/final note – left in blank. This will be added only after I finish the article and I can sum up a final idea based on my findings.

Now you can start working on crafting the content template for your article. Would you follow a basic look or try to make it more attractive?

5.3. Craft a Content Template Having User Experience in Mind

Every article that you write needs to have a creative content template, a natural flow. If we go further with our example, the web content needs clean visuals – images, videos, gifs, and a very important step is to create a cover photo that approaches and has the title written on it. It is easier to share it on Facebook, Pinterest and more. If you can, create a longer picture – similar to an infographic picturing the final look of the desert, if we follow our example, and then the ingredients and steps you have to perform.

Make it simple and easy to follow. Here’s an example:

The way you structure your article is synced with the design of the website. That means the design of your website can make it easier or not to perform some magic tricks with your content. If you’re using an open-source content management system and not a customizable HTML website, such as WordPress, then it is easier to implement a layout.

Remember that Google likes bullets, numbers, structured data and very straightforward answers. This will help you win Google’s answer boxes as well, and you’ll get to be ranked on position zero on Google.

The way information is displayed has high importance. For a recipe, you need to have the first section with ingredients that need to be separated from the main body of the article. And visuals have a higher significance. Below you can see a good example you could inspire from.

Source: lifeloveandsugar.com

The trick of this page is that Print button which makes it easier for people to have it in physical format. Somebody really knows the audience and their behavior. When you cook, you make a lot of mess and a printed format of the recipe is a very good way to make the content more useful. Lindsay, the blogger of this website, got an extra point for this little feature because her content breaks the virtual space. UX is well applied to this recipe page.

User experience – the holy light that brightens the page and triggers the appreciation of the user. Depending on the type of content, there are some things you shouldn’t miss in order to keep the user and don’t scare them. Beside site speed and optimized images, you should also have sharing buttons (if possible for images have the Pin icon – if visuals have high importance, like in our example for pastries, desserts, and everything related to cooking, in general).

Some other elements that you should keep in mind are:

adaptable screen resolution;
simple font with reasonable size and line spacing;
separate sections of images and text, not overlapping content without white space;
user location integration for local personalization;

There’s an explanatory image of what UX means, created by Stephen P. Anderson, an internationally recognized speaker.

UX also means knowing your user and their behavior, so you can anticipate and give more freedom to use and read your content. Just like the example above, the print button is a great integration for recipe pages.

5.4 Include Tags in Title and Body

In SEO writing, besides content, the title also matters. And for that, there are lots of studies to back up.

Adding the keyword closer to the beginning of the title will give you high advantages. Firstly, because you can increase your click-through rate, as the user would like to click on titles that contain what they are looking for online. Secondly, this way you can avoid that the title to be changed by Google and have a different title shown in SERP. Google does this now. Depending on the search made by the user and what is found relevant on your page, the search result for your webpage as you know it can be altered by Google and you can get a different title and meta description.

Google is smart to understand what your page is about, but it is important you give it some hints.

If you offer good hints, then it will figure it out easier and reward your webpage with better SEO rankings.

The second thing to mention on this topic is the effect of keywords in the title. In one of our researches, we could see if adding the keyword in the title influence rankings. By evaluating titles analyzed in the research, we used 3 levels of similarity (low, medium and high) to spark some light into the discovery and extract data from the first 20 search engine ranking positions.

If we take a look at the chart results, we can’t really talk about a high correlation since the differences are pretty subtle. But we can surely get out some insights. For example, mainly the instances with a high similarity can be found for 1st ranking website. The red line is slightly bigger than the rest of the rankings. Moreover, there’s an overall decreasing trend form the 1st position until the 20th position. Which can mean only one thing:

Adding the keyword in the title can make a clear difference between ranking 1st or 2nd.

Another good intake is to try optimizing the title for multiple keywords, if possible. But don’t include keywords just for the sake of it.

Since we are talking about writing for SEO, you need to include tags to let search engines know how your piece is structured. Title tag has a high influence on your piece of content because it will be displayed as the big blue link in search engine results:

Title tags and headlines are really important because that’s the first thing the user sees. To create compelling titles, follow headline formulas and check out your competition. If you look at your competition, you can see how you can create better headlines and standout.

You need to have a relevant, engaging and attractive title to make the user click on it and stay on page. Also, don’t make a promise from the title that you can’t fulfill in the body content. There might be cases when Google rewrites your title tag with information from meta description and page content if Google doesn’t like the one you added. Chances are this won’t be as good as the one you’ve created, so you must ensure that your own title tag is completely relevant, descriptive, has the right length and the focus keyword phrases included.

There are some copywriting techniques you could follow for generating clickthrough rates:

Create actionable titles, asking the user’s question: What’s in it for me?
Use the brand leverage. For well-known brands, it is in their best interest to use the brand name in the title.
Don’t use title case.
Create unique title tags.
The body tag shouldn’t miss. You need to highlight that part and explain to the search engines where the main part of your content is. Where other tags are incorporated, such as heading tags (H1, H2, H3, ..H6), image alt descriptions. There are some other HTML elements that you should integrate for better optimization: URLs and meta descriptions.

5.5 Write In-Depth and Relevant Pieces of Content

Now that you know what type of content you should write, it’s time to actually start writing for SEO and most importantly for your users’ needs.

Google likes in-depth and relevant content.

Content creation is very important, as you already know. The key here is to always add high-quality content on your website. This will improve dwell time by keeping your visitors engaged.

Studies say longer posts are more often associated with better ranks. In one of our researches, it turned out that the top-ranking articles have around 2000 words.

Below you can see the results for the blog posts that have 1001-5000 number of words, amongst other categories.

As you can see the number of ranks decreases when the positions drop. The first 5 positions can be set apart from the rest of the pages. It seems that overall a higher number of words are correlated with higher ranks. That is suggested not only by the chart but also by the Pearson Correlation Coefficient, which indicates a very strong negative correlation (-0.9). The negative correlation means that, in general, longer posts are more often associated with better ranks.

5.6 Animate Your Text by Adding Images, Audio, Video Content

Video content can boost your content and increase your conversion rates. If we follow our previous example regarding cronuts, for the query “cronuts with puff pastry,” we have a website that ranks first with the video and then with a webpage where the video was embedded. If you take a look at the print screen below, you can see it ranks in Google both on the first (for video content) and eleventh positions.

SEO fact: Videos have a 41% higher click through rate than text.

In this case, the video tutorial can push the webpage higher in search engine rankings. Visual content appeals to emotion, creates intimacy, and engages the visitors. A Blue Corona study states that:

80% of consumers believe demonstration videos are helpful when making purchases.

If you decide to add video content to your webpage, my recommendation would be to use Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo to upload the video and then embed it into your page. This way, you’ll have it on two supports that can bring twice as many visitors.

5.7 Make Use of the Power of Internal Linking

Internal links provide extra value for a webpage and it is a powerful SEO copywriting tip. Here are the two main advantages:

Internal linking helps search engines understand your content.
It helps the users stay longer on the website and navigate to the topics of interest.

The best way to use internal links is when you are writing about something and want to bring extra explanations, and link to a page where you previously talked about that. For example, now, as I am explaining the internal linking power, I’ve linked to a page where we previously tackled the topic more in-depth.

A bad internal linking is a sign of bad architecture and you might risk misleading and confusing the user. Make sure you point to valuable, live and accurate pages and link to the proper anchor texts.

The process isn’t so hard. You should know the website pretty well, or at least search to find the proper article. And the more internal links you have, the more value Google will give it. You all know the saying, too much of anything isn’t good for anyone; it applies in this situation as well. Make sure you don’t overuse the method because too many links will drop the value on the page. There’s a limitation of 10-15 links for every 1,000 words written.

5.8 Make Your Content Mobile Friendly

It wasn’t long ago when Google rolled out the Mobile-first index. At that moment, things took a different turn. Basically, Google might show different search engine results on desktop compared to mobile. Now, Google’s system for crawling, indexing, and ranking for the desktop version of the website is different than Google’s system for those processes on mobile. Websites are bound to make the shift to a more mobile-focused index.

Google mobile-first indexing is about how we gather content, not about how content is ranked. Content gathered by mobile-first indexing has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet collected this way or desktop content. Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index.
	Google

When talking about mobile-friendliness, here are some ways to rank in mobile search results:

Create a responsive website and dynamic serving website;
Serve structured data for the desktop and mobile version;
Use the robots.txt testing tool to verify the mobile site;
Add your mobile site in Search Console;
Verify the crawl rate.

Source: developers.google.com

Mobile accounts for half of all global web pages served and we are on an ascending evolution regarding mobile searches. According to Statista, in 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3 percent in the previous year. Even if the mobile searches have experienced continuous growth, that doesn’t mean the desktop search decreased, but rather more people are using multiples devices to different actions and want to be always informed.

As of February 2017, mobile accounts for 65.1 percent of all web traffic in Asia and for 59.5 percent of all web traffic in Africa.

5.9 Create Google Friendly URLs

Some time ago, we performed an in-depth study on 34k Keywords to study the influence of titles and URLs in SERP. When we analyzed the URLs length to see which is the best format correlated with higher rankings, we saw that the more concise the URLs, the greater the chance to have higher rankings. Below you can see the chart with the extracted data:

As long as the title length is between 50-60 characters and the URL length is between 90-105, you’re safe. Having a concise URL length carries more benefits than having a long and not so easy to read or remember URL. If the URL and title contain the focus keyword, that is surely an advantage. But we’ll discuss this further on.

Of course, having a concise URL is helpful in all sorts of ways beyond the search results hierarchy. For instance, even if most casual users don’t bother remembering full URLs nowadays, it can still count as an advantage if you make it easy on the brain. Think about EMDs, for instance: instinctively, you are more likely to go with the URL that most resembles your thought process (“I need to find an electrical bicycle…. oh, looks: a site named just that”). The extra effort you can put into it is making sure that not only the homepage, but pretty much any page on your website has its URL fit in a neat number of characters (that, if too large to be easily remembered, can at least be short enough to be easily recognized).

5.10 Spread the Word

Content amplification is a powerful method to reach a wider audience and multiply your links by hundreds. Amplifying your content should be mandatory if you want people to know about it and increase your website traffic.

After you finish writing your article, the process shouldn’t stop. You have to create awareness around it and push it to other people who might be interested. We are not talking about traditional social media marketing or emailing. That’s not amplification. You can look at the amplification process as a way to strengthen the signals of your post.

Reach new audiences through native advertising;
Use storytelling to receive a social boost;
Build a solid community around your brand;
Use content syndication on Medium or similar websites to build your blog audience;
Collaborate with influencers to earn links;
Post on StumbleUpon and absorb targeted traffic;
Integrate promotion messages or buttons on your webpage.

6. How Important Is It to Update Content on My Website?

Updating existing content is highly important for Google due to its algorithm updates.

It’s 2019 and Google has a lot of Freshness Updates that focuses on providing the user with “fresher, more recent search results”. Google favors fresh content only for some specific queries that deserve freshness, widely known as QDF. QDF stands for Query Deserves Freshness. If a particular search phrase is a QDF, then Google will show up the most recent results.

SEO writing does’t mean just publishing new content, but also updating existing content. Updating a piece of content and adding new information can expand the number of keywords that page is targeting and thus result in more traffic. If you have a longer piece of content, you can try optimizing for multiple keywords and expand your traffic, your audience.

You should always keep your articles up to date. But not just with the date, with the information, the content itself, quality and relevancy!

The age of a web page or domain isn’t the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn’t change. In this case, the amount of change on your web page plays a role.
	CYRUS SHEPARD
	Owner @ Zyppy / @CyrusShepard

There are some things that will impact your rankings and they’re closely related to freshness:

CTR, which is a ranking factor.
Posting new content frequently might help you expand your search visibility by targeting new keywords.
The performance of your site’s domain, which is dictated by the number of unique domains that link to your website and by their quality.

7. Should I Delete Underperforming Content from My Site?

Mainly, you could delete content that is performing badly. There are lots of reasons why a piece of content doesn’t perform well. Maybe it is low quality or maybe you’ve applied some black hat strategies for it. Maybe you just tackled a topic that is of no interest for the user or, on the contrary, it is a highly competitive niche and you don’t have that 10x content and therefore, you can’t attract the user.

On the other side, deleting content might be tricky because you don’t know if you’ll ever need that content again or weather it will be relevant at some point. A better option would be to deindex it by adding a rel=“noindex” to those pages. You removed them from SERP, but you can still see them in the admin page. Deindexing is safer and easier. Or you can “noindex, follow” which will tell the robot to noindex, but the user can still access if they know the link through the follow tag.

Before deciding and taking such a drastic measure, you’ll have to perform a content audit, see how your content ranks, see if the information is still valuable and not outdated. We did a major clean-up on the cognitiveSEO blog by following the next content strategy:

We identified low-performance articles by looking mainly at the ranking position, bounce rate, engagement, search traffic.
We decided on the content that needs to be pruned: we had to choose if we leave it as it is, redirect or do a quality review (deindex or delete).
The quality review also included link building for some articles, re-optimization for getting the best content there is for that topic on the web and improving the content performance score.

We even talked with lots of SEO experts that experience content pruning and most of them saw a high increase in organic traffic after they cleaned their website. You can check the case studies and our content pruning story here.

Below you can see the search visibility for the cognitiveSEO website after the content pruning strategy. Of course, meanwhile we kept on writing well optimized articles for both users and search engines, therefore there is not a direct correlation between the growth and content pruning, but most likely, it helped.

There are 3 actions you can take, based on the type of content you have:

Deindex content that performs poorly and yet serves a purpose to your users. Therefore, it won’t show up in search results, yet users will still be able to access it.
Delete content that brings no valuable information to the user and is performing badly.
Redirect the URL if you decide to delete specific pages or repurpose them. It is crucial to redirect the traffic and users to relevant and valuable content, so you don’t have broken pages and lose a lot of links. In this manner, you can repurpose the deleted pages.

To answer the question: Should I delete underperforming content from my site? A better answer would be: repurpose it instead of deleting it. Repurposing content is a highly appreciated white hat strategy. Adding fresh content to make it the best there is, re-optimizing the content for multiple keywords might help your website’s rankings and increase its value.

We’ve compressed our guideline by talking about the crucial elements that cannot miss from your SEO writing process in 2020 and beyond. Keep in mind some of the SEO friendly content pillars like contextuality, mobile-friendliness, HTML tags, evergreen roots, user experience principles, video correlation. Writing for search engine optimization purposes can be difficult and can become a hard-handed job. Yet, you can save any limping piece of content you might have with the strategies explained above. Every well-invested action will bring you results so best of luck in writing high-performing pieces of content. While it’s true that you might not be able to get to position one without any backlinks for a highly competitive keyword, you’ll definitely be able to increase your rankings in Google just by optimizing your content and having in place a great SEO content strategy.

The post SEO Writing for Copywriters → The Ultimate Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

JavaScript Crawling for Better & More Accurate Site Audits

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 10:22:57 +0000

There are over 1.5 billion web sites in the world, and JavaScript is used on 95% of them.

With no additional introduction to the importance of performing an in-depth SEO analysis on your site, regardless of the programming language it uses, we are proud to tell you that starting today, cognitiveSEO can crawl and perform in-depth site audits on all types of websites, JavaScript generated sites included.

With so many sites using content generated with JavaScript, you might feel that there is no need to highlight the importance of JS. Yet, with so many changes happening in the world wide web, it is safe to assume that one might not be up to date with everything that is happening in web development. However, using JavaScript highly impacts business and its SEO strategy; therefore, being able to run site audits on all types of sites is a must these days.

So, indulge us to talk a bit about the importance of JavaScript Crawling, about how to run a site audit on JS generated sites within cognitiveSEO and how JavaScript affects SEO.

Find All Possible SEO Issues on JavaScript Websites

As we mentioned before, cognitiveSEO has just added a brand new feature: the possibility of crawling & analyzing JavaScript websites.

You can find all the possible technical and SEO issues a site may have and get recommendations on how to fix them.

cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit analyzes the technical health of your JavaScript website and helps you detect all the weak points of your website before your users do, giving you a competitive advantage on the competitive market we are swimming in. The SEO Audit Tool crawls all the pages it finds on a website, be it JavaScript or not, regardless of the size of your website, and provides a fully customized set of data easy to comprehend and visualize.

The truth is that with the ever-evolving search engine algorithms you need an efficient solution to keep your rankings safe. And cognitiveSEO does exactly that: it lets you know all the issues that might prevent your online business from getting the organic traffic and the high rankings you deserve.

You can set JavaScript crawling for any site with literally one click: simply enable the JavaScript crawling functionality from the editing section and you’re all set.

Of course, along with this functionality, there are dozens of other customizations you can add to your site audit so it can best respond to your needs: crawl structure, when to crawl, what to crawl, crawl sources, etc. Anything you need to perform a site audit as accurate and reliable as possible.

Performing a complete JavaSscript website audit will give you a deeper understanding of why your site is not generating the organic traffic you think it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving. This kind of website audit gives you a much wider array of SEO items to look at and can analyze issues of all types that might prevent you from reaching your best possible ranking.

Why Is JavaScript Crawling So Important?

There are tons of websites using JS and it’s easy to understand why this happens. Using JavaScript in designing and building websites is very popular as it makes it possible to create interactive and dynamic content. Visual animations, navigation, displaying dynamic content to users based on specific behaviors are just a few of the things that can be done with JavaScript.

Yet, analyzing a JavaScript website is not always a walk in the park. It requires a lot of resources and in-depth analyses. Luckily, you don’t need to worry about this anymore as you can run complete Site Audits within cognitiveSEO, on all types of websites.

Here are just some of the advantages of enabling JavaScript crawling when running a Site Audit:

You’ll get a more accurate analysis and you’ll have better issues identification.

Many sites use JavaScript generated content, be it completely or partially. Even if your site has only a couple of elements generated with JS, it is highly important to get those sections analyzed as well. It’s always the small pieces that make the bigger picture.

You can find out how crawlable your pages are with and without JavaScript rendering enabled.

JavaScript analysis is the closest thing you get to what your users actually see within their browsers. You can run an SEO audit, with and without JS enabled and see the differences for yourself.

You can analyze a wider range of websites.

So, let’s say that you want a really cool site template, with a dandy interface, so you choose to create your site using Wix, for instance. That’s awesome! The downside is that in most of the instances you’ll hardly find possibilities of completely analyzing all the technical and SEO issues your site might have. Yet, the JavaScript crawling gets things done for you, allowing you to analyze sites built with different platforms and programming languages.

What Is JavaScript and How Does it Work?

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages to develop websites. It uses frameworks to create interactive web pages by controlling the behavior of different elements on the page.

Initially, JS frameworks were implemented client-side (front-end) only in browsers, but now the code is embedded in other host software, such as server-side (back-end) in web servers and databases, which will save you from a lot of trouble and pain. The problems started when JavaScript implementation relied only on client-side rendering.

If JavaScript frameworks have server-side rendering, you’ve already solved the problem before it even arises. To better understand exactly why problems appear and how you can avoid them, it is important to have some basic knowledge of how search engines work. For that, we need to establish the phases of the information retrieval process: crawling, indexing, and ranking.

How JavaScript Affects SEO

If you want to find out more about the impact of JavaScript on SEO, you need to know that we wrote a more exhaustive piece of content on JavaScript and SEO.

JavaScript means more loading time speed and faster server load (code functions run immediately instead of waiting for the server to answer), easier implementation, richer interfaces and higher versatility (can be used in a huge variety of applications). But JavaScript SEO brings some problems along the way. Lots of webmasters fail to optimize the content that uses JavaScript code. And this is (most likely) because they don’t have a complete site audit overview.

Everybody started to doubt whether search engines, like Google, are able to crawl JavaScript. And that was the wrong question to ask. The better question to ask is can search engines parse and understand the content rendered by Javascript? In other words, can Google rank your website if it’s made in JavaScript? The truth is that more and more websites are relying on JavaScript, so search engines have improved their page rendering functionality.

Even if not completely maybe, it’s important to know that Google is able to crawl and index the rendered version of pages as well as the HTML version.

So, the questions that pop out are:

“Does Google crawl JavaScript?” The answer is more and more lately.
“Does Google index JavaScript?” The answer is yes.
“Should I use JavaScript?” The answer is it depends on your needs.

A JS website is indexed and ranked. We’ve learned things the hard way until now. We know that making it easier for Google to understand the generated content is the best approach. To help Google rank content that uses JavaScript, you need tools and plugins to make it SEO friendly. And you need a comprehensive SEO analysis to make sure your site is performing as well as it can.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, we know. You need to know that JavaScript uses up crawl budget as Google requires more resources to render, crawl and index JS websites, adding a layer of complexity to the process. Moreover, JavaScript can be hard to combine with good SEO.

Yet, regardless of all these matters, keep in mind that a good SEO Audit can save you from lots of bigger troubles; and since you now have the possibility of performing audits on all types of sites, JS included, you have no excuses for not performing a Site Audit right now.

The post JavaScript Crawling for Better & More Accurate Site Audits appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Google BERT Update. How the Natural Language Algorithm Affects You

Cornelia Cozmiuc — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 11:10:49 +0000

Just last week Google made waves with its announcement of quantum supremacy – the claim that they have developed a quantum computer that has been demonstrated to solve, in a matter of days, a problem that a “classic” supercomputer would most likely take thousands of years to solve. Elsewhere, stories about robots taking our jobs abound, while machine learning seems to be on everyone’s mind.

But change is not always flashy or even visible. Last week, Google introduced a new update named BERT, which is characterized as a massive and the biggest step forward for search in the past 5 years, as well as one of the biggest steps forward in the history of search altogether. Yet, look and ask around in the SEO community and you’ll see very little that announces as much. Also, it is not yet very clear what Google’s BERT is targeting and how will the SEO landscape be influenced by this big update. So, let’s figure it all out!

What Is Google BERT Update?
What Is Google BERT Targeting?
Does Google BERT Affect SEO?
Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s the title of a novel by visionary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. If it doesn’t sound familiar, you might better recognize it under its movie adaptation title, Blade Runner. Both book and movie concern themselves with questions on what it means to be human in an ever more technological world and how to (still) distinguish between humans and androids. 2014 indie sci-fi Ex-Machina, by director Alex Garland, asks a similar question by referencing the concept of the Turing test: if a robot were to pass as human to every other human in the universe, would it still be a robot? These are fascinating questions and luckily we can still ponder about them in sci-fi literature and film. We’re not there yet in real life, although one has to wonder how long will it take until the more trivial “I Am Not a Robot” captcha will get checked by a robot (it has).

Even though we are still far away from sheep-dreaming androids, we’re seeing constant progress in the way of more human-like computer interactions.

What Is the Google BERT Update?

Putting it simply, Google BERT is supposed to help a machine understand what the words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.

Yet, to respond to the question what does BERT mean? we need to talk in a more explanatory note.

BERT, which is what the latest and the biggest Google algorithm update is called, stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing.

So, is BERT a language model? (geeky alert ahead)

Yes, we can say that it is a language model. Yet, you need to know that even if BERT is a new concept, is not hot new. The BERT concept was made public in 2018, in a paper published by researchers at Google Artificial Intelligence Language.

According to Google researchers, “unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide
range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.”

Language model pre-training has been shown to be effective for improving many natural language processing tasks. These include sentence-level tasks such as natural language inference and paraphrasing, which aim to predict the relationships between sentences by analyzing them holistically, as well as token-level tasks such as named entity recognition and question answering, where models are required to produce fine-grained output at the token level.

If we were to ask Google what the BERT name means, we’ll get to see a range of interesting results. In all fairness, my search query was for “bert name”, nothing related to the update. Yet, if we’re looking at the “people also ask section”, we get three different pieces of information. Not contradictory, not opposite, but different which might translate in confusion for the user. Will the BERT algorithm update solve this matter? Let’s pursue our investigation to find out.

Fun Fact: The Google BERT Update was launched on October 25, the same day Kanye West launched its latest album, Jesus Is King.

What Is Google BERT Targeting?

By Google’s own estimates, BERT update will affect 10% of all queries. That’s a tremendous percentage, but it might not have caused a visible splash by SEO community standards. That’s most likely because the update focuses on “longer, more conversational queries”, whereas these longer tail queries are queries that (probably) SEOs don’t target as much in a heavy way.

If that last part sounds familiar, it might be because it’s not too far off from our recent discussions about search intent. The basic question is, then, what does the user really want to find out? There are quite a few examples out there illustrating the difference that BERT made.

Search Engine Journal provides an example of BERT understanding, using the phrase “how to catch a cow fishing,” which has nothing to do with the image that may be conjured in your head right now (or in the picture below) and everything to do with a very particular sense of the word “cow” in relation to fishing, referring to a large striped bass.

Google itself offers some examples of queries which would have been pretty clear in intent to a human conversation partner (e.g.: “2019 brazil traveler to usa needed a visa,” and “do estheticians stand a lot at work”), but were previous to the update entirely lost on Google, based on the results it displayed.

By applying the BERT models to both rankings and featured snippets in Search, Google pretends to be able to do a much better job, helping users find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in the query. And users can search in a way that feels natural for them.

In an article from 2018, Rani Horev predicted BERT’s importance. As he stated, BERT will improve search and is undoubtedly a breakthrough in the use of Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing. The fact that it’s approachable and allows fast fine-tuning will likely allow a wide range of practical applications in the future. Follow KDnuggets for more information and resources on AI, Data Science, and Machine Learning.

Does Google BERT Affect SEO?

Yes, the BERT update affects SEO and allow me to explain why.

SEO – Search engine optimization is the process of making your site better for search engines. Therefore, any update that the search engines are making to their algorithm influences the search engine optimization process.

Now, the question that remains is what can you do to optimize for the BERT update?

If we listen to Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison, who helps people better understand search and helps Google better hear public feedback, the answer is pretty straightforward: nothing new. What Danny actually highlights is that there is nothing that you should do from today on that you shouldn’t have done before BERT. And that is: write content for users.

We hope that there is no doubt for anyone that Google has been focusing on content for a couple of years (here’s a case study on Panda 4 update, which targeted content big time and affected lots of important websites). And we don’t want to re-iterate the “content is king” nor to over-highlight the importance of writing both SEO and user-friendly content. Yet, let’s try to understand where SEO is standing now in the context of BERT.

We believe that two main aspects need to be taken into consideration when we ask ourselves how the latest Google Update influence SEO.

Identify and Optimize for the Right User’ Search Intent

In the BERT training process, the model receives pairs of sentences as input and learns to predict if the second sentence in the pair is the subsequent sentence in the original document. So, the algorithm is trying to better understand the user’s needs, even to predict them if and when possible.

Google BERT update tries to (even) better understand the users’ search intent.

Search intent or keyword intent is the reason why people conduct a specific search. Why are they searching? What are they trying to achieve through their search? Are they trying to figure out the answer to a question or do they want to reach a specific website?

With the increasing use of mobile and voice search, where people need fast and contextual answers to their questions, Google tries to become more and more able to determine the search intent of people. So, the whole Google SERP is now trying to best fit the search intent and not the exact searched keyword. Now, more than ever, there will be situations when the exact searched term will not even be included in the Google search results page. And this happens because Google has become better and better at determining the search intent of people.

Google has to figure out what exactly do people want, so it can offer them the search engine page results they need. And, from an SEO point of view, your job is to create content that is relevant to the Google users and matches their search intent.

Not to linger on this anymore, remember that search intent is more important than ever.

Optimize for Featured Snippets

Google stated that BERT is about users’ natural language and understanding longer queries. What Google tries to highlight with the focus on featured snippets is that searcher intent is to find content that responds exactly to the this question really quick.

Featured Snippets (also known as answer boxes, knowledge graphs or Google direct answers). If you’re searching for something like “how many calories does an apple have”, you’ll get a direct answer, highlighted within a box, just like in the examples below. We did a really cool research on answer boxes a while ago; you should check it out.

Also, with the BERT update, Google focused on showing even more relevant featured snippets. To better understand what this improvement is all about, we are given the example the featured snippet for the query parking on a hill with no curb. Before, Google used to place too much importance on the word “curb” and ignored the word “no”, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately respond to this query. So they would return results for parking on a hill with a curb. This latest update seems to fix this matter, as the search engine better understands the query and the context.

But how should you optimize for the featured snippets or answer boxes? Well, here is where content steps in, so keep on reading.

Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

Yes, Google stated that content is even more important, and therefore, one should focus their full attention on writing content relevant for the user.

By definition, content marketing implies creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. And Google’s featured snippet seems to endorse that. And since Google announced that it had leveraged its pre-trained language model BERT to dramatically improve the understanding of search queries, it’s clear that content marketing needs to comply with this biggest leap forward in the history of search.

As Google better understands natural language, focusing on longer tail keywords and on featured snippets, it’s clear that there are big opportunities for content writers to serve their readers with content written more “humanly”, that answers a searcher’s question as quick as possible and provides much value.

Leaving the theory aside, here are the steps you should take to write content that is relevant for your users but also content that will rank high so that your users will find it.

Step 1. Perform a Google SERP analysis

Every keyword research or content optimization process should start with a SERP analysis together with a competitor analysis. The Ranking Analysis from the Content Optimizer Tool gives you tons of insights related to the analyzed keyword. Quick and easy, you get to know the search volumes, what type of content ranks on that keyword, how difficult it is to rank on that query (by following keyword difficulty), as well as how popular that keyword is among searchers. Also, the tool lets you know the exact keywords and links that boosted that page in the top Google results to easily optimize your content.

Step 2. Create relevant & optimized content

Content Optimizer does most of the job for you. I know I’m biased and I don’t want to praise the tool too much, but the reality is that it does most of the job for you. Once you performed the ranking analysis, what you need to do is start writing a new piece of content or optimize the existing one and the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you need to use so your content will be relevant for the user’s search intent.

Remember, you need to write for humans. BERT seems to make Google understand even better the searcher’s queries, so you have no excuses.
And if you’re asking why do you need a tool to “write for humans” I’d tell you that a tool can give you lots of insights of what you’re users are actually interested in and you can write content that will answer their needs; and secondly, your users need to find your content first on the first Google page result to access it.

Step 3. Discover new keywords & rankings opportunities

You don’t have to limit yourself to one targeted keyword; you need to discover other queries that your users might be interested in. Searchers have more than one question when it comes to products from your business. Take the opportunity and offer them relevant content for most of their questions. You can use the same Content Optimizer for this task. The tool has two sections that will automatically let you know what other questions are related to your search query:

The Keyword Explorer – this section is great for keyword analysis and for discovering new keyword opportunities. It also gives you the possibility of seeing only the question suggestions. Get inspired by the list of questions, check out the relevancy of the question, its volume, CPC (cost per click), and choose the one that is the most suitable and profitable.

The People Also Ask section – the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you should use in your content, what people are searching for, but it will also offer you a set of questions that relate to your original search query. You should consider answering these questions in your content or create new content starting from these questions.

Although BERT integration in Google Search is currently only available for English queries in the US, Google says it is planning to apply BERT to additional languages and locations. So the rest of the world won’t have to wait too long until BERT will be responsible for the searches in dozens of languages.

When applied to ranking and featured snippets in search, BERT models can process words in relation to all other words in a sentence rather than considering them one-by-one and in order. This enables a better “understanding” of context, which is particularly helpful when it comes to longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions strongly affect meaning. This brings huge opportunities to the search world and big challenges to SEOs and digital marketers.

And while the performance improvements are impressive, Google acknowledges that natural language understanding remains an ongoing challenge. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t adapt their marketing strategy or should re-think their marketing automation and SEO strategies to comply to today’s search marketing requirements. Yet, with search engines becoming more and more complex, there are no “complete guides” or “tips and tricks” lists to optimize for BERT or any other future updates (most likely). You need to keep yourself updated and have the user in mind no matter what you do.

The post Google BERT Update. How the Natural Language Algorithm Affects You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Cornelia Cozmiuc – SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies

Do Hashtags Influence SEO? Here’s How to Rank High Using Hashtags

1. What Is a Hashtag and How It Was Born

2. How To Rank High on Social Media Using Hashtags

How To Use Hashtags on Twitter for Maximum Engagement

Instagram and Hashtags – A Story of Power and Charm

Do Facebook Hashtags Offer Enough Exposure?

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Why You Should Double Down On Hashtags

Conclusion

13 Things We Learned from 10 Years of Writing SEO Friendly Blog Posts

Optimize Everything from URLs to Conclusions

Don’t Assume Anything! Check Grammar, Facts, Quotes

Being Consistent Is Difficult. It’s Also the Key to Success

Originality Is Good, but so Is Content Update

Google Algorithms Come and Go, Quality Content Stays

Creativity Is A Lot of Hard Work

Questions Are More Useful than Answers

Forget Academic Writing

Solve Your Readers’ Problems, not Your Dilemmas

The Title of the Article Will Influence Its Performance

Write Less but Write Better

Write Less, Promote More

Stick to Your Principles

40 Most Effective Digital Marketing Tactics and Techniques in 2024

I. Content Marketing

II. Search Marketing

III. Social Media Marketing

IV. Email Marketing

V. PPC & Paid Advertising

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Conclusion

Content Marketing Services | The Complete List for a Successful Digital Strategy

Content Marketing Strategy

Use Keyword Research Tools

Check the Top-of-mind Keywords

Look for Seed Keywords to the Keyword Explorer or Google Keyword Planner to Get New Ideas

Prioritize the Keywords You Want to Rank For