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.

Jibran Qazi is an SEO consultant, growth hacker, and founder of Hunter Canada, a company that helps tech firms achieve exponential traffic growth. Enjoy his story, written and documented by himself, and see how he managed to grow an app in the Fintech space, increasing its number of monthly visitors from 4000 to 420K+ in just 6 months.  All organic traffic from Google, no PPC, no paid ads.

1. Success Story of 420K+ visitors increase 
   1. Social Proof
   2. The Numbers
   3. First 30 Days
   4. First 60 days (2 months)
   5. First 120 Days (4 Months)
   6. First 180 Days (6 months)
2. How To Get Exponential Results For Your Own Site
3. The SEO Process
   1. Negative SEO Check on Main (Mysite.com) + Subdomains
   2. Build Citations
   3. Add Your Link to Reliable Directory
   4. Add Text
   5. Moving Forward
   6. Using Phrases As Anchor Text
4. The Link Building Strategy
   1. Forget About NoFollow Links
5. Conclusion

1. Success Story of 420K+ visitors increase 

The length of our contract was 6 months which started on May 29th, 2018 and ended on Nov 29, 2018.

Let’s start with some social proof, shall we:

1.1 Social Proof

If you zoom into the email, you’ll see I got them on the first page for “Invoice” and “Receipt”.  Two massive keywords. Not sure if they are still there but during that time, they sure were.

1.2 The Numbers

For obvious reasons, I can’t share the exact numbers but this should give you an idea.

Which lead to over 350K downloads of their app.

Let’s break down the month by month increase.

1.3 First 30 Days

Success to these guys was a 30% increase in the first 3-6 months. I handed this to them in the first 30 days.

In fact, I more than doubled it. Over 60%.

1.4 First 60 days (2 months)

During these months and pretty much every month after I started, the growth was (As expected) simply exponential.

370%+ increase in traffic in just 2 months.

Over 1200%+ increase in just 3 months.

1.5 First 120 Days (4 Months)

Over 3000%+ increase in traffic. In fact, this was the first time the traffic went over 140K.

1.6 First 180 Days (6 months)

This is where I took them over 8000% in organic growth and had over 420k people in total. All in 6 months.

2. How To Get Exponential Results For Your Own Site

To get such results in your own niche, you must rank for some high volume keywords. I got this Fintech company on the first page for the following massive keywords:

• Invoice;
• Receipt;

Considering they weren’t even close when I benchmarked everything in the beginning, these are pretty solid results.

I literally beat out sites like Wikipedia, Shopify, Office.com and many more established sites with massive advertising budgets.

3. The SEO Process

Since I can’t share exactly what I did for legal reasons, let me share some “general tips”. I just applied my 3 step formula again:

1. Fix what’s wrong (Site Architecture).
2. Optimize Site (On-Page SEO).
3. Build Links (Starts from day 1).

If you’re new to SEO, or not sure what ‘link juice’ is, start here.

The only difference is instead of approaching these steps in a sequence, you should perform all 3 steps at the same time in a holistic way.

Now you can use lots of tools for the first two steps (Depends on your preference really) but the main one that really helped me get this site (Plus my other clients/sites) to the next level was hands down, Cognitive SEO.

Here’s why:

• If you want the deepest backlink data, there is just no comparison.
• For the past 3 years, I’ve been using it for the initial NegSEO cleanup and then ongoing monitoring.
• When I’m considering getting a backlink from somewhere which looks a little odd, CognitiveSEO allows me to take a deeper look.

Guys, the thing is if you want great results, you have to use quality tools. CognitiveSEO is one of them. So generally speaking, here is how you should usually approach a site.

3.1 NegSEO Check on Main (Mysite.com) + Subdomains (help.mysite.com)

Always do a NegSEO check on your main domain and any subdomains first. Sometimes spammy links from your subdomains can kill your traffic over time. I love how CognitiveSEO allows me to look up subdomains for NegSEO as well. Very important.

When disavowing, always make sure you manually check the metrics of the sites you want to disavow. Sometimes you can disavow good ones as well and that could hurt you a lot.

There is a world of difference between a spammy site vs a low quality site. You need to disavow spammy site not low quality sites.

According to Cognitive SEO, 97% of Google is made of low-quality sites. Check out Google’s very own backlink profile below:

3.2 Build Citations

Citations are links from local business directories. It is surprising how so many businesses (Established or not), have not paid any attention to these.

Quality citations are a great source for backlinks and another great way of diversifying your backlink profile.

3.3 Add Your Link to JoeAnt

If there is one directory that I swear by to this day, it is JoeAnt. Love how they’ve maintained their quality throughout all these years. So always make sure you are present on JoeAnt.

It will give your site two things. A quality backlink and another diverse source that your backlinks is coming from. In this case, it would be from a directory.

3.4 Add Text

Try your best to turn your main pages (Pages you want to rank), into long copy.

These days, you need to have around 3000+ words. You don’t have to do it right away but keep adding text little by little.

3.5 Moving Forward

Most of these changes that I’ve mentioned here take the first 30-60 days. Usually 60 days as all the changes you are making need to get re-indexed as well. I used a service called One Hour Indexing for this.

Oh wait … What about backlinks?

Again, nothing special here either. Just you typical, manual, white hat link building (Blog comments, Forums, Directories, etc).

When it comes to SEO, it’s link building that takes most of my time. 2-4 hours a day at the very least. I recommend getting 15-20 links a month and see how your site reacts to it. Then you adjust your numbers accordingly. That’s really it.

3.6 Using Phrases As Anchor Text

Forget about one or two-word anchor texts. Most of the anchor texts that I use are between 5 to 7 words. Yes you read that right. It looks natural and it works.

In most cases, using the keywords isn’t necessary either.

4. The Link Building Strategy

Now, this is something I haven’t seen anyone discuss so I would like to share this. After finding quality link opportunities, where and how do you point them?

Well first, never link to the homepage. As the homepage usually already has enough links coming in. I’ve read case studies where they only link to the homepage and get great results. Like I said earlier, everyone has their own style and this is what has worked for me.

Once I reach the top, I randomize this pattern every 30 days so it all looks natural for Google as well. Think of link building as putting different coats of paint. Just make sure each coat (link building cycle) is different.

4.1 Forget About NoFollow Links

Forget about NoFollow or not. Just get links that fall in your pre-determined metric’s range (One I mentioned above).

You need both kinds of links (Heck I say get all kinds of links from all kinds of CMS’s) so you get quality links from diverse sources. That’s the key to successful link building.

Please stop ignoring ‘NoFollow’ links. If they are coming from a good authoritative place, get them. Nofollow links from Forbes or Wikipedia are still world-class links. Never check if a backlink is NoFollow or not. Haven’t done that in ages.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, if you do the following, you’ll get great results:

• Pay attention to where and how the ‘link juice’ of a site flows. Be obsessed with link juice.
• Make smart changes that work for you and Google. A healthy balance here can always be achieved.
• Write about things your competitors aren’t.
• Never stop getting backlinks.
• Use proper tools to get a deeper look at your backlinks (Current and the ones that you want to acquire).
• Run your own tests.

That’s pretty much it.

Disclaimer

This is not a paid post. cognitiveSEO made no agreement with the author.
This is Jibran’s success story, written and documented by himself.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.

About the author

  Jibran Qazi is an SEO consultant, growth hacker, and founder of Hunter Canada, a company that helps tech firms achieve exponential growth. 

The post How A Company from the Fintech’ Space Grew from 4000 to 420K Visitors in Just 6 Months appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Jim Miller is an e-commerce consultant, and founder of Salesbloom, who collaborates with world-renowned marketing gurus. Enjoy his story, written and documented by himself, and see how we hit the Google’s top SERP spots with no backlinks but with a good content optimization.

Over a six to nine month period using the content assistant optimization tool, I have seen numerous pages swiftly develop and rank to the highest pages of Google. So getting traffic without building backlinks can be achieved with the right content strategy.

This case study was composed to help share the success I had for my client.

1. Why This Ought to Work For You?
2. How We Hit the Google’s Top SERP Spots
   1. Step 1: Find Existing Content to Improve
   2. Step 2: Search for the Main Keyword with Cognitive’s Keyword Tool
   3. Step 3: Optimise with Content Assistant
   4. Step 4: Fetch URL within Google Search Console
3. Results

Why This Ought to Work For You?

Working behind the scenes with some of the fastest developing agencies in marketing, you encounter conflicting strategies both internally and externally, which promise to improve your client’s rankings.

I’m a firm believer in testing everything before foolishly trusting any information from whoever it may be, whether an influencer, agency or otherwise, so I work behind the scenes to know what actually works.

Years ago, I cracked an algorithm on eBay’s search engine with one of my first career positions, taking a small (and I do mean small) local footwear retailer from £10k online sales per month to £250k (£450,000 Christmas Peak).

All in just under six months!

Yes, it’s true – and this included outselling retail giants like ‘Barretts’, ‘Office’ and ‘Schuh’- and all without a penny of a marketing budget!

I’ve never had the luxury of limitless budgets (and I prefer not to either as the constraints bring out the best in me). Having a typically micro-budget (maybe being a tad frugal as well), I’m always hesitant to pick something like ‘Marketmuse’ and put my house on the market for a taste!

Being overworked (and a little disorganized if I’m honest at the time) necessitated a search for a timesaving tool for obtaining the broader metrics or overarching topics and keywords which help others rank more highly. It was then that I came across Cognitive’s Content Assistant tool – though at that time it took a little digging as the software was so new.

Cognitive’s content assistant tool allowed me the opportunity to see correlated topics and missing keywords that enable the content to shine through. I’m not a natural writer, I rely on others to help me edit my thoughts as many e-commerce consultants do. I might add that my thoughts are not always that easy to convey, so this tool was an immense help.

I found the experience when using the Cognitive SEO to be intuitive in the main, simple to use and then ideal to communicate to others.
	Jim Miller
	Founder of Salesbloom | @salesbloomuk

Now at Salesbloom, we constantly develop existing content using Cognitive and produce new articles within the same content writing process.

Here’s how we did it (as I’m honest enough to say I have great colleagues too!) …

How We Hit the Google’s Top SERP Spots

If you’ve never used Cognitive or unless you’re comfortable enough to drop into the Google Search console,  it’s worth tracking your existing content’s keyword positions with Rank Tracker before you start.

The first things to do are:

• Find existing content you determine needs to be improved upon.
• Search for the main keyword with the ‘Cognitive Keyword Tool’.
• Optimize your content with ‘Content Assistant’.
• Fetch URL within Google Search Console

Step 1: Find Existing Content to Improve

One of the best positions to start from is by finding pages with keywords or queries that currently rank outside the top five spots on Google.

The ‘sweet spot’ is choosing keywords that sit in position 4 up to 30.  As you can see, the blue line above did brilliantly!

Step 2: Search for the Main Keyword with Cognitive’s Keyword Tool

Pick your head term or the keyword you want to rank for and search with the keyword tool. On the example below, I chose “SEO agency” as my keyword phrase.

Feel free to pick any keyword and page you like as I’ve had success with category pages on e-commerce websites, homepages and blog articles.

Make note of the average content performance score. The goal is to beat that on your optimization round. ( I suggest you open a new Google doc and add it at the top to remind you of your target)

It’s good to pull out the relevancy scores and consider any that score higher than 3 stars. Create your new content so it reads well, and without worrying about keyphrases initially. Once you’ve done that, copy the list of keywords that Cognitive suggests and work out a structure for your article based upon the 3-5 star terms.

GO FOR GOLD.

Never strive to be average at anything.
	Jim Miller
	Founder of Salesbloom | @salesbloomuk

Take a peek at the ranking analysis tab next to see how you are performing before you continue.

It’s a good idea to see what competitor pages do on the look and feel of the page for content flow. Google ‘likes’ these sites for a reason so it’s a ‘no-brainer’. (Ultimately, it’s because the visitors do as well!)

The action to take for this example is: Write a 700-4000 word content piece that beats 69.

Step 3: Optimise with Content Assistant

Once you’ve gone into the Content Assistant,  press the top right, ‘Import link’ if it’s an existing page (and yes, it can even score raw code). Otherwise, copy and paste your content into the relevant sections and hit ‘Check Score’.

This site is new so typically it’s not going to score well yet, but if you export the list and scroll down on the right-hand side you now have keywords to export and use. You do have the option to amend the copy on the left-hand-side in real time, but each check of the score reduces your overall monthly allowance. 

I prefer to optimize outside in a Google document file so as to not squeeze keywords in when they are not needed, and to ensure your article or post still reads well. Repeat each process, and once you feel you’ve done a good job hopefully, you’ve beaten your competition’s score. If not, take a step back and see where your content can be improved.

Step 4: Fetch URL within Google Search Console

Login to Google Search Console and retrieve the revised URL.

(I’m not convinced this speeds it up, but it’s a habit I now do every time).

Results

Results can be manipulated but these graphs illustrate this type of content is not reliant upon seasonal wins or easy pickings. That alone should encourage you to test this for yourself, based on my findings.

The first piece of content below was devised for a SAAS company which has grown from zero to almost 7,000 clicks in a year.

This, with no backlinks or promotion: Pure organic traffic gain.

Some keywords can take longer to develop (as below) but site traffic appears when you produce good content via the ‘Content Assistant’.

Here’s another blog article created and developing nicely below. Perfect for a revisit within a year turnaround.

Here’s a comparison (below) for much older content.

To reiterate, I’m not going for easy choices on keywords. To my mind, there aren’t many anyway, but the example above is recently optimized and shows positive progress in a short period.

Disclaimer

This is not a paid post. cognitiveSEO made no agreement with the author.
This is Salesbloom’s and Jim’s success story, written and documented by himself.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.

About the author

 Jim Miller is an e-commerce consultant, and founder of Salesbloom, who collaborates with world-renowned marketing gurus such as Neil Patel and Eric Siu on internal projects.

The post How Salesbloom Builds Excellent Traffic Without Backlinks appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

1. Website Speed as a Ranking Factor
2. Reducing the Image File Size Using the Lossy and Lossless Compression Techniques
3. Case Study – Image Compression Tools Tested to the Limit
   1. How the Image Optimization Test Was Performed
   2. Top 6 Metrics Tested for Finding the Best Image Compression Tool

1. Website Speed as a Ranking factor

Site speed, according to Google, “reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests”  and for all intents and purposes serves both the user and the site owner. Users get an enhanced experience, site owners are more likely to get reduced operation costs and… well, more users, who stay on the website longer.

Google thinks the same, as indicated by the very fact that it provides us with tools to check up on our site speed and suggests solutions for sluggish pages. There is the PageSpeed module in the Google Developers section and a Page Speed Insights for making a speed audit for every website.

Even Yahoo has a developer module for page speed improvement, called Yslow. The slew of freely available tools is certainly meant to wear off some of the concerns that only big sites can benefit from this change. In fact, chances are smaller sites have the upper hand here in terms of flexibility and adjusting. Some questions and concerns remain though, the most important being:

What is and how exactly does Google measure “site speed?”

For instance, the difference between “document complete” and “fully rendered” time when loading a page was mentioned. The former means that while not all the elements on a page are showing, you can start clicking and navigating. The latter means that everything is clearly visible on the page, even background stuff like ads and images. Even though it is difficult to pinpoint specifically and with certainty which aspect of speed directly helps your rankings, working on your site loading speed, in general, is bound, at the very least, to enhance your users’ experience. So, for instance, having a “document complete” time which is faster than the “fully rendered time” could help.

2. Reducing the Image File Size Using the Lossy and Lossless Compression Techniques

Images can play a major role in the difference between “document complete” and “fully rendered site” loading times, especially for mobile sites.

One solution is to simply delay loading images. Let everything else load first and then only at the end start loading images. This ensures that your site is functional long before you get to the bandwidth-chugging portions of the page. As with everything else nowadays, there are lots of plugins that can help you. On WordPress, you can try Advanced Lazy Load or Smush. But if you need to do that, maybe the problem is simply that your images are too big and they slow down your site speed anyway. So why not compress your images to begin with?

We used two techniques for image compression for our case study:

• lossless compression, which means the image quality remains largely the same. 
• lossy compression, which means some loss of fidelity may occur, though in general, it may be imperceptible.

Brian Jackson, Director of Inbound Marketing of Kinsta, explained each compression method:

Lossy image compression refers to compression in which some of the data from the original file (JPEG) is lost. The process is irreversible, once you convert to lossy, you can’t go back. And the more you compress it, the more degradation occurs.   Lossless image compression refers to compression in which the image is reduced without any quality loss. Usually, this is done by removing unnecessary metadata from JPEG and PNG files. RAW, BMP, GIF, and PNG are all lossless image formats.
	BRIAN JACKSON
	Dir. of Inbound Marketing Kinsta

You can see below the representation of both reduced files using these two techniques. 

To be more exact on this, the correct term is perceptually lossless. A human can’t tell between a JPEG optimized version and the Original photo. JPEG is a lossy format. PNG is lossless. 

3. Case Study – Image Compression Tools Tested to the Limit

We went out and researched some of the best image compression tools out there which use the lossless and lossy techniques for image compression. After we identified them, we made a list of the most relevant tools that would be up to the job:

• JPEGMini
• Kraken Image Optimizer
• Puny PNG
• Tiny PNG
• Google’s PageSpeed Module

I hope it’s useless to mention that this analysis is unbiased and none of the mentioned tools offered to take us out for a beer or promised any goods in exchange. So we are going to test those 4+1 tools on the same artifact and see if we can notice any difference in loading speed results.

To make the analysis more encompassing we added a 5th element to the comparison (a 5th dimension, if you will), which is slightly different from the other 4: Google’s PageSpeed. Unlike the other image compression tools we have included in our research, Pagespeed isn’t really a compression tool as much as an optimization tool that works holistically through a series of custom filters which are executed when the HTTP server serves the website assets.

What gets it a spot in our test is the fact that it “dynamically optimizes images by removing unused meta-data from each file, resizing the images to specified dimensions, and re-encoding images to be served in the most efficient format available to the user.” Sounds pretty nifty, right? We’ll see if the boast stands at the end of the day.

3.1 How the Image Optimization Test Was Performed

The test had to be the same for all and give these tools a run for their money, so we decided on optimizing our blog’s entire image data (galery), which rounded up at 3,824 images. This was done on a test version of the site and it has not gone live yet. It was designed for testing purposes only. Most of the services we used to compress the images have their own API and some example scripts but for our test, we’ve built our own scripts which send a request for each image.

Some services have a “batch upload” feature, but for consistency, we’ve sent a single image per request since we cannot do a “batch upload” on all servers. We don’t want to lade you with too many technical details. Yet, a few comments on the process are in order. Where an API was not available, the images were processed with the service provided by that particular software.

The first comment is that JPEGMini was the only tool that was a downloadable software, the rest being hosted online. The second is that all of the tools have APIs, except for JPEG Mini. Last but not least, for Pagespeed we used the Nginx module.

3.2 Top 6 Metrics Tested for Finding the Best Image Compression Tool

We measured several metrics, which we could split into two categories:

• Image compression related metrics.
• Page load speed related metrics.

For the first category, we only had results for the 4 image compression tools, since Pagespeed is a bit of a different type of tool, as discussed earlier. It is worth noticing that not all tools had the same workload:

• TinyPNG only compressed both PNG and JPEG format files.
• JPEGMini only compressed the JPEG format files.
• Kraken compresses both PNG and JPEG format files.
• Puny PNG compresses both PNG, JPEG and GIF format files.

The metrics in both categories, however, were calculated relative to the actual work and not to absolute standards. And here they are:

1. Metric 1 – Conversion Time

We ran tests for each tool to see which one of them manages to convert the image faster and our winner was JPEGMini.

Let’s start with the conversion time, measured in minutes. Since the number of conversions wasn’t the same for all tools (in fact, it was slightly different in each case), it makes more sense to look at the number of conversions per minute. The detached leader is JPEGMini, with roughly 113 conversions per minute, or close to 2 conversions per second. The other 3 tools trail significantly behind, with little difference between them, by comparison. TinyPNG and Kraken are at 30, respectively 21 conversions per minute, while PunyPNG is utterly unimpressive at merely 11 compressions per minute.

2. Metric 2 – Compression Power

Next, let’s look at compression power. This, again, is a metric resulting from the relation between two different measurements: the compressed size of the output relative to the original size of the input. The winner, by a margin, is TinyPNG, with a 2.78 compression ratio, with the other three being at less than half the rate (1.19 for Kraken and 1.3 for JPEGMini), or at best, just slightly better than half the rate (1.53 for PunyPNG). So far the format specific tools seem to fare much better than the format general ones.

3. Metric 3 – Pages with Mainly PNG Images

And now for the real test: does any of this impact the time to load the page? For PNG related pages, the time after compression is best improved with TinyPNG (5.29 seconds) or Pagespeed (5.44 seconds). The difference between the two is by and large negligible. Kraken and PunyPNG, however, are significantly lower (with basically no difference at all between them, however: 7.47 and 7.45 seconds respectively).

The latter loading times are more than double than if the web pages used no images and closer to the load speed if there were no compression at all (8.56 seconds). The sizes of images loaded on the web pages are, as expected, in line with the loading times. The average size is 8 MB for Pagespeed and 8.2 MB for TinyPNG, practically half the size of images obtained from Kraken (15.9 MB) or PunyPNG (15.7 MB). For comparison, the average size of the PNG images on a loaded page is 19.5 MB, not much bigger than for the compressed results for Kraken or PunyPNG.

4. Metric 4 – Pages with Mainly JPEG Images

What about JPEG image format? It’s another win for Pagespeed and the format-specific tool. This time, however, the result variation is nowhere near as dramatic as in the case of the PNG files. In fact, the times to load the page are really close:

• 3.24 seconds for Pagespeed
• 3.45 seconds for JPEGMini
• 3.53 seconds for Kraken
• 3.55 seconds for PunyPNG.
• 3.77 seconds for the Original Images
• 3.03 seconds with No Images

Hardly noticeable, isn’t it? Add to that the fact that all of these values are still not that much different from the page load time when there are no images on the page (3.03 seconds) or even when all the images on the page are at their original size (3.77 seconds). As you would expect, the difference in the average size of images loaded on page is similarly unremarkable.

Pagespeed gets the best compression, at 3.4 MB, with JPEGMini following closely at 3.9 MB. Kraken and PunyPNG are both above the 4 MB mark, with 4.3 MB and 4.4 MB respectively. While the first two values are significantly different than the average size of the page with uncompressed JPEG images on it (4.9 MB), they are nowhere near the size of the page with no JPEGs on it (1.2 MB).

Let’s do a quick recap on the JPEG and PNG compression.

Best JPEG Compression (Best is First)

1. PageSpeed
2. JPEGMini
3. Kraken
4. PunyPNG

Best PNG compression (Best is First)

1. PageSpeed
2. TinyPNG
3. PunyPNG
4. Kraken

The best JPEG compression is done by PageSpeed, then JPEGMini , followed by Kraken and PunyPNG. When it comes to PNG files, Pagespeed leads the way, tied with Tiny PNG, followed by PunyPNG and Kraken. Barring Pagespeed, the better tools seemed to be the ones that are geared for specific image formats (JPEGMini and TinyPNG), with the all-around tools doing poorer in terms of results.

5. Metric 5 – Bulk Conversion Speed 

Total Conversion Times by Tool

• JPEGmini – 20 minutes / 2275 images converted
• TinyPNG – 60 minutes / 1460 images converted
• Kraken – 197 minutes / 3824 images converted
• PunyPNG – 328 minutes / 3722 images converted
• Pagespeed – On the Fly Conversion / no initial conversion time

Images Converted per Minute by Tool

• JPEGmini – 113 images/minute
• TinyPNG – 24 images/minute
• Kraken – 19 images/minute
• PunnyPNG 11 images/minute
• Pagespeed – On the Fly Conversion

In terms of bulk conversion speed there are some aspects that need to be mentioned. First of all, PageSpeed executes the conversion instantly, on the fly, and JPEGMini is a downloadable software. So, there are some technical differences between these two tools and the others, which might make the comparison between them a bit harder. At the same time, JPEGMini and PageSpeed’s way of functioning regarding this matter is their competitive advantage so we need to give the credits to Pagespeed and JPEGMini for being the fastest.

PageSpeed seems to be the best as it makes the conversion instantaneously and JPEGMini is the next best thing, but it is limited to JPEG files. TinyPNG and Kraken are tied up in terms of speed (both not very impressive), with the former only being useful for PNG files. PunyPNG, while good for all image file formats, has the least impressive bulk compression speed of all five tools.

The conversion speed indicator is important to take into account when deciding on the tool if you want to use it on web pages that rely extensively on images. If your website’s total count of images is comparable or higher than ours, it might be worth going for PageSpeed or JPEGMini as they have the best results in terms of total conversion times and images converted per minutes.

6. Metric 6 – Conversion Process Easiness

Figures and numbers are highly important but we all know that is not all about them. A software must provide great results but must also be easy to use, intuitive and simple to understand. After all, a software’s success is given by the end user. For instance, PageSpeed is a great product and can be the detached leader in many chapters but is definitely not the most user-friendly product.

If you are not a computer literate and you don’t know how to install and configure the requested Apache or Nginx modules, then no matter how good the results are, PageSpeed might not be for you. In addition, you will need to have the rights to alter web server configurations in order to install the PageSpeed module (it won’t work for shared hosting). Unless you want to turn to a tech expert, the use of this tool will make you feel inadequate and will, paradoxically, make things look harder.

JPEGMini, Punny PNG, Kraken or TinyPNG, on the other hand, have an easy to use interface and don’t require high technical skills. From the easiness of conversion point of view, these tools are made simple, helpful and really meet the user’s needs.

Deciding on the Winner 

Deciding on a winner is hard, yet necessary in order to conclude our in-depth query. Before doing so, let’s take a look at the tools’ overall presentation and take a sneak peek at what they have to offer.

The distinction of the best all-around image compression tool when taking into account all the results goes to PageSpeed: it’s either tied for the lead, or the leading tool in terms of both file size and time it takes to load the page for both JPEG and PNG image file formats and none of the other four tools manage to do so consistently (it shares the distinction with two separate tools: TinyPNG for PNG files and JPEGMini for JPEG files).

So how much does PageSpeed actually help you? Well, the best way to measure this is by looking at the time you save by compression per load on tested page. For PNG, you get from 8.56 seconds (with the uncompressed files) to 5.44 seconds for a page to load. This means the page loads at a 36.45% faster rate. For JPEG files, we got from a loading time of 3.77 seconds (for uncompressed images) to a 3.24 seconds loading time, meaning pages load at a 14.06% faster rate. Less impressive than for PNGs, but still noteworthy.

Think of it this way: every time a user lands on one of your pages, their experience is up to 36.45% faster and better. After all, the life of the web surfer is improved with every second one is looking at relevant information rather than at a blinking hourglass. The one thing to keep in mind with Pagespeed is that there is some loss of image quality with its compression, but it is so small that it shouldn’t be a serious drawback for most websites (i.e., unless high image quality is what you’re actually going for, in which case maybe image compression is not really the best way to optimize speed on your website).

This is the fully complete metrics table data compared.

And the Winner is …

Looking back at all the graphs and figures it is not hard to say that PageSpeed stands out from the rest of the tools. In a world where the user doesn’t have the patience to wait more than 10 seconds before a page loads, Page Speed can be seen as one of the webmaster’s best friends. PageSpeed Modules are open-source server modules that optimize your site automatically. It is definitely not the average webmaster’s tool as it requires high technical skills in order to use it.

All in all, from our research it results that PageSpeed gives the best-added value to a website optimization process overall being, maybe, the best option in what concerns a page’s loading time.

Conclusion

A site’s speed clearly plays an important role in user experience and in the Google Algorithm. People from the SEO industry are making a big investment in content and that is great. Yet, what’s the point of all the struggle if it takes too long to load? Knowing the tools that can help you optimize your site’s speed and make your life as a webmaster a bit better might really come at hand. To summarize the result of our research, we can say that PageSpeed seems like a very helpful tool. Also, you can get inspired from this WordPress image size guide. 

PageSpeed is a free to use tool that can be used on Apache and Nginx Servers and allows you do to all of your changes on the fly. It also has a cache so it won’t put too much burden on the server. If you do not have access to a server configuration, we would recommend using the JPEGMini for JPEG compression and TinyPng for PNGs. You could simply decide on only one format to use and go with the one you choose, since that would make things simpler for you and allow you to use the most efficient tool.

And don’t forget the Lazy Loading technique ;). All these together will make your site “lighter” and “faster”!

Note: This blog post is an improved version of an older one we had.

The post Image Compression Techniques That Will Help You Rank Higher appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

We optimized 6 articles from one section of a blog and increased the organic traffic by 78%.

Background

One of the issues we are facing at Advert Point is the constant challenge of increasing our clients’ traffic organically. The SEO landscape is ever changing and the focus on quality content is more important than ever.

Fortunately, cognitiveSEO came up with a complete solution for this, combining the old school SEO metrics with digital marketers’ current needs. If you’re a content marketer, this tool can really lower your efforts of creating the best content on the internet and bring traffic to your site. 

Content Optimization Process

We first made some keyword research with the Keyword Tool and used the Content Assistant for content optimization for one of our clients, following the article selection sent by them.

We’ve optimized 6 articles from one section of the client’s blog with the purpose of increasing the web traffic. The strategy was to first introduce the long tail keywords and then focus on the main phrases. There were 3 steps in our strategy:

• We first added some of the suggested keywords. We looked in particular for keywords with a high number of organic searches.
• Waited for a few days then we added some more keywords reflecting the main query. As a tip, I suggest you look in the Ranking Analysis to see how the landing pages for the related query look like. It can help you get insights for future optimizations. At this stage, adding a few internal links to the optimized article can bring more benefits and make your content stronger. It will increase your chances to hook the users and guiding them to stay more on the site.
• Then we rewrote the description to provide important information on SERPs. 

The rankings were almost immediately improved. And we efficiently increased the visibility in SERPs and traffic.
	Gabriel Curcudel (Krumel)
	Founder & CEO at Advert Point / @krumel

It’s quite easy to understand and use the tool. It offers useful information for content writing and some good hints regarding the potential keywords to use when you create optimized content.

It was effortless for me to take actions and plan things when I had access to an all in one place tool. The recommendations made by the tool are pretty accurate, and this is important when you use tools. Not to mention that it’s a real help in discovering opportunities and improve quality of content. Forward to that, it will help you grow your business.

I would definitely recommend it to my clients. Now it’s easy to play. It’s a must tool.
	Gabriel Curcudel (Krumel)
	Founder & CEO at Advert Point / @krumel

Results After Using the Content Assistant Tool

We reoptimized the page using the Content Assistant. There were 3 phases in our strategy. We first added some of the suggested keywords, waited for a few days then we added some more keywords reflecting the main query. Then we rewrote the description to provide important information on the search engines. It is an important aspect if you also want to lower the bounce rate. Say in the description exactly what the user will find on the landing page.

You can see in the next screenshot how beautiful the article grew after using the tool.  

The re-optimized page had an increase of organic traffic YOY with 78% compared with last year, same period.

After ranking on Google’s second or third page for a while, we’ve jumped to #1 page in Google really fast. We succeeded in increasing website traffic, conversion rates and gaining much more unique visitors. All because we’ve followed a natural and effective way to improve the rankings. The Keyword Tool and the Content Assistant was a help, a guidance telling us what keywords to use. The search volume for specific keywords was also an important trigger.

I also experienced with other pages. We tested by optimizing two new pages.

We had to optimize the content for many queries; the topics can generate traffic from more than 2-3 important keywords. The strategy was to first introduce the long tail phrases and then focus on the main keywords.

We played safe, just wanted to raise the pages close to important positions and then naturally let them rank in time. Yet, the results were amazing. 

For another client, we optimized 6 articles from one section of a blog and increased the organic traffic. We wanted to raise the organic traffic for one important section of a blog. We picked 6 articles with different topics, then made research with cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool and used the Content Assistant to reoptimize the pieces of content given by the client. This was a method for driving traffic and increasing the ranks for the relevant content. 

We easily increased the visibility in SERPs and traffic for those articles using the tool.

This content marketing strategy was very good because, as you can see, the rise was constant and natural, no weird spikes and drops. It was a smart way to increase traffic, nice and steady. 

The method we used can work very well for some and should be adapted by others and included in the content strategies each business has. The marketing tips I gave along the way can help them achieve similar results. An online business can benefit a lot from this guideline. Getting more traffic to your website has never been more effective than this.

Disclosure

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

The post How Krumel from Advert Point Has Increased Its Clients’ Organic Traffic by 78% in One Month appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5,  for one of the term we were optimizing for, to #2 in the search engines.

Background

As an agency, we are always dealing with clients that face all kinds of issues, insignificant search rankings, low quality content, few social shares on social media, poor internal link optimization, low conversion rates, slow loading time for a website, defective link building techniques used and so on. Yet, regardless of the problem they are facing, rankings have always been a focus point.

The biggest advantage I’ve experienced using the tool is the permission to build better blog posts and content pieces with insights from the SERPs we’re aiming to target. And content has a high importance among other Google ranking factors.

For as long as I remember, quality content has always had higher value and can assure a great number of organic traffic.

It’s a good resource for onpage SEO to have on hand for a sanity check to ensure you’re covering all relevant topics in our content marketing plan.

The tool was very simple and easy to use. It did not take long to understand how it worked.
	Bill Sebald
	Founder at Greenlane / @billsebald

It takes a different angle by letting you see multiple SERP results and their contents, which is something that not many other tools have. You can easily use it to optimize your site and boost the ranking of your website.

The USP for this tool is the insights you get en masse about the SERPs you’re optimizing for (topics being covered, intent, etc.).

 Content Optimization Process

We started using cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool & Content Assistant for old blog posts optimizing purposes. We chose the article posts that performed well for us and tried to optimize them using the tool.

So basically our new approach on the content creation for the improved version was a quick process. We got a baseline score of the content and then worked on improving it by including some of the topics found in the SERPs that we hadn’t previously included in the write-up.

We went through about 4-6 iterations of our copy until we hit a good content performance.

The step-by-step guide for improving your search ranking and content performance at once is simple:

• find the underperforming pieces of content;
• perform a short keyword research to choose the keywords you want to rank for;
• optimize the new blog post using those keywords;
• use the “Fetch as Google” to re-index the search engine optimized web page;
• continue with link building to gather more value and have a strong content strategy to improve your SEO rankings.

Results after Using the Content Assistant Tool

After we used the keyword phrases recommendations, we saw a beautiful growth and noticeable improvement for the targeted keywords.  

We hit a content performance score improvement from 51 of 74 and a readability score improvement of almost 67.

We had been ranking no. 5 in the search results previously and within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5 for the term we were optimizing to #2. So the improvement is good to see.

This fluctuated over the next few days but then we settled into the #2 spot and have remained there since. This optimization seems to have worked great!

For the time period 6/8-6/25 vs. 5/21 – 6/7 (we launched the changes on 6/8) and for the term we were targeting, we went from 4 clicks in 5/21 to 6/7 to 9 clicks in 6/8 to 6/25. We also improved in clicks for a few other relevant terms.

Total clicks for the 5/21 – 6/7 time period reached 123 and for the 6/8-6/25 time period, 165. Impressions went from 3,709 to 4,755. Average position decreased though which was interesting: 19.7 vs. 21.7. No real traffic lift overall was seen.

We also went from ranking for 29 keywords for the post to 74 overall. Checking in Google Search Console, we saw a lift from 129 queries (13 with clicks) to 222 queries (20 with clicks).

On top of that, we had an overall improvement of the CTR (clickthrough rate) after we optimized the existing content as you can see from the next screenshot.

Huge gains? Maybe not, but we weren’t testing with a webpage that had a big potential audience. This is still very promising, and we’re going to start using it with clients who have keywords that need to move.

Disclaimer

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

The post How Greenlane Agency Boosted Their Rankings in Just a Couple of Days appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

From position #12 to position #5 in under 30 days. It’s definitely a huge thing, especially for consultants and site owners who are looking to get even more productive in the technical maintenance aspect of their websites.

Let me tell you my experience using the Keyword Tool and Content Assistant to improve the rankings and organic traffic to my website.

Background

As an SEO pro, I am always searching for new means to improve ranks, website traffic, and all the SEO related metrics. 

Content is king; it is a a highly important SEO ranking factor every inbound marketer should take advantage of. Especially because it can help you increase organic traffic and search rankings. 

On a daily basis, I used another tool feature (TF-IDF from OnPage.org) for making the content re-optimization process a whole lot easier. But after I started using the Content Assistant tool and saw how easy it is I was really impressed. And the result spoke for themselves. 

You can easily spot the volume and recommendation for your targeted keywords. But in the end, you have to create some quality backlinks to take advantage of the new pieces of content.  

It only took me around 5-10 mins to re-optimize a single page. A type of service any SEO consultant can actually offer on its own.
	Jason Acidre
	Co-founder & CEO at Xight Interactive / @jasonacidre

The tool is like a low-hanging fruit for any content marketer, an easy alternative to Google Keyword Planner; it allowed me to save a lot of time and effort while my website started to increase search traffic and improve rankings in the search engines, offering good user experience all at once.

You’ll be able to create quality content by offering valuable organic search results to the user. 

It can also be used as a solution for those who were hit by Google Penalties in the past for thin content or other Panda related mistakes. Or on another side, it can be used as a guide to content curation. 

The Content Optimization Process

I started using the tool on 2nd of June. I optimized 2-5 pages using the Content Assistant to test it and find out if we get something out of it. As soon as I started to optimize the original content, republish it, I easily increased traffic and saw immediate improved results. Just like this one:

You can see the webpage had a beautiful growth and that was due to the quality content optimization procedure.

Then I continued with other pages; summing up a total of 15 low quality web pages optimized on a 30 days-period. What I did mainly was to re-optimize the pages as follows:

1. By using the Content Assistant feature of Cognitive SEO, I’ve included the majority of the suggested keywords by the tool on the content assets we’re aiming to increase in organic visibility.  I’ve also restructured the underperforming content and added new sections – to make the inclusion of the suggested key phrases more logical, natural and create relevant content.
2. I’ve built new internal (contextual) links pointing to the optimized versions of the pages from other topically related content to pass more link equity and ensure we’ll be sending more new signals to crawlers. Use the fresh content as an internal link for other recent posts to strengthen your sales funnel.
3. Lastly, we requested for these quality content pages to be re-indexed via Google Search Console’s Fetch as Google feature. This is a very important step because you have updated content that needs to be re-indexed in Google as it appears to offer good user experience.

I think that any content marketer could follow these 3 steps in their content creation process to bring a positive impact to site traffic, organic search, conversion rate and other valuable metrics and decrease the bounce rate.

A great value have the relevant keywords chosen to optimize a piece of content on your site.

The Keyword Tool shows relevant keyword recommendations that can help you do search engine optimization on a higher level.

You can choose other keywords, more valuable for your content relaunch by looking at the keyword rankings for search volume, relevancy and keyword difficulty. Aim for the long tail keywords to impact rankings. Following this marketing strategy, you get a chance at increasing your organic traffic. 

Results After Using the Content Assistant Tool

Just like the example above I saw major improvements to other blog posts I used for the testing. See the screenshot below, extracted from Google Analytics.

The article had a steady growth in the number of sessions, users, and other behavioral metrics. The blue line shows the visits trend for June and the orange one for May. There is a clear difference between those two. There isn’t room for doubts.

I optimized a page for “SEO Philippines”. After only 48 hours the URL jumped from #17 to #12.

After a couple of days more, it jumped on Google’s first page. 

In 30 days, my article succeeded to rank from #17 to #5 for the term “seo philippines”. – Jason
	JASON ACIDRE
	Co-founder & CEO at Xight Interactive / @jasonacidre

This means a growth from page 2 on page one, and 12 positions.

Nonetheless, this is a link-heavy SERP results, so building a couple of high-quality links to this page should really help the page make it to the top page.

The tool is a fortune cookie. It can offer almost immediate results. It is very simple to use and it is highly effective.

Another example used in my testing was a page optimized for the keyword “SEO strategies resources”.

After 48 hrs, the page actually got features in the answer box, ranking number 0, but only lasted for a day. The URL was ranking around #6 – #8 for the past few weeks, and now is steady on #4 – #5 for “SEO strategies resources”.

I saw massive improvements in traffic and search rankings for most of the test pages I optimized on 2 weeks after the changes have been made.
	Jason Acidre
	Co-founder & CEO at Xight Interactive / @jasonacidre

Being able to re-optimize 10-15 blog posts per week can tremendously impact a site’s overall search visibility. It’s definitely a huge thing, especially for consultants and site owners who are looking to get even more productive in the technical maintenance aspect of their websites.

It is easy to increase organic search traffic on the existing website and a great way to create evergreen content that can break any other content strategies and SEO tactics recommended by rookies. Of course, link building, keyword research, social media and other factors may influence rankings. But this is a damn good starting point. 

Disclosure

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

The post How an SEO Pro Increased His Organic Traffic by 157.80% – Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

To shed some light once and for all if and how content influences rankings, we’ve performed an in-depth analysis on almost 40,000 keywords and around 4 million pieces of content. And the results are GOLD.

Content marketing, among other SEO strategies, is really a hot topic these days for any industry. But I bet you already knew that. What we think you might not know is 1. the exact correlation between SEO and content, as well as 2. how to measure how well optimized your content is. We got them both sorted out: 

1. We figured out how strong the correlation between content and SEO rankings is. 

2. We created Content Performance – the performance measurement metric that tells you how well optimized a piece of content is from an SEO point of view.   

Do you know how the content of your website actually impacts your search engines’ rankings? Or do you know the exact key elements your content needs to have in order to rank in Google’s top results?

After having analyzed a whopping set of data we’ve got it all sorted out: content assets, content’s correlation to Google rankings, measuring content performance, the key elements that boost content + many other data that we’re sure is going to impact your website big time.

The study is quite large and to get the best out of it you will need to thoroughly read this article. And yes, it’s quite long but, for the sake of your business,  totally worth it.  

1. Defining a New Metric: Content Performance
2. A High Content Performance Will (Almost) Guarantee You a Top Google Position
3. Commercial vs. Brand Keywords: How Do They Correlate With Rankings
4. How Do Domain and Page Performance Influence Rankings
5. How Long Should Your Content Be to Get High Rankings
6. How Can You Improve Your Content Performance Score 
7. How We Did the Research

1. Defining a New Metric: Content Performance

We needed to correlate content with Google positions (and further on, with conversion rates). But we cannot correlate “content” or content piece as a whole. We needed a metric to track, something that would make content measurable. After long-term researches, marketing analytics and measuring the performance of huge amounts of pieces of content, we ended up with the Content Performance metric.

What Is Content Performance?

The content performance 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 is. And not only this: the same metric that is measuring your content performance also gives you info on the reasons why a piece of content is performing well or not.

The Content Performance score reflects how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus.

Putting it simply, the content performance metric shows you how well a page is optimized from a content point of view, on a scale from 0 to 100.

The Content Performance metric is an indicator entirely developed by us, everything from soup to nuts. A lot of Google reverse engineering was involved in this, combining algorithms and concepts such as semantic search, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), TF*IDF or topical authority, just to mention a few.

Case Study

How Greenlane agency went from #5 to #2 in Google in 24 hours.

Bill Sebald – founder at Greenlane, with 15 years of eCommerce & SEO, tried a new approach on content creation and content optimization, using the Content Optimizer tool.

They got a baseline content performance score and then worked on improving it .They went through about 4-6 iterations of their copy until they hit a good content performance score. They improved their score from 51 to 74.

They had been ranking #5 in Google previously and within 24 hours, after improving their content performance score, they saw their ranks improve from #5 to #2.

You can read their full story here.

How Does Content Performance Work?

As I know you are curious what’s happening under the hood, I am going to share with you a bit from our internal “kitchen”:

• We start by analyzing the top rankings results from Google, having related content as a focus point.
• After that, we apply some really advanced algorithms in order to identify the semantics, topics and keywords used on those pages. We do not take in consideration HTML tags influence (h1/h2, etc.). We only look at how well written and relevant the content is, trying to identify the exact factors that boosted those pieces of content on the top of the rankings.
• Based on an in-depth analysis, we measure the performance of the content, giving score for each piece of ranking content, highlighting the focus keywords used by that piece of content.

How Did We Come Up with the Idea of Content Performance Metric?

It all started from a cliche. Everybody says that content is king, you need to have good content to rank and I bet you can continue this row of self-evident truths.

But lately, it’s been getting harder and harder to rank on Google’s top rankings, no need to insist on that. Analyzing the search and online marketing context we figured out that the solution of getting high ranks relies on content. Even John Mueller from Google said that without well-optimized content, even if you clean up your website, and you fix all of the issues, it still won’t rank high.

But our question was:

How can we actually measure the impact of content on rankings? We also believe that content impacts rankings but how exactly?  We needed some clear evidence.

Call me the doubting Thomas but I believe that almost everything that exists can be measured at some point. So, can we “measure” content and performance data? A difficult, but not impossible task.

Inspired by semantic search and the term frequency – inverse document frequency (I know it sounds like a Wheel of Fortune word but you can find more info on it here) we came up with a metric that can measure the impact any piece of content has on rankings: the Content Performance metric.

2. A High Content Performance Will (Almost) Guarantee You a Top Google Position

Do you know that saying: Save the best for last? This time we decided not to take it into account.

If you torture data long enough, it will confess.
Admittedly, we are too excited about the findings so we couldn’t help but share the big news with you:

Content does influence rankings but we also figured it out why and how.  

As you can see in the screenshot below, after compiling and analyzing all the ranking content for the top positions in Google, for around 40,000 keywords, we realized that there is a very strong correlation between content performance and rankings (and therefore organic traffic we might say).

The higher the content performance score, the better the rankings.  

The correlation above was made in 2017. Two years later, after the Google March Update, we decided to run the same analysis again. Content still correlates with rankings but much more after the Google update, as you can see in the chart below. 

At an informal level, we always knew that content strategies have a lot to do with rankings and quality content creation improves your rankings. Google itself admitted it and they even created an update dedicated to this issue and the importance of relevant content. 

When you actually see real numbers that show to what extent content performance influences rankings, it’s totally different. 

So let’s do a rundown of these interesting observations.

The first thing to notice when looking at this chart is that good content performance is within average values – almost within the middle two-thirds of a 0 to 100 scale. There are no extremely high or extremely low content performance scores. Not only that but along the represented interval, points are quite evenly distributed – there are no quick jumps or sudden falls, everything follows the same, smooth line.

This is another important observation: the trend line is a lot smoother (almost perfect, from corner to corner). There are only 4 instances in this chart where points don’t follow the “high content performance equals high position” rule and those are very subtle, almost unnoticeable. If the vertical axis went from 0 to 100 instead of zooming in at the current interval, we’d probably not notice those points at all.

Last but not least, there is another visual cue to be found in the graph: a sort of a “cut-off” point at a score of 50 for the content performance, which almost evenly splits the first 10 positions from the following 10. While not specifically significant in itself, it is consistent with the other observations and strongly points that:

There is a very strong correlation between a high content performance scores and ranking on a high position.

3. Commercial vs. Brand Keywords:  How Do They Correlate With Rankings

There are 9 million bicycles in Beijing and over 1 billion websites in the world. And all these billion websites are interested in targeting all sort of keywords.

At a holistic level, we realized that while measuring the performance of the content, the keywords analyzed by us within this research, fall into one of the two categories: commercial keywords and brand keywords.

• Brand keywords refer to the keywords strongly related to the name of the brand. For instance, “cognitiveSEO” is a brand keyword we are interested to rank for.
• Commercial keywords are the ones that have a direct profit – making intent. For instance, in our case “best SEO blog” would be a commercial keyword.

The question now remains: does the content targeted for commercial keywords correlate differently with rankings than the content targeted for brand keywords?

Is the content quality different for the two instances? And how about the conversion rates?

Commercial Keywords – Ranking Correlation

Just by taking a look at the chart below it’s crystal clear that when it comes to the content targeted by commercial keywords, the correlation between the content performance and top rankings is extremely strong.

This means that when it comes to commercial keywords, content has a very high impact on rankings.

It’s almost impossible to keep up with the link amount a big brand is getting. Yet, content performance is something that is in your full control and you can take advantage of it.

Brand Keywords – Ranking Correlation

We realized that the same strong correlation that applies to the overall content performance and rankings, applies as well when it comes to brand keywords in particular.

It seems that the better the content performance score for the brand keywords’ content, the better the rankings.

Yet, we couldn’t help noticing a particularity of this correlation. Yes, it’s a strong one (we ran several regression tests on it to make sure of that) but it’s slightly different. As you can notice in the chart above, the first position has almost the same content performance score as the 5th one (#1 scores 46, # 5 scores 45). And this situation replicates to some extent to other situations as well.

And, as we are prayed upon the idea: if it works, why? If it doesn’t why?, we took a closer look at this situation.

Content matters a lot when it comes to brand keywords, yet, not as much as it matters when it comes to other types of keywords. And this is because we believe there are other external factors that boost a brand name to the top of the rankings.

Let’s take, for instance, “Brand Mentions”. It could be a commercial keyword, yet, is also a brand name: brandmentions.com.

Even if the content performance score for brandmentions.com score isn’t as big as for other pages targeting the same keyword, the brand itself will be the winner and it will rank first.

And this is because Google is really good at semantical search and understands the intent of the user, firstly. Not to mention that the brand itself is most likely the topical authority for the brand keyword and it will be automatically ranked among first.

Yet, content performance seems to matter a lot in the case of brand keywords as well. So just because you are targeting your own brand name doesn’t mean that you don’t have to put efforts in creating a high performing content.

4. How Do Domain and Page Performance Influence Rankings

The bitter-sweet truth is that content alone does not boost rankings. There are other ranking factors that interfere when it comes to SERP position. And among those factors there is the domain and the page’s performance.

We can refer to domain/page performance or authority. We used the term “performance” for this research as it piles up several factors (domain/page’s age, number of incoming links, etc.)

Domain Performance vs. Rankings

As we can deduct from the screenshot below, overall there is a strong correlation between a domain’s performance and its ranking position.

Yet, this relation is not always smooth and linear. We can see that the domain performance for the pages ranking number one is almost the same with the ones ranking number 4.

Therefore, even if domain performance seems to matter a lot when it comes to rankings, there are cases when other factors, such as content performance, might matter more than the domain’s overall performance.

As you can see in the chart below, after the Google March Update from 2019, the domain performance seems to matter slightly less when it comes to rankings. 

Page Performance vs. Rankings

When it comes to Page performance, there is clearly a strong relation between the authority of a page and its rankings. The higher the page performance, the better the rankings.  

If, after looking at this chart you say something like: I have zero chances of ranking without a high page performance, think again.

We repeated the research on the impact a page performance has on rankings two years later, and we concluded that while page performance is an important ranking factor, it seems to matter a bit less nowadays that it used to a couple of years ago. 

When you get to think about it, how does a page become highly authoritative? Among others, when it’s a topical authority on a subject. And how can you become a go-to resource on a subject, the topical authority on that matter? By having relevant and optimized content on that particular subject. Therefore, without planning to make everything about content, we cannot help by noticing how connected the pieces from the ranking puzzle are.

5. How Long Should Your Content Be to Get High Rankings

As we crawled so much data, we couldn’t help taking a peak at the number of words top 20 Google ranking webpages use.

The very first thing you should notice about any chart is the variation range. In this case, it looks like having anywhere between 1400 and 2000 words is associated with being in the top 20 rankings.

It seems that the optimal number of words one page should use in order to rank high is somewhere around 1700 words. Yet, here is a longer subject to debate which we’ve luckily covered in a previous study: Long versus short content, which one ranks better?

The next thing you should do is look for trends and correlations. And here is where things usually get complicated. Even this chart, while seemingly straightforward, points to a few interesting observations. The first is that, in general, it is better to have more rather than fewer words .

There are 11 points on the graph that go in direct decreasing order of both number of words and position. They are not consecutive, so that makes the trend a bit less obvious, but it is there. Even where there are consecutive points that don’t follow this “rule,” the rule is reinstated within maximum 2 points.

The second equally interesting observation is that this rule is visible only from the 3rd position onwards, while the first three positions actually display the opposite trend – the fewer the number of words, the higher the rank. But here comparison between points is again useful.

The number of words associated with the first position, while lower than the number of words associated with the second or third position, is still higher than 15 of the other 20 positions (75%).

I know; it sounds a bit complicated. But this actually means that while there is not a perfectly linear correlation, the placement of points is still consistent with the idea of a correlation.

What do we get when put all of this together? Two conclusions:

Having fewer words, rather than more, within a certain interval, is likely to land you on a lower ranking.

Having between 1600 and 2000 words (all other factors being equal) has the highest chance of placing you in the top 10 Google positions.

Yet, remember: it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

6. How Can You Improve Your Content Performance Score 

If you’ve made it so far, allow me to reward you with a short joke:

Statistics play an important role in genetics. For instance, statistics prove that numbers of offsprings is an inherited trait. If your parent didn’t have any kids, odds are you won’t either.

Also, since you’re here I’m guessing that you’ve browsed through all the charts and figures exposed above and you are now interested in our sense of humor only. But you want to see how can you make the most out of this research.

If the content performance boosts rankings, then, the content performance score is what you need to work on. 

Seeing the high correlation between the content performance score and the rankings, wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that helped you out to calculate and improve your content performance score?

Well, good news: we’ve invented that tool: The Keyword Tool & Content Optimizer. 

As we’ve made this great breakthrough with the content performance score, we knew we needed to do something about it. So we’ve begun to dig deeper and decided to create a tool that will offer something that no other automated tool can: the exact recommendation that any piece of content should follow in order to improve its content performance score and therefore its rankings.

It wasn’t an easy ride, I can tell you. Lots of hard work, advanced algorithms and months of continuous work and research. Yet, the results are tremendous as we’ve managed to create the tool that we and any SEO pro, webmaster or content marketing needs. 

But I’d better show you how it works.

Let’s say that I own a food blog and I am interested in tackling the “vegan recipes” niche. I already used the Keyword Tool to get an idea of what people are searching for in Google when it comes to this subject. And now I am interested in “beating” my competition’s content performance score.

Just by taking a look at the Ranking Analysis section I can get a full idea of who my competitors are, where they rankings are and how  they got there. 

Having the content performance score for each of my competitors makes it easy for me to understand where my content performance score should be. More than that, I also get the exact list of focus words those webpages used. The focus keywords are the exact keywords that boost the content performance score. 

I am all covered when it comes to the competition. I know who ranks where and why. But what about my content score?

The Content Optimizer is a feature also created by us.

A personal assistant that will tell you the exact pieces you need to use to improve your content performance score.

It’s a learning machine, based on real search results, that helps you to optimize your content and your overall online marketing strategy.  

It’s like trying to solve a really complicated puzzle but someone would come and would give you the exact instructions and steps you need to follow. Things get way much easier, right? Just take a look at the screenshot below.

I’ve entered my own piece of text on which it seems I need to do some content improvements. It seems that my content performance score is only 19 and my goal is to beat #1 score, which is 52. So how do I get that score? By following the recommendations, just like in the screenshot above.

Super easy and straightforward.

There are some important keywords that I never thought of using. And not only my content performance score will be increased if I use them, but also the overall quality of my article, as it will tackle some subjects that are of high interest. And also my Google ranks. 

It’s a 100% beneficial situation:

• my blog articles will get great content optimization tips (due to which my target audience will have a better user experience)
• and my SEO rankings will improve. 

We know that this research is not a beginners guide; but this why we created the right tool for you, to make you re-think your content marketing programs, your marketing automation processes  and the way you tackle search engines rankings.

Of course, there are a lot of factors that can influence rankings: social media (we even did a research on how social signals influence rankings), backlinks, a site’s architecture, brand awareness, local SEO efforts, etc.

As long as content performance has such a high impact on rankings, why not make the most of it?

At the end of the day, you should look at the performance of your content holistically. Beside reaching top rankings, what top performing content manages to do is helping the sales teams, increase the contract sales, obtain qualified leads. The customer stories, the engagement metrics, the SEO and content marketing strategy you’ve put in place, your overall online marketing efforts should be all translated, directly or not, into sales conversions.

7. How We Did the Research

The short answer for the “how we did the research” question would be: with tons of patience and a truck of coffee.

The longer answer would be: 3,784,369 pieces of content.

What we actually did was to look at the content, domain, page performance and many other data coming from approximately 3,7 million of pages ranking on 40k keywords. We took the first 100 SERPs for each keyword. We’ve analyzed them thoroughly, squeezed them as much as we could and we draw some great conclusions.

Even if we had the data for the first 10 Google pages, we decided to present you the conclusion on the top 20 positions in Google because, bottom line, we know that these are the “most hunted” positions and are of great interest for you, guys.  The data collection took place in April 2017 and March 2019. 

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it the right way, did not become still more complicated.
	Poul Anderson
	American science fiction author

Inspired by Google Semantic Search, Latent Semantic Index, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI & LSA) and applying lots of advanced algorithms and Pearson Correlations, we squeezed everything we could for the set of data we had in order to make sure we have the most accurate and reliable results possible.

We also ran some regression analysis to make sure the correlation was right and the results more than confirmed our theory. It turned out there was a 97% positive relationship between variables and that the regression model accounts for 94% of the variation in ranking. With p falling way below 0.01, it is clear that this finding is significant and not the result of random chance.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that there aren’t other factors that contribute to ranking variation, just that the variation in content performance correlates, to a very large degree, with the variation in rankings, and that it is consistent with all the other factors.

Leaving modesty aside, we do believe that the findings from this current study have a great has a huge impact on your digital marketing strategy overall and on a more granular scale on your content audit, on user engagement, the digital experience you are offering, how you track content performance and how you set up goals for your future content strategies.  You now have key metrics not only to measure but also to improve content. You can channel your content efforts better and more efficiently so you can finally get to see those big numbers in your analytics tools, be it Google Analytics or Google Search Console (and we’re talking about big numbers in traffic not in bounce rates).

We hope we haven’t lost you somewhere among the geeky data. Yet, we believe that a solid research cannot be made without a proper methodological approach.  

And yes, we do know that correlation does not imply causality.  But, as the creator of the XKCD web comic states:

Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’ 

And, if we were to draw a conclusion to all the data, what you need to keep in mind is that a high Content Performance score is correlated with top rankings in Google.

The post Does Content Performance Impact SEO Rankings? – An In-depth Research On 3,7 Million Pages appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

But aside from the technical complications of this move, there are other considerations as well. One such unforeseen side effect is that switching from http to https would cause the loss of the social share counts on Facebook and Google+ pages. To be fair, this disadvantage is not specifically linked to the https switch, but to any URL change in general (which might be why Google has not put forward an official fix for this, so far).

We ourselves faced share counts loss when we migrated our site from http to https. It was a punch in the stomach for us; yet, we had no other chance than finding an efficient method to recover Facebook shares after the previous URLs changed to https. Finding the right solution of getting the Facebook shares back wasn’t an easy ride. But a solution was needed and we are really happy that we found it. As we are your number one fans, we couldn’t keep the fix of getting your shares back for ourselves. Below you will find the exact steps that you need to take if you experience a similar problem and you want your hard-worked social shares displayed on your web pages.  

With the cognitive’s reunited superpowers we came across a solution to recover your social shares after moving from HTTP to HTTPS.

Tested Steps to Maintain Your Social Shares after a Site Migration from HTTP to HTTPS

The truth is that moving from HTTP to HTTPS doesn’t come up easily. It can be a real pain, not to mention that if you’re not 100% vigilant, you can suddenly lose your ranks. We’ve written a blog post not long ago on how not to lose your ranks when doing a website redesign. Moving from HTTP to HTTPS is not a walk in the park. Maintaining your shares while doing so can be even harder.  And we know that from our own experience.

Long story short, when moving from HTTP to HTTPS you lose all your hard worked social share counts from Facebook and Google+. It is not a pleasant situation at all, especially when you’ve worked so hard for each and every social share. It’s a vanity metric some may say, and that’s true. Yet, it’s a highly important social proof that can give you tons of insight about your overall social media strategy. 

For Facebook and Google+ there are two different methods to get your social share counts back when moving from http to https. Along with those, there are a couple of generic changes you need to perform. Below, I am going to list you the generic updates which are common for recovering the social shares for both Facebook and Google + and afterwards some specific actions that you need to take for each social network separately. 

Generic Changes to Get Your Social Share Counts Back

1. Create a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS

This is probably the first and the most important step you need to make when migrating your site. What the 301 permanent redirects do is to redirect any visitor, including search engines, to your new version of the site, the one with https. Along with the direct traffic, the age, authority and reputation of your old website in search engines is transferred to the new web address. If you don’t implement 301 redirects correctly, not only will your social shares be forever lost, but also your ranks and traffic. 

You can find more details on how to perform 301 redirects on Google’s support page. Also, the world of internet is pretty generous when it comes to giving pieces of advice on how to move your site to https.  Putting it simply, with only a few lines of code you can transfer all the organic search traffic from one domain to another.

2. Add  <link rel=”canonical”> to the new HTTPs page

The rel=canonical is an HTML element that helps you prevent duplicate content issues. Basically, what it does is to tell the search engines which one is the preferred version of your web page. When you switch to https, what will happen is that you will have two websites with identical content: your http and your https version. In order to avoid duplicate content and all the related problems, you need to let search engines know which version they should show up in their results. 

To make sure that your current URL  (the one with https) shows up in search results,  you need to add <link rel=”canonical”> on your new HTTPS version of your site.  As through exemplification is the easiest way of understanding things, let me show you how this works by using a URL of our own. As I want this blog post , the https version,  to be the one that will show up when people will be looking for ways of repurposing content, this is how the URL should look like: 

<link rel="canonical" href="https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/11813/ways-of-repurposing-content/" />

3. Change <meta property=”og:url”> 

To begin with, you need to know that the purpose of “og:url” is to set the preferred URL for the page you are sharing. If you are thinking for a second that this isn’t so important, let me know tell you that through “og:url” you define the page that all your shares will go to.  Therefore it’s highly – decidedly – deeply – eminently to set the <meta property=”og:url”> to point to your newly HTTPS version.  Therefore, here is how a URL should look like:

<meta property="og:url" content="https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/11813/ways-of-repurposing-content" />

How to Get Your Social Shares Back on Facebook after Moving from HTTP to HTTPS

We all create a lot of content. We try to make it the best, the most documented; that kind of content that goes straight to your inbox and makes you read it. Content is king; but what is a king without followers? Along with being a social proof instrument,  the social medium is a fantastic traffic driver and it can even influence your ranks (we’ve previously written a blog post on this).  Therefore, losing your Facebook social  shares is a tremendous problem. And, unfortunately, it happens when you switch to https. We encountered the same situation ourselves when we migrated our site and after long researches we figured out a way on how to move to https without losing Facebook shares.  Below we are going to show you a workaround, tested and implemented by ourselves. 

It’s important to know that these changes should be done only for pages that already existed on your site when you made the switch. For newer pages these modifications should not be applied.

1. Find out how many Facebook shares you have for a URL

To see how many social shares Facebook has for a URL, you need to use Facebook’s developer debug interface. You need to get to a page similar with the one from the screenshot below. You have the possibility of entering any URL to see how many shares it has. You will add here the http pages you are interested in getting your shares back for. Of course, you can use this interface for other issues as well, yet, from the present purpose you need to use the Sharing Debugger category.

2. Set both your HTTP and HTTPs social shares to zero

After adding the URLs you are interested in Facebook’s debug interface, you will have the possibility to “Scrape Again” (you will have a button with this exact message). Once you do this, all your Facebook shares will be zero, for both HTTP and HTTPS. Don’t panic, as the next step will fix this situation. 

3. Update rel=”canonical”

The previous step left you with all your shares to zero. By now you might be thinking how these steps are really helping you in getting your shares back. Bear with me as you are closer and closer to getting your social shares count. 

The next step in solving the social share loss situation is to alter the content you are showing to Facebook’s crawler. What you need to do, for Facebook only, is to make sure that the rel= canonical tag is placed, but not the way you would think of. It’s exactly the other way around: you need to make the http version the preferred one, just like in the example below: 

<link rel="canonical" href="https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/11813/ways-of-repurposing-content/" />

has to be

<link rel="canonical" href="http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/11813/ways-of-repurposing-content/" />

4. Identify Facebook’s Crawler

If you think that the problem is already solved and your share counts are already updated, I must ask you to have a little more patience, as you are just one step closer already. 

We’ve previously told you that you need to alter your content’s page for Facebook’s crawlers. Yes, this is very similar to cloaking, an old school search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser. However, this situation is different than the one in which you want to grossly manipulate Google’s ranks. Using this will not impact your ranks and will not affect your site negatively. What you are going to do is not altering the exact content of the page, but only the protocol and with the sole purpose of keeping or getting back the social shares. 

An important step is correctly identifying Facebook’s crawler. You can do this identification by user agent or IP.

The Facebook’ guys are straightforward when it comes to this matter and they explain you how to identify their crawler. 

In the screenshot below you can see how things should look like in the Facebook debug interface after altering the content for the crawler. As you can see, the fetched URL is the one with https while the canonical URL is with http. Remember that this should be apply for the old pages that you had on http. 

For the new pages, the one that you’ve created on https already, things should look like in the screenshot below. HTTPS for both fetched and canonical URL.  In the screenshot below there is a blog post that we’ve created after the https migration. As mentioned before, for newer pages the modifications presented in this chapter should not be applied.

You can get inspired from the code examples below, for three different instances, for PHP, forNginx and for Apache. 

PHP Code Example for Identifying Facebook’s Crawler

if(preg_match('/facebookexternalhit/i',$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
	echo '<link rel="canonical" href="http://______YOUR_URL_WITH _HTTP__">';
} else {
	echo '<link rel="canonical" href="https://______YOUR_URL_WITH _HTTPS__">';
}

Nginx Code Example for Identifying Facebook’s Crawler

if ($HTTP_USER_AGENT ~ "^((?!facebookexternalhit).)*$") {
	return 301 https://cognitiveseo.com$request_uri;
}

Apache Code for Identifying Facebook’s Crawler

For Apache, you can create a code similar to the one above, depending on the web Apache server syntax. 

Bonus: How to Get Your Social Shares Back on Google+ after Moving from HTTP to HTTPS

As in the previous case, you need to know that the following changes need to be done only for pages that already existed on your site when you made the switch to https. For newer pages these modifications should not be applied.

Wen it comes to getting your social shares back from Google Plus, things are a bit easier than in the case of Facebook. No crawler identification or content alteration is needed. The only thing you need to modify are the Google+ sharing buttons so that you will share the URL on http and not on https.  To do so, for your old pages you can get inspired from the code example below: 

<!-- Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag. -->
<script src="https://apis.google.com/js/platform.js" async defer></script>
<!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render. -->
<div class="g-plusone" data-size="tall" data-href="http://______YOUR_OLD_URL______"></div>

You need to keep in mind that, for the new pages, the code will contain the https version, just like in the code below: 

<!-- Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag. -->
<script src="https://apis.google.com/js/platform.js" async defer></script>
<!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render. -->
<div class="g-plusone" data-size="tall" data-href="https://______YOUR_NEW_PAGE______"></div>

As you can see, when it comes to Google Plus only the social share button suffers changes; no content fixer or https URL alterations. You can switch to SSL and still keep your shares just with a workaround on the sharing button.  

The Struggle of Getting Your Facebook Shares Back 

Facebook likes are linked to the URL, meaning that even a single character change (like the extra “s” that gets added when you switch from “http” to “https”) will cause you to lose your likes.

As Facebook itself explains on the social plugins part of their FAQs, “you can’t move the likes, shares or comments directly to the new URL but you can use the old URL as the canonical source for the number of likes or shares at the new URL”. 

However, the feedback on the effectiveness of this solution and others is mixed, at best, with some users suggesting that even fixes like those proposed by Facebook are incomplete or ineffective.

Other solutions suggest to manually put the old share count into the custom fields of a plugin but those share counts will not increase until the new share count for that link equals the share count you pasted into the custom field. Therefore, not quite a solution if you really need your old shares back; not to mention that if you have lots of pages with different share counts it’s very unlikely that you know those numbers by heart. 

It’s true that the social media networks might suffer from manipulation if they blindly moved social signals across redirects.

You could, for instance, buy an old domain and transfer all the social signals to another landing page that interests you. But what webmasters usually want is to get their shares back, the social shares that they already have with no other deceiving intent. 

You don’t want your site to be considered as having insecure content but you also want your http and https urls to have their social count recoveries as fast as possible. The problem comes when Google considers that the SSL certificate is a must but not Facebook likes not so much. Any webmaster would probably think different, that both are important and both are a part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Along with the changes required in Google Analytics when you make the switch from https to https, you should consider the workarounds presented above in order to maintain your Facebook likes safe and sound. 

The post How to Recover Your Facebook Shares after Moving from HTTP to HTTPS appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

From what we are concerned, link building is far from dead.

It would be arrogant to say link building (or even SEO) is exactly the same as it was a couple years ago. And it’s also true that the landscape of SEO and link building is always changing, but that doesn’t mean link building is dead and buried. What we think it actually means is that the importance of building high-quality white hat links has never been higher. “Can link building co-exist with Google Penguin updates?” one might ask. We believe that yes.

A proper understanding of the concept of link building in the current context is needed, of course. Yet, whether you are new to link building, or you have been doing it for a while, there might be some underused link building techniques that might help you to secure high quality links. And those are the exact tactics we are going to present to you in the following lines:

What’s Different About Penguin 4.0 ?

Earning the First Link

1. Interview Experts/Influencers
2. Link Bait
3. Create Best in Class Content
4. Build Free Tools
5. Aggregate Data & Create Stats

White-Hat Link Influencing

1. Identify Dead Businesses
2. Send Handwritten Notes
3. Link Reclamation Technique
4. Brand Mentions Technique
5. Target the ’Media Mentions’ Page

Monitoring Your KPIs

1. SEO Visibility
2. Link Acquisition Speed
3. Penalty Risk Monitoring

What’s Different About Penguin 4.0 ?

For a couple of years now, Google has got us used to its algorithm updates, whose aim is to catch spam link profiles as quickly as possible and to keep low-quality sites from ranking well in the search results. What you might not be familiar with is the concept of Real Time and Granular.

What that means exactly:

Real-time: Your site will be penalized in near real-time (if you get unnatural links) as well as recover from a penalty incredibly quickly (if you disavow or remove the bad links).

Granular: The Penguin algorithm will be able to devalue spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting the ranking of the whole site.

Step 1: Earning the First Link

The very first link might be the one you’ll have to work the hardest for.

It can be very frustrating, too – knowing that links give rise to links yet you’re yet to get your first one. But despite this knowledge, it is crucial that you earn that first link fair and square.

Do not beg for it, do not buy it, do not happen upon it.

Work hard for it and the reward will feel that much sweeter. This is not just some idealized notion of ethics, either. You need to be able to win that link and prove to yourself that you can do that. So how can you fight for the first white hat link?

Strategy #1 – Interview Experts/Influencers

You’re probably not an expert yet, otherwise people would already be flocking to hear what you have to say. But that doesn’t mean you cannot take advantage of the appeal of an expert. And the best thing is you can do that while also offering honest quality to your readers. It’s not disinterested, and it’s also not dishonest. But it’s a great deal to attract links.

That’s how most interviews work – we want to offer readers some insight, but also attract their attention.

Convincing an expert or an influencer to do an interview doesn’t have to be very difficult. Most of them are people who are just interested in getting their message across, so an opportunity to do that will more often than not be something they should be interested in. There are also so many ways of interacting nowadays which are just convenient that it would be a missed opportunity for them not to accept your invitation (even if you don’t have a large audience yet). And on top of that is an opportunity for you to start building relationships that will help you through the future. 

They can reply to questions you wrote in an e-mail (if they don’t have enough time to answer all your questions at once or cannot agree on a schedule), appear on a podcast (if it’s easier for them to speak than write) or even meet with you in a face-to-face conversation (if they are old school or have a certain place to be and time to spend).

Of course, you can play around with the format any way you like and think it will make your interview stand out. You can have a round-table with several experts, or set-up a sort of a debate between two experts with differing viewpoints. Either of these could work out great regardless of the format (whether it’s in writing or audio form). As you can see in the screenshot above, we’ve compressed the expertise of renowned digital marketers into an article that brought not only social traction but also qualitative links. This search engine optimization strategy can help you improve your conversion rate.

Strategy # 2 – Link Bait

The word “bait” might sound a bit shady, but we’re not advocating anything that would be unethical.

We’re just highlighting that some content is more appealing than other.

Trendy subjects are more likely to be read than not-so-salient topics. Salience is not equal to importance, but has to do more with what’s on your audience’s mind at a certain time. Some things are always important, but what particular aspect about them is salient can change over time. For instance, we’re always talking about how to be Panda-proof, but if tomorrow a new release came out, we’d be talking more about that than usual.

Certain ways of structuring content are also more likely to attract interest than others.

The best example would be lists and rankings. They always tend to attract visitors and shares to a much larger extent than long-form articles. Charts and infographics tend to be more appealing (and easier to share) than text, regardless of how well-written the text is. As you can see in the example below, a smart & dynamic way of presenting  content might make wonders.

Deep down we’re still very visually-oriented beings.

Seeing is believing and it requires less effort on our part to understand information. Reading requires an extra effort and a higher power of abstraction. We’re always going to be tempted to go the easier road.

So how do you use this information?

Try to stay up-to-date on what people are interested in, what’s “hot” and what’s “not”.

Make a habit out of reading the news on a daily basis, even if you don’t always have an active interest in everything that’s out there. You need to get attuned to what your audience would like to read about, rather than what you’d like to share. Ideally they should always be the same, but when they’re not, it might be worth to side with your audience. Once you’ve settled on a subject, do a bit of additional research and come up with a new or interesting way to present the information. You don’t necessarily have to be a master designer. There are plenty of tools already out there and still new ways to combine them to come up with a catchy, innovative visualization of a topic.

Strategy #3 – Create Best in Class Content

This is taking things one step forward compared to the previous strategy. We’re not just talking presentation, but also content. For this, you’ll have to do quite a bit of research.

There are plenty of good articles out there on any given topic, but how many of them are really great?

To create a popular blog post, you should meet at least four criteria:

First of all, a piece of content should be comprehensive.

Of course, not all posts need to be user guides, but a wide perspective is always helpful. Even if you don’t expand on all opinions on a subject, simply touching on them can be a useful primer for most readers. It also makes sure that you stay relevant for a wide audience, so that your article is of interest even for users who know quite a bit about the topic.

A great article should also try to go in-depth.

Most people can find the surface info on their own, with a simple Google search, but it takes work to do several searches, read, curate and compile the relevant info and then present it in a neat package – and that’s where you come in. If you’re discussing SEO tactics, try go talk advantages and disadvantages for each, speculate about how difficult or easy it would be to implement, share from your own experience.

It’s also crucial that an article is up-to-date.

Sometimes the info is out there but it’s just not accurate anymore, or the examples are old and readers can’t relate to them, or there’s a new kid on the block disrupting the landscape – just think of statistics about Internet content and users and how quickly they become obsolete. Keeping up on the changes is hard work but someone’s got to do it, especially if they can attract views and shares in the process.

Last, but definitely not least, a great article is always easy to navigate.

This feature cannot be underestimated, since it’s what makes users feel like a huge amount of work has already been done for them. It’s also what makes the article shareable and what gets people to talk about it.

Here’s an example of a piece of content that meets the 4 criteria exposed above: 

It’s responding to a ongoing need in a very comprehensive way and the results were impressive.

Strategy #4: Build Free Tools

We’re entering original content territory now. This is a very valuable strategy even if you don’t feel programming is your best strength. That’s because a lot of people tend to think of tools as complex pieces of software, which require a lot of time investment, both in creating them and in maintenance work. And that can definitely be the case with some tools. But those are not the only tools that are successful.

People will use tools for all sorts of tasks, even apparently simple ones, if it saves them some time or makes the task more appealing.

You need to look no further than the app market to understand that the concept of functionality is being stretched in all directions. Apps with a very narrow function are successful because they perform that function very well, sometimes even in the face of apps with more functions (which might be viewed as bulky).

So then why make your tool free as opposed to selling it?

Because you’re after a different kind of capital. What you’re after is known, being trusted and sought after. Once you’ve got those, you can move along to creating other tools which you can try to monetize. But that will only work if you first have the links.

For instance, in the screen below you can see an apparently commonplace, yet a very useful tool for calculating VAT in the UK. It’s free to use, it solves a problem and as people appreciated its use, they were willing to link it and sharing with others.

Strategy #5: Aggregate Data & Create Stats

This is not just about making information look good, but about creating that information in the first place.

We’re talking original research, a post that others might refer back to when creating their own articles.

It can be a very productive endeavor, but before you dive and hope you get a few good links out of it,  you need to consider a few questions:

• • What are you hoping to find? There might be a particular theory you’re interested in testing, or you might have a question where you’re not sure what the answer will be. Either way, you need to first formulate that question or theory, so that you know what data to get.

• • Where can I get the data from? Some of the data that could be used for research could already be out there. Official reports, disparate statistics that can be put together or even data that you can easily pull from the web. Of course, most times, the most interesting and novel research might come from data that has never been put together before.

• • What can I find out from the data? There is a delicate balance between applying statistical tools on your data to find out the answers to your questions and “fishing” for interesting results by mixing and matching any possible correlations within the data. Just because you can find a certain correlation in a mountain of data doesn’t mean that it’s real or relevant to your readers.

In the screenshot below you can see an example of a website that presents key findings on credits, card debts and other of interest topics from this area. People really enjoyed and used the info found here on further studies, articles, etc., which can be easily seen in the number of referring domains that this website has.

Step 2: White-Hat Link Influencing

When it comes to link schemes, as opposed to white-hat ones, Google is pretty straight forward: any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

Therefore, the only types of links you should aim for are the white-hat ones. We’ve talked more about this subject in a previous post. Stay tuned as in the following lines we are going to develop some strategies on how to get white-hat links:

Strategy #1 – Identify Dead Businesses

We have touched on this before, but re-kindling “dead” pages is worth mentioning again, because it is a very lucrative white hat link building strategy. What does it involve? A few simple steps, really. Start with a local business and then extend your area of interest.

You need to identify a business that had an active page at some point but has since gone under.

Some of these pages might not even load, but luckily there are quite a few repositories of past online content out there (the Wayback Machine being only the more popular of them). The content that was there might still be largely useful and relevant to a particular audience. 

After identifying such a website and closely inspect its links, you might be interested in acquiring that “dead business” and get fully advantage of those referring domains that are wasted out there.

In the screenshot below you can see an example of a website that is not live (or at least it wasn’t in the mid of January 2017 ) but has tons of links on competitive anchor text. If I were in the shoes business, I would definitely take this website under my radar.

Strategy #2 – Send Handwritten Notes

You may have stumbled upon this before and thought “Not with my handwriting!” or “That sounds very time consuming and not at all useful.” But here’s why it might just work.

Handwriting already seems like a thing from a bygone age, like vinyl discs, or film cameras. But like with most things gone vintage, there is a strong case for a comeback, in the shape of a luxury commodity.

There are times, such as when you get a new customer, or celebrate a milestone or anniversary, when a handwritten message can really drive the point home.

It’s showing that you care and value someone enough that you are willing to spend extra time and effort to make them feel special. And that action solely is very likely to bring you an extra high quality link.

But what if I have to send hundreds or even thousands of letters? Surely that would take forever. Luckily, there are several services out there that do exactly that (and do it quite well; some examples: Bond.co, LetterFriend, etc.. Is it a bit of a cheat? Sure. Does it still have a better impact than good old Times New Roman and might get you links? You bet.

Strategy #3 – Link Reclamation Technique

Of all the possible link building and generally SEO tactics, this might be the least selfish, as it ends up giving something back to the web community.

And let me show you why.

Identifying the broken pages of any website has a lot of benefits and I think you already knew that. Yet, what you might not be aware of is that you can transform the broken page identification in a link building technique. Long story short, you can identify & recover lost link equity using the linked 404 pages on a site.

How? Quite simply. Firstly,  run the website you are interested in within the Site Explorer and you will immediately be listed with all the broken pages that site has.  As you can see in the screenshot below, broken pages are something common for all type of websites, be it big or small, be it Microsoft or the neighborhood grocery’s website.

OK, you might say, but how can this technique help me with my link building campaign?

Well, you can always go further and take a look at what your competitors are doing. There is a chance they have a lot of broken pages and therefore, a lot of links associated with those pages. And all these can be translated into great link building opportunities or you. No one can stop you from digging deeper, finding those broken links, recreating that broken content, and replacing broken links with your corrected link.

Allow me to detail how this technique works in 3 (not simple but effective) steps:

1. 1. First, you need to find those broken pages and links. And before imagining a huge amount of work that comes with this task, let me remind you that half of your job is done as you can instantly see all the Broken Pages. You will also be informed about the number of links each broken page has.

1. 1. Then, update or recreate the content of the website the broken link originally led to. If there are other broken pages and not your own you are analyzing, you can even include your own site in the alternatives. Archives such as Wayback Machine or Warrick can help you to recover the original content (which you can improve on, of course).

1. 1. Last and not less importantly, you can contact the webmaster who has the broken link on his/her site and recommend your alternative (quite a bit of outreaching and networking is involved here). The more you can come off as acting in good-faith and interact as a real human (as opposed to a SEO-churning bot), the higher the chance of success.

It’s a win-win situation: the users get an updated version of the quality content they were looking for, you get links and potential shares. All for a bit of work that involves (re)search (for relevant dead pages), curating (of existing information) and editing (of the updated information)

#4 – Brand Mentions Technique

We all want to earn or create more and better links. And in our pursuit of doing so, we may overlook some tactics that are just in front of us. And one of these techniques is making use of web mentions.  There have been some interesting articles written on the importance of mentions in ranking and there has even circulated the idea that mentions could be the future of link building. That is a topic which is still debatable but one thing is sure: mentions can help us within the link building strategy as we can take advantage of those brand mentions without links.

Sounds quite easy, right? Find your brand mentions that don’t have links, transform them into linked mentions and the job is done. Yet, thousands of pages are created every day on the web. And from this never ending sea of content you need to find where and when you are mentioned. Moreover, you want to find those web mentions that don’t have a link to your website; mentions that represent link opportunities for you. This begins to sound more like Mission Impossible than an effortless task.

However, like in many other situations in digital marketing,  having the right tools at your disposal will save you an unimaginable amount of time. And in the quest of finding unlinked mentions, BrandMentions comes to help.

And, as it’s said that there is something magical about number 3, we are going to sum up the efforts from the brand mention technique that you’ve seen in the screenshot above in 3 steps:

1. 1. Firstly, you need to create an alert so that you will be notified every time your brand is mentioned anywhere, anytime on the web. It’s the easiest way of monitoring your business and always be aware about what is said about you out there.

1. 1. Secondly, after you’ve checked out all your brand alerts, try identifying the authors that mentioned your brand but did not link to your website. After identifying the authors, we personally prefer LinkedIn when it comes to getting in touch with them but you can choose any sort of communication you are familiar with or work for you.

1. 1. The last step (that can be the first step in the beginning of a beautiful friendship) is sending a message to the author with many thanks for the mention and with the request of adding a link to the mention. This way, you can obtain a high-quality link and potentially gain a long-term relationship.

Strategy #5 – Target the ’Media Mentions’ Page

Anytime we are crafting a piece of content, we do it having something in mind. Sometimes we want to highlight a great feature of our product, sometimes we want to share an opinion or a finding or we might as well be very outraged about something and we want to share our anger with our readers. Whatever the case might be, whenever you are working on a piece of content, it would be bad if you had in mind the media mention page. We know it might sound difficult to make targeting the media pages a goal in itself, yet it might do you well in terms of link building.

Take a look at the example below. barnimages.com/resources is a great place for linking without big efforts implied.

Monitoring Your KPIs

I know that some of you might not be a big fun of this part of the job, where you need to draw the line and see how your business is standing after all the efforts you’ve invested, yet it’s a highly important section.

Monitoring your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) evaluates the success of your strategy and is of great help when shaping the approach your next campaign.

There are many elements you should constantly look at when it comes to link building campaigns. Below we are going to present you the top 3 you should always keep an eye on.

#1 – SEO Visibility

Every time you’re trying to figure out what has happened to a certain website, the first chart you should look at is the SEO Visibility one. Because just by taking a glance at this chart you can see whether there are significant downhills caused (probably) by Google updates or whether that site’s online visibility is stable and doesn’t have dramatic ups and downs.

SEO visibility is essentially about monitoring the search performance of a website as it presents the historical development of a domain’s visibility in Google. It has 2 components, search volume and the position of the ranking keywords. It basically reflects how often a website shows up in the search results and is calculated based on millions of keywords that are tracked in Google, their importance and traffic volume.

For instance, just by taking a look at the screenshot above I can tell how  producthunt.com is doing in therms of SEO Visibility. Moreover, I can see their historical data and I can correlate their ups and downs with Google’s algorithm updates.

The SEO Visibility chart is the one you should look at before starting your link building campaign, after you’re done with it and in between. In other words, all the time. Why are we such big fans of the SEO Visibility?

It’s probably the only chart that can help you identify historic google penalties for any site,  analyze competitors and compare yourself and also watch for future problems.

#2 – Link Acquisition Speed

So you’ve run a link building campaign and you want to check the results. And what you’re probably praying for are dozens if not thousands of links achieved in a very short period of time. Well, this might not be exactly helpful if you are still aiming for a natural link profile.

As we are looking at the screenshot below, we can see the number of new and lost links acquired on a daily basis. And this is great for monitoring. You should always keep an eye on all of your links, either new or lost, analyze them, manage them and most important, be aware of them.

Having a spike of links can be a reason of joy but also a warning sign at the same time. Where are all those links coming from? Why are there 12k links in one day coming from only 2 referring domains? Does my link acquisition speed look steady, consistent and natural, etc.? These are just some of the questions you should address yourself when checking your newly acquired links.

#3 – Penalty Risk Monitoring

We cannot emphasize enough how ongoing unnatural link monitoring is a necessity with the latest Google Penguin 4.0. Constantly keep an eye on your backlink profile. And, when running a link building campaign, the monitoring necessity is even higher.

Manually checking ALL of your links and identifying the unnatural links might take you way more time than you have available to invest in this matter. And even if you were willing to invest all the energy it takes, with Penguin always evolving, time might not be in your favor.

As soon as Google discovers that some links are shady, it will instantly penalize the website involved.

This is why we recommend you using a specialized tool for this matter. That doesn’t mean that your job is over in this area but it definitely eases your work. Check out for unnatural and suspect links, create alerts so that you can be notified in real time once “not Google friendly” links are connected with your website, browse through all of your links and disavow the ones you consider harmful to your website.

With the hope that this link building tactic will bring you the results you are hoping for, we would be more than happy to hear about your experience on this matter. At the end of this post you will find the techniques detailed above summed up in a Slide Share presentation. If you feel like some link building tips and techniques aren’t for you, we say try them anyway. At best, you will add some awesome high quality links to your arsenal. At worst, you will have tried something different and learned more about SEO and running a business in general.

We’d be happy to hear from you about your experience either way.

The post How to Do Link Building and Not Get Penalized in 2017 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.