With no additional introduction to the importance of performing an in-depth SEO analysis on your site, regardless of the programming language it uses,  we are proud to tell you that starting today, cognitiveSEO can crawl and perform in-depth site audits on all types of websites, JavaScript generated sites included. 

With so many sites using content generated with JavaScript, you might feel that there is no need to highlight the importance of JS. Yet, with so many changes happening in the world wide web, it is safe to assume that one might not be up to date with everything that is happening in web development. However, using JavaScript highly impacts business and its SEO strategy; therefore, being able to run site audits on all types of sites is a must these days.  

So, indulge us to talk a bit about the importance of JavaScript Crawling, about how to run a site audit on JS generated sites within cognitiveSEO and how JavaScript affects SEO. 

Find All Possible SEO Issues on JavaScript Websites

As we mentioned before, cognitiveSEO has just added a brand new feature: the possibility of crawling & analyzing JavaScript websites. 

You can find all the possible technical and SEO issues a site may have and get recommendations on how to fix them.

cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit analyzes the technical health of your JavaScript website and helps you detect all the weak points of your website before your users do, giving you a competitive advantage on the competitive market we are swimming in. The SEO Audit Tool crawls all the pages it finds on a website, be it JavaScript or not, regardless of the size of your website, and provides a fully customized set of data easy to comprehend and visualize.

The truth is that with the ever-evolving search engine algorithms you need an efficient solution to keep your rankings safe. And cognitiveSEO does exactly that: it lets you know all the issues that might prevent your online business from getting the organic traffic and the high rankings you deserve.

You can set JavaScript crawling for any site with literally one click: simply enable the JavaScript crawling functionality from the editing section and you’re all set. 

Of course, along with this functionality, there are dozens of other customizations you can add to your site audit so it can best respond to your needs: crawl structure, when to crawl, what to crawl, crawl sources, etc. Anything you need to perform a site audit as accurate and reliable as possible. 

Performing a complete JavaSscript website audit will give you a deeper understanding of why your site is not generating the organic traffic you think it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving. This kind of website audit gives you a much wider array of SEO items to look at and can analyze issues of all types that might prevent you from reaching your best possible ranking.

Why Is JavaScript Crawling So Important?

There are tons of websites using JS and it’s easy to understand why this happens. Using JavaScript in designing and building websites is very popular as it makes it possible to create interactive and dynamic content. Visual animations, navigation, displaying dynamic content to users based on specific behaviors are just a few of the things that can be done with JavaScript.

Yet, analyzing a JavaScript website is not always a walk in the park. It requires a lot of resources and in-depth analyses. Luckily, you don’t need to worry about this anymore as you can run complete Site Audits within cognitiveSEO, on all types of websites. 

Here are just some of the advantages of enabling JavaScript crawling when running a Site Audit: 

You’ll get a more accurate analysis and you’ll have better issues identification.

Many sites use JavaScript generated content, be it completely or partially. Even if your site has only a couple of elements generated with JS, it is highly important to get those sections analyzed as well. It’s always the small pieces that make the bigger picture. 

You can find out how crawlable your pages are with and without JavaScript rendering enabled.

JavaScript analysis is the closest thing you get to what your users actually see within their browsers. You can run an SEO audit, with and without JS enabled and see the differences for yourself. 

You can analyze a wider range of websites.

So, let’s say that you want a really cool site template, with a dandy interface, so you choose to create your site using Wix, for instance. That’s awesome! The downside is that in most of the instances you’ll hardly find possibilities of completely analyzing all the technical and SEO issues your site might have.  Yet, the JavaScript crawling gets things done for you, allowing you to analyze sites built with different platforms and programming languages. 

What Is JavaScript and How Does it Work?

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages to develop websites. It uses frameworks to create interactive web pages by controlling the behavior of different elements on the page.

Initially, JS frameworks were implemented client-side (front-end) only in browsers, but now the code is embedded in other host software, such as server-side (back-end) in web servers and databases, which will save you from a lot of trouble and pain. The problems started when JavaScript implementation relied only on client-side rendering.

If JavaScript frameworks have server-side rendering, you’ve already solved the problem before it even arises. To better understand exactly why problems appear and how you can avoid them, it is important to have some basic knowledge of how search engines work. For that, we need to establish the phases of the information retrieval process: crawling, indexing, and ranking.

How JavaScript Affects SEO

If you want to find out more about the impact of JavaScript on SEO, you need to know that we wrote a more exhaustive piece of content on JavaScript and SEO.

JavaScript means more loading time speed and faster server load (code functions run immediately instead of waiting for the server to answer), easier implementation, richer interfaces and higher versatility (can be used in a huge variety of applications). But JavaScript SEO brings some problems along the way. Lots of webmasters fail to optimize the content that uses JavaScript code. And this is (most likely) because they don’t have a complete site audit overview. 

Everybody started to doubt whether search engines, like Google, are able to crawl JavaScript. And that was the wrong question to ask. The better question to ask is can search engines parse and understand the content rendered by Javascript? In other words, can Google rank your website if it’s made in JavaScript? The truth is that more and more websites are relying on JavaScript, so search engines have improved their page rendering functionality.

Even if not completely maybe, it’s important to know that Google is able to crawl and index the rendered version of pages as well as the HTML version.

So, the questions that pop out are: 

• “Does Google crawl JavaScript?” The answer is more and more lately.
• “Does Google index JavaScript?” The answer is yes.
• “Should I use JavaScript?” The answer is it depends on your needs.

A JS website is indexed and ranked. We’ve learned things the hard way until now. We know that making it easier for Google to understand the generated content is the best approach. To help Google rank content that uses JavaScript, you need tools and plugins to make it SEO friendly. And you need a comprehensive SEO analysis to make sure your site is performing as well as it can. 

It’s not all sunshine and roses, we know. You need to know that JavaScript uses up crawl budget as Google requires more resources to render, crawl and index JS websites, adding a layer of complexity to the process. Moreover, JavaScript can be hard to combine with good SEO.

Yet, regardless of all these matters, keep in mind that a good SEO Audit can save you from lots of bigger troubles; and since you now have the possibility of performing audits on all types of sites, JS included, you have no excuses for not performing a Site Audit right now. 

The post JavaScript Crawling for Better & More Accurate Site Audits appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

But change is not always flashy or even visible. Last week, Google introduced a new update named BERT, which is characterized as a massive and the biggest step forward for search in the past 5 years, as well as one of the biggest steps forward in the history of search altogether. Yet, look and ask around in the SEO community and you’ll see very little that announces as much. Also, it is not yet very clear what Google’s BERT is targeting and how will the SEO landscape be influenced by this big update. So, let’s figure it all out!

1. What Is Google BERT Update?
2. What Is Google BERT Targeting?
3. Does Google BERT Affect SEO?
4. Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s the title of a novel by visionary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. If it doesn’t sound familiar, you might better recognize it under its movie adaptation title, Blade Runner. Both book and movie concern themselves with questions on what it means to be human in an ever more technological world and how to (still) distinguish between humans and androids. 2014 indie sci-fi Ex-Machina, by director Alex Garland, asks a similar question by referencing the concept of the Turing test: if a robot were to pass as human to every other human in the universe, would it still be a robot? These are fascinating questions and luckily we can still ponder about them in sci-fi literature and film. We’re not there yet in real life, although one has to wonder how long will it take until the more trivial “I Am Not a Robot” captcha will get checked by a robot (it has).

Even though we are still far away from sheep-dreaming androids, we’re seeing constant progress in the way of more human-like computer interactions.

What Is the Google BERT Update?

Putting it simply, Google BERT is supposed to help a machine understand what the words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.

Yet, to respond to the question what does BERT mean? we need to talk in a more explanatory note.

BERT, which is what the latest and the biggest Google algorithm update is called, stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing.

So, is BERT a language model? (geeky alert ahead)

Yes, we can say that it is a language model. Yet, you need to know that even if BERT is a new concept, is not hot new. The BERT concept was made public in 2018, in a paper published by researchers at Google Artificial Intelligence Language. 

According to Google researchers, “unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide
range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.”

Language model pre-training has been shown to be effective for improving many natural language processing tasks. These include sentence-level tasks such as natural language inference and paraphrasing, which aim to predict the relationships between sentences by analyzing them holistically, as well as token-level tasks such as named entity recognition and question answering, where models are required to produce fine-grained output at the token level.

If we were to ask Google what the BERT name means, we’ll get to see a range of interesting results. In all fairness, my search query was for “bert name”, nothing related to the update. Yet, if we’re looking at the “people also ask section”, we get three different pieces of information. Not contradictory, not opposite, but different which might translate in confusion for the user. Will the BERT algorithm update solve this matter? Let’s pursue our investigation to find out.

Fun Fact: The Google BERT Update was launched on October 25, the same day Kanye West launched its latest album, Jesus Is King. 

What Is Google BERT Targeting?

By Google’s own estimates, BERT update will affect 10% of all queries. That’s a tremendous percentage, but it might not have caused a visible splash by SEO community standards. That’s most likely because the update focuses on “longer, more conversational queries”, whereas these longer tail queries are queries that (probably) SEOs don’t target as much in a heavy way.

If that last part sounds familiar, it might be because it’s not too far off from our recent discussions about search intent. The basic question is, then, what does the user really want to find out? There are quite a few examples out there illustrating the difference that BERT made.

Search Engine Journal provides an example of BERT understanding, using the phrase “how to catch a cow fishing,” which has nothing to do with the image that may be conjured in your head right now (or in the picture below) and everything to do with a very particular sense of the word “cow” in relation to fishing, referring to a large striped bass.

Google itself offers some examples of queries which would have been pretty clear in intent to a human conversation partner (e.g.: “2019 brazil traveler to usa needed a visa,” and “do estheticians stand a lot at work”), but were previous to the update entirely lost on Google, based on the results it displayed.

By applying the BERT models to both rankings and featured snippets in Search, Google pretends to be able to do a much better job, helping users find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in the query. And users can search in a way that feels natural for them.

In an article from 2018, Rani Horev predicted BERT’s importance. As he stated, BERT will improve search and is undoubtedly a breakthrough in the use of Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing. The fact that it’s approachable and allows fast fine-tuning will likely allow a wide range of practical applications in the future. Follow KDnuggets for more information and resources on AI, Data Science, and Machine Learning. 

Does Google BERT Affect SEO?

Yes, the BERT update affects SEO and allow me to explain why. 

SEO – Search engine optimization is the process of making your site better for search engines. Therefore, any update that the search engines are making to their algorithm influences the search engine optimization process. 

Now, the question that remains is what can you do to optimize for the BERT update?

If we listen to Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison, who helps people better understand search and helps Google better hear public feedback, the answer is pretty straightforward: nothing new. What Danny actually highlights is that there is nothing that you should do from today on that you shouldn’t have done before BERT. And that is: write content for users.  

We hope that there is no doubt for anyone that Google has been focusing on content for a couple of years (here’s a case study on Panda 4 update, which targeted content big time and affected lots of important websites). And we don’t want to re-iterate the “content is king” nor to over-highlight the importance of writing both SEO and user-friendly content. Yet, let’s try to understand where SEO is standing now in the context of BERT.

We believe that two main aspects need to be taken into consideration when we ask ourselves how the latest Google Update influence SEO. 

Identify and Optimize for the Right User’ Search Intent

In the BERT training process, the model receives pairs of sentences as input and learns to predict if the second sentence in the pair is the subsequent sentence in the original document. So, the algorithm is trying to better understand the user’s needs, even to predict them if and when possible. 

Google BERT update tries to (even) better understand the users’ search intent. 

Search intent or keyword intent is the reason why people conduct a specific search. Why are they searching? What are they trying to achieve through their search? Are they trying to figure out the answer to a question or do they want to reach a specific website? 

With the increasing use of mobile and voice search, where people need fast and contextual answers to their questions,  Google tries to become more and more able to determine the search intent of people. So, the whole Google SERP is now trying to best fit the search intent and not the exact searched keyword. Now, more than ever, there will be situations when the exact searched term will not even be included in the Google search results page. And this happens because Google has become better and better at determining the search intent of people.

Google has to figure out what exactly do people want, so it can offer them the search engine page results they need. And, from an SEO point of view, your job is to create content that is relevant to the Google users and matches their search intent. 

Not to linger on this anymore, remember that search intent is more important than ever.

Optimize for Featured Snippets

Google stated that BERT is about users’ natural language and understanding longer queries. What Google tries to highlight with the focus on featured snippets is that searcher intent is to find content that responds exactly to the this question really quick. 

Featured Snippets (also known as answer boxes, knowledge graphs or Google direct answers).  If you’re searching for something like “how many calories does an apple have”, you’ll get a direct answer, highlighted within a box, just like in the examples below. We did a really cool research on answer boxes a while ago; you should check it out.

Also, with the BERT update, Google focused on showing even more relevant featured snippets. To better understand what this improvement is all about, we are given the example the featured snippet for the query parking on a hill with no curb. Before, Google used to place too much importance on the word “curb” and ignored the word “no”, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately respond to this query. So they would return results for parking on a hill with a curb. This latest update seems to fix this matter, as the search engine better understands the query and the context. 

But how should you optimize for the featured snippets or answer boxes? Well, here is where content steps in, so keep on reading. 

Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

Yes, Google stated that content is even more important, and therefore, one should focus their full attention on writing content relevant for the user.

By definition, content marketing implies creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. And Google’s featured snippet seems to endorse that. And since Google announced that it had leveraged its pre-trained language model BERT to dramatically improve the understanding of search queries, it’s clear that content marketing needs to comply with this biggest leap forward in the history of search. 

As Google better understands natural language, focusing on longer tail keywords and on featured snippets, it’s clear that there are big opportunities for content writers to serve their readers with content written more “humanly”, that answers a searcher’s question as quick as possible and provides much value. 

Leaving the theory aside, here are the steps you should take to write content that is relevant for your users but also content that will rank high so that your users will find it. 

Step 1. Perform a Google SERP analysis

Every keyword research or content optimization process should start with a SERP analysis together with a competitor analysis. The Ranking Analysis from the Content Optimizer Tool gives you tons of insights related to the analyzed keyword. Quick and easy, you get to know the search volumes, what type of content ranks on that keyword, how difficult it is to rank on that query (by following keyword difficulty), as well as how popular that keyword is among searchers. Also, the tool lets you know the exact keywords and links that boosted that page in the top Google results to easily optimize your content. 

Step 2. Create relevant & optimized content 

Content Optimizer does most of the job for you. I know I’m biased and I don’t want to praise the tool too much, but the reality is that it does most of the job for you. Once you performed the ranking analysis, what you need to do is start writing a new piece of content or optimize the existing one and the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you need to use so your content will be relevant for the user’s search intent. 

Remember, you need to write for humans. BERT seems to make Google understand even better the searcher’s queries, so you have no excuses. 
And if you’re asking why do you need a tool to “write for humans” I’d tell you that a tool can give you lots of insights of what you’re users are actually interested in and you can write content that will answer their needs; and secondly, your users need to find your content first on the first Google page result to access it. 

Step 3. Discover new keywords & rankings opportunities

You don’t have to limit yourself to one targeted keyword;  you need to discover other queries that your users might be interested in. Searchers have more than one question when it comes to products from your business. Take the opportunity and offer them relevant content for most of their questions. You can use the same Content Optimizer for this task. The tool has two sections that will automatically let you know what other questions are related to your search query:

The Keyword Explorer  – this section is great for keyword analysis and for discovering new keyword opportunities. It also gives you the possibility of seeing only the question suggestions. Get inspired by the list of questions, check out the relevancy of the question, its volume, CPC (cost per click), and choose the one that is the most suitable and profitable.  

The People Also Ask section – the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you should use in your content, what people are searching for, but it will also offer you a set of questions that relate to your original search query. You should consider answering these questions in your content or create new content starting from these questions. 

Although BERT integration in Google Search is currently only available for English queries in the US, Google says it is planning to apply BERT to additional languages and locations. So the rest of the world won’t have to wait too long until BERT will be responsible for the searches in dozens of languages. 

When applied to ranking and featured snippets in search, BERT models can process words in relation to all other words in a sentence rather than considering them one-by-one and in order. This enables a better “understanding” of context, which is particularly helpful when it comes to longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions strongly affect meaning. This brings huge opportunities to the search world and big challenges to SEOs and digital marketers. 

And while the performance improvements are impressive, Google acknowledges that natural language understanding remains an ongoing challenge. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t adapt their marketing strategy or should re-think their marketing automation and SEO strategies to comply to today’s search marketing requirements. Yet, with search engines becoming more and more complex, there are no “complete guides” or “tips and tricks” lists to optimize for BERT or any other future updates (most likely). You need to keep yourself updated and have the user in mind no matter what you do.  

The post Google BERT Update. How the Natural Language Algorithm Affects You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Here, at cognitiveSEO, we like to get things done. We start improving our features and tools soon after we launch them, we constantly fine-tune what’s already implemented and we never settle for less. That’s how we’ve become addicted to constant and never-ending self-improvement.

Improvement and continuous development sound fantastic, right? But so does waking up early, eating healthy or reading 2 books per month. But until you actually take the first step to do those things – wake up and don’t put your alarm on snooze, choose the salad over the french fries, read the first pages – the gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it only gets wider.

In case you don’t know about the Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool, you can check out the description below. 
For those of you who are already familiar with the tool, you can skip right to the improvements. 

1. What Is the Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool?

2. A More Suitable Name for the Improved Content Optimization Tool

3. New Metrics for a Better Understanding of Google Search Results

4. Content & Links Difficulty – Find Out What You Need to Rank to the Top

   1. What Is the Content Difficulty Score?
   2. What Is the Link Difficulty Score? 

5. Keyword Search Volume & Popularity Over Time

6. Content Assistant Gets Multiple Features 

7. Search Intent – Get to Know What the User Wants from the Very Beginning

8. Mobile & Specific Local Analysis Are Now Available

9. Improved Overall Algorithm & Better User Experience

1. What Is the Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool? 

Briefly, cognitiveSEO’s Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool is, for the moment, the fastest way to boost your Google rankings. 

For those of you who haven’t tried cognitiveSEO’s Content Tool yet (the official name of the tool is Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool but most people refer to it as the content tool), please allow us to say a few words about what the tool does.

We created a tool that will help you take full advantage of content as a Google ranking factor. A tool like no other, a tool that understands how the keyword research and search optimization game needs to be played these days. A tool that makes no compromise in terms of quality. A tool that delivers higher rankings & increased organic traffic. 

Below you can see an explanatory video on what our Content Optimize Tool is all about.

This tool is for any marketer, webmaster, SEO Pro, blogger or content writer who needs an app that will actually yield results on a short and long term; a tool that is fully transparent and understands how the SEO landscape has evolved in the last years.

This is NOT just another keyword tool or a Google Keyword Planner alternative. While all the other tools (that we are aware of) stop at giving you keyword suggestions, we go that extra mile: we let you know what to do with those keywords by giving you the exact methodology one should follow to improve their ranks.

You can find here everything you need to know about the tool. Yet, I’d like to present you just two unique features that the tool has:

1. The Content Assistant – the personalized content optimization & content analysis tool that will give you the exact recommendation you should use so that your content will rank the highest. 

We analyze the top ranking pages in Google for the specific keyword you are interested in and, based on a complex semantic algorithm, we let you know how to optimize your content. And which are the exact keywords your content should contain to be as relevant and as optimized as possible.

The tool tells me the exact keywords I should use in my content, highlights the ones I already use and lets me know if there are keywords that I should use more often. In the event of keyword stuffing, the tool will let me know what are the words I overused and which prevent my content from performing as it should.

2. The Content Performance Score – The metric that 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 and relevant content it is. 

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

After a keyword research, you get a content performance score for every piece of content you might be interested in, for any keyword or topic.

After we developed the Content Performance Score, we wanted to make sure that there is a connection between Content Performance and Rankings. And, without lingering for too long, we started a massive SERP research on 30,000 keywords trying to identify whether and how content performance influences Google’s top rankings. 

The higher the score on content performance, the more likely a page is to be ranked higher up.

You can check out the full research here. 

2. A More Suitable Name for the Improved Content Optimization Tool

When it came to our Keyword Tool & Content Assistant, I’m sure you’ve said it and heard it in different ways: the content optimization tool from cognitiveSEO, the content assistant tool or the keyword tool from cognitiveSEO. We don’t mind calling it in different ways; yet, we thought a lot about re-naming the tool so it will be more representative for its main functionality: content optimization.  

cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool & Content Assistant now becomes the Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool. 

The same search optimization tool, the same efficiency, now with a slightly different name.
We started with the name change as a prologue. Yet, for the advanced improvements and the brand new features, keep on reading. 

3. New Metrics for a Better Understanding of Google Search Results

Being in the SEO business for a while, we know that digital marketers & SEO Pros need and love metrics. They like to compare sites and keywords to find the best cost-efficient solution, to create reports for clients, to perform in-depth researches and so on. And to perform all these activities they need metrics and numbers they can rely on. Their intuition when it comes to try ranking for a keyword for instance, needs to be backed-up by reliable metrics. And they couldn’t be more right. You cannot start an in-depth analysis without relying on a handful of strong metrics.  

But what metrics should you actually look after? 

Take baseball. Every team has the same definition of success: winning the World Series. This requires one main asset: a good team which is made out of good players. But what makes a player good? Baseball experts used to answer this question with a handful of simple metrics like batting average and runs batted in. Yet, statisticians came up with better, new metrics. They provided teams with the ability to slice their data in new ways, find better ways of defining good players, and thus win more games (I hope you all watched Moneyball).

While we know that all metrics are proxies for what ultimately matters, we know that some metrics are better than others. 

You’re most likely familiar with the metric: keyword difficulty. It is a metric used to determine how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. Assessing keyword difficulty can help you determine whether or not it’s worth investing resources to rank on that specific keyword.  While we know how important this metric is, we are also aware of the fact that sometimes, this metric alone might not be very practical. We don’t claim to have reinvented the SEO and digital marketing metrics; but what we changed is how we look at the data.

We made the keyword difficulty metric more granular by dividing it within two more straightforward and easier to understand metrics: the content difficulty and the link difficulty. 

4. Content & Links Difficulty – Find Out What You Need to Rank to the Top

What does it take to rank #1 on Google? How many times did you hear that phrase and how many times did you answer with “it depends“?

What we tried to do is to eliminate that “depends” as much as possible and to give you the exact metrics you should follow when it comes to ranking to the very top.

In variable proportions, the two most important Google Ranking Factors are content and links. And this is how we came up with two metrics: Content & Links Difficulty.

4.1 What Is the Content Difficulty Score?

The Content Difficulty metric estimates how hard it will be to rank with well optimized content in the top 10 organic results for a given keyword in a given location.

The Content Difficulty is plotted on a scale from 0 to 100. The lower the Content Difficulty score, the easier it is to create content that ranks high. A lower Content Difficulty score means that there is less content competition on this keyword, and a higher chance to improve rankings using content.

And if you are still wondering if content does influence rankings, here’s a quote from Google’s representative, John Mueller. 

“Without well-optimized content, even if you clean up your website, and you fix all of the issues, it still won’t rank high.”
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

Not only will the tool let you know how easy or difficult it is to rank on a specific keyword from a content point of view, but it will also let you know what content performance score you’d need to win top rankings for that keyword. 

4.2 What Is the Link Difficulty Score?

Links Difficulty estimates how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 organic results for a given keyword in a given location, based on the number & strength of the backlinks that are currently linking to the top URLs ranking for this keyword.

The Links Difficulty is plotted on a scale from 0 to 100. The lower the Links Difficulty score, the easier it is to rank high with backlinks. A lower Links Difficulty score means that there is less competition on this keyword, and a higher chance to improve rankings by getting the recommended number of links.

There is no doubt that the Link Difficulty score is super useful when analyzing the search engine ranking pages or when working on your link building campaign. You want to rank high on a specific keyword, but you need to know what it takes in terms of content and links. And the tool tells you exactly this. But what is even cooler is that the tool gives you the full list of links for any analyzed page. 

Simply click on the number of links for each page or each domain, and you’ll be redirected to the Site Explorer where you’ll get a quick and useful backlink analysis. If you want to check your internal links as well, check our onpage SEO tool. 

5. Keyword Search Volume & Popularity Over Time – How to Find What the Searchers Are Looking For

The Content Optimizer already gave you info on the number of monthly searches for each analyzed keyword. What we’ve added extra now is the trend of the search query, the popularity of the analyzed keywords. 

You’ll now get: 

• The Monthly Search Volume – the total number of searches that are performed through Google, on a monthly basis;

• The Historical Search Trend – the popularity of a keyword in Google Search; It shows the relative interest and trending searches for any given keyword from as early as 2004.

If by now you are still wondering why is this data important, please allow me to offer you an example. 

As you can see in the screenshots below, there are two keywords analyzed: “digital marketing agency chicago” and “marketing agencies in chicago il”.
It happens (quite often unfortunately) for people to start optimizing for different keywords without making a trend or search analysis before. Indeed, in these two cases, the search volume is not very big, yet, consistent enough. Not to mention the trend. “digital marketing agency chicago” is not only searched more on Google within a month, but it also seems to have a growing popularity. On the other hand, “marketing agencies in chicago il” has a lower number of monthly searches but also a descending popularity trend. If you’re a marketing agency from Chicago, Illinois it would be good to rank well on both keywords; yet, it would be wiser to focus on the one with more searches and a growing trend popularity. 

6. Content Assistant Gets Multiple Features 

Leaving modesty aside, you need to know that the Content Assistant tool is one of a kind in the digital marketing field. 

The Content Assistant is now even easier to use, it’s super smart and does most of the job for you.

What you already knew about the tool is that to optimize your content, you just copy-paste a piece of content, start writing a new one or import the content of a page from a URL and the tool tells you the exact keywords you should use in your content, highlights the ones you already use and lets you know if there are keywords that you should use more often. In the event of keyword stuffing, the tool will let you know what are the words you overused and which prevented your content from performing as it should.

Aside all that, allow us to highlight some of the main improvements: 

• Get the exact questions people are asking on Google, related to your query – you can see what your readers and customers are interested in, and you can answer those questions in your content. This section is also very useful for identifying new content ideas you can write about. 

• Better content editing features – whether you copy-paste a piece of text, you import a URL or start from scratch, it will be easier for you to edit the content within the tool. 

• HTML toolbar included – you can edit and format your content just the way you want. You can view your content’s source and you can edit the code behind it directly or you insert pictures, videos, highlight, format or anything you need in terms of content editing. 

• See the content performance score you should have to rank in top Google results – you will get a content performance score target based on the analysis of the pages that are ranking for the keyword you are optimizing for. 

• Know your content reading time – you can now see how long it will take your readers to go through the article written by you. 

7. Search Intent – Get to Know What the User Wants from the Very Beginning

Putting it simply, search intent is the why behind a search experience. In other words, why did the person make this search? What was the reason behind it? Do they want to find out something? Do they want to buy something? Do they want to navigate on a specific website?

Knowing the intent of the user is of paramount importance. If the keywords you want to rank for have clear and consistent intent behind them, you can tailor your content format and structure to be the best possible match for that intent. 

Let’s say, for instance, that your search is related to sunglasses. Based on the exact words you use, the search engine might interpret your query as having different intents behind it:

• informational (if you search for “how to clean polarized sunglasses”);
• navigational (if you search for the name of a particular brand of sunglasses);
• transactional (if you search for “buy polarized sunglasses” or “sunglasses on sales”);

But sometimes, figuring out the intent of the user is not that easy. That’s why we fine-tuned our SEO content optimizer tool so you can see from the very beginning what is the search intent for the keyword you want to optimize for. This way, you’ll know exactly what type of content to create for it. 

A search for “how to make tiramisu” will be classified by the tool as being “informational” from a search intent point of view. To rank on this keyword, it’s likely you’re going to need a “how to” type of SEO content or an user guide to draw attention and, given the context, a blog is probably the best type of page to host this content. On the other hand, with a search like “iphone 10 vs samsung galaxy 10”, you would fully expect for the first page of results to be filled with comparative review type pages from specialized review websites.

8. Mobile & Specific Local Analysis Are Now Available

An online presence is highly valuable for every business, no matter if you are located in a single place or have lots of offices around the globe. And search engine optimization should be applied both locally and globally.

Businesses that want to optimize for mobile and local SEO should have all the necessary tools and knowledge to fulfill their goal. Now more than ever, Google is focused on offering a personalized experience for each user, thus local optimization plays a crucial part in the play. Understanding this, we now offer you the possibility of creating the perfectly optimized piece of content at a mobile and local level. Choose the exact location you want to rank on, and see what it takes to rank be in top Google results. 

9. Improved Overall Algorithm & Better User Experience

You already know it: today, publishing content is more important than ever. It is the one thing that is going to make the difference in a really hectic noisy market place.

But content marketing doesn’t happen overnight, especially with its continuous reinvention and advancement of technology. You need the right tools to keep up. 

And although the monthly search volume for your query, keyword suggestions filtered by relevancy, number of words, etc. are important metrics for you to follow, they are not enough. 

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?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that would tell you the exact things your content is missing to rank in top 10 results?

Good news, we’ve invented that tool and we’ve also improved it: Content Assistant – the personalized content optimization tool that will give you the exact recommendation you should use so that your content will rank the highest.

What was a trendy and efficient technique a couple of months ago, now it might not work anymore as Google have changed their algorithm. This is why we know that in order to have a tool that brings real result we need to keep on improving it. The digital marketing evolves, but so does our tool. 

We’ve updated the complex algorithms that make the Content Optimizer work efficiently .

The content performance score is now even more accurate and the keywords suggestions offered by the tool are clutter-free.

Any algorithm has a false positive ratio. Yet, we try to keep that ratio at the lowest possible level. The improved version of the content assistant will offer you zero (or as close to zero as possible) unrelated keyword suggestions or keywords you should focus on. You will now be able to concentrate only on the keywords that will make your relevant content rank in top search result or even in Google’s answer box. 

Keep in mind that the Content Optimizer is a learning machine, based on real-time search results.  It is not just a database, but an instant Google SERP analyzer. If you’re looking for a third party opinion of the tool, here you can find a Content Optimizer from cognitiveSEO review. A lot of Google reverse engineering was involved in this, combining advanced algorithms and concepts such as semantic search, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), TF*IDF or topical authority, just to mention a few.

We hope you’ll enjoy the improvements just as much as we do. If you’re already using the tool, please let us know what you think about the new additions. If you’re new, take the tool for a spin and tell us how you like it. 

The post The Improved Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool. More Features. Smarter. Simply Better appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Given the fact that Google Search Console, the tool that helps you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, is such a used tool by our users, we had to include it within the cognitiveSEO Dashboard. No more switching between tools, no more wasting time and comparing data between tabs or downloaded files. Google Search Console is now part of the cognitiveSEO toolset.

Therefore, from now on you’ll have all the marketing KPIs in one place. You have all the tools and information in a single window to create better reports and have a wider view of everything that happens with a website. After Google Analytics, is time for Google Search Console to join the cognitiveSEO family.  

1. The Importance of Google Search Console Integration
2. Keep Track of Your Most Important Website Performance Metrics
3. Combine Search Console Metrics and Analytics with the cognitiveSEO Data
4. Get an Overview of Your Website’s Performance Including All the KPIs
5. Personalize Your Reports Based on the Metrics that Interest You Most

1. The Importance of Google Search Console Integration

You can make better business decisions and improve your presence online following the data you get on your dashboard. Create correlations and cross-check your data through Google and cognitiveSEO. You can keep track of the most important Google Search Console data and, together with the Google Analytics integrations and the data you receive within cognitiveSEO, you can create one of the most comprehensive reports.

The information you get within cognitiveSEO is unique and helps you have an overview of your website from a different perspective. The result is simple: no more wasting time and a way better website management. 

2. Keep Track of Your Most Important Website Performance Metrics

The new Google Search Console integration reunites all the important marketing KPIs in one place and keeps you updated of any change. Once you have authorized your Google Search Console account you’ll be able to track a lot of metrics in the cognitiveSEO Dashboard.

Form pie charts to tables, the most important data will be displayed directly in your cognitiveSEO account. You can make lots of combinations due to the high level of personalization given by the widgets. And basically, the same data you’re seeing within your Search Console account, can be seen directly within cognitiveSEO. Pretty neat, right?

Almost all the data that you can see within the Search Console can be added on the cognitiveSEO dashboard. Yet, for a better understanding, let’s browse through some metrics from Search Console and see how we can monitor them within our SEO toolset.

Overall Web, Image or Video Performance

You’ve probably heard time and time again that performance matters and that the first step in improving your website is measuring it.

But what web performance metrics should you pay attention to? Well, it depends. While there are some universal web performance metrics that almost everyone should track, the metrics that matter most to you could vary based on your industry or business goals. And this is why we want to offer you the possibility of adding as many metrics as possible from Page Speed, Google Analytics, Google Search Console. 

Metrics are not one size fits all.

One of the most popular chart from Search Console, the performance one, can now be added within cognitiveSEO. You can see the velocity of your clicks, impressions, click-through- rate or average position at a web, image or video level. Of course, you can choose the period of time you want to see the data for, keeping in mind that this Google tool allows you to see data from the last 16 months. 

Keep in mind that for a better analysis, the total number of clicks, impressions and average CTR, and position you have the possibility of adding two types of chart: a numeric one and a trend one. 

But let’s take a look at these metrics a bit more granular.

Total Number of Clicks

Intuitively, the total number of clicks tracks the number of people that clicked on a page from your website in SERP. It basically counts how many people visit your website and it gives you indications of your website’s traffic. Therefore, you can view the evolution of your whole website’s clicks in the search results. This chart is customizable and allows you to select:

• the search type: web, image, video;
• reload time: 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours;
• the period of time you want to see the data for.  

Of course, you can edit the chart any time you want and select the period for display, available at the bottom of the chart by clicking on the left and right arrow. There are lots of periods available; it can be 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 1 year, and more, up to all the time. 

Total Number of Impressions 

The total impression chart is a very intuitive one: it keeps track of the amount of time a user sees your page in Google Search results. Similar to clicks, impressions measure one thing: the effectiveness of your website content. An impression is a view. When a page of your website displays to a user in the search results, after a keyword search, that is one impression. The impressions are counted every time a person sees your webpage, no matter if it’s the first or the tenth time visitor sees it. 

The chart can be customized for a specific period to display the trending line, the reload time and search type. All of these can be added or adjusted within our freshly added Google Search Console widgets. 

Average CTR (Click-Through Rate)

The average click-through rate reveals how often people who view your page in the search results click on it and visit your website. The CTR determines somehow the value of your webpage. The higher your CTR, the better. Continually keeping an eye on this metric is highly important as it helps you draw some important conclusions on your business performance: what it works, why it works, what you need to improve, etc. 

But click-through rate and rankings – do they go hand in hand or not? You can check out if and how click-through rate impacts your Google rankings from this awesome SEO interview.

Web Performance by Page and Device 

You know the saying: all pages are equal, but some of them are more equal than others. Get to know how your pages are performing; which one has the most clicks, impressions? Which one has the least? Which one should you focus on less and which one is bringing you most of the traffic?

Also, another important metric you should focus on is how your website is performing on several devices. Everybody knows mobile is on the rise but does this apply for your business as well? Check where most of your clicks, and therefore your users, are coming from and start re-thinking your strategy having this data in mind. 

3. Combine the Search Console and Analytics Metrics with the cognitiveSEO Data

Being able to see data from multiple other tools directly within cognitiveSEO is awesome; yet, the question remains: how to make the most out of the Google Analytics and Search Console integration and get the best of both worlds? 

There are several instances where you can combine the data from all the tools, but allow us to present just some of the instances where you can take advantage of both cognitiveSEO and the data provided by Google. 

Get to Know Your SERP Position in Google

Google’s tool offers you the possibility to check your website’s average position. This chart helps you track the evolution of the average position in SERP for the whole website. You need to know that the data is aggregated by all queries. The position value is the average position for all searches. Yet, for your specific search, your position might be different than the average because of many variables, such as your search history, location, and so on. 

While knowing your average position can give you an overall idea of how your website is performing, knowing the exact positions your website is ranking for, on local, desktop or mobile, on the keywords you are interested in, it’s crucial.

We recommend you combine the data you get from the Search Console with the exact SERP positions you get from the cognitiveSEO Rank Tracker. 

Hope you all know that within cognitiveSEO you can also track your rankings on a local level. With 46% of all searches on Google seeking for local information, there is no need to highlight the importance of keeping track of your ranks at a local level. 

Pull data from Search Console to check out your average position by country, analyze the countries you are already ranking in and the ones that you are not but you’re thinking of targeting, and after that make sure to track keywords at a local level with cognitiveSEO. 

Optimize for Your Top Search Queries

Search queries are the words that people type into the search box and trigger a list of results. The Search Queries table keeps track of the queries that trigger your domain in SERP, so each time someone searches for specific words, the tool extracts the lists. 

Looking at the search queries list, you can get insight into exactly how users are searching for your type of product or service and giving you an opportunity to refine your focus keyword list to reach a broader audience.

Once you know what keywords you want to target and how you are performing on those keywords, what you need to do know is to make sure that your site is well optimized for that keyword and has high chances of ranking for it.

You can use the Keyword Tool & Content Assistant to optimize your website for the exact keywords you want to rank and make sure you’ll reach to the top Google SERP. 

Once you optimize your pages, your job is not yet done. You need to constantly monitor your progress, check how your pages are performing and keep an eye on what it needs to be improved. The Google Analytics integration allows you to do exactly this: constant monitoring your website’s performance. And since it’s already integrated within the cognitiveSEO marketing dashboard, why not use it to its full capacities? 

4. Get an Overview of Your Website’s Performance Including All the KPIs

Enabling Search Console data in your cognitiveSEO account is a time breaker and a game changer. Time is highly important and making apps more suited for the user is a great asset. We understand that value of time and cherish it. That’s why we thought of gathering all the important KPIs in one place. Moreover, lots of users mentioned the need in their reporting process. 

Along with Google Analytics, the addition to the tool, Google Search Console integration, is an efficient solution that allows you to be in control of your website 24/7 without being overwhelmed by lots of cross-checking platforms, windows, and files.

Probably, you are already familiar with the cognitiveSEO Dashboard; now, you can find the new Google Search Console widgets right below Google Analytics. Therefore the Dashboard will look more complete and more appealing for your reports and your day to day overview. 

5. Personalize Your Reports Based on the Metrics that Interest You Most

I bet you put a lot of work in your reports. You can create more comprehensive reports that are visually appealing, highly personalized and automated. And you want to deliver top-notch data and only the relevant information. Get rid of the clutter and personalize your widgets by selecting only the category you’re interested in and apply all the filters that you’d like. 

You decide what information to display, the period of time, the device tracked and a lot more. cognitiveSEO makes it very easy to set up each chart and view it the way you want. You can maximize or minimize your chart, exactly as you wish. All of these options are available in the GSC widget form cognitiveSEO Dashboard.

cognitiveSEO makes it very easy to have all the marketing KPIs in one place, by using the Google Analytics and Google Search Console integration. By authorizing the accounts you’ll get a lot of valuable data in a single place, creating the most comprehensive reports.

Now it is easier to create fully customizable reports to surprise your clients, to check all the results in a single place, save more time to do other tasks instead of wasting time on checking the data on multiple platforms, and easily share the report directly from the cognitiveSEO dashboard containing all the marketing assets to your clients and team members. 

So, what you’re waiting for? Give this comprehensive SEO dashboard a free try! 

The post All the Google Search Console & SEO KPIs in One Place: the cognitiveSEO Dashboard appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

And, as the environment changes, so do we. The key is in that very word: “better” – not “good”, but “better”, which comes with the promise of continuous improvement.

This is why after creating the cognitiveSEO tool we have never really stopped working on new ideas. Sure, there was plenty of tinkering with the existing tool, in trying to give you the best analysis of off-page SEO issues, overlooking the quality of referring domains, your backlink profile, potentially broken links and so on. But a comprehensive SEO audit isn’t complete without looking at the on-site elements related to site architecture: the website pages, their loading time, the xml sitemap, meta tags and meta descriptions, content quality, etc. And this is how the cognitiveSEO Site Audit was born. 

We’ve worked a lot (please read tremendously) to make this new Site Audit tool and give it all sorts of unique features.

What’s it all about?

In short, our brand new SEO website audit tool flags ALL possible OnPage SEO issues a site might have and provides recommendations on how to fix them. Putting it simply, the new tool allows you to improve your website’s onpage SEO performance, at the highest level of detail.

Therefore allow me to present you just some of the things our built-with-sweat Site Audit can do for you: 

1. Find All Possible SEO Issues of Any Website and Get Recommendations on How to Fix Them
2. Use cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit to Get Improved SEO Results and Conversions
3. Improve User Experience by Correcting Site Architecture Problems
4. Cutting-Edge Technical Yet User Friendly Site Audits for Both Marketers and Professionals
5. Why cognitiveSEO Is the Only SEO Tool You’ll Ever Need

The addition of the Site Audit feature makes cognitiveSEO the only SEO software you’ll ever need. 

What does this mean in terms of wins for you? At cognitiveSEO you now have everything SEO related all together: backlink analysis, technical SEO Audits, content audits, keywords research & rank tracking, content optimization, Google Penalty prevention and recovery, and much much more.

1. Find All Possible SEO Issues of Any Website and Get Recommendations on How to Fix Them

Although the title might be self explanatory, you need to know that the title is also very accurate. 

Our website audit gives you a much wider array of SEO items to look at and can analyse issues of all types that might prevent you from reaching your best possible ranking.

Of course, off-page issues are highly important to work on at times, but they won’t target all the important search engines ranking factors. Here’s where the on-site factors step in. To make sure you’re not missing anything, you should be aware 24/7 of the offpage and onpage factors that influence your website’s performance.

The truth is, that with the ever-evolving search engines algorithms you need an efficient solution to keep your rankings safe. And cognitiveSEO does exactly that: it lets you know all the issues that might prevent your online business from getting the organic traffic and the high rankings you deserve. 

Even more, cognitiveSEO’s technical SEO audit tool helps you detect all the weak points of your website before your users do, giving you a competitive advantage on the competitive market we are swimming in. Our SEO Audit Tool crawls all the pages it finds on your website, regardless of the size of your website, and provides a fully customized set of data easy to comprehend and visualize.

While knowing the exact problems your site encounters is great, just half of the job is done. But we take care at the other half as well, as we offer you precise recommendations on how to fix the error on your site so you can outrank your competitors and quickly increase your overall website performance. So, all you have to do is crawl your website with our SEO auditing tool. Pretty neat, right? 

cognitiveSEO’s onpage analysis offers a set of unique features and numerous parameters that allows you to see what’s under the hood of your entire website and your SEO campaigns. Below are just some of the features that our comprehensive audit checklist contains.

2. Use cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit to Get Improved SEO Results and Conversions

At the end of the day (or of the year) there are a lot of metrics we look at to measure our website’s success. But there is a particular one that is on everybody’s lips and which actually pays the bills: the conversion rate. 

We are not going to talk about incredible tips and tricks on how to deliver overnight magic solutions for boosting your conversions. But about the tangible, actionable things that you ca do to improve you sales and conversions. 

Performing a complete website audit will give you a deeper understanding of why your site is not generating the organic traffic you think it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving.

Let’s take for example the situation from the screenshot below. The analyzed website has pages that are really really difficult to reach. There are even pages you can reach after more than nine or ten clicks. In an era of instant data and solutions, having these type of pages could be a buzz killer…not to mention a conversion killer. One of those hard to reach pages could be an important one for you; one from which you would expect to generate conversions or any type of transaction. 

Knowing what’s holding your conversions at a low rate is the first step for increasing them. Look for your website elements that could yield your biggest wins.

Once you run a complete website audit you will figure out that there is so little effort you can invest and the results could be so huge. 

3. Improve User Experience by Correcting Site Architecture Problems

An excellent site architecture is mandatory for both search engines and for user experience. Why, you might ask.

If we think about the site architecture issues many websites encounter, we can understand how they can mess both search engine crawlers and the user’s experience.

Here are just a few examples: 

3+ Clicks to reach any page –  It’s known that pages that are 3 to 7 clicks away from the homepage are harder to reach while pages that are more than seven clicks away from the homepage may never be reached by a visitor that lands on the homepage. You should check that no important pages are too far aways from a click path point of view from the homepage. This way, both your visitor and the search engine could easily get to that page. 

Internal anchor text bombing – Internal links are highly important; yet, if your landing page is not Wikipedia, having tons of internal links could do you more harm than good. Your best bet is to write internal anchor text for both visitors and engines.

The URLs are not search or user friendly – We’ve even conducted a study on this matter a while ago, finding out that the more concise and self explanatory the URL, the greater the chance to be higher up on ranks. Google loves shorter URLs but also your users. Really, as long as the length falls between 50 and 60 characters, you’re probably in a good spot. But as long as your URL looks something like this, http://www.example.com/product.aspx?ID=/c/YoZn1Z2v/46411526post=20908&action&IT=5f7d3d, you might want to reconsider your choices. Luckly, our Site Audit will let you know on any issues you might encounter with your URLs. 

Dynamic URLs – If it’s even remotely possible, avoid them completely for your user and the search engine’s sake. Yet, knowing what URLs are dynamic can save you from lot of troubles. 

With the flood of gigabytes and gigabytes of new information being created every second, search engines took on tremendous importance. Some even became so ever-present in our lives that we take their search results for granted, not wondering how they are produced or how the silent and irregular algorithmic update might influence them. So understanding why something is relevant, while something else is not, has become a separate mode of innovation and improvement in itself. It’s rank high in the search results or perish.

Our onpage SEO audit helps you diagnose all the SEO errors and problems with your site structure or website architecture so that you can deliver the best UX for your users. Our SEO checker also performs an in-depth competitor analysis so you can check what your competitors are doing and how can you beat them at their own game.

4. Cutting-Edge Technical Yet User Friendly Site Audits for both Marketers and Professionals

How do you recognize a good Site Audit tool? To be honest, there are many step by step guides on how to do that but one of them is by checking if it fits the needs of both marketers looking to improve the overall performance of a website and a skilled technical SEO who wants to dig deeper into the analysis. 

cognitiveSEO’s powerful Site Audit offers you the exact customized data that fits your needs.

SEO audits are for both savvy, super technical SEO gurus and digital marketers or for content marketers coordinators. While speaking the language of all could be hard and why not, tricky, when it comes to SEO we need to understand that search engine optimization is a mean and not a purpose. Therefore, regardless of your job title, as long as you are part of the “online business team”, or you’re on the “improving your site” side,  then you should take a sneak peak at a comprehensive website audit. 

5. Why cognitiveSEO Is the Only SEO Tool You’ll Ever Need

By adding the new Site Audit onpage module, cognitiveSEO will be the only tool you’ll ever need, a complete toolset that will serve for all your SEO needs – both on and off page. Within the ever-growing tools landscape of SEO, it can be very comforting to be able to rely on a single provider for all your needs.

It’s not just comfort – relying on a single ecosystem means better integration, more efficiency and increased simplicity.

And if you don’t believe me yet, here is a short list of the features cognitiveSEO provides:

• Technical SEO Website Audit
• In-depth Backlink Analysis
• Content Audit
• SEO Visibility
• Site Health Audit
• Desktop, Mobile and Local Rank Tracking Tool
• Keywords Research
• Content Optimization
• Social Visibility
• Automated Digital Marketing Reports
• Quick Backlink Checker
• Shareable SEO Dashboard
• Google Algorithm Changes

You need to know that the idea of having an all-in-one SEO analysis toolset started seven years ago from one man’s passion for SEO and digital marketing and his desire to find a cost-efficient solution that could meet all his professional requirements. Years have passed and cognitiveSEO has grown stronger each year, with lots of awesome users confirming the same need: an all-inclusive SEO software that would be reliable, accurate, affordable and would integrate anything an SEO Pro, webmaster or digital marketer would need. 

We are proud to be standing here today, knowing that we’ve created something that both ourselves and our customers can use to improve their business.

With no hidden tricks and no shortcuts, but by using a powerful SEO software and the greatest tool of all: our brain.  

The post cognitiveSEO Launches The Site Audit Tool That Fixes Your Site & Increases Your Ranks appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Better. Faster. Stronger. This is how the cognitiveSEO app feels like now. We spent the last couple of months improving our toolset from a design & functionality point of view, so all our users could now enjoy a tool that loads up to five times faster, has a cleaner interface, and a way better usability. 

We have to be honest and admit that in the past users complained about slow loading times and a not-so-great user-experience. 

With everything else we’re currently working on (and trust us, there’s a lot), we could have just let this go and said “It can wait”.

But “good enough” is just not good enough for us and we want our users to have both the best service and the best experience when using our service.

We wanted to address these concerns for a long time now, but everything happens at the right time. And given that today’s the right time, we are glad and proud to share with you what the cognitiveSEO team members have been breaking their backs with in the last months. 

Up to 5x Faster Loading Time

In a world that is constantly rushing and with a need for near-instant gratification, there is no need to outline the importance of speed. Faster thinking, faster internet speed, faster vehicles, faster apps – everyone and everything is moving faster. Therefore, we had no other choice than comply and offer our users an SEO toolset that would fit their speed needs.

You’ll be doing more work in less time.

No more slow-loading times, regardless how big the data volume is, and no more dead times until website comparative analysis loads. The cognitiveSEO app is now faster than it ever was, while also remaining cutting edge and fully comprehensive. 

Improved User Experience

We always focus on having a deep understanding of our users – what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations when it comes to using our tool. 

And while we were aware that the design is highly important, we didn’t want to leave some equally important attributes behind such as utility, usability, and efficiency.

We all need people to give us feedback. That’s how we improve. And we were lucky enough to have a lot of users sharing their experience with us regarding the tool, their needs, requirements, and interests. We were all ears, and we’ve made the necessary changes to make sure our users have a better experience with the tool, a better feel, and a more efficient use of it. 

You can now enjoy a way easier selection and creation of campaigns. You can switch between campaigns fast and easy, regardless if you’re checking link profiles or keywords’ rankings. 

The filtering capabilities are now improved; not only they look and feel better, but they are also more advanced. You can now better visualize the available filters, you can add several filters at once, and you can also save all your favorite ones with just one click.  These are only some of the improvements we’ve made. However, in order to actually enjoy the improvements we’ve made to better user experience, we highly recommend you to try it out and convince yourself. 

Cleaner, Easier to Understand Interface

Just like in so many movie montages, we’ve gone for a style change that makes us feel better about ourselves.

The new design looks better, moves faster and is more in line with the way we see ourselves now. 

Being in the SEO world, you’ve probably heard this a thousand times before: Content is king. While this remains true, we need to outline the fact that content is king, but the presentation is also important because this is what makes you look at the content in the first place. The same is true both in face-to-face interactions and when it comes to digital interactions.

Marketers, designers, and developers worked together in finding the best re-design version, one that would not snip anything off the quality, but would rather offer a better feeling, flow, and ease of tool use. 

If someone has something important to say but fails at being attractive, we tend to lose focus. It’s not something we do intentionally, but we do it nonetheless. Were we to choose, most of us would probably go for a rather shallow but well put together motivational speech, than an informative but dry lecture. People might eventually listen if you have something worth to say, but it’s better to make it easier for them.

This is what we tried to do with our interface: create something more attractive, cleaner, and easier to understand and work with. 

But too much talk ruins it, so you would better go, check out the tool improvements, and experience the changes on your own. It will definitely sweep you off your feet!

The post A Better cognitiveSEO Is Now Live. Huge Speed & Design Improvements appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

We are very proud to share with you cognitiveSEO’s newest tool named Signals. What is this tool doing? Keeping your online business safe. How? By monitoring the SERPs so you can spot and be notified of all important Google updates & fluctuations. And yes, it’s real time. 

cognitiveSEO Signals is the tool you need to have in mind when it comes to Google Algorithm Changes. We know, Google Updates can be a scary thing, but we’ve come to rescue this time.

Being able to not only monitor, but also understand why fluctuations happen will give you a competitive edge, both in the short and in the long run.

You will be able to more easily recover from an unsuspecting penalty (even if you don’t know all the specifics) and, over time, you will gain a better understanding of the ways and directions search engines are moving into.

This way, you could even tailor your strategy in such a way that you can even avoid rank drops following some algorithm changes.

Not to mention that you’ll receive all the Google Updates Alerts directly in your inbox.  

1. Google Algorithm Updates – A Constant Challenge
2. cognitiveSEO Signals or How to Keep Your Business Safe
3. cognitiveSEO Signals – Under the Hood
4. How to Spot Google Updates – October 2017 Update Case Study 
5. The Best Is Yet to Come

Google Algorithm Updates – A Constant Challenge 

Some of the major algorithm updates are publicized and attract open discussion and scrutiny. But most are adopted inconspicuously, leaving the online community scratching their heads for causal relationships when it comes to their fluctuations in the rankings.

Ourselves are constant Google-Fluctuation-Hunters and not once we’ve written articles and case studies about the latest algorithm updates. We know, just as much as anyone who has a business online, that a Google update can damage you (in some cases) irremediably. You can lose your business in just a few seconds. Of course, there are also happy cases when a Google update can boost you up in rankings, yet, the main concern remains to keep your online business safe. You know the saying, what goes around comes around. Today you’re up; tomorrow brings new challenges. 

cognitiveSEO Signals or How to Keep Your Business Safe 

Being aware of everybody’s main concern: keeping your online business safe,  we’ve created a tool to spot all Google’s updates in real time. We are proud to introduce you cognitiveSEO Signals.  

We monitor the SERP so you can spot all the important updates & fluctuations. 

cognitiveSEO Signals – Under the Hood

To make sure that the newest cognitiveSEO family member is the right tool for you in terms of spotting Google Updates, check out Signal’s résumé: 

Impressive Data Set

We monitor more than 100 000 keywords on a daily basis. Whenever there is a spike that strays from the baseline, we can tell you whether it is due to natural fluctuations or a change in Google’s approach.

Hourly Updated Data

You can easily track and visualize changes as they happen with an updated hourly chart. The data is easy to understand as the fluctuations are marked as normal, medium and high. Also, a Google algorithm change score will help you to keep track with all the changes. 

Granular Data for an Accurate Interpretation

You can fine-tune your analysis by adjusting the period of time and level of variation displayed in the fluctuation chart. It’s important that you have this kind of flexibility because just as not all trends are easy to spot in an ever shifting landscape, not all changes are significant. We allow you to visualize the data in a way that allows you to better understand Google and its updates: you can see fluctuations for the top 10, 20 or 50 positions only; you can also choose to see the data only for ranking changes with at least 3, 5 or 10 positions.  You can see exactly the importance of the granular data in this case study exposed below. 

Volatility Alerts Directly in Your Inbox

All you have to do is subscribe with your e-mail address, and we’ll keep you up to date on any rank fluctuations. This way you can find out when Google updates its algorithms and be ready to deal with the causes of any rank drop you might encounter.

Google Updates for 12 Countries, on Desktop, Mobile, and Local Level

There is no need to repeat that Google’s updates are not the same worldwide. While in Canada there can be massive fluctuations, in France could be no trace of major updates within universal search. This is why we offer you the possibility to spot the updates for the country you are most interested in. For the moment we offer you real time updates for: US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, India, Italy, Netherlands, Romania and Turkey.

Also, for some countries, you have the possibility to see the volatility for desktop, mobile or local rankings.  

The best part about our newest tool? This is just the beginning! There are more features coming up in the future and we can hardly wait to share them with you in the near future. 

How to Spot Google Updates – October 2017 Update Case Study 

cognitiveSEO Signals make it easy to spot any important Google updates. Being so granular, one of the greatest merits of the tool is that it allows you to see not only when there were fluctuations but who exactly was affected by the updates and to what extent. 

A recent Google Search Algorithm & Ranking Update was spot on October 7th – 9th by Barry Schwartz. Having this update in mind we’ve decided to see how we can use cognitiveSEO Signals to spot it.  The path of discovering this update was a very interesting one. 

Bare with me here and allow me to show you what exactly am I talking about.  Let’s take a look at the screenshot below. We can see that starting with 7th of October, there are some medium fluctuations, yet nothing very impressive. We see this algorithm change for the top 50 positions, taking into consideration sites that had ranking fluctuations with at least five positions.  

You know that saying, there are no facts, only interpretations. And the only thing we sometimes have control over is perspective. So I invite you to take another look at the same chart, for the same period of time but for a different set of data.  

This time, if we look only at the fluctuations occurred within Google’s top 10 positions and for even higher ranking changes (all the websites that experienced changes in rankings with at least 10 positions), in front of our eyes will stretch a whole new situation. It seems that the fluctuations at the beginning of October where actually very high. As we are looking at changes in rankings with at least 10 positions (be it increases or decreases), we can easily realize that there has been a lot of interchanging between Google’s first 2 pages.  

Most likely some of the pages that had a warm place on Google’s first page have fallen on the second page and some “lucky” (but most likely hard-working) websites from the second page are now enjoying the benefits of being within Google and users’ favorites. 

It’s a dramatic fluctuation if we think the battlefield for any webmaster and SEO pro is unfolding on Google’s first page. 

Even more, if we take a look at the fluctuations from the beginning of the year (from January 2017 until mid October 2017) we can see that this is the biggest update from this year. We all know that Google is constantly changing and there has been some other fluctuations during the year. But none so significant as this one.

Therefore, if you experience some sudden drops for your top ranking keywords and you don’t know why, the chart below may hold the answer. 

The Best Is Yet to Come

The old adage that “Information is power” is no longer entirely true. A more updated version might be: 

The ability to scan through relentless swathes of information and distinguish signal from noise is power.

Not quite as catchy, but a lot more accurate.

We’ve promised you in the title that the best is yet to come and we are going to stick with that. What does this mean exactly? 

It means that we are not stopping here.

Without reveling how cognitiveSEO Signals will look in a couple of months from now, let me just tell you that you will love it.

And this is because there will be new features available and you will be able to correlate directly the relation between your site and the Google Algorithm Updates.  

Google rolled up so many updates until now. Mobile friendly, intrusive interstitials, Google payday loan, Google Penguin and Panda updates, Google Hummingbird or the Brandy update. Some of them are Google confirmed, some of them are unnamed updates. Regardless of the situation is import to keep an eye an all of them. But, how can you do that when they are so many? 

The best things come to those who wait. I am sure that you will have patience and meanwhile you will take full advantage of cognitiveSEO Signals’present capabilities. 

Being on Google’s golden list is what we all want, and this tool gives a helping hand in our pursuit to #1 Google page. 

Why is it so difficult to make it to the top (and stay there)? There’s obviously no universal answer or formula, but there is one common element:

The constant drive from the information gatekeepers (i.e., Google & co.) to improve and refine the accuracy and relevance of their algorithms.

cognitiveSEO Signals is for the moment free to use. Therefore, you have no excuse not to be updated with the major Google Algorithm Changes. 

The post New Tool to Spot Google Algorithm Updates in Real Time appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Admittedly, Twain didn’t know a thing about SEO, but his wisdom remains relevant beyond technology. Because, when you come to think of it, that’s a large part of what we do: we struggle to find the best way to say something, so as to make it the most attractive to potential users.

In the past few months we’ve been working relentlessly on a game-changing SEO tool: The Keyword Tool and Content Assistant. A tool that is perfectly adapted to the digital marketing realities and designed to help you to improve what matters most: rankings.

We firmly believe that our Keyword tool is, for the moment, the fastest way to boost your Google rankings. With the hope that we’ve stirred your curiosity, we invite you to scroll down and read more about the tool that will make you re-think they way you do SEO. 

1. Does It Take You Months, If Not Years, to Improve Your Rankings?
2. Keyword Tool & Content Assistant – The Tool That Changes the SEO Game
3. How Is cognitiveSEOs’ Keyword & Content Tool Different Than the Other Keyword Research Tools
4. How To Get Higher Rankings on Google in Three Easy Steps
   1. Step 1. Use the Keyword Explorer to Reveal Thousands of Topics & Keywords Opportunities
   2. Step 2. Understand How Content Impacts SERP by Using the Ranking Analysis
   3. Step 3. Use the Content Assistant to Identify the Exact Keywords Your Content Is Missing to Rank Higher
5. What Is the Content Performance Score?
6. Does Content Performance Influence Rankings? – Massive SERP Research
7. Case Studies – Higher Rankings with 30 Minutes Work in Less Than 48 Hours

Does It Take You Months, If Not Years, to Improve Your Rankings?

How many times did it happen to you to write amazing content that simply didn’t rank the way you’d expect to?

And how many coffees did you drink trying to figure out why other pages rank in front of you for a keyword that you are highly interested in?

I know it happened to me a lot and I know how frustrated I felt.

Lately, it’s getting harder and harder to rank on Google’s top rankings, no need to insist on that. Yet, we cannot stop thinking: What can we do to reach those top positions? Are links the solution? Maybe content?

Last year we realized that the competition in Google was made up of mega-brands like Wikipedia, Forbes and Entrepreneur. Yet, to have a puncher’s chance against these huge authority sites we need to outsmart them.

But how can small brands and businesses stand a chance in front of these giants? Off page factors like links are not in our direct control. And even if they were it’s almost impossible to keep up with the link amount a big brand is getting. 

We then realized that the solution stands in the ranking factors that we can control, such as content. 

As we like to find solutions more than we like complaining about problems, we’ve started to experiment with some advanced theories about how Google classifies top ranking content and to put them into practice. We’ve played around with complex algorithms, semantic search and cutting edge artificial intelligence. 

The amount of work invested in creating this metric? Humongous!

The results? Worth every second!

As mentioned before, we’ve figured out a solution for the Google top positions issues and the results were incredible:

• Higher rankings
• More organic traffic (within days)

And as we, at cognitiveSEO, like to share the best experiences and tools with you, we’ve started working on a tool that will make re-think all your SEO’s strategies. 

Keyword Tool & Content Assistant – The Tool That Changes the SEO Game

Ranking on Google’s top positions is becoming harder and harder every day. And this is because there are a lot of ranking factors that are not under your direct control.

Everywhere you turn you hear the saying: Content Is King. But what does that even mean?

With Google focusing more on semantic search, content remains a huge ranking factor. And, unlike backlinks for instance, content is in your full control.

What we did was create a tool that will help you take full advantage of content as a Google ranking factor. A tool like no other, a tool that understands how the SEO game needs to be played these days. A tool that makes no compromise in terms of quality. A tool that delivers higher rankings & increased organic traffic – The Keyword Tool and Content Assistant. 

Below you can see an explanatory video on what our Keyword Tool is all about. 

You too can become a topical authority and get the best possible rankings based on content.

Relavancy and optimization.  Two important attributes that every content should have. And we are going to tell you exactly how to achieve them.

Our Keyword Tool & Content Assistant is not just a tool, but a 3 in 1 tool that combines these powerful features:

• Keyword Research
• Ranking Analysis
• Content Optimization 

The keyword research tool will help you to identify new ranking opportunities and thousands of keyword and topic suggestions.

The Ranking Analysis will give you insights on the top ranking pages in Google, letting you know the reasons why those sites are ranking there, from a content point of view and not only.

The Content Optimization Tool is a fully personalized content assistant that will guide you to craft optimized and relevant content that will rank in top SERPs.

This tool is for any marketer, webmaster, SEO Pro, blogger or content writer who needs an app that will actually yield results on short and long term;  a tool that is fully transparent and understands how the SEO landscape has evolved in the last years.

How Is cognitiveSEOs’ Keyword & Content Tool Different Than the Other Keyword Research Tools

When you read the title of this chapter, chances are you must have said something like: “oh no, not another keyword research tool.”

And you couldn’t be more right.

This is NOT just another keyword tool or a Google Keyword Planner alternative.

Yes, it gives you thousands of keyword suggestions and ranking opportunities and yes, by using the tool you can find the keywords that people are typing into Google Search Box. And even the keywords from autocompletes and search engine suggestions, ordered by search volume, cost per click or keyword difficulty.

But it does much more than that.

While all the other tools (that we are aware of) stop at giving you keyword suggestions, we go that extra mile: we let you know what to do with those keywords by giving you the exact methodology one should follow to improve their ranks.

What is the purpose of a keyword research tool if not improve your rankings? We understood this need and this is how we came up creating a tool that will ease the process of your final purpose: higher rankings.

If we were to include everything that the Keyword Tool & Content Assistant does in just one tagline, this would be it:

The Keyword Tool & Content Assistant helps you to find keyword opportunities & create better performing content.

As we were saying before, there are lots of keyword research tools available, yet there’s no other tool like this one out there. And this is because our tool is not just a simple keyword explorer. Our tool also offers the exact methodology one should follow to improve their ranks.

As we cannot summarize everything that our freshly launched tool can do for us in just one tagline, allow us to give you some more insight on what cognitiveSEO’s newest member can do for you:

• Reveal Thousands of Topics & Keywords Opportunities in a Matter of Seconds (it offers instant results on any term that might cross your mind)

• Complete Keyword Research Using a Fresh & Massive Database (it gives you way more recommendations coming from multiple sources: our own huge, updated database, suggestions and autocompletes from multiple search engines, + many others.  

• Understand How Content Impacts Search Engines’ Rankings (it gives you content insights for any website, letting you know why some pieces of content perform better than others )

• Identify the Exact Keywords Your Content Is Missing to Rank Higher (it will give you access to exact focus keywords you should use in order to obtain the best possible ranks)

• Create topically relevant content for any niche and industry (it offers you a personalized Content Assistant Tool that guides you through the whole optimization process )

Of course, these are just some highlights on what the tool can do for you. But don’t believe us! Go ahead and try it for yourself.

How To Get Higher Rankings on Google in Three Easy Steps

The most terrifying words in the search engine optimization world are: I’m a SEO expert and I will rank your site #1. And this is because there are a lot of agencies out there that guarantee number one ranks for any major search term by using all sort of shady tactics. We even wrote a blog post about this.

While getting ranked #1 is an entirely desirable outcome, the truth is that no one can guarantee that it will actually happen. It’s not that you aren’t trying hard enough. Rather, there are so many factors influencing the ranking that it would be impossible for anyone to be able to proficiently control all of them.

However, there are ranking factors that are out of your control (backlinks, social signals, etc.) and others that are under your total control, such as content.

What we did was find a solution to control one of the most important ranking factors: CONTENT.

There is no easy way out when it comes to ranking high on Google. We know this and any digital marketer or SEO Pro knows this as well.

What we are offering is not an easy way out but an efficient and simple methodology of increasing rankings.

We also know that Google uses so many algorithms when ranking a website that it’s almost impossible to keep up with all of them. So what can you do in order to be among Google’s favorites?

Make use of the algorithms that are in your direct control, such as Content.

Google has come a long way in fine tuning its algorithms and its tendency lately has been to rank sites according to content, more than any other factors.  They have even created an algorithm that will de-rank websites with thin content and which are not topical authorities in their niches. 

Considering everything mentioned above, this is how we came up with a solution for getting high ranks, based mainly on content.

No backlinks required, no other extra work. Just a good, relevant, optimized content methodology that will most likely move your rankings where you deserve: in top Google position.

With no further introduction, we are proud to present you the 3 steps technique that brought us and our early adopters awesome results in terms of organic traffic and rankings:

• Step 1. Use the Keyword Explorer to Reveal Thousands of Topics & Keywords Opportunities

• Step 2. Understand How Content Impacts SERP by Using the Ranking Analysis

• Step 3. Use the Content Assistant to Identify the Exact Keywords Your Content Is Missing to Rank Higher

There is no magic formula, no shady tactics, just effectively channeled effort.

Step 1. Use the Keyword Explorer to Reveal Thousands of Topics & Keywords Opportunities

In the modern SEO landscape a keyword research tool is not just a passing trend but a must.  

And when we started crafting our own keyword tool what we had in mind was to create an all – inclusive tool, the one that will give you all the info in one place, without being forced to search elsewhere.

So, let’s say that I own a health website and I am interested in the keyword “protein shakes”. A simple search on the Keyword Tool will reveal thousands of opportunities that might have never crossed my mind: keywords I have never thought on ranking before, topics I should target considering monthly search volume or cost per click, + many other ideas. 

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can now identify not only new topic ideas, but also the keywords it is worth investing in.  Check out the most relevant keywords, the one with the highest volume and find out cost per click data so you can better craft your SEO strategy. 

Where from do we get the data for our Keyword Tool?

• Huge proprietary database, constantly updated
• Search engines suggestions
• Autocompletes from multiple search engines
• + many other sources

What is the main info you will have access to by using the tool?

• Thousands of keywords and topics suggestions
• Monthly Search Volume
• Keyword Difficulty
• Cost per Click
• Relevancy

Step 2. Understand How Content Impacts SERP by Using the Ranking Analysis

So you’ve made the keyword research, you found the best topics opportunities for you and you’ve decided to focus on a specific keyword. Now what?

Now you can get even more data not only on the topic or keyword you are focusing on but also on the top ranking pages for that keyword. 

You now have access to a piece of info that you cannot find elsewhere: 

You get to know the exact keywords that boosted a piece of content in top Google results. 

As you can see in the screenshot above, when searching for what web pages rank on the top results for “protein shakes”,  you will also see the reasons why those pages are ranking there. 

You will get insights on the keywords those pieces of content used, you will know the number of words each ranking page has and its performance. You will also get a readability score based on which you can get an idea of how easy it is to read that page. And if you want to see for yourself how that page looks like, you can access it directly from the tool. 

Another important metric highlighted by us within this section is the Content Performance score, a metric we are going to tackle in the future chapters. 

Step 3. Use the Content Assistant to Identify the Exact Keywords Your Content Is Missing to Rank Higher

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that would tell you the exact things your content is missing to rank in top 10 results?

Good news: We’ve invented that tool!

Content Assistant – the personalized content optimization tool that will give you the exact recommendation you should use so that your content will rank the highest. 

How does the Content Assistant work?

For the last months we’ve been working  on an algorithm that would determine the impact content has on rankings. This is how we came up with the Content Performance score, a metric detailed in the following chapters, and the Content Assistant, a tool that tells which are the exact keywords you should add to your content to rank higher. 

We analyze the top ranking pages in Google for the specific keyword you are interested in and based on a complex semantic algorithm we let you know which are the exact keywords your content should contain to be as relevant and as optimized as possible. 

You can start optimizing a new content or work on an existing one.  Let us go back to our “protein shakes” example.  What I did was take a piece of content written on this subject and added to the Content Assistant.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the tool tells me the exact keywords I should use in my content, highlights the one I already use and lets me know if there are keywords that I should use more often.  In the situation of keyword stuffing, the tool will let me know what are the words I overused and due to which my content would not perform as it should.

The better optimized the content, the higher the content performance score and the chances of ranking in top Google results. Your users will get better and more relevant content and you will get higher rankings. 

Does it look straightforward? Well, it actually is and the benefits it brings are HUGE. 

The time it takes to optimize a page? Of course, it depends on the context.

With 30 minutes or less spent on optimizing you can get top rankings. 

What Is the Content Performance Score?

As we, at cognitiveSEO, like to be problem solvers, we tried and failed, failed then tried some more, worked a lot until we found a solution for this: The Content Performance Metric.

The metric that 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 gives you info on the reasons why a piece of content is performing well or not.

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.

As you can see in the screenshot below, you get a content performance score for every piece of content you might be interested in, for any keyword or topic.

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 the content as a focus point.
• After this, 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 give a content performance score for each piece of ranking content, highlighting the focus keywords used by that piece of content.

Does Content Performance Influence Rankings? – Massive SERP Research

After we developed the Content Performance Score, we wanted to make sure that there is a connection between Content Performance and Rankings.

And without lingering for too long, we started a massive SERP research on 30,000 keywords trying to identify whether and how content performance influences Google’s top rankings. 

After we processed all the data, when we looked at the correlation between Content Performance and Position, we knew we were on to something. A really strong Pearson’s correlation coefficient (-0.97), confirmed by the distribution in the chart.

The higher the score on content performance, the more likely a page is to be ranked higher up.

I am not going to detail here the researcher’s joy that we felt once we saw the results. 

We then knew that our Content Performance Score is accurate and it does predict higher rankings. 

Of course, the content performance score is not the only factor that matters when Google ranks a webpage. There are domain and page performance, the freshness of the content and other metrics. However, the Content Performance is a metric that is now at your disposal and you can make the most out of it. You can increase your Content Performance score and therefore hope for higher rankings. 

We also ran a 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.

There are obviously a lot of other tests that we would like to run to further assess the robustness of our model, and hope to do so in the future. But for now, what we found has more than solidified our trust in the new tool.

We are not going to annoy you with many methodological data (if we haven’t already) as we are going to write a more detailed blog post on this matter in the future. 

What you need to keep in mind for the moment is that a high Content Performance score is correlated with better rankings in Google. 

Case Studies – Higher Rankings with 30 Minutes Work in Less Than 48 Hours

Our Content Assistant allows you to fully optimize your content and to make it topically relevant in a matter of minutes. As you have the exact recommendation you should follow in order to get the best possible rankings at your disposal, all you need to do is invest a small amount of time for some great results. 

It’s a win – win situation for everybody: the users get better, relevant content and you are getting higher rankings.

The time spent in optimizing the content can differ on the context, of course. From what our users have told us so far, it seems to be taking somewhere between 5 to 30 minutes for each optimized page. The improved ranks were visible for some of them in less than 24 hours and for other in just a couple of days.

We have some great case studies we would like to share with you. Bill Sebald, Jason Acidre and Krumel were some of the SEO experts who used cognitiveSEO’s newest family member and had some great results after using the tool. 

Bill experienced great results in less than 24 hours. Great result for him and for us as well. 

Within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5 for the term we were optimizing for to #2. This fluctuated over the next few days but then we settled into the #2 spot and have remained there since. Read the full case study.
	Bill Sebald
	founder @Greenlane, 15 years of eCommerce and SEO experience

Jason is another pro that likes our tool (we hope) just as much as we do. The testimony is that he went straight to number one page in Google with minimum time investment. 

From position #12 to position #5 in under 30 days (for the term “SEO Philippines”). Read the full case study.
	Jason Acidre
	Experienced SEO Pro, Co-founder @xightph

Krumel is an SEO expert who has been working in the Search marketing field for more than 10 years now. His experience with the Content Assistant tool was great as he managed to boost his clients’ traffic up to the sky. 

I’ve increased my clients’ organic traffic with 78% in one month. The rankings were almost immediately improved.And we efficiently increased the visibility in SERPs and traffic. Read the full case study.
	Krumel
	Founder & CEO @Advert Point

To make things easier for you, here are the exact steps you need to take when doing content optimization with our Keyword Tool and Content Assistant:

1. Enter your targeted keyword.
2. Review the keyword suggestions.
3. Go to the Ranking Analysis section to see how content impacts rankings for your competitors.
4. Go to Content Assistant and start optimizing your content (old or new).
5. Implement the changes on your site (publish new article/page or update old page/post).
6. Go to Search Console and ask Google to fetch/re-fetch your content.
7. Wait & check your improved rankings.

We can keep on talking on what our newly launched Keyword Tool and Content Assistant can do for you. But we say go ahead and see for yourself. The tool is also listed on Product Hunt and you can check it out there.  

Take the tool for a spin and let us know your thoughts on it. Hope you’ll love it as much as we do. 

The post Keyword Tool & Content Assistant – The New Way to Boost Your Rankings appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Today it’s our Site Explorer’s turn to get updated. Just as a quick reminder, our Site Explorer is one of the fastest and most accurate ways of researching links, spotting growth opportunities & investigating rankings for any site.

Just a few months ago the Site Explorer benefited from another round of updates. Why do we keep on improving our tools so often, one might think. Well, we live in a world characterized by evolution. And the driving forces behind the evolution of our system is our need to solve real problems and needs.

I invite you to watch two sessions of Formula 1 pit stops, one from 1950 and the other one from 2013. If in the Indianapolis F1 Circuit from the ’50 it took the team “only” 67 seconds to make all the changes needed for the car, nowadays, literally, if you blink, you’ve missed the pit stop as things are going that fast. It is in our human nature to always reach for something better, higher and we, at cognitiveSEO don’t make an exception from that.

Without any further introduction, allow me to proudly present you the cognitiveSEO Site Explorer’s main improvements.

Actionable Data at Your Fingertips

Technological development offers new possibilities to make people’s daily lives safer, healthier, funnier and more comfortable. The new technologies provide us with great tools for managing our digital marketing strategies as well as tools for elderly people to live longer on their own. And all of these tools are great. Yet, what makes the difference between just some functional tools and some life changing innovations is the user’s ability to interact with those tools. Be it smart phones, smart 3D television, online shopping and communities or ambient intelligence and smart homes, what we really like about all of these is the capacity of interacting with them.

We understood this but moreover, we understood our users’ need of a highly actionable tool that would allow them to craft their workflow just the way they want. This is why we came up with an even more user friendly Site Explorer, where almost every piece of data, every number, each link, each chart or list is actionable. Putting it simply, almost anywhere you click within the cognitiveSEO’s Site Explorer, you will be provided you with valuable pieces of data.

Some of this update’s benefits:

• Easier to navigate within the tool
• Dive deeper into specific data
• Get instant data on what interest you most
• Better data visualization

Let’s say for instance that out of your whole link profile you are interested in image links only. Manually analyzing all the links and trying to identify only the image-related ones might consume not only a lot of time but it will also put your patience to test. What the new Site Explorer does for you is instantly showing you the data you are interested in, in an easy to understand view, with export and management possibilities. Couldn’t be easier.

Deep Dive Instantly into All Your Referring Domains and Links

Imagine that two people are carving a six-foot slab of wood at the same time. One is using a hand-chisel, the other, a chainsaw. If you are interested in the future of that slab, whom would you watch? Which one do you think will finish the slab first? And which one do you think would win more points at the work quality part?

In digital marketing, just like in probably any other domain, we want to have data as fast but also as accurate as possible. Yet, most of the time we need to sacrifice speed at the expense of quality or vice versa. The Site Explorer is trying to offer instant data in almost any SEO matter that might interest you but without losing sight of the importance of the data quality.

As we know how important the referring domain are, we’ve created a special actionable section, entirely dedicated to referring domain. We know that in the industry there is always this “craving for links” and many companies are working to build as many links as possible from any source possible. From our point of view, just counting links instead of focusing on the referring domains is a mistake.

Let’s say you are trying to see how two sites are doing from a link profile point of view:

• Site “A” has 100,000 links, coming from 10 referring domain.
• Site “B”, has 1,000 links coming from 100 referring domains.

Which one do you think is more popular in the SERPs?

Site “B” is surely doing better, even though it has 10 times fewer links. Why? It has 10 times more referring domains.

When you try to unravel the “mystery” of a link profile, the first number you should look at is the number of referring domains.

And this is why we’ve felt the need of creating an actionable area, easy to reach, were referring domains are analyzed at leisure.

Having all your referring domains and link is great. Yet, having the essential data for all them, that’s magic. Not only do we offer you a list with all your links referring domains but we also give you the possibility to check out each and every domain, to see the influence each has on your overall website profile, its date and its top 10 backlinks.

Easily Export Any Info that Interest You

It is said that no job is done until the paperwork is finished. Of course, when we say “paperwork”, we are not referring to stack of files but to an ease in working with files, no matter of the amount of data contained.

We all need to export data for several reasons: reporting, pitching, analyzing, creating statistics, managing the data, share them with coworkers, and we could add here dozens of reasonings. Yet, for whatever reason we might need to download data from different tools one thing is sure: we want the process to be done as easy and as adapted to our needs as possible.

One click away exports are easy to spot just by taking a look at the Site Explorer. You have the export button, with two downloading possibilities: CSV or Excel file. What is even more useful is the fact that you can download ANY data available in the Explorer, well segmented and niched.

Sometimes a folder with 500 referring domains and 9000 links might not be exactly what you’d like to consider manageable. We know this as we’ve often experienced it. This is why you now have total control over your exported data. Meaning that you can download a very specific segment of links or only the referring domains with a certain influence, or if you want, the whole link profile. You are the one deciding when and what you want to export.

Filter, Sort and Share Any Data

When working with a high amount of data, filtering and sorting it is of paramount importance. Paraphrasing a famous English novelist, all data are equal but some of them are more equal than others. Meaning that not all data have the same importance at the same time. Sometimes you might feel the need to visualize the links with high influence first, while sometimes you might want to order the referring domains by date. Whatever need you might have, you will find it easy to filter and sort any data that interest you with this Site Explorer’s new feature.

We know how important metrics are for you as your current or future strategies rely on them. At the same time, we know that as important as the metrics might be, the ease with which you access and visualize the data is as important. Our new Site Explorer allows you to share the data you are analyzing with your colleagues, your partners, your clients or anyone you want. Just let anyone you want know the URL you are on and the other person will see the exact data and metrics that you do.

Site Explorer – Just the Beginning of the Journey

All the analysis made with the Site Explorer can give you great digital marketing insights for any website, be it yours, your competitors or your clients. You can have an in-depth overview of your past or recent work and you can have a professional idea of how you’re standing based on the data provided by our Site Explorer.

Yet, this is just the beginning of the adventure, let’s say, just an warm-up. In order to take strategic digital marketing decisions or to craft a long or short term strategy for any website, a more in-depth analysis is needed. This is why we recommend you run cutting-edge link audits, ultra powerful but easy to understand, with cognitiveSEO’s InBound Link Analysis. Dozens of data are put at your disposal, whether you want to use it for research, pitching or reporting. A lot of geeky data that offer powerful insights in a comprehensive visualization.

Site Explorer is great for getting an overview of the situation but is the inBound link analysis that will actually make things happen for you.

The post The Fully Actionable Site Explorer from cognitiveSEO appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

The Importance of the Google Analytics and cognitiveSEO Integration 

So how can this improve your insights into your web presence? First, let’s get into Google Analytics and see why we’ve decided to integrate it in the first place. There are 4 key metrics you can keep track of on Analytics:

• Duration
• Page/Visit
• Event
• URLs

They are defined by Google as goals and each of them can give you a different insight into your performance. The data that you get within cognitiveSEO is unique and helps you have an overview of your website from a different perspective. Therefore, both data gathered from Analytics and cognitiveSEO are highly important in order to make the best decisions for your business. The end result: no more wasted time, no more matching results and comparisons and no more switching between tools. Google Analytic’s goals can now be easily tracked within cognitiveSEO.

Keep Track of Your Most Important Metrics

We’ve mentioned before that Google has some goals that we should all be interested in monitoring. We’ve tried to cover all of these goals by adding six fully customizable widgets. We need to mention that each and everyone of these widgets has such a high level of personalization that out of them hundreds of combinations can be made. From pie charts to tables and bar charts, any of your Google Analytics data can be displayed directly into your cognitiveSEO account.

Let’s take each of Google Analytics’ goals and see how they can be reached by continuously monitoring the newly cognitiveSEO integrated Google Analytics’ widgets.

Visit Duration

Visit Duration is fairly intuitive: it keeps track of the amount of time each person spends on your website. Of course, you can customize the widgets of this goal to only register people spending more (or less) than a specified amount of time. It might be exactly what you’re looking for if you’re interested in differentiating between random visits and regular users. All of these can be added or adjusted within our freshly added Google Analytics widgets.

As a use case for this goal, you can choose to track sessions that lasts a specific amount of time or longer or why not, the bounce rate.

Pages/Visit

Pages/Visit is  quite simple to grasp: it counts how many pages someone sees when they visit your website. Just as with the previous one, this one can be customized to only show results within certain thresholds. What you can set in order to monitor this goal is, for instance, user views of a specific number of pages or screens or how many sessions a user had.

Event

Event is a bit more complicated than the other goals, but also more interesting. It counts the number of times a visitor performed a certain action. What type of action? Well, that’s for you to decide. It can be anything from using a certain widget to spending X amount of time watching video content and, to clicking on a social media button embedded on your website.

URLs

URLs keeps track of a specific URL, so each time someone visits a particular page, it gets triggered. If you have a registration or announcement page, this would be the ideal metric. Of course, you can keep track of any of your pages, getting info for users by page or keep track of pages by organic searches.

Each of these goals has limitations that you need to be aware of. Together, they are quite a powerful analysis tool. So, let’s see next how do they can expand our existing capabilities.

Get an Overview of Your Website’s Performance at a Glance

Time may be our friend or our biggest enemy. In any of these cases what we want is to make the best out of our time, to cherish and value it as much as we can. As we ourselves often feel the time pressure, we wanted to create an efficient solution that would allow you to be in control of your website 24/7 without being overwhelmed by such a task.

You might already be familiar with our SEO Dashboard, a sort of “control panel” and a must for every digital marketer.  The new Google Analytics integration within cognitiveSEO  offers you not only transparency and control over the data associated with your account but also a great way to visualize your marketing efforts. Having listed together the metrics that interest you the most, you now have the possibility to see all the data that matters for your website at just a glance. No more switching to other tools, no more wasting time in checking all sorts of reports, no more impossibility of comparing data. You now have them all at the same place.

Needless to say that the integration of the Analytics metrics in our SEO Dashboard allows you to take decisions on the spot, reacting quickly, even in real time, to any issues that might occur.

What’s even greater is that you can share your dashboard with your colleagues, your partners, your clients or anyone you want. Therefore, any of these people can have access to your most important metrics anytime they want via a simple shareable link.

Personalize Your Analytics Metrics Just the Way You Want Them

As you put a lot of work in making your website perform well, we think that you should have a great visual output as well. And even more, we think that you should be the one who chooses which metrics you should visualize and exactly in which way.  This is why we allow you to fully customize all the widgets from cognitiveSEO, Google Analytics included, of course.

You are the one who decides which data you want to see exactly, the period of time you are interested to get the data from or the device you are interested to analyze the data for. All of these and many others personalization options are available for you withing our newly introduced Google Analytics widgets.

Having all these customization features at your disposal, you can take full advantage of the Google Analytics widgets and create infinite possibilities of monitoring. For one widget type only you have so many customization options that you can create dozens of data visualizations combinations: for your mobile only, for returning users only, for new sessions only and so on. We think that any piece of data has something valuable inside of it and this is why we wanted to be sure that you have the possibility to make any combination that might interest you.

Better Reporting to Clients or Team Members

No job is finished until the paperwork is done. And any of your marketing efforts usually end up in a report, be it to your supervisor, your team members or your clients. 

As much as we’d try to get rid of them, reporting is the process of assigning meaning to the collected information and determining the conclusions, significance, and implications of the findings. And, as complicated as this may sound, we’ve made this process for you just as simple. You can now get custom-built reports for your clients’ digital marketing needs, including relevant Google Analytics real-time data for your campaigns. 

cognitiveSEO reporting section allows you to :

• create fully customizable reports ready to amaze your clients with
• schedule reports to be sent automatically to your clients
• white-label reports for your marketing needs
• share reports with clients and team members

When reporting, you are probably concerned with getting ALL the data that matters so that your efforts are visible and, why not, appreciated. With the Analytics integration, you don’t need to worry about this matter any more. You don’t have to generate reports from cognitiveSEO and try to combine them with data from Analytics, as you have them all together now.

You will send more comprehensive reports, that are visually appealing, highly customizable and automated.

You can even create reports excluding any data except Google Analytics. That’s right; inside cognitiveSEO’ reporting Section you can perform Analytics reports only, if this is what you want. Pointless to say that you can combine the metrics just the way you want and create unlimited reports for any of your digital marketing needs. With this latest integration, reporting just got even better.

Understanding how customers use your website is a fundamental step for improving or adjusting your digital marketing campaigns; luckily cognitiveSEO helps do just that. And with our latest Google Analytics integration we try to best respond to any online marketing business, making it easy to understand, fine-tune and grow your business.

The post From Google Analytics to SEO and Marketing KPIs. All in One Place! appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.