Need help with your small business social media? Check out these 10 tactics based on 2019 Inc 500 Social Media Research by UMass Dartmouth.
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You keep hearing around that the same way true fans like their Apples fresh (I’m talking about iPhones), Google likes its content fresh. Well, it’s somewhat true, but not for the reasons you might think of!
Google doesn’t necessarily favor “fresh” content. Some search queries definitely deserve freshness, while others not so much. However, fresh content can impact SEO through some indirect “freshness” factors.
To better understand the concept, we first must detail a little what “fresh content” actually means.
What do you understand by fresh content? Content that has been published today? Content that is regularly updated?
The term “fresh content” represents content that is dynamic in nature (especially in meaning).
Therefore, it’s not as much “new” content in relation to time and when it has actually been created or published, but new in meaning and what the data behind it reflects.
Many people believe that fresh content is content that has been recently published. Sometimes, they even mix up freshness with frequency.
Let’s start with content that has been recently published. If I am publishing a piece on “The History of England”, would you call that fresh content?
Most likely not, because people have been writing about the history of England for probably hundreds of years. It’s nothing new.
The post is new on my site, of course, but common SEO sense says that new content without any backlinks and amplification will have a harder time ranking, especially in very competitive niches, such as history (where Wikipedia probably dominates). You’ll have to make huge link building efforts to dominate the results with a new page and we all know how risky that is! (it usually results in a penalty).
Now frequency is very similar to freshness and they often intersect, but it’s not always the case. I could post something fresh once per week, or I could post something fresh every day.
Frequency will ensure that your site gets crawled more often (thanks to Caffeine).
That means search engines will use more of their resources on sites that publish more often, because they need them.
If you’ve been publishing once per month for the past year, why would Google check your site daily? It would be a waste of resources.
However, if your site publishes 25 articles each day, then Google has to make sure it checks your site multiple times per day to index those results as soon as possible (thanks to Caffeine) and be able to display them to the users if they request it (thanks to the 2011 update).
One common misconception is that stale websites will be negatively impacted. That’s been proven wrong.
Brian Dean made this pretty clear with his blog. He publishes rarely, so his website is mostly still. However, his content always ranks at the top. I also have a blog in Romanian on which I haven’t posted in over 6 months. 9/10 articles are ranking on the 1st page and 6/10 are ranked in the top 3 positions.
If there’s something that has changed over time, it’s that those rankings have actually increased.
You see, you don’t need to publish too often when you can actually go into the Google Search Console and ask Google to immediately index your web pages by hitting a single button.
This all started back in 2009, but just like many events, it has developed into a big conspiracy over time.
If you were in business back in 2009, you’d remember about the Google Caffeine update and how much of a big deal it was. The update is often referred to today as the Freshness Update, because Google used the phrase “fresher results”.
Although the update was announced back in 2009, it took almost a year until it finally rolled up.
The thing is, unfortunately, that many people got it all wrong.
The Google caffeine update has nothing to do with rankings. It’s main focus is indexing. Rankings and indexing are two very different things.
Indexing is when Google takes a first look at your content and adds it to the index. That means it has the potential to be ranked.
Ranking however, is a completely different story, with a much more complex algorithm behind it. This algorithm, which was updated in 2011, was actually older than you might think.
Ranking “fresh content” at the top was actually happening way before that. In 2007, Amit Singhal had developed an algorithm that favored freshness for some particular subjects and queries.
Note how I say “some specific queries”. Wait, let me make that bigger.
Google favors fresh content only for some specific queries that deserve freshness, widely known as QDF.
QDF stands for Query Deserves Freshness. If a particular search phrase is a QDF, then Google will show up the most recent results. This happens a lot in particular areas, as Matt Cutts explains in the following video:
In fact, in its official post about the update, Google specifies exactly what types of queries the update will impact:
I know there have been some speculations that only by changing the date to an article you could make it look fresh and you could abuse the algorithm changes to make Google keep you at the top. However, they are what they are (speculations) and I promise you that for each example you give me of “fresh” content ranking at the top I can find at least 1 example of “old” content ranking at the top.
In fact, I’ll give you some examples right now, from the SEO field. It’s a field that frequently changes and you always have to stay up to date in order to be relevant.
There’s no way a guide from 2015 or 2010 would still be useful, right? Well… Google thinks otherwise:
And here’s another example:
You might argue that “fresher” results rank better than those. Well, you’re right but that doesn’t prove anything, because one can say “fresher results also rank below and they even come from big sites such as Hubspot”.
However…
There are factors that might influence rankings in this situation and we’ll talk about them soon, so keep reading!
But thinking that you’ll rank better just by having a more recent publish date is silly. And I’ll crush it even more soon.
Both Caffeine and the 2011 Freshness Algorithm Update affect mostly news sites. This is the broader category, in which you can include celebrities, general news, politics, technology, you name it.
I’ll give you an example:
Notice a difference from the SEO examples I gave before? No article from 2009 or 2010 here, right? They’re all from 2019, posted hardly one month before me writing this post. The second article doesn’t even list the date, but instead the number of days it was posted ago. It can also be hours sometimes instead of days.
Why do you think this is the case?
Because in this case, a 2009 post would be horrible as a search result. People want to know the latest phones, not the outdated ones from 2009. Google knows the user’s intent so it tries to match the results to fit it.
Do we have an official answer? Sort of. And it’s pretty recent:
No
—
John
I have to say, I’m not quite pleased with the answer, because John has the habit of being very vague in his answers. I mean… I’ve just proven above that Google favors fresh content in certain cases.
Sure, we also have to get the context of his answer. That question about freshness has been asked after John tweeted this:
“As a user, recognizing that old content is just being relabeled as new completely kills any authority that I thought the author / site had. Good content is not lazy content. SEO hacks don’t make a site great. Give your content and users the respect they deserve.”
So, basically, John Mueller, Google’s representative, is trying to tell you that updating the post date every day is a bad digital marketing strategy and it won’t help you rank better.
I have to admit, I miss those days when Google used to be a lot more detailed and explicit in its answers. Why?
Because, as discussed, before, Google does favor fresh content, but in certain areas! And John’s answer should’ve reflected this reality, which also includes QDF.
Queries that Deserve Freshness is a reality! Matt Cutts talked about this before. There are certain search phrases, such as “best android phones” which I’ve shown above as an example, that deserve freshness. Users want to see the latest posts, so here, you might have the upper hand if you keep everything up to date.
Does that mean that you can keep ranking at the top by constantly changing the post date? No.
Does it mean that some articles will outrank other articles because of the date when they were posted? Yes.
But there are a lot of factors that signal freshness. Not just the date. Is the topic growing popular on social media platforms? Are the articles getting any new backlinks? In other words, is it something that’s happening now?
Are those answers contradicting one another? I don’t think so. In the end, Google’s not perfect. It’s just an algorithm. Do you think a human person could determine better what the best result for the masses would be? I highly doubt it.
Will updating old blog posts help you rank better? Probably. But not just by changing the date. Google sees those changes and it accounts for “hacks” like this.
In this article, Search Engine Land stated that Google told them about one of the factors that determine freshness. It’s not the date!
“Google now tells us that one of the freshness factors — the way they determine if content is fresh or not — is the time when they first crawled a page. So if you publish a page, and then change that page, it doesn’t suddenly become “fresh.”
One of the factors that determine freshness is the time when Google first crawled the page.
So no, Google doesn’t care if you keep changing the date.
Does that mean you shouldn’t update your articles? No!
You should always keep your articles up to date. But not just with the date. Also with the content, quality and relevancy!
Has something changed since you’ve first written the article? Go and update it. Make your updates visible. This will allow users to also have a historical view on the events.
As Cyrus Shepard put it in this article:
| The age of a web page or domain isn’t the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn’t change. In this case, the amount of change on your web page plays a role. | |
 |
Cyrus Shepard |
| Owner @ Zyppy / @CyrusShepard | |
So the page’s age (when it was first crawled) is important, not just the publish date in the article, which can be faked. If you’re going to make small, insignificant changes, there are small chances that you will see any effects on the rankings.
If you feel like your post is outdated but you don’t know exactly how to improve it, use our Keyword & Content Optimization Tool.
On the right side, it will give you a list of keywords that you should use in your article in order to make it more relevant. You can view them as topics you should cover when you’re writing. The ones with dots are the most important ones.
If you want to know exactly what we did to gain 70% more SEO visibility, you can take a look at our content optimization results.
Keep in mind that any changes to your content might also result in negative impacts. Be prepared for this in case it happens. If you have an article that’s already ranking #1, it’s probably a better idea to leave it like that!
As mentioned before, new content lacks authority, distribution and links. It’s unlikely that it will outrank older content.
However, publishing new content does expand the number of keywords your site is targeting and thus it results in more traffic.
It’s just simple math. Will a higher post frequency increase your rankings overall? Probably not, although it can result in more backlinks which leads to higher domain performance over time.
However, a higher post frequency is almost guaranteed to increase traffic. No matter what others say, if you have 1000 followers and they read you once per week, if you make them read you twice per week, you’ve increased your traffic. It’s simple math.
But remember, you also need to post good content. You have to structure it well. You have to account for your audience’s needs. Not just blindly post things there.
Make sure to use the Keyword Tool to maximize your chances of ranking higher on Google when you create new posts.
I don’t want you to be upset with me, so I’ll tell you some things that will actually impact your rankings and they’re closely related to freshness.
Click Through Rate is a ranking factor. This has been tested and proven countless times. If users click your headline more and stick with your website, it signals Google that your site is a good result.
But what impacts CTR? Well, mostly it’s the position you’re ranking for, but the 3 things that affect CTR are the Title tag, the URL and the Meta Description, because they’re all shown in Google’s search results.
I hope you can see where this is going. How many times have you seen the current year or “Updated 20xx” in a title? Probably often. I mean just take a look at the “best android phones” example! It’s full of it! Why?
Using the current year in your title might positively affect CTR, which can result in higher rankings.
Should you change your title anually to feature the current year? Probably. But make sure your article is still up to date, otherwise Google’s going to catch that and punish you for it. If the article is still up to date, you can leave it like that. If not, you should probably improve it.
You can also reshare and redistribute your content as “new” on you social media platforms. This will help you gain new backlinks and traffic if the article was previously successful.
If you post new content frequently, you can expand your search visibility by targeting new keywords. This is almost guaranteed to bring more traffic if you do it right.
We’ve started doing this since November 2016 and the results have been promising. Have our rankings improved overall? Yes. Was it because we published more content but with the same high quality? It certainly had an effect (more backlinks, more shares, more topical authority).
Closely related to quantity is the performance of your site’s domain. This is dictated by the number of unique domains that link to your website and, very important, also by their quality.
If you publish more content, target and distribute it properly, then you can increase the number of backlinks to your site, which will result in a better domain performance.
If you want to check your domain performance, you can use the CognitiveSEO Site Explorer.
The domain performance has a positive impact on all your articles, because Google starts to trust your site as being qualitative. Just think about it. If you buy a domain today and write something about SEO (let’s say it’s the same quality), do you think you can outrank cognitiveSEO right away? It’s hardly the case.
Still confused? Here, I’ll summarize everything, just for you:
What do you think about fresh content? Are you in a niche where fresh content is vital? How often do you publish on your site? Have you ever tried changing the date to rank higher? Has it worked? I doubt it has, but prove me wrong in the comments section.
The post Content Freshness & Rankings | Does Fresh Content Impact SEO? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Link analysis projects can be difficult and time-consuming, especially for websites with larger link profiles, which is why optimising your workflow and improving the integrity of your data is so important. In the last couple of years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with websites that have tens of thousands of domains pointing at them, […]
The post Identifying dead links for more effective link analysis appeared first on Builtvisible.
How Builtvisible embraces shared values and resource modelling to buck the trend The agency world has traditionally been terrible for work-life balance. From the Mad Men-esque “good old days” to today’s always-on culture there is a widely accepted norm that agency life is one of long working hours, unrealistic deadlines and counting down the days, […]
The post Achieving a healthy work-life balance at a digital agency appeared first on Builtvisible.
Writing for SEO has become an adventure, a complicated math problem we are all trying to calculate by finding the secret to get the results faster. The number of search engine factors advanced, the Google algorithm updates increased, the number of businesses that use SEO increased, the number of SEO agencies increased and more and more people became aware of its importance and the market is pretty cluttered and the competition is very high. And we know how important it is for you to stand up in the crowd.
There are some things that are still available in terms of SEO, and also lots of new ones. We’ve put together a guide to find out how to write for SEO in 2019 to be above the pile.
We’ve said it lots of times before, and we’ll continue to say it as long as everybody understands the importance of its meaning: content must be written for the user. Contextual content is the new icon in terms of SEO at the moment. It is one of the important changes that took place in the last period. Lots of SEO experts talk about semantic and context-based results.
The first step in SEO has been the same for quite some years. We’re talking about keyword research. Deploying the topics of interest and the killer questions, we can elaborate a descriptive terminology. Keywords will help us describe the topic at its best for the users and make it optimized for search.
Finding keywords shouldn’t be hard. You need to have a starting point and based on the targeted keyword you can find many derivatives. There are tools that can help you find the best examples and generate traffic. Keyword Tool and Content Assistant are two awesome helpers, that work best together. They’re like your best buddies you can call in the middle of the night to get you out of trouble.
We are talking about producing content for SEO, which means valuable, evergreen and quality all-in-one. And for that, you need to raise your head up the crowd and don’t get flushed away by all the people that are “writing” and creating worthless content. There are lots of noisy environments with “too much” SEO content.
| Without strategy, content is just stuff, and the world has enough stuff. | |
 |
Arjun Basu |
| Award-nominated author | |
You have to become an SEO content writer, not just a simple writer for succeeding at SEO. You need to ask and answer the right questions so that your content helps the users, and keeps them on the page.
| Valuable content is found at the intersection between your customer’s needs and your business expertise. | |
 |
Sonja and Sharon |
| Founders of ValuableContent | |
Source: www.valuablecontent.co.uk
Valuable content breaks the glass and goes beyond the screen. Imagine that your visitors come from all directions and you need to make them feel that they’ve come to the right place. They need trust so you’ll need to offer the information they need and think: “Wow. This is the place for me. Somebody really understands me.”
To get to the previous situation described above you’ll have to understand the context of your potential customers’ search and fill in the gaps. It’s mandatory to know your potential customers’ needs and interests.
Google discovered that the conventional keyword search, as we know it, has some limitations and doesn’t offer topical results based on the query search. For a simple keyword, there are lots of topics related and information available online.
Google developed patents to understand the context from knowledge bases for more accurate results. It wants to focus more on topic-related results so the whole process works based on probabilities. For example, when a user performs a search on Google, the search engine uses a system to return landing pages with topics related to the query by looking at the text on that page.
You may ask how you can you take advantage of that and get ideas for contextual keywords. Focus on the user, the user’s search intent and how to steal their heart so to convert them.
Let’s take an example. You have a pastry in the US and have a new receipt of cronut. For those who don’t know, a cronut is a croissant-doughnut invented by a pastry from New York City.
Since you want to tell the world about your new cronut, there are multiple ways to do so. It is very important to decide whether your content will be information or brand. If you go with the second one, then search for the keyword and see the volume and who your competitors are. If you go with the first type of content – informational, then check to see what other people are searching for.
Based on our example, you can see what people from the US searched for. Most of the keywords are informational and all of them want to know and understand what cronuts are. If your target audience knows about them, then choose directly the keywords that are more relevant and descriptive such as: “cronut flavor of the month”, “cronuts with puff pastry”. Based on these two keywords you can perform other searches and first more relevant keywords.
Since we’ve talked about context, then it’s very important to collect as many keywords as possible to select a topic in the second step. When we get to the onpage optimization part, you’ll need focus keywords. Don’t end up with just one keyword, look for a second keyword, similar to the first one.
The second step in the research phase is finding topics that will keep drawing the audience to your website. Usually, the articles that are evergreen have information that doesn’t alter in time, and also a type of content that solves a problem that lots of people are struggling about.
In the example above I was talking about cronuts. For some, it might be an old story, but for others a new discovery. It is more unique than other types of deserts, it has two things into one. That type of product/topic might be what makes it last. When it first appeared in NYE, people stood in line for this hybrid. Nobody knew how it tasted, but everybody was intrigued. So the mystery draws attention and uniqueness keeps it alive. Word of mouth was a good trigger. The lesson here is that you need a topic that will engage the community.
You can create a receipt with steps and tips because according to the research (performed in the first step) there were lots of people who want to find out how to make a cronut. The basic receipt won’t change, but there will be variations to it. So people will go to basic before trying something new for the first time.
There are some other tricks you could use to take advantage of content immortality:
I got my inspiration after I read an interesting blog post on the furniture store Furniture of Dalton’s blog, intitled Sofa Story: A Brief History of Ten Iconic Forms. And after reading through it, I thought that article might be a very good example of how content used to evolve. And the Sofa Story can be correlated to content evolution, with a more visual effect.
In the early days, sofas were hard, harsh supports made out of stone, wood, steel and lots of other material without any cushion. Over time, they gained popularity, and some types of sofas started to become a little too tawdry, with lots of cushions until they made their way to a more contemporary soft seating in a range of styles.
Roman sofa made of Terracotta (form the second half 4th BCE) displayed at Louvre
Grecian couch (from 1825) displayed at High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Modern sofa you can find in stores nowadays
If we were to compare it to content, it pretty easy to see the similarities; content started small, then there was the stuffed keywords era, and afterward it got more complex and more accurate.
You’ll have to spy on your competition and see what their focus is to outrank them. Competition might be very high on some niches. Content Assistant is here to guide you. For a specific query, the ones that we’ve discovered above we can see the type of query we pursue – brand, informational, and commercial.
In our example, we have an informational query. Looking at the competitors we can see what SEO pages are ranking. Skimming through the first 10 pages we find lots of cooking blogs, a video tutorial for a magazine (that ranks twice – once with the video from youtube, and secondly with the article published on site).
In this case, we see what our competitors are, and get inspired by them. Since your a business, you can write your pieces of content using more unconventional methods. Remember how important visuals are in this industry, but we’ll talk more about this in the third and fourth step. Numbered, highlighted or bulleted steps make the recipe appear simpler and easier to make.
Glazing you over the competitors will lead into the next step – the final one from the research phase.
Once we’ve collected your focus keywords and the words and phrases recommended by the tool for your SEO article, you can make a list. A simple document is enough. My method is pretty simple and you can use it.
Now you can start working on visualizing the template for your article. Would you follow a basic look or try to make it more attractive?
Every article that you write needs to have a template, a natural flow. If we go further with our example, the web content needs clean visuals – images, videos, gifs, and a very important step is to create a cover photo that approaches and has the title written on it. It is easier to share it on Facebook, Pinterest and more. If you can, create a longer picture – similar to an infographic picturing the final look of the desert, if we follow our example, and then the ingredients and steps you have to perform.
Make it simple and easy to follow. Below is an example:
The way you structure your article is synced with the design of the website. That means the design of your website can make it easier or not to perform some magic tricks with your content. If you’re using an open-source content management system and not a customizable HTML website, then it is easier to implement a layout.
The way information is displayed has high importance. For a receipt, you need to have a first section with ingredients that need to be separated from the main body of the article. And visuals have a higher significance. Below you can see a good example you could inspire from.
Source: lifeloveandsugar.com
The trick of this page is that Print button which makes it easier for people to have it in physical format. Somebody really knows the audience and their behavior. When you cook, you make a lot of mess and a printed format of the receipt is a very good way to make the content more useful. Lindsay, the blogger of this website, got an extra point for this little feature because her content breaks the virtual space. UX is well applied on this receipt page.
UX – the holy light that brightens the page and triggers the appreciation of the user. Depending on the type of content there are some things you shouldn’t miss in order to keep the user and don’t scare them. Besides site speed and optimized images, you should also have sharing buttons (if possible for images have the Pin icon – if visuals have high importance, like in our example for pastries, deserts, and everything related to cooking, in general).
Some other elements that you should keep in mind are:
There’s an explanatory image of what UX means, created by Stephen P. Anderson, an internationally recognized speaker.
UX means also to know your user and their behavior so you can anticipate and give more freedom to use and read your content. Just like the example above, the print button is a great integration for receipt pages.
After we’ve got you these preparation steps for gathering all the information and SEO tips that you need to make a great piece, you’ll have to put to work your writing style and skills. Here you put your magic into action. The content creation process begins. Beside the natural language and creative abilities, there are some SEO technicalities that are almost mandatory for success. Writing SEO friendly blog posts can be difficult and time-consuming. However, it’s time well spent, as SEO helps us rank better in the search engines.
Correct grammar, descriptive topic where you reach all the points related, personal opinions, real conclusion and unique content are necessary for creating highly readable web pages.
Since we are talking about writing for SEO, you need to include tags to let search engines know how your piece is structured. Title tag has a high influence on your piece of content because it will be displayed as the big blue link in search engine results:
You need to have a relevant, engaging and attractive title to make the user click on it and stay on page. Also don’t make a promise from the title that you can’t fulfill in the body content. There might be cases when Google will rewrite your title tag with information from meta description and page content if Google doesn’t like the one you added. Chances are this won’t be as good as the one you’ve created, so you must ensure that your own title tag is completely relevant, descriptive, has the right length and the focus keyword phrases included.
There are some tips you could follow for generating CTR:
Video content can boost your content and increase your conversion rates. If we follow our previous example regarding cronuts, for the query “cronuts with puff pastry,” we have a website that ranks first with the video and then with a webpage where the video was embedded. If you take a look at the print screen below you can see it ranks in Google both on the second and twelve positions.
In this case, the video tutorial can push the webpage higher in rankings. Visual content appeals to emotion, creates intimacy and engages the visitors.
80% of consumers believe demonstration videos are helpful when making purchases. – Blue Corona
If you decide to add video content to your webpage, my recommendation would be to use Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo to upload the video and then embed it into your page. This way, you’ll have it on two supports that can bring twice as much visitors.
Internal links provide extra value for a webpage. The have two main advantages:
The best way to use internal links is when you are writing about something and want to bring extra explanations, and link to a page where you’ve previously talked about that. For example, now as I am explaining the internal linking power, I’ve linked to a page where we previously tackled the topic more in depth.
A bad internal linking is a sign of bad architecture and you might risk misleading and confusing the user. Make sure you point to valuable, live and accurate pages and link to the proper anchor texts.
The process isn’t so hard. You should know the website pretty well, or at least search to find the proper article. And the more internal links you have, the more value Google will give it. You all know the saying “Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone”, which applies in this situation also. Make sure you don’t overuse the method because too many links will drop the value on the page. There’s a limitation of 10-15 links for every 1,000 words written.
It wasn’t long ago when Google rolled out the Mobile-first index. At that moment things took a different turn. Basically, Google might show different search engine results on desktop compared to mobile. Now, Google’s system for crawling, indexing, and ranking for the desktop version of the website is different than Google’s system for those processes on mobile. If, in the old days you could have content about dental cleaning on desktop and content about a completely different topic on mobile on the same website, now that’s not possible. Website are bound to make the shift to a more mobile-focused index.
| Google mobile-first indexing is about how we gather content, not about how content is ranked. Content gathered by mobile-first indexing has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet gathered this way or desktop content. Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index. | |
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When talking about mobile friendliness, there are 5 ways to rank in mobile search results:
Source: developers.google.com
Mobile accounts for half of all global web pages served and we are on an ascending evolution regarding mobiles searches. According to Statista, in 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3 percent in the previous year. Even if the mobile searches have experienced a continuous growth that doesn’t mean the desktop search decreased, but rather more people are using multiples devices to different actions and want to be always informed.
Moreover, as of February 2017, mobile accounts for 65.1 percent of all web traffic in Asia and for 59.5 percent of all web traffic in Africa.
Content amplification is a powerful method to reach a wider audience and multiply your links by hundreds. Amplifying your content should be mandatory if you want people to know about it and increase your website traffic.
After you finish writing your article, the process shouldn’t stop. You have to create awareness around it and push it to other people who might be interested. We are not talking about traditional social media marketing or emailing. That’s not amplification. You can look at the amplification process as a way to strengthen the signals of your post.
Writing for search engine optimization purposes can be difficult and can become a hardhanded job. You can save any limping piece of content you might have with the strategies explained above. Every action well-invested will bring you results. We’ve tested multiple times the best practices and the most efficient ways to get your results by doing the right thing and not waste your time testing yourself.
We’ve compressed our guideline by talking about the crucial elements that cannot miss from your SEO content writing process in 2019. The SEO friendly content pillars are contextuality, mobile friendliness, HTML tags, evergreen roots, user experience principles and video correlation.
The post How to Write for SEO in 2019. The Step by Step Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Need a social media strategy? Start with your social media goals then use this One Page Social Media Strategy guide to get your social media and your business on track. Social Media Strategy Worksheet included.
The post Social Media Goals You Need To Win: How To Create A One Page Social Media Strategy appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
If you’re active on social media groups or forums, you’ve probably seen plenty of free SEO audit offers. Ask an opinion about your site and the comment sections will quickly fill up with offers.
Hey, but it’s FREE, right? I mean, isn’t that great?
However… if we’ve learned something over the past years of digital marketing and SEO is that nothing good comes for free. Even if you do end up spending less money, you spend time instead and always risk doing a bad job.
In this article, I’ll tell you why it’s a good idea to rely on a high-quality tool or hire an expert when it comes to SEO audits, even if it costs you some money.
Like in finances, an audit is an inspection. In this case, it’s an inspection of your website. And no, in today’s terms we’re not only talking about SEO. The truth is that when you say SEO you say everything, because almost everything impacts SEO these days, from traditional technical SEO implementations and keywords to conversion rates, design and UX.
So what’s the purpose of this inspection? Well, you can view the audit as a doctor. The term comes from latin ‘auditus’ and it means ‘hearing’. So the ‘doctor’ ‘listens’ to your website to determine what’s wrong with it.
We will take a more detailed look at what a good audit needs but first, let’s define what a good SEO audit should contain.
Before we detail why free website audits won’t serve you any good, we first have to take a look at what a good SEO audit should contain. This isn’t necessarily a guide on how to do an SEO audit, but rather an outline of what it should contain and why it’s important that it contains those things.
A well defined SEO audit will contain the following:
Competitor research: You can’t really analyze something if you don’t compare it to anything. In SEO, everything is relative. Sure, you have a set of objective standards such as loading speed, user friendly URLs and not having malware on your site, but in the end, rankings are what matter.
You want to know where your site is positioned compared to other websites in your industry that are your direct competitors. You can’t compare your site to all websites, so you must choose wisely based on some criteria, such as which keywords they are targeting and how you are ranking on those keywords compared to how they are ranking.
Which takes us to our next point…
Keyword Research: You need to know your main keywords and which keywords you currently rank for. While the latter can be easily identified with a rank tracking tool, the former is usually up to a person to decide. How’s a tool going to decide what your business is selling? Of course, the tools can help you out with this a lot if they are good ones. If not, they can sink you more into the problem.
The audit should also contain a detailed keyword research, split into multiple, important categories of the website. Ideally, this should include future keyword opportunities and highlight the top performing keywords, which have a high search volume and are also highly relevant for the website/business.
While good keyword research tools are available, the prioritization process is very subjective and will always differ from situation to situation and website to website.
Indexation: An audit should analyze how well search engines index the website. Useful information can be extracted from the Google Search Console, but often it’s not enough to get an entire picture. If the search console doesn’t pick it up, the Google itself doesn’t pick it up.
Is the site using noindex tags where it shouldn’t? Is there an underlying issue that prevents the site from indexing? This is interconnected mostly with the next part I’m going to talk about, which is the technical and onpage SEO audit.
Technical SEO & OnPage SEO Audit: This is the most time consuming part of the website analysis. Free SEO Tools will only show you some basic aspects, such as wrong http to https redirect. Also, most SEO tools are actually analyzing only one page a time, so actually analyzing the whole site would take an eternity, not to mention that you would somehow have to centralize the data.
A technical audit should analyze a bunch of things, from title tags and meta descriptions to the presence of duplicate content, broken links and other important ranking factors search engines take into consideration.
A list of SEO issues that the CognitiveSEO Tool Analyses
More importantly, it should also analyze the structure of a website, looking at the internal linking and how that outlines which pages are the most important in the website. Depending on the type of website, the audit should contain different sections. For example, if a website is multilingual/international, the audit should analyze if the hreflang is implemented correctly.
It’s interesting how free audit tools work, because they analyze single pages instead of the entire site (which requires plenty of resources and time) but on the other hand they look at the entire site link profile instead of focusing just on that page.
Links Audit: Although people have been focusing less on link building and while it’s true that backlinks have become less important and harder to obtain over time, the truth is that they are still very important.
A list of factors the CognitiveSEO Tool uses when analyzing the link profile
At most, free tools can tell you an estimate of how many links a website has. However, they will never tell the complete story! You’ll need a lot of resources to gather all the information. It’s not just a number’s game.
Where are those links coming from? Quality sites? Relevant sites? Are they natural? Do they look spammy?
Content Audit: Now that you have determined the targeted keywords you should rank for and have ideally prioritized the most important technical issues that must be fixed, it’s time to take a look at the content.
There are some technical aspects such as duplicated content, which tools such as ours can help you figure out:
However, someone should also map the keywords to existing pieces of content for proper update within the title tags, headings and content and also think of new content ideas that could interest the audience, depending on which keywords people search more for in each market, which is something no technical SEO tool can do.
However, it doesn’t stop here. How should the content be written? Who will read it? These are questions that an SEO Audit should analyse.
General Overview: A tool can’t find everything. How does everything interconnect with social media marketing and offline marketing? Are there any mistakes the business does that might affect the overall performance of the website and business, even though they’re not directly connected to SEO? What about other things that tools can’t really analyse, like web design, or how to improve conversions?
Here’s an example: if your competitors have hundreds of positive reviews on local SEO listings such as Google MyBusiness (Maps) then you should encourage the owner to also get reviews. It could be as simple as asking the customers in the store to leave a review if they’ve had a good experience.
Prioritization: This is probably the most essential part. A complete audit (even the free ones) contain a lot of data. If it doesn’t tell you what to do first, you risk spending a lot of time on things that don’t really matter. There are SEO issues that are very hard to fix and take a long time, but they might not be critical. Wasting time there can cost you greatly.
For example, many will be quick to recommend blogging and link building. It’s true, content and links are very important. However, if the site has implemented hreflang or canonical tags wrongly, then fixing that should be a priority since it could end up in a bigger mess if more content is added.
Most importantly, a good SEO audit should contain SPECIFIC EXAMPLES and ACTIONABLE SOLUTIONS. Without them, it’s just theory.
Again, think of the doctor analogy. What if your doctor said “I think you might have a broken arm” or “You might want to try this medicine”? Seems kind of sketchy, doesn’t it? You’d probably not trust them much.
I’m sure you’d prefer they showed you an X-ray of your broken leg, showing exactly where the bone is broken and then tell you to put plaster right away, assisting you and showing you exactly how to deal with it in the future, as well as giving you some tips on how to prevent this whole situation from happening again.
As I’ve previously said, everything is subjective and will differ from site to site. Sure, you can have a general pattern or checklist you can follow, but you can’t analyze all sites the same way. Some target international languages, some don’t, they all run on different platforms, some are eCommerce others are informational, there are just too many factors to take into account for a general one button tool to figure out.
Now I’m going to ask you: Do you think anyone is willing to do all of the things mentioned above FOR FREE?
While for small sites that have just been created and have very small budget this might work, for bigger sites it has 0 use. If you have the flu, anyone can say drink some tea and stay in bed. If you’re ill (no traffic) but you don’t know what the problem is… you might need House M.D. to fix you.
A good SEO won’t do website audits for free. They might take a look at your site to make a general impression, but they won’t spend time digging in too deep. Instead, they will make an offer for a detailed audit.
Why?
Audits are at the core of any search engine optimization strategy. They contour where you’re at right now and they dictate where you’re going to.
Let’s go back to the doctor analogy. A doctor has to find out what’s wrong with you right now but also tells you what you have to do to fix your problems. Getting mistreated will usually end up in lost time, more pain and empty wallets.
The problem with free SEO audits is that many people offer them in hope of hooking a client. They ‘discover’ basic issues that most websites have and then use them to enhance the fear factor in order to sell their services.
In the end, the truth is that fixing minor issues doesn’t pay off the bills. Rankings & sales do.
Most free SEO audits out there lack essential things such as direction, goals and target audience. Without understanding that, the chances of your website increasing in rankings are dim.
Even with paid SEO Tools, you’ll still need someone who knows how to analyze the data and recommend specific actions.
But since so many people have started using these free tools and searching for them, it was inevitable that the market would satisfy the demand. A high number of free SEO tools started to wonder around the internet.
The truth is that 99.9% of the free audit offers you will get for your site are probably done using free, one click SEO audit tools. You put in the URL of a website, you click a button and it analyzes your website.
I have nothing against these tools. But if someone gives you for free something that you can get for free anyway… then I have a little problem.
These tools might be useful for a small, freshly created website with very small budget. It’s good for example to know that you need a good server or that you shouldn’t upload big image files. But the owner will usually be more than happy to do the research himself in order to save money. However, I highly believe we should all do what we’re best at, so if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re better off hiring an expert!
Free SEO audit tools can come in handy. However, on the long run, if you want to do something serious with your business and website, they are often misleading.
Here’s why, specifically:
Let’s say you want to do an SEO audit and you search for ‘free audit tools’. You decide to test multiple ones, because they’re free. Most of them, if not all, will eventually give a result similar to this one:
How Most Free Website Analysis Tools Work
The score usually analyses one page instead of taking a look at the entire site. If you get 30% score, you’ll see 100% as your goal. However, remember that 100% scores don’t pay the bills (at least not for you, but they can pay it for the ones offering you that free audit).
It’s usually the same with all free tools. You might know for example that PageSpeed Insights is often used to determine the technical status of your site. However, the tool often focuses on things that aren’t the most effective for SEO.
For example, caching external sources is not possible, yet the tool still drops your score if you have external resources that are uncached, even from Google itself (such as Analytics Tags). Another popular thing is to use modern file types for images, although many browsers and platforms don’t fully support them yet.
So an SEO might hook you in with a free audit, then tell you your score is 30% and that you need SEO services. It fixes most of the things (which by the way, your niece or nephew can do) by installing some plugins on your site and then shows you a new 90% score, green lights everywhere. That’s one hour of work and it should be paid accordingly!
Having scores to determine a website’s ‘health status’ isn’t all that bad. In fact, we have one of our own:
However, in the left side you can see how the tool has separate sections for things such as Indexability, Content, Architecture and Performance. There you’ll find detailed explanations on what exactly you should prioritize and how you can fix the issues.
Most free tools out there do the big mistake of simply counting the number of backlinks and rate your link profile after that.
For example, if your site has 0 backlinks, your offsite score might be 0. But if it has 1000 links, it will say that you have good activity and that your link profile is awesome.
That’s very misleading!
What’s actually important is how qualitative those links are. Are they coming from relevant domains? Are they spammy? That’s when a tool like the Unnatural Link Detection tool comes in handy!
But analyzing links takes time and resources. You have to crawl the web and use servers and tons of processing power to come up with the results and not have to wait for months to get them. That’s why, unfortunately, you won’t get it for free (only a trial, which you can try).
And even with this tool, you’ll still have to analyze the results and figure out what the issue actually is. What led to this situation? How can it be avoided? Should you disavow the links or focus instead on building more quality ones?. These are all answers no tool can give you directly and accurately.
If someone’s going to give you a free recipe for your site to grow #1, I’d bet they won’t do it for free.
In the future, it’s possible that AI tools and very advanced software will be able to give you the perfect solution to getting to #1. It’s possible that it will choose the right competitors, analyze and compare the rankings, come up with the best keywords and content ideas, fix all technical issues in a blink of an eye and then even give you a massage.
However, I highly doubt you’ll find that for free and, by then, Google will probably be even more advanced and complex.
Free SEO audits are like Romanian mechanics. They all say something about your car for free, but none of what they say is actually the problem and they end up replacing unnecessary things over and over again. Paid SEO audits are like German mechanics. They won’t say anything until you pay them fairly, but once you’ve paid they tell you the exact problem and fix it.
Here’s why you shouldn’t choose to waste your time with free SEO audits:
If you’re settling for the wrong goals, you will waste time hoping for rankings. Meanwhile, you’ll lose all the traffic and sales you could get if properly auditing your site. You will focus on things that are not actually important. You will obsess over getting 100% which means nothing for your site. I could show you plenty of sites that rank high and get traffic and sales but have low scores on free SEO tools.
Most of the time, loading times is what’s important. You can have big images and plenty of JS, as long as your site loads in under 1-3 seconds, you’re probably good go. For example, what would a photographer say if you ask him to compress the images on his site?
Paid SEO Audits & Tools might cost you less on the long run!
There’s something you can do to protect yourself from these free offers. You will easily differentiate people that actually know what they’re doing from people that just want to make a quick buck.
Here’s what you have to do:
Before asking any SEO consultant for an opinion, fix the basic stuff yourself. Even if you do it yourself, is not free. You’ll spend the time, so it’s not actually free.
However, this way you can fix some of the most basic things. For example, image compression. If you get a very low score on tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GT Metrix or high loading times on tools like PingDom Site Speed Test, chances are high that you’re using big images on your site.
The fix is as simple as installing an image compression plugin or downloading all your images from your server, compressing them using tools like Tiny PNG and then uploading them back (keep the same file names and also backup your site before you make any changes).
All other problems there are usually fixable with some plugins. Cache issues? Add a cache plugin. Minify issues? Add a code minification plugin. You’ll never get 100% score and you shouldn’t focus on that. For example, sometimes you really need to use external resources, such as JS codes for e-mail marketing or advertising. If they aren’t cached, you’ll still get a lower score, when in fact, your site doesn’t have that issue.
This way you can protect yourself from SEOs that are just trying to lure you in with the Free Audit bone and actually pick a good SEO.
If those SEO tools mentioned above hit scores of 90% plus, chances are you will demoralize them. If your score is 26%, they will be able to say “You need to fix this and that and that and this is how much it hurts your website and blahblah”.
However, if someone offers you a detailed, 40 pages manually written PDF file on which they’ve spent tens of hours of research, then you should probably take the offer. Although I highly doubt that it’s going to be for free.
If you’re an SEO consultant, stop doing free audits! Learn to do a serious SEO audit that will actually help your clients.
Small business owners which don’t have resources will usually take the deal if the audit is professionally made. They need search engine optimization services anyway and you need to audit the site anyway before you know what you should do. As for bigger companies, they usually have their own team for execution so the audit will actually be the only thing they really need.
If you want something to assist you in auditing a website, you can try the CognitiveSEO Package. It contains all the required tools for a good audit, from Keyword Research to Technical Audit, Link Audit and Rank Tracking tools. Not only that, but you’ll also be able to schedule reports directly to your clients’ e-mail to notify them about the progress.
One of our team members will assist you in analyzing your website to determine exactly which steps will actually help you improve your rankings.
SEO Audits are an essential part of your SEO & Marketing Strategy. You should always audit your website from time to time to make sure things are good and going to the right direction.
Free website analysis & SEO audit tools can help you make a quick overview on the website, but they won’t actually help you define your strategy.
What’s your experience with free SEO tools? Do you use them? How much do they help to positively impact the rankings of your clients’ websites in the Google search results? What do you include in your SEO audits? Do you give them for free? Let us know in the comments section!
The post Why Free SEO Audits & Tools Can Actually Cost You More On The Long Run appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
