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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Optimize Everything from URLs to Conclusions

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

SEO Writing for Copywriters

Internal Linking Strategy 

Title & URL Influence on Rankings Research

Link Building Campaigns

How to Write SEO Friendly Titles

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

And it did pay off. 

 

Originality Is Good, but so Is Content Update

 

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

 

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

 

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

The results are summed up in the chart below. 

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

Google Algorithms Come and Go, Quality Content Stays

 

This is similar to the one hit wonder music bands.

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

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

 

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

Excellence is not an act, but a habit.

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Creativity Is A Lot of Hard Work

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Questions Are More Useful than Answers

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

Forget Academic Writing

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Solve Your Readers’ Problems, not Your Dilemmas

 

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

 

But always ask yourself these 3 questions:

 

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

 

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

 

The Title of the Article Will Influence Its Performance

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

Write Less but Write Better

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

Write Less, Promote More

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

source: multichannelmerchant.com

 

Stick to Your Principles

 

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

 

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

 

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

Don’t write anything you wouldn’t read. 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

1. Content Marketing Strategy
   1. Use Keyword Research Tools
   2. Check the Top-of-mind Keywords
   3. Look for Seed Keywords
   4. Prioritize the Keywords You Want to Rank For
   5. Select Top Keywords
2. Content Creation
3. Content Distribution
   1. Link Building
   2. Social Media
   3. Community & Relations
4. Constant Content Update
5. Content Analytics Reporting
   1. Organic Search Traffic
   2. Keyword Rankings
   3. Social Shares
   4. Backlink Volume

 

Content Marketing Strategy

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Use Keyword Research Tools

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Why any analysis should start with a keyword research?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Check the Top-of-mind Keywords

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool can give you tons of keyword opportunities. You can check out for questions people are looking for an answer on Google. You can filter the keywords ideas by volume, relevancy and so on, so you can find the best keyword opportunities for you. 

 

 

Prioritize the Keywords You Want to Rank For

 

Now comes the more difficult part.

 

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

 

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

 

Content Performance and Domain Performance.

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Select Top Keywords Based on Relevancy and Search Volume

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

Content Creation

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

Write content that stands out and is share worthy. 

 

While doing so, also make sure to: 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Content Distribution

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Link Building

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

Also, don’t forget about internal linking. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Social Media

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Use social media advertising (like Twitter or Facebook advertising) if needed. Make use of partner programs, custom content, go for  influencer marketing if needed. 
Yet, it is highly important to make yourself visible on social media.

 

Community & Relations

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Comments are a great way to:

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

Constant Content Update

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Content Analytics Reporting

 

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

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

 

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

 

Now, what’s to do? 

 

Check out the result!

 

But what should you check?

 

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

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

 

Organic Search Traffic

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Keyword Rankings

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Social Shares

 

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

 

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

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

 

Backlink Volume

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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How to Be a Twitter Chat Champion: The Ultimate Guide

Want to become a Twitter Chat Champion? Then use this Twitter Chat Guide with related social media marketing tactics and examples.

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Mad Men Marketing Quotes: How To Improve Your Results

Celebrate the Day of the Dead with these Mad Men Marketing Quotes that remain relevant today. Use them to improve your  social media marketing.

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31 Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips You Need To Drive Awesome Results

Want to improve holiday marketing? 31 Halloween social media marketing tips with examples.

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2020 Content Marketing Pivot: 3 Tactics You Can Use To Improve Your Results

Made the Content Marketing Pivot yet? Get the research, statistics, data and examples so your content marketing serves a higher purpose to get results.

The post 2020 Content Marketing Pivot: 3 Tactics You Can Use To Improve Your Results appeared first on Heidi Cohen.

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Marketing Success Metrics: 3 Types You Need To Know

Want to achieve business goals despite fear of math? Use marketing success metrics to track results over time. Has marketing metric definitions with easy-to-use formulas.

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

Let’s see!

 

Google Indexing Problem – Confirmed on October 1, 2020

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 1, 2020

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Meanwhile, Google communication revolved around this type of messages:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

What Is the Google Canonicalization Issue 

 

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

 

What does this exactly mean?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

What Is the Google Mobile Indexing Issue

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 7, 2019

 

 

How Does Google Indexation Issue Affect Your Business

 

The short answer to this would be: BIG TIME. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Can You Do Anything in This Situation?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

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