As we are often being asked about many misconceptions from the SEO world, we’ve decided to gather and share with you the most important SEO myths that tend to keep you from improving your ranks and traffic. And of course, clarify them once and for all.

SEO can make you or break you, depending on how you’re using it. Here’s an idea of what you should stay away off, the SEO myths. Read them, breath them and live without them:

1. Using Tabbed Content Can Penalize Your Site
2. Syndicate Content Does Hurt Your SEO
3. It’s Better to Have More Links Than More Content
4. The Disavow Tool Is Useless After Penguin 4.0
5. Links in Comments and Forums Will Attract Google Penalties
6. Social Signals Don’t Impact SEO
7. All Backlinks Are Created Equally
8. Keyword Optimization Matters Most in SEO
9. Artificial Social Shares Will Boost Your Rankings
10. Keyword Density Should Be at Least 2% to Increase Your Rankings
11. A High Number of Links Is All You Need to Rank on the Top
12. You Don’t Need an SEO Specialist, Anyone Can Do It
13. SEO Is All About Rankings

The evolution of SEO is faster than our ability to perceive it. Over the years, it appeared so many speculations regarding SEO that you would think you were at a stock market.

The long list of SEO myths continues to be more and more voluminous. Some of these myths appeared from the need of the so-called experts who wanted to find out Google’s next move. It is sad to see these people living and dying by Google’s quotes and PR statements.

Let’s move past the “SEO is dead” phrase and start focusing on certain facts pertaining more to bad documentation rather than to real myths. SEO is not dead and we’ll be long gone when and IF that will really happen. It is very much alive and, we might add, omnipresent.

SEO is not about shenanigans. SEO is not something you can easily use to bring your newly created website on top of results like some magic fairy dust. Rather, it is a continuously evolving industry. There is no one-time recipe for SEO algorithms that change every day. You have to adjust your strategies accordingly and act naturally. Otherwise, you might look suspicious.

We’ve seen a lot of stressed and frustrated people blaming it on tools and agencies when they don’t see the SEO efforts equating to payoffs instantaneously. Even the creation of the world took more than one day. Good results don’t come easily.

Digital marketers understand that SEO is not a magic pill that will skyrocket your rankings in one day.
	Vishal Ray Malik
	Founder of ConversionLink / @vishalraymalik

1. Using Tabbed Content Can Penalize Your Site

Tabbed content started as a solution for keeping your site clean and to the point, without overcrowding the reader. They could show or hide the content by a click. What started as a good thing for the user ended badly for the search engine crawlers.

The hidden text using expandable sections was bad for SEO because bots could not read the text and therefore the website couldn’t get indexed or ranked.

Google discarded the websites that used the “click-to-expand” type of content because it thought they were hiding it from the user, exactly the opposite of its intention. But as you all know, there might have been a grain of truth in Google’s position towards tabbed content because there are all sorts of people trying to trick Google.

John Mueller stated that Google may not rank the page for the tabbed content because it knows users do not see the content by default.

From our point of view, it’s always a tricky problem when we send a user to a page where we know this content is actually hidden. Because the user will see perhaps the content in the snippet, they’ll click through the page, and say, well, I don’t see where this information is on this page. I feel kind of almost misled to click on this to actually get in there.
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google /  @JohnMu

You can listen to his answer in the next video:

Nonetheless, we must understand that Google penalizes those websites that deceptively use hidden text.

Matt Cutts explained in the video below that using JavaScript for collapsing content is an accepted and a common practice by lots of ecommerce websites that want to make their site more welcoming.

Using JavaScript for tabbed content that includes hidden text is an accepted example within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Not all hidden text is considered deceptive. For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site.
	Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Let’s take Wikipedia, for example, the online encyclopedia that uses on-click expandable content on the mobile version.

If you look at the picture above you can see that the collapse sections complement the content. There is a lot of information on the page and you can easily go and read only what you’re interested in, and not the whole article.

Using tabbed content is not bad for SEO and Google won’t penalize your site if it is implemented in a non-spammy way. The hidden text or links is considered spammy if it there solely for search engines rather than visitors.

2. Syndicate Content Does Hurt Your SEO

First, let’s start by saying duplicate content is neither syndicate content nor article spinning.

We all know about duplicate content and the long talk over the year, when it has been said that duplicate content will penalize your website. Things have changed and we learnt that the duplicate content penalty was a myth. Matt Cutts and Andrey Lipattsev said repeatedly that duplicate content doesn’t get you penalized, while copied content does.

As for article spinning, the penalization is applied. It is a technique used in SEO by rewriting articles and replacing specific words, phrases, sentences trying to provide a different version by each spin.

However, syndicated content refers to a situation when a third party publishes an article taken from a source while mentioning it and doesn’t take credit for the article. Syndicated content doesn’t violate Private Label Rights (PLR) either because the original author keeps the ownership of the article and offers a Creative Commons license for reposting.  

If all these steps are followed, then syndicate content won’t damage your site or your SEO; it won’t be deemed copied content and get you penalized. So the myth of syndicate content must be broken. Syndication is not a form of plagiarism as long as there is a source cited.

The truth is that only copied content and article spinning will penalize your website.

Here’s what John Mueller says in Search Console Help, regarding content that is automatically generated, doesn’t comply with the copyright infringement and the Webmaster Guidelines.

Our algorithms prefer unique, compelling and high-quality content. Content that is rewritten, “spun,” automatically translated or otherwise modified in an attempt to make it appear unique would go against our Webmaster Guidelines and can result in action being taken against sites that rely on such content.
	John mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google /  @JohnMu

Syndication can really help you if done correctly. If you use it as an amplification technique, you get the chance to rich a broader audience.

There are a lot of trustworthy websites that publish syndicate content and have a large number of people that are subscribed to the newsletter and RSS feed through a dedicated service like Feedly.

3. It’s Better to Have More Links Than More Content

There was a time when it was better to have more links than content to rank higher in Google. Back then, links had more value. Building links on specific anchor texts was essential for SEO industries and to boost your search rankings. And since it began to have such a huge effect on rankings, all kinds of webmasters and SEO pros started to do link building just to create chunks of links, thinking only about quantity and not at all about quality. Google realized that people abused this technique and flooded the SERP with irrelevant and bad sites getting triggered there only by having bad inbound links with no value for the user.

The solution Google found was the Webspam Update, named Penguin afterward. This big change happened on April 24, 2012, when Penguin was released for the first time. Back then, it addressed problems such as keyword stuffing and link schemes. Later on, they took the problem into their own hands and penalized sites with unnatural, manipulative inbound link profiles.

Both Matt Cutts and Andrey Lipattsev confirmed that content, links and RankBrain are the first 3 rankings factors. All of them are equally important. None of them is more important than the other (according to Google). 

But here is just one of the myths you should leave behind: links value more than content. Put your ideas into action and start creating an abundance of new pieces of content or improve the ones you already have. Information is in your pocket.  

A natural link profile and good content can bring you high rankings. And the best way to do it comes from the SEO masters and people that went through all Google dances and managed to dance all the way up to the present.

Bill Sebald, from Greenlane, managed to improve the rank from #5 to #2 for the period of time they optimized the content with the help of Content Assistant. And he’s not the only one. The knowledge and tools are here; you just have to create the strategy and take some time to do it.

Within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5 for the term we were optimizing for to #2. This fluctuated over the next few days but then we settled into the #2 spot and have remained there since. Read the full case study.
	BILL SEBALD
	Founder Greenlane / @billsebald ‏

4. The Disavow Tool Is Useless After Penguin 4.0

To disavow or not to disavow? That is the question.

We get tons of emails and questions from people saying they know disavow tools are useless and Google knows which links they built and which they didn’t.

Let’s take the example above that can prove our point:

I saw that I have some links marked as unnatural, but I have never built those links. Google says if you never built the link then don’t worry about it. I only built the link to a single post which is 100 photoshop tutorials post so that is why I am shocked to see that all of my links are marked unnatural by your tool.

The 100 photoshop tutorials post is unnatural itself. Google might ignore it, but it might not. Google doesn’t know if you built those links. They are pointing to your site and that’s it. Maybe someone did a negative SEO attack on your website. Google could see that as something you did and penalize you. What Matt Cutts and John Mueller say is different from what the algorithm does.

When Google Penguin 4.0 went live, Gary Illyes said:

Traditionally, webspam algorithms demoted whole sites. With this one, we managed to devalue spam instead of demoting AND it’s also more granular AND it’s real time. Once the rollout is complete, I strongly believe many people will be happier, and that makes me happy.
	Gary Illyes
	Google spokesperson / @methode

People still asked if the disavow tool was still necessary, along with this update:

5. Links in Comments and Forums Will Attract Google Penalties

SEO myth busting again; here’s the urban legend that has been brought to life: all community engagement is toxic, such as links in comments and forums.

Don’t confuse blog commenting and forums with directories. The latter are more suspicious, but for sure in that case, also, there are white-hat directories. One of the clearest differences to emerge is that a forum is a discussion panel and a directory is an online list or catalog of websites.

The mirror has two faces. If we’re to take forums in general and links in comments (even nofollow links) we would say that they have low-quality, because there are a lot of spammers. Along the years, lots of forums were bombarded by constant spam messages from marketers trying to cash in on a captive audience and build lots and lots of spammy links. It was a time when forums were popular, that’s why the bad guys focused their attention on them.

Forums have some advantages:

• Have niched users;
• They bring topical relevancy;
• Have loyal users, that help increase website traffic through repeated visits;
• Easily create a connection and build a relationship because you no longer have to search them and capture their attention;
• Easier to gain trust.

So you can understand why spammers were attracted by building links there through comments. But with time, just like Google, proper forums that delivered relevant information started to have more restrictions on user-generated content (UGC).

The next wave of the Web is going to be user-generated content.
	John Doerr
	General partner KPCB / @johndoerr

You can find lots of trustworthy forums and social communities built on user-generated content that provide valuable information from experts and pros. Reddit, WebmasterWorld, Moz Forum, Quora, Campus Society, Stumble Upon, Tumblr are just a few examples of communities built on user-generated content, each of them focusing on a specific audience.  

Did you know that millennials spend 30% of their media consumption time with content that is created by their peers (UGC) and consider it to be more memorable than other media? But that’s not all, user-generated content is trusted more than traditional media (59%) according to a research made by Ipsos MediaCT/Crowdtap.

Millennials are also committed to engaging with social media on a daily basis above all other media types.

Let’s debunk this myth together. Community engagement is not toxic if it observes Google’s quality guidelines and comment links from forums and user-generated communities are naturally placed there.

6. Social Signals Don’t Impact SEO

Come into the mythical place named Narnia, where everything is possible and social activity has no value for SEO. Well, let’s see why it is a myth and which is the truth behind it.

I hear lots of people saying things like:

“Is it true that likes on Facebook, Twitter, and so on, do not count towards Google rankings? Well, why bother improving my social activity?”

Or even asking:

What would be the SEO benefit of linking to Instagram/Facebook/Twitter posts?

But the real question should be “Is your site providing added-value for your users?” rather than thinking of the “SEO benefits”.

Let’s get one thing straight: it is true that a “like” on a social account doesn’t influence Google rankings, but they have a positive influence among shares, engagement. John Mueller states that there is no direct ranking signal in Google’s ranking algorithm. Google treats Facebook and Twitter posts like any other web pages for search, but NOT as a ranking factor. But this doesn’t mean social signal has no value for SEO. It indirectly influences website rankings.  

Social signals have a lot of value in this manner. You build your brand and drive traffic to your website, therefore influencing your rank on Google.  

Source: blindfiveyearold.com

We conducted a study on this topic and the numbers were clear: a strong presence on social networks is correlated with better rankings. This means that, in general, the higher the ranking of the website, the higher the chances that the average presence on social network is larger.

Another interesting discovery was the fact that Facebook post engagement has a strong connection with organic search CTR. Larry Kim saw that Facebook posts with extraordinarily high engagement rates tended to have above expected organic search CTR.

Source: wordstream.com

In the end, it is about how engaging your content is.

If you have a successful activity on your social accounts and create engagement, you have the possibility to attract a larger audience and send it to your site. On top of that, that audience can share the information and amplify it, organically. Influencers come to your site and in no time you can increase the number of links, which boosts your SEO efforts.

Links are the confound in the correlation between social shares and rankings.
	AJ Kohn
	Owner, Blind Five Year Old / @ajkohn

Remember that social engagement sends positive signals to Google. Long story short, social signals have an indirect impact on SEO and a powerful impact on search rankings. The result of the social activity is more valuable than the action per se. That’s the one that counts.

7. All Backlinks Are Created Equally

Oh boy! Oh boy! They never stop coming. I’ll boil this down to the bare facts.

You know and I know that there are bad and good links. Getting at this point, we can see that backlinks are not created equal. But let’s not stop here.

Let’s go on with the good links and say that they are created equally. At this point, I have to ask you: is a link on Forbes equal with bananaroots.wordpress. com? The first domain is an American business magazine and the second one is a blog about bananas. Firstly, the two domains are different by the industry, secondly by the domain influence/authority and page influence/authority.

There are so many aspects to take into consideration when we talk about backlinks that this could take an entire post and lots of coffee to bare all the SEO myths that are out there and debunk them. But, I’ll save your energy and go with the one that interests us today, at this moment.

To figure out this backlink equality issue, let me present you two situations. If you search for “brown recluse” you’ll see search engine results from EmedicineHealth and LiveScience. The first page  has a well-covered topic with lots of on-topic content as you can see in the next screenshot:

The second page was a short article, poorly-covered with a lot of general information about a lot of things.

And then we checked the number of links. If we were to compare the two sites, the LiveScience has lots of links, it is a big site.

If I had to choose, a link on EmedicineHealth would be more valuable than LiveScience.

Equality is not always the answer. Equity is.

Source: culturalorganizing.org

Link equity (formerly named link juice) is an important part of off-page SEO since it passes value and authority from one page to another.

Let’s accept and embrace the fact that backlinks are not created equal and focus on those which are more “juicy” or equitable.

Some links are more equal than others.

8. Keyword Optimization Matters Most in SEO

Targeted keywords optimization is one step in all the SEO process that happens on-site. The first would have to be keyword research. You can do that through multiple alternatives. Keyword Planner from Google Adwords has been one of the most popular options for a long period of time, but since SEO evolved, lots of agencies have proposed lots of other tools.

Some other opportunities that we can find in Google are the autocomplete suggestions we can see when we start typing in the search bar for a specific query (as represented in the next screenshot). Or, review the list of searches related to autocomplete suggestions that we can find at the bottom of the first page.

There is also the Keyword tool and Content Assistant which is a complete option that includes the keyword research, competitor spying for that keyword, keyword and content optimization.

All the keyword phrases we use in a content create a vocabulary and therefore give a context to the topic we’ve written about. Due to that, Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to understand if your content is related to a search query. In case you need guidance using keywords suggestions that take this algorithm into consideration, Content Assistance can give it to you in seconds. The tool uses the same algorithm for extracting keyword recommendation you could use in your content.

But keywords do not represent everything, context does. It just started to have a major impact on search results. And let’s not forget RankBrain, which helps Google process its search results through artificial intelligence. So Google will start to offer more personalized results based on each individual behavior. It goes through billions of pages and selects only the most relevant for particular queries.

Nowadays, as we mentioned several times, Google’s trying to optimize the page for the user. So if you’re trying to use specific words over and over again just to optimize for the search engines, it will only weaken your website. In the end, you might get penalized and suffer a great loss.  

Taking into consideration the SEO process we talked about, keyword optimization is not the crucial SEO element or the most important one, but it is the first one. It is a dwarf among giants. There are arguably even more relevant aspects. At the moment, we can not point to a specific SEO element that is the most important one, but rather there is a handful of steps and aspects that create a synergy.

9. Artificial Social Shares Will Boost Your Rankings

We’ll start by saying that artificial or fake social shares are considered to be black hat social media techniques.

We talked before about social signals and you know by now that they are emerging as ranking factors as search engines try to understand our social interaction and behavior. In this manner, a page with lots of shares and links has the advantage to rank higher. But just like any abuse of guidelines, these tricks that fool the system are penalized.

That being the case, Facebook says that buying fake likes, shares will only hurt you; it might get harder for those who want to advertise, too. Not once did it happen for Facebook to suspend advertising accounts. And it’s not so easy to reactivate such an account.

Pages with artificially inflated like counts are harming themselves, making it harder and more expensive to reach the people they care about most.
	Facebook

Facebook adds that they value real connection and support strong relationships created through the platform.

We have a strong incentive to aggressively go after the bad actors behind fake likes because businesses and people who use our platform want real connections and results.
	Facebook

Experts value the power of social signals but only used for the right reasons, not for inflating with artificial shares and likes that pollute the social platform.  

Social media is a set of modern communications channels that can be used to transmit “content” and communications to an audience. As such, it can be used, in this context, to publicize “content” and news so that more people hear about you and then link to you. And those links can help your rankings.
	Samuel Scott
	Marketing speaker and tech contrarian / @samueljscott

The bottom line is artificial social shares don’t help in keyword ranking. In the best case scenario, you should call yourself lucky if your account isn’t suspended. Facebook is using AI to penalize spammy websites in its News Feed.

10. Keyword Density Should Be at Least 2% to Increase Your Rankings

Keywords, in all its forms for SEO, seems to be a hotly contested topic.

At this point, I barely have strength left to argue. It starts to get funnier or is it rather me feeling nervous-funny.

The never-ending talk about keyword density that should be 10%, 4,5% or 7 %. We’re starting to ask ourselves if is so hard to be natural these days?!

It’s ironic, you’re asking “What would the algorithm think about this?” and the algorithm is asking, “What would a real human think about this?”

During a Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout, last year, John Mueller said that the focus should be on the readability and not on the keyword density.

We expect content to be written naturally, so focusing on keyword density is not a good use of your time. Focusing too much on keyword density makes it look like your content is unnatural.
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google /  @JohnMu

Keyword density might lead to keyword stuffing if you try and program everything like it is a machine.

A lot of people think there’s one recipe and you can follow it like baking cookies. And if you follow it to the letter, you’ll rank number one. That’s not the way it works.
	Matt Cutts
	Former head of the webspam team at Google / @mattcutts

That’s not how the search engines work. Google will recognize the pattern.

The sad part is that we are in 2018 and we’re still hearing questions such as “what is the ideal keyword density percentage to improve rankings in Google in 2018?” (*facepalm* and *heavy breathing*).

Then you go back to quality, the naturalness of things. So no, you should not focus on maintaining your keyword density a specific percentage to rank higher. There is no IDEAL % for keyword density. Rather have a vocabulary, semantics, a long copy to avoid keyword stuffing. In the end, be very careful not to have too much of one keyword.

11. A High Number of Links Is All You Need to Rank on the Top

The myth goes something like this: once you have so many links, you don’t really need anymore. And it should be enough for helping you rank higher. No numbers are thrown out (apparently it might differ from one industry to another), but it is really such a thing of having too many links that it doesn’t matter in terms of ranking if you get more? 

In the ante-Penguin Era, a high number of links might be enough for ranking on top if you wanted to believe that.

Obviously, there is no such thing as too many links. Maybe for unnatural links, though. Because if you have too many unnatural links you might get penalized. But here we are talking about good links as ranking signals. Smart marketers and webmasters wouldn’t pursue this, because they know (spoiler alert: debunking a myth right now) links is not the only ranking factor and neither is the number of those links. The focus should be on content marketing, social activities, natural links, since we talked so much about them.

12. You Don’t Need an SEO Specialist; Anyone Can Do It

Whoever said SEO is something any IT guy can do, fooled you.

There is, indeed, technical SEO, which as the name says, requires some technical expertise. It is an SEO component, entirely something else. If you hear technical it doesn’t necessarily have to be IT. The job of an SEO expert is different from an IT expert; it requires wider knowledge on content, user behaviour, equity, semantics and context, and a lot more.  

Think of SEO this way: If a customer-focused content marketing program is the sandwich, then SEO is the mayonnaise. It touches nearly everything and enhances the overall flavor of the sandwich, but on its own, it’s not very appetizing.
	Lee Odden
	CEO at TopRank Marketing / @leeodden

Of course, you need the knowledge of an IT person that can handle some things better than an SEO pro. You can not give or expect from somebody experienced in IT to do the SEO duties and expect best practices and great results. Some things go hand in hand.

An IT professional can help you with issues such as website crawling (errors, XML sitemap, URL parameters, indexing errors), redirects, website audit (for internal links), loading page speed, some local SEO issues, and many more.

In the end, SEO isn’t something you can handle to an IT person, in case you want to rank and have a site and visitors.

13. SEO Is All About Rankings

Search engine optimization is the process for naturally placing the website in search results by the search engines. If we think from the on-site perspective, then the keywords used in context, the meta descriptions, the images selected for the content, the title are significant among all the on-site SEO elements.

Getting this straight, we need to understand that SEO, at this level, must answer to the user need and intent. That is the future: the user-intent-based content. Google’s moving the attention on user intent for more accurate and personalized results.

Relevant and well-optimized (not over-optimized) content remains a top ranking factor. Think of that this way: you are on the first page of Google and rank for a keyword you optimized your content for. You want the users to enter your website or not? If the answer is yes and they will do so it means you optimized correctly your content, you have relevant meta description, title, URL. If on the contrary, the user doesn’t enter your website it means it’s not relevant, you optimized the content for the search engines, and that won’t last for long.

My rule of thumb is: build a site for a user, not a spider.
	Dave Naylor
	Head of Search Marketing and Speaker at Bronco / @DaveNaylor

Lost are the days when over-optimization was doing all the job for ranking your content higher and higher ‘till it reached the sky, because sky is the limit. But no more!

Over-optimization for the sole purpose of ranking isn’t a technique approved by Google according to the Quality Guidelines.

Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.
	Wendy Piersall
	Blogger & author at wendypiersall.com / @emom

But for some other reason, if you have over-optimized content, you have a chance to clear your past and deoptimize it. At this stage, you have to evaluate your content and see if there is anything you can adjust, redirect or rewrite and re-optimize to fulfill the actual requirements for quality.

If you got it until here, I must congratulate you and ask you to debunk another SEO myth, and tell the truth, that SEO is not all about rankings, but rather quality, natural language, context and earning links (named just a few, because we could keep it like this all night).

Conclusion

13 is an unlucky number, not to mention when it is placed near SEO myths. The internet is full of them, and people follow them blindfoldedly. You decide what is best for your business and what SEO strategies to apply or not. Yet, we wanted to share and debunk with you the most common SEO myths, the ones that we are constantly asked about.   

In the online marketing world, there will always be tons of detours, easy fixes, or “a complete guide to SEO and conversion rate optimization” that will increase your search engine rankings on the spot. We’ve tried to cover some of the biggest SEO myths; yet, we know that there other highly debatable topics in the industry worth tackled, like voice search or guest blogging. Whenever we’ll feel the need, we’ll update this list and we hope we’ll get updates from your side as well. 

We are always trying to provide you with valuable content and information in the SEO world, with facts that can be applied and aspects you should stay away from and never challenge Google or other search engines. These SEO myths are in the last category and we hope that this article was a helping hand. If you have some other SEO myths you want to share or discuss with us, feel free to write about them at the comments section below. 

The post 13 SEO Myths That Will Probably Kill Your Ranks in 2024 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

That’s how we come to the idea of searching the trends in content marketing which influence SEO so you know what to expect and how to place yourself on the wave and not against it.

We’ve talked about the importance of content on our blog on multiple occasions, especially since Google started to focus their ranking signals on content. We even researched how you can rank on top Google positions without links with a proper content strategy in place. 

With so many trends to choose from the content marketing area, we had a hard time narrowing down the ones that will have a high impact on SEO, but nevertheless, here they are:

1. Natural Language Search & Voice Search Content
2. Optimized Content for User Search Intent
3. Personalized Content Experiences
4. Content Creation Process Has Reconfigured Its Steps
5. Content Marketing Will Be Written Only for Content Marketers
6. Context Is the New Era of SEO
7. Influencer Marketing Has More Power
8. Customers Expect Full Transparency 
9. Video Content Is the Most Preferred Type of Content
10. Native Advertising Is Rising Rapidly
11. Bite-Sized Content Revolution

Having such a handful list of goodies, it’s time to make the content marketing strategy, prepare our tools and get to work. Now that we are passed the springtime and we’re heading into the sunny summer, we have to be prepared, otherwise, we risk getting burnt. We don’t need just suncream but also our bag of knowledge and the life ring to help us stay above the water.

Content has been a highly debated topic since Google said it is one of top three ranking signals. Especially if your brand is focused on the strategy direct to consumer and you sell directly to the end customers then your content is an asset. Your website content needs to be correctly optimized and highly accurate to drive content traffic and then sales. That’s why you need be aware of the trends to make your content stand up.

1. Natural Language Search & Voice Search Content

Voice search is one of the content marketing trends that is increasing viciously. According to Google, 20% of mobile searches are now voice searches. Moreover,  voice-activated content has constant growth. 

 This trend has a high influence on SEO. In the screenshot below you can see how much the voice search accounts from all the searches performed on the search engines.

The printscreen is taken from a study on the effect of voice search on SEO we conducted some time ago. You would be surprised what we discovered!

An increasing number of people in the United States are using voice to conduct searches. An Emarketer study shows that one-third of the US population uses voice search. A comparison beside search typed queries and. 71 percent of consumers prefer to use voice searches (PricewaterhouseCoopers).

We performed some searches in Google trends to understand the evolution and to have a clearer understanding of how voice search can revolutionize the SEO world (and if that’s a true fact).

We then added some other search terms to compare. We wanted to see if there is a difference between an organical growth and an explosive one.

We discovered that SEO was on the safe side, but not for long. We can still use our SEO and digital marketing knowledge as the voice revolution might be close but not yet underway.

As a recommendation, I would suggest using natural language and create relevant content that is easy to read, just like you are talking with somebody and not over-optimizing for the sake of SEO “success”. Build a content strategy optimization for voice search and use conversational marketing. 

For example, if you want to use chatbots make sure they have a natural language (conversational marketing) and they are easy to implement and relevant to your website.

When asking a question in your article, try to respond to it in a full sentence, giving a specific response, make it easy to skim and invest in building trust. Try using a conversational tone in your content and optimize for long phrases or even questions. Keyword tool has an option that allows you to receive a recommendation based on your search terms. And you can choose to see all the questions and the metrics attached to them.

Some other thing you should do is optimizing for local searches since they started to take a hike in searches. As you could see from our study on voice search, there were a lot of “near me” searches.

2. Optimized Content for User Search Intent

Content and search engines together changed the way they work.  They are now in sync, have strict rules are are definitely content marketing trends you should follow. The trend in content shifted the focus on the user, and Google is trying to deliver better optimized and personalized content to each user – hence the user search intent. 

To understand the user search intent you need to perform a lot of keyword research. If you understand what your users want and what their intent is when they are searching for a specific query, half of the job for ranking on that keyword is done.

To better understand your audience, perform keyword research, look through analytics and conduct studies to find out what is their paint point, if they find what they need on your website. If the bounce rate is high that means they don’t find what they are looking for (based on the keyword they search and got on your page). Then check your content and see if it is misleading, answers to the title/topic you’re targeting. 

See what keywords do they look for on your website search box, then follow their path through the pages they navigate and design the customer journey map. There are lots of ways to better understand your audience and optimize your content for user search intent. We’ve conducted a thorough guideline on how to identify & best optimize for user search intent based on three types of user search intent: informational, navigational and transactional. 

3. Personalized Content Experiences

Personalized content is the new buzzword in the content marketing trends world. Studies have shown that this year we’ll have more content than before, and this story has been around for some years. Several dozens of pieces of content might be published until the end of this year.  

For example, Domo, the American software company which specializes in business intelligence software, performed their research and shared the results through their Data Never Sleeps 7.0 project (the fifth year since it started). In the graph below you can see how much data is flooding the internet every minute of the day.

Personalized content creates a connection between the brand and the customer and has lots of benefits. According to Evergage’s 2019 Trends in Personalization Survey Report respondents saw that personalized content delivers better customer experiences.

That being said, with all the data coming around and bombarding the reader with information from all sides, your content must stand out. That’s how the personalized content appeared. The readers feel important when you address them in person.

Studies show that personalized content is more effective and powerful and website visitors convert better when they are targeted through customized content.

Personalization has started to become critical in the future of content marketing. It is a content marketing trend that has a big influence on SEO. That means more appropriate content for each user, based on their last searches on site, on their last activity on social media, on the actions taken on-site and so on.

For example, one user downloads an e-book from your site. Next time you could offer similar e-books, or you could welcome them by name on your site. Go further, and send them personalized emails. It is more personal, and you get a chance to fulfill your readers’ needs. Creating personalized experiences through adaptive content can increase your results and bring more conversions. If you’re a B2B, here’s a content marketing strategy you can get inspiration from.  

Adidas used the personalization technique to send different emails to women and men, which was very smart and appealed better to each gender. Below you can see an example:

Source: www.campaignmonitor.com

Personalized emails experienced an increase of 26% open rate. And the nice part is that everyone can take advantage of this technique. And this is just one example. 

You can create content only for your users, or you can offer special prices for them, depending on your digital business. For example, Answer applies special discounts in the checkout step for users who are the in VIP club, meaning those who passed their first purchase.

If you’re using personalized content, you’ll have higher scores and in the end, a strong and good impact on SEO. Not to mention you’ll improve the user experience. You’ll need to rely on automatization and create segments, and collect behavioral data to maximize your SEO efforts.

4. Content Creation Process Has Reconfigured Its Steps

We all know that people used content creation by starting with a keyword they wanted to rank for (usually a long tail one, to get a high volume of traffic) and creating content around it. The deceiving part of this content creation process was that it started to attract a lot of thin content just for the sake of ranking high in Google, with no intention of serving the user.

The content creation process changed and now follows a more natural and more user-friendly path. Now you have to start with finding a content gap or a problem and getting the answers to that through your content. Then perform a keyword search for your topic, optimize it, promote it and so on.

If a few years ago people started with the keyword, now they are beginning with the topic by looking on social media sites; forums or client’s questions, reviews, feedback, comments or support questions. There is a lot of content at the moment, and having an article that addresses a pertinent question and has answers to readers’ needs, will secure you a safe place in Google. It is a necessity. Following high rankings in Google with no value content is no longer an option.

Google trends is an option for following popular topics, based on their searches. Follow popular websites in your industry, or follow trending hashtags on Twitter.

Another way to get ideas would be to steal the spotlight from your competitors. BrandMentions can you where your competitors are mentioned, what influencers endorse them, top website and resources where they are featured.

The new content creation process can bring you lots of benefits if you try to respond to the questions and needs of your audience, instead of following keywords to rank for with no value-added. 

Another influencer marketing software you could use is OSI Affiliate Software. You can easily manage any referral program to generate more traffic and conversions. 

5. Content Marketing Will Be Written Only for Content Marketers

We are living hard times, especially in the content marketing world. Unfortunately, content marketing is starting to be addressed to content marketers. How will this affect SEO you might ask? Tremendously.

The Marketoonist said the evolution of content marketing is simple: we write content for content marketers. 

We got to the point where there is so much content written from one minute to another, that I’m sure a lot of content is rewritten in some parts. Let’s think of it this way. You go to a conference where lots of experts gather and start talking on a topic, and for sure multiple ideas will pop-up and at least 5 people will write about what was discussed. Each has a unique style, that’s for sure, but inevitably some ideas will be similar. You can’t avoid it.

On top of that, there are a lot of people who use tools for rewriting content that already exist on the web. That falls into the dark hat category. We all know that article spinning is not accepted.

If you are using this technique, you are putting your website in danger. Instead, if you’re trying to offer valuable content and write content for the content marketers, you must keep up with it. There is a high competition out here, you must have information that educates the audience and offers engaging content. Attract and retain your potential customers. You must be prepared to play in the big league. Don’t write what is already there. Make it personal and talk from your experience.

6. Context Is the New Era of SEO

A new content marketing trend is embracing the content culture and the knowledge-sharing industry. It is about the patents that talk about context and how search will change its form. The trend started with the saying “context is king”. After all the time we heard content is king, now the times changed and a new concept will rule the whole kingdom.

Google’s attention on the user intent when searching started to have a high significance because context is something beyond keywords. Now, Google is trying to focus on user intent to offer more accurate and personalized results. We discussed previously the patents that concern the context topic and we discovered the role it has and if it can impact SEO.

Through context, Google aims to show topical search results, which is very well exemplified in the next screenshot:

After we explored the patent and tested out ourselves to see how search results look like, we thought of the implications it might have on search engine optimization.

We should focus on lots of other indicators, besides keywords. We need to create a relationship between terms and concepts in content. For example, if we are writing about “Volleyball rules”, then you need to think of all the keywords and phrases that are related to your topic and include them there. Make sure you think of the users’ intent. What are they trying to find out? What are their questions? And try to offer responses in a friendly tone, depending on your topic.

The content must answer to the title. You should use synonyms of your title, and not repeat the focus keyword hundreds of times.

7. Influencer Marketing Has More Power

 Influencer marketing is a popular tactic and a growing trend. According to a study by Nielsen, 83% of consumers trust recommendations from their peers over advertising. People trust recommendations from individuals over brands. Another research on the same topic by NoGre, a graduate education community, says that 88% of consumers trust online recommendations as much as personal ones. 

Moreover, Celebrity Intelligence conducted a study where they saw that the ROI generated by influencer marketing is 11x times higher than banner ads. Another study says that influencer marketing yields a $6.50 return on investment for every dollar spent.

Lots of brands already use influencers for promoting their services, because influencers influence the decisions of the people who follow them. Besides that, they bring a lot of benefits, such as:

• Influencers can produce more shareable content for brands;
• Brand-influencer relationship can be a long-lasting partnership;
• Influencer campaigns can spread across multiples platforms to achieve a wider range of influencers;
• Influencers sharing qualitative images and original content;

Gal Gadot has become the CEO (Chief Experience Officer) of Huawei; she is also the ambassador of the latest handset. She appeared in their video marketing campaigns and she published social media content from Huawei smartphone as you can see in the next screenshot:

Visual content is highly appreciated by users and due to the type of product, they had a lot to gain from their collaboration with the actress. 

Another interesting campaign we’ve discovered from Huawei was in a collaboration with the presenter of Asia Express in Romania. Asia is a place with lots of beautiful and intriguing experience and Huawei Mate 10 Pro was the great companion for taking the best shots of the show through the eyes of the presenter on Instagram. You could follow the path of the competition by following the hashtag #huaweimate10pro (and #asiaexpress).

Below you can see some screenshots:

Lots of the pictures were part of the Huawei campaign and all of them had the hashtag #huaweimate10pro.

The marketing tactic Huawei follows, by collaborating with influencers, leads to fulfilling their marketing purposes by driving traffic and sales. These examples are well-known and effective practices and they can give high flexibility to the brand to promote the product or service through an influencer. It generates quality content, and you can offer related information and accurate digital content through content curation. 

SEO can have a lot to gain from the influencer marketing trend because you can create articles and content to support your campaign and explain what you did and create a story around it. Not to mention, if you have an innovative idea, you can create word-of-mouth and lots of links will “flood” your backlink profile.

8. Full Transparency for a Beter Customer Experience

The Global Trust in Advertising survey by Nielsen shows that Europe has the lowest trust rate in advertising compared with the other continents. That explains, on the other side, the reason of the GDPR existence. This change can improve people’s trust and create a better world on the web.

Below you can see the results of the research:

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) created a lot of fuss. We are still new to this change and how it affects the website and business owners. Until 25 May 2018, all websites had to update their policy for transparency and let users know what & how their data would be used by publishers.

Lots of webmasters sent emails to users to give their consent to continue using the website. Also, when accessing the site for the first time, you had to give your consent before reading the content.

The fact is that customers expect transparency and feel safe knowing what information you are using, whom you give it to and what they can share or not.

A very interesting approach is the content experience approach. Meaning that when creating your content strategy, you need to think that your audience will interact with you in different ways, through different channels and formats, all elements of a bigger experience. you should check it out!

9. Video Content Is the Most Preferred Type of Content

As you probably expected, video consumption has tremendously increased in volume in the last year and it’s one of those content marketing trends that is here to last. Here are some interesting stats to understand the dimension of the idea:

• YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of total internet users;
• 87% of online marketers use video content (OutBrain);
• Having a video on a landing page can increase conversion by 80% (EyeView);
• Demo viewers of a product are 1.81x more likely to purchase than non-viewers  (Mill For Business);
• 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the content format with the best ROI (Insivia).

And these are only a few numbers. There are lots of other studies and analyses that show video is one of the most effective and engaging types of content. Video content has become the most preferred forms of content, for sure. According to a study by Outbrain, 86% of marketers prefer video and livestream, instead of blog posts, slideshows, articles or others. The recent blogging industry survey delivered by FirstSiteGuide also confirms that 26% of bloggers are also investing heavily in producing video content for YouTube to support their written content.  

We already took advantage of this trend, as lots of other experts and brand did, by creating podcasts and learning videos for those who want to know more about SEO and marketing.

cognitiveSEO talks are interviews with experts on the industry that we tackle with on lots of ideas on how to create a better company, to increase traffic, to become better specialists and follow insights on their success story.

If you’re a Facebook user or Twitter user, then create video content there and share it with your target audience. Make sure your video has a high quality and the message is easy to understand. Look at your competitors to see what they are doing (wrong or right).

Use live videos. They are so popular right now. And the great thing about them is whenever you post a live video as a brand on Facebook, it automatically sends a notification to all of your fans that you are live and they can view your video. Take advantage of that.

Try to talk about what interests your users. Invite them to tell what questions they have. For example, Gary Vaynerchuk’s has the “Ask Gary” live streams on Periscope regularly where he gathers 5-6k simultaneous viewers. Kindly ask them to subscribe or like the video at the end, as that is a common practice.

10. Native Advertising Is Rising Rapidly

Native advertising is known to take the lead and grow faster in the years that will come. It’s one of the content marketing trends you can’t ignore. Just like personalization had a great impact on the audience, native advertising has a higher chance to convert the viewers.

A research by Native Advertising Institute says that more publishers are adopting native advertising. 51% of them already have. In the same research, it is stated that an overwhelming number of publishers (82%) are positive toward native advertising.

All these numbers can work very well for you and can bring you revenue if you decide to use a native advertising campaign. There are platforms that can help you share high-quality content and increase the number of traffic through content amplification. Outbrain and Taboola are two examples of content distribution platforms where content sharing is very easy to implement.

A good example of a successful native advertising campaign is the one from CNN. They used a native advertising campaign that helped them increase their revenue by 60%. Create was the team that was responsible for the development, production, and delivery of all branded content for CNN International Commercial clients.

Branded content and native advertising has exploded in the last couple of years. It is an upward trend that other publishers are also experiencing.
	James Hunt
	Vice President Create Group, CNN International Commercial’s in-house marketing and global brand studio

11. Bite-Sized Content Revolution

The length of a piece of content has always been a topic of discussion. Bite-sized content changed the way we consume media. We are bombarded with information from lots of channels and our attention span has changed because of that. We can get easily distracted.

Twitter revolutionized the way information was distributed. You had a limitation of 140 characters so that tweets could fit into single SMS messages. Then they increased to the limit to 280 characters. It was the only time the company increased the number of Tweets, for parity in language. According to their researchers, 9% of tweets reach the character limit in English compared to the Japanese, which was only 0.4%.  

The way we write and use social media marketing to share information changed the way we read and consume content, as well. And that’s got a strong effect on content marketing and content marketers. Bite-sized content has lots of advantages such as fighting against boredom, and it is easier to remember because it is the essential, and it is adaptable to the readers.

Bite-sized content works very well for those who are avid users of social networks and newsreaders or those who are used to find chunks of information at their fingertips. Millennials are maybe the biggest consumers of such type of content.

You should follow the “bite-sized content” trend if you want to attract other categories of readers. Or in case you are used to serve long content with lots of points and topic of discussion, such as listicles and cover a larger audience.

If you want to nail this trend down and explore it to get the wave of readers, you should try to cover the news and other information that is fresh, by offering more value and more information in an easy-to-read article. Start investing your time in bite-sized content if your target audience consumes this type of content. 

Conclusion

Content marketing is a changing industry just like any other. We were witnesses at the video content that changed the rules of how we see content nowadays, becoming at one point of the most preferred type of content. Influencer marketing comes quickly in the forefront and if you use the right influencer and concept you have a high chance to craft great content around it and create word-of-mouth that will mean: brand awareness, more content, higher visibility, and increased traffic. 

The content marketing trends focus will fall on the personalization, context and natural language in your articles. Everybody is looking for experiences. That’s one of the reasons why native advertising has increased so rapidly and will grow even higher. Paid advertising can be an excellent choice if you are using it for content amplification to promote various content formats you have available on your website. All editorial calendars should include content distribution.

The recommendations from our article will help you get started with making your content trend-approved. Kick your marketing approach a notch. Follow the guidelines and implement a better content strategy to achieve your marketing goals. Your content marketing efforts will pay off. 

Investing in content is better when you’re thinking smart and strategic. Content marketing trends can show some directions.

The post 11 Content Marketing Trends That Will Affect Your SEO appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

To fulfill that need and deliver good quality content that meets all the requirements and improve the search, Google officials let us know about major Google Algorithm Updates they make from time to time. This way, webmasters, content writers, SEO analysts and SEO professionals take action and update their websites accordingly.

Most of the time, it is hard to understand what has changed, what we should do or how our site should comply with the requirements. With BERT – Google’s latest algorithm update, things get even more confused sometimes.

We thought of making things easier for you to understand the evolution of Google’s algorithm updates, what Google focuses on, the important role the user is playing in a search, what a quality page should have to rank, what type of pages Google disapproves and more interesting discoveries found in the quality rater guidelines.

The Search Quality Guideline is the tool all websites should comply with. After a thorough analysis, here’s what you should know about Google’s Algorithm Updates to deliver proper content:

1. Google’s Algorithm Updates Purpose – Improve the Search
2. Google’s Main Focus – Quality Content
3. Google’s Most Important Ranking Factor – The User
4. Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines Utility – Improve Google’s Search Algorithm

1. Google’s Algorithm Updates Purpose – Improve the Search

The times change, the users’ needs change, so it is only natural that the search should improve accordingly. And Google’s Algorithm Updates do just that. What was top priority a few years ago, might have other value now. Google wants to keep results relevant as content on the web changes.

Google did mention they make thousands of updates yearly, and only a few major updates per year that are officially announced. See below an example of an official announcement from Google Search Liason’ Danny Sullivan about their last confirmed broad core update.

This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that:https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoXhttps://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 13, 2019

First things first. Google started a new era of SEO back in 2003, when it was Google’s Florida Update turn to get rid of overly optimized content (including keyword stuffing, invisible text, hidden text and so on). Things continued on the same topic: get rid of manipulative link building and black hat techniques that didn’t serve the user’s best interest, but was rather a gimmick to fool Google and rank higher. 

Then, Google looked at the main content on a website and targeted those that had lots of ads above the fold and were blocking the actual content. The focus spread to the user the Google algorithm updates were meant to deliver more localized results and detect whether a query or webpage had local intent or relevance.

Lots of other Google Panda updates followed, plus the Google Payday Loans update which targeted spammy queries mostly associated with shady industries (payday loans, porn, casinos, debt consolidation, pharma) and included better protection against negative SEO. 

The following updates targeted conversational search, such as voice search and the improvements were made to offer more relevant results for those types of complex queries. After voice search, another big change was the Mobile-Friendly Update, that rewarded websites that had a user-friendly mobile version to deliver quality content on mobile devices, too. Plus Google started to predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking through Mobile-first indexing.

The next big thing that followed was RankBrain, which Google acknowledged at that time to be one of the three main ranking factors, besides content and links. RankBrain is a machine-learning algorithm that filters search results to offer users the best answer to their query.

Next, Google releases real-time Google Penguin. They said Penguin is devaluing links, rather than downgrading the rankings of pages. What followed next were lots of algorithms that targeted low-quality content, deceptive advertising, UX issues, making the search a better place for the user. Their constant advice was to “continue building great content.”

In the last year, Google algorithms targeted content relevance, to reward those websites that comply with their request to offer the best content on the topic. Lots of broad core algorithms have been made and will continue to be made according to Google. All the pages that might perform less than they used to or experienced a slight rank fluctuation aren’t penalized or subject to a quality update by violating guidelines, but rather other pages were found to deliver better content and were rewarded with a better place. This is also the case for Google latest update named BERT, which is characterized as a massive and the biggest step forward for search in the past 5 years, as well as one of the biggest steps forward in the history of search altogether.

2. Google’s Main Focus – Quality Content

The way Google search looked a few years ago has changed tremendously, including its appearance, the analyzed intent behind the searches, the way results are pulled out. 

To follow Google’s explanation, imagine that in 2015, you made a list of top 100 movies to see. If you were to look at it now, that list might suffer some changes. There’s are lots of reasons: new movies have appeared, other ones might have changed their position since your preferences changed. So, the list you knew in 2015 looks slightly different than the one you’d make today. 

Similar to Google’s algorithm updates, it started to evaluate other factors. Just think of the battle between content and links. Backlinks had been the king and queen of the ranking factors until Google started to move the ship towards content, and more specific, quality content. 

“Sometimes, the web just evolved. Sometimes, what users expect evolves and similarly, sometimes our algorithms are, the way that we try to determine relevance, they evolve as well.”
	JOHN MUELLER
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

Google started to focus more on content. Google’s officials always say to build quality content, referencing a blog post written by Amit Singhal. John Mueller continues to recommend to those who participate in the Webmaster Hangouts and ask questions on Twitter to follow the Quality Guidelines and create quality content. 

Garry Illyes, on the other side, tweeted multiple times saying how important it is to have quality content.

3. Google’s Most Important Ranking Factor – The User

Yes, site quality is important and all Google wants is to deliver it to serve a user’s needs. So, isn’t really the user who dictates the way pages are valued in search? 

Let’s say the user searches for a how-to tutorial to remove wine stains. The way he decides which pages to read is influenced by what Google pulled out in search through algorithms that calculate context created by previous searches. Then the user enters the pages he wants by looking only at the title and meta description. The user is the one to eventually reward specific pages. 

Moreover, the results pulled out in SERP are influenced by location, interests, previous searches, language. So isn’t really the users that generate a set of results based on history? 

Have you ever been curious to find out specific results on a particular country and your results were displayed based on your current location? Well, that’s because now Google automatically knows your location and offer localized results in the current language. It is frustrating especially if you’re on vacation and want to search for something in your native country. If you think the incognito mode is the answer, you’re wrong. It doesn’t always work, even if you change the language and country manually. 

This topic was fleshed out on the SEO Growth Hacks Facebook Group by one of our colleagues. 

The searches are influenced also by the device you’re using and the websites you’ve previously visited. Check the example below, for example. I asked somebody from Germany to search for “moving furniture services” and then I performed the same search in Romania. Even though the query is in the same language, the results are different. 

Searching for moving furniture services in Germany

Searching for moving furniture services in Romania

It’s only understandable that Google wants to offer more relevant results and location is an important trigger. Google works on delivering information that is findable, accessible, relevant and usable correctly.

Understanding Google and serving the user is a winning recipe. 

A good user experience helps sites gain traffic, popularity and ultimately begin ranking. John Mueller confirmed it on one of his Google Webmaster Hangouts. UX is an indirect factor that marks a high-quality website. 

This year, at BrightonSEO 2019, where John Mueller and Hannah Smith’s held a Q&A Keynote, John mentioned that their job is to “measure how happy people are with regards to Google in the whole kind of content ecosystem.” 

Michelle Wilding, Head of SEO & Content at The Telegraph, present at BrightonSEO 2019 talked more about the connection between SEO and UX:

SEO’s change in direction has meant that the user is now first and foremost. Google cares deeply about providing quality experiences for searchers. Therefore UX is more important than ever – and so is collaborating with your UX/CRO department.
	Michelle Wilding Baker
	Head of SEO & Content at The Telegraph

To design great user experience we need to follow quality guidelines, understand how to please Google and make users happy. There’s one question that Google makes you wonder when creating content that puts the user in the center.

Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors to the site or does it seem to exist solely by someone attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

4. Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines Utility – Improve Google’s Search Algorithm

There are some Page Quality Rating FAQs that point out some important characteristics of high-quality content, such as:

• deliver original information;
• describe the topic thoroughly;
• offer insights and additional interesting discoveries based on studies or personal research;
• write a descriptive title to represent the content well;
• avoid exaggerating titles and fake news;
• provide trust and show your content is a reliable source of information, using expert opinions;
• check for facts to see if your content doesn’t share misleading information;
• verify spelling and correct language style;
• ads don’t interfere with the main content or interstitials block the user see the main content;
• it isn’t mass-produced content;
• it is mobile friendly; 

Checking all of these elements will provide a poof vest against Google’s algorithm updates. 

A more comprehensive source of information about quality content is the Quality Rating Guidelines, where you can find the questions and descriptive explanations. Based on these guidelines, Google assesses your content, analyzing E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness). Google created the EAT to translate algorithm concepts and make them more user-friendly. There’s not EAT algorithm or an EAT score, but rather documentation for those eager to understand better what Google looks for when deciding what pages to reward and rank. 

“EAT and YMYL are concepts introduced for Quality Raters to dumb down algorithm concepts. They are not ‘scores’ used by Google internally.“ #Pubcon @methode Followup: There is no EAT algorithm.

— Grant Simmons (@simmonet) October 10, 2019

A core algorithm is not like one if statement. "It's a collection of millions of tiny algorithms that work in unison to spit out a ranking score. Many of those baby algorithms look for signals in pages or content. When you put them together in certain ways, they can be…"

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 10, 2019

Depending on the industry, a high E-A-T means that the content is written by an expert, or organization that is trusted and has authority in that niche. Some topics require less expertise, and to have a high E-A-T it is required to have extremely detailed, helpful reviews of products and information on that particular topic. There are lots of content writers that offer valuable information based on their life experience and can be considered experts on that matter. High page quality means you have a positive author reputation and positive brand reputation (recognized through user reviews), a high standard for accuracy and that it is focused on helping users. Below you can see some example of pages with high page quality rating: 

Don’t bury the real meat of the content. Make it understandable, add visuals, make reference to studies and researches, add personal opinions based on previous life experience, add lists for an easier understanding of the topic, look at it through all the possible sides, make it the best possible side of what’s already available in published form. Something worth remembering every time before starting writing a new piece of content:

Don’t write something that’s been written before, without bringing any additional value or new information. 

In this case, you’re not thinking of the user’s best interest but yours, and it’s selfish, irrelevant and useless. 

Since we’re talking about things you shouldn’t do, let’s elaborate on the topic more to find out what Google disapproves and what type of pages are banned from the search. Low-quality content, as Google describes it, has the following characteristics:

• it is created without adequate time, effort, expertise, or talent/skill;
• the content doesn’t correspond to the title and does not achieve the purpose;
• the title has no call to action, nor does it represent the main content;
• it has irrelevant exaggerated or shocking titles;
• a small amount of content with no additional value, such as writing just a few paragraphs on a broad topic;
• pages with interstitials and ads that are blocking the user to see the content they came for;
• it contains disturbing images, such as sexually suggestive images on non-porn related pages;
• pages with mixed content that are not safe for the user;
• malicious or financially fraudulent pages that shatter the trust of users and are harmful;
• the company doesn’t have contact information, email address o social media accounts, or shares anything to make it a trusted company;
• pages that potentially spread hate;
• pages that misinform users;
• content that is inaccessible on hacked websites and spammy pages;
• auto-generated or scraped content and other forms of content generated through black hat techniques.

Below you can see some example of low-quality content:

If you avoid and check out all the latest characteristics and focus on the things that matter to create the best content there is on the web, you’ll be able to make both Google and the users happy. And even if, hypothetically, your page might be devalued by other pages after a google search ranking algorithm update, that doesn’t necessarily mean you got penalized, but rather other pages offer more value. Which brings us again to those elements mentioned above. You should always stick to those. 

Don’t forget that search engines do not understand content the way humans do. It is a more complex process where Google looks for signals and correlates it to the meaning of relevance humans are aware of. Delivering perfect content is hard, even for Google. That’s why they perform these broad core updates from time to time. To curate content and keep improving their ranking signals & systems.

Think of it this way, in order to get results for a searched query, Google analyzes and organizes all the information on the internet to give you the most useful and relevant search results in a fraction of a second. Sometimes, it even gives you the correct form for misspelled or mistyped queries. 

The post What Google Wants You to Know about Its Algorithm Updates appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

And, speaking of important stuff, we’ve searched and scooped through the Webmaster Central Hangouts to reveal the most intriguing facts about SEO Google has ever said.

Google Webmaster Central Hangout is an important source of information you should always keep an eye on. It is available for everyone, you can send questions or address them live directly to experts, and find insights straight from Google.

You can check Google’s working hours directly on their website and listen to all recorded videos, starting with 2012, regarding all kinds of topics, offpage SEO and onpage SEO facts included. Yet, we thought you wouldn’t want to listen to all the recorded hangouts, therefore we’ve made a summary for you as we’ve curated the most interesting of them all and tackled the following: 

1. You Can Get a Site Architecture Penalty
2. Mobile PageSpeed Is Not Yet a Ranking Factor
3. Search Console Doesn’t Count Knowledge Graph Clicks
4. Don’t Canonicalize Blog Pages to the Root of the Blog
5. Applying Multiple Hreflang Tags to One URL Is Possible
6. No Limit on the Number of URLs That Google Bot Can Crawl
7. Now You Can Get ‘Upsetting-Offensive’ Content Flag
8. Disavowing Is Still Necessary for a Post-Penguin Real-Time Era
9. URL Removal Tool Affects All Domain Variations
10. No Specific Limit for Keyword Density in Content
11. Content Duplication Penalty Doesn’t Exist
12. Better to Add Structured Data Directly on the Page Than Using Data Highlighter
13. Have Relevant URL to Rank Your Images Higher in Google
14. Low-Quality Pages Influence the Whole Domain Authority (DA)
15. Google Works With Over 150,000 Users and Webmasters Against Webspam
16. Google Knows Your Work Place and It Isn’t Afraid to Admit It
17. Personal Assistant Search Optimization (PASO) Might Be the Future of SEO
18. Google Search Console’s Metrics Get Fully Integrated Into Google Analytics
19. Object Recognition Works in Combination With Image Optimization for Better Results in Google
20. Google Site Search and Custom Search Within Site Will Become One
21. HTTPs Ensures That the Information Users See Is What the Owner of the Site Provides
22. URLs Should Have Less Than 1,000 Characters
23. You Can Have Multiple H1 Elements on a Page
24. New Content Should Be Linked High in the Site Architecture
25. Google Says It’s Ok to Have Affiliate Links
26. Google Will Treat Nofollow Link Attribute as a ‘Hint’
27. The Number of Words on a Page Is Not a Ranking Factor
28. Google Does Not Render Anything Unless It Returns a 200 Status Code

1. You Can Get a Site Architecture Penalty

Does Panda take site architecture into account when creating a Panda score? was one of the questions answered on a Google Webmaster Central Hangout.

Google Panda is an algorithm that looks out to the overall quality of the website and its content. In a previous blog post, we detailed how this Google update (the Panda algorithm) can affect websites and how it could actually be a topical authority. 

From a Google point of view, Google Panda is more of a general quality evaluation and it takes into account everything. The site architecture is included. If somehow it affects the quality of the site overall, you might get a Google Panda penalty for bad site architecture. 

Panda penalizes websites for “low-quality sites” or “thin content sites” and aims to return results with higher-quality sites near the top of search results. Let’s say, for example, that your website has issues that affect the quality of the site, such as a bad structure – then you should take some time to improve that.

If you are in the position of making a website redesign, creating a new site from scratch or doing something similar that might affect the architecture of your website, you should take into consideration what John Mueller said. 

Follow the full conversation in the next Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout with John from February 24, 2017 at 9:06:

2. Mobile PageSpeed Is Not Yet a Ranking Factor

Recently, another intriguing question was addressed at a Google Webmaster Central Hangout:

How much emphasis does mobile PageSpeed have as a ranking factor?

John Mueller made a full disclosure about this in the next video from March 2017 (at 46:44), saying that for the moment Google doesn’t use it at all. So you’ve all found the truth, my friends, said directly by Googlers:

 Mobile PageSpeed is not an index ranking factor.

As plain and simple as that. 

Having a mobile Page Speed improves user experience and it is a critical web redesign consideration, but until now it hasn’t been used as an index ranking factor to generate mobile searches.

From an SEO point of view, for the moment, Google doesn’t take it into account at all, but keeping count of mobile PageSpeed is an important SEO task you should not overlook. This way you can offer a nice experience to your users. If they are pleased, they might come back and increase your conversion rates. Invest to gain. 

3. Search Console Doesn’t Count Knowledge Graph Clicks

Another intriguing fact about SEO revealed on Google Webmaster Central Hangout is that the Search Console doesn’t count Knowledge Graph sidebar clicks or impressions.

John Mueller said that: 

If you look for your company’s name and it appears on the sidebar with a link that goes to your website, it isn’t counted. On the other hand, he said that sitelinks should be counted.

You can listen to his full explanation from the Google Webmaster Hangout in the next video from February 2016 at 30:15:

4. Don’t Canonicalize Blog Pages to the Root of the Blog

Another thrilling fact about SEO revealed in a Google Webmaster Hangout was about blog pages canonicalization to the root of the blog. List to what John says on February 2017 at 16:28:

Somebody asked if it’s a correct procedure to set up blog subpages with a canonical URL pointed to the blog’s main page as a preferred version since the subpages aren’t a true copy of the blog’s main page.

Setting up blog subpages with a canonical blog pointed to the blog’s main page it isn’t a correct set up because those pages are not an equivalent, from Google’s point of view.

And even if  Google sees the canonical tag, it ignores it because it thinks it’s a webmaster’s mistake.  

This method has been overly used by lots and lots of websites, but that doesn’t make it a good thing. Small or big companies make mistakes all the time.

5. Applying Multiple Hreflang Tags to One URL Is Possible

Another exciting SEO fact was unveiled after a Googler asked the next question:

Can you assign both x-default and en hreflang to the same page?

John Mueller gave a short and comprehensive explanation to this:

Yes, you can apply x-default, and en hreflang to the same page.

Also, it is possible to say to Google this is English for UK, and it is a default page. The x-default hreflang attribute doesn’t have to be a different page. Another thing you could do is to set multiple hreflang tags going to the page. For example, you can have one for UK English, Australian English, American English, and the UK English is the default one you want to use for a website.

You can take a look at the full disclosure from February 2017, starting with 21:06:

6. No Limit on the Number of URLs That Google Bot Can Crawl

The idea that Google can crawl only 100 URLs is a myth.

That is one of the most interesting pieces of information among the facts about SEO exposed on Google Webmaster Central Hangout. Somebody asked if there is a limit to the number of URLs that Googlebot can crawl. John Mueller answered that there is no limit. See the video below from April 2017 (47:58): 

Up until now, we knew that Google could crawl a hundred pages from every website. There is no such thing. He also explained that they analyze the crawl budget. This means they try to see what and how much Google can and wants to crawl regarding the website itself.

The crawl budget topic was explained on the Google Webmaster Central Blog along with the factor that impacts this topic:

• Faceted navigation and session identifiers
• On-site duplicate content
• Soft error pages
• Hacked pages
• Infinite spaces and proxies
• Low quality and spam content.

7. Now You Can Get ‘Upsetting-Offensive’ Content Flag

Google’s effort to stop fake news and offer qualitative results never ends.  They are rolling an on-going process of improving search value.

Paul Haahr, ranking engineer at Google, even said: “they’re explicitly avoiding the term ‘fake news,’ because it is too vague”.

Google is continuously trying to offer qualitative results and for that, they have worked with over 100,000 people to evaluate search results.

The people involved go under the name of Google search quality raters due to the fact that they conduct real studies and they are actually searching on Google to rate the quality of the pages that appear in SERP, without altering the results directly. These raters use a set of guidelines that have an entire section about the “Upsetting-Offensive” content flag that they can use.

A content could be flagged under the next circumstances:

• Has content that promotes hate or violence against a group of people based on criteria including (but not limited to) race or ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality or citizenship, disability, age, sexual orientation, or veteran status.
• Contains content with racial slurs or extremely offensive terminology.
• Includes graphic violence.
• Explicit how­-to information about harmful activities (e.g., how-tos on human trafficking or violent assault).
• Other types of content which fall under the upsetting or offensive category.

8. Disavowing Is Still Necessary for a Post-Penguin Real-Time Era

Another intriguing fact that Google exposed on Google Webmaster Central Hangout is the confirmation the following:

You should still use the disavow file even though Google Penguin is real time now.

John Mueller explains that if you know your website was using shady unnatural ways to generate backlinks that didn’t respect Google’s guidelines, then you need to disavow those links that could harm your website. You need to evaluate your backlink profile to see where you stand.

The intriguing question somebody asked him was “Now that Penguin runs real time would it be correct to think that if we found a few bad links on our site and disavow them, we might see a ranking improvement relatively quickly? Also, does Penguin now just devalue those low-quality links, as opposed to punish you for them?”

John Mueller declares that Google looks at the web spam on the whole website to see what decision they have to take. If you have damaging links and use the disavow file, Google will find out that you don’t want those links to be associated with you.

Google Penguin is a webspam algorithm and it doesn’t focus only on links. It decreases search rankings for those sites that violate Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

On the final base, disavowing unnatural links helps Google Penguin and it is a recommended practice. One of the facts about SEO backed up by John Mueller and Gary Illyes:

You can follow the discussion from October 2016 on the following Google Webmaster Hangout with John Mueller about this topic at 23:20:

9. URL Removal Tool Affects All Domain Variations

Take into consideration all variations when you want to use the URL removal tool, including the www/ non-www and http/ https. This is not a fix for canonicalization.

If you’re trying to take out the HTTP version after a site move, then both HTTP and HTTPs version will be removed and it is something you definitely don’t want.

It is recommended to use the URL removal only for urgent issues, not for site maintenance.

For example,  if you want to remove a page from your website, you don’t have to use the URL removal tool because over time it will disappear automatically as Google will recrawl and reindex those pages.

Listen to John Mueller’s entire dialogue from December 2016 in a Search Console Google Webmaster Central Hangout at 17:18.

10. No Specific Limit for Keyword Density in Content

A compelling question has been quite recently asked at a Google Webmaster Hangout about the limit for keyword density in content. John Mueller gave a straightforward answer regarding this topic:

We expect content to be written naturally, so focusing on keyword density is not a good use of your time. Focusing too much on keyword density makes it look like your content is unnatural.

Also, if you stuff your content with keywords, it makes it harder for users to read and understand what your content is about. On top of that, search engines will recognize that instantly and ignore all the keywords on that page.

Instead of concentrating on the limit of keyword density in content, you should aim your attention at making your content easy to read.

Use the next trick, for a change. Try and give somebody a phone call to read the content out loud. If they understand what you said in the first 2 minutes, then you’re safe, your content could pass as natural.

11. Content Duplication Penalty Doesn’t Exist

Content duplication has been a long-debated topic.

Let’s break an SEO myth: duplicate content will bring you a Google penalty. It’s not true. It doesn’t exist. We debated this issue in a previous article as well. 

Back in 2013, Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s Webspam team, said that:

In the worst-case scenario (with spam free content), Google may just ignore duplicate content. I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing. – Matt Cutts

Google tries to offer relevant results for every search query. That is why, in most cases, the results that appear in SERP are filtered, so the information isn’t shown more than once. It is not helpful for users to see two pieces of the same data on the first page.

In 2014, during a Google Webmaster Central hangout John Mueller said that Google doesn’t have a duplicate content penalty.

We won’t demote a site for having a lot of duplicate content – John Mueller

It was confirmed on June 2016, when Andrey Lipattsev, senior Google search quality strategist, repeated and said content duplication penalty doesn’t exist.

But you could get a penalty if you manipulate Google’s guidelines and create content in an automated way, content that is scraped from multiple locations and that doesn’t serve another purpose than generating traffic.

12. Better to Add Structured Data Directly on the Page Than Using Data Highlighter

The submitted question on this topic was the following:

Is is better to use the Data Highlighter from Search Console or it is better to add up markup from the web page? What’s the best practice?

John Mueller says it’s a great option to use and try out structured data. There are sites with content that needs to have structured data and Data Highlighter is an easy way to test it out.

Structured data implementation on your page and not through the Data Highlighter is something that needs a lot of attention. Yet, it is the recommended procedure if you think of the long-term perspective. Markup data is available for everyone. You can see if it’s implemented correctly and, more importantly, you don’t have to worry about it.

If you marked your content for each element, then when you change your layout, for example, your data will be shown properly. As for Data Highlighter, it has to learn that change.

You can listen to the whole explanation in the next Google Webmaster Hangout from April 2017 (starting with 46.04): 

13. Have Relevant URL to Rank Your Images Higher in Google

Another important fact we’ve figured out from  Google Webmaster Central Hangout is about the impact of the URL of an image in Google. Can it help Google understand better what an image is about?

And here is what Google had to say about this: 

We do look at the URL for images specifically and we try to use that for ranking, but if the URL is irrelevant for that query and nobody is searching for that term, it doesn’t help Google.

The main point is that Google looks at the URL when ranking images. It is an important step because Google aims to deliver qualitative results. The correlation between the domain name and the query is highly significant. It is an effective SEO tactic you could apply. 

SEO Friendly URLs can ultimately lead to higher perceived relevance, leading back to an edge from a SEO perspective. And we know this for a fact, from a study conducted by us on 34k keywords. Here is what John had to say about this on February 2017, at 40:17: 

Let’s say that the title name of a URL is 123 and the image is about flowers. In this situation, the URL won’t disappear because of its irrelevant file name but there might be a problem here on how and for what query that image will show.

Even though Google is becoming smarter and smarter at object recognition, we still need to help it by offering descriptive information about that image (follow the guidelines from point 20 on this matter).

SEO Friendly URLs are a must when we talk about content, images or any other types of information on your website. It is important to offer a higher importance when naming your files; an SEO fact also backed up by Matt Cutts.  

14. Low-Quality Pages Influence the Whole Domain Authority (DA)

Another interesting fact about SEO that Google debated on Google Webmaster Central Hangouts was whether low-quality pages influence Domain Authority.

The exact question addressed to Google’s representatives was “Can low-quality pages on the site affect the overall authority?”

In general, when the Google algorithm looks at a website, it also takes into consideration individual pages.

You can find more on this subject in the following Google Webmaster Hangout from March 2017 at 10:05:

Let’s say you have a small website. If you have bad quality links on a website, then it could affect the domain authority. On the contrary, if you have a large site and only a sprinkle of bad pages, then the damage is not so big. Google understands that, in a bigger picture, those pages aren’t the main issue.  

The main pain point is that low-quality pages affect the way Google views the website overall and this is something you should fix either way.

Find a solution for that pages. You could either remove them or try to improve their quality.

15. Google Works With Over 150,000 Users and Webmasters Against Webspam

Among the most interesting facts about SEO that Google exposed on Google Webmaster Hangout is the way Google fought spammers in searches. Webspam is a persistent problem in our days. It fired an alarm signal when they saw the data in the most recent SEO statistics report, published afterward on the blog.

In 2016, there was a 32% increase of hacked sites compared to 2015.

But now, with the help of users, the problem of spam Google search results is being stopped. Last year, Google started working with users, besides webmasters, to improve the quality of SERP, to clean it of spammy websites and to make it a safe web environment.

The Webmaster Central stuff managed to work with over 150,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers against webspam. Also, users tackled webspam by helping Googlers.

Approximately 180,000 spam reports were submitted by users around the world, as we spotted on Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Besides making Google Penguin live and improving the algorithm to take actions against webspam, the webmasters from the spam department at Google performed manual reviews on sites’ structured data markup and took manual action on more than 10,000 sites that did not meet the quality guidelines and followed black hat SEO techniques.

16. Google Knows Your Work Place and It Isn’t Afraid to Admit It

Nowadays, we take our smartphone everywhere. It’s like it’s attached to our hand because we have a lot of information on the phone. We are logged into email, we have easily access to our accounts, to our contacts and we can easily find everything we want with a quick search on Google even if we walk or ride.

Google Assistant makes it easier to search and find what we want by offering us the possibility to make voice searches and personalize our content on Android, even when we’re offline.

We’ve debated the voice search topic leisurely on a previous blog post I invite you to browse. 

With this feature you can take lots of actions on your phone and on Google search:

• Find contacts call, email, send messages on social apps (Facebook, Twitter, etc).
• Set different actions on your personal phone (set alarm, turn on NFC, turn on Bluetooth, brightness, take a picture).
• Organize your calendar and see future events or schedule a meeting.
• Open apps you have on your smartphone.
• Listen to songs.

On a more complex level, you could ask the Google Assistant questions such as “what do I have to do today?”, “How long will it take to go from Princeton to New York?”, “Book a table at East Restaurant”.

You can see the personalized touch on your phone if you search in Apps for a person, task, event and so on. You’ll find the results for that specific query from all your installed apps (as you can see in the picture above).   

17. Personal Assistant Search Optimization (PASO) Might Be the Future of SEO

PASO comes from Personal Assistant Search Optimization. PASO might be the future of SEO because mobiles undergo a continuous development, now with the Google Assistant and the AMP feature for mobile optimization.

Google is trying to simplify the search process and to make it as easy as possible to get the information you want with fewer taps on your mobile device.

An important aspect why PASO might be the future is due to the fact that it offers personalized information for each user. It is an important aspect to keep in mind for getting improved search engine rankings.

Google Assistant is the quickest and easiest way to get your hands on the information. It doesn’t matter if you ask for a receipt, for explanations/definitions, for directions. See the example below:

You ask and Google Assistant gives you the information in a heartbeat. It is more likely that the personal assistant result has a higher CTR, because it is tailored to your answer and it’s the only one you see comparing with the results from search engines. And besides that, it offers you suggestions related to your previous search.

If you want to get featured on Google Assistant you need to make sure you answer a question and your piece of content is optimized for humans.

You should follow the same steps as optimizing your content for ranking number zero. One way would be to ask the question and then answer it. This way you take a shot to get displayed in the answer box.  

18. Google Search Console’s Metrics Get Fully Integrated Into Google Analytics

The Google Search Console helps webmasters manage the way their websites appear in SERP and Google Analytics helps users to integrate services like Webmaster, Adwords, and other tools to see results based on the source (paid search, organic search result).

Along the years, users could link Google Webmaster tools with Analytics, but they could see the results separately, in different sections. The Search Console results appeared in Google Analytics under the Acquisition section, as you can see in the next screenshot (this option is still available):

In the old version, you could only see how users came on the website and not what they did once they got there. Now, with the next improvement, webmasters can see all the metrics in one place and make decisions based on the data combined with those two tools.

You have access to the Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions data in one place. Due to this update, you could have many more possibilities to use the search data, as mentioned on the on Google Webmaster Central Blog:

• discover the most engaging landing pages that bring visitors through organic search;
• discover the landing pages with the highest engagement but with low attractions of visitors through organic search;
• detect the best ranking queries for each landing page;
• segment organic performance for each device in the new Device report.

19. Object Recognition Works in Combination with Image Optimization for Better Results in Google

The question that popped out in another Google Webmaster Central Hangout was:

Google is getting better and better at object recognition. Does this means that we no longer need to optimize our images description with descriptive files names, alt tags, title tags, etc.?

Having optimized images is a good indication for getting improved search engine rankings.

At this moment, we still need to optimize our images in order to rank as high as possible.

We won’t have to do that, maybe in the future. For the time being, having a relevant file name, alt description, title tag, caption on the image will help Google understand. Also, the text around the image helps Google understand what that page is about and what it needs to rank for. 

Maybe in the future, 5-10 years from now, if things go very well, all that information won’t be necessary, but for now optimizing images helps object recognition to offer better results. 

You can listen to the whole conversation on intriguing facts about SEO in the next video from February 2017, at 13:07:

20. Google Site Search and Custom Search Within Site Will Become One

Do you know if Google Site Search is going to shut down and transfer to Custom Search? What’s the impact?

It’s about that special site search you can set up and search within your website. You can see how it looks like in the example below:

The Custom Search is quite similar as you can see in the next screenshot:

Google Site Search will combine with Custom Search because they do almost similar things. Site Search is used for one website and Custom Search can be used on different sites or just one.

You can also listen to what John Mueller from Google says about this change on February 2017, even though he isn’t directly working on this project (32:32): 

21. HTTPs Ensures That the Information Users See Is What the Owner of the Site Provides

Another interesting SEO fact debated on Google Webmaster Central Hangout was about how relevant HTTPs is as a ranking factor for sites with information only.

The official response from Google is that:

HTTPs is relevant for any types of website. It doesn’t matter if the site has information only; it is still relevant. HTTPs doesn’t apply only for encrypting information like credits cards and passwords, but it also ensures that the information users see is what the owner of the website is providing.

An overly used technique to hack takes place in hotels, airports, cafes or, in general, other public spaces that offer free wi-fi access. They can take a look at the HTTP pages and add a tracking information or ads on those pages because the owner of the website failed to increase the security system. I bet that nobody wants spammy ads on their website, even if it’s informational only.

HTTPs helps users to see the content that was meant to be shown.

More on this matter you can find in the video below (56:30) registered on February 2017:

22. URLs Should Have Less Than 1,000 Characters

In July 2019, John Mueller recommended keeping URLs under a thousand characters. While you might think that’s not much, consider the fact that sub-folders can greatly expand the length of a URL. Moreover, studies showed that shorter URLs carry lots of SEO advantages. A concise URL can help you have a higher position in the search results hierarchy. Plus, it will come in handy for users that are casual and don’t bother remembering the name.

The URLs should be short enough to be easily recognized.

You can review the full answer in the next recording of the Webmaster Central Hangouts:

23. You Can Have Multiple H1 Elements on a Page

John Mueller said that you can have as many H1 tags as you want on a single page. If you have ever thought that adding a single h1 tag on a single page is the recommended way to proceed, well you should know that you can heave multiples headings. Don’t worry about that matter.

As many as you want.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 12, 2017

If you look at the following video, you can find out the explanation, too.

With HTML5, it is not a problem to have multiple H1’s. It is common to have them in different parts of the page, in your website’s template, theme or other sections. Whether you have HTML5 or not, it is completely fine to use multiple heading tags of the same type on a page.

On the other side, having no h1 tag on a page is a problem and it should be fixed. That means you have pages without the main heading, and both Google and the user wouldn’t know what it’s about.

Did you know?

 

The Site Audit from cognitiveSEO automatically classifies the headings and shows you all the related issues .

Add the website to audit and the tool will extract information regarding indexability, content (title, headings, duplicate pages, thin content canonical pages, mixed content, images), architecture, mobile and performance. In the Content section you‘ll get a list with all the headings types and graphs with information from you site.

 

24. New Content Should Be Linked High in the Site Architecture

A well-structured architecture can change the faith of your website drastically. Web crawlers, like Googlebot, crawl the website architecture. The goal is to index the content and return it in the search results.

Sometimes, crawlers can’t discover your pages and you need to help them. Google admits that sometimes it doesn’t seem to be finding all the pages on your site. It can happen because it can’t crawl them, or it can’t understand them properly to index those pages.

To help Google index and crawl it, make sure you have a sitemap and new content is linked high up in the site architecture. Anything that you want to push a little bit in the search results, it will definitely help Google if you add it higher in the site architecture.

John Mueller recommends that it is the correct way to do it.

What also makes a big difference for us, especially if your Homepage is really important for your website, is that newer content is linked pretty high within the structure of your website, so maybe even on your Homepage.
	John mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

You can find the full script below:

25. Google Says It’s Ok to Have Affiliate Links

The question that popped into one of the latest Google Webmasters Tools discussed the need for affiliate links and the correct way to mark them. Google considers affiliate links to have a commercial background since you’re trying to make some money pointing to a distributor or somebody that you trust.

John Mueller confirms it:

From our point of view, it is perfectly fine to have affiliate links. That’s a way of monetizing your website. We accept that these links are marked appropriately so that we understand that those are affiliate links.
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

An option would be to use the rel =”nofollow” or use the newest rel=“sponsored”. The sponsored rel link attribute was introduced a few days ago to mark links that were created as part of advertising, sponsorships or similar agreements.

The additional attributes (rel=“sponsored” and rel=“ugc” – for user-generated content) are meant to help Google understand the nature of links:

Follow the whole explanation from John in the next video:

26. Google Will Treat Nofollow Link Attribute as a ‘Hint’

As of March 2020, Google will treat all link attributes, be them sponsored, user-generated and nofollow as a hint for ranking purposes.  For crawling and indexing purposes all those links will become hints. That means Google might count a link as credit, consider it as part of spam analysis or for other ranking purposes.

The company is making the change to better identify link schemes while still considering the link attribute signals.

For example, if we see that a website is engaging in large scale link selling, then that’s something where we might take manual action, but for the most part, our algorithms just recognize that these are links we don’t want to count then we don’t count them.
	John mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

27. The Number of Words on a Page Is Not a Ranking Factor 

Somebody from the Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts said that YouTube should be removed from search results:

Please remove YouTube form Google search results. Let websites compete with websites. It’s not fair when I write a 4,000-word article covering every aspect of a topic and then get over ranked by a 500-word article just because this website has more authority.

The fact that Google offers different types of content for a search query means diversity. There are different ways of finding relevant content to each individual user. The number of words on a page doesn’t necessarily reflect relevancy for a search query.

John says that the number of words of a page is not a factor they use for ranking. It doesn’t matter if you have 4,000 words on a single webpage and somebody else has 500 words, your page won’t be automatically more relevant than another page.
	john mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

Rather than focusing on the number of words, consider the quality of your content. Instead of writing an extra article, make sure that all the content on your site is of the highest quality possible.

28. Google Does Not Render Anything Unless It Returns a 200 Status Code

A question about status code popped in one of the Google Webmaster Hangouts:

Does Google check status code before anything else, for example for rendering content?

John said that they do check the status code. Google does not render anything unless it returns a 200 status code.

We index the content or render content if it’s a 200 status code, but if it’s 400 or 500 error or redirect then obviously those are things we wouldn’t render.
	JOhn Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

If you have a beautiful 404 page, that’s very good but that page won’t be indexed in Google. 

If it returns 404 then we just won’t render anything there. 

Same thing happens for redirects. For example you have page A, and you create a redirect – which will be page B. According to Google they will only show page B, with its new content, and page A as you knew it won’t be indexed in Google. 

To fix any issues you might have associated with your website and feed Google with the right content, use the Site audit from cognitiveSEO and then check your sitemap. Google looks to sitemaps to understand which pages to crawl and index. If your 301 status code pages don’t technically exist, there’s no need to keep them. You’ll waste crawl budget. Keep only the final redirect URL.

Because pages with 301 status codes no longer technically exist, there’s no point asking Google to crawl them

Did you know?

 

The Site Audit from cognitiveSEO automatically shows the status code for your webpages.

Add the website to audit and the tool will extract information about your pages. Correct any issues and make sure you have 200 status code pages. A well optimized site should not have any 3xx ,4xx or 5xx issues.

 

Below you can find the full video:

Conclusion

Take into account these SEO facts, as they will be helpful in planning your search engine optimization strategy, content marketing strategy or in any decision you take for your business and your website regarding the online marketing area. It’s a win win relationship: you will be updated with the SEO news and (hopefully) you will do things respecting the Google recommendations. And you can stay connected really easy:  check the Google webmaster central office hours and see what’s going on. 

Of course, keeping track off ALL the hangouts can be a burden. This is why, the previous 21 SEO stats are important for each webmaster and shouldn’t be ignored. On the long run, don’t lose focus on your plan and stick to your goals. These videos can help everyone, both rookies and SEO experts alike. They are quite a juicy resource, from keyword research, content creation, link building to other effective SEO strategies and SEO tactics. 

Having organic clicks from organic searches is still an important advantage in the lead generation path. These intriguing facts about SEO can be applied in the social media marketing strategy and in the whole inbound marketing process as well as in any other strategies, as long as you have an online presence.

Furthermore, other domains can positively influence your SEO efforts, if you’ve done your job right. If you follow the previous tips for boosting SEO you could have a good chance to succeed. 

The post 28 Intriguing SEO Facts Exposed by Google on Webmaster Central & Hangouts appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

It all started with thorough research to find the right ingredients that could build the perfect piece of SEO content, the “divine” copy, the father of all that has ever been written, the kid you have ever wanted, the … you get my point. So keep reading and take notes!

Research served as our base to pull out accurate data and relevant info that anybody could use in their content writing process. Everything in terms of length, title tags tips, headlines,  URLs appearance, publishing time and more finesse structuring ideas. 

How to write perfect content, you might ask? If you observe the following steps, you’ll get a chance to achieve it: 

1. Find Out What Type of Content Google Wants You to Write for Your Users
2. Write In-Depth and Relevant Pieces of Content
3. Add the Keywords You Want to Rank for in Your Title
4. Design an Internal Linking Structure
5. Create Google Friendly URLs
6. Keep Updating Your Blog with Fresh Content

1. Find Out What Type of Content Google Wants You to Write for Your Users

Before actually starting to write your content, your first step is to understand what type of content users want and Google encourages you to write. SEO and content go hand in hand.

Usually, users search for something on search engines because they have a desire, and want to find answers and information. Finding the reason behind it requires deeper SEO analysis and Google is using context to show better search intent results. User-intent-based content responds to that need. To deliver that type of content, you must find out the proper type of search intent. 

There are three types of content that can respond to a user’s needs: 

• Informational content ranks for informational queries that cover a broad topic.
• Transactional content responds to a transactional query that user is searching for due to commercial intents.
• Navigational content responds to a navigational query which the user is searching to reach a particular website/brand that he has knowledge about. 

For each stage you need to understand the user intent exactly as Google tries for each search performed on SERP. Optimizing for each type of search intent can be a little trickier, but with the right tools, nothing seems impossible. 

Did you know?

 

The Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool from cognitiveSEO automatically classifies the search intent for you. 

You just need to type in the keywords you are interested in optimizing for, and the tool does most of the job for you. The tool performs keyword research, it will tell you what the user search intent is, how popular and competitive keywords are, how difficult it is to rank in search engines, and cream of the crop: what it takes to rank for a specific keyword, meaning what are the exact keywords and links that boosted that page in the top of the search results. 

 

We can agree that on a larger scale, there are three types of content: 

• TOFU content delivers informational content
• MOFU content delivers transactional content
• BOFU content delivers navigational content

In the screenshot below, you can see what each of these acronyms mean. 

What is top of funnel content (TOFU)?

Top of the funnel content is that type of content that offers information and tries to teach the visitors, answers common questions or pain points. At this stage, you don’t try to sell to the visitor because you might risk losing them. At all costs, avoid commercial content for this audience. TOFU content is used mainly for attracting new prospects and build awareness. 

What is middle of funnel content (MOFU)?

Middle of the funnel content lays between quality content that keeps the users informed and their understanding and need of your services or products. It is a key piece in your content marketing strategy. You can deliver MOFU content through case studies, personalized white paper that includes your business solutions, product reviews and best practices, discounts, webinars, events, surveys and so on. 

What is bottom of funnel content (BOFU)?

Bottom of the funnel content is at the purchase level, where you have brand loyalty and users see in you their loved brand. It comes after TOFU content and MOFU content as validation for delivering valuable content that responded to your clients’ needs. It is the type of content where you nurture and convert your lead magnets into customers. With the right data, you can increase your conversion rate. BOFU content can have different forms, such as live demos, customer stories and personal reviews from clients, comparison products, new product or features launch and so on.

Your audience can be divided into all three stages of the buying funnel: top of funnel (TOFU), middle of funnel (MOFU) and bottom of funnel (BOFU). For each stage, there are specific triggers that pull the visitor down the funnel. And for that, you need to create content that will convert them. 

Source: www.aweber.com

The perfect content needs to deliver information based on the stage of the content marketing funnel where your audience is. For that, you need to know what type of content works best for all those three stages. 

2. Write In-Depth and Relevant Pieces of Content

Now that you know what type of content you should write, it’s time to actually start writing for SEO and most importantly for your users’ needs.

Google likes long and relevant content.

Studies say longer posts are more often associated with better ranks. Buffer says that the ideal blog post has around 1600 words. In one of our researches, it turned out that the top-ranking articles have 2000 words. 

Below you can see the results for the blog posts that have 1001-5000 number of words, amongst other categories. 

As you can see  the number of ranks decreases when the positions drop. The first 5 positions can be set apart from the rest of the pages. It seems that overall a higher number of words are correlated with higher ranks. That is suggested not only by the chart but also by the Pearson Correlation Coefficient, which indicates a very strong negative correlation (-0.9). The negative correlation means that, in general, longer posts are more often associated with better ranks.

I am not saying to write long content for the sake of writing. But when you tackle a subject, try to make the most out of it and go as in-depth as possible (and suitable for your site and business).

How would I know what to write about? one might ask. The Content Optimizer comes to rescue as it does most of the job for you,  no matter the niche. Because it is designed for content writers and combines all the steps for the content writing process.:

• Keyword Research: First you can search for the perfect fitting keyword phrase for your topic. Understand the keyword intent and select your best option. Based on the language, the country and the device you want to rank for, you get a list of recommended keywords relevant for your selection. 
• Ranking Analysis: Second, you can perform a short a concise competitive analysis on a particular keyword, see what type of pages rank (video, text, how-to, lists, tutorials and so on) and find similar topics. Plus you’ll get to see how long are the articles written by your competitors, the readability score and the number of focus keywords used in the content. 
• Content Optimization: In the final step, you can start adding your piece of content and optimize it for that search term, by including your original idea. Depending on what type of query intent, you’ll have to write similar blog content to respond to that intent, to have useful content. The tool will give you a list of keywords that you’ll have to add them in context and it will tell you if your piece is well optimized for search engines by using a Content Score. The higher the Content Score, the higher the chances to improve your ranking in Google and respond to the users’ needs. That way you can produce content that is relevant and it has value.

You get lots of metrics that will tell you how many words your piece of content has, what keywords does it use, what keywords it should use, and it gives you new ideas about arguments you should cover in your copy.

Did you know?

 

The Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool from cognitiveSEO is a tool created by digital marketers for content writers. The cool thing about it is the fact that has all sorts of metrics and gives insights. On the matter of content lenght, it automatically correlates the number of words on a page with rankings.  

You just need to type in a keyword you’re interested in for optimizing a page, and the tool extracts the search results that rank for that keyword + many useful data. You get to know how well optimized from a content point of view each page is, what links are pointing to that page, how many words are on the page, the publish date, etc. All this data is very useful as it gives you insights on how your content should look like to rank in top Google results. 

 

3. Add the Keywords You Want to Rank for in Your Title

Besides content, the title also matters. The third step for writing the perfect content is to strategically add keywords in the title.  And for that, there are lots of studies to back up. 

Years of practice and research showed us that Google puts more weight on the keywords that are closer to the beginning. Adding the keyword closer to the beginning of the title will give you high advantages. Firstly, because you can increase your click-through rate, as the user would like to click on titles that contain what they are looking for online.  Secondly, this way you can avoid that the title to be changed by Google and have a different title shown in SERP. Google does this now. Depending on the search made by the user and what is found relevant on your page, the search result for your webpage as you know it can be altered by Google and you can get a different title and meta description. 

Google is smart to understand what your page is about, but it is important you give it some hints.

If you offer good hints, then it will figure it out easier and reward your webpage with better SEO rankings. 

The second thing to mention on this topic is the effect of keywords in the title. In one of our researches, we could see if adding the keyword in the title has any ranking importance. By evaluating titles analyzed in the research, we used 3 levels of similarity (low, medium and high) to spark some light into the discovery and extract data from the first 20 search engine ranking positions. 

If we take a look at the chart results, we can’t really talk about a high correlation since the differences are pretty subtle. But we can surely get out some insights. For example, mainly the instances with a high similarity can be found for 1st ranking website. The red line is slightly bigger than the rest of the rankings. Moreover, there’s an overall decreasing trend form the 1st position until the 20th position. Which can mean only one thing:

Adding the keyword in the title can make a clear difference between ranking 1st or 2nd.

Another good intake is to try optimizing the title for multiple keywords, if possible. But don’t include keywords just for the sake of it. 

4. Design an Internal Linking Structure

Nobody says it better than Google: Link architecture—the method of internal linking on your site—is a crucial step in site design if you want your site indexed by search engines. It plays a critical role in Googlebot’s ability to find your site’s pages and ensures that your visitors can navigate and enjoy your site.

Any good website should have a well-designed internal linking structure. If you want your website to rank higher, your content creation process should include an internal linking strategy. Search engines look at internal links when deciding what pages should rank, amongst lots of other factors.  

The best internal linking strategy is to do internal linking.

An internal linking structure should connect web pages that are related and bring added value and more information when needed, not just for the sake of it. Too many internal links on a page won’t do any good for that page. Just think of those pages flooded with a huge list of links, like the one below: 

Another example of pages with lots of internal links is when it has a huge navigation or right side/left side “Most popular categories” or “Most popular articles”.

Note this: Adding more internal links on a single page will devalue the existing links. You have to rob Peter to pay Paul. One way or another, you decide to strengthen particular pages and reduce the weight of other pages. 

Each page has a PageRank amount (from 0 to 100, for example) divided by the number of links. So, the fewer the number of links, the more weight they pass.

Dave Davies performed an SEO audit on a large e-commerce site called Trophy Central and implemented an optimization plan including internal linking and web design. After the implementation was defined, the results came slightly easy. He monitored 381 terms and high changes in SERP, divided into 4 categories: 

• Top 100: More 56 keywords ranking in top 100 terms, across 24 declined in rankings and across 165 improved.
• Top 20. More 34 phrases ranking in top 20 terms, 5 declined in rankings and 55 improved.
• Top 10. New more 9 in top 10 terms, declined for 3 and improved for 13 phrases.
• Top 3. The site had no top 3 terms in the beginning and had 2 after the changes.

If you decide to design an internal linking strategy and receive more website traffic, besides improving your site’s rankings, make your links highly visible and not hidden in obscure locations. 

Did you know?

 

The Site Audit Tool from cognitiveSEO automatically shows you information about the internal linking structure of any site.  

You get a list with all your internal links categorized, as you can see in the print screen below. There are three categories of pages you should take a close look at:

• Pages with a small number of internal links – try to link them from a higher number of pages in your site.
• Orphan pages – those are pages that are not linked at all from your site.
• Pages with over 100 links – they might be linked too much.

 

You can use Site Audit tool to check other linking issues (internal and external, broken link building), duplicate content, indexability, performance metrics, mobile data, mixed content, social media issues and many more.

5. Create Google Friendly URLs

The fifth step is to create Google-friendly URLs following our next guidelines. 

Some time ago, we performed an in-depth study on 34k Keywords to study the influence of titles and URLs in SERP. When we analyzed the URLs length to see which is the best format correlated with higher rankings, we saw that the more concise the URLs, the greater the chance to have higher rankings. Below you can see the chart with the extracted data:

As long as the title length is between 50-60 characters and the URL length is between 90-105, you’re safe. Having a concise URL length carries more benefits than having a long and not so easy to read or remember URL. If the URL and title contain the focus keyword, that is surely an advantage. But we’ll discuss this further on. 

Of course, having a concise URL is helpful in all sorts of ways beyond the search results hierarchy. For instance, even if most casual users don’t bother remembering full URLs nowadays, it can still count as an advantage if you make it easy on the brain. Think about EMDs, for instance: instinctively, you are more likely to go with the URL that most resembles your thought process (“I need to find an electrical bicycle…. oh, looks: a site named just that”). The extra effort you can put into it is making sure that not only the homepage, but pretty much any page on your website has its URL fit in a neat number of characters (that, if too large to be easily remembered, can at least be short enough to be easily recognized).

6. Keep Updating Your Blog with Fresh Content

Amongst all the ranking factors mentioned above, freshness is highly important for Google as it has improved its ranking algorithm to offer up-to-date relevant results. At the time the algorithm was updated, Google promised that its focus was to provide the user with “fresher, more recent search results“. Which makes freshness a factor that can define your perfect content strategy. 

Freshness isn’t the same thing as frequency. The “freshness” in the fresh content lays in the information. Writing fresh content can be visible through its value at the moment we speak and the meaning of the data behind it. Fresh content is dynamic in meaning. 

Google likes fresh content but only in certain cases. Changing the date isn’t updating a piece of content, but rather faking it. There are some industries where freshness has a higher importance on rankings: 

• Recent events or hot topics such as news. 
• Recurring events such as conferences.
• Frequent updates such as product reviews.

Here’s what John Mueller says: 

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. https://t.co/aEWhH0KnGw

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) August 15, 2018

Publishing fresh content will help you get more links and achieve higher SEO visibility. Moreover, freshness factors in your content can impact your CTR.  

Conclusion

All these success factors can help you create evergreen content and deliver perfect content for SEO purposes, but mostly for your users’ well-being. You’re probably writing lots of content on a daily basis, but to make it worth your time, you need to be strategic about it. Writing successful content will help you increase your conversion optimization. For that, your content strategy needs to contain several things: length, keyword appearance, optimized URL & title, reason & intent, link power. So your blog articles should be around 2000 words, have keywords in title and URL, preferably in the beginning. 

You need to understand users’ intent and offer similar content, deliver dynamic and interactive content that has accurate information, valid data. In addition, create connections between webpages through a powerful internal link architecture.  

If you understand how SEO and content fits into your overall digital marketing strategy, then you’ll manage to increase traffic, and in the end, increase your rankings.

Takeaways – The type of content Google wants to rank:

• Is intent-based.
• Contains concise URLs, titles with keywords closer to the beginning.
• Has a well-structured internal linking architecture.
• Has well-targeted content for target audiences from each stage of the funnel.
• Is quite long (~2000 words).
• Offers fresh information.

The post SEO Content Writing Done Right – Create Content that Google Wants to Rank at the Top appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Us, as SEO people, we’ve always asked intriguing questions and tried to dig up dirt to find out new interesting things, new facts, new discoveries, and correlations between the SEO factors and new rankings possibilities. Today is the day for a new discovery. We’ll see what the search results will provide us. We performed a lot of searches for pharma, gambling and skincare keywords. 

After analyzing the results for the keyword research, content analysis and link audit, we’ve come to the realization that the top-ranking content has some various metrics where high-quality content might be more valuable than link; on the other hand, on specific keywords and niches, link counts more. 

The case study was performed on 31 URLs and 12 keywords from niches such as gambling, viagra & penis enlargement, weight loss and acne & blemish treatments. We looked into more sensitive topics to see exactly what is the fluctuation and what type of content ranks on the first page. You can see the main results below. 

1. Analyzed Metrics for the Case Studies
2. Optimized Content Values More Than the Number of Links for Top-Ranking Content for “Buy Viagra Online” 
3. Search Results with Qualitative Content & Low Influence Pages for Most of the “Weight Loss” Keyword Types
4. Lots of Results with Quality Content and No Links for “Acne Treatment” Related Keywords
5. Content Performance Overwrites Top-Ranking Results for “Online Gambling” Queries

It is not a comprehensive research, but it opens some valid questions that could help us and many others on further investigation for a more in-depth study. 

Torture data long enough, and it will confess.

We’ve previously made a research about the impact of content on rankings since lots of SEO experts say that content values more. Results show that content does impact rankings and has a high effect. We wanted to make the research more granular and find out if that applies to niches where black hat had a glorious past, such as viagra, gambling, weight loss medication.  

1. Analyzed Metrics for the Case Studies

For all the analyzed case studies we used the cognitiveSEO’s toolset. We started by searching for keywords using the Keyword Tool and Content Assistant and then looked for links metrics on Site Explorer. 

The metrics we investigated are:

• Webpage position on the search engine results page: using the Keyword Tool we looked at the position each website ranked for.
• Content Performance Score (CS): The Keyword Tool displays a content score for each page by scraping and analyzing the content, where you can see on a scale from 0 [low] to 100 how relevant and optimized this content is for the analyzed keyword. 
• Page performance shows you, on a scale from 0 (low) to 100, how authoritative a page is, based on the incoming links pointing to that page.
• Page influence predicts the ability for a specific page to rank in search engines, using levels such as No influence, Low influence, Good influence, Average influence, and High influence.
• Number of referring domains: Site explorer shows the number of domains that link to a certain webpage.
• Number of links displays the number of links that a page has.

Based on the data gathered for each keyword research made, we were able to spot some similarities that led us to some interesting insights. For each page, we followed the content metrics versus the links metrics, which helped us understand whether content or links are more valuable or whether there is a constant connection between those two for some particular keywords and niches.

We made a list including the keyword, the URL and the metrics described above. We looked only at the search results from the first page of Google.

On top of that, we monitored the results on a period of two weeks to see if there are any changes and all the search results kept their place with minor changes. We started looking on July 2nd, 2019.

2. Optimized Content Values More Than the Number of Links for Top-Ranking Content for “Buy Viagra Online” 

One of the first keywords that we searched for was “buy Viagra online”. You’ve probably received a lot of spam with the phrase “buy Viagra online” from websites that used all sorts of tricks to get higher rankings in SERP. Looking into the search results on Keyword Tool we could see that we had 4 results with high content scores and low page performance score. A low page performance score means a few links pointing to those pages or very low-quality links. 

If you take a look at the screenshot below, you can see the results. We didn’t take into consideration the first result because the domain name contains the keyword “viagra”, it is a high authority page and automatically pages from that domain will push the pages to rank higher on SERP. 

If we look at the first highlighted URLs, we can see both pages have a high content performance score of 95 and 93 and very low page performance score of 19 and 0. And the number of links is 22 for the first blog post and 0 for the second one. 

Looking at the results we could see lots of pages that had a high content performance score compared to the average CS for “buy Viagra online” since it is quite a competitive market and there are lots of searches for this keyword phrase (10K – 50K monthly volume). 

Beside these, you can see some results that contain limping content triggered by the page with high influence and more qualitative links. 

3. Search Results with Qualitative Content & Low Influence Pages for Most of the “Weight Loss” Keyword Types

In the same category of spammy black hat techniques were the pages optimized for keywords that contained “weight loss”. I performed keyword research for the following variants: 

• weight loss pills;
• weight loss plan;
• weight loss program;
• weight loss diet.

Below you can see the results for all these searches. We highlighted the search results that had a good Content Score and low page performance score and fewer links. 

For a deeper analysis, you can see a side-by-side comparison between the Content Score from Content Assistant tool and the number of links plus page performance from Site Explorer. 

Through the results, we could find lots of websites with almost no Link Influence (under 18) and high Content Score (most of them have ~70). It is a competitive niche if we look at the monthly volume and the keyword difficulty (more than 63):

• weight loss pills – 73 keyword difficulty, 50K – 100K monthly volume;
• weight loss plan – 63 keyword difficulty, 1K – 5K monthly volume;
• weight loss program – 65 keyword difficulty, 1K – 5K monthly volume; 
• weight loss diet – 66 keyword difficulty, 5K – 10K monthly volume. 

Another thing that is quite intriguing is the fact that two of the highlighted pages for the last keywords (weight loss program and weight loss diet) rank first. And all the highlighted pages have a Content Score bigger than the average score. 

4. Lots of Results with Quality Content and No Links for “Acne Treatment” Related Keywords

The following keyword research was for acne treatment and skincare treatment variables, such as:

• coconut oil for acne;
• blemish treatments;
• argan oil for acne.

The results we had for all of these three searches were some of the most visible because, as it turns out for all of them, content had a strong impact on the rankings. For the first results, we could see a Content Score over 60 (above the average Content Score) and a low Link Influence. If you take a look at the next screenshot you can see the webpages that stood up due to content. 

If we look at those four websites, we can see that they have lower domain performance than the rest of the websites that rank. 

The last keyword “argan oil for acne” has even more results where the Content Score is higher than the average and the Link Influence has a low score (under 12). There are webpages with a Content Score of almost 70, 80 and 90. Since we saw so many results, I’ve highlighted 8 out of 13 results. 

In this particular case, we can see exactly how much content values. Sometimes more than links. Out of curiosity, I’ve looked on those pages and all of them were blog posts with informative content and comments in some cases. Check out the side-by-side comparison below – content score vs link influence score & no. of links:

5. Content Performance Overwrites Top-Ranking Results for “Online Gambling” Queries

Gambling is a competitive market and there have been cases of black hat techniques for gambling websites, similar to the previous examples we’ve talked about. We’ve looked for variables such as:

• online slots;
• Play Vegas slots online;
• online gambling real money.

Looking at the results, we can see that for the first keyword, “online slots”, we have two webpages with almost the same content score ~90 and the Link performance is almost the same (29 and 31) and both have a small number of links (5 and 10 links). While looking at the Link Influence we always searched for the number of links and their value. Compared to the other results, those two websites have one of the highest Content Score and two of the lowest link influence levels. 

The next keyword we searched, “play Vegas slots online”, followed the same pattern, a website with a content score over 90 and the lowest link influence.

The same situation applies even to the last keyword searched, “online gambling real money”, showing pages with a high content score (80-90), and a low link influence and few links, with low-quality value.

Check out how the websites look: 

Conclusion

The purpose of these case studies was to spot any incongruence between ranking webpages in Google. The opposite direction of link building vs. content marketing can be very visible for more atypical keywords for gambling, skin treatment, pharma niches. 

In the end, we wanted to find out which is more important, content or links and whether an optimized page with a low number of links values more or if an un-optimized page with a high number of links ranks better. 

In particular issues, it seems that unique content can be more valuable than links, which can be a good sign to invest more in powerful content strategies as a smart inbound marketer. This doesn’t mean you should stop getting links and forget about them. Link still matter. So, if you have a strategy for link building, try to build links in the most natural way possible; the white hat techniques are the best option. Say no to buying links, exchange links or other black hat techniques to attract links because it was never a good solution for a high-performance domain.

The post Content Marketing vs. Link Building Case Studies – What Should You Focus On appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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

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

1. Success Story of 420K+ visitors increase 

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

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

1.1 Social Proof

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

1.2 The Numbers

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

Which lead to over 350K downloads of their app.

Let’s break down the month by month increase.

1.3 First 30 Days

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

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

1.4 First 60 days (2 months)

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

370%+ increase in traffic in just 2 months.

Over 1200%+ increase in just 3 months.

1.5 First 120 Days (4 Months)

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

1.6 First 180 Days (6 months)

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

2. How To Get Exponential Results For Your Own Site

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

• Invoice;
• Receipt;

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

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

3. The SEO Process

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s why:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.2 Build Citations

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

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

3.3 Add Your Link to JoeAnt

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

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

3.4 Add Text

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

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

3.5 Moving Forward

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

Oh wait … What about backlinks?

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

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

3.6 Using Phrases As Anchor Text

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

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

4. The Link Building Strategy

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

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

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

4.1 Forget About NoFollow Links

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

That’s pretty much it.

Disclaimer

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

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

About the author

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

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

The future of search looks like it will have actually less search, as weird as that might sound. Google performed lots of changes in SERP, lots of algorithms and features were added and updated, which make things even more complex. While in some countries Google search lacks in optimization, other countries experience major fluctuations. 

That being said, we’ve searched through our memories and the web to understand how Google has changed in 2019 so far and here are the top highlights:

1. Pick up Where You Left off on Search
2. Confirmed Broad Core Update in March 
3. New Way to Explore Information with Google Discover
4. Enriching Search Results Through Structured Data
5. Mobile-First Indexing by Default for New Domains
6. The June 2019 Core Update
7. The Site Diversity Update Roll Out
8. Navigate the Search More Easily and Safer

Last year alone, Google performed 3,200 changes to their system, including features and regular updates meant to keep the results relevant. Moreover, they say evolution is the key to face the changes. 

“Sometimes the web just evolved. Sometimes what users expect evolves and similarly, sometimes our algorithms are, the way that we try to determine relevance, they evolve as well.”
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

1.  Pick up Where You Left off on Search

Right at the beginning of the year, Google added a new feature that helped users who perform mobile searches and launched activity cards to help users pick up where they left off. For example, if you look for search queries such as clean eating receipts or clean eating diets and you are logged into your Google account, you’ll be able to find an activity card at the top of the results page. That way, it provides easy access and it is a handful way to continue exploring and read your previous searches. 

You’ll only be able to see the pages you’ve visited, along with the searches you’ve made. You can either click on the pages that you viewed before or perform another search to discover other aspects to that topic. That way, you can pick up where you left off on Google search.

Moreover, you can bookmark a specific receipt and add it to your collection for future reference. Your collection can be accessed by looking in your menu on the top left of the Search page or through the bottom bar of Google app. You can have as many collections as you want. 

Easily edit your search activity and card by deleting pages or turning them off by tapping the three-dot icon. 

The change performed by Google using this method was desired to make search history more accessible and more useful, help users follow their interests, build new habits, keep up with their tasks and keep valuable information on sight. 

2. Confirmed Broad Core Update in March 

The first confirmed update of this year from Google happened on March 13. Initially, the name was Florida 2.0, but Google themselves named this update Google March 2019 Core Update. The unlucky 13 came on a Wednesday. 

The updates could be spotted using cognitiveSEO signals, by looking at the chart. In case there are big fluctuations, marked with red bars, that means there are possible updates.  Below you can see a printscreen from the tool how the core update looked right on that day.

Google made it official on Twitter, where you can see the whole thread and the discussions on the topic: 

This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that: https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoXhttps://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 13, 2019

While Google performs lots of focused updates nearly daily, there are some broad algorithm updates that happen several times per year. This update was about quality, designed to improve the overall results with no other specific details. 

For every site that was impacted by that, there’s nothing they can do to fix it. Apparently, that’s what Google SearchLiaison said through a tweet. Building great content should be everyone’s mantra. Link building, social media marketing, online presence also matters in the SEO industry; so things remain the same. 

There’s no “fix” for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.
	Google SearchLiaison

Since content is mentioned, most probably it was a content related update, focusing on the quality it provides for the user. To stay ahead of competitors you should always search for the opportunity to deliver great content that becomes viral. Look for trends and evergreen content. With this in mind, ranking in Google will look like a gamble. Personalization and localization will become crucial and your focus will change upon that.

3. New Way to Explore Information with Google Discover

Named Google Feed when it was first released and later Google Discover a few months ago, the tool was planned to surface relevant content to the users, even when they’re not searching. The product is used by more than 800 million people each month to stay up to date. 

Google Discover works very smoothly based on preferences, by following certain topics, customer’s behavior and search history. The tool recommends your content related to anything you might be interested such as sports, TV shows, actors, public personalities, brands, flights, travel, weather info and may more.

Google Discover can have major implications on how the user will interact with search and web. Since a user can personalize its search and select only the things that interest them, the Google Search itself might lose some of the popularity. With that in mind, a business will not compete to be in the first 10 positions to win the user’s heart, but rather in the top 1-3 (at max) because that is the number of results a user sees on a mobile screen when performing a search.

So, when a user searches for a topic, Google looks at the pattern for each user and tries to understand the subtopics related to each other. Based on the data collected, Google Discover will surface relevant topic that might interest the user next, predicting their future search. 

Discover is one step ahead. 

Discover has a lot of potential and it might change user behavior regarding online searching and information consumption.

4. Enriching Search Results Through Structured Data & Search Console

Google has always encouraged websites to add markup to their content for the search engines to understand better what that’s about. Implementing structured data on your website will probably offer you the chance to receive an enhanced appearance in Google search results. 

In 2019, Google is pushing website owners to use more structured data for highlighting all sort of content and achieve more goals through a lot of great new features:

• Increase brand awareness: for logo, local business, and sitelinks search box.
• Markup your content for more traffic: for articles, breadcrumbs, events, jobs, Q&A, recipes, reviews.
• Highlight products on SERP for conversions: for price, availability, and review ratings.

Which such a big range of content that you can use structured data for, the SERP has definitely changed. The newest additions to the list are structured data for FAQ and “How-to” type of content. For example, “how-to” content can be highlighted, by adding structured data to the steps, tools, duration, and other properties. Take a look at the example below:

 There is detailed how-to documentation and FAQ provided by Google to help you to perform a correct setup. Explore Google’s search gallery and look at the right documentation for each element. 

Moreover, you can build how-to guides actions and FAQ answers with markup for Google Assistant, which means that how-to & FAQ answers can also be surfaced on the Google Assistant. Take a look at the example below:

All the structured data can be supported both on Google Search and Google Assistant and in Search Console, where you can see reports and monitor your website’s performance. 

In case there are some errors and Google Search Console detects some issues you’ll see them on the Enhancements report. 

The Structured data reporting from GSC has lots of advantages and allows you to review errors, warnings and valid items, plus the pages associated with such issues.

5. Mobile-First Indexing by Default for New Domains

This year, at the end of May, Google announced that as of June 1, 2019 mobile-first indexing was enabled by default for all new websites. On that day, it became official that websites should present the same content to users and search engines for both mobile and desktop devices. 

At the time we even wrote a 5 steps guideline to help website upgrade their mobile search engine optimization efforts and be prepared for the change. 

You can check any link from your website in Google Search Console using the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console. Doing so, you’ll see how it was crawled and indexed.

With this Mobile-First Indexing launching, Google search is changing, showing the same content on mobile and desktop, forcing sites to comply for them to keep their rankings (for both mobile and desktop). For newly designed websites Google is determining them to check factors such as parity of content (including text, images, videos, links), structured data, and other meta-data (such as titles and descriptions, robots meta tags) to comply with mobile-first indexing. 

As mentioned before, Google recommends websites to be mobile friendly and keeps encouraging responsive web design. Since mobile-first indexing has been running websites, should use a single URL for both desktop and mobile websites.

6. The June 2019 Core Update

Google announced on Twitter that a core update was rolling out on June 3, 2019. Similar to the update from March, it is part of the several broad core algorithm updates.

Tomorrow, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the June 2019 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this tweet for more about that: https://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 2, 2019

While Google hasn’t made any official statements on the following update, John Mueller said that core update encompasses a broader range of ranking factors. As he said, that there’s nothing specific to fix, lots of websites experienced ranking drops. You can hear what he specifically said in the Webmaster Central office-hours hangout when a user asked him about the update:

I think it’s a bit tricky because we’re not focusing on something very specific where we’d say like for example when we rolled out the speed update. (…)Sometimes the web just evolved. Sometimes what users expect evolves and similarly, sometimes our algorithms are, the way that we try to determine relevance, they evolve as well.
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

He reminds about a blog post written by Amit Singhal, formerly the head of Google’s Search team for 15 years, about the quality of the website which can really help the users in situations like these. 

To understand a little better the situation, use cognitiveSEO signals and look at the fluctuations. Below is a printscreen with the evolution of search when the Google update was released. 

I looked for rankings changes for sites that had ranking changes by at least 3 positions on desktop, mobile and local rankings for the first page of Google Search Engine for the US market. cognitiveSEO signals monitor over 170.000 randomly selected keywords for both desktop, mobile and local rankings to offer valuable insights of what happens in Google so you can spot significant fluctuations.

7. The Site Diversity Update Roll Out

Right after the June 2019 Core Update, Google rolled out the Site Diversity update which is completely different and completely unrelated. This update was created in the interest of the user so they won’t see more than two listings from the same site in the top results. In the screenshot below you can see the top search results for “create dental website” where www.pbhs.com has two search results. 

Google explains that there might be situations where you could see more than two search results in Google when their systems determine that it is relevant to do so for a particular search. Whether it is content, website speed, Rank Brain, conversion rate optimization or any other factor, Google’s algorithm will decide what to show. The good thing is that it is improving and refined in order to offer more relevant results. 

This site diversity change means that you usually won’t see more than two listings from the same site in our top results. However, we may still show more than two in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 6, 2019

It will be a while maybe until this update works wanders because there are still people who see more than two results from a website in Google search engine’s top results, as you can see if you look people’s tweets. 

Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison, says will affect only main listings though:

Sounds like the diversity update will only affect regular organic results and not affect features like featured snippets, people also asks, etc. https://t.co/gFz1E1bhd4

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) June 6, 2019

8. Navigate the Search More Easily and Safer

Continuing with diversity in SERP, Google wants to show more types of content including featured snippets with the results that might interest you, answers box, Knowledge Panels which can help you find key information or predict your searches using Autocomplete. 

Their search results page doesn’t look like what we used to know, with a list of blue links and some ads. Now it is more personalized, offering information from lots of sources in all sorts of form: video content, visual content and text to connect you with useful information as quickly as possible.

If you look at the example below, you have lots of information above the fold allowing you to perform as fewest actions as possible and see everything with one click or two. 

Takeaway

Ask for a new pair of eyes to look at your website to review it and find out new ways of improvement. Moreover, look together at who is searching through your website to find out what they are looking for, the flow. Evaluate user experience by looking at the user’s behavior. All these insights are a good exercise for you to understand the user better. 

If the user is changing, their behavior will change, and therefore search will change. In this equation, your website should be changed -> improved. The search engine optimization role in the future of search gets even more complicated. Google for sure is shaping the future of SEO. 

The post The Future of SEO – How Google Search Has Changed in 2019 & How It Affects You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

For everyone that has stumbled on this, I understand you. I know what you’re feeling. And you’re not alone. For somebody who writes on a daily basis, you need to be like a factory of fantastic ideas and give valuable information to the audience, because they need it. They are looking for guidance in every possible way.

I bet that not once it happened to you to remain stuck and don’t get any inspiration for an article. The desire was there but the playground was empty. 

Most of you have to become factory ideas overnight, but there are solutions for you during the day. That’s why we thought about the following effortless ways and platforms to find topic ideas:

1. Look for Q&As on Quora
2. Use BrandMentions to Spy Your Competitors for Content Ideas
3. Uncover Trends and Identify Influencers on BuzzSumo
4. Search for Question Topics on  cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool 
5. Generate Niche Keyword Ideas Using Ubersuggest
6. Get Inspired Using Pinterest
7. Follow Influencers’ Articles on LinkedIn
8. Search Through Thousands of Courses on Lynda
9. Get Ideas from Discussions in Facebook Groups
10. Use Reddit to Find Questions Related to Your Topic
11. See What Other People Are Sharing on Zest
12. Explore Medium Posts
13. Check out What’s Popular on Flipboard
14. Explore Trending Stories on Trend Hunter
15. Search the Internet Using AllTop
16. Check Google News for Current Events
17. Stay Updated With Google Webmaster Hangouts
18. Look Through Shared Articles on Academia
19. Find Stats and Case Studies on Statista
20. Explore Global Development Data on World Bank Open Data

Finding the right content topic is essential, but the way you write it is also important. Good content writers will always be in demand, just like Joel Klettke points out.

“We don’t need to hire a writer. We’ve got formulas and a template!” pic.twitter.com/HREhKHCimw

— Joel K (@JoelKlettke) September 18, 2018

1. Look for Q&As on Quora

Quora is an abundance of information and continuous resource for content writers, users, noobies and people wanting to find specific answers to their problems. The information is organized and edited by users, which makes it easy to understand the user behavior. Quora is so famous that even the former U.S. President Barack Obama is on it.

Besides all the ideas, you get the advantage of seeing what language and vocabulary people use, the way of writing and asking questions. And after you got some inspiration, you can write the article. Then you can answer questions by pointing people to your article.

Quora is a great space for keyword research and headlines/titles inspiration. For example, if we use the screenshot below and we want to write about keyword cannibalization, we can see if most people use a focus keyword such as – avoid keyword cannibalization or the question type such as – what is keyword cannibalization.  

The site is divided into topics, which makes it easy to search for blogging ideas and get insights on what people are looking for. There is an entire community on Quora where a lot of people and experts on every subject you can imagine are actively contributing with knowledge.

If you are focused on a specific topic, use the newly launched Spaces and follow the community that interests you.

Besides all the ideas we’ve talked about, there are other things Quora is good at. Only by using a few clicks you can:

• find what people are looking for. Search for general keywords on Quora and see questions regarding your topic.
• get updates on trending topics right on the homepage.

• read sourced research from experts and get their permission to quote them in your new article.
• generate leads by engaging people with your helpful answers.
• find every influencer that you can contact for outreach.

2. Use BrandMentions to Spy Your Competitors for Content Ideas

Wouldn’t it be a shame to miss an opportunity to talk about something that has great traction and create a massive, evergreen blog post that will get a good social media score and links 3 years after you’ve written it?

We’ve previously talked about the advantages of using a social monitoring tool, such as BrandMentions, that gives insights based on what finds online. You can spy on your competitors to see what are they writing, what type of content gets more engagement. And based on the response they get from the audience, you can see the topics of interest and try to create a better piece of content than theirs.

You can monitor fresh topical content related to your business and create better content in your niche. You just have to search for a topic and the tool will show you the results.

Whenever your brand is being brought up on the web, a marketing opportunity is rising and that applies to your competitors as well. If you know what people are talking about them and find their strengths and weaknesses, you’ll know what to offer to the audience and steal them from your competition.

Using a social monitoring tool such as BrandMentions helps you manage the mentions and go right on the spot by offering live support. You can find what people are saying about a specific brand and not necessarily to it, because there might be lots of untracked brand mentions, without any direct link to the brand.

For example, people might talk on social media but not place the @ before the name of the brand. And we must remember that it’s not only influencers in your industry who mention brands on the web, but there are also lots of other people that are consumers.

3. Uncover Trends and Identify Influencers on BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo can help you generate new content for your blog and see what the audience craves. You can search for popular topics and see results based on total engagement, evergreen score, number of links and other more. You have lots of filters available to go into deeper analysis and get more accurate results based on your needs.

For example, we searched for video marketing and we wanted to see the pages with the highest engagement.

Another great thing about this tool is that you can get some ideas of keywords based on the results you get. If we look at the search we’ve made for video marketing, we can see that video and SEO, or video marketing tips, or video marketing statistics are valid recommendations we could use in our content.

4. Search for Question Topics on cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool 

If you’re in search of customer questions use cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool to generate content ideas and monitor question on various subjects and brands.

Based on the keywords you’re interested in writing topics on, you can filter the results and get:

• phrase match;
• search suggestions;
• focus keywords;
• questions;
• or group topic.

Did you know?

Within the Keyword Tool you can see results based on location, language and device option (desktop vs mobile). So you can see niched topic ideas based on what people are searching and following in a particular place, city.

Besides, you could spy your competition and see which type of content triggers more traction in SERP. Get a sneak peek on what are they writing about, what kind of content is ranking for a particular keyword (product page, homepage, blog post, YouTube video and so on), the subject line.

With just a few clicks, you can get valuable insights on some keyword and topics ideas, plus do a short competitive analysis on any keyword you are interested in ranking for. 

5. Generate Niche Keyword Ideas Using Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a keyword suggestion tool that lets you perform keyword research and also give you common phrases and some articles inspiration related to the keyword. With just a scroll you get a list of keyword recommendations plus some important metrics (search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, CPC, volume search) and in the end some articles along with social shares from Facebook and Pinterest.

Below you can see an example for blogging. if you haven’t considered using Ubersuggest for content ideas now is a good time. 

6. Get Inspired Using Pinterest

Another free way to find content marketing ideas is by using Pinterest. The motto of the platform describes it very well: Discover recipes, style home ideas, inspiration and other ideas to try. So inspiration is at its place on Pinterest.

If you’ve never used Pinterest until now, then you did miss on lots of great opportunities. The social media content you get here, might not be found on the other social channels. You can use Pinterest to:

• Get free ideas for blog posts.
• Learn to create infographics with valuable information.
• Create content that your audience actually wants.
• Find keywords you should use in your blog post to help with SEO on Pinterest.

The process is very simple and very intuitive for beginners. Just search for a keyword, such as blog and see the results:

Then look in the search suggestions box for other keywords that are used for searches and get topic ideas and headlines that intrigue the user. Look at the most popular keyword suggestions, such as marketing (blog marketing), for beginners (blog for beginners), ideas (blog ideas), tips (blog tips) and so on.

That means there are a lot of new bloggers looking to learn about blogging or bloggers that are in the marketing field and search for ideas and so on.

Getting those recommended keywords means that those are what your audience is searching for. Use those keywords into your titles tags and description.

If you decide to use Pinterest, then those keywords should be into your pin description and heading to boost your Pinterest “SEO rankings”. So that when people are searching for those keywords, your post gets a higher chance of being on the top. That’s how easy it is to get creative content marketing ideas using Pinterest.

7. Follow Influencers’ Articles on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional social media platform that you could use to connect with experts and people that write valuable information. You can comment and create connections and, most important of all, you can get inspired by what they are writing and talking about on LinkedIn.

You can find the posts they make and the questions they ask by scrolling on the homepage:

You can go deeper and look at their published articles. LinkedIn Pulse is the platform owned by LinkedIn where influencers write their articles. 

If you get an idea and write about it, then you can contact the influencer and let them now that you quoted them in one of your articles and they can check the blog post once its published. After that, you can ask them for a share or you can share their post by tagging them.

It will create a snowball effect and you can get more people to share your content afterward and get new contacts that you can ask for their ideas in your next piece of contact. For example, you can create a blog post asking a single question to industry influencers where you could quote their answer. And then repeat the sharing process to build a strong online presence. It works very well as a growth hacking technique, too.

LinkedIn is a great source of inspiration. And it makes it easy to get exposure for yourself and your business if you decide to share your articles there.

8. Search Through Thousands of Courses on Lynda

Lynda is a platform with online courses on lots of work fields for people that want to receive a certificate or want to learn software, creative, and business skills to achieve personal and professional goals. 

No matter the topic, there is some valuable information that you can find on Lynda. Find and learn new content writing tips in one shot. You can even find information for any difficulty level. For example, if you search for some photography related content, select the photography category or search for a niched topic. 

9. Get Ideas from Discussions in Facebook Groups

Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers and get new content ideas. Facebook Groups is an underrated asset. It a strong base for an active community. You can see new trending topic discussion, recommendations, tips, new insights from business owners and specialists.

You can use communities in case you have any doubts about a specific topic. Let’s say, for example, that you heard lots of times that multiple links coming from one and the same domain are considered to have lower value, so unique linking domains are typically a more reliable metric than link count. And you’d like to know if anybody experienced a situation when this statement isn’t true and get some examples that you could use in your article (of course, after asking for permission).

Or you can ask for tips on client retention and see what comments and answer you get and use them in creating a new piece of article. The combinations are endless. You just need to be on the right community, where people comment and are active.

There are lots of types of blog posts that work differently on every business page or group, so make sure you get ideas and adapt the message to the type of audience you target.

10. Use Reddit to Find Questions Related to Your Topic

Reddit is a resourceful collection of data, or as they promote themselves “the front page of the internet”. And they don’t call like it that for no reason. Reddit has hundreds of groups named reddits which are designed based on lots of domain of interest/typology of content. They promise to give you the best of the internet in one place. You can find inspiration on many topics no matter the form – text, video or visual content.

There is a highly active community with over 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users), ranking as the No. 6 most visited website in U.S. according to Alexa. 

One of the most famous subreddit is r/IAmA where you can find Q&A series. AMA means “ask me anything” and attracts all sorts of characters, and personalities that answer to the people’s questions. They are a great way to get firsthand knowledge about what it’s like to be a firefighter, a corporate whistleblower, get better at sales, content writer etc. Or you can join niched subreddits such as r/SEO, r/marketing, r/science, r/CrazyIdeas, r/GetMotivated and more. 

Moreover, you can select your topic and type of content by choosing “Popular” posts or “All”. For know-it-all people I would recommend using RedditList or RedditMetrics to find up-and-coming subreddits. Follow people discussions and generate your next content topic. 

11. See What Other People Are Sharing on Zest

I usually use Zest for finding new blog post ideas. Right after you enter the page, you’ll see each article in a box format which includes the title, the cover attached and a short description. 

The friendly design works very well to skim through the content and makes it very easy to share and save it in your account for future inspiration.  

There are other ways than scrolling to search for content on Zest. You can apply specific tags and get the articles that are related.

Other options for filtering results are by the type of content (audio, video), shares, clicks or latest posts.

There are lots of experts that share their articles here. You can follow people and get instant notifications. It is very easy to use and easy to share content, as well. This comes in hand if you want to amplify your content and give it a boost after publishing.

If you haven’t used it before, you should definitely start now because it is a gold mine.

Don’t miss all the Zest from the content marketing juice. Your content needs all the zest and personality you can get.

12. Explore Medium Posts

Medium, just like Zest, collects lots of articles that people share, write and appreciate. The content is engaged and maintained by its users. It is a good source of inspiration because you can see what content is resonating with readers around specific topics. Needless to say that Medium is a solid platform for finding hundreds or thousands of content topics. 

Based on what you’re reading, following and liking you get recommendation “From Your Network”. People appreciate the articles by using “claps”, so the more claps a page has the more likely audience is interested in that topic. 

Besides the recommendation you received based on what you read, you can also select the topic and the domain of interest: art & entertainment, industry, innovation & tech, life, society. 

13. Check out What’s Popular on Flipboard

Flipboard is a great source for curated content. Search through technology, news, entertainment, design, and health topic around the web. It has a collection of articles just like Zest, where you can search, read, save and share stories yourself. Create an account and share interesting stories to be a part of the community. There are lots of authors and people that share stories on various topics. 

If you install the mobile app you have all that information at your finger. Swipe left to flip pages and get to stories that interest you and get instant inspiration whenever you are.

If you want to search for a specific topic that you’re interested, type in and look through the results. Follow that topic to receive notifications based on new articles shared on Flipboard. For example, if you want to see what’s new regarding Huawei and US issue, search and scoop through the results.

14. Explore What’s Popular on Trend Hunter

Trend Hunter is the world’s largest, most popular collection of cutting edge ideas, fueled by 233,000 people, big data & Trend Hunter AI as they mention on the website. Select from lots of domains of interest and filter type of content by searching ideas, lists, videos, photos or insights. If we look at the business category these are the trends right now: 

If you want to deliver quality content and always be the first informer for your audience, it is recommended to know the trends and write evergreen content including the trends. 

15. Search the Internet Using AllTop

Another free way to find blog content ideas is to look on AllTop, where are collected all the top stories. For example, I searched for sports news and you get all sorts of recommendations you could get inspiration from. 

There are lots of A-Z posts you could take inspiration from. As a good practice to use AllTop to find blog content topics, start by searching the topic and look for articles that are similar. Take the next example, I searched for SEO blogging and I got the next results. 

I’ve highlighted two articles that interest me. Both articles focus on the same type of content. Use them as a starting point, and divide your search then by looking for “blogging” only and see what results you get. 

16. Check Google News for Current Events

Google News can fit very well in your content marketing strategy to see what is trending in digital marketing and other industries. It is the easiest way to look for current events and news in your industry. An interesting news post relevant to your query can be used to write a quick, creative and even controversial content.

You can search for anything regarding digital marketing or business, technology, entertainment, science, sports and many more. Or search for things you might be interested in, based on what you find in other categories and get directions from there.

If you want awareness and have a relevant audience then finding a news hook for your pieces could be the solution. You have the possibility to select the language and the country and get more personalized results, which afterward can be saved in your account.  

17. Stay Updated With Google Webmaster Hangouts

If you’re a digital marketing or work in the SEO field then following Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout is a good option to find content topics. There is a big community of SEO experts, business owners, and knowledgeable people, in general, that participate in the meeting. All the Hangouts are hosted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, that answers to the questions that are added before the meeting on the Google Webmaster Youtube channel or asked live by those who participate. There are limited seats and people are very keen to learn and set some clear directions on where the SEO world is heading by finding inside tips from John.  

If you want to find out more about Google, updates, and SEO, in general, you can follow what do people ask and extract some valid tips. We even wrote an entire article based on the finding from Webmasters hangouts, named 21 Intriguing SEO Facts Exposed by Google on Webmaster Central & Hangouts, which I highly recommend you to scoop through.   

18. Look Through Shared Articles on Academia

Whenever you need academic papers, research articles I’d recommend you to use Academia.edu. Not only you’ll find valuable content ideas from well-documented papers written by specialists, professors, students and many more, but you’ll also find references for the articles you’re writing right now. You can elaborate new topic discussions for all sorts of meetings, podcasts, roundups, and get an abundance of new content ideas.

Search for people, papers, jobs and download documents if you’d like. With just a simple scroll you get a lot of smart content to take inspiration and pin down the right topics. 

19. Find Stats and Case Studies on Statista

Statista is another source of inspiration for documented data. Here you can find large researches, case studies, stats and graph performed on a large number of participants from lots of locations.  

There are all sorts of studies on Statista and you can make great discoveries if you search through them. For example, you can find out that excitements is the main feeling related to discovering new music among adults in Brazil or the fact that most deepwater discoveries happened in South America (315 from 2010 until 2016), or maybe you want to know that most of the people watched Discovery Channel’s Shark Week on TV or may you want to know that 64 percent of people aged 18-24 consume new in online media, people aged 55+ are looking at news on TV and those aged 25-34 are divided between online and TV mostly. 

All the stats available on site are a great starting point for an article. Remember that numbers will always add value to your piece. It is very important to know how to use them and how to draw attention to the user’s eye.

Belinda Weaver from CopywriteMatters offer some valuable tips on how to use numerals and numbers in a copy:

1. Use numbers instead of spelling them out.
2. Don’t start sentences with numerals.
3. Spell out “percent,” instead of using the % symbol.
4. Use monetary values in numerals ($5,000 or $5K versus five-thousand dollars).

Numbers influence how our readers perceive us and it can have a high power of persuasion if used correctly.

20. Explore Global Development Data on World Bank Open Data

World Bank Open Data offers global financial and development data. It lets you explore through various collections of time series data on a variety of topics no matter if you look for international or local data.

The site has lots of resources and only the data catalog provides access to over 2,000 indicators, solely. Check out all the resources:

• Open Data Catalog;
• DataBank;
• Microdata Library;
• World Development Indicators;
• Open Finances;
• Projects & Operations;
• Open Data Toolkit;
• Living Standards Measurement Study;
• Global Consumption Database.

Conclusion

As a farewell message and recommendation after all these tips, I shall leave you with one that can complement the other ideas and it could help you be a better content creator. Grow the skill of becoming content savvy, which means developing the ability to see valuable content everywhere. The content creation process can be hard, but there are lots of ways to make it easier.

Whether you’re in the bus/metro/car and see a commercial ad or somebody reading an interesting book (look at the title), reading useful posts on social media, listening to the radio or podcasts, watching a video/movie, reading something online or skimming through the news, you must see content inspiration everywhere. This way you’ll never run out of blog post ideas again.

When you found yourself a great topic, combine more options that we’ve elaborated here to have a more insightful article and cover all the information. 

The post 20 Free Ways to Find Blog Content Ideas That Convert appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Businesses that want to optimize for local SEO should have all the necessary tools and knowledge to fulfill their goal. Now more than ever, Google is focused on offering a personalized experience for each user thus local optimization plays a crucial part in the play.

For that, you need mostly tools and all sorts of local SEO strategies to get to your clients, even if you’re on the other part of the world. All the local SEO software listed in this article have one thing in common – to help you optimize your local search rankings for your website.

1. cognitiveSEO
2. BrightLocal SEO
3. Yext
4. Whitespark
5. Synup
6. Local SEO Checklist
7. Reputation.com
8. Moz Local
9. Tribe Local
10. Advice Local
11. Linkio

We’ve gathered a list of 10 local SEO tools. Each one of them has great individual features regarding analytics, effective local listing opportunities, the ability to automatically update your business information with minimum effort or reviews management. In order to test and choose the best one, you’ll have to know what your needs are and understand how local SEO works. Get to know them before you make a choice.

Local SEO has become more important than ever. It seems that 46% of all searches on Google are seeking for local information. From all of that, 76% of local searches result in a phone call on the same day. Moreover, 28% of people who search on their smartphone for something nearby resulted in a purchase.

1. cognitiveSEO  

Let’s start the list with cognitveSEO and then mentioned lots of other solutions, depending on everyone’s needs. cognitiveSEO is a friend from the house so we’ll be more than glad to present it to you. 

For tracking and improving your local SEO, cognitiveSEO has 2 neat features: the Rank Tracker and The Keyword Tool & Content Assistant. 

The Rank Tracker has advanced options to follow the evolution of your keywords by checking local rank tracking on any device and browser you want.

It is as simple to use as you think: add the keywords you are interested in ranking for (or check the suggested keywords if you’re not sure what keywords to track yet), select the country, the browser and check the Local Rank Tracking box. You can check the rankings as locally as you want. You can also add the same keywords on different locations so you can compare rankings on different location afterwards. 

cognitiveSEO’s  Local Rank tracking tool has lots of advantages:

• you’ll have an accurate view on your website’s performance in local SEO;
• there is a variety of countries and languages you can select from;
• it has accurate city/area precision;
• integrated mobile tracking;
• get instant alert notification whether you suffer from local changes in rankings;
• manage keywords through filters and tags.

The Keyword Tool & Content Assistant is another tool that gives you the possibility of optimizing for local search. You can create or optimize content directly for local SERP. The tool will let you know the exact keywords your content is missing to rank within the top Google results. It’s easy to use, intuitive, saves you tons of time and what’s even more important it actually works. You can check out the story of an agency who improved their rankings from position #5 to position #2 in 24 hours using the tool.  

Did you know?

 

46% of all Google searches have local geographical parameters. That means almost a half of all searches made on Google.
So keeping track of your local keywords is a must. You can use cognitiveSEO’s Rank Tracking for this.

For a better understanding of your business performance, compare your universal rankings with your local ones. The variations can be quite big so it’s important to be aware of your ranking situation. This way you can better adapt your strategies on the way, and focus more on what matter most for your business. 

On top of that, the tool allows you to keep an eye on all the important Google algorithm updates to see if they had any impact on your website’s rankings. 

 

2. BrightLocal SEO

Founded by Ed Eliot & Myles Anderson in 2009, BrightLocal has a complex local SEO feature, with which you can monitor, audit and optimize. The tool makes it easy to analyze performance data such as organic, local and mobile search rankings, local business listings, customers reviews, Google My Business (GMB) insights, Google Analytics data, and social media interactions.  

BrightLocal knows how important online reviews are. Every year, they do the Local Consumer Review Survey and in 2018, the results showed that 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34) and 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34).

Source: BrightLocal

The tool allows you to perform lots of actions to clean and build a reputation online, plus lots of insights to boost your local SEO, using the following features:

• Monitor Local Citations: Get detailed NAP (name, address, phone) audit and find citations opportunities to boost local rankings by spying on your competitors.
• Grow your online reputation: Manage and generate customer feedback on key review sites.
• Optimize Google My Business listing: analyze your GMB data, follow changes and benchmark performance against your competitors.
• Local SEO audit reports: Get detailed information about local SEO metrics, fix issues and perform better reports.

3. Yext

Yext is an SEO software that helps you manage and include reviews and local pages. The tool has a variety of products and features that make it easy to integrate with lots of local directories. The way it is structured will make sure your business is up-to-date and all the information is accurate.

The local SEO services provided by Yext allow you to put your business on the sight of the user through the various apps available in the Knowledge network. You can see just a few of them in the print screen below; the list is long.  

The most used SEO features of this tool are:

• Yext Listings: it puts you in contact with all the listing and gets your business displayed across 100+ digital services globally. Here you’ll find the Knowledge Network that will help you get to your customers.
• Yext Pages: it manages your landing pages to built AI-ready pages for each of your advisors, events, restaurants, menus, locations, and more to offer accurate information and optimized pages for your user. You can build them for scale and conversions.
• Yext Knowledge Manager: it is a cloud-based platform where you can find lots of insights about your audience, what information they seek, starting from locations, holiday hours and in-store promotions to parking entrances and more. You can find out more about what a knowledge manager is here. 

Customer behavior has changed a lot since the growth of local SEO. Yext performed a major analysis using internal data of more than 300,000 customer business locations active from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2018. The study showed that:

Businesses across industries saw more interactions via AI-enabled services than their own websites. Up to 2.7 times as much traffic on third-party sites.

4. Whitespark

Whitespark started as an agency but now focuses on offering SEO software tools. It was founded by local SEO expert Darren Shaw and it’s designed to finding citation opportunities that you might be missing so you can improve your search rankings. Beside that, you can use it to earn reviews, build high-quality backlinks, manage your local search and win more customers.

Citations are still valuable and important, you still want to build them out, and they’re table stakes now. The algorithm was simpler five years ago, so citations played a bigger role. I think if you don’t do citations, you’re hurting yourself a little bit. If you’re not accurate and listed on the important sites in your industry, you’re going to have a bad time.
	Darren Shaw
	Founder of Whitespark

Whitespark is known for the following tools:

• Local Citation Finder: it gives you lots of opportunities to get new citations by spying on your competitors’ citations and find all the places where your business is listed.
• Local Rank Tracker: it tracks and localizes all your ranking data and displays your organic rankings in Google and Bing.
• Reputation Builder: it manages your negative feedback before turning into bad reviews, creates an easy and automated way to collect reviews.
• Link Prospector: it was designed to find new link opportunities. You can amplify your content to earn more shares and links.
• Review Checker: it will check business reviews, to understand if you’re doing well or you’re receiving negative reviews. Plus you’ll get directions to resolve them.

Reviews can influence the user’s decision quite a lot. The “Local Consumer Review Survey 2018” made by BrightLocal showed that positive reviews encourage users to use a business in a fairly large proportion (68%), compared to other factors, such as price and location.

5. Synup

Synup is an all-in-one local marketing software that manages and optimizes your local business content. The tool scans your business online and gives you information on where it is listed. The management system is easy to use, it is fully automated to evaluate your listings, reputation and analytics data.

Here are the local SEO features available on Synup:

• Local listing management: the platform crawls location data on 200+ local search engines and directories and gathers it in one place where you can easily manage your data.
• Aggregate all your interactions: you get instant notifications whenever a customer leaves reviews or interacts on social media through comments, shares. You can respond directly to reviews within the platform.
• Monitor your analytics: automatically track analytics on your business locations’ performance.
• Easy to use reporting: Export all the information you need in any format you want (pdf, excel, CSV).

6. Local SEO Checklist

Local SEO Checklist is a tool developed by Synup that offers something any other tool is lacking: it can fix technical local SEO issues. You can analyze on-page elements, everything related to Google, top business directories, citations, customers reviews and testimonials, website content and backlinking.

Based on the elements you select, you can create checklists, as the name points out, and use the platform as a guide to know exactly what parts of your site need improvements and optimization for local searches. It offers 40 different tasks that detail a specific local SEO action.

Besides all the features available on the platform, you have lots of other options to optimize your website:

• Google Checker: it checks if your Googe My Business has accurate and correct information;
• Schema Scanner: it checks if your website uses correct schema and fixes the issues;
• Audit Business Listing: it checks how your business listing data appears across 48 important directories including Google, Facebook, Yelp and more.

7. Reputation.com

Reputation.com is created for large multi-location businesses to monitor and improve their reputation, and optimize customer experience. It uses AI and natural processing languages to analyze all the data and measure and quantify your brand’s performance to give you the most accurate insights.

The tool has one of the best features for multi-location management, in case you’re having lots of properties to take care of. You can keep your properties in order and managed. The dashboard is user-friendly and you have all the features on sight to audit business listing, publish on social media, including customer sentiment and industry benchmarking to gain ranking advantage in front of your competitors.

Here are the key features available to help you improve your local search rankings:

• Directory Management: the tool keeps all your location data accurate and helps you manage them in order to lead the customer to your online and offline store.
• Business Listing: easily claim all your listings and fix any mistakes or missing data, then submit the correct information to all the third party websites to get to your audience.
• Online Reviews: keep your reputation clean by using the tool to find out what customers are saying about you, lead them to send reviews and monitor all of them through the centralized dashboard.
• Reputation score: Based on the information it founds online, the tool will calculate a reputation score letting you know what you’ll have to improve.

Reputation.com’s goal is to help businesses have all the information in one place to improve website visibility and increase rankings.

8. Moz Local

Moz Local is one of the most known local SEO tools. It can be used for both small businesses and big enterprises, especially for increasing visibility and checking listing issues. On top all of that, Moz assures business listing on all major online directories and aggregators and gets rid of all the duplicates and wrong information about your business.

It makes sure all the listings are correct and consistent. Plus it secures your relationship with your audience by having the option to get instant notifications for new reviews to offer real-time feedback. 

Here are the local SEO solutions that the software offers to make your business ready, set and distributed over the web:

• Social media verification account: make sure it has Facebook and Twitter verified account;
• Directory and aggregator submission: Moz locally shares your listing across the search distribution; plus you’ll get a distribution report to analyze the effectiveness of your published listing over time. 
• Local listing distribution dashboard: setup your business listing;
• Google My Business sync: claim your business and sync the data to share accurate NAP information and more;
• Review monitoring: monitor your reviews and ratings to have an accurate view of your business. 

9. Tribe Local

Tribe Local is a local SEO tool for managing listings and online reputation. Beside the other SEO softwares, Tribe Local makes it very easy to create white-label reports to your business or for local clients, export bulk data and add unlimited users and freelancers. Plus, it has even over 200 local listing sites, including premium citations. 

Based on your results, you can get a score to see exactly what your business is lacking in local optimization: Citations score, Reviews score, Rakings score, Analytics score, GMB score. Here’s the main features of Tribe Local you can use to amplify the online presence and performance of your client’s business:

• Business Directory Citations: Use it to check your existing local SEO citations, add it to 200+ local business directories and fix any listing you have.
• Reviews Management: Scan to check your existing online business reviews, analyze your ratings, analyze the feedback and perform multiple analysis for your business on a certain period of time.
• Local SEO Ranking: The local tracker allows you to keep track of all business metrics, have a clear picture of your present status and track local rankings to be ahead of your competitors. Plus you can generate local performance analytics and see your evolution. 
• Reputation Management: Analyze sentiment of reviews posted online, create testimonial widgets to convert happy customers, send customized email campaigns to your customers, receive alerts and track all your reviews.
• Google My Business: Add your businesses in GMB and other 200+ business directory sites. Edit and fix all of your business citations.

Besides all of these, the tool has lots of advantages for agencies, as they promote it as a good fit for those working with multiples accounts and users. 

10. Advice Local

Advice Local is the last SEO tool from our list, but not the least important. It creates competition to Yext, and it has a great advantage over Yext due to the fact you can manually build out local citations while Yext uses an API. Compared to the other tools, it has a voice search algorithm that gives you directions on how well your location is featured on voice assistants. Plus, Advice Local is a complete all-in-one local SEO solution for local optimization. They brag about the power to ensure the accuracy and visibility of your business’ location information on search engines. 

The Data Amplifier network publishes data about your listing on strong sites like Google, Yelp, Apple Maps and Facebook to enhance your local presence online. It includes a big database of data aggregators, data accelerators, data enhancers, additional GPS accelerators, vertical directories, and other directories for legal, home services, finance, and restaurants. 

Here are the local solutions proposed by Advice Local:

• Listing Management: It uses a combination of APIs and manual submissions to claim, create and optimize listings. It has integrated GMB, Bing and Yelp local pages
• Store Locator: The dashboard allows you to manage multi-location businesses, create SEO optimized landing pages and add store locator to your client’s websites to keep them connected with their audience.
• Voice Search Readiness Test: It uses an algorithm to provide a score for you local businesses based on how easy they are found on all voice assistants (Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant).

11. Linkio

Linkio is an SEO tool created to help SEO experts in monitoring the backlinks and optimizing the anchor texts for maximum benefits and staying neutral while getting before the competitors. Maintaining a quality backlink profile with diversified anchor texts you can be sometimes very difficult and you should always use a tool made especially for that purpose.

With an integrated rank tracking system and local tracking you can monitor daily keyword positions and see how your backlinks influence your Google rankings.

The bottom line is that you need to perform local optimization for your business, if it’s the case of course. There are many myths around local SEO so make sure you get your strategies right. In the local SEO area there are always new things to discover that can help your business get new customers, improve your visibility and get more local searches. 

There is no one size fits all tool. Yet, the above tools are a great starting point and a big help for you to keep your local business going. Check them out and feel free to make additions to the list in the comment section below. 

The post The Best Local SEO Tools & Software to Improve your Google Rankings appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.