[40] Have you ever heard about getting a “manual penalty” from Google? It means that an actual human being reviews your website after an automated
process has flagged it as suspicious. And at the end of the day, if that Google employee comes to the conclusion that your site is indeed shady, it means
your site is banned from the search results and does not show up anymore. This is probably the worst possible scenario for your SEO efforts.
Here’s how the cause-and-effect chain looks like:
You (maybe even unintentionally) do some shady SEO activities for your website
Google algorithms catch you as your website triggers a certain amount of red flags
A real person manually checks the site against the red flags and if you are being caught, you get the manual penalty.
The consequence is that your site is removed from the search results. The good news is, that the chances for being blocked from Google are relatively low.
But what can you do if it happens? A major indicator is that your organic search traffic suddenly drops out of nowhere. In this case, check the Google
Search Console for more information, fix the issues and resubmit your website again.
[41] In general, Google assumes that content that is buried deep in your site is less important than pages that are easily accessible. Therefore, keep your
relevant content within reach – ideally not more than 3 clicks away!
This will help Google’s bots to crawl your site more efficiently and increases the chances of having all your important pages properly indexed – a primary
condition for all SEO efforts.
Research shows that the optimal crawl depth for a website is three levels or less.
Here are a couple tricks about how to increase the accessibility of your pages:
● optimize internal linking
● place the most important URLs in the top levels of a site’s architecture
● use breadcrumbs to allow users and search engines to easily navigate through your pages.
[41] In general, Google assumes that content that is buried deep in your site is less important than pages that are easily accessible. Therefore, keep your
relevant content within reach – ideally not more than 3 clicks away!
This will help Google’s bots to crawl your site more efficiently and increases the chances of having all your important pages properly indexed – a primary
condition for all SEO efforts.
Research shows that the optimal crawl depth for a website is three levels or less.
Here are a couple tricks about how to increase the accessibility of your pages:
● optimize internal linking
● place the most important URLs in the top levels of a site’s architecture
● use breadcrumbs to allow users and search engines to easily navigate through your pages.
[42] Google offers different tags for us to categorize and describe our pages. The search engine does this in order to be better educated about which pages
we want to be indexed, followed or not accessible.
There are three important tags out there that everyone should know about:
● Noindex: tells the search engine to exclude your page from the search results
● Disallow: tells it not to crawl your pages at all
● Nofollow: tells it not to follow the links on your page
So the big question is, why and when should we use each tag?
Well, the number one goal should be to optimize your crawling budget. Just imagine you have a complex website with over 1000 individual pages and 800
of these 1000 pages are generated by tags. In this case you tag these pages with a noindex tag which results with your site being crawled more efficiently.
WordPress and pretty much any decent CMS or your SEO solution (such as Yoast or RankMath) gives you options for such a task.
[43] Let’s think a step further: Google sets a limited crawling budget for each website and probably won’t crawl all your 1000 pages in detail. Your goal is to
have the most important sites crawled while the not so important ones are of lower priority. What you want to avoid is that Google crawls the wrong,
irrelevant pages while leaving the important ones out!
“The ranking strength of a website is the average ranking strength of its pages.”
Keep that in mind and go through every page one by one asking yourself: “Does this page have good chances to rank for the keyword that it’s targeting?”
There comes a number of automatically generated pages with every CMS, which – from an SEO point of view – shouldn’t be indexed. With WordPress, they
usually are:
● tags
● attachments
● custom post types pages
● custom post types categories
● custom post types tags
● author pages
The simplest way of disabling these in WordPress is by using Yoast SEO or Rank Math.
[44] As we just learned: “Content is King!” This is the SEO mantra you should live by. Google relies on content to determine the ranking of websites – and
your job is to provide this content! The base of every SEO strategy should hence be a well-planned, long-term content strategy.
When it comes to content, producing some kind of content is not the challenge. Producing the right content is! You will need to publish GREAT pieces of
content that provide real value for your readers and ideally complement each other. (Hence the need for a strategy!)
Here are a couple tips:
● Group content around specific subjects and themes
● Create several layers of content around a topic
● Show various perspectives on a certain topic
● Discuss different phases of your buyer personas (awareness, ready to buy, …)
● Focus on keywords that are easy to rank for AND that have significant traffic
● Focus on keywords that are easy to rank for AND that have significant traffic
[44] As we just learned: “Content is King!” This is the SEO mantra you should live by. Google relies on content to determine the ranking of websites – and
your job is to provide this content! The base of every SEO strategy should hence be a well-planned, long-term content strategy.
When it comes to content, producing some kind of content is not the challenge. Producing the right content is! You will need to publish GREAT pieces of
content that provide real value for your readers and ideally complement each other. (Hence the need for a strategy!)
Here are a couple tips:
● Group content around specific subjects and themes
● Create several layers of content around a topic
● Show various perspectives on a certain topic
● Discuss different phases of your buyer personas (awareness, ready to buy, …)
● Focus on keywords that are easy to rank for AND that have significant traffic
● Leverage and reuse your existing content by improving it and keeping it up-to-date
[45] Every SEO content strategy should be based on an extensive keyword research. Why? Because before you can produce content people are interested
in, you will need to know what they are searching for!
You can have very high-qualitative content but if you write for the wrong keywords people will simply not find or read it. This means, you wasted your time
and/or money.
You hence need to make sure the keywords you’re writing for…
…are relevant for your business
…target customers during a certain buyer-journey phase
…have enough traffic to make your efforts worthwhile
But how exactly do you do that?
First of all, there are several tools which can help you find the right keywords:
● Ubersuggest – https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest
● Ahrefs – https://ahrefs.com (paid)
● SurferSEO Chrome extension – https://surferseo.com/keyword-surfer-extension/
And here are some Tips and Tricks for building a successful content strategy:
- Group all your long-tail keywords by main topic/keyword.
While doing your keyword research, you’ll most likely find many similar long-tail (niche) keywords covering the same main topic. My recommendation is to
group them and then write one long-form piece of content, covering EACH of the keywords. This way you avoid”so-called “content cannibalization” issues,
meaning you target the same keyword across several web pages, cannibalizing your own content. - Start with with low-competition keywords
There might be keywords that fit your business and have significant search traffic. “Well that’s great – let’s target them!” you might think now. Well,
considering that you are not the only one coming to that conclusion, there are probably many other big websites outside targeting that keyword. And it will
be VERY hard to compete with established pages (like Hubspot to give an example) especially if you’re just starting out or you know your website is not yet
an authority. Hence, I recommend to target keywords that are currently dominated by websites that are not highly established yet and therefore easier to
beat. - Find which keywords your competition is ranking for and steal them by writing 10x better content
This one is self-explanatory – beat them to the ground! More about creating 10x content in the next section.
beat. - Find which keywords your competition is ranking for and steal them by writing 10x better content
This one is self-explanatory – beat them to the ground! More about creating 10x content in the next section.
[46] Although word count per-se is not a ranking factor (always keep in mind quality over quantity!), writing long-form content leads to various benefits:
long-form has more opportunities generates more backlinks than short posts
therefore they perform in search results
which means long-form content brings more traffic
We know – this is a very casual cause-and-effect chain – but this is how things work. However, this relation is only proportional till a certain length is reached
as the negative effects of too much length set in (nobody wants to read forever long content right?)
Now the question arises, how long should your content be? Statistically speaking, the ideal word count lay between 800-1500 words per publication.
Nevertheless, your focus always should remain the quality of an article rather than the word count. Keep in mind: Your main goal of the content is to solve a
certain problem in a unique way and to provide valuable information – no matter if this happens in 500 or 5000 words.
In the end, there is one thumb rule to live by: The easier your content is to consume and understand, the better!
[47] The term “10x content” was firstly introduced by Moz a few years ago and refers to “content that is 10 times better than the best result that can currently
be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase or topic.”
The reason why people use Google search is because they want to find the best solution to a problem they’re facing. However, sometimes there is simply
no great answer to a problem out there and the first Google page only consists of landing pages or short, meaningless articles.
Now, imagine you suddenly find a piece of content such as a blog article that provides REAL value and solves your problem in ways you’ve never thought
about. This is content you are proud you found, and there is a chance you then go ahead and bookmark it, share it on your social networks, or even link to it
from your blog. And this is the reason why it should be your goal to produce outstanding content as the effect can be huge!
For you to get a better idea and some inspiration, here are some 10x content examples put together by the Moz team.
[48] Content cannibalization = derogatory strategy of targeting the same keyword across several web pages.
As definitions are always a little dry, here’s an example:
Look at these two domains:
https://domain.com/new-york-wedding-venues https://domain.com/new-york-wedding-reception-venues
Both links (of the same domain) refer to the SAME main keyword (New York Wedding Venue) – not ideal.
How do you identify content cannibalization?
An easy way to find out if your pages are threatened by content cannibalization is the tool Ahrefs.
The main idea behind it is that you first export the keywords your site is ranking for, then arrange them alphabetically which lets you identify URLs ranking
for the same keyword.
For a more detailed and hands-on explanation, check out this video Ahrefs published to explain how it works.
How to avoid content cannibalization
● as stated above, group long-tail keywords in topics, then write long-form content covering ALL these keywords, rather than writing unique pages for each
one of them
● avoid falling into the “searcher intent” trap by targeting the same main keywords several times, covering different searcher intent nuances on different
pages.
[49] Content hubs (other names include pillar pages or topic clusters) should be the core of your website structure.
The Content Hub strategy is an approach to build up a website by clustering subpages with similar content (sometimes referred to as “spoke” pages) and
linking them to a superior hub page.
There are many different ways to shape these content hubs. They could for example be existing blog categories or new pages built from scratch.
If you’re looking for inspiration, you will find a deeper explanation of the topic here. You can also have a look at this detailed list of content hubs put together
by MIG.
[50] Hub pages usually cover a certain subject, such as a specific keyword with a significant search volume and a ranking difficulty in the range of medium
to hard. However, achieving a high rank with such a page on its own is hard. Hence, you will need to create additional, supporting content, to “feed” the hub
page.
If you look at your current website it is very likely that you already have a hub-structure of some kind in place, for example in the form of categories. Now it’s
time to work with them and create supporting content such as blog posts to push these pages up in the ranking.
[51] Content marketing is a continuous process. While it’s important to publish new content on a regular basis it is crucial to not lose sight of your “old”
publications. Make sure you keep them up to date (so they are still relevant!) and continuously improve them to further push and/or keep their ranking.
Very often, this aspect is overlooked or seen as unnecessary. But that’s the biggest mistake! Studies show that revised “old” content often performs much
better than newly published articles. The potential is big – so don’t be surprised if your traffic on an old page doubles after you update it.
Here are some ideas you could use when updating old content:
● Make sure the information is still accurate and relevant to date
● Fix broken or expired links and/or add new links to new, relevant references
● Fix grammar mistakes and improve your writing style
● Add new media to the post, such as images or video embeds
Don’t forget: Once you update an old post it will also update its publication data to that day – which in return means that the article will show up among the
latest results. Et voilà there you have it – a fresh piece of content that is as good as new!
[52] Since this sounds like a given it is actually one of the most unnoticed malfunctions. As mentioned before, your categories serve as content. So far so
good. However, these content hubs automatically show respective content from your blog posts and articles. Which, in turn, means that the risk of
cannibalization is huge as your content appears not once but several times across your website.
In order to avoid this phenomenon (and to get your pages to rank!) you will need to produce UNIQUE content for each category.
An easy way (e.g. in WordPress) is to add a unique description to each category.
[53] E.A.T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. E.A.T. are three of the most decisive dimensions Google uses to determine if you are worthy
to rank high – or not. Why? Well Google wants to make sure it always presents the best results for a search query. And who would you trust more regarding
the quality of a website – an established and renowned global organization that has been in the industry for years or a newcomer with no reference?
The first step to increase your E.A.T is to make sure that the content on your website reflects your expertise and authority in our industry and that people
see you and your website as trustworthy.
For example, let’s take two websites:
A – A general, magazine style blog which covers different family-related topics such as health, food, DIY gardening, kids, and so on.
B – A blog from a nurse who has worked with children for years and speaks about child nursing only.
Now let’s say both websites publish an almost identical article (assuming that the websites are also identical in terms of link and on-page profile), then the
article published on the nurse blog will most likely outrank the one published in the magazine. Why? Because the content of the nurse blog is stronger
correlated to E.A.T. than the other one. Makes sense?
Another example: Let’s say you’re a photographer and suddenly decide to write a blog post about knitting socks on your photography website. Now
suddenly this article ranks with pro-knitters that have solely focused on publications about knitting for years. They will easily outrank you!
Another example: Let’s say you’re a photographer and suddenly decide to write a blog post about knitting socks on your photography website. Now
suddenly this article ranks with pro-knitters that have solely focused on publications about knitting for years. They will easily outrank you!
the quality of a website – an established and renowned global organization that has been in the industry for years or a newcomer with no reference?
The first step to increase your E.A.T is to make sure that the content on your website reflects your expertise and authority in our industry and that people
see you and your website as trustworthy.
For example, let’s take two websites:
A – A general, magazine style blog which covers different family-related topics such as health, food, DIY gardening, kids, and so on.
B – A blog from a nurse who has worked with children for years and speaks about child nursing only.
Now let’s say both websites publish an almost identical article (assuming that the websites are also identical in terms of link and on-page profile), then the
article published on the nurse blog will most likely outrank the one published in the magazine. Why? Because the content of the nurse blog is stronger
correlated to E.A.T. than the other one. Makes sense?
Another example: Let’s say you’re a photographer and suddenly decide to write a blog post about knitting socks on your photography website. Now
suddenly this article ranks with pro-knitters that have solely focused on publications about knitting for years. They will easily outrank you!
So, keep in mind to write content around your fields of expertise, where people consider you a reliable authority.
[54] E.A.T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. E.A.T. are three of the most decisive dimensions Google uses to determine if you are worthy
to rank high – or not. Why? Well Google wants to make sure it always presents the best results for a search query. And who would you trust more regarding
the quality of a website – an established and renowned global organization that has been in the industry for years or a newcomer with no reference?
The first step to increase your E.A.T is to make sure that the content on your website reflects your expertise and authority in our industry and that people
see you and your website as trustworthy.
For example, let’s take two websites:
A – A general, magazine style blog which covers different family-related topics such as health, food, DIY gardening, kids, and so on.
B – A blog from a nurse who has worked with children for years and speaks about child nursing only.
Now let’s say both websites publish an almost identical article (assuming that the websites are also identical in terms of link and on-page profile), then the
article published on the nurse blog will most likely outrank the one published in the magazine. Why? Because the content of the nurse blog is stronger
correlated to E.A.T. than the other one. Makes sense?
Another example: Let’s say you’re a photographer and suddenly decide to write a blog post about knitting socks on your photography website. Now
suddenly this article ranks with pro-knitters that have solely focused on publications about knitting for years. They will easily outrank you!
So, keep in mind to write content around your fields of expertise, where people consider you a reliable authority.
[55] Back in the early days of search engines, it was common practice to overload your article with your target keywords as the amount of matching words
was a crucial ranking factor.
Today, things are not that simple anymore and Google uses a variety of factors and complex algorithms to determine how high your site should rank. While
it’s hard to optimize your site according to all parameters (the exact interplay is a big black box) it should be your major goal to provide real value for your
users: The better the user-experience, the better it is for your site ranking.
[56] We have already learned that Google uses a variety of measures to determine the “rank worthiness” of your site. As the search engine always tries to
spit out the best possible result for a search query, it will track if people are satisfied with your page as a result. How does Google do that? It tracks how
much time people spend on your site after clicking on it. This in turn means if someone realizes that your content is not at all an answer to their question
they will “bounce” immediately, signaling to Google that your website is not what they are looking for. This is very bad for our ranking for the respective
keywords.
There are 3 types of search intent:
● informational (example: “how to knit socks”)
● transactional (example: “hand-made socks amazon”)
● commercial (example: “mailchimp review”)
● navigational (example: “starbucks near me”)
Here is a piece of advice: Before creating content for a certain keyword, check and understand the top search results to see what Google shows for this
keyword and try to match your content to it!
they will “bounce” immediately, signaling to Google that your website is not what they are looking for. This is very bad for our ranking for the respective
keywords.
There are 3 types of search intent:
● informational (example: “how to knit socks”)
● transactional (example: “hand-made socks amazon”)
● commercial (example: “mailchimp review”)
● navigational (example: “starbucks near me”)
Here is a piece of advice: Before creating content for a certain keyword, check and understand the top search results to see what Google shows for this
keyword and try to match your content to it!
[57] Studies show that articles that mention their keyword in all three components tend to rank higher than articles that don’t.
Here’s an example: Let’s say we target “mailchimp review” as the main keyword with our article.
The optimal “trio” should look similar to this:
● Title: “Mailchimp Review. Still the Best Email Service Provider in 2020?”
● URL: “https://domain.com/mailchimp-review/”
● Heading (inside the article): “Prerequisites of our Mailchimp review”
[58] Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a way in which search engines index and retrieve pages. LSI keywords are words or phrases that you can use to add
more context to your content and help search engines index it.
[59] Research has shown that pages that mention their focus keyword in the first paragraph rank higher than pages that don’t.
Therefore, always try to keep your focus keyword (or variations of it) in the first paragraph of your article.
[60] Sounds logical right? However, many website owners end up with two H1s on the same page.
Why can this be a problem? It’s simple: Heading 1 is a strong indicator for search engines about what the page is all about. Tip: Try to match your H1 with
the Meta Title for the respective page.
[61] What is a meta title? It basically defines the title of each page and is pulled by search engines to display your website in the SERP results.
An SEO-optimized title has various advantages when it comes to Google’s ranking as it will trigger several ranking factors such as user intent, click-through
rate (CTR) and keyword match. Hence, make sure to set it right!
When optimizing a meta title for SEO, always keep in mind:
● it’s important to match your content to the searcher’s intent of the target keyword
● try to come up with an alluring title to increase click-through rate
● keep it short – usually there is a maximum character limit (This varies by search type, but as a tip, include the target keyword in the first half of the title)
[62] While the meta description is not a ranking factor per se, it significantly influences other crucial ranking factors, for example the click-through rate. If it’s
well written, a meta description can make a big difference!
Similar to meta titles, there are some “rules” to live by when drafting a meta description:
● it’s important to match your content to the searcher’s intent of the target keyword
● try to come up with an alluring text to increase click-through rate (you can also include a clickbait)
● keep it short – usually there is a maximum character limit (this varies by search type, but as a tip, include the target keyword in the first half of the title)
● include the target keyword in description
well written, a meta description can make a big difference!
Similar to meta titles, there are some “rules” to live by when drafting a meta description:
● it’s important to match your content to the searcher’s intent of the target keyword
● try to come up with an alluring text to increase click-through rate (you can also include a clickbait)
● keep it short – usually there is a maximum character limit (this varies by search type, but as a tip, include the target keyword in the first half of the title)
● include the target keyword in description
[63] Google is a fan of well-structured websites and a clear content hierarchy. The easiest way to achieve this is to use headings.
Generally, you should use Heading 1 (H1) for the main page title. Subsequently, use H2 and H3 (and so on) for subtitles with the goal to further structure the
content on the following levels.
[64] We have already mentioned the importance of headings on your site above. Not only Google loves a well-structured page – your users love it well. It
makes it so much easier to read and understand your content if it’s formatted and styled according to your content hierarchy.
Apart from varying font size, you can leverage formatting parameters such as bold, italic or cursive styles, include lists or blockquotes, and so on to enhance
the user experience – and in return, a better Google ranking!
[65] Having internal links in place (see Content Hubs checkpoint) helps to turn your page into a healthy website and helps increase organic traffic.
You can link to other relevant pages as well as to your own pages.
[66] Research shows that websites that link to external sites tend to rank higher than websites that don’t. Hence, try to place links to other websites where it
makes sense, for example if these sites go in depth on a certain topic. This increases overall user experience as well as it makes it easy for people to
navigate to other topics.
Another option is to set anchor parameters:
● “rel nofollow” (if the link is an affiliate you should always set that anchor)
● “target _blank” for opening the link in a new window
Not sure what this means exactly? Go more in-depth here.
[67] While this sounds like a no-brainer, it happens all the time!
Here’s an example: Let’s say we target the focus keyword “Los Angeles Wedding Planner” with our homepage. On this homepage I now accidentally link to
my “About me” page with the SAME anchor text. Why is this bad? Because at the end of the day I want my main Homepage to rank for the target keyword –
if I link to the “About me” page in this manner, I signal Google that I would like the “About me” page to rank higher – which should never be the goal.
Tip: Turn it around and link from the “About me” page to the Homepage – with the anchor text “Los Angeles Wedding Planner”!
It can be tricky to identify this issue – especially when it comes to blog posts and external links – as the anchor texts sometimes don’t coincide with the focus
keyword, but with variations of it. What happens is that you end up giving another website a boost, rather than your own.
[68] Even though we are in the year 2020, Google still has no proper way to identify the “content” of a picture. So what Google does instead is relying on the
image names and tags. In order to make sure Google understands your pictures and can classify them accordingly, make sure to give them meaningful
names.
A great example are stock pictures which often have perfectionized the image naming. See it for yourself: Go to depositphotos.com and hover over any
picture to see the description behind it. This is how it could look like:
“stock-photo-delicious-fresh-meat-cheeseburgers-wooden.jpg”
[68] Even though we are in the year 2020, Google still has no proper way to identify the “content” of a picture. So what Google does instead is relying on the
image names and tags. In order to make sure Google understands your pictures and can classify them accordingly, make sure to give them meaningful
names.
A great example are stock pictures which often have perfectionized the image naming. See it for yourself: Go to depositphotos.com and hover over any
picture to see the description behind it. This is how it could look like:
“stock-photo-delicious-fresh-meat-cheeseburgers-wooden.jpg”
[69] This goes hand in hand with the previous paragraph: Add descriptive alternative (alt) text to your images to provide more context. These additional tags
are an important source for search engines to “understand an image” – it basically enables them to index it properly.
But be careful: Make sure to use unique and descriptive alt tags in order to avoid “over-optimization”. Hence, don’t use tags that are similar to your focus
keywords but not directly relevant as this adds up to the keyword density.