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Q&A Interview With The SEMrush Team: Talking SEO & Online Marketing

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Q&A Interview With The SEMrush Team: Talking SEO & Online Marketing

Last week, we sat down with a few members from the SEMrush team. In a nutshell, SEMrush is today the world’s leading provider of competitive intelligence and keyword research for professional digital marketing campaigns, with versatile, affordable plans. And yes – we use and love their software. We talked to Tara, Michael Stricker, Michael Isaac, and Tyler in our Q&A session. (Bios of the team members are at the end of this post.) We asked them how SEMrush came to be, common marketing problems to be faced today, SEO insights for website owners, among other things. It was a great session, with a lot of useful knowledge shared from their team – read, enjoy, and share! Tell us a little about how SEMrush was started (what’s your founding story)? Michael Stricker: “It was a dark and stormy night…” – Oleg and partners are the only ones who can answer this… they concocted something to aid their SEO data-gathering, and their peers were so taken with the result that they offered to pay for it… and the rest is history. Tyler: Oleg and Dmitry were tech guys working for a marketing firm with the task of creating “cool tools” (as Oleg puts it) for their company to run more efficiently. The point wasn’t profit; just create something cool and useful for the industry. They got so into it that they spun off the tools to create SEOQuake then SEMrush. Tara: Please see this for quotes directly from Oleg. What kind of daily problems does SEMrush answer for online marketers? Michael Stricker: Questions arise regarding what keywords your market is using most frequently. SEMrush enables astute marketers to get inside their prospect’s heads for a minute. The fact that it also affords an X-ray into what is working best for one’s online competitors is the icing on the cake. Add to that keywords, ads, clicks and spend for AdWords and you’ve got a chocolate layer cake. Sweeten that with Google Shopping data regarding keywords and prices and you’ve got a tray of high-converting cupcakes on top. Now, consider mobile search terms, visibility tracking and then specify local search down to the city and state, and you’ve got a tiered wedding cake for SEOs married to the data. Roll out the SEO Audit to help find and fix link errors and such that can trap search spiders and prevent your site from being fully indexed and you’ve got confections fit for a Technical SEO. Do that in 28 countries worldwide and Bing U.S. and you’ve given the world a slice of the pie. Michael Isaac: When people use SEMrush, they are constantly looking for answers. “What will be my next keywords?”, “Who should I be looking at the closest as a competitor?”, “What are the next errors I should fix on my site?”. We help our users find out all of this information every time they log in. We can tell them who is ranking for the same keywords they are, what issues we find with their site through our Site Audit tool, what keywords they should target next through their SEO and multiple other reports that can contribute to their overall success. We have users that are logging in every day fully utilizing the data we have in our database to improve themselves and find new information that will grow their online marketing efforts. Tyler: Prospecting clients with overview report and site audit. Which keywords to optimize for and which to stay away from. Who’s linking to me, what kind of links, and which links I should no-follow. Who’s spending what and how much in ads? Tracking and reporting SEO/PPC progress. Tara: While we market SEMrush as a competitive intelligence tool, there are many other things it can do for digital marketers. As a content manager and writer, I appreciate the insight SEMrush offers in editorial direction. I can use it to see which topics we’ve covered thoroughly or where we need more content. SEMrush allows me to combine instinct and data to produce informative content our readers enjoy. You’re not just competing with others, you’re competing with what you’ve already done on your own website. How would SEMrush benefit a typical marketer looking to analyze or boost their SEO rankings? Michael Stricker: Market insight comes with crowd-sourced data about what it is that web users are actually searching for, and the words and phrasing they use indicates just where they are on the “path to purchase”. Competitive insight gleaned from understanding your keyword strengths (unique, well-performing content and keywords), weaknesses (gap analysis), opportunities (popular keywords unique to competitors), and threats (keywords that are very competitively shared by commercial foes) all feeds into a holistic picture of what works and what does not, so that experimentation and attendant risk is minimized and positive SEO results can be accelerated and maintained. Knowing when to avoid pursuit of steeply-competitive keywords can preserve working capital for small or new domains. Gaining knowledge of competitors who invoke your brand to gain traffic for themselves is like a suit of golden armor. Forewarned is forearmed. Michael Isaac: Typical marketers are always looking for ways to improve their SEO and watch their competition closely. We believe here at SEMrush that we have came up with the perfect tool to conduct this research. We have tools that will provide insight on possible keywords you are looking to target or have been keeping an eye on. We offer multiple tools and reports that will assist you with tracking your competition and adding their SEO/PPC campaigns to determine where they have been struggling the most. Tyler: How wouldn’t they? Unless they feel like wasting a million hours manually crawling SERP results then they need SEMrush. They probably won’t need every feature, but life without a tool like SEMrush is like setting yourself up for failure– as a digital marketing. Tara: One of my favorite features about SEMrush is the position tracker report. I have my personal website set up in SEMrush and the … Read more

The Basics Of How to Fix Any Google Penalty

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The Basics Of How to Fix Any Google Penalty

It’s not surprising if you’ve encountered a Google penalty at some point, if you’re a website owner. Google only represents the most popular search engine in the world today. On average, over 1.17 billion unique searchers use Google to find what they’re looking for on the net. And recently, Google has realized the need for streamlining the results it gives to users. This new user-centric program deals with helping users get more relevant results out of their search. In order to do this, Google has started inspecting the things that make up a website and comparing them to what it considers a useful website. Understanding Google Penalties: How To Fix Any Google Penalty In keeping with the model that Google is aiming to perfect regarding relevancy of search results, a set of guidelines were given to webmasters for them to understand what Google looks for in order to rank a site well. How Do They Happen? Penalties occur when a webmaster ignores one or more of these guidelines, either willfully or inadvertently. If your site is hit with a penalty, it becomes quite obvious when you look at your recent web traffic. At one point you’ll see your web traffic decline. What Makes Them Really Bad? If the decline is significant enough then you may have a really big problem. This can put a damper on your lead generation and significantly curtail it. 57% of B2B marketers state that search results make up a majority of their leads, so you can see how damaging a penalty is to a site or domain. The thing is, the penalties are supposed to be damaging. They’re aimed at managing and preventing abuse of resources while at the same time trying to keep website owners honest in their dealings with searchers. They try to balance searches to deliver the most relevant results but in order to do so they might hit sites that might be perfectly above board, except that they break one or two rules that Google has said delineates a site as good. It’s a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it’s true, but until there’s a better, more efficient algorithm, it’s a chance the search engine giant is willing to take. Major Signs You Got Penalized One of the key things you need to understand before we go any further is this: just because you had a decrease in traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you were hit by a penalty. Many webmasters give in to their confirmation bias and jump to conclusions about their site being hit by Google for not conforming on some little detail when it really wasn’t Google’s fault at all that the numbers were just bad for one particular week due to some obscure technical detail such as: issues with crawling poor redirects issues with the server bad robots.txt configuration blocking access These are a few of the more common reasons why a site’s traffic may be affected through non-Google means. Decrease in traffic is one of the ways you can tell that your site MAY have been hit with a penalty. Other telltale signs of a penalty occurring may be: traffic drops on individual pages or regarding specific keywords A significant number of your pages get de-indexed Your entire site becomes de-indexed There is no surefire way to tell if you’ve been hit with a penalty just from looking at your traffic. That’s why, to ensure that you’re dealing with a penalty, you need to employ other means. Looking At Algorithmic & Manual Penalties In the penalties category, Google can hit you with one of two types of penalties. Manual penalties are usually given if your site obviously operating as though it’s a suspicious site. They can curtail quite a lot of your traffic. Most webmasters won’t ever get hit with one of these, unless they’re knowingly doing something underhanded and get caught by Google. Algorithmic penalties come from algorithm updates. As Google upgrades its algorithm from version to version, some users get hit with a penalty if they don’t conform to what Google expects to see when it runs its algorithm on the site. Algorithmic penalties are much harder to find than manual penalties, and usually requires you to do a bit of digging. Detecting Penalties If you assume you have a penalty of some sort, the simplest method to figure out if it’s true is to log in to Google Search Console (which was formerly Webmaster Tools). Once there you can unroll your messages to see if Google detected something untoward about your website. Alternatively you can check the Search Traffic Heading under Manual Actions and you will see if you were hit with a manual penalty. Algorithmic penalties are a bit harder to put your finger on. There’s no flagged message or heads-up in any console screen that tells you that you’ve been penalized by the algorithm. One of the more effective methods of testing to see if your site was hit by an algorithmic penalty is to determine when your traffic dropped and manually determine if any important Google update occurred on or near that date to mess with your traffic. The Panguin Tool is an automatic method of doing that that saves you time in the long run. It is also important to remember that this is not a 100% effective method of determining if you’ve been hit by an algorithmic penalty, but only serves as a rough guideline. Understanding the 5 Major Google Penalties There are quite a large range of penalties that Google can possibly hit you with. These include, but are not limited to penalties that deal with spam, weak content, backlinks and a hundred other small algorithmic updates that can affect your traffic to varying amounts. The most common penalties you’re going to encounter can be classified into a few major categories such as: 1. Unnatural links: Unnatural links come in one of two flavors: Links To your Site: These links originate outside of … Read more

What Happened to Google’s Local Search Content? Big Ranking Changes

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What Happened to Google's Local Search Content? Big Ranking Changes

For people familiar with Google’s local search content & overall algorithms, it’s clear that things are changing (again). In the lingo of SEOs, earlier this month, people began to notice that the 7-packs that typically showed up in the business search results had been replaced by 3-packs. Although many marketers were initially alarmed, the trend continued and it soon became clear that the presentation of local searches had changed. Google’s Local Search Content: What Does the Pack Thing Mean? Before we go any further, I better define what the heck this “pack” thing is. (This is what Google refers to it as.) 7-pack vs. 3-pack simply means that Google is showing 7 locations instead of 3 when you search for a location. See example screenshot when I searched for “restaurants Austin” on my mobile Android device. It only gives me 3 results before the More button. Back to the News Story So within hours of the first 3-pack’s appearance, 3-packs had completely replaced all 7-packs across all vertical search rankings in every country. People were shocked. Although Google is known for rapid-fire updates, they had previously tested local changes and then rolled them out only to certain countries. Needless to say, the rapid change to local search results has left many people wondering what happened and what comes next. Local Search Results Optimized for Mobile One of the reasons that Google changed the face of their local searches is to accommodate the ever-growing number of mobile searches. By optimizing their search results for mobile devices, they cater to the wide selection of their users who prefer accessing the web via smartphone. Now, when desktop users view their search results, they will notice that it looks quite similar to the search results a mobile user would see: the 3-pack has been designed to fit perfectly onto the screen of mobile users and desktop users are along for the ride. In light of these recent changes, the top 3 search engine spaces are hot real estate for content marketers everywhere. Although mobile users have been accustomed to 3-packs for quite some time, desktop users are just now getting the swing of things and there is a high probability that content that doesn’t make the cut of the top 3 will be forgotten by users. How Did the 3-Pack Changes Affect Traffic? As you can imagine, Google’s local search content doesn’t just change willy-nilly. For all of Google’s algo updates, each proposed change goes through a heavy regiment of testing and, historically, SEO’S have noticed these tests as they take place. A few SEO’s predicted the 3-pack change and local businesses with more than two competitors have begun to feel the heat. Many SEO’s speculate that Google made the change to 3-packs because the search results in the top three spaces of Google’s presentation were getting the most traffic. These results probably garnered more clicks and more attention, but this can probably be attributed to positioning more than anything else. Even if mobile rankings operated on the 7-pack system, the top 3 fit perfectly on a mobile screen, making them far more visible to a mobile user. Unless the mobile user scrolls down, results4-7 are all but invisible. That said, it’s likely that Google made the change because results 4-7 were simply not getting enough clicks and they wanted to streamline user experience. Many local companies, however, don’t appreciate being booted from the first page because, even if they weren’t in the top 3, being in results 4-7 still offered ample branding opportunities and provided companies with a way to get their company out there for added exposure and notability. Changes to Addresses In the new 3-pack results, searchers will notice that Google has made some important changes to the addresses that appear in the 3-pack queries: they’ve removed specific, numerical addresses in favor of street names and not all local businesses love it. Although this change may promote people clicking through, which is a great thing for businesses that don’t land a spot in the top 3, even clicking through doesn’t show an address on the left side of the page. Additionally, searchers no longer see phone numbers, Google+ links or flyouts. Store hours, however, have been added. Ability to Search for Ratings With the new 3-pack changes, Google users can now search for businesses based solely on their ratings. This is especially crucial for restaurant-related businesses. Now that users can search based on star-ratings (two stars, three stars or four stars), it’s obvious that companies are going to find themselves competing for increased ratings. When given the chance to search only for four-star companies, it stands to reason that Google users might not be all that interested in two or three stars. This is big news for small businesses with local competitors. What Google’s Local Search Content Change Means for SEO All of the changes implicit in the new 3-pack structure spell some big competition for SEO’s. Now that Google has essentially lopped four spots off of prime results page real estate, the competition for the top three has become fierce. Even companies that currently have a spot in the top three local search results can’t afford to get too relaxed: a spot today does not guarantee a spot tomorrow, especially because the competition for those spots just got fierce. This new climate calls for companies to optimize their content for local SEO by taking steps like researching keywords, creating high-quality content and developing a highly visible home page that includes the company’s name, address and phone number as well as an embedded geo sitemap. Additionally, companies that can garner additional positive customer reviews will stand a better chance of sitting pretty in the search results. Conclusion Although these steps aren’t shocking to those familiar with SEO, they are new for local businesses that have never done any local SEO before. In the changing climate of Google’s local searches, though, it’s obvious that companies with more than two competitors now … Read more

The SEO Basics of 2015 (It’s Hard, Here’s How You Win) Q&A With Jeff Deutsch

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The SEO Basics of 2015 (It's Hard, Here's How You Win) Q&A With Jeff Deutsch

We sat down – virtually, of course – with acclaimed author and SEO marketer Jeff Deutsch, author of the viral Inbound post Confessions of a Google Spammer (which hit over 160,000 views and 90k+ Facebook shares). He gave us some awesome, original insights on SEO basics for current marketers in 2015 (and beyond). It’s a read any online marketer should take the time to make. Tell us a little about how and why you got started in SEO. I’ve always dreamed of changing the world through mind control. As an introvert, SEO seemed like the best way to approach it. I probably got the dream from my dad. He was a pretty prolific writer. When I was 8 years old, he taught me how to hypnotize people. He used to proudly tell me stories about how, in college at Columbia in the 1950s, he would make his (pretty, female) subjects regress to memories from the womb—and beyond. I thought that was pretty cool. In college, I majored in political science. Because I thought they were going to teach me how to do mind control on a mass scale. (Spoiler alert: They didn’t.) So I tried doing it on my own. My first experiment came in 2003. At the time, the debate was raging on the need for war in Iraq. I was fervently against it. I had carefully collated all the projections on how many lives would be lost and money spent. Then I put up a website with the facts. Then I advertised the website by stapling and taping hundreds of bright lemon yellow flyers all over the conservative, war-hungry streets of New Orleans. The next day, I saw most of my flyers had been torn down during the night. My anti-war website got no traffic. That was the first time it dawned on me how important it is to have a reliable source of traffic that other people can’t easily take down. I wish I could say I started doing SEO back then, because man! It was easy back then. Unfortunately, I only started to figure it out in 2008, when I was doing marketing for a company in Beijing that had virtually no budget. By 2010, I had started my own little SEO company in Plainsboro, New Jersey, in an attempt to escape the Beijing pollution and relocate myself and my then-pregnant wife to the U.S. The relocation failed, but the SEO succeeded in a big way. How big have SEO basics changed since the day you started out in SEO compared to today? Nowadays, it takes a LOT more money, charisma, or tech skills to start an SEO agency. Today’s SEO basics are a lot different that yesterday’s. Back in 2010, anyone with limited tech skills and the right cheat-sheet could easily start a successful SEO agency on a $1200 budget. I even wrote a post about it on backlinksforum.com if you want to know the details. But the basic concept was building parasite backlinks using spun content and force indexing them. If you don’t recognize those terms, never mind. They’re not going to help with SEO for the big money keywords these days anyway. However, I talked to some guys at one SEO agency at Opticon and according to them—amazingly—these methods STILL work for very low competition keywords. They use them to rank for reputation management clients’ names. But they are the exception to the rule. Most successful agencies these days have the money, charisma, or tech skills to have a comparative advantage over you and me. They gobble up all the keywords (and clients… and money…) by combining that advantage with the scaling power of automation and social media to force the Gini coefficient of SEO ever upwards closer to 1.0. Money SEO agencies These guys just buy links on high PR guest blogs like HuffingtonPost, or buy whole sites on Flippa to turn into pumpers or feeders, or pay to build a big ole PBN. They have the resources to reverse engineer their competitors’ backlink profiles and outbid them on quality link placement. Profile: Think in-house link buyers for online casinos. Zodiac sign: Taurus. Star Wars equivalent: Think Senator Lott Dod, Minister of the Trade Federation. D&D counterpart: A NEUTRAL EVIL human rogue. Charisma SEO Agencies These people know how to network, be popular and get tight with high traffic sites. And get them to link to their creative content. Which they know people will like because they extrovertedly talk talk talk to everyone. Profile: Think inbound marketers like Dharmesh Shah, Neil Patel, Joel Klettke. Zodiac sign: Libra. Star Wars equivalent: Queen Padmé Amidala. D&D counterpart: A LAWFUL GOOD half-elf bard. Tech Skill SEO Agencies These folks know how to automate outreach and find loopholes to rank and bank. Mostly these guys are pretty agnostic about the method, and only care about the result, so it’s hard to label them “white hat” or “black hat.” If, for example, they develop a WP plugin that gets them cloaked links, and they only rank reputable sites, who are they hurting really? Or maybe they develop the scripts to find high value expired domains with aged backlinks to build PBNs or 3BNs. The main thing is that they are mavericks who zig when everyone else zags, and they almost assuredly rock the pants off PHP, Python, Ruby, or all three. Profile: Think Justin Mares from ProgrammingForMarketers.com and any SEOs on StackExchange.com. Zodiac sign: Aquarius. Star Wars equivalent: Han Solo. D&D counterpart: A CHAOTIC NEUTRAL halfling swashbuckler. By the way, as you can see from my $1200 guide above, back in 2010 people like me used to hand out actionable, effective SEO basics advice on forums for free all the time. Those days are over. Nobody does that anymore for The Three Reasons People Don’t Publicly Share Effective SEO Tactics Anymore. The Three Reasons People Don’t Publicly Share Effective SEO Tactics Anymore Google’s anti-spam team reads the forums to find and close loopholes the way agents in the … Read more

Time to Get Optimized: 10 SEO Content Writing Tips

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Time to Get Optimized: 10 SEO Content Writing Tips

The cornerstone of great online content is great SEO. And yet, without content there is no SEO. It’s an interesting complex. Without great SEO content, no website can rank well, can’t be found by users, and can’t go viral on the web. With this in mind, it’s clear that writers who want to develop their online brand and improve the functionality of their online content are essential, as well as their skill sets. To help you achieve great SEO content, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite SEO writing tips to help you succeed. Read on to learn more. 10 Smart SEO Writing Tips for Better Content Great content is the sum of its parts, and one of its most important parts is SEO. Unfortunately, many writers simply don’t understand how to take the (few) tenants of SEO and apply them to online copywriting. Fortunately, those who want to learn can simply take the following SEO writing tips and plug them into their online content for better results, starting today: 1. Keep all of your content high-quality Today’s publishers are under an intense amount of pressure. People want more content than ever before, and they want it faster than it’s often possible to produce it. Because of this, many publishers and marketers weaken and start publishing low-quality content just to have published something. Unfortunately, this is the wrong way to go. While it may seem like low-quality content can be optimized just the same, it’s important to remember that great SEO goes much deeper than technical mumbo-jumbo. While you may be able to use the same keyword phrase in low-quality content as you do high-quality content, its effect on your readers won’t be the same, and you’ll likely sacrifice some relevance and value as a result. Keep in mind that, in the world of SEO, all good things begin with quality content. Without a quality piece of content to optimize, your SEO efforts won’t pack the punch they should, and your content risks falling flat on its face. By insisting on publishing only high-quality content, you can help ensure that your readers will find value in your material and that all of the SEO work you do down the road serves to enhance an already powerful piece. 2. Keep your topic relevant to your audience No matter what you’re writing, don’t lose sight of your audience. Some writers have a tendency to drift off to unrelated topics in hopes of being engaging and unique to a wide assortment of readers, but this misses the mark entirely. Instead of leaping from one point to the next, ensure that your content features a cohesive structure and that it’s all designed with your target audience in mind. Focus on what you’re writing and keep who you’re writing to in mind. Unless your content has a well-defined target audience, it never really stands a chance of ranking well, and the likelihood that it will go viral in a particular segment or group is small. Make it simple. With this in mind, do your homework. Research your target audience and find unique ways to speak to them in your online copy. Make it fun. People will know good quality writing when they see it, and they’ll know you’re talking to them when you take proactive steps to do so. 3. Experiment with formulas for your headlines They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but in the world of SEO it might sound more like this: “Imitation is the fastest path to success.” You know that sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy are famous for their click-bait headlines, and, if you’re like most readers, you’ve probably clicked a few yourself. As it stands today, one of the most critical components of any piece of content is its headline. In addition to providing an SEO boost by featuring relevant long-tail keywords, a headline also has a dramatic impact on click-through-rate, which, in turn, has a significant impact on SEO. With this in mind, it’s clear that you cannot afford to let your headlines slack. Because of this, you may want to try headline formulas and see where they get you. While nobody is advocating that you steal your competition’s headlines, or borrow excessively from successful companies, taking note of what they do and applying it to your business is an excellent way to boost your headline success and influence your click-through rates in a positive way. In light of this, get to work testing out negative headlines, lists, headlines that reference your audience, and those that inspire curiosity. When you find one that works well, play with variations of it. In addition to boosting your SEO, this will also make you a better writer. 4. Avoid overstuffing your content with keywords Keep your eye on how many times you use your target keyword. While keyword density obsessions have slackened in the last several years, keywords still need to feel natural, and if they don’t, you’re liable to get penalized by Google. A good rule of thumb is to stick to in a keyword for every 50 or 100 words of content. More than that, and it will sound redundant. Less than that, and your content won’t actually be optimized for the keyword. Wherever you use your target keyword, keep it simple and to the point. Users will pick up on awkward keyword inclusion faster than you can say “hot potato,” and they’re willing to abandon your content because of it. 5. Break your content up into headers and subheaders In addition to making your content easier for users to read, breaking it into headers and subheaders also helps your content look more appealing, and it can have some distinct SEO benefits, as well. One of the best guidelines for this practice comes from WordPress’s powerful Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin, which evaluates on-page content for SEO and readability, generally recommends that there be no more than 300 words between headers or subheaders. This keeps content readable and skimmable for users. 6. Update your content on a regular basis Updating your content … Read more

Essential Blogging Tips: Q&A with Adam Connell, Founder of Blogging Wizard

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Essential Blogging Tips: Q&A with Adam Connell, Founder of Blogging Wizard

This week is the first week of our Q&As, a series we’ll be doing weekly with experts in our field, so we can learn and grow from their wisdom. Stay subscribed so you can read them weekly! We’re excited to present our first one: last week, we had the chance to (virtually) sit down with Adam Connell from Blogging Wizard. We asked him all about blogging—and he gave us some awesome insight and great blogging tips. It’s a must-read for any serious blogger. Essential Blogging Tips: Interview with Adam Connell, Founder of Blogging Wizard & Julia McCoy If you’re at any stage in blogging (just beginning, several years in the game, etc.) you’ll love what Adam has to say. Let’s get started! 1. What inspired you to create Blogging Wizard? Before starting Blogging Wizard I’d launched a few different blogs and the success I’d had helped me land a marketing job. After working at the agency for a while I wanted an outlet to share what I was learning, and in particular help other bloggers. One night I woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled “Blogging Wizard” on a piece of paper and went to sleep. The following day I purchased the domain name and started planning. 2. Tell us a little about your success story. Like most new blogs, it took a while to take off. Especially as I didn’t have much free time to grow Blogging Wizard. But as time went on I landed some good guest blogging opportunities on the likes of Problogger, and Search Engine Journal. I focused on connecting with other bloggers and began being featured in group interviews, as well as some coverage in HuffPost and CIO. In June 2014 I’d grown my blog to the point where I could leave my full time marketing job and focus 100% on blogging. Since then I’ve been mentioned on the likes of Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine. At the moment I get around 60K-70K monthly readers. 3. What’s one piece of advice you would give someone just starting out in blogging? The most important thing to get nailed down at the start is what you’re trying to achieve. If you don’t know where you’re going, how can you make sure that you get there? Sure, you might end up there by chance but if you take control of your goals, you can make sure it happens. The next step is to work backwards from your end goal and figure out exactly how you’re going to get there. Break everything down into smaller, more manageable steps. Look at it from a tactical level too. You want to grow your audience and be able to keep more people coming back to your blog, so what’s the best way to do that? For most blogs, it means building an email list! So once you know what to focus on, you can build your blog around it and prioritize other things like social media accordingly. For example, I get more traffic from my email list than my social following, despite my social following being larger. So while I still work on improving my social presence, my blog is geared more to encourage email sign ups than social follower growth. The bottom line is this: know what you want to achieve, break it down into smaller steps and you’ll achieve your goals much faster. These are my blogging tips. 4. What’s a good way a blogger can narrow down on the right audience? First you need to make sure you’re in the right niche. I see so many blogs that start off so well and then fade into obscurity, this is usually because the blog owner has lost interest or they weren’t able to make the blog financially viable. So, start off right and consider 3 things – what you love, what you know and can you make money in that niche? Even if your goal isn’t to make money now, it may be in the future, after all, we’ve all got to put food on the table. The truth is that there’s usually a way you can make a blog profitable with some out of the box thinking, but when all other methods fail you can offer the skills you’ve attained as a blogger as a service – still, it’s good to consider revenue potential at the start. Having knowledge and experience you can draw upon is a valuable asset but I’m a big believer that you can learn anything you put your mind to, but the bottom line is that it helps. Above all else, the biggest consideration should be what you’re passionate about. You can make a success out of a blog that you’re not passionate for but it’s VERY challenging. And it defeats the point of starting a blog, most bloggers blog because they want to do what they love. By focusing on a niche you’re passionate about you will grow an audience faster (passion shows through in your writing) and you’ll be far more motivated to succeed. This is just the starting point though, the next step is to get as clear as possible on WHO you’re helping and HOW you’re going to help them. Be as specific as possible and really get to the core of who your target audience is. Creating an elevator pitch is a good idea, something like “I help ____ to _____”. For example, for a new project I’m working on, our elevator pitch is “we help solopreneurs streamline their life and streamline their business”. So get clear on who you’re helping and how you’re going to help them (i.e. the problems you’re going to solve) and your blog will grow so much faster. You’ll find it easier to speak to your audience and your audience will immediately see why they should follow your blog. To get clear on the WHO and the HOW, you could try to find online communities in your niche and ask people to fill … Read more

Google Panda 4.2 – What Does This Mean for Your Web Pages?

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Google Panda 4.2 – What Does This Mean for Your Web Pages?

Sarah Shade is a Content Specialist at Express Writers. The newest Panda is here. Panda 4.2 is Google’s most recent updated to their algorithm software and it’s already befuddling content marketers everywhere. It’s no secret that Google can be a little, well…secretive, about its updates so it’s no surprise that nobody really seems to know what’s going on with the 4.2 update. Fortunately, we’re here to help. Here is what the Google Panda 4.2 updates mean for your web pages— in as plain English as I can utilize. Google Panda 4.2 Will Affect a Small Percentage of Search Queries According to expert estimates, the Panda updates will affect some 2-3% of all web searches. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that this is Google we’re talking about so 2-3% equals roughly 36 million searches. This number isn’t quite as large as some of Panda’s previous updates. Panda 4.0 affected 7.5% of web searches while 4.1 took a toll on 3-5%. It’s easy to understand why some SEO’s are concerned, however, because between September 2011 and May 2014, none of Panda’s updates affected more than 2.4% of web searches. Panda 4.2 Still Insists Upon Quality Over Quantity One thing that hasn’t changed with the Panda 4.2 update is the insistence upon quality content. The update puts a high premium on quality content and can be expected to punish scraped content and down rate sites that use shoddy content creation techniques. As with previous Panda updates, Panda 4.2 is out to do away with keyword stuffing, content mills, ugly, broken or unscrupulous websites and black hat SEO practices that attempt to fly below Google’s algorithm radar. According to Google’s recent post on Google+: “Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.” For sites that are already creating high-quality content, these updates shouldn’t present a problem. For those that aren’t, however, it might be time for an about-face. Panda 4.2 will further emphasize Google’s insistence that sites need to focus on quality over quantity by producing original content that is well written and utilizes keywords correctly. Additionally, Panda 4.2 can be expected to crack down on ugly, overstuffed websites. On this same note, any site that has been penalized by any of the previous Panda updates will now have a chance to reform and step over to the side of all that is good and just in the world of content marketing. Sites that were down rated by previous panda updates and have made the needed changes will now have the chance see an uptick in traffic, providing the changes made were up to snuff. This is a double-edged sword, however, as sites that were not previously affected by the Panda updates may see a downtick in traffic due to the update and its accompanying requirements. If nothing else changes but you notice a lull in traffic post-Panda 4.2, it’s likely the new algorithm is to blame. Google Panda 4.2 is the Slowest Panda Yet Although this version of Panda was first introduced on July 18th of this year, the complete rollout is projected to occur slowly over the course of several months. This is not surprising, however, as Google’s updates have gotten slower and slower and the time between updates has expanded. It’s been ten months since Panda’s 4.1 update and sites that were dinged by that round of updates are anxiously awaiting 4.2 to take hold, although it looks like they’ll have to wait just a bit longer. On that same note, sites that haven’t placed the needed level emphasis on quality content may notice some downticks in their traffic with the 4.2 updates. Unfortunately, once the update is released, it is too late to make changes to a site and those penalized by the new updates will simply have to wait until the next slow Panda comes along. Because Google Panda 4.2 is such a slow-moving beast, SEOs may have a difficult time determining how and when the algorithm is affecting their site. On this same note, it will be somewhat difficult to pinpoint exactly what Panda 4.2 is promoting or penalizing although it’s safe to say that this update, like all the others, was born for the purpose of buoying quality content to the top of the search rankings. The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same With this recent Panda update, SEO’s have all the same questions they always have: what is the update targeting? How will webmasters become aware of penalties to their sites? What kind of content is best for rankings? Although the answers to these questions aren’t explicitly clear, it is a safe bet that this Panda is like all of the others in that it is seeking to promote and reward quality content. This means that sites that feature well-written, original content that utilizes high-quality links and has a high DA score are likely safe from any negative affects borne by the 4.2 update. In light of that, the high ground remains the same: create original content that is high quality, well researched and valuable to your readers. Although Panda’s updates may seem complex, they all point to the same thing: the value of great content and a war on sneaky SEO tactics that allow black hats to trick the system and artificially inflate rankings. This Panda, like all the other Panda’s in Google’s army, just wants to reward the sites that do the best job and let everyone else step to the back.

Google Needs an SEO Guy! How Even Google Struggles With Ranking

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Google Needs an SEO Guy! How Even Google Struggles With Ranking

It might seem impossible that Google, the king of SEO, needs help with SEO or that Google needs an SEO guy at all. But, according to a recent posting on the Google Careers job board – it’s true. The job board calls for an SEO project manager and describes the job like this: “As a Program Manager for Technical SEO, you will work with cross-functional teams across Marketing, Sales, Product Development, Engineering and more to help drive organic traffic and business growth. You will take part in website development and optimization, help shape blog and social strategy, improve website code hygiene and define web architecture for international websites.” (Source: google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=120105001) Google Needs An SEO Guy: Why Even Google Needs Help Regardless of whether you run the system or not, the process of increasing organic traffic is tough. Google’s lucky new SEO will be responsible for everything from developing web code to advising, collaborating with and synthesizing feedback from departments like Product and Engineering and Marketing. Although Google employs a large team of technical developers, designers, writers and engineers, it is possible that the addition of a new SEO would indicate that, in a sea of content, Google has trouble standing out – just like everyone else. For years, Google has been a business shrouded in mystery and intrigue – it seems larger than life, its updates are secretive and it seems to literally rule the Internet. This job posting, however, may provide a well-qualified SEO with a look behind the curtain. What the New SEO Will Need to Qualify for the Job It’s fair to say that whoever eventually fills this job description will be the envy of many SEO’s across the web. Being the SEO guy for Google is a little bit like being a member of the Kardashian’s camera crew – it’s an exciting role that offers plenty of behind-the-scenes intel and a fair amount of excitement. In order to be that lucky SEO, though, you’ll need the following qualifications: BA/BS degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent life experience. 4 years of experience developing websites and applications with applications and software such as SQL, HTML5, and XML. At least 2 years SEO experience. Experience working with Google App Engine, Google Custom Search, Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Experience creating and maintaining project schedules and extensive experience utilizing tools within project management systems. How the New SEO Will Boost Google’s Rankings Even if you are Google, there are no free lunches in terms of SEO. In order to boost the company’s rankings and drive more organic traffic, Google’s SEO will have to focus on content rather than simply relying on technical SEO. In addition to being vastly more evergreen than technical SEO, content is the #1 ranking factor these days and is the only sure way for a company, any company, to boost its rankings. Although SEO is and will always be an important factor to understanding rankings and boosting a site’s position in the indexes, it’s clear that Google’s new SEO will have to focus on a bit more than SEO alone. Why Content is King Not much has changed since Bill Gates used the term “content is king” way back in 1996 and, today, it rings as true as ever. Cliché though it might be, content is king, and there’s really no way to get around that in the world of rankings. While SEO is a pivotal piece of the structure that creates great rankings and high-quality, high DA websites, content is the crème de la crème of digital marketing, far beyond technical SEO. The reason for this is that content is essentially the only thing that deems a page worthy of a search engine result. Keep in mind that it would, of course, be almost impossible to rank a blank page with SEO alone. That said, creating great content is integral for any company that wants to boost rankings in the long-term. Content Meets Consumer Demand Content is a product and it meets the consumer demand for information. Great content will quickly be passed around the web in order to satisfy the demand of a certain community of consumers and will be the subject of potentially infinite links and backlinks. There is a huge abundance of content on the web and, in every niche far and wide, there is great content and there is poor content. The difference between the two is that great content satisfies a thirst while poor content simply clogs SEO indexes with badly written junk. Great Content Provides Links One of the most important purposes great content plays in creating natural traffic is driving links. Great content is optimized for linking and will quickly be shared across the web, driving traffic back to the home site and boosting its rankings in Google. Regardless of what Google’s new SEO does, it is obvious that organic traffic comes, first and foremost, from content and all the technical SEO in the world isn’t worth much if there is not a great platform of content from which to spring. A Suggested SEO Strategy for Google In 3 Steps To give Google’s new SEO a leg-up, we’ve laid out a simple SEO strategy that helps drive organic traffic and boost ranking: 1) Begin With a Site Audit: Site audits are an important tool for anyone who wants to rank in search engines. Many sites have duplicate content hanging around that may damage rankings and even Google isn’t immune. Cleaning this up will go a long way toward producing better rankings and driving more traffic. 2) Conduct Some Keyword Research: Determine what keywords to start using and working into the new content you’re going to create. Keywords are a large factor in overall rankings and can help a page show up in Google’s indexes according to search terms and links. 3) Start Blogging and Creating Original Content: Remember – there are no free lunches and content is king. Start blogging and creating great, linkable, shareable original content and … Read more

9 Lies SEO’s Are Still Telling Themselves

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9 Lies SEO’s Are Still Telling Themselves

Joshua McCoy is our company COO and our all-around developer and web guru. Read more on the About page. Did you hear about this story yet? Chances are, if you’ve made any kind of rounds on the internet, you already have. After years of being a massively successful link builder who made upwards of $50,000 each month by spamming Google, marketer Jeff Deutsch realized that he was building homes on the dark side of the moon. I started out in SEO around 2010, and although many marketers around me did, I never followed suit and went the black hat way. I stayed white hat and inbound marketing friendly ever since I started out (which is why my role at our content agency, Express Writers, fits me perfectly). Yet, I know enough of the “dark” realms to have major respect for someone like Jeff telling his past as a black hat this transparently. The iconic image below was all too perfect for the crazy tale that subsequently fetched 150,000 views and over 94,000 shares alone on Facebook. He didn’t quit black hat SEO because the income wasn’t good or the lifestyle pleasant (quite the opposite, as Jeff details). It was because the SEO model he had created was impossible to maintain in the face of increased awareness about link builders and aggressive Google programs like Panda and Penguin. In Deutsch’s powerful confession piece, “Confessions of a Google Spammer,” the author chronicles his rise and subsequent downfall as a black hat link-builder. He transparently allows readers see the ugly truth of how the life of a professional, black hat SEO can quickly spiral out of control, becoming a merciless and often empty money-machine that leaves the spammer devoid of real skills or knowledge of white hat tactics. When his link-building business begins to fail, Deutsch becomes anxious and addicted and realizes that he is ill suited to survive in the post-de-indexing world. After a hellish 18 months, he finally realizes that to be truly white hat, he needs to cross over into the world of inbound marketing and high-quality content instead of continuing to run on the “anxiety-inducing treadmill of using black hat SEO to get traffic.” Although this story may seem anecdotal, it is more than just a come-to-SEO-Jesus moment. 9 Lies SEO Marketers Like To Tell Themselves (And Stay Comforted In Their Sleep) This story is a perfect example of how SEO’s often tell themselves things that involve the following nine lies, which lead not only to their personal downfalls, but also to the mucking-up of the entire SEO industry. 1) My latest hack will fall below Google’s radar yet again Although there are loopholes in every system, Google is a particularly good one and with developments in de-indexing as well as programs like Panda and Penguin, it’s highly unlikely that a hack will evade Google’s radar for long. What’s more, once Google catches on, there is a solid chance that the hacker is in for a rapid de-escalation of lifestyle like the one Detusch experienced after his $100,000 per month business was lost to de-indexing. 2) Those tiered links won’t get figured out anytime soon Since tiered link building is a decidedly black hat technique and search engines are on a mission to destroy black hat techniques, it’s a safe bet that tiered links won’t work the way SEO’s want them to. Google’s algorithm relies on at least 200 ranking factors arranged in order of their impact on total rank with contextual links being the crème de la crème of the linking world. Not only does tiered linking not work but it is likely to be found out due to the fact that a large number of low-quality links throws out a huge number of negative metrics, which acts as a footprint for Google’s spam filters, which are now built specifically to obliterate spam-filled tiered links. 3) My pyramid linking scheme still works Pyramid linking is a risky business and since it is so intrinsically reliant upon wobbly pillars like tiered links and ongoing hacks, it is liable to crumble and, when it does, the SEO is in deep trouble. Once again, one needs only to turn to Deutsch’s article for an example of this. After the Authority Link Network began to crumble, Deutsch found himself in the position of watching his clients loose their clients and so on and so forth. Although a pyramid seems like it might touch the sky, there is no way for the top to stay intact when the bottom begins to crumble. 4) I can post crappy content that a $5 Fiverr gig author wrote Content is king, as it turns out, and there’s really no way to get around this fact. Nowadays, crappy content sticks out like a sore thumb and Google doesn’t appreciate spammers who add millions of words of spam to its index. As a result, there have been several updates to the system that are designed specifically to target cheap, spammy content. With increasing focus on high-quality content and strong, white-hat links, it’s gotten harder and harder for crappy content to rise through the ranks. 5) I still think I can succeed with .gov links Links are an important topic to white- and black-hat SEO’s alike but the essential difference lies in the type of link being used. Links can either help or hurt SEO or simply be ignored altogether by search engines. .Gov links happen to fall into the latter camp. White certain types of .gov links can be beneficial to SEO ranking, they do not often rank as high as other types of links. The reason for this is that, historically, black hat SEO’s have used .gov and .edu links to lend false authority to their spammy content and, like it always does, Google caught on. 6) My article spinner isn’t broken Simply put, article spinning is poor form for any SEO and, as search engines continue to evolve, the use of article spinning software continues to become a worse idea. One … Read more

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