seo rankings - Express Writers

January 2020 Core Update: All You Need to Know (Plus Tips on How to Survive It)

January 1, 2021January 28, 2020 by Adam Oakley

On January 13, Google announced a core algorithm update called the January 2020 Core Update. Immediately, site owners took to social media to express their dismay on (yet another) major change that could affect the years of hard work they’d put into reaching a top spot on Google’s SERPs. Some posted despairing memes. Others begged Google “not to be cruel.” Yet others worried how their keyword rankings would be affected as the new update rolled in. pic.twitter.com/VhifzOau2o — Heba Said (@HebaSaidSEO) January 13, 2020 So, what is the January 2020 Core Update? Should you be worried about it? Most importantly, what changes should you make to your site so you don’t lose your Google rankings? Let’s explore this massive update in today’s brand new blog. [bctt tweet=”Should you be worried about @Google’s January Core Update? What should you do to maintain your rankings? Find out in this new guide by @JuliaEMcCoy” username=”ExpWriters”] January 2020 Core Update: All You Need to Know (Plus Tips on How to Survive It) – Table of Contents January 2020 Core Update, Explained Experts and Content Creators Speak Up about the January 2020 Core Update The Top Sites Impacted by the January 2020 Core Update How to Optimize Your Site to Survive the January 2020 Core Update 5 Aspects of Content That Ranks Well on Google 1. Originality 2. Comprehensiveness 3. Expertise 4. User-Friendly and Trustworthy Presentation 5. User Value 5 Tips to Update Your Content and Continue Ranking Well Despite Major Google Updates 1. Write Content You Can’t Find Elsewhere 2. Improve Content Found on High-Ranking Sites for Your Keyword 3. Proofread to Perfection 4. Step into Your Audience’s Shoes 5. Forget Keywords Moving Forward after the January 2020 Core Update January 2020 Core Update, Explained Google’s number one goal is to provide value to users. Because of this, it has made thousands of changes per year in recent years. However, not all of these changes are noticeable. Most of them are tiny tweaks. The January 2020 Core Update is different. According to Google, this update will have more noticeable and actionable effects for content producers and webmasters. source: Google Webmaster Central Blog [bctt tweet=”The January 2020 Core Update is different. According to Google, this update will have more noticeable and actionable effects for content producers and webmasters.” username=”ExpWriters”] What it boils down to is Google making a brand-new list of the top sites with the most value in 2020. If your site takes a hit and falls in the SERPs, it’s not because it’s a bad site. It’s simply because users are changing. There are a ton of new sites online. And there are sites which have been online for some time, but whose value was never fully discovered. Source: Search Engine Journal Overall, the January 2020 Core Update is going to shake up the SEO world. Let’s look at what webmasters and content creators have to say about it. Experts and Content Creators Speak Up about the January 2020 Core Update Users reacted differently when the news of the January 2020 Core Update was released. Some were dismayed. pic.twitter.com/cN9wSAXasi — Jon Tromans (@JonTromans) January 13, 2020 Others were confused. @JohnMu YOU PEOPLE HAVE ROBBED US OF OUR HARD WORK and Thousands of dollars spent on content. CONFUSED @Google @googlewmc — Kingsley Felix (@Iamkingsleyf) January 14, 2020 Still others decided to laugh it off. I miss the days when these updates had cool animal names — Da Schnitzi (@DaSchnitzi) January 13, 2020 Of course, top marketers and SEO experts had their own opinions. Rand Fishkin’s interest was on the bolded ads, favicons, and brand icons featured in the update. My theory on why this took so long to get to desktop: Google knows it obscures ads & thus increases ad CTR (according to @jumpshotinc data from 2019, the mobile change yielded ~15% more ad clicks), and wanted to wait until a quarter in which they needed to show that growth. https://t.co/5bMQoCLbS2 — Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 13, 2020 SEMrush listed three prominent changes the update included. What’s new in #Google? January 2020 Core update Brand icons & black ad labels are live on desktop SERPs Brand new SERP features New options in the rich results test More fresh industry news in our first Google News Digest of 2020 https://t.co/7DyriMZo9A. — SEMrush (@semrush) January 20, 2020 A few days after the release of the update, Glenn Gabe tweeted his findings on the “volatile” splash it had made. The Jan 2020 core update volatility seems to be calming down, which makes sense. Danny announced on Thurs that the update completed, although we could see the effects for a week or two. But to me, major volatility should be done. Here are some of the trackers showing volatility: pic.twitter.com/b3nGzW8O31 — Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 18, 2020 Will this update affect you? According to Danny Sullivan, it will, no matter where you live. It’s a global update. It has (and does always unless we say otherwise) rolled out globally. — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 16, 2020 The Top Sites Impacted by the January 2020 Core Update In the few days since the January 2020 Core Update rolled in, various sites in different sectors showed significant change in SERP rankings. Let’s look at the winners and losers (so far). 1. Sites with Improved Rankings Since the January 2020 Core Update According to data from Sistrix, sites in the health sector enjoyed gains since the update rolled in. OnHealth.com and verywellhealth.com saw a 37.7% and 34.72% change, respectively. Source: Sistrix.com Other sites with improved ranking include a football site, a movie tickets site, and two news sites. Could this have to do with trending news (the British Royal Family and the Holocaust) and entertainment content? 2. Sites with Lower Rankings Since the January 2020 Core Update The sites which took the biggest hits since the update are carmagazine.co.uk and boxofficemojo.com. Source: Sistrix.com The data shows car buyer and finance sites also taking hits since the update rolled in. Could … Read more

Client Story: How Express Writers Helped nFusion Solutions Rank for Keywords That SEO Software Missed

June 19, 2024August 20, 2018 by John G.

This is a guest post by John G., a full-time Content Strategist and expert copywriter in our team. nFusion Solutions faced a very common challenge when they came to us: their site wasn’t showing up in search results for their relevant keywords. However, their challenge was actually a lot more unique than that. This meant I needed to think outside the box to deliver. Here’s the story. Download the PDF case study of Client Story: How Express Writers Helped nFusion Solutions Rank for Keywords That SEO Software Missed What Happens When SEO Software Can’t Help with Keywords? Several of the company’s main competitors were showing up for practically every keyword they threw at Google. Usually, the solution is fairly straightforward. At Express Writers, we use premium software like SEMRush to discover which keywords stand the best chance of bringing our clients lots of traffic. They can’t be too competitive, but they also can’t be too low on monthly searches. However, nFusion Solutions’ predicament was a first for me. Even though we knew which phrases would bring up their competitors in Google – and, thus, were relevant keywords – the industry is so niche that these keywords didn’t see enough monthly searches to show up in our premium platforms. So, there was no simple way of knowing which phrases would be the most valuable to our client. 4 Steps for Using a Competitor to Do Keyword Research Instead, what I needed was a solution that would tell me which keywords these competitors used most across their entire sites – every single page. It stood to reason that these were the ones having the biggest impact on their rankings. Once I had that information, I could sift through the results to find the keywords that would put nFusion Solutions on the same page as these competitors. This involved “pulling apart” the other companies’ websites page-by-page. Step 1: Finding Every Indexed Page for the Competitors’ Site The first thing I needed to do was to find every single page of the target competitors’ site. Sometimes, you can just access the site’s sitemap. Other times, you might need to use a tool like Rob Hammond’s SEO Crawler, which will scan an entire site and return URLs for each and every page. If your competitor’s site has more than 300 pages, you’ll probably need a premium tool like Screaming Frog to accomplish this. Fortunately, nFusion Solutions’ competitors only had around 100 pages apiece. Once your crawler is done, take the results and put them into an Excel sheet. Here’s what the results look like when I did this for the Express Writers website: Then, I’d just copy-and-paste the results into an Excel like this: Step 2: Pulling the Keyword Density for Each Page Now comes the heavy lifting. To figure out which keywords showed up the most across all of a single competitor’s site, I needed to conduct a keyword-density report for every one of their 100+ pages. Again, there are free tools that can do this. I prefer SEO Centro’s version. You just enter each of the individual URLs into the tool and it will return the keyword breakdown for each one. Here are two screenshots of the results from one of the competitor’s main pages: And for three-word keywords: As you can see, I was only concerned with keywords that included two or more words. I left out single-word keywords like “gold” and “silver” because they aren’t nearly specific enough for nFusion Solutions’ purposes. Step 3: Identifying the Best Keywords After conducting a keyword-density analysis for each page of each competitor’s sites, I moved the most popular keywords for each page onto an Excel sheet, keeping an ongoing tally of the frequency with which each one was used. When I was finished, I had an excel sheet that showed which keywords were used the most across all of these sites. It looked like this: Step 4: Choosing the Right Keywords for My Client’s Pages The final step was simply choosing which keywords from the list were most important to each of nFusion Solutions’ new pages. I did this by looking at which keywords the competitors used most often throughout their sites. I also took the time to learn about nFusion Solutions’ market, so I knew which keywords made the most sense for each of their service pages. Want to hire John to build great content for your brand online? Let us know! You can also request a free 15-minute strategy consultation with him here. Going the Extra Mile to Find the Best Possible Keywords While premium SEO software is necessary for online marketing, it might not always be enough. In the case of nFusion Solutions, I had to get a little creative in order to find which keywords would be most valuable to them. Fortunately, the above steps are easily replicable. So, if you’re struggling to keep up with your competitors and the software you’re using doesn’t seem to help, you now know how to find what keywords are proving most valuable. Need great copy? Check out our pricing in the Content Shop.

10 SEO Writing Mistakes That Will Hurt Your Rankings

December 31, 2020May 26, 2014 by Adam Oakley

These days, webmasters have to invest a considerable amount of time, money and energy in the right optimization tactics to stay in Google’s good graces, including correct SEO writing. If this is your case, good news – we’ve got some useful information for you to share in this blog. The bad news is that you cannot count on a one-size-fits all search engine optimization (SEO) plan allowing you to improve their rankings. Don’t be discouraged though. The good news is that practice does make perfect in this case, without too much blood, sweat and tears. What Can Hurt Your SEO Writing Rankings Once you agree to play by the book and ditch black hat SEO tactics in SEO writing and all SEO you do, you can easily avoid some of the most common optimization pitfalls. Here are 10 major mistakes that could hurt your rankings and get your website in serious trouble, forcing you to crack open your piggybank to correct your wrongdoings. 1) Posting Duplicate Content on Your Website. Duplicate SEO writing will never do you any favors. As tempting as it may seem to save some time and money by stealing someone else’s intellectual property, don’t go down this road. Duplicate content is dangerous for a number of reasons: It exposes you to major penalties from search engines. In case you didn’t know Penguin 2.0, Google’s much-feared algorithm change was rolled out to target duplicate content, identify unethical SEO tactics and remove offending websites. It disappoints your readers, making them land on your competitors’ websites. Posting duplicate content is like telling your audience how awesome your main rivals are. Your competitors will most likely send you flowers for this. Just take a minute to think about it: what does duplicate content say about you, your company, or your aspirations, vision and purpose in business? Absolutely nothing! This is precisely why instead of copy pasting meaningless, unoriginal web content, webmasters should turn to personalized, compelling, relevant, user-oriented web writing that ensures a flawless user experience and also helps the website rank higher in search engine results. 2) Relying on Keyword Stuffing. Keyword stuffing is so yesterday. None of the competitive players in your niche are doing it anymore, so why would you? Long gone are the days when you could stuff your texts with dozens of keywords and get away with it. At this point, according to Search Engine Journal, first-class, Google-friendly web writing should display a perfect balance between everyday language and keyword usage. So this leads us to a very pressing question: how much is too much, when it comes to keywords? Unfortunately, there is no mathematical formula that you can apply to get a precise answer to this question. The experts at Moz have weighed in to say the keyword density would be a waste of time. Here’s a simple solution for you: read your text aloud: if it doesn’t sound right, then it probably isn’t. If what you are reading makes sense and flows naturally, chances are that Google will also appreciate your optimization efforts. When in doubt, you can always use one of the many keyword density analyzer tools available online to assess the quality of your writing. 3) Posting or Approving Spam Comments. Some business owners prefer to take the easy way out when it comes to implementing on-page and off-page optimization tactics. The road to SEO writing hell is often paved with good intentions and ignorance. Those who pay third-parties a certain amount of money to spam different websites by posting comments accompanied by a link to their webpage seldom attain their end goal. This technique is very annoying and less effective than you may be inclined to think. It will inevitably affect your brand, making you seem desperate. We all have to start somewhere, but do you really think that multimillion dollar companies managed to reach their target by posting spam comments on other people’s websites? If the recipe for success would be so simple and so transparent, everybody would be following it to get rich and famous overnight. Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Also, according to Entrepreneur, you have to be very careful when it comes to approving comments posted on your website or blog. Keep only the ones that provide real value to your customers and ditch the rest. This is the safest method to protect your image, discourage spammy SEO writing practices employed by others and show the uttermost respect for your readers. If you want to safeguard your website from spam comments that may compromise your reputation, just follow Google’s set of guidelines. 4) Investing in Irrelevant, Low-Quality Content. Google strives to ensure a more than satisfactory navigation experience for all Internet users. This means that it values high-quality content and compels webmasters to improve web writing that doesn’t meet its standards. If you’re willing to cut corners when it comes to crafting new content, you may want to reconsider, since Google is not the biggest fan of quality compromises. Before writing a new blog post or on-site content, make sure you: Have an in-depth knowledge of the topic that you plan to expand on Conduct a keyword analysis to discover the most popular queries around which you will build your content Are familiar with the particularities of your niche, business and audience and can actually respond to your visitors’ needs and demands. 5) Not Investing in Content (At All!). Sometimes,lack of drive can be much more dangerous than a misguided action. The history of your company is not going to write itself. If you can agree upon this fact, then you can also reach the conclusion that lack of content won’t say too much about who you really are and where you’re heading. Your visitors are craving for premium, informative, problem-solving content; so what exactly are you doing at this point to address their needs and demands? Well-focused, reader-oriented content gives your audience a good reason to listen to what you have to … Read more

What Happens When Your Rankings Vanish? 7 Judgment Day Preparations

January 1, 2021March 3, 2014 by Adam Oakley

You know those houses that are all shelled in… with capsuled steel windows that can open to reveal the daylight or completely close shut to put the dwelling into twilight zone? Or those “zombie” shelters built feet and feet below ground, with beautiful living areas, advanced lighting and power technology included? Those people got it goin’ on. Now, consider your livelihood. How would you like to know it’s bulletproof…just like that previously described house or bomb shelter is? If you’re an Internet marketer, this should be just as important to you as it is to the landowners on Doomsday Preppers (a reality TV show where all the people prepare for earth’s apocalypse with aforementioned and described dwellings, for the non-nerds out there). Let’s Talk About Preparations… For The Rankings Apocalypse Hey, it’s a serious thing to make yourself sure of. With all of the algorithmic updates and changes to PageRank that Google is using to try and minimize black-hat SEO it’s likely that, unless you’re one of the bigger companies out there, you’ll be hit. One day you might wake up and find out that your visibility and rankings have dropped drastically (like many sites did in 2011 after Google’s Panda algorithm update). How do you prevent this from happening in the future? Or, if the worst should happen, what do you do if you lose visibility? Fortunately for you there are ways to defend against it happening and ways to reverse your rankings if it does. Most of these strategies you should be using right now to defend yourself because, as everyone knows, “the best offense is a good defense.” As long as you’re implementing strategies early and continually cultivating hits and strategies in unambiguously legitimate ways then there will be nothing to worry about when it comes down to another Google PageRank update. 1. Links How can you prepare for a “zombie apocalypse,” so to speak, that could (could not, could, your pick, hmm, or Google’s pick?) occur and fell your link strategy? Private Link Networks Are Dying! It’s common knowledge that PageRank takes into account incoming links. In order to prevent your site rankings from getting hit with penalties it’s vital to let your links come as naturally as possible. This means that there should be no private link networks! Google is going full force and ripping these shady techniques out by the roots. Honestly, private link networks might not be a temptation for the big boys but for a startup it’s a tempting and temporary solution for rankings, that can get your site slapped with a penalty. Incoming Hyperlinks. But even if you’re not intentionally attracting shady links, you may have some less-than-savory links coming to your page and affecting your rankings. The links themselves may not be the problem but it might be overused anchor text that is the dead weight that might get Google to drop the hammer on a keyword it sees too often, according to a Moz blog on how rankings can vanish. There’s also a problem if the quality of the hyperlinks isn’t good enough. Google adds any anchor text linking to your site to your keywords. If your incoming links are frequently using “click here” in anchor text then your visibility will skyrocket when someone searches “click here.” But who actually does that? If you find an important site linking to you with bad anchor text then contact them and ask them to change it. Don’t Look Stupid. While you’re watching the sources that are linking to you, check to see the other places they’re linking to as well. Google sure is. If your site is linked on the same pages as www.terriblewebsite.com then you’re going to be associated with that crowd rather than other, authoritative sites. This goes double for your outbound links. For one thing, you’ll lose credibility with your visitors if you’re linking to unreliablesources.co.uk just as fast as you’ll drop in the Google rankings. 2. Design Obviously this is almost as important as your linking strategy, and remember—this includes real people too, since it’s the forefront or cover to your strategies. Forget Search Engines. The New York Times didn’t get readers through keyword mining and artificially inflating their readership by tricking them into picking up a paper. They gained rankings and popularity by being a quality newspaper with generally reliable information. Giving people what they came for will gain repeat visitors while making pages for search engines will cause visitors to bounce out faster than a boxer’s speed bag. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t use smart SEO strategies but deliver what you promised and you’ll have to worry a lot less about gaining rankings, traffic or conversion rates. Watch Your Visitors. Another way to gain traffic, and conversion rates, is to simply pay close attention to your visitors. This means that you should always be thinking about optimization (even during website redesigns). Whether it’s making a responsive website that is viewable on PCs, tablets, and smartphones or making the behind-the-scenes aspects easy to crawl through and audit, providing an easy, pleasurable experience will keep people coming back and increase your rankings. Remember Search Engines. Google’s PageRank algorithm isn’t just going through your website and links to pick up on exactly what you are and whether you’re worth it. They’re going through your background nuts and bolts. Use your meta descriptions even if you’re not using meta keywords (which are basically obsolete for the time being). But, really, this falls under forgetting search engines too because it’s your blurb on a search engine page. If you make your meta description more interesting than your competitors then you’ll see your click-throughs jump. 3. Content This is considered today as a foundation of SEO. So let’s see just how you can be ready for the zombie world when content changes, too. Be Useful. There was once bottled water… for pets. Notice that last sentence is in past tense. Everyone who guesses … Read more

4 Best Practices for Optimizing Your Content

January 1, 2021December 13, 2013 by Adam Oakley

Optimizing your content is like having a cake with all of the right toppings, a pie with scrumptious filling, and a gift with all of the adoring wrappings. Look at your content as the foundation of your (virtual) pie — the crust and filling — but proper optimization are those pieces that make your cake really pop to Google, and are what make your website rank. Your content shouldn’t just be written; it needs to be optimized, too. Optimize Your Content The Google Friendly Way So, how do you optimize content to make it ooze with delicious goodness and still look perfect to Google? Here are a few of our best practices, to get you started. We take the holistic approach when it comes to content optimization. That means good SEO practices should be engrained throughout all aspects of your content, PR and online marketing. Therefore, it’s in your website’s best interest if you apply these tactics across the board. The Elements of Optimization There’s a lot of theories about what is right/wrong regarding content optimization. We certainly don’t claim our opinion to be the gospel of SEO, but there are some key elements to proper optimization: Uniqueness User Experience Keyword-Targeted Content Meta and Title Tag Optimization Notice “keywords” is just one of many elements? We’ll touch on that in just a second. Be Unique: No One Likes to Read What’s Been Done Before We’ve driven this point through your head a few times, but we’re going to do it again as part of our best practices round-up. According to Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Your content should offer obvious value and not just be an “about me” promotional page Your text, images and audio should be eye-catching and unique Your content should set you apart from the crowd — offering real insight and showing off your obvious expertise Your pages should be described by at least 80 percent of your visitors as “helpful” or “useful” User Experience Matters You’re not writing for just the search engines; you’re also writing for the reader. If readers are greeted with a wall of text and stuffed keywords, they aren’t going to do anything but click on the back button. You can’t just force your keywords onto the page. It’s much like filling a pie. If you cram every ingredient and make it overflow, it’s going to bubble and burn on the bottom of your oven — and that stinks. For example: Not even five years ago you could cram keywords into your headers and be the man (or woman) at content optimization. You’d rank high just for combining a mixture of keywords and calling it a header. Say your keywords were “Los Angeles SEO Firm” you could title your pages as “Los Angeles SEO Firm | SEO Firm Los Angeles” but when Google caught on to the stuffing and unnatural usage, they changed the game. Today your headers have to read like a sentence, which means this unnatural, awkward way of using keywords is a thing of the past. Using Keyword-Targeted Content All of that keyword research you’ve done means nothing if your content doesn’t target keywords properly. Just as we mentioned above, optimizing your content means using keywords naturally within the content. Your content should make sense, read naturally and readers should enjoy what they’re looking at — all while search engines are indexing your content based on the keywords you’ve targeted. Your primary keyword or targeted phrase should be sprinkled in your content, but don’t overdo it. We say three percent is a good density — anything more and your content might look stuffed. Your content should be relative to your keywords, according to Search Engine Watch. So if your keyword is “Los Angeles SEO Firm” you should be writing something relevant to SEO practices or local Los Angeles businesses/individuals needing SEO services. There’s nothing worse than stumbling across a page using high-ranking keywords that don’t match the content — and trust us, Google will take care of your site soon enough if you don’t play by the rules. You can check your content optimization by using plug-ins (available for free or a small fee). These plug-ins analyze your content based on your targeted keywords and can enhance the rankings of your posts. Meta and Title Tag Optimization Content optimization includes your meta descriptions and title tags. When you write content tags, you first need to write them for the reader. Write something that catches their attention; after all, it’s the readers who you need to click through and keep reading. Then, incorporate keywords, naturally, into those title tags. Optimizing your content’s headlines can get you more clicks, get your content shared, and also rank your website higher, according to a recent blog by HubSpot. Your meta descriptions are important — don’t leave these blank. However, also don’t stuff these with every keyword you have. Instead, stick to one keyword in your description. Since search engines cut your description off at 25 to 30 words, it’s best to keep it at maximum 25 to 30 words. Consider it a short little teaser — similar to a Facebook or Twitter post — that gets people to click. No need to spill it all out for them. Content optimization isn’t rocket science. In fact, when you follow all of these best practices you can optimize your content and rank faster than just picking and following a select few.