The news is in, and it doesn’t look good for Google Plus, with the Google announcing that the platform is to be shut down.

Plenty of people have claimed the writing was on the wall right from the beginning, and that this was bound to happen at some point or another. Others, though, have remained faithful to the platform. They’ve spent a lot of time building out a presence on Google Plus and have always sung its praises.

Whichever group you belong to, this post will fill you in on Google Plus and its role in the social media landscape. You’ll learn how Google Plus impacted SEO results and how you can use this knowledge to improve to improve your SEO campaigns.

Yes, Google Plus is not going to be around for much longer. But using the information in this post, you’ll understand how to take the marketing lessons learned from Google Plus and apply them to any future products released by Google or anyone else.  

Let’s begin!

The History of Google Plus

As other social media networks like Facebook started to develop a huge user base, Google felt like should get in on the action. The company did this, by creating a social media network in 2011, known as Google+ (AKA Google Plus).  

One of the cool things about Google Plus is the way that you’d organize your ‘friends.’ So instead of having a large list of people on your friend’s list, you’d instead use a Circle system.

Source

This meant that you could have a Circle for ‘family,’ but also another Circle for ‘acquaintances.’ You could even dedicate Circles to specific kinds of content, making it easy to monitor certain topics, whenever they’re mentioned on Google Plus.

The Circles feature was welcomed, because nobody else could see your Circles, meaning you had a high level of privacy over who you interacted with on the network. The Circles also made it easy to share content. People could post content/opinions to these Circles, and only those in the Circle could see the content.

Source

Aside from that, Google Plus functioned like a normal social network.

You could ‘+1’ content, which is the same as a ‘like’ on Facebook. You could also comment on content, again, just as you would on Facebook.

There was also a feature that allowed people to ‘share’ this content with their own Circles. In effect, this is like someone ‘retweeting’ something on Twitter. Eventually the network added ‘hangouts’ which made it easy for people to conduct video chats.

Initially, the system was set up so that it was invite only, a little bit like Gmail when that was first released.

The social network grew rapidly and only four weeks after its release, data showed that the network had over 25 million unique users. However, despite reports of over 90 million users, a lot of people felt like the network was a bit of a ‘ghost town.’

Some felt that this was down to the fact that user numbers were inflated, because people were forced to sign up, if they had a ‘Google account.’

For instance, you might create a Google Account to use other Google Products, such as YouTube. But, setting up a Google Account also meant that you set up a Google Plus account. There was data to correlate with this viewpoint too, with research showing that 90% of Google Plus users had never created a public post.

That said, the network did show signs of success.

A lot of people liked the network, because of the privacy offered by the ‘Circles system.’ This meant that privacy settings were easy to control, making it easy for you to decide who was going to see what – something that was slightly tricky at the time for people that wanted to do the same with a Facebook account.

Of course, the ironic thing here, is that one of the main things that led to Google closing the network down, was a data breach, with Google admitting that an API bug exposed the data of over 500,000 users.

Even outside of the data breach, there was evidence that Google Plus didn’t have a bright future. Official data provided by Google stated that “90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.”  

You could argue that the network was doomed to fail, when the person who ‘invented’ the network, left in 2014. Ever since then the network experienced a slow death, but it was recent events that really put an end to the network and forced Google to make a decision on its future.

Google Plus and SEO

Because Google owns Google Plus, there was a sense that it could gather data from the platform more easily.  This interested people in the world of SEO, because it meant that any ranking signals related to Google Plus activity, might have a rapid impact on search listings.

Whether this actually happened, is up to debate, and there’s a wide range of opinions on this.

Initial data did suggest that Google Plus had a significant impact on SEO results. The chart below shows data from 2013, which highlights how ‘+1’s’ had an even bigger impact than the number of linking root domains!

Source

However, upon further investigation, many came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the +1’s themselves that generated the improvement in rankings.

Rather it was that if someone +1’d your content, it created a link. Because Google owns the property, they’re able to gather data on the link very quickly and hence use it to improve rankings.

Here’s a great explanation of what was going on.

Source

Another thing noticed early on, is that Google Plus lead to personalized search rankings. This meant that your activity on Google Plus reflected how content appeared in the search listings.

Rand Fishkin designed an experiment that helped to bring some awareness to this concept. He wanted to see what would happen if a large number of people +1’d a post on Google Plus. If you take a look below, you can see the brief he provided for this experiment.

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After engaging in this experiment, people found that there was indeed, an impact on their search listings, as a result of interacting with this content on Google Plus. For instance, some people saw a result similar to the one below, which indicates an improvement in ranking.

Source

Others, though, noticed a different ranking for the exact same link. In addition to this, many found that after performing the same search using incognito mode, the same link was found much lower in the search listings.

Over time, there was still some evidence that having a presence on Google Plus, did have some impact on SEO. The chart below shows that some level of presence on Google Plus, whether having a page shared on the platform, or just having a link to an account, did correlate with an improvement in rankings.

Source

So… Many considered that Google Plus had some effect on rankings.

But it wasn’t exactly clear if this effect would produce an improvement in rankings, in a definitive and clear-cut way. Because there isn’t a lot of people on the network, it’d take a lot of effort to generate some buzz.

Eventually, it became clear that after the initial boost Google Plus didn’t have a huge impact on rankings. Many felt that having a large Google Plus presence didn’t produce the same uniform effect you’d expect if you decided to build more backlinks or if you produced better/more content. Thus, in the end, many felt it was better to just stick to tried and tested SEO principles.

SEO Without Google Plus

One of the reasons activity on Google Plus improved SEO rankings, is because it helped show that your website belonged to a larger brand.

Because Google can no longer use activity on Google Plus to help determine search engine rankings, it has to rely on data from other social media networks. But Google doesn’t have as much access to the data of other social networks, as it did for Google Plus. Thus, it often relies on branded searches to help determine the strength of a brand.

Following this, it’s worth thinking about how you can build a brand on other social networks. In doing so, you’ll be able to improve the number of branded searches for your company, which will help improve your SEO results.

You should also think about how you can use other Google properties to help you nudge your rankings a little bit higher.

One of the things you can do is set up a Google My Business account. Even if you’re not a local business, Google My Business can help you build out a presence within Google’s ecosystem, that can possibly help your rankings.

Remember – the goal here is to build out your website so that it represents a brand. If Google releases a new product in the future, think about how you can use it to build a presence for your website. If you can build a large presence on a new platform, it’ll show Google that your website can be trusted.

A Quick Mention on Paid Ads

If you have some experience with running paid ad campaigns on Google, you may have noticed that you could show how many followers you had on Google Plus. This, of course, works well in regard to social proof, since if a company has a lot of followers, it’s likely a sign that you can trust the company.  

Here’s an example of how that would look.

Source

Well, since Google Plus is shutting down, you can’t really make use of this anymore. That said, there are other ways you can incorporate social proof into your ad. One example is to include the reviews you have, an example of which is shown below.

Source

When doing this you can show the reviews from your Google My Business account, or the reviews from your Google Merchant Centre account.

It’s worth noting that anyone can leave reviews on your Google My Business account, but for your Merchant account only customers that have bought something from you can leave a review. Thus, the Merchant account option works well for ecommerce stores.  

What Does the Future Hold?

Whenever a big digital company releases a new platform, it inevitably causes a stir in the online marketing world. That’s because marketers know that there’s an early mover advantage on offer for those that can take action.  

Google Plus is a prime example of that and early data did suggest that the platform had a big impact on SEO results. Of course, the effect didn’t last long and Google eventually limited the impact of the network on search results.

Whether or not you managed to take advantage of the platform, you can take the lessons you’ve learned here, and apply them to new platforms in the future. Provided your brand has a solid base, you should be able to propel your company to new heights if you know how to rapidly build out a presence on future platforms.

The post Google+ and SEO: How does the shut down of Google+ affect your SEO Strategy? appeared first on Serped.com.

Are you familiar with the saying, “Every little helps”?

Sometimes in the quest for big things, we tend to miss out on the small things that can have a significant impact.

In SEO, it's true.

There are a few ‘little' important things that most of the SEOs I know either forget or ignore. And, these are so simple you'll kick yourself for it because they are decisive ranking factors that can give you the edge over your competition. These are:

1. Page Speed
2. Security

As security and speed analysis are gaining more and more importance, it is crucial for SEOs to take them a bit more seriously while auditing the sites to find improvement opportunities.

But, they shouldn’t consider it as an additional task. So, to make it easy for them, we added two new sections – Security Analysis and Speed Analysis –  to SERPed’s site auditor tool – Site Auditor Pro.

If you are a SERPed user, the next time you log into your SERPed account, you will see two new sections in the SEO Review report under Site Manager. These are:

1. Security Analysis
2. Speed Analysis

Further, in this post, we’ll dive into the data these two sections show and how you can use them to gain more insights.

Let’s get started!

Security Analysis

Ever since Google announced that it would consider HTTPs as a ranking signal, many websites installed SSL certificates. But, there were still a few who didn’t care much about it.

To ensure that consumer’s privacy is protected, from October 2017, the search engine giant started showing ‘Not Secure’ text in its Chrome browser on the pages with text input fields not having the SSL properly implemented.

One of the benefits of securing all URLs is – If a site has all URLs secured, it gets the green “Secure” message in the browser which builds trust and increases conversion.

Another benefit of switching to HTTPS is that your referrer data remains intact.

When you have unsecured HTTP, you don’t get insights on referral data as most of it is lost and appears as ‘Direct’ in your analytics reporting contributing to what is referred as ‘dark traffic.’

The ‘Security Analysis’ section gives you insight about:

• Whether a site has an SSL certificate implemented or not
• Even if a site has SSL certificate, is every URL on the site secured?

Going a step further; it also shows you all the unsecured URLs, so you know what all URLs you need to work on.

Speed Analysis

With Google’s introduction of a mobile-first index in 2017, Page Speed has now become more critical than ever.

If you are still not convinced (which I believe is not the case), and by any chance have in mind – how and why does Page Speed matter?  

Then, check this… how Page Speed can impact your revenue.

Australian retailer Booktopia in one of their presentations in 2017 shared that speeding up their page load times by 1 second resulted in an extra $600,000 on the bottom line.

Yes, $600,000 extra in profit just from improving the Page Speed by 1 sec.

Now that you know how Page Speed can impact your ranking and revenue, let’s have a quick look at data and optimization insights you get under ‘Speed Analysis’ section:

We believe these new additions will further empower you to take your SEO to the next step and serve your clients (if you do client SEO) better.

Here’s a short video to brief you about how these two advancements can help you be better at Site Audit.

 Let me know your thoughts regarding these enhancements and feel free to reach out to us about anything related to SERPed.

The post Site Auditor Pro Update: Security and Speed Analysis for comprehensive site auditing appeared first on Serped.com.

If you’ve spent any time at all optimizing an SEO campaign, you know that there’s more to the process than just building links.

After all, a good SEO process involves on-page optimization, as well as off-page optimization.

A lot of people ignore on-page optimization, because it isn’t necessarily that exciting, but it’s definitely something you should pay attention to.

One of the best things you can do, when it comes on-page optimization, is to make use of something known as ‘Structured Data’ and ‘Schema Markup.’

If you have no idea what those two phrases mean, that is okay.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at what ‘Structured data’ and ‘Schema Markup’ is.

We’ll also take a look at how you can make use of these two concepts, in order to improve the SEO value of your website.

By the end of this post, you’ll know how to get the most out of on-page site optimization, using ‘Structured data’ and ‘Schema Markup.’

Let’s begin!

What is Structured data?

Structured data is essentially a bit of code you put onto your website, that provides search engines with bit more information in relation to your website.

This code is ‘structured’ in such a way, that makes it easy for search engines to ‘read’ it — hence the name ‘structured data.’

So why should you make use of Structured data?

Because it impacts the way your search listings, appear in a search engine.

If you implement Structured data properly, your search results will provide a lot more contextual data when they appear  in the listings.

On top of that, your listings will also take up a bit more ‘space.’

Both of these factors are helpful, because they increase the odds that someone is going to click on your website, when it pops up in the search listings.

This is in part, because your search listings now provide a bit more information and also look more visually appealing.

For instance, take a look at the search listing results below.

Both of these search listings, relate to recipes for a ‘lemon cake.’

But, if you look at the first one (the one at the top) you’ll notice that there’s a lot more information being shown, in relation to making the cake in question.

• There’s a rating for the recipe
• There’s information on how many votes were ‘cast’ in order to produce that rating
• There’s an estimated ‘time’ for the recipe
• There’s even caloric information

On top of that, if you take a look at the description for the search listing, you’ll notice that there is a lot more information being provided, when compared to the other search listing on the bottom.

In fact — you could almost take all of that information and know all you need to know about making lemon cake, without having to go through the process of clicking on the link!  

What is Schema Markup?

To get the best results with what we’re going to cover in this post, you don’t really need to know a lot about ‘Schema’ and what it is.

But for the sake of this post, let’s quickly explore what it is, just so that you’re comfortable with the concept and don’t get confused should you come across the term at a later date.

So, Schema, is essentially just a form of ‘Structured Data.’

Not too long ago, the search engines all agreed that they’d essentially use the same kinds of formatting for structured data.

There are different forms of Schema, when it comes to website Structured data.

For instance, if you look at the image below (from Schema.org), you’ll notice that there are different forms of Schema that you can use, when it comes to obtaining the structured data needed, to display ‘opening hours.’

While you’re free to use the other options, you should really consider using the ‘Microdata’ form, since this is often the easiest to implement.

How can you implement this all?

Implementing structured data within your website code isn’t that easy, if you do not have a background in coding.

Because of this, if you’re no good at coding, it might be a good idea to get a web developer on board of whom will be able to help you do things properly — saving you hours of frustration.

However, if you’d like to give this a go on your own, though, then you can use something known as the ‘Structured Data Markup Helper.’

This tool will walk you through the process of creating the code that you need to put on your website, in order to provide the search engines with the extra information that they need.

When using this tool, you just need to enter in the URL, of which you want to generate data for.

You can then just highlight the relevant pieces of information and attribute the details accordingly.

So, for instance, in the above screenshot, I’d just highlight the name of the recipe, then select the ‘Name’ option.

Once you’ve gone through the entire process, the tool will then provide you with the code you need to put on your website.

If there is some information you want to put into your code, that can’t be found within the Schema Data Markup Helper, then you can go to Schema.org, to find examples of code that might be helpful.

If you take a look at the screen below, you’ll see that Schema.org, provides a lot of options for those that are looking for a certain kind of ‘markup’ to use on their website.

If you click through to one of the options and pick a specific ‘property’ you’ll then be provided with the code that you need to implement onto your site, should you want to add a certain kind of data to your website’s structured data.

The example below, shows how this can be done if you want to implement structured data that relates to ‘opening hours.’  

As mentioned, though, this can all get a bit tricky if you’re not familiar with working with code — so don’t shy away from hiring web developer if you’re struggling.

Different Types of Schemas Markup and How to Implemented them.

As shown above, Schema Markups can be used in many different situations and its application doesn’t apply to just one ‘kind’ of website.

And so with that in mind, let’s take a look at few different examples of Schema and how they can be implemented.

1. Local Business Schema Markup.

If you’re doing SEO for a local business, it is a good idea to set up something known as Local Business Schema.

Local Business Schema is a good way to add a lot of relevant information about your ‘local business’ within the search listings.  

Using Local Business Schema, you can dramatically change the way that your website appears within the search listings — as shown below.  

Source

Below you’ll see an example of the different data points you can use, when it comes to creating the Schema for a local business. The example shown, relates to a restaurant.  

Source

As we covered earlier, you can easily create the Schema for a local business, using something known as the Structured Data Markup Helper.

If you’d like to see all of the Structured Data you can use for a local business, check out the local business section of the Google Developers site.

2. Event Sites Scehma Markup

You can also use Schema for a website that deals with ‘Events.’

Source

With the help of Events Schema, you can display a lot of information related to a particular ‘Event,’ of which allows for people to find out what they need to know, about a particular event.  

Here’s a great example from Google, that shows all of the different data sets you have to work with, when building out your ‘Events’ schema.

Source

Events Schema can be a little bit tricky and there a few things you’ll want to keep in mind when building out your Events Schema — all of which is shown in the ‘Guidelines’ below.

Source

If you’d like to find out more about the different kinds of Schema you can use for a website/webpage related to events, head over to the Events section within the Google developers site.

3. E-commerce and Product Website Schema Markup

You can also set up Schema for a website that provides ‘products.’

You can set things up so that additional information is provided, when people are searching in relation to a specific product.

An example of this is shown below.

Here is an example of the different kinds of data that you can input (and therefore show) when creating Schema for a product page.

Source

Similar to ‘Events Schema’, you’ll want to keep a few things in mind when writing up the Schema for a product page.

It’s important that you stick to these guidelines, should you want your web pages to appear as they should within the search listings.

4. Personal Site Schema Markup

Let’s take a look at one final example of how you can use Schema, in relation to a page dedicated to a particular person.

Here’s an example of ‘Person’ Schema, and how it would appear in the search engines.

If you’d like to implement this kind of Schema onto a webpage of yours, you can use the following Schema formatting.

Source

As always, make sure you use the Structured Data Testing tool, after implementing your Schema, to make sure your Schema has been implemented properly.

If you keep on finding that there are errors with your code — speak to a web developer to help smooth things out.

Conclusion

In this post, we’ve taken a look at how Structured Data works and how the concept relates to the Schema Markup.

Making use of the concepts we’ve covered in this post can really help improve the performance of your websites when it comes to SEO.

Both in relation to letting search engines know more about your site, as well as improving the way your search listings look in search engine results.

Nevertheless, these strategies aren’t necessarily easy to implement — so be sure to speak to a developer if you need help.

In any case, try implementing what you’ve learned as soon as possible, as it can take some time for the search engines to review the changes you’ve made to your site.

Good luck!

The post Schema Markup and Structured Data – How to use them to boost your SEO results appeared first on Serped.com.

If you want to maximize your SEO approach, it can be a good idea to figure out how you can target multiple keywords with just one piece of content.

But whilst this can be a great thing to aspire to… It’s not exactly easy to achieve.

After all — if you get things wrong you might end up in a worse position than if you had just targeted one keyword.

That’s because you may end up with mediocre rankings for all the keywords involved, as opposed to one great ranking for one keyword.

Thankfully, such a situation can be avoided if you adopt the right approach.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at what that approach is, and we’ll dive into what it takes to create a single piece of content that will be optimized and subsequently rank for multiple keywords.

Let’s get started!

Finding your ‘Additional’ Keywords

To begin with, you need to figure out the ‘extra’ keywords you’re going to be targeting.

You don’t want to put your time and effort into targeting extra keywords that won’t result in that much ‘extra’ traffic.

So how do you get this done?

First, you need to view things from the perspective of your target audience, of whom is actually doing the searching.

Other than the keyword you’ve initially selected, what else might a member of your target audience, type into Google, in order to find a web page like yours?

If you’re struggling here, you can use the SEO tool suites like SERPed.net to help you learn more.

For the sake of this post, let’s suppose that we’re creating a post based on the topic of ‘how to start a marketing agency.’

If we go to the ‘Ultimate Research’ tool, and type in that keyword, you will be presented with the following ‘results.’

These results let us know some of the other keywords people might type into Google, when they’re looking for a post that tells them to achieve a similar goal, in terms of learning ‘how to start a marketing agency.’

For instance, when it comes to achieving the end goal of ‘starting a marketing agency’, you can see that people might type in –

• How to start a marketing agency
• How to start a digital marketing agency
• How to start a social media marketing agency
• How to start a content marketing agency
• How to start up a marketing agency

Three of these five keyword variations achieve a decent ‘Avg. monthly searches,’ so we know that a lot of people are typing these keywords in, alongside our ‘core keyword.’

In any case, now that we’ve identified some of these ‘additional’ keywords, it is important to keep them in mind, and incorporate them when possible, when implementing the tactics covered later in this post.

Optimizing Your Title Tag to Include Multiple Keywords

Right, now that you have these keywords, you need to think about incorporating them into your ‘Title Tag.’

It is important that you do this in a way that looks ‘natural.’

If you try to force it, your title is going to be bad on two fronts.

First, it won’t make sense and won’t be appealing to potential readers.

Secondly, Google will catch onto the fact that you’re trying to spam keywords into your Title Tag, and hence will probably penalize you for doing this.

If you’re a little unsure, here’s how you could do this, using the keywords we discovered earlier.

So remember, the initial keyword was ‘how to start a marketing agency.’

But, using the additional keywords, we could change things up so that it is now…

‘Digital Marketing Agency: A Step by Step Guide on How to Start Yours From Scratch.’

Now, even though this Title Tag could do with a bit more work, it gives you a good idea as to how you can incorporate multiple keywords.

Optimizing Your H2 Tags To Include Multiple Keywords

The next thing we need to focus on are the H2 tags.

When you’re writing your post, you’ll inevitably create some sub headers, to help break up your content.

More often than not, when you’re writing your post in WordPress, you’ll notice that the sub headers are known as ‘Heading 2.’

Here’s what it should look like:

When trying to determine what a piece of content is about, Google scans these ‘H2’ sub headers.

Because of this, you should try to incorporate your additional keywords, into your H2 sub headers.

Again, this isn’t too difficult to do, and it’s just a matter of writing your headers in a manner that doesn’t look forced and ‘spammy.’

Focus on one or two core keywords, for each H2 tag you create.

An example of an H2 tag using main keyword or its variation:

As shown in the above screenshot, the main keyword for this post – “Marketing Plan for Digital Agency”- is used in the title of the post. And, the H2 tag uses a variation – Digital Agency Marketing Plan.

Create a Description Tag That Targets Multiple Keywords

The next thing you’ll want to focus on is the ‘Description Tag’, also known as the ‘Meta description.

The Meta description is generally the text you see below a search engine listing.

Here’s an example of a Meta description.

The concept here is pretty much the same as everything else that we’ve covered so far.

You’ll want to insert your additional keywords into your meta description, without making things look forced.

Because the Meta Description provides you with extra characters, it can be easier to write a Meta description that targets multiple keywords than say a Title Tag.

Making the Most Out of Your Core Content

It’s also important that you focus on creating your content so that it includes (and therefore targets) multiple keywords.

You should try and include as many variations of your initial keywords as possible within your content.

You can do this by reviewing all of the keywords that are shown in results by long tail keyword tool, within SERPed SEO suite, based on your initial keyword.

Here are some of the keywords returned by the tool:

It would be a good idea to naturally include as many of these keywords as possible, into the actual core piece of content.

Doing so, can help the content trigger for a huge number of keywords – going way beyond your initial selection.

As we’ve covered multiple times in this post, you don’t want to make anything seem forced here.

If you can’t make the keywords fit into the content naturally, then don’t worry about it and move onto the next keyword.

The Result

So after reading what you’ve read so far — you still might not be convinced that what we’ve covered actually works.

You might want some proof — which is fair.

Well… If you take a look at the screenshot below, you can see a real life example, that showcases…

1. That it’s possible to rank for multiple keywords
2. The tactics we’ve covered actually can help rank a blog post for multiple keywords.

Take a look for yourself..

As you can see, the URL in the ‘Ranking Page’ column remains the same.

However, if you look in the ‘Keyword’ column, you can see that this blog post ranks for multiple keywords.

And then if you take a look at the ‘POS’ column, you’ll see that the blog post has, in fact, achieved multiple #1 rankings.

So if you’re having some doubts, hopefully the above screenshot should help convince you that what we’ve covered in this post, really does work.

Conclusion

When you know how to target multiple keywords with just one piece of content, you’ll be able to multiply the power of your SEO strategy.

We’ve taken a look at some of the things you can do, if you want to make it so that you’re able to target multiple keywords with a single blog post.

Whilst all of these strategies can be effective on their own, you’ll achieve the best results when you use them all simultaneously.

So get started now — the sooner you get to researching and implementing, the faster you’ll be able to achieve beneficial results.

Good luck!

The post How to Target Multiple Keywords With One Blog Post appeared first on Serped.com.

With 88% of B2B marketers using content marketing, there’s a good chance that you might have taken a leap of faith and started a content marketing campaign of your own.

And whilst that can be a good idea– how do you know if your content marketing efforts are actually working?

After all, content marketing can be time-consuming and often expensive – so you’d be forgiven for wanting to figure out if you’re going about things the right way.  

In this post, we’re going to review some of the metrics that you can use to work out how well your content marketing is going.

We’ll explore how you can adopt a data driven approach and use certain metrics to improve the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.

By the end of this post, you’ll know which metrics matter when it comes to content marketing and how you can use such metrics to optimize your campaigns.

Let’s begin!

Understanding the different types of metrics

We’re going to review four ‘types’ of metrics you’ll want to pay attention to when it comes to content marketing – 

• Consumption
• Engagement
• Social
• Conversion

Different pieces of content, are suited to different types of metrics.

Appreciating this point, will reduce the odds of you creating content that doesn’t help you move closer to your content marketing goals.

For instance, you might be looking to achieve great ‘social’ metrics.

With that in mind, you’ll need to create content that lends itself to thriving on social media.

Creating a post that highlights the benefits of your product compared to the competition isn’t likely to do as well on social media.

A ‘list’ post, is, however, would be well received on social media.

On the other hand, a comparison post would succeed in driving conversions – something that would be hard to achieve with a standard list post.

And so when you understand this concept, it becomes easier to figure out how you should shape your content marketing plan, based on what your goals are.  

If you want to create content designed to produce specific metrics, it’s worth taking some time to understand the Buyer’s Journey, and how you can map your content marketing plan to the Buyer's Journey of your ideal customer.

Consumption metrics

Consumption metrics are just that – metrics that tell you how people are consuming your content.

If most of your content is on your blog, Google Analytics can help you monitor your consumption metrics.

Within Google Analytics there are two key ‘consumption’ metrics you want to monitor – 

• Pageviews
• Unique visitors (also known as Users)

The Pageviews metric will let you know the number of times a particular page has been viewed.  

You can find it in Google Analytics by selecting ‘Behavior’ and then the ‘All Pages’ option.

This metric lets you work out which content is being consumed the most.

If you find that a particular page is drawing a lot of attention, it suggests that there is a demand for the ‘kind’ of content on that page.

When developing your content marketing plan, you can then use that piece of content as inspiration, when deciding on what kind of content you should be creating in the future.

The unique visitors (or Users) metric, lets you figure out how many unique individuals are visiting your site.

You can find it by clicking on ‘Audience’ and then ‘Active users.’

This metric is important because it lets you observe the overall popularity of your site.

If you’re not generating an increasing number of unique visitors/users, it means that your content isn’t getting the exposure it needs.

In most cases, if your consumption metrics are poor it’s because of one of two (or even both) reasons – 

1. You’re not promoting your content enough
2. You’re not creating content that people care about/will be interested in consuming

If you’re looking to promote your content, there are two approaches you can use.

One option is to run a paid traffic campaign.  

You can do this with the help of Facebook Ads or Google AdWords.

With such platforms, you can achieve a lot of exposure with a little ad spend.

There’s also the option of finding people who’ve shared similar content in the past and then letting them know you’ve created something related.

Because these individuals have shared content in the past, you know that they’ll share your stuff if they find it to be good.

If you can get your content in front of them there’s a good chance that they’ll help it get more exposure.

7 Content Promotion tactics that helped us grow our traffic by 63% in 60 days. Check it now!

If your target audience doesn’t find your content interesting, you need to study what’s already working.

You’ll be able to tell if people aren’t interested in your content by checking your engagement metrics, of which we’ll cover later.

One way you can create content that people will find interesting, is by researching existing examples of content within your niche, that have been widely shared.

All you need to do then, is create something better, based on the proven topic, and promote it using the strategies mentioned above.

You can find examples of popular content using Buzzsumo.

Note: There’s also a third reason why consumption might be low, of which relates to SEO.

Low consumption levels can sometimes be attributed to the lag time, between publishing content and the time it takes for SEO to talk hold.

If consumption metrics are poor, but you’re relying on people to find your content via a search engine, don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that your content marketing is failing.

Even if you create awesome content – it can still take 6-8 months before you begin to generate a steady stream of traffic from the likes of Google or Bing.

If your content is mostly video and it is hosted on YouTube, you’ll just want to keep track of the views that your videos are generating.

If it isn’t hosted on YouTube, you can still make use of the other metrics we’ve covered.

Engagement metrics

Engagement metrics are helpful because they let you know if your content is connecting with the people consuming it.

Engagement is important because it means that you’re establishing a strong relationship with your audience.

Focus on engagement, not on vanity metrics. Strong engagement metrics = a strong r'ship with audience.
Share on X

Developing a strong relationship is key, because it helps improve the odds that those consuming your content will become fans of your brand and then eventually customers.

In some cases, even if consumption rates are high it all counts for nothing if engagement metrics are low.

On the other hand, if consumption metrics are low but engagement metrics are high, it’s often a sure sign that you’re onto something powerful.

Examples of engagement metrics are – 

• Comments
• Likes (YouTube or Social Content)
• Average Session Duration

Comments are a great way to measure engagement.  

More often than not, if someone has consumed a great piece of content, they’ll want to let you (and the rest of the world) know that they appreciate what you’ve created.

Think about how much content an individual consumes over the course of the day.

If someone has taken the time and effort to write out a thoughtful comment, it’s a sure bet that they found that piece of content engaging.

Likes can also be a good way to measure engagement.

Whilst this could also be counted as a social metric, it often provides more value when classed as an ‘engagement’ metric.

Keep in mind that because it’s easier for people to ‘like’ a piece of content, than to leave a comment, likes can give a ‘big picture view’ of how engaging your content is.

Comments let you know in greater detail what people found engaging about your content but likes will let you know whether or not you’re on the right track.

Average Session Duration lets you know how long someone has spent on your site, after coming into contact with an initial piece of content.

This metric takes into account all interactions that someone has with your website, before 30 minutes of inactivity or until the day ends.

The graphic below does a good job at showing what a ‘Session’ might look like.

Source

You can find Average Session Duration data, by going into the ‘Audiences’ section in Google Analytics.

If someone finds a piece of content to be engaging they’ll be more invested in your brand.

As result, they’ll likely click around your site and consume other pieces of content – therefore producing a ‘long’ session duration.

The caveat here, is that you need to make it easy for people to move around your site and find other pieces of interesting content.

Consider using a sidebar that lists the top content on your blog and remember to link to other pieces of content on your blog, when writing your content.

If your content isn’t achieving high engagement metrics, you need rethink the needs of your target audience.

As mentioned before, that might mean reviewing existing pieces of popular content, of which is produced by companies that share the same audience as you.

Content engagement can also be impacted by the way you’re presenting your content.

If your content doesn’t have enough images or paragraphs, it will be seen as unappealing.

Following this, people won’t want to engage with your content, because it can seem like too much work.

Social Metrics

With social media playing such a big role in the distribution of content marketing, it would be a mistake to not monitor the social metrics of your campaigns.

You’ll want to keep an eye on the following, basic social metrics – 

• The number of times your content has been shared to social networks
• The kind of engagement it receives on individual social networks

You’ll also want to monitor which social networks are driving the most traffic and ‘click throughs.’  

Using Google Analytics, you can identify which social networks are driving the most traffic.

Log into Google Analytics and go into the Acquisition section, under the ‘Social’ option.

You can use this information to help dictate which social network you should focus.

Identify which network is providing you with the most ‘organic’ success and then consider running a paid campaign on that network.

This campaign could be designed to either promote your content, or grow your audience on that network (say by promoting your Fan Page, for instance).

This can be a good way to double down on any success you’re currently achieving.

Another way you can improve your social metrics is by engaging with the audiences you have on your social media profiles.

This will help establish a better relationship with those audiences.

If you can improve the quality of the relationship your audiences will take greater interest in your future social media posts.

This can help improve the most basic social metric – how many times your content has been shared.

Conversion Metrics

Whilst the other metrics we’ve covered are nice, it’s the conversion metrics that will help you figure out if your content marketing is producing a return.

In fact, if you take a look at the chart below, you’ll see that generating leads is one the main goals for B2B Content Marketers.

Source

Conversion metrics let you know how many people are entering your ‘funnel’ because of your content marketing.

Conversion metrics might include – 

• Opt-ins
• Calls Booked
• Sales

You may want to segment how you collect leads, so that it becomes easier to figure out which pieces of content, are driving which conversions.

One way you can do this, is by having separate lists for each piece of content, even if your ‘opt-in bribe’ remains the same

In doing so, it is easier to identify which pieces of content are driving the most conversions and also the most sales.

You may even want to consider the idea of having specific phone numbers for certain pieces of content.

If your conversion metrics aren’t up to scratch it can be down to a number of reasons.

On the most basic level, it may be that you’re not giving people a good enough incentive to opt in.

Referring back to the Buyer’s Journey – it could also be that your content isn’t doing a good job at convincing people they should buy from you, when they’re in the ‘Consideration’ stage.  

If all your other metrics are good, but your conversion metrics are poor, it could be that your funnel simply isn’t doing a good enough job at converting people.

Conclusion

In this post, we’ve taken a look at the metrics you can track to assess the effectiveness of your content marketing.

When you have access to certain metrics, it becomes easier to create a data driven content marketing plan, of which has a higher chance of succeeding.

So even if your current plan isn’t bringing results, all you need to do is review the numbers and let them tell you where you’re failing.

Though it sounds simple, it could mean the difference between success and failure, when it comes to your content marketing.

Best of luck!

The post Content Marketing Reporting: Data-driven approach to optimize your content marketing appeared first on Serped.com.

Soon after we’ve announced the launch of our new interface – SERPed 2.0, a lot of you guys reached out with your feedback, amazing suggestions on how to improve the existing tools, and new feature requests.

Among all, the one that really stuck at the top of our mind was:

“Your Site Explorer Tool is very powerful. But, the navigation and multiple scrolls make it complex to use.”

We brainstormed on it internally and agreed that if we can pull off a better navigation and show all the data in one view,  it would be an amazing improvement to our Site Explorer tool.

Change is opportunity… So we added a bunch more features too! (read on)….

After a good 6 mockups and around 294 dedicated hours of coding and testing, here we are. Ready to share the new Site Explorer with a complete makeover and more powerful than before.

Old Site Explorer:

New & Improved Site Explorer:

As you see in the above image, the layout, look and feel of Site Explorer has completely changed.

A few noticeable changes are:

• Left side panel to see all the available options.
• All the critical data in one view. No more scrolling.
• The data for the stronger version of your domain highlighted in the colored text.

New features added to Site Explorer:

1) Spam Analysis: Get the data straight from the industry leading metric from Moz. You can use spam analysis to:

• Check for spammy links to your site
• Evaluate potential links
• Cleanup Link
• Disavow Files

Don’t forget! To get access to all of this data you’ll need access to the SERPed tool. You can apply for membership right here.

The awesomeness doesn’t here.

A) You can also dig deeper to know the reasons behind the spam score.

Fix the reasons that are affecting your domain’s spam and bringing it down.

B) Go one step further and check all the low-quality links redirecting to your domain.

2) Link Velocity: Before we move to how you can use this awesome feature to learn how your backlink strategy is performing, let's understand what link velocity is?

To put in simple words; Link Velocity is a measure of how many new backlinks your website gets naturally over time..

Ideally, your backlinks should grow with time. A healthy link velocity graph is an upward curve.

Using our Link Velocity tool, you can keep an eye on the over time growth of backlinks to your domain and take preventive measures if you notice anything fishy.

3) Link Age: According to Search Engine Journal, backlink age is one of the ranking factors. It is considered as a factor of trust.

Our Link Age tool shows you the number of backlinks you earn each year and the percentage share. The intuitive graphs give a quick insight into your site’s backlink profile.

4) Anchor Language: This is one more interesting and experiential tool that we added in Site Explorer.

It gives you a confidence score about the language of an anchor text that is used to link back to your site. Using this confidence score, you also get the hint about the predominant language used on the domain that is linking back to your site.

It is your go-to tool if you are planning to buy new domains to build your blog network and looking to see what language it had previously built to it.

We believe this new layout and new features will further empower you to take your SEO to the next step and serve you clients (if you do client SEO) better.

Here’s  a short and quick tutorial to walk you through each and every feature of our Improved Site Explorer.

Hope you enjoy the convenience of the new layout and the power of new features!

Excited to give the new and more powerful Site Explorer a shot? You can apply for exclusive membership right here.

Let me know your thoughts regarding this improvement and feel free to reach out to us about anything related to SERPed.

The post [SERPed.net Update] New & Improved Site Explorer Tool – More Insights, Informed Decisions, Better ROI appeared first on Serped.com.

Things change pretty much on a daily basis in the world of SEO.

Since the announcement of Google’s AI machine learning algorithm – RankBrain – in 2015, one of the most discussed topics in SEO galleries is:

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

With Google admitting RankBrain being one of the top three ranking factors, these discussions have become even more worthwhile.

Image Source: IKF Communication Creator

In past 3-4 months, we also saw a spike in the number of SERPed members asking the same question. And, multiple posts claiming 2017 as the year of AI and Voice Search, we think it is the right time to dive deeper to understand more about it.

To get more clarity on this topic, we decided to go straight to the big guns and find out what they think about it. Our team reached out to 26 SEO Experts from around the globe and asked the following question:

How do you see the increasing role of AI in search algorithms and what are your suggestions for SEOs to handle it?

The responses from each expert are compiled below.

Fasten your seat belts and get ready for an awesome ride.

1) Albert Mora

Albert Mora is the CEO and co-founder of Seolution, an SEO agency for Shopify e-commerce sites. He has been doing SEO from 1997 and has around 20 years of experience. Follow Albert on Twitter here.

Since the beginning of the Internet, artificial intelligence has played a relevant role in the operation of search engines. Logically, the algorithms have been evolving, but the fundamental underlying principle remains the same: search engines want to deliver quality search results to the users. For this reason, if you want a long term sustainable SEO results, you must think about the users first, not about the search engines. This implies:

• Quality content on your website, to meet the needs of the visitors
• Becoming the online reference for your niche or sub-niche
• Not only improving the on-site SEO but the usability of the whole website
• Do outreach, to search for links from reputable websites directly related to the topic of your website

2) Alex Chris

Digital Marketing Consultant at reliablesoft.net and author of The Complete SEO Guide. Alex has more than 15 years of experience in Digital Marketing, and he is working online since 2002. Follow Alex on Twitter here.

The AI does change the way Google is ranking websites but SEO wise, the recipe of success is pretty much the same: Great content, Avoid keyword stuffing, Add related keywords to the content and title, strong incoming links from highly trusted websites.

3) Ana Hoffman

Ana never thought Internet marketing would be her career of choice, but when she got her head around SEO, she knew she had found her passion. That passion became the centerpiece of her popular blog, Traffic Generation Café. Ana is always ready to serve her readers and subscribers, with free traffic generation strategies, like SEO, social media, blogging and other internet marketing methods. Follow her on Twitter here.

The goal of a search engine is to understand and mirror the human evaluation of a page. The more human it ‘thinks', the better it can serve humans.
AI is the ultimate answer to humanizing search engines.

In many ways, AI will make a job of an SEO a lot easier. After all, it's a lot easier for us to relate to humans than a machine algorithm.

So what are humans looking for in a search engine result?

They are looking for the best and quickest solution to their problem – their query.

Thus, knowing your audience and the keywords they use to look for a solution will remain the key to being found.
Once you are found, your goal is to be read. So make it easier for both humans and search engines and make your content more readable.

Use:

• keywords throughout your content
• descriptive headings that help a reader follow along
• bite-sized sentences
• visuals

4) Anil Agarwal

Anil Agarwal is the founder of BloggersPassion.com blog where he helps his readers in improving their search traffic and sales. You can connect him on FB here.

Although AI role is increasing in search algorithms to determine the weight of a web page, however, the user intent is still a top priority. If you're not focusing on giving the best experience to your target audience through your content, no matter what tactics you adopt, they are of no use.

So make sure to focus on people's intent rather than worrying about the AI role. That's how you succeed in the long run. As Google always say “content is king”, that's what your top priority should be.

5) Ashley Faulkes

Ashley is obsessed with SEO and WordPress. He is also the founder of Mad Lemmings. When he is not busy helping clients get higher on Google he can be found doing crazy sports in the Swiss Alps (or eating too much chocolate – a habit he is trying to break). Follow Ashley on Twitter here.

Google is using AI to tune search to give the best results to the searcher. In some ways, this is not a major change, so it is not something I would recommend worrying about. It is just another evolution of Google's algorithm in the direction of filtering out the best results.

To handle this, I would just continue – providing excellent content (above the competitors) that answers the query at hand. Also, tuning things like Headlines and Meta Descriptions has been shown to have a significant impact at the moment. As Google is starting to look at user behavior and not just keywords or links.

So, if you stick to the fundamentals and stop trying to game the system you can still win – do keyword research, create great content and get some links.

6) Chris Dreyer

Chris has 12+ years of SEO experience and is the founder and CEO of Rankings.io.  He has worked with 100s of law firms as well as other businesses to help them increase leads and get more clients with search engine optimization. Follow Chris on Twitter here.

AI (or more specifically ANI for Artificial Narrow Intelligence) already plays a significant role in SEO and search.  Google’s Rankbrain has been around for a little while and is key in weighing Google’s core algorithms depending on the types of queries users enter into a search bar and the corresponding signals produced by those searches.

There is a lot of buzz around AI in the SEO community, and in the next 5-10 years, we are going to see a rapid increase in capabilities of what AI can do and how smart it gets.  That phenomenon is grounded in basic computing principles and the Law of Accelerating Returns.  The more advanced AI gets, the faster it grows.

As far as what that means for SEO I think it’s safe to predict some short term impacts (although long term I don’t think anyone has a solid idea of what’s going to happen).  In the near term (i.e. 5-10 years or sooner), I think we will see a lot of loopholes for SEO closed.  Right now algorithms are pretty good at spotting link spam and other black hat tactics.  AI is going to make it much, much harder if not impossible to game a search engine.

Another thing that could happen is that sites will need to become much more niche-focused as AI works to sort out what are bad sites and what are good sites.  A lot of machine learning is based on existing examples fed to a machine.  For example, Rankbrain has to classify websites so that it can compare them to what it knows to be ‘good’ and what it knows to be ‘bad’.  Sites that contain too much varying information (and that are not that well known in the offline world such as Wikipedia or dictionary.com) may have a much harder time ranking.  Sites that focus on a single topic area are much easier to classify and (as long as all else is equal) will have a better chance of ranking well for relevant phrases.

Lastly, in the near term, I envision SEO becoming far more technical than it is today.  If you think about it, in the beginning, it was super easy to rank well in search.  The tactics were extremely straight forward (i.e. keywords in a meta tag, any link placed anywhere from any other website helped, etc.).  Fast forward just a decade and SEO has already become much more advanced because search algorithms have become more advanced.  As search engines move closer to the realistic human analysis of websites (and beyond), SEOs will have to adapt.  We will have to understand how AI works in order to optimize sites to rank well.   

7) Chris M. Walker

Chris M. Walker was active in the Information Technology industry for over a decade. In 2013 he formed his SEO agency and rapidly expanded it to have clients in numerous industries across the United States.

Chris also runs one of the most successful SEO services and outsourcing businesses in the industry with his services featured in Source Wave and other SEO industry webinars. You can follow his blog at http://superstarmarketingonline.com.

At first glance, AI might seem intimidating to the average SEO. They may think that none of the “tricks” they use to get rankings will work. In my opinion, however, a more intelligent search engine algorithm will only benefit an SEO professional. The key is for them to change the way they think. Instead of thinking from the perspective of an SEO they should think as a site or business owner. What actions would a person that is launching a new, or managing an existing site take in order to increase its search engine visibility? That is how the AI will determine ranking, and that is what a smart SEO will ask themselves when developing a campaign instead of thinking about what kind of links they should build or what type of metrics a site has.

8) Craig Campbell

Craig Campbell is a UK based SEO Consultant with over 15 years experience in the industry. Craig is now focussing a lot more time providing training courses and tutorials online to share his experience with others looking to learn more about Digital Marketing with many FREE tutorials on his blog. Follow Craig on Twitter here.

I think as always the SEO game is changing and AI being used by the search engines has resulted in many minor changes over the short term. However, it's not like AI is something new, it's just getting better and more advanced. Which as a result means that that SEO's out there who use techniques that are maybe a little black hat may get caught out quicker. So anyone using tactics like that will have to be careful on what footprints they leave.

SEO has changed a lot over the years from the days of ramming sites with content full of keywords and any link counted, to a point where the search engines had to evolve and deal with those using automated processes to build links and all of that type of thing. There are folks who want to use spun content and all of this type of things, and it's becoming easier for search engines to identify that with AI and the other things they are doing to ensure that customers who do a search get a good quality relevant website on the search results.

SEO is a game that is constantly evolving and people have to try and test different things to ensure they remain ahead of their competitors, for me using tools and software to gather my own intelligence such as competitor analysis tools and keeping on top of the game is an important part of being an SEO. I feel that the people who say AI is changing the way SEO works come's from people who are lazy, or possibly using black hat techniques and are looking for excuses because they don't want to do SEO/Marketing properly.

For myself I don't put all my eggs in one basket and rely on organic search traffic, I think doing social media, webinars and many other ways to get myself in front of other people is all part of what I call my overall marketing campaign. But I do feel it is the job of SEO and Digital Marketing experts to adapt to change.

But for me, I have adopted a much broader marketing approach, as I for one do not want to have all my leads coming from search, and some AI change results in my leads drying up, so for me building a reputation and marketing myself on multiple channels is important.

It was much easier years ago for me to rank well, by posting to every directory under the sun, I wish SEO was as easy as it was 10 years ago, but technology changes, tools change and I've adapted over the years and tried new things so I think you have to embrace those changes and work on your overall strategy.

9) David Hood

David has been doing Client SEO since 2012.  His journey to SEO is an interesting one. He struggled at first to make good money with it but figured out enough to do $140k in 2013.  His income has increased significantly every year since then.  Now he makes $40k per month and is about to hit $1 million in earnings. Learn more about his money making hacks here.

Technically, Google is a giant AI, but I don't think it is really that sophisticated yet.  Most often, it reads the text in the most important places and determines what queries your website is most relevant to based upon those high priority text locations.

With each level of sophistication, they want to add to their algorithm, the amount of computation grows exponentially.  In other words, adding a new important search engine ranking factor increases their resource needs by about 10x.

I suggest people don't spend too much time focusing on every “AI” tweak that Google makes or worrying about how close to sentient Google's AI is. Instead, I think it is more productive to spend most of your time trying to get high-quality links to pages and sites with proper simple On Page.

10) David Schneider

David is a content marketing guru and a go-to person when it comes to getting links and eyes on his content. He owns a product that is an amazing tool for blogger outreach, check it here http://ninjaoutreach.com/ . Follow Dave on Twitter here.

I think what AI brings to the table is speed. It will let them weed out other black/gray hats that have managed to dodge penalties, and they can increase the capability to recognize black/gray hat attempts. Still, I believe none of the fundamental rules changed. Google and other search engines still want the same thing: search results that give their users the best experience. As long as you stick to those fundamental rules, you’ll do okay.

11) Deepak Kanakaraju

Deepak Kanakaraju is a Digital Marketing Author, Speaker, Trainer, and Consultant. He is the founder digital marketing blog – DigitalDeepak. He also runs India's largest Digital Marketing Facebook group with 36k+ members.

There has been some form of AI in search algorithms since the beginning. But the AI is improving and becoming more complex over time. All the AI tries to mimic human intelligence in ranking websites, and in the next few years, it will come dangerously close to human-level thinking. So you have to ask yourself the question – what if a human reviewed my website? Would he/she like it? Will they rank it high on the search engines? If yes, then you do not have an issue! Do not try to game the search engines because your rankings will be wiped out in the next algorithm update.

12) Evgeniy Garkaviy

Evgeniy is an SEO consultant, Adwords certified specialist, and blogger. His expertise in online marketing has helped him to featured on many top blogs. You can check him out at www.Newsmakers.co.uk and Follow Evgeniy On Twitter here.

Whether it is “Ok Google” on Android and other Google platforms, Cortana on Windows and other Microsoft platforms, Siri on Apple platforms or Amazon’s Alexa, the trend and the enthusiasm with which AI is being pushed in search, is something SEO must tune into very quickly.

The best way for an SEO practitioner to handle the increased role of AI in search algorithm is to study each AI closely. Identify the parameters the AI use to rank sites. Once these parameters are identified, you just need to ensure your site development incorporates the factors the AI you are targeting uses for ranking sites.

14) Jason Acidre

Jason Acidre is an SEO Expert based in the Philippines. He’s the Co-founder of Xight Interactive and the author of Kaiserthesage, where he’s written dozens of guides, case studies, and tutorials on SEO strategy. Follow Jason on Twitter here.

Obviously, Google is starting to understand complex/compound queries and is also capable of serving better search results for many of these queries.

Google algorithm’s dependence on artificial intelligence and integration of different machine learning processes will only grow even more in the coming years (RankBrain is definitely just the first step).

But all these future additions will most likely aim to accomplish one goal – to satisfy searchers.

That’s why the best action to take to future-proof your site’s SEO is to focus on satisfying your target audience (especially those coming from search).

Ensure that you have the best answers for all the queries that your site’s pages are targeting to rank for. It’s imperative to optimize your site’s content to match the searcher’s intent.

Focusing on building your site’s brand is also one of the key areas you should be investing more of your efforts on, through:

• Consistently pushing out high-utility content assets that will be valuable to top, middle and bottom of your audience funnel (to build loyalty and solidify brand recognition).
• Associating your brand with other authoritative entities/publishers/sites in your space (through content partnerships and other linking opportunities).

Google search results are brand-biased for a reason (and for other popular entities as well) because people trust them. That’s why it’s very important to build on trust to really win in Search.  

14) Jordan Kasteler

Jordan Kasteler is a freelance marketing consultant, entrepreneur. Passionately innovating status quo. He has a history of entrepreneurship co-founding and serving positions in such companies as BlueGlass Interactive, an Internet marketing agency and SteelCast, a tech incubator housing several other self-started companies. His work experience ranges from in-house SEO at Overstock.com, marketing strategy at PETA, and to agency-level SEO. Jordan is also an international conference speaker, blogger, and book author of A to Z: Social Media Marketing. Check out his blog here or follow him on Twitter here.

AI will make search engines smarter in how they understand user intent and behavior. They will reward sites for good engagement while serve more relevant results based on context (e.g. device, history, location, buy cycle, time of day, etc.). Algorithms will continue to learn from themselves and adapt to become more intelligent. This will change SEO as there'll be no set of signals to optimize for as algorithms will be dynamic, customized, and ever-changing. It'll become more important than ever for SEOs to understand their audience and serve their needs. A good user experience with compelling content will no longer be semi-optional.

15) Kevin Indig

Kevin Indig currently manages SEO @ Atlassian (JIRA, Trello, Bitbucket, Confluence, Hipchat, …) and advises many brands around the globe for growth. A German implant living in the silicon valley, he has a long-standing background in startup and enterprise marketing for all sorts of industries. Follow Kevin on Twitter here.

In October, Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) announced: “From mobile first to AI-first”. This completely disrupts SEO and is the biggest change to the field since it's existence after my mind. The impact is severe. Searchmetrics declared ranking factors dead because of this, and they're right.

The connection between AI and SEO is Hummingbird (including Rankbrain). I realized the impact when I did some competitor research for Atlassian not too long ago. I was shocked! Not every page ranking in the top10 for a high search volume keyword had a strong link profile or super long content. It was all driven by user signals. There is no guarantee anymore that you link well with a lot of (good) backlinks. There is no guarantee anymore that you rank well with a lot of words on your page.

There are three takeaways for SEOs from this:

1. User satisfaction trumps everything. That CAN mean long-form content. But it can also mean a simple widget. Or a gallery of images.

2. Traditional ranking factors mean nothing without context.  Instead, focus on industry ranking factors and compare your site directly to your competitors in every aspect. Look at what's ranking in the top10 for the keywords you want to compete for and do it better than then. In the best case, 10x better! See Ross Hudgen's article on that for reference.

3. SEO becomes even broader. Yes, you still have to make sure your site is technically optimized, and that alone can be a full-time job for more than one person. But no, just checking off a list and expecting to get a flood of organic traffic doesn't work anymore. SEOs need to make sure the design and layout are on point, they need to make sure copy is insightful but engaging, and they have to make sure ads aren't killing the brand* – all to improve user signals.

*Side Note: users burned by ads are harder to win over with SEO

16) Kulwant Nagi

Kulwant Nagi is a professional blogger, world traveler, and a speaker. On his blog BloggingCage.com, you can read tips to become an awesome blogger, get traffic on your blog and how to make money with your blog. He is running more than 20 niche blogs where his team writes about technology, health, sports, and supplements. Catch him on Twitter @kulwantnagi and Facebook @kulwantnagi.

AI is playing a big role in ranking these days. Back in the golden days, people use to trick Google by feeding keyword-rich article, making them bold, italic, underline and finally domination the top positions. But with the boom in the internet usage, Google is putting extra efforts to provide accurate content to end-user, which ultimately involves AI to make it better.

AI understands a set of patterns, user's behavior, actions and finally filter the site. If a user is landing on your site by feeding any specific query in Google and spending a lot of time on your page and clicking on many relevant links in the article, this means that you succeed in delivering the right content. But if he/she is just bouncing back after few seconds, you lost the game.

To handle Google AI and to make search engines love your blog, I would recommend reading statistics based, research based articles which help users understand the concept in a deeper way. He/she spends more time on your blog and read many related articles to that specific topic.

Including LSI keywords and voice search keywords can be a big win here. Google is moving more towards voice search now, so making your content compliment to these changes will be a big win.

17) Michael Pozdnev

Michael Pozdnev is a dreamer and a pro in SEO with 16 years of experience who wants to become your friend. His best blog post: How to Write Your First Blog Post. Follow Mike on Twitter here.

I’ve been doing SEO for 17 years already, and the news that AI will eventually control the search algorithms keep appearing every year. However, in reality, virtually nothing has changed for all this time. Usual people keep developing these algorithms. They want to help the users get the most relevant response to their questions. And if you manage to create content that fits these rules + if you have a strategy for getting external links, you’ll be on the first page of Google.

18) Mike Kawula

Mike Kawula is CEO of Social Quant, a top ranked Twitter tool by HubSpot, that helps you find the most relevant followers on Twitter. An entrepreneur whose last 3 businesses each hit 7 figures in less than 3 years with his last being ranked the 144th fastest growing company by Inc. Magazine.

He’s an author, has been featured on CNN, interviewed by Anthony Robbins and featured in over 100+ publications. Follow Mike on Twitter here.

Artificial Intelligence is clearly improving the consumer experience of searching for products and services online.

There is a complex mix of algorithms running all the time, returning search results in a fraction of a second. And each search result has an entirely different algorithm working in the background.

Search engines like Google are better than ever at sniffing out garbage content and will toss low-quality sites into the virtual landfill dumps they belong in.

My advice for any business owner or startup who wants to assure they’re not buried deep in search results is to invest (time and money) in site setup and SEO strategy.

AI analyzes your location, content, reviews, links, social proof, keywords, citations, site structure, onsite user time and behavior as ranking factors for your site.

If you want to win, stop trying to manipulate your rankings with some trending “hack” guaranteeing immediate results (there’s no such thing in SEO).

Instead, do what has always worked in business and create the best user experience possible.

You can’t go wrong by:

• Consistently produce good content around questions your prospects are asking
• Making your site accessible across whatever device your prospect wants to find you on and assure again it’s an amazing experience
• Making your site aesthetically appealing, fast, structured properly, and up to date
• Over-delivering both online and off, so your visitor wants to tell everyone on social media, in person and on every review site just how darn good you are.

19) Mike Morgan

Mike Morgan – Co-founder and head strategist at High Profile Enterprises, an award-winning SEO and Content Marketing agency based at beautiful Ohope Beach in New Zealand (look it up!).Follow him on Twitter here.

One of the big discussion points for 2017 – how will AI affect implementation of SEO?

Google has been moving toward more accurate analysis to provide better answers since its inception. AI simply gives them smarter tools to do this. Several updates have been geared toward supplying this advantage – understanding intent despite linguistic complexity and ambiguity and some easy wins in local intent are already part of the everyday experience. However, there are numerous instances where this is still failing when more complex concepts and idioms come into play.

As an SEO the focus needs to be on when they get this right across the board. Think holistic, think grouping, think clusters when it comes to targeting. And focus on quality and treating the topic with respect. But most of all think about the User. How can you create a solution for exactly what they are looking for – no games, no tricks – just provide value.

20) Nat Eliason

Nat Eliason is a writer at www.nateliason.com on all things interesting and author of “Come Again”. In the marketing world, he works with brands to develop content and SEO strategies based on his experiences with Sumo, Zapier, Programming for Marketers, and his own site. Follow Nat on Twitter here.

To me, this just means that everything is harder to game. You can't use clever tricks for SEO anymore; you have to focus on what actually moves the needle: creating really great content that's better than anything else out there. AI will reward that, don't try to game it.

21) Nathan Gotch

Nathan Gotch is the founder of Gotch SEO, a St. Louis SEO agency. He is a globally recognized SEO expert and entrepreneur. He helps business owners with SEO strategies, tools, and information they need to achieve their goals. You can check him out at http://gotchseo.com/blog/  and follow Nathan On Twitter here.

If your focus is on giving value to the user through content and experience, then it really doesn't matter. Google's objective doesn't change because they are using a different method. Google wants to give the searcher the best answers and results possible. My main recommendation is to move to a content-focused SEO strategy.

22) Robbie Richards

Robbie Richards is the author of robbierichards.com and the founder of Royal Jay's search marketing agency. He has been featured on Search Engine Land, Digital Marketer, AdWeek, Ahrefs, Huffington Post, unbounce, and other large industry publications. Follow Robbie on Twitter here.

In recent years, all search rank signals were based on information and discovery, but not learning. That was until RankBrain and machine learning arrived. Google is now able to draw context from queries (new and old) and learn it permanently. This study from Stone Temple found that AI machine learning improved search results by 54.6%.

With search crossing desktop, tablet, mobile and voice search, the way people search for information, and the way search engines interpret these queries, is rapidly changing. AI will help Google better understand the context of the queries that might not have the exact keywords that were searched for. Optimizing for RankBrain is not a cut-and-dry deal. RankBrain targets non-understandable queries and those containing colloquial terms. Therefore, it's a waste of time to try and target queries that RankBrain targets.

It is far more beneficial for SEOs to focus on semantics and context when producing content. Site structure will also remain extremely important as a mechanism to build relevancy and context through top-level navigation and internal link structure.

23) Sam Hurley

Sam Hurley is a lateral-thinking digital marketer holding years of experience in both agency and client-side settings. He is the Founder of Digital Consultancy venture: OPTIM-EYEZ.

He has achieved success for SMEs, national to international blue chip organizations while being ranked as the world’s #1 digital influencer by Webinale and #2 most influential digital marketer by Onalytica. He was also recently commended as one of the top 3 content marketing influencers of 2016 by ScribbleLive.

Catch him on Twitter and LinkedIn for heaps of helpful material on entrepreneurship and marketing!

AI is the future, and the future is now.

RankBrain is Google’s name for its first innovative, machine-learning artificial intelligence algorithm that’s used to help process search results.

It’s been officially named Google’s third-most important ranking factor…and you can bet your rankings there will be many more algorithms like RankBrain to come…

One of RankBrain’s primary purposes is to sift through what it deems to be relevant search results when a user enters a never-before-seen or otherwise unusual query (and learn from the user’s consequent actions) — something Google has found difficult to interpret in the past.

Not only that, expect it to be constantly learning how to best serve visitors with the most relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy results available — minus the public updates of algorithm changes we’ve received in the past.

That means Google is becoming increasingly difficult to game these days. Simply put: You are better off focusing on publishing remarkable content that aligns with your target audience (while ensuring your website is similarly outstanding to navigate) and distributing this content heavily, rather than attempting to use, for example, isolated black hat tactics.

To optimize for RankBrain:

• Research content topics thoroughly and cater for users’ pain points.
• Apply semantic keyword strategies.
• Produce thought-leading content.
• Distribute your content heavily across all mediums.
• Ensure your website is easy to navigate.

I recently wrote a comprehensive piece on SEO Trends in 2017, which covers RankBrain and much more.

24) Syed Irfan Ajmal

Syed is a serial entrepreneur, digital marketing consultant, author, and speaker. He has written for publications such as Forbes ME, Huff Post, Business.com, SEMrush, Virgin Startup, Tech In Asia and others on content marketing, SEO, growth hacking, and personal branding. He has done training and keynotes on the same topics in Pakistan and Dubai at Google Business Group sessions, various business incubators. He has also been a guest on internet shows such as SEMrush webinars, the MVP Marketing podcast, and the Profitability Revolution Paradigm. He blogs at www.SyedIrfanAjmal.com. Follow Syed on Twitter here.

Since Google still is the leader of the search world, I will share my views in the context of Google’s AI. AI is playing an increasingly important role in search algorithms.

Back in the day SEO experts would anxiously wait for a new algorithm update and then update their onsite optimization and backlinking strategies accordingly.

However, today the changes to search engine rankings are more real-time. According to Gary Illyes of Google, the machine learning system RankBrain helps Google in “coming up with new signals and signal aggregations.”

Through the use of deep learning and natural language processes, Google is able better understand user queries and provides more accurate results.

Let’s use an example: If a user comes to your website and immediately goes back to the search results, Google may use it as a signal that the page it showed to the user was not relevant. Through AI it would learn from this action combined with other signals such as the user’s search history, location etc., and work on providing better results.

This means that rankings for certain keywords can change in real-time based on the query used, and so it would be safe to say that the results that each user sees for the same keyword may actually turn out to be different.

So what does it mean for content marketers, SEOs, and bloggers?

For one, AI advancements are helping Google get better at recognizing the format (text, image, video, audio) of a content piece. This is good news for visual content creators since Google favors YouTube videos and other visual formats. Hence creating visual content (videos, infographics) and optimizing them through the use of relevant keywords, etc. in title, tags, meta description would be smart.

Also, with AI improving Google’s ability to show better and more accurate results coupled with AI’s ability to assess if a particular content piece was not relevant to a user (based on the associated bounce rate or other factors) it is more critical than ever to give more attention to factors such as:

• Content quality (as  someone once said, ‘writer for the readers rather than the bots’. So no keyword stuffing or other spammy, low-quality gimmicks)
• Landing page design and copy
• Relevant CTAs (so that once the user is done visiting your page, you can persuade them to go to other related pages, or get them to convert into email subscribers by offering them more in-depth content)
• This also means it is important that before you work on earning backlinks for a content piece, you ensure that its quality is top notch. As Larry Kim says, a mediocre content piece with tons of backlinks will no doubt become a red flag when the visitors leave the page in no time after landing on it.

To sum it all up, delight the readers by providing top notch value through your content and work on engaging them and keep them entertained and ‘infotained’ throughout their stay on your page. In this regard it would also make sense to think about how your web page appears on mobile and what can you do to improve the user experience for mobile users.

25) Temi Odurinde

Temi Odurinde is an online professional, with over a decade of experience in digital marketing, web hosting, and web development.  He is passionate about sustainability and long distance running. Follow him on Twitter here.

According to the people, AI is the future of search engine ranking and other online technologies for that matter. Deep Learning System powers AI, such as Siri and OK Google. No one fully understands how deep learning works just yet. One thing we are sure of is that it learns and responds to the command by taking in a large quantity of data.

The best way for SEOs to handle AI in search is to do what they have always done in the days before AI. That is to build quality SEO friendly, responsive website, get quality links and root a website in a locality. Most of the time, AI uses the location of the search query, to determine how SERP pages are served to the person searching for information.

26) William Harris

William Harris is a growth marketer and entrepreneur that has positively improved many businesses – from eCommerce stores growing revenues 100% in 2 months to SaaS companies growing revenues 270% in 7 months. He blogs at Elumynt. You can follow William on Twitter here.

When it comes to AI and search algorithms, you have to remember that they have one main goal in mind – to provide the most relevant search results to a human being.  If humans like the results, then they come back to search there more often.  Your goal as an SEO is to take your attention away from algorithms and AI – and focus on what will make your page more relevant for the human beings that will be looking for your information.

WOW… This is too much information to digest at one go.

Around 6350 words later… I would like to say a massive well done if you have made it this far.

The good news is that you now have 26 expert’s views to shield your SEO strategy before Artificial Intelligence (AI) make any dent to it.

What is your take on – How do you see the increasing role of AI in search algorithms and what is your suggestions for SEOs to handle it?

Tell me in the comment section below

And.. If you haven’t checked our 52 Copy-paste topic idea for your blog, click here. Use them today, drive more traffic and you are sure to succeed.

The post 26 Experts On How AI Will Change The Way We Do SEO appeared first on Serped.com.

Learning how your audience finds you on the web is the key to your online marketing strategy's success.

Did you know?

According to a study by Conductor on 30 sites from different industries, organic traffic accounts for 64% of the total traffic. The share of other sources is – Direct (12%), Paid Search (6%), Referral (15%), and Social (2%).

The study proves that organic search is your best bet to drive more traffic to your site and why is it important to rank higher in search engines?

Did you know?

For a web page or website to rank higher in the search engines, multiple factors come into play. Google considers more than 200 factors to determine the ranking of a site in the search engine. These are mainly divided into following categories:

1. On-page factors
2. Off-page factors
3. Domain factors
4. Site factors

While nowhere on the web you’ll find the complete list of all the factors, In this post, I`ll be covering most of the On-page SEO ranking factors in detail and how they affect SEO ranking.

Let’s get started.

ON PAGE SEARCH ENGINE RANKING FACTORS

Keyword In URL

In one of the hangouts happened in January 2016, one of the questions was, ”Keyword in the URL, is that a ranking factor?”

To this, here is what John Mueller from Google replied:

I believe that is a very small ranking factor. So it is not something I'd really try to force. And it is not something I’d say it is even worth your effort to restructure your site just so you can get keywords in your URL.

In one of the other experiments conducted by Gaston Riera where he tested the keyword position in URL – in exact match URL, in a subdomain, in a subdirectory, and in the slug. His findings are:

• Having a keyword in exact match domain helps very little.
• Having a keyword in a subdomain (ex: keyword.domain.com) doesn’t help in ranking at all.
• Having a keyword in a subdirectory (ex:www.domain.com/keyword/page-name) help only when you are trying to rank a particular page.
• Having it in slug (ex: www.domain.com/keyword) is the best case where it makes most impact

Learn more about the experiment in detail here.

Keyword In Title Tag

A Title tag is the first thing that a user sees in the search results. Thus, it plays a crucial role in whether the user will click a search result or not.

Not just this, Search engines also consider it as a concise brief of content on a web page. A Keyword in the Title tag sends strong signals to search engines about the relevancy of a result to search term.

Going by this, it should be one of the strongest ranking factors. Shouldn’t it?

But, wait. There is more to it.

Barry Schwartz authored an article “Google: Title Tags Are Not A Critical Ranking Signal” and quoted Google's John Mueller, “Title tag is not as critical for ranking as the content on the page.”

To find out the significance of title tags as a ranking factor, SEOChat conducted a detailed study. The results showed a weaker relationship between ‘keywords in title tag’ w.r.t. Search engines result positions.

Keyword In Meta Description Tag.

Meta description, as we all know, is the 160 characters content piece that summarizes a web page.

Does Meta Description play a role in ranking?

It is one of the most discussed and debatable topics in SEO corridors. Search engines claim that they don’t consider meta description in ranking algorithms. But according to SEO experts, it indirectly affects SEO ranking.

So, If search engines do not consider meta description in ranking, is it compulsory to have meta description for every page to rank?

Here is what Former Google Spam Head Matt Cutts says on it:

Let’s have a quick look at how top SEO sites or blogs use meta description:

SEO Book:

As you can see, SEO Book does not use meta description for their home page. Google automatically picks it from the page content.

Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal, however, uses a meta description for important pages (ex: home page) but doesn’t use it for blogs.

Search Engine Land

Unlike the above two, Search Engine Land uses meta description for all the page (home page, blogs, and others).

So, in the end, it all depends on you as it is pretty clear that meta description does not have a direct impact on SEO ranking. 

Keyword In H1 Tag

H1 tag is visually the most prominent text on a web page.

It classifies the content to make it easier for a user to understand. At the same time, it also tells search engines about what should they associate a web page with and what should they recognized as important on a page.

That’s why it is considered as the most important SEO and User experience signal on a web page. It is recommended to use one H1 tag per page and include a keyword in your H1 tag.

Here is a quick video by Vertical Measure that nicely explains the importance and uses of heading tags in SEO.

Keywords In The Page Content

From the days of stuffing your page with keywords to writing for readers (not search engines), SEO copywriting has come a long way. But, it is still relevant to include targeted keyword in your page copy.

Here is how one of the Top SEO blogs – Backlinko – uses keywords in the page content.

The next question that arises is – what is the Optimal Keyword Density in a page copy to rank higher?

To get the answer, we looked around to see what SEO experts have to say on it. And, here we are with Matt Cutts views on Optimal Keyword Density.

The essence is, there is no one standard optimal number or range. As long as you lie in this ‘unknown range’ aka ‘sweet spot,' search engines will not penalize your content.

The Length Of The Content

300 words…500 words…1000 words or more than 1000 words?

What is the magic word count to rank your content higher in search engines?

Experts have mixed opinions on content length, but a majority favors long-form content. Even the studies declare long form content a winner.

To clear the air, SerpIQ conducted a study wherein they analyzed top 10 search results for 20,000 keywords. And, the results are:

• There is a direct correlation between length of the content and position in search engine.
• The content piece at the top position is slightly more than 2450 words in length, and the one at the last (tenth) position has around 2000 words. So, the average comes around 2267 words per post.

The fascination for long form content triggered more studies from various experts.

In one such study by Dr. Pete from Moz; he found a direct correlation between long-form content and the number of links a post gained.

The way results look, long form content ranks better in search engines and earns more links.

Does it mean the long-form content is the clear winner here?

WAIT.

Before coming to any conclusion, let’s listen to what Moz supremo Rand Fishkin has to say:

Not sure where the idea that “great content” = “really, really long content” came from, but we need to dispel that myth.

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) March 30, 2016

A great content has nothing to do with the length. He defines great content as one that:

• Serves visitor’s intent and answers their queries
• Helps readers find the right information FAST and EASY
• Helps reader meet their goals

So, as long as your content matches your audience’s needs and meets your business goals, you are doing a great job. Don’t fall into long form content trap. Write for people and search engines will automatically find you.

Duplicate Content

A lot of misconceptions prevail about duplicate content and how Google deal with it. In this section, I`ll try to bust a few of them.

Before we head to misconceptions, let’s first understand what duplicate content is to Google:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.

Misconception #1: Google penalizes your site if it finds duplicate content on the site.

Fact: Duplicate content doesn’t lead to any sort of penalty because Google does not have a concept of duplicate content penalty.

Surprised?

Let’s hear Google’s Andrey Lipattsev views on it.

So when Google does not crawl a website’s content, it doesn’t mean the site has been penalized. The filter in search results is simply because the content is not fresh and unique.

The question that arises now is, how to check whether Google has filtered your content?

It's pretty easy. One can check it simply by adding “&filter=0” at the end of a URL.

Canonical Tag

The core function of canonical tag is to prevent the duplicate content issues. It tells search engines about the preferred URL for when multiple URLs have the same content.

For example, for many sites, we see different versions – one with ‘www’ and without ‘www.' For us as visitors, both are same. But, it is not the case with search engines. They consider these two as separate versions of the same domain. It leads to content duplication and confuses search engines which version to crawl.

It is where ‘Canonical Tag’ is required. The structure of a ‘Canonical URL Tag’ is:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/”>

If your website or blog is on WordPress, Yoast’s advanced SEO plugin makes it super easy to add a canonical tag. You can directly add it in the space provided.

Ryan from Webris explains Canonical tag in the easiest way in this video. I bet you won’t need any other video to understand the concept after watching it.

Quick Tip

Before setting up a canonical tag to tell search engines the preferred URL, I highly recommend you check the stronger version of your site. You can do it using advanced SEO tools like Site Explorer.

Image Optimization

A picture is worth a thousand words.

The Chinese proverb holds true for SEO and search engines as well.

Google Image Search is one of the high-quality traffic sources for webmasters. As per data, image searches contribute 20-60% of all the Google visits if a website is well optimized for Images. Still, it is the most ignored SEO optimization practice.

Here is a quick explanation by Matt Cutts on why should you take Image Optimization seriously.

Pointers to follow to optimize an image for SEO:

• Ensuring the right file name
• Add an ‘alt tag.’
• Add OpenGraph and Twitter Card for social media sharing
• Use images in the XML sitemap

Below is how a regular code snippet that includes an ‘alt tag’ looks like.

<img class=”aligncenter wp-image-2278 size-large” src=”https://www.serped.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Canonical-Tag-2-1024×521.png” alt=”Canonical Tags – on page search engine ranking factors” width=”1024″ height=”521″ />

The colored text in the above code snippet is ‘Image alt tag.'

Content Freshness

Search results are best when they are fresh (or recent) and relevant. At the same time, Google is smart enough to categorize the content and understand the difference between fresh content and evergreen content.

For informational content like latest news and events, Google uses Query Deserves Freshness (QDF). It is a ranking algorithm that determines when a user is looking for latest information.

Here is an example:

IPL auction gets a lot of public interest every year. So, as the auction day approaches, all subject related content gets a boost. This boost is the result of QDF.

QDF does not apply to transactional and informational queries. Listen to Matt on how QDF works and content freshness as a ranking signal.

Outbound Links

Does Linking to an authority site in your niche help in search engine ranking?

Well, SEOs think that it does. But, Google’s John Mueller has a different opinion on it. He says it all depends on the webmaster.

He denies that linking to someone else’s site brings any SEO advantage, but he is in all support for outbound links if it improves the user experience.

On the other side, a study from Reboot shows a positive correlation between a page’s outbound links and its search engine rankings.

Moz in its Whiteboard Friday series has a great post explaining the impact of external linking for SEO.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is a powerful SEO technique.

It helps webmaster in bridging the gap between their top read and top-selling content pieces. Not just it, there are many other SEO benefits of internal linking:

• Passing the link juice across site
• Better navigation for readers
• Reduces the bounce rate
• Better crawling and indexing

Additionally, internal linking helps websites define their content hierarchy – A key to success for content heavy sites.

Wrapping It Up

So there you have it – all on page search engine ranking factors explained in one place.

Have you checked for all on your website or blog? If not, which one you are going to start with first?

Let me know in the comments along with your opinion on this post.

PS: I'll be covering other search engine ranking factors – Off-page, Domain, and Site – in detail in my upcoming posts. Get on our list to get them in your inbox when they go live!

The post On Page Search Engine Ranking Factors For Every Webmaster In 2017 appeared first on Serped.com.