case study

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — February 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 06:37:56 +0000

Don’t miss February’s roundup if AI’s impact on SEO has been on your mind. Many of this month’s pieces deal directly with AI and how it is advancing and being optimized. Catch up now so you don’t fall behind. The guides are first. You’ll learn more effective ways to use AI, what big changes to Assistant mean for search, and how to rank quickly with entity AI SEO. The case studies and experiments are next. You’ll see what the data says about growing traffic without SEO, how a company generated 400k+ in revenue with money keywords, and how to most effectively block content from appearing in Google searches. The roundup closes on the SEO and AI news and discussions you shouldn’t miss. You’ll get the latest headlines about changes to core web vitals, examples of how Google grades content from a live audit, and some reasons AI-generated content may rank over original news. ChatGPT for SEO? You’re Using It Wrong https://ahrefs.com/blog/youre-using-chatgpt-wrong/ Joshua Hardwick brings you this piece about making the most of ChatGPT (or other generative text tools you may prefer). He argues that many SEOs aren’t using these tools to their full potential due to some common mistakes. Throughout this guide, he identifies these mistakes and provides some advice for overcoming them. For example, he discusses the mistake of asking AI tools questions they can’t answer. If you ask an AI to provide data only available through analytical tools, you will likely get a bad answer with flawed data. He provides tips for developing prompts that allow the AI to provide more helpful answers. Joshua also argues that asking an AI tool to simply write an article is a mistake. He recommends a different approach where you provide guidance and solicit ideas over several prompts to generate more elaborate responses. Check out the full guide for more tips on how to make the most of AI tools. Joshua addresses other mistakes and how to overcome them. For now, Assistant and Search. Did Google Just Quietly Launch a New Search Ecosystem? https://www.mariehaynes.com/assistant-and-search-did-google-just-quietly-launch-a-new-search-ecosystem/ Marie Haynes introduces you to some changes being made to Google Assistant, which may affect how users search for your site. Google published a blog post with the changes. Marie summarizes the major details: “The microphone icon will now trigger Search Results” from within the Google app…also…the microphone in the Pixel Search bar will now activate Voice Search instead of Assistant.” Marie argues that these changes make voice search a much more important feature. She points out that Assistant delivers websites (in addition to other sources) in response to spoken queries. Throughout the rest of the guide, Marie explains how Google Assistant works and delivers results. She takes you through what users see when they make commercial and non-commercial searchers. Several helpful images are provided to help you. She also reminds you that Bard is coming to Assistant soon. These and other changes may lead to an overhaul of the entire search ecosystem. Marie closes with some theories on where Assistant may go from here and how its capabilities are already evolving. Check out the complete guide to start preparing for a big voice search transition. Next, you’ll learn some tips you can put to use right now to rank more effectively. Entity AI SEO: How I Rank #1 In 10 Hours (Semantic ChatGPT Workflow) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1I_GgJJ7F4 Julian Goldie brings you this video explanation of how he was able to rank in only hours with entities using AI. For the guide, he uses ChatGPT and Autoblogging AI, but you can do the same with your AI tool of choice. The compact 12-minute video includes all the steps you’ll need to follow for your own ranking experience. Julian starts with a helpful explanation of entities and explains how you can differentiate them from related concepts like keywords and LSI. Once you’re caught up with all the definitions, he guides you through the process that he uses to create entity-focused content with AI. He uses his preferred tool for these steps but explains all the principles of what he’s doing so that you can apply them to any tool. As he’s going through the steps, he gives you an inside look into how he evaluates and modifies the first drafts that he’s given by tools. You’ll get some good advice on pruning AI results that you can use in almost any project. Check out the full video to get a great introduction to entities and how content can be used to target them. For now, you’re ready to move on to the case studies. First, you’ll be looking at one of my most recent experiments. It’s an SEO experiment…without any standard SEO. How I Grew Traffic 37.9% on Google, Without doing SEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DgWUgtZGqQ I was able to achieve a 40% increase in users and a 37% increase in sessions without using traditional SEO. I didn’t create optimized content or links as part of this experiment. I also didn’t use AI. I still achieved over 800 referring domains, including Microsoft and Google. My agency did this through “programmatic SEO.” You’ve seen this before, most likely on real estate websites or other nationwide businesses with local fronts (such as hotels). Thousands of pages are generated to supply a home page to each region. The case study involved a software client not ranking for any keywords beyond their own brand name. We built thousands of programmatically-generated pages to cater to each location where they did business. As I show in my video, travel, and currency conversion tools do this regularly and generate millions of visitors. Before the video continues, I will give you a breakdown of the pros and cons of using this process. The pros can be compelling, including the potential to draw significantly more links from all sources. The video takes you through all of the steps I followed to generate programmatic pages for my client. I describe how I found the scalable keywords I needed, how to recognize head terms and modifiers for your content, and how to base your pages on search intent. I’ll also show you how I use various accessible tools like Google Sheets to create better-generated content for programmatic pages and how I help Google identify all these new pages. This isn’t a technical process at all, but as you’ll see, the results were impressive.In the next case study of the month, you’ll see how SEO changes can be reflected in revenue. How Cognism Generated $441K in Revenue With Money Keywords https://moz.com/blog/money-keywords Joe Barron shows how one SEO strategy generated nearly $450k for one company with declining traffic and ranking. Joe’s team decided to move forward with money keywords and were surprised at the results. Before he jumps into his process, he describes some of the changes in how his team thought about strategy. Previously, they focused on top-of-funnel keywords. However, this generated too much traffic that didn’t act when arriving on the page. Joe’s team transitioned from educational content to what he calls converting content. He defines these as keywords people only use when they want to buy something. He lays out the steps his team followed in choosing these keywords and how to recognize the business potential in each one. Once the keywords were chosen, Joe’s team went through several other steps, including publishing the content and optimizing for conversions. Joe describes how this change in strategy required his team to think far more about off-page SEO than they had in the past. He discusses how his team drove backlinks in several different ways. He also lays out the criteria they used to choose good sites. The results of the experiment were impressive. Page views increased by 72.1%, and our average engagement time increased by 13.6% from 2022 — 2023. The tested pages generated 832, and 242 deals. Of those 242 deals, 53 were closed-won, generating $441k in revenue. How to Use Data-Nosnippet to Block Specific Content From Being Used in a Google Search Snippet [Experiment] https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/how-to-use-data-nosnippet/ Glenn Gabe brings you this in-depth experiment into blocking content for being featured in search snippets. As he explains, he has been receiving a lot of messages from website owners who are displeased with the snippet Google has chosen to represent their site. He argues that though this is a problem, there are ways that site owners can effectively limit what content is used to generate a snippet. He runs an experiment to demonstrate how effectively this can be done with the data-nosnippet tool. As he explains, you can use the data-nosnippet attribute on any div, span, or section html element. The experiment started with a page that had a meta description but showed other content in the snippet. He added a span tag in the HTML containing the text used to craft the search snippet. A data-nosnippet attribute was then added to that span tag. He provides some helpful screenshots and other images to guide you through the process of blocking content on your own. See Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup — February 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—January 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 13:19:19 +0000

Jump into the new year with the biggest stories in SEO. This roundup covers AI, SEO heists, and big hints from Google about what’s coming next. First, you’ll review some recent data, analysis, and case studies. You’ll learn some new SGE insights, find out what tests revealed about removing meta descriptions, and learn whether the “SEO heist” we discussed in the last roundup was worth it. Next, you’ll find some guides to help you develop more effective SEO. They’ll teach you what to expect from SGE and Generative AI and how SGE will likely impact your organic traffic going forward. At the end, you’ll find some of the top news stories of the new year. It’s all about Google’s latest moves, including phasing out third-party cookies, the company’s response to a massive spam attack, and removing the previously posted SGE end date. New Google SGE insights: Content formats, YMYL, product views https://searchengineland.com/new-google-sge-insights-content-formats-ymyl-product-views-435849 Danny Goodwin brings you a trove of data covering Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE). This feature represents a huge shift in Google’s search capabilities and has already started driving some changes in some vertices. Danny introduces you to some of the changes revealed in a recent study. For example, SGE is now showing up for 84% of all searches. When it does show up, it most often takes the form of an opt-in option where users can voluntarily request an AI-generated answer. SGE is also showing up in some very predictable formats. 48% of the time, it appears as an ordered list. An unordered list appears about 38% of the time, and a product-view result appears about 8% of the time for product queries specifically. Google has also implemented some SGE warnings for YMYL results. Answers may include warnings about results not being age-appropriate, not representing legal, medical, or financial advice, or possibly dangerous. Product views are yet another area where Google is experimenting heavily. For products, Google provides SGE-related listings, carousel groupings for multiple preferences, and value cards for specific products. Check out the entire article for more analysis and links to the research. Generated meta descriptions have been another major part of Google’s AI adoption. In the next article, you’ll find out what happens when you remove the ones you’ve created. Does Removing Meta Descriptions Improve Click-Through Rates? https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/removing-meta-descriptions Noe Servin brings you this look at a recent Search Pilot study. The study involved removing all listed meta descriptions over the recommended character limit from an e-commerce site, even from pages that had carried those descriptions for a long time. This allowed Google to rewrite them based on the page content autonomously. Search Pilot opened the test with a quiz of their followers. The polled SEOs didn’t agree much with the results. 42% believed the test would have inconclusive results, while the rest were split between the view the test would have positive or negative results. The results of the test showed that there was an average 4.2% increase in monthly organic sessions when the descriptions were removed, and Google’s generated descriptions were allowed to assert themselves. Ultimately, Search Pilot recommended the client to move forward with applying these changes to all applicable pages based on the result. Check out the complete study for more information about the test and its results. Next, you’ll look back at the recent SEO heist with AI content, and how it is playing out from the perspective of experts. An Agency Used AI to Pull an “SEO Heist”: Was It Worth It? We Asked Experts https://blog.hubspot.com/ai/seo-heist Curt del Principe brings you this biting analysis of how one agency founder used generative AI to pull off a heist that stole 3.6 million in traffic from a competitor. Curt asked experts to give their view of what happened, whether it is (as some critics call it) “the death rattle of the internet.” You can grab the backstory for this heist from our last roundup or read this full piece to get an idea of what happened. For now, you just need to know that the heist involved downloading a competitor’s sitemap, turning all URLs into blog titles, and using those titles as AI prompts to produce thousands of pieces of content. As Curt admits, this did work for a surprising amount of time. The site achieved significant growth over more than a year. According to Google, this shouldn’t be able to happen. The Google team has many times alluded to algorithms that catch and punish derivative content. They were effective at diminishing spun content sites in the early 2000s. He theorizes that the algorithms didn’t work this time because new AI articles have a different construction than old spun articles. The heist didn’t involve stealing the competitor’s content, just the subjects of that content. Some experts were asked whether this agency created a “black hat roadmap” for SEO. Some agreed that was a reasonable worry. If AI content can perform at the same level as human content, it could easily crowd out human-created content. However, the experts Curt polled are skeptical that this will remain a problem. As they point out, hundreds of effective tricks for gaming Google have come and been squashed. They also pointed out that the original writeup of the heist didn’t cover conversion data, which may have been significantly lower than the traffic alone suggested. How Google will deal with issues like these remains to be seen, but check out the complete piece for more analysis. For now, let’s jump into the month’s guides, starting with an idea of what to expect from SGE in 2024. Google SGE And Generative AI In Search: What To Expect In 2024 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-sge-and-generative-ai-in-search-what-to-expect-in-2024/504578/ Kristi Hines brings you this look at the evolving landscape of AI and how you may need to adjust your strategies to deal with the evolving landscape of AI in search. She starts with some coverage of recent surveys suggesting that people are highly interested in AI-powered search. About a quarter of US adults already trust AI results, and a third are convinced the results are factual. Kristi believes that Google is chasing even higher levels of adoption and reminds us that Google’s CEO and other officers have described the evolution of search with generative AI as one of Google’s top priorities. New changes, including increased speed and ad placements, have already been announced. Google also focuses on new features that drive organic search traffic to websites. Advertisers have already been told that they can expect native ad formats for SGE, greater connectivity with Bard, and more. Kristi notes that based on Google’s statements and actions, local searches may be a big focus. One-third of SGE results already include local packs. Overall, Kristi argues that SGE is here to stay. Far from a temporary project, it may be one of the most important parts of Google’s search results going forward. However, she also argues that there is a high potential for SGE results to push down organic results like featured snippets did. She argues that there are steps that SEOs should take to be better prepared, and makes some predictions, including: Make sure you check out her full article for more analysis of Google’s statements and how SEOs can prepare. For now, let’s dive more into one specific topic that she covers: GEMini, and its implications for the future of AI. Hidden Gemini: Google Is “Humanizing” the Search Results to Protect Itself Against the AI Storm https://www.growth-memo.com/p/hidden-gemini Kevin Indig brings you this look at how Google is attempting to humanize search results to protect itself against some of the consequences of the incoming AI storm. Google has already launched a system called “Hidden Gem.” This system is designed to find and boost content in forums and blog posts that have proven helpful to readers but have not been given a normal chance to rank. Kevin believes that this will target content that has good user engagement but has struggled on domains without strong authority. As he points out, we have already seen some effects of this policy, with sites like Reddit and Quora appearing for more searches. Kevin argues that one of the biggest benefits of boosting forums is that many of them already impose user verification in some form. By promoting forums, Google can rest on the work these forums already do to verify users rather than try to handle verification itself. He believes that the conversation offered by forums provides value that goes beyond what an LLM can produce. As he points out, forum conversations aren’t just frank answers, they can be funny, sympathetic, or provided by experts with a long history of good standing in the community. Kevin has some ideas for how you can leverage hidden gems for growth. He recommends collaborating with gems through paid influencer campaigns, creating or buying profiles on top forums. He also recommends starting your own community. Check out the complete guide for more tips on using hidden gems. In the final guide for the month, you’ll get a Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—January 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Case Study: The Programmatic SEO Approach that Got Attention from Oracle and Google

Matt Diggity — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 13:23:43 +0000

What if I told you there’s an SEO tactic that allows you to create hundreds of thousands of high quality pages at scale and at a fraction of the cost of doing so manually? Welcome to Programmatic SEO. In this case study, you’ll learn how my team at The Search Initiative grew our client’s organic traffic by 38% sessions. This was achieved by adopting a programmatic approach to SEO. Instead of hiring writers, we designed a single page template and let programming do the rest, creating 500 pages.. On top of this, the site received links from over 700 referring domains including industry heavyweights like Oracle and Google – without us doing any link building ourselves. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. Before that, here’s some more information about our clients goals and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client operates in the software industry, offering a platform to secure and manage open source development for processes that involve custom combinations of tools and platforms. The client didn’t have any visibility for keywords that would make them money which meant that there was a large pool of lucrative keywords that were missed out on. Ranking one or two new pages wasn’t going to cut it. So we created a long-term plan on how to attain tens of thousands of keywords and without manual effort optimizing each page… programmatically. Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Generating Content Through Programmatic SEO Traditional SEO focuses on enhancing a website’s search engine visibility through high-quality content and keyword-centric landing pages and blogs. In most cases, it’s a perfect way of building keywords, links, and mentions, as long as your content is well-crafted and adds value to the end user. But what if there was a way to do this at scale? What is Programmatic SEO? Programmatic SEO (often referred to as pSEO) involves creating landing pages at scale through automation with the aim of ranking them on the search results pages. Each page is uniform, targets a single unique keyword and is created using automated tools and a database. You’ve probably already used websites that have created pages in this way. Real estate websites, eCommerce sites, and even content sites (examples below) have been using this method to pass information from one system to another, allowing them to create thousands of properties or product pages populated with data from suppliers with generated titles, headings, images, descriptions etc. Here’s an example on Realtor.com. If you were to search “houses for sale in [location]”, you’re likely going to find the following kind of pages in the results. Los Angeles New York Note how the layout of each of these pages is identical, but the content (i.e. the properties) change. A quick Google search reveals that there are 19,495 cities, towns and villages in the USA. Realtor.com can’t possibly create a page for every location manually. Instead, they use programmatic SEO. What’s the Difference Between Traditional & Programmatic SEO? Although the goal of both of these is the same, to grow organic traffic, the difference lies in how this is achieved. Traditional SEO focuses on growing search visibility over a long period of time with a focus on producing high-quality, unique content that targets higher competition keywords. Programmatic SEO achieves the same goal, but at a quicker pace as you’re creating multiple pages with an identical layout at scale from a database, templates and automation. In most cases, if your template takes a page and duplicates it, only changing just the keyword – that sucks for users and will likely also get penalized by Google for having large amounts of duplicate content. However, if you use a template to create thousands of products and generate helpful content that accurately describes the specific product, you’re creating value to the user, which is what Google is looking for. However, when it comes to local SEO you do indeed get a free pass and only need to change the city name in order to be “unique enough”. Example Uses of Programmatic SEO Apart from real estate websites like Realtor.com, here are some other examples where websites have employed programmatic SEO to build their pages. Informational Sites Informational sites like Nomad List use programmatic SEO to help users find the best places to live, work and travel. The site takes data about things like cost of living, internet speeds etc for places around the world and produces landing pages in a way that is easy to understand and read. The site is essentially taking readily available data and repurposing it to provide valuable insights to its audience. Directories and Workflow Apps Zapier, a workflow automation tool that integrates thousands of applications and tools, programmatically made landing pages for every single tool they work with showing custom workflows that can be made with the unique combination of the user’s chosen tools. In the financial sector, Wise made a template for a landing page for every single currency they work with, helping their clients convert between any number of currencies. Travel Itinerary Planners Platforms like TripAdvisor and Expedia that help users plan their travel itineraries implement programmatic SEO to dynamically generate destination guides, optimize meta tags for popular attractions, and create content tailored to specific travel preferences. For example, TripAdvisor aggregates hotels based on location so that when you search for keywords like “hotels in japan” or “restaurants in london”, you’ll see pages like this: Job Portals Job search websites like Indeed or Glassdoor often use programmatic techniques to generate job listings, company profiles, and other content for search engine optimization. The template for their job listings pages remain the same. The difference here is that the content is generated by their users i.e. companies and individuals uploading the job listings to their system so that they can be displayed in the relevant listing pages. These are just a handful of examples, but regardless of your industry or size of website, you can make use of pSEO to generate pages at scale. Pros and Cons of Programmatic SEO Here are some of the advantages of Programmatic SEO: But before you commit to pSEO, here are some things you need to be aware of: Despite these disadvantages, and even if you don’t have a massive website, you can still incorporate pSEO into your SEO strategy. Read on to find out how… How to Generate Content Through Programmatic SEO Creating truly programmatic content requires data that needs to be sourced to create content for hundreds, if not thousands of pages. We’ll start by identifying keywords that you can target at scale and data sets that you can use to integrate into your content before using Google Sheets and ChatGPT to build out your web pages. Finding Scalable Keywords For programmatic SEO to be effective, you need to be able to target hundreds or thousands of similar keywords using a single page template. This requires identifying relevant keywords that have many variations that are similar. One way to do this is by entering a seed keyword relevant to your website into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool. For example, if you had a website about everything vegan, you might use terms like “vegan restaurants”. Then click on the Matching Terms report, which shows an expanded list of possible keywords related to the seed keyword. Top tip: consider refining the search results by adjusting the Keyword Difficulty to less than 20 and the Domain Rating (DR) of top-ranking sites to less than 30. This filter will show keywords that are easier to rank for, even with limited backlinks. Identify patterns within the keywords to see which of these can be used to create pages for programmatically. In this case, many of the keywords refer to a particular location, preceded by the term “best” i.e. “best vegan restaurants in chicago”. You can do this by sorting the keywords by “Term” as opposed to “Parent Topics”. You now have 176 keywords (in the USA) that follow a similar pattern for you to create pages for. Identify Modifiers In the previous example, the keywords identified can be split into two categories: head terms and modifiers. The head term is the top-level category of the keyword that you’ll aim for i.e. best vegan restaurants. The modifier is what turns the head term into long-tail keywords (these are highly specific search terms that have lower search volumes) i.e. in chicago. Here’s another example… For a travel website, you could have the following head term and modifier combination: “things to do” + “in [location]”. You could also narrow things down further by adding a secondary modifier: “things to do” + “in [location] + “for [target audience]”. By the end of this process, you’ll have a long list of keyword variations that you can now start to generate content for. Read More Read More

The post Case Study: The Programmatic SEO Approach that Got Attention from Oracle and Google first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – November 2023

Matt Diggity — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 08:57:12 +0000

Don’t miss this roundup if AI SEO and Google’s recent updates have been on your mind. The guides, case studies, and news items we’ve got for you will catch you up on everything happening. This month’s guides focus on AI and a recent change in Google’s algorithm. You’ll get tips on how to future-proof your marketing for AI, advice on how to incorporate AI chat into your SEO, and a breakdown of how to respond to a broad core update. The case studies are next. First, you’ll learn how Google changes your searches, then you’ll learn what happened to one site when they experimented with removing content. Finally, you’ll get some of the biggest SEO headlines of the past month. Google has announced another update and may have already started a different one. You’ll also learn about Google’s mobile-first indexing announcement and discover how a presidential executive order may impact your marketing tools. How to Future-Proof Your Marketing for an AI-Centric Search World? https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-future-proof-your-marketing-for-an-ai-centric-search-world-5-minute-whiteboard/ Rand Fishkin brings you his vision of how marketing departments may need to adapt to AI in the coming years. He posits a hypothetical future where Google search results may look more like the output of an AI tool—with links and snippets replaced with generated statements that include information, advice, and possibly only a few tailored links. There are at least a few reasons to believe this might be what’s coming, and he spends most of his analysis discussing how this new model might play out and how you need to adapt. As far as preparations go, he argues you need to tie your brand to words and phrases people enter into search experiences so that it can be mentioned. If Rand is right, this may be the only kind of SEO that matters in the future. Check out his full piece for tips on adjusting to AI-driven changes for SERPs in the next few years. Next, you’ll learn how you can adopt the AI chat technology that’s already here. How to Incorporate AI Chat and Software into Your SEO Workflow https://moz.com/blog/incorporate-ai-chat-into-your-workflow Katherine Waiter Ong brings you this look at where the current generation of AI chat tools belongs in your project development process. She has a series of ideas for how you can put these AI tools to work, including some she has already put into practice. The detailed guide covers prompts that you can use in all parts of your workflow, including: She gives you plenty of alternate prompts for each task so that you can test them out on your own preferred AI Chat program. In the final guide of the month, you’ll get a broad core explanation that can help you troubleshoot site problems. Google’s Broad Core Algorithm Updates: Important Points and Frequently Answered Questions for Site Owners and SEOs https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-broad-core-updates-important-points-and-frequently-answered-questions/ Glenn Gabe provides a guide for site owners who are having a bad time with the recent broad core updates or those who just want to understand how core updates work on a deeper level. He covers the major points, including what site-level quality algorithms are, how content is judged, and what makes content “quality.” You’ll learn some recovery steps that you can follow to improve your performance next time. As he explains, improvements aren’t likely to be recognized until the next update rolls around. Take that time to implement some of the higher-impact improvements Glenn recommends. He covers his “kitchen sink” approach to remediation and provides evidence for why he believes Google is looking for significant improvement over the long term. He advises you to look at content, UX, ads, affiliate setup, and technical SEO across your site. Check out the complete guide for more information on playing the long game with broad core updates. For now, you’re ready to move on to the month’s case studies. The first has three different case studies on the impact of Google’s Search Generative Experience. How Google Changes Your Searches (A Study of 10,000 Queries) https://moz.com/blog/google-modifying-searches Dr. Peter J. Meyers analyzes over 10,000 results to tell you what’s really happening with your queries. His analysis follows a recent wire article published (and then withdrawn) claiming Google was replacing searches with branded searches. Google has denied that charge, so Myers launched a case study into what they really were doing. He tracked thousands of results and recorded how they were changed. He then applied his own analysis to the changes and their intent. From his results, he created several categories of the changes Overall, he argues against bad intent on Google’s part. You can see his data and make up your mind for yourself. The next case study is a bit of fun, but it might have some real implications for site owners. You’ll explore what really happens to a rank when content gets deleted. I Deleted the Content From Two Posts to See if They’d Still Rank. Here’s What Happened https://ahrefs.com/blog/impact-removing-content/ Patrick Stox brings his personal experiment into removing content and its consequences. You might be surprised to learn this isn’t necessarily a death sentence for your pages. He starts with an interesting reveal from Google’s John Mu. In it, Mu explains that it’s not necessarily Google’s policy to stop ranking pages that lose content. He goes as far as saying that Google may continue to show an empty page if it serves some relevant search purpose. His simple test involved two old blogs with decent traffic. The content was removed on August 8th, and then restored on the 20th. First, he found that Google was able to detect when the change happened. Traffic dropped immediately, but what he noticed was that most of the rankings only lost a few positions. The rank loss remained consistent, without growing worse over the course of the experiment. He offers some final notes toward the end of the experiment. He argues that more testing will be necessary to understand the long-term effects. Additionally, he points out that a recent test to remove links had a similar outcome. Now, you’re ready to catch up on the news. The first item is the announcement of November’s updates. Announced: November 2023 Core Update https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/11/q-and-a-on-search-updates Google Search Central’s team brings you this news of several major updates, including the newest core update. They acknowledge that this news will surprise some SEOs who didn’t expect another one so soon after the October update. This update will focus on a different core system than last month’s. They clarified that their guidance is the same for both updates. However, as the announcement clarifies, this won’t even be the only update rolling out in November. In the same statement, Google confirmed that an update to the review system would also be rolling out. With this announcement, they also said they will no longer give updates on review system changes. This will be because the updates are moving to a format of regular, ongoing changes rather than big rollouts. The core update began on the 2nd of November. The rollout is predicted to take about two weeks. However, in many past updates, Google has exceeded these deadlines (sometimes by several more weeks). The rest of the announcement contains some helpful resources on updates for site owners who may want to review information about what to do next. Another update may have also landed near the end of October. The next piece brings some data and chatter about it. Google Search Algorithm Ranking Update October 25 (Unconfirmed) https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-ranking-update-36269.html Barry Schwartz brings you this analysis of an update that may have had an impact on some sites out there. It was not announced before it began acting on rankings, but drove some interesting volatility and a lot of chatter from SEOs. The volatility that he was tracking began to spike around October 25th. Barry takes you through the major tools and what they detected. You’ll get to see the results from about 10 of them to get an idea of how the tools are measuring the action. Barry also covers some of the active chatter from the SEO community. A number of SEOs responded that they experienced sudden drops or increases that leveled off over the day. Some reported the traffic spikes had also resulted in much higher conversions. Ultimately, it wasn’t clear what had caused everything that had been recorded and discussed. This may have been an aftershock of the earlier update, or it might have been testing or preparation for the November update. Google did have one major announcement to make just before October ended. On the final day of the month, they declared that the long-delayed mobile-first indexing had finally arrived. Mobile-First Indexing Has Landed – Thanks for All Your Support https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/10/mobile-first-is-here The Google Search team brings you the news that the trek to mobile-first indexing is finally complete. This process has been ongoing since early 2016. The final date was pushed back multiple times before it finally was declared complete with this statement. Google included justifications for the change in their writeup, Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – November 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

88% Monthly Traffic Growth & Outranking Amazon (SEO Case Study)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 12:39:44 +0000

Going up against big competitors in your industry, like Outlook India for Affiliate sites, Amazon for eCommerce sites or Wikipedia for informational queries, isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. With careful content optimization, following the right UX best practices and building authority with quality backlinks, there’s nothing stopping you from doing what we did with our client’s rankings. In this case study, you’ll learn exactly how my team at The Search Initiative increased our client’s organic traffic from 72.4k to 136.4k sessions in under a year – and outranking the likes of Amazon for important keywords. In this article, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. Before that, here’s some more information about the website’s goals and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client is an online adult store primarily targeting the United States. The main objective for this campaign was to grow visibility for commercial intent keywords so as to drive organic traffic to important category pages, with the ultimate aim of generating more online sales through eCommerce. One of the first things we did to build the site’s domain authority and ranking power so that it could compete against the likes of Amazon – one of their main competitors for adult toys – was to leverage the power of AI to execute a blogger outreach strategy. Didn’t think Amazon rank for these kinds of keywords? Think again… At the same time, with the client operating in such a lucrative market, we needed to build topical authority and present them as a credible source of information. To address a lack of topical authority, we implemented a content strategy that focused on creating informative blog articles that are related to the adult toys that the client sells, and the niche in general. For any website looking to improve conversions, you need to ensure that you’re providing users with a great experience; and that everything works as expected. The client’s website lacked basic UX best practices that were costing them both money and traffic. Finally, to improve the positions of the client’s “money” keywords (i.e. the ones that have a commercial intent and bring in the most conversions), we focused our attention on optimizing existing and creating new category pages (more on this later). Learn how to tackle these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Building Backlinks With Blogger Outreach (& AI) When it comes to boosting the rankability of a web page, few SEO tactics come close to being as powerful as link building. One such link building tactic that we employ (and have continued to get great success from) at TSI, is blogger outreach. Blogger outreach involves finding topically relevant websites who you can then reach out to for a link back to content that their audience will find useful. Let’s break down the main steps on how to do blogger outreach – with the help of generative AI tool ChatGPT. Link Prospecting There are a number of ways you can find link prospects, but in this case study, I’ll show you the cool new way of how to do it – using ChatGPT. Link prospecting is about finding niche relevant websites that can link back to your website. I recommend using GPT4 in conjunction with the WebPilot plugin enabled. To do this, go to Settings and enable plugins. Go back to the chat and open the Plugin dropdown and select WebPilot – this is a plugin that enables GPT to scan live websites as opposed to relying on its training data from 2021. So here’s a prompt that you can use to find these prospects: Using the WebPilot plugin for ChatGPT, please give me a list of 20 popular websites within the [enter your niche]. Here’s an example of a response from GPT providing websites from the audio tech niche. It was able to find an article that lists 30 popular audio tech sites, and it asked if that’s what I wanted. I said yes, and it listed the sites along with their links. Now, AI tools like ChatGPT aren’t perfect (yet), so It’s important to manually check each of these sites to ensure they’re relevant to your website. You can also apply a similar approach to identify online communities within your niche. Here’s a prompt: Using the WebPilot plugin for ChatGPT, please give me a list of 10 popular online forums/communities within the [enter your niche]. Here’s the response from ChatGPT: By the end of this process, you should have a considerable list of potential websites to get a backlink from. Getting Contact Details Once you’ve prepared your list of websites that you want to reach out to, the next step is to find the contact information for them i.e. an email address of a writer at the site, or via their general contact form. You can usually find email addresses on the contact us page of the website (see why having one is important?), but if you’re unable to find one, you can use a tool like Hunter.io. Hunter.io is a tool that you can use to do this – they have a Chrome extension that allows up to 25 searches per month for free. If you’re using their website, enter the domain into Domain Search and hit enter. You can see that the tool has found 21 email addresses for the example site. Pitch Creation The most important step in this process is the pitch – this is what will be the deciding factor on whether or not you’ll get a backlink from your prospective site. The key to crafting a great outreach pitch is ensuring that you’re adding personally relevant information about the website that you’re pitching to. This doesn’t mean that you can template the process, but that you still need to personalize the pitch based on who you’re pitching to. In general, you need to explain: To create a pitch worthy of securing backlinks, why not use the help of ChatGPT? Here’s an example of a prompt that you can use to do this: Using the WebPilot plugin for GPT, please write a blogger outreach pitch to [enter prospective website URL] (might want to include their about page) with the goal of writing a guest post for their site. Please include a subject line. My website is [enter your URL], and it’s on the topic of [insert your niche]. Guidelines: Here’s what ChatGPT came up with: GPT even provides a compelling subject line that you can use. Monitoring Progress Once the emails have been sent out, all is not done. You should monitor your progress to identify which pitches (and subject lines) worked the best. Blogger outreach is something that constantly evolves over time, especially as not every website will get back to you on the first go. You can also ask GPT to provide a template for follow up emails… Learn more about how to carry out blogger outreach in detail here. Here’s a look at the kind of results we’ve got from this link building campaign: Building Topical Authority with Engaging Blog Content Apart from optimizing and creating new content for your website’s core landing pages (i.e. the pages that drive your business), it’s important to grow your topical authority – which is a concept that’s been thrown around a lot in recent years. Read on to find out what it is, why it’s important and how you can build it for your own site. What is Topical Authority? Topical authority refers to a website’s perceived expertise and credibility on a specific topic or subject area. Search engines like Google aim to deliver the most relevant and high-quality content to searchers’ queries and use signals like topical authority to determine the ranking of web pages in search results. Websites that consistently produce high-quality, informative, and relevant content on a specific topic are more likely to be seen as having topical authority. Here’s an example… Imagine you’re venturing into the realm of sustainable fashion. Crafting a single article that revolves solely around ‘sustainable clothing’ might not be sufficient to thrive in this niche. Why? Because sustainable fashion is a broad subject, and attempting to encapsulate its entirety within a single article would be an overwhelming task. To establish yourself as an authority in this field, your content needs to cover a wide range of topics within sustainable fashion, including: Why is Topical Authority Important? Google associates a website with a topic in order to rank it as a relevant resource for search terms about the particular topic. By having a lot of content about a specific topic on your website, you create opportunities to add internal links between the pages so that Google and users are more likely to find your content more easily. Doing so also helps increase your topical authority in the eyes of Google and helps show that your website is the go-to Read More Read More

The post 88% Monthly Traffic Growth & Outranking Amazon (SEO Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—September 2023

Matt Diggity — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 07:46:36 +0000

Stay ahead of the competition with the latest SEO news, analysis, and tips. This roundup, featuring the latest core update and some big AI changes, has everything you need to hit the ground running. Big news opens this roundup. You’ll see the first early analysis on the new broad Core Updates, learn about the removal of FAQ snippets, and find out what’s rolling out alongside Google’s new Search Generative Experience (SGE). Next, you’ll get the latest numbers from recent case studies. You’ll get some data-based arguments for why AI optimization may be the future of SEO and how other SEOs are making the most of these new tools. You’ll also see an analysis of how digital “goliaths” are doing SEO and what one SEO learned as a Google Search Quality Rater. The guides, at the end, will empower you with some new techniques. They teach you how to strike the right balance when creating AI content and how to beat existing power players when jumping into new niches. Google August 2023 Broad Core Update Is Live – What We Are Seeing Now https://www.seroundtable.com/google-august-2023-core-update-35927.html Barry Schwarts brings you this news about the drop of the latest Core Update. This one arrived on August 27th and is still continuing as of this writing. The official Google announcement claimed the rollout would take approximately two weeks. However, even three weeks after the launch, Google has yet to announce that the rollout has ended. This rollout may be taking extra time due to the amount of changes. According to the details Google released, all types of content are being targeted for adjustments. Google declined to state the percentage of all queries/searches impacted. Barry reported the first obvious tremors in an update article he published on the 12th. He tracked SEO chatter across major forums and found that there were significant reports of dropping traffic. Several SEOs reported traffic changes as significant as -35%. Most of the volatility may be yet to come. While Google hasn’t given us many details about this core update, they have been more direct about another change. FAQ snippets are disappearing for many results. Google Removes FAQ Snippets from Search Results https://www.sistrix.com/blog/google-removes-faq-snippets-from-search-results/ Johannes Beus breaks down Google’s recent decision to remove FAQs and How-to rich results from most SERPs. The move was announced in a Google Search Central post in early August. At the time, Google claimed that these types of results were being cleared to create a “cleaner” and “more consistent” search experience. Under the new guidelines, FAQs will only be shown for authoritative government and health websites. How-tos will continue to appear for desktop results but not mobile results. So far, there’s no news on if or when How-to results will be removed for desktop users. Google provided this reminder for users who still plan to use markup for desktop searches. Note: With mobile indexing, Google indexes the mobile version of a website as the basis for indexing. To have How-To rich results shown on the desktop, the mobile version of your website must include the appropriate markup. Johannes took a look at how SERPs had changed since the announcement. According to his data, FAQs were nearly completely eliminated from mobile results by early September. This followed the removal of nearly half of them around June of 2023. This was not Google’s only major change this month. They also introduced links to web pages within the SGE’s AI-powered answers. Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) Officially Rolls Out Links to Web Pages Within Answers https://searchengineland.com/google-search-generative-experience-officially-rolls-out-links-to-web-pages-within-answers-431324 Barry Schwartz brings you this news about a new SGE feature that could have major implications for SEO. As announced by Google earlier this month, SGE users will now see an arrow icon next to AI answers that directs them to relevant pages. Google claims that this feature will show the websites that were used to generate the information for the AI answers. Depending on the answer given, it may show one or several sites as sources. U.S. users should already see these changes reflected in searches. In the coming weeks, it will roll out to other countries, including Japan and India. This feature is not necessarily in its final state. Google has tested other models and may continue to update. The move has been supported by many SEOs who want to see their sites get credit for being used to generate AI answers. It may open up a new avenue for optimizing AI. The first data piece of this roundup has some ideas for how that may work. Forget SEO: Why ‘AI Engine Optimization’ May Be the Future https://venturebeat.com/ai/forget-seo-why-ai-engine-optimization-may-be-the-future/ Sharon Goldman brings you this analysis of the potential for AI engine optimization in the future. A series of experts were interviewed on their predictions for how AI optimization might appear and how SEOs should prepare. They predict several major changes that SEOs may need to adapt to, including— Check out the complete article for in-depth interviews with several AI industry players and analysis of recent AI moves by major players. Next, you’ll learn what a recent survey says about how SEOs are using AI right now. (Survey) Generative AI and SEO Strategy: Getting the Most Out of Your Tools https://www.searchenginejournal.com/generative-ai-and-seo-strategy-getting-the-most-out-of-your-tools/493591/#close Matt G. Southern brings you some AI insights from Search Engine Journal’s State of SEO Report. A series of SEO experts were asked to answer questions about the AI tools that were being used in their strategies. The survey revealed some interesting trends, including— Matt predicted some additional possibilities based on the results. He predicts that humans will remain an important part of auditing and perfecting content and that the rising popularity of voice AI searches will mean big changes for SEOs. Next, you’ll find out what’s important in SEO right now, from the perspective of an SEO who tried being a Google Search Quality Rater. I Secretly Worked as a Google Search Quality Rater (You Can Too) https://zyppy.com/seo/google-search-quality-rater/ Cyrus Shepard brings you this look at his time as a Google Search Quality Rater. These raters are responsible for reviewing sites and providing information Google may use to promote or demote sites in key niches. Google had no problem allowing an SEO to sign up. While confidentiality agreements cover parts of the experience, Cyrus was able to share a lot about how the process works and what SEOs can learn as raters. First, the test to become a quality rater is apparently a challenging one. Even with a long background covering Google’s guidelines, Cyrus reported failing it on the first attempt. While he couldn’t provide information about what he was asked to evaluate and why, he did provide a list of the publicly available factors he thought were especially important in light of what he learned. He named “Page Quality” at the top of this list, noting that the current guidelines devote 70 pages to it. He also identified Needs Met, User Intent, and Reputation as factors that are particularly worth studying. Cyrus suggests that some SEO teams could seriously benefit from getting at least one team member to sign on and serve a short time as a Google Quality rater. So far, he’s keeping the position. The guides are up next. First, you’ll get some ideas for creating balanced AI content. Balancing Creativity With Caution When Using AI to Create Content https://moz.com/blog/use-ai-with-creativity-and-caution Bethan Vincent brings you this look at some of the practices she’s developed while working with AI writing tools. Based on her experiences, she created some basic rules that you can apply to create high-value AI content. First, she shares some warnings for big organizations. She stresses that, due to AI using inputs to learn, it is vital that anyone building AI content avoid providing proprietary information. Be careful about entering client information to build content because it could be used to train the model. It may also show up for other users of the AI system. Bethan also warns you against automatically trusting the outputs you receive from AI. While AI hallucination is one problem, she reminds you that there’s also a possibility that even the original information retrieved by AI isn’t correct. Human eyes are still essential for catching errors. She recommends that anyone using AI for quality content create a step to verify sources, figures, and facts. She also recommends that you double-check any links that are created by generative tools. After providing some warnings, Bethan has some advice for using AI to the best of its current abilities. She lays out how she’s developed her own process to use AI for the acceleration of original ideas, to analyze completed content, and to create more variations for a different perspective. Check out the entire guide for some thoughtful tips on how to make AI content better. In the final guide of the month, you’ll learn some strategies for taking on the sites that are already at the top of a given niche. Beating Incumbents at Content in Competitive Spaces https://www.kevin-indig.com/beating-incumbents-at-content-in-competitive-spaces/ Kevin Indig brings you this advice Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—September 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Thank You Gift

Matt Diggity — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 16:39:29 +0000

Step 1Download Your Resources!1. The Diggity Marketing Evergreen Onsite SEO GuideIt’s my firm belief that onsite SEO is one of the most misunderstood and overlooked aspects of ranking.Ironically, having solid onsite will get you higher in the rankings than any amount of backlinks.Follow the concepts in this guide… these onsite methods are exactly what I use to get my rankings. If and when you see returns, please tell me about your success story. Download Latest Version of the Diggity Onsite SEO Guide 2. Matt Diggity’s Backlink Blueprint TimelineHave you ever asked:How long do you wait to hit your money site with links or social signals?When do you build citations?What link velocity should you hit your money site with?Should you send links to your social profiles?In this guide, I’m going to provide you with a complete linking process and timeline – helping you get from “Day 1” to “Page 1”. Download the Backlink Blueprint Guide 3. An SEO’s Guide to Scaling an SEO BusinessScaling an SEO business proposes a very unique set of challenges. SEO techniques change from year to year.What works today might not work for you tomorrow.How will your company stay up to date with the next algorithm change?Are you going to be able to get your head out of the day-to-day busy work, so you can focus on determining the next niches to go after?How are you going to expand your agency if you’re constantly on the phone with needy customers?The answer to all these questions boils down to how to scaling. In particular, scaling an SEO business… which is what I cover in this guide. Download the Guide to Business Scaling 4. How to 132X Your Website Profit – The Biggest Wins from 3 Case StudiesIn my SEO agency, The Search Initiative, we’ve collected quite a few huge wins when it comes to ranking, optimizing, and scaling affiliate SEO websites.In this guide I’ve highlighted three of the biggest winners and broken down what were the key factors that caused these sites to succeed:Female Beauty Niche: $500 to $16400 per monthWeight Loss Niche: $4000 to $33100 per monthToy Niche: $500 to $45000 per monthFind out exactly which SEO tweaks and conversion wins were able to get us an average of 132X profit on these three sites. Download How to 132X Your Website Profit Case Studies 5. The Complete SEO Checklist – Your Guide to Getting Traffic on GoogleI’ve put together the ultimate checklist you’ll need to sky-rocket your SEO success.42 best practices based on years of SEO experience & testing.Covers everything. From keyword research and content optimization to link building and technical SEO.Always up-to-date with the latest findings.You’ll find out the best practices and tasks you need to know to increase your site’s organic traffic and rank #1 on Google. Download the Complete SEO Checklist 6. First 30-Day SEO Checklist – Your Day-By-Day Walkthrough To Creating a Profitable Online BusinessI’ve put together a day-by-day, 30-day walkthrough on how to create a profitable affiliate marketing blog.Step-by-step guide based on years of SEO experience & testing.Covers everything. From keyword research and content optimization to hosting and link building.Always up-to-date with the latest findings.Each day, you’ll get a small task in the process.And by the end of 30-days, your website will have traction on Google, and you’ll be on your way to a profitable online business. Download the First 30-Day SEO Checklist More Coming Soon... Step 2Get up to speed with AI How to use ChatGPT to make Google LOVE 💕 your Website…Are you wondering how to use chatGPT to make your website's traffic go vertical? In this video, you'll learn how to use chatGPT to grow your traffic faster and protect yourselves from algorithm updates. My AI Website Got Busted 🙁Have your AI website got a decrease in traffic recently? In this video, you're going to learn why this traffic bump is normal and what you need to do to make $20.000 per month. 8 SEO Niches that are PERFECT for AIHave your AI website got a decrease in traffic recently? In this video, you're going to learn why this traffic bump is normal and what you need to do to make $20.000 per month. How AI will KILL SEO (and what you should do instead)Are you wondering how to leverage AI for SEO and what will that mean for you as an SEO professional? In this video, you'll get to know what you should do to compete with other AI wannabes. Step 3Add me on Social Media![tcb-script src="https://apis.google.com/js/platform.js"][/tcb-script] Follow @mattdiggityseo [tcb-script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"][/tcb-script]Step 4Join Our Facebook Group to Connect With Thousands of SEO Entrepreneurs [tcb-script async="" defer="" crossorigin="anonymous" src="https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v7.0&appId=187133741333814&autoLogAppEvents=1"][/tcb-script] Read More

The post Thank You Gift first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—August 2023

Matt Diggity — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 07:00:12 +0000

If you want to amplify your SEO efforts with AI, this is a roundup you shouldn’t miss. We’ve gathered together some of the most essential guides, case studies, and news headlines to keep you ahead of the competition. The guides are the first. They’ll give you the tools you need to use generative AI to increase E.E.AT. scores, understand Google’s own systems, run better campaigns with machine learning, and use ChatGPT to find keyword variations. Next, the case studies will give you real data on what’s working in SEO. You’ll learn how one site grew 200% with image-based SEO, the experiences of SEOs who removed AMP, and the results of an interesting experiment that disallowed humans. At the roundup’s end, we’ve included some headlines you shouldn’t miss. Google is planning some huge changes, Shopify is enhancing its on-page experience with AI, and Google has made a big update to Product Rating policies. 4 Ways to Leverage Your Website’s E. E. A.T. Using Generative AI Tools (Part 1) https://www.ezoic.com/guest-blog-4-ways-to-leverage-your-websites-e-e-a-t-using-generative-ai-tools-part-1/ Saleh Ahmed brings you this two-part guide to analyzing and filling content gaps using AI tools. In it, he covers how you can fill in competitor data and search queries using AI, assign topics more effectively, and generate topic clusters from competitor sitemaps. After an introduction, he starts with some steps for priming any AI you use for content-level improvement. He provides a series of starting prompts you can use to guide the AI toward the right parameters, including all of the following— After that, he gives you examples of how tools like ChatGPT and Bard respond to these prompts and prepare themselves for the next step. The steps are designed so that you can use most major AI systems to complete them. His advice carries you through four levels of different prompts until the tool is ready to analyze your content. The guide continues with advice on directing the parameters you’ve created with these prompts to analyze your content and that of your competitors. Check out the complete guide for more content tips. Next, you’ll learn about some AI systems that may already be impacting your content—Google’s own. Google’s Helpful Content & Other AI Systems May Be Impacting Your Site’s Visibility https://www.mariehaynes.com/google-ai-systems/ Marie Haynes brings you this look at how Google is reshaping SEO with AI. In it, she dives deep into how AI has already significantly changed Google’s ranking system. She follows up with some tips you can follow to avoid big losses across these changes. First, she makes the case that nothing is more important to SEO than aligning with Google’s quality criteria. Now, she argues, AI is doing a lot of the work of judging and ranking content based on that criteria, and she has some ideas for how you can play by AI’s rules better. She comprehensively breaks down how Google’s AI systems have been operating since 2016, with some graphs that track the introduction and resolution of major traffic volatility since then. Then, she takes you through all of the AI/Machine systems that are currently at work. She covers— For each system or series of systems, she gives you some analysis of how they work and what signals they use. She explains how you can do better to please these systems and which factors matter most. The complete guide is incredibly thorough and could provide a good foundation for you or any employees you want to understand AI in SEO. Next, you’ll learn some precise steps you can use to get keyword variations from your favorite AI tools. How to Use ChatGPT to Uncover Keyword Variations Other Tools Miss (Prompts Included) https://searchengineland.com/chatgpt-keyword-variations-tools-miss-prompts-429665 Tony Hill brings you this look at how you can use ChatGPT to find keyword variations other tools might miss. The process involves a series of prompts, so you can use the same principles on any of your favorite AI tools. The guide jumps directly into the steps with the basic keyword “drones” as an example. Starting with this single term, Tony takes you through five steps that will get you a narrowed list of effective variations. The guide doesn’t end there. Tony takes you through another set up steps that you can follow to find words and phrases that your potential customers might need. Finally, he provides some best practices for adding missing word variations to your lists. With all the steps laid out, you can test this technique out for yourself in a half hour or so. It may become one of your AI-enabled habits. For now, we’re ready to dive into the month’s data studies. In the first one, you’ll learn how one company used image thumbnails to earn a 200% increase in traffic. Foot Locker Image SEO Case Study: 228% Increase for Google Image Thumbnails https://brodieclark.com/foot-locker-image-seo/ Brodie Clark brings you this case study into a big traffic increase for Foot Locker. As an introduction to the results, he provides some quick background on how Google image thumbnails are generated for category pages. Foot Locker had been an example in an earlier guide he created about thumbnails, and this study looks at the actions the company took to correct their problems—as well as the results. He jumps right into those. Foot Locker went from having no image thumbnails appearing for any of its important category pages to having nearly all pages producing multi-image thumbnails. Brodie illustrates the difference by showing you images of how SERPs looked for Foot Locker results before and after the changes. Even from just one image, the change is striking. The company’s result covers significantly more of the page with half-a-dozen images. In numbers, the changes across the site accounted for a rise from ~60K organic visits per month to now 195K organic visits per month. The traffic is still increasing. Brodie continued by documenting the steps the company took to resolve the issues. He covers a long list of changes they made while troubleshooting issues related to— Check out the complete study for more information about how you can target the same issues with your own sites or clients. Next, you’ll learn how the AMP removal may still affect your sites. How It’s Going After Removing Google AMP Pages 3 Weeks Ago https://www.seroundtable.com/remove-google-amp-status-35724.html Barry Schwartz brings you a condensed look at some of the changes that have followed the removal of AMP. He covers his own site (SEO Roundtable) as an example and provides you with a look into his site data three weeks afterward. He followed the AMP removal guidelines closely, so his experiences may be instructive for site owners attempting the same thing. He recorded a few problems with the initial removal. He warns readers that Google was still referencing AMP URLs in canonical pages early in the process. This turned out to be a delay in reporting that was easily resolved. As many SEOs likely fear, there were some problems with Discover. For a brief time, the site was not showing up at all, and when images did appear, they were not the proper size. This was resolved with a minor fix. Overall, Barry described the process as going smoothly. Several weeks later, no major problems are holding the site back. You should be able to enjoy the same results by following Google’s guide (linked just above) and considering the troubleshooting steps Barry discusses here. The last study in this week’s roundup is an eyebrow-raising test of Google’s cloaking detection and response. Disallow Humans (Bad Cloaking) https://ohgm.co.uk/bad-cloaking/ Oliver H.G. Mason tests Google’s cloaking limits by fully banning humans from his site and watching how Google responds. As a quick reminder, cloaking is when you show two different pages to crawlers and human searchers. Google considers cloaking to be spam and has worked to control it since it emerged as an early black-hat technique in the 2010s Oliver’s test tracked the modern response from Google’s detection systems. Human searchers were sent to a nearly blank page with a simple message about the website being closed. Crawlers could still access the original content. The interesting result was that Google didn’t appear to have detected the change at all. Traffic did begin to decline, but it was a slow and moderate decline even three months after Google had indexed the change. Oliver suggested that the results may have come from over-tuning of Google’s detection mechanisms. He theorized that the systems policing this practice may be primed to hunt for adult topics rather than a page that’s simply empty. The results may be interesting to SEOs who want to run their own tests. For now, let’s jump to the news. First, Google has made a major announcement regarding Howto and FAQ results. Google Reduces the Visibility of Howto and FAQ Rich Results in Search https://searchengineland.com/google-reduces-the-visibility-of-howto-and-faq-rich-results-in-search-430452 Google has announced that they are effectively demoting HowTo and FAQ rich results. As part of the changes, fewer rich results will be appearing in all searches. Fewer FAQ results will appear overall, and How-to results have been restricted for desktop Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—August 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Grow Traffic by 368% (Market Disruption Case Study)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 07:49:21 +0000

Whether you’re starting out from scratch or growing your existing brand’s organic search presence, there’s nothing stopping you from disrupting the search results pages of your industry one step at a time. The key to doing this is keyword selection. Combine this with killer, shareable content and a solid link building strategy, and you’re well on your way to boosting your organic traffic. In this case study, you’ll learn exactly how my team at The Search Initiative increased our client’s organic traffic by 368% and monthly revenue by 445% despite their industry being dominated by a big competitor. If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Before that, here’s some more information about the website’s goals and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client produces and sells nicotine alternatives that use natural ingredients instead of tobacco. The brand and product had close-to zero online presence when joining the agency and their main competitor had already monopolized the market – so the main objective for the campaign was to build organic traffic from the ground up and generate online sales through eCommerce. One of the main challenges was the fact that keywords that had any substantial search volume were extremely competitive and dominated by their main competitor. As a start-up, the client’s site lacked the topical and domain authority required to be able to compete for such terms. Instead, we focused on building visibility by targeting informational search queries about quitting smoking such as smoking alternatives. By focusing on producing more content on the blog, we needed to make sure that the client’s products were showcased in the articles so that users were enticed to click through and place an order. This was achieved by implementing a related posts section (designed to keep users longer on the site), a sidebar (so that we could add calls to actions) and adding internal links (to drive users towards relevant product pages). To build the brand’s online presence, we focused our link building efforts through digital PR, so that people would start to know that the brand and product range existed. Check this video below to learn more about digital PR. Finally, we rounded off the strategy by making sure that any technical issues holding back the site’s performance were addressed. The two main issues that we tackled was to implement a more user-friendly URL structure (so that they were easy to read, remember and share for users) and to improve the page performance (by compressing and minifying files that were large). Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Informational Keyword Targeting With the commercial keywords out of bounds due to high competition and lack of topical authority, we focused on building the site’s keyword visibility for informational search terms instead by producing content around question-based keywords related to smoking. How to Find Question Based Keywords to Target I’ll show you two ways to find question-based keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer The first is using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool. You can now go ahead and write an article about the lifespan of cats. People Also Ask If you don’t have Ahrefs, you can still find informational keywords from the People Also Ask section in Google’s search results. In the above example, Google added the two following questions “What is the friendliest cat to own?” and “What is the kindest type of cat?” when expanding the original question “What is the best cat for first time owner?”. Writing Content for Informational Search Terms Once you’ve found the informational keywords that you want to target, the next step is to start writing the content. Here are some tips on how you should do this: Here’s what you need to look for: Use your competitors as a baseline for what you need to include within your page. You should also look at how they have optimized other on-page elements such as the title tag, H1 heading, meta description and their URL for the target keyword. For example, here’s the featured snippet for the keyword “how long do cats live”. And here’s where the answer is taken from within the ranking page. As you can see, the page provides a clear and concise answer to the question right at the beginning of the article. Then it goes into much more detail about the lifespan of cats later on in the article by covering more specific topics like which type of cats live the longest etc. The short answer caters to users who just want an instant answer to their search query whereas the rest of the article is for users who want to learn more. This is especially important if you’re writing about a topic that can impact a user’s physical, mental or financial well being. But even websites that don’t fall into this category need to demonstrate their expertise in order to build trust. Here are a few ways you can achieve this: Following the above steps will help grow your keyword visibility for informational search terms. Redesigning The Blog for SEO Apart from optimizing and expanding the content on your blog, it’s also important to ensure you’re following best practices in making it as functional as possible for users. Below are things that you should include within your blog to improve navigation and overall usability. Add Related Posts A Related Posts section provides readers with additional relevant content that they might be interested in. It helps users discover more of your blog’s content, increasing their engagement and time spent on your website. In addition to this, related posts help: How Should I Choose Related Posts? When selecting the related articles, make sure that they are indeed relevant to the current post so that readers are naturally encouraged to continue reading. Where Should the Related Posts Be Added? The most common place to put your related posts section is towards the bottom of the page. How Many Related Posts Should I Include? When it comes to how many related posts to include, I recommend aiming for 3 to 5. Adding too many will confuse readers as to what to read next and dilute the importance of each related article. How Can I Add Related Posts? One of the most popular WordPress plugins for related posts is the Contextual Related Posts plugin. It’s a free plugin that automatically generates a list of related posts based on contextual cues from your blog post’s title and content. All you have to do is install and activate the plugin. If you’re looking for something that allows for more customization, check out the Custom Related Posts plugin which allows you to pick your related posts manually. Add A Sidebar The purpose of most blog posts is to provide information, not to sell. However, that doesn’t mean that you can convert users looking for information to customers. One way to do this is to leverage the space in your sidebar by adding calls to action (CTAs) and other enticing content. Here are some examples of what you can add to boost engagement and conversions: Building out your sidebar by adding these elements can transform the engagement levels on your website. Add Internal Links You’ve already learned about internal links in the form of Related Posts, but let’s focus on internal linking in its most traditional form. The idea of internal linking is to add a hyperlink on one page on your website to another page. These links help establish connections between different pages, improve website navigation, and assist search engines in understanding the structure and hierarchy of your website’s content. Here are some tips on how to implement internal linking on your blog: Use Relevant Anchors: use descriptive anchor text (the clickable part of the link) that accurately reflects the linked page’s content. If possible, try to use anchor texts that include the main keyword that you’re trying to rank on the linked page. Strategic Placement: incorporate internal links so that they fit naturally within the body of your content. Link to Relevant Pages: distribute your internal links across relevant pages to ensure a well-connected website structure. Don’t Overdo It: avoid excessive internal linking on a single page, which can confuse users and dilute SEO value. Link Back to Your Blog Post: don’t forget to also add internal links back to your blog post too so that it too can benefit from other pages’ authority. Building Brand Awareness With Digital PR Considering that the client’s brand had no online presence and the product range itself had zero search volume, the site needed a boost in domain authority. The best way to do this is with backlinks. Instead of general blogger outreach, we showcased the client’s product range with content that highlights smoking alternatives, targeted towards people looking to quit smoking and built awareness of their Read More Read More

The post How to Grow Traffic by 368% (Market Disruption Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—July 2023

Matt Diggity — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 09:37:17 +0000

This month’s roundup has the latest SEO data studies, guides, and news headlines you need to stay ahead of the competition. To start, you’ll get some data from our studies. The first one is a poll of marketing teams, including major names like Spotify, on their implementation of AI. The next is a deep-dive case study into how one brand took a commanding lead in the volatile insurance niche. Then, you’ll pick up some new skills from our guides. First, you’ll learn how to use the new Google Perspectives feature. Then, you’ll learn how to improve your informational content by using points of view. At the end of the roundup, you’ll find a lot of recently breaking headlines you shouldn’t miss. Learn about mysterious queries, the latest new launches by Google, how Google uses AI, and how to make the most of the newly-available Google Analytics 4. Marketing Teams Are Using AI to Generate Content, Boost SEO, and Develop Branding to Help Save Time and Money; Study Finds https://www.businessinsider.com/marketing-industry-using-ai-save-time-money-boost-productivity-study-2023-6 Aaron Mok brings you this look at a recent client poll by the platform Bynder. The company polled 104 major clients about their AI usage, including major brands like Spotify, Puma, and Canon. More than half of all respondents to the poll reported that their marketing teams were already using AI. They reported using it to automate basic tasks, generate email/social media drafts, and quickly paraphrase other content. Aaron followed up to find out how ChatGPT was being used. He got responses from various founders, marketing directors, and other leaders. They reported using AI for tasks like product descriptions and even generating business proposals. AI is still an emerging technology. The adoption rates seen in this poll suggest that it will play a large role in marketing going forward, especially for companies large companies in competitive niches. Check out the complete article for the link to the study and more analysis of AI’s potential. Next up, you’ll find out how the company Progressive overwhelmed competitors in the insurance niche to become the #1 SEO presence in two years. How Progressive Is Winning the SEO Insurance Industry https://www.kevin-indig.com/how-progressive-is-winning-the-seo-insurance-industry/ Kevin Indig brings you this case study examining the rise of Progressive (a national-scale insurance company in the United States). Several years ago, this company was firmly in 4th place. Now, it’s beating all competitors, and Kevin details how. First, he reminds us that this is an incredibly difficult niche. It’s highly regulated, has strong competition, and the buying cycles are typically very short. It takes serious effort to see movement in this niche. Still, Progressive was able to manage it with three strategies that Kevin goes over in great detail He took several lessons from his analysis that he condensed into several strategic questions you can ask yourself if you hope for the same results: Don’t miss his complete guide if you have some content problems. The results speak for themselves, and he has much more advice (and helpful graphs) for you to learn from. Learn From Others’ Experiences With More Perspectives on Search https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-perspectives/ Lauren Clark (Google’s Product Manager), brings you this detailed look at the new Perspectives feature now available in some searches. She describes this feature, what it is meant to accomplish, and how it pulls its results. As she explains, this is an AI-powered feature meant to provide more access to real opinions from sources across the internet. The new feature will highlight results that are drawn from forums, QA sites, and social media. They will include long and short-form videos, images, and written posts. The features will also include information about the person who posted the content (for example, their name, profile pictures, or the popularity of their content) when possible. Lauren claims that in addition to the other stated goals, Perspectives is intended to make it easier for users to find expertise and experience. The update also comes with some changes to how review content is ranked. See the full guide for a complete introduction to this new feature. Next, you’ll get some ideas on improving your informational content with another kind of perspective. How and Why You Should Create Informational Content With POVs https://moz.com/blog/informational-content-with-povs Victor Ijidola brings you this look at creating more compelling informational content. He argues that by providing a point-of-view, you can make this content drive sales more effectively. In this guide, he lays out how. By using a POV, he means to provide your own perspective or to personalize the information so that it could only have come from your own experience. This practice can help you avoid creating generic, cookie-cutter content. He presents some detailed arguments for the power of the POV. First, he argues, it helps you form a deeper connection with your visitor. Sharing a POV helps readers feel that they are beginning to know you. A relationship is created when you reveal your personality or preferences. Victor argues that the connections you build through authentic perspective can create or attract more committed fans to your content. He also argues that it has the potential to make readers more likely to invest in content after reading the opening paragraphs and eventually more likely to convert. He follows up his arguments with some tips for how you can create some POV-driven content. He recommends exploring your product’s keywords and identifying the areas where you have strong opinions or background. As he reminds you, POV isn’t just about opinion. You want to be able to back up your view. With the month’s guides finished, you’re ready to take on the latest headlines. First, you’ll learn about a bizzare Local Guide Program keywords that may also be appearing in your client’s Google Search Console. The Mysterious Appearance of “Local Guide Program” Queries in Google Search Console https://www.seroundtable.com/local-guide-program-gsc-35575.html Glenn Gabe brings you his own investigation into a mysterious keyword. During a client audit, he found out that the keyword Local Guide Program was driving traffic to pages across his client’s site. The problem was, he couldn’t figure out why. He checked out similar sites and found that the keyword was appearing there, too. These pages did not appear to have any relevance to this keyword or to be participants in a Google program of the same name. All the traffic was coming from desktop searches, nearly 100% of it. It was also coming from multiple countries. Furthermore, it was always reported that every checked page was always ranking #1 for the term. For many sites, this keyword alone accounts for a decent amount of traffic. As of yet, the mystery remains unsolved. Glenn was unable to find any answers on his own, or any answers in the various forum posts that have covered the same topic. SEO should keep an eye on the situation, especially if this keyword is appearing in their client’s console reports. If it’s a bug, the traffic may suddenly disappear after an update—creating an issue for SEOs and their clients. Next, Google has a new feature going live. The Perspectives feature we discussed above is getting it’s own menu filter on SERPs. Google’s Perspectives Search Menu Filter Is Now Live on Mobile in the US https://brodieclark.com/google-perspectives-filter/ Brodie Clark brings you this look at the new search menu filter that appeared shortly after the launch of the Perspectives. Now, mobile users will be able to filter their results down to exclusively the items that appear for perspectives. This development may be worth noting for SEOs. Any filter that limits results to personal essays and videos will likely bypass brand websites or other properties where SEO is typically performed. This may be the start of another big change in how content is valued and produced. Brodie speculates that the entire Perspectives feature may be an attempt by Google to win back some search share from its growing rival tiktok. The Perspectives feature and filter makes it significantly easier for searchers to find short-video results. Make sure that you check out the complete article for some images and explanations of how the new filters work. You’ll find some ideas you can use to start developing content that can rank on this new and potentially revolutionary search features. Next up, Google has another announcement. It claims that its upcoming algorithm will eclipse ChatGPT. Google DeepMind’s CEO Says Its Next Algorithm Will Eclipse ChatGPT https://www.wired.com/story/google-deepmind-demis-hassabis-chatgpt/ Will Knight brings you this look at recent statements by the CEO of Google’s DeepMind projects. The CEO, Demis Hassabis, claimed that the next project, AlphaGo, would be powerful enough to eclipse the current capabilities of ChatGPT. As Will reports, AlphaGo has been in development for a while. In 2016, the program defeated a champion player of the strategy game Go. The project rests on proprietary techniques like reinforcement learning and detailed trees of alternative options to generate more effective responses. While Google may have some high hopes for AlphaGo eclipsing ChatGPT, the program currently remains in development. That isn’t to say Google has been absent from the Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—July 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—June 2023

Matt Diggity — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 07:39:59 +0000

Read this roundup to catch up on AI and SEO. This summary of May’s top guides, data studies, and news headlines comes packed with 5 fresh items covering new AI systems and the changes they are bringing to search. The first guide will introduce you to SGE—Google’s new AI search augment— and how it works. Then you’ll learn about some new recommended KPIs for content quality and find out how to seize the most low-hanging SEO opportunities on a tight budget. The data studies are next. You’ll see the path one team took from 0 to 12,000,000 users in 2 years. Then, you’ll find out which brands are recommended by AI engines (and why), read a large-scale report on the state of search, and see the data for predictions that AI use will grow by 5x this year alone. You’ll find news at the end. The latest headlines will tell you how to understand news topic authority, and how Google is introducing AI to its results. If you prefer consuming video content, check this out. Google Search Generative Experience: A Look at SGE With 12 AI Overviews https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-sge-ai-overview-examples/487918/ Kristi Hines provides you with this in-depth look at SGE (a new generative AI search aid that will augment normal Google searches). She provides multiple examples of how it will handle queries and provide results so that you can start to adjust your SEO. First, she lets you know how to join the partial rollout as a volunteer and start testing all these features for yourself. If you plan to wait until the full release, these examples will give you a good idea of what to expect. These limited examples suggest that SGE works on slightly different principles than desktop and mobile search—at least enough to change the top winners. Make sure you check out the rest of the guide for the other examples and what they can tell you. Ranking in any kind of search takes good content. In the next guide, you’ll get some advice for building better content with more updated KPIs. Your New KPIs to Gauge Content Quality https://sparktoro.com/blog/your-new-kpis-to-gauge-content-quality/ Amanda Natividad suggests you start building content with a new sort of approach. She claims that her development process isn’t meant to produce raw traffic but reliably delivers business results. In this guide, she introduces the KPIs she keeps for her process, what they mean, and how to capture them. Among others, she recommends the following KPIs for content quality— Check out the guide for a complete list of KPIs that prove your content is on the right track. Following KPIs like these can help you claim the credit you deserve for long-term or more abstract strategies. Speaking of helping clients understand your value, the final guide of the month focuses on how you can reorder large SEO projects to start delivering for clients faster. The Ultimate Low-Hanging Fruit SEO Strategy — Whiteboard Friday https://moz.com/blog/low-hanging-fruit-seo-strategy-whiteboard-friday Aleyda Solis brings you this guide to finding SEO’s “low-hanging fruit,” or in her words —” those activities that will tend to have a higher output, a higher impact, and lower effort.” She argues you should be tracking these opportunities from the start so you can use them to mitigate impatience from clients and stakeholders. She recommends that you build a low-hanging fruit analysis alongside your typical SEO audit and use this analysis to develop your SEO schedule. When you identify needs that can be met with low-hanging fruit solutions, space them out so the client sees results for the entire project. She provides some examples of solutions that may work for most types of projects, including— Her complete guide (see the full video) includes a number of low-hanging targets and a flow chart to help you organize and prioritize them. She also has some extra advice on how you can start executing faster for clients. That’s all the guides for the month. The case studies are next, starting with how one team hit 10m visitors in 2 years. 0 to 12,000,000 Users in 24 Months – Sleep Advisor Case Study https://nemanja.com/case-studies/sleep-advisor/?fbclid=IwAR2jZDC1rAMtv9lzOvvDiSS9vZPsFMICT_B-Emgcf1Uzu8x8jvYwcxlRW-Q Nemanja Mirkovic brings you this analysis of the explosive growth of SleepAdvisor.org. This site project between Nemanja and a friend has been ongoing for 5 years. This study looked at a slice of two years when the site moved from no visitors to millions. The analysis starts at the idea stage. Nemanja fully documents how he chose the niche, researched the competitors, and even chose the exact domain for SleepAdvisor. From the start, he says, he focused on having content superior to what niche competitors were offering. He built and scaled high-quality content using an internal team. You’ll also get a lot of information about how he built his team and content process. For the rest of the analysis, he describes how his team acquired backlinks for the site, developed content marketing for growth, and tested social media. When traffic began to pour in, the team made the decision to focus on CRO. He provides examples of how CRO informed his process and how years of CRO testing have changed the presentation of his site. He closes the analysis with all the ways the company successfully (and unsuccessfully) monetized the traffic it generated. You’ll learn about how all of the following monetization attempts played out— For the next data study, you’ll take another look at AI. These systems have been found to recommend brands when prompted. Is this an SEO opportunity? Visibility in the AI Future: Which Brands are Recommended By OpenAI? https://www.sistrix.com/blog/visibility-in-the-ai-future-which-brands-are-recommended-by-openai/ Johannes Beus brings you this exploration of what major generative artificial intelligence engines are recommending brands and how often. This test was performed on OpenAI. The team gave the engine 10,000 product categories and asked it to return recommendations. This immediately yielded some interesting findings for the future of commercial search. Johannes noted— Johannes was also able to determine the most recommended out of all brands. In order, these were— These results have significant consequences for brands that cannot make this list. Generative results are drawn from search engine results, and the winning brands there may have a powerful foundation in coming AI technology. Check out the complete analysis for many other insights, including the list of brands that perform below average and charts of how often certain brands appear. The next case study is a look at the overall state of search in 2023. It’s a helpful large-scale review of everything that’s changed in a tumultuous couple of years. The State of Search 2023 https://www.semrush.com/blog/state-of-search-2023/ Marcus Tober brings you this catch-up resource for all the changes in search. His team calculated total traffic trends based on 50,000 US domains. Nearly 150,000,000,000 searches were analyzed to determine the rise and fall of different factors, topics, and terms. One factor that his team couldn’t ignore was the dramatic increase in Google Search Updates. They tracked how many of these updates landed compared to previous years and how much volatility they caused. For one, they detected that updates are becoming more frequent. Next, Marcus takes you through the major website tends for the last year. As he notes, there has been a 3-year decline in the number of ranking domains. This may result from Google’s work to stop spam from ranking. He notes that this also means larger sites rank for more keywords than before. This may suggest a growing advantage for sites with larger budgets and footprints. The remainder of the study is a detailed, extended graphic that illustrates most of the covered trends. You’ll learn more about: Check out the complete study to catch up on everything that happened over the last year. For now, let’s look to the future. One study predicts that the use of AI will rapidly increase over 2023. Use of AI for SEO and Content to Grow 5X This Year https://searchengineland.com/seo-compounding-value-393965 Danny Goodwin brings you these polling results on SEOs and their agencies performed by BrightEdge. He notes that marketing budgets have mostly been holding steady from the start of the COVID crisis. Budgets are expected to grow again, with many investments going toward AI. He analyzed the following findings from the study: Check out Danny’s write-up to get more analysis and a link to the full AI use study. For now, you’re ready to see the latest news. First, we have an official Google announcement with some important news for SEOs in the “news” niche. Understanding News Topic Authority https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/05/understanding-news-topic-authority?hl=en Google has released this guidance in response to the proliferation of news sites and sites that deal with news content. Over the course of the guidance, they explain how topic authority works for these sites and how Google balances a need for accuracy with other concerns. The company partly explains how topical authority works with “news.” Like many niches, this one works on a number of signals that determine how high you can rank. They include— This short report should help SEOs in the news niche understand what it takes to succeed Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—June 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

What Are SERP Features? (16 Common Types)

Matt Diggity — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 10:09:44 +0000

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) have come a long way from their humble beginnings as simple lists of organic results. Today, SERP features offer a more engaging and informative search experience, helping users find appropriate information quickly and efficiently. With years of experience witnessing the evolution of SERPs, I will guide you through the diverse range of SERP features that have transformed the search experience for users worldwide. Summary What Are SERP Features? SERP features are elements for enhancing your search experience on Google and other search engines that go beyond the standard search results. These features provide users with more detailed and appropriate information related to their search query without the need to click through to a specific website. “It’s no longer enough to rank for 10 blue links.” Brian Harnish, Lead SEO at iLoveSEO. Back in the day, search engine results pages would display a simple list of the top 10 results for a search query, commonly called “10 blue links.” Modern SERPs have evolved to include various features that keep users engaged and increase their chances of quickly getting what they want. Why Are SERP Features Important? SERP features are important for enhancing the user experience on search engines like Google. Their primary purpose is quickly delivering the most fitting and accurate information, helping users find answers without clicking through multiple websites. As a result, search engines can maintain their reputation for reliability and efficiency. From an SEO perspective, SERP features offer both benefits and challenges. Websites that secure a spot within these features, such as the “People also ask” section, top stories, or featured snippets, can experience increased traffic, brand recognition, and visibility. These results can make your content stand out, attracting more clicks and engagement. However, websites that only rank in organic search results without appearing in SERP features may experience a decline in click-through rates. Many SERP features, such as answer boxes, provide users with direct answers to their queries, eliminating the need to click on search results. A 2020 study revealed that 65% of Google searches ended on the search results page, highlighting the growing importance of SERP features in driving user engagement [1]. Organic SERP features Organic SERP features are non-paid enhancements that enrich search results with engaging, informative content. 1. Featured Snippets Featured snippets account for about 8% of all organic clicks [2]. They provide a concise and accurate answer to a user’s query, appearing at the top of Google’s search results page. This prime location captures the attention of searchers, leading to a significant boost in click-through rates. Suppose someone searches for “How to make perfect scrambled eggs.” A featured snippet might appear, briefly summarizing the essential steps, ingredients, and even cooking time. This helpful information is more likely to encourage users to click on the source website for a more in-depth explanation. 2. Rich Snippets Rich snippets are the information that embellishes the typical search results, going beyond the usual title tag, description, and URL. These can include images, ratings, and other details that entice users to click and explore further. For example, if you’re searching for a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, a rich snippet might appear with a mouth-watering image of freshly baked cookies, a rating from users who have tried the recipe, and the prep time required. This extra information piques your interest and helps you decide if that’s the recipe you want to try. 3. People Also Ask Box ‘People Also Ask’ (PAA) are the boxes that appear on Google search results, and they appear in about 8.5% of all US-based search queries, as discovered by Advanced Web Ranking [3]. PAA boxes give you a glimpse into possible answers to your question before you even think of typing it. Let’s say you’re researching ways to grow tomatoes. In the PAA box, you might find questions like, “What is the best time to plant tomatoes?” or “How often should I water my tomato plants?”. This helps users get a more comprehensive understanding of their topic without having to perform multiple searches. 4. Local Pack When you pull out your phone and search for “pizza near me,” Google presents you with a neat list of nearby pizza places, complete with ratings, addresses, and directions. This handy feature is called the Local Pack. Local Pack prioritizes location-based results, making it invaluable for users who want to find businesses or services nearby. It’s especially crucial for businesses that rely on foot traffic, like restaurants, salons, or retail stores. 5. Image Pack The Image Pack shows images directly on the results page. These images are sourced from Google images and displayed in a visually appealing grid format. Google understands that sometimes, users prefer visual information over text. That’s why they tested search results with and without the Image Pack. The outcome revealed that searchers found the image pack more helpful, and thus, Google decided to include it by default. 6. Video Carousel The same as the image pack, the Video Carousel SERP feature presents a selection of videos directly within the results page. Previously, this carousel would display only three video thumbnails, but now, users can click the arrow button and browse through up to 10 video results without leaving the results page. This provides a richer and more dynamic user experience, as searchers can quickly access various videos related to their query. 7. Twitter Carousel The Twitter Carousel is a dynamic SERP feature that displays recent tweets from users or entities related to a trending topic or search query. Instead of merely providing a link to the individual’s or brand’s Twitter account, the carousel showcases the tweets, making it more interactive and engaging for searchers. This feature offers real-time updates and insights into the latest discussions or happenings surrounding a specific topic, person, or brand. Users can quickly gauge the sentiment or discover news without leaving the search results page or visiting Twitter directly. 8. Top Stories Top Stories highlights the most relevant and trending news articles related to a user’s search query. Like Twitter cards, these visually engaging cards display the headline, source, and a thumbnail image of the article, making it easy for searchers to stay informed about current events and popular stories. This SERP feature is helpful for users seeking the latest information on a specific topic, as Google continually monitors news sources and tracks stories gaining traction. 9. App Pack The App Pack SERP feature shows mobile applications from the Google Play Store for Android users or the App Store for Apple users. Typically, Google displays the top six apps it deems most pertinent to a searcher’s query, providing them with quick access to the best app solutions. This feature benefits users seeking apps catering to their needs or interests. By offering a curated selection of top apps, Google saves users time and effort in sifting through countless options in the app stores. 10. Jobs The Jobs SERP feature is a valuable tool that helps job seekers find suitable employment opportunities directly on the search results page. It compiles a list of open positions based on the searcher’s query, including essential information such as the job title, company name, location, and additional requirements. This feature saves users time and effort by summarizing suitable job openings without visiting multiple job listing websites. 11. Knowledge Graph Panel The Knowledge Graph panel is a comprehensive informational feature Google offers for quick and accurate details on various topics. It gathers data from reliable sources like Wikipedia to create a rich and visually appealing summary on the search results page. This feature is handy when looking for a brief overview or key facts about a subject, such as a historical event, a famous person, or a popular tourist destination. If you search for “Leonardo da Vinci,” the Knowledge Graph panel will display essential information about the renowned artist, including his date of birth, famous artworks, and notable inventions. 12. Reviews Reviews are an essential element of search results that help users gauge the quality of products, services, or content based on the experiences of others. Typically displayed with a star rating and sometimes accompanied by an image, they offer valuable insight into consumers’ overall satisfaction. Incorporating reviews into your search results can significantly impact your online reputation and credibility. Without a doubt, a restaurant with numerous positive reviews and a high star rating is more likely to attract potential customers than one with few or low ratings. 13. Sitelinks Sitelinks offer users quick access to specific pages or sections of a website. These additional links are usually displayed beneath a traditional search result, making it easier for users to find their desired destination on a site. Imagine searching for a popular online store. Instead of clicking on the main link and navigating through the site, Sitelinks provide shortcuts to popular sections like “Men’s Clothing,” “Women’s Clothing,” or “Sale Items.” This streamlined navigation boosts user experience and saves time. 14. Related Searches Related Searches is an insightful feature on Google that Read More Read More

The post What Are SERP Features? (16 Common Types) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

What Is Off-Page in SEO? (And Why It Matters)

Matt Diggity — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:10:46 +0000

With millions of websites competing for attention, optimizing your website for search engines is more important than ever. Therefore, understanding the ins and outs of off-page SEO is not a luxury. Off-page SEO helps search engines understand how much other websites and online communities trust your website, which is a significant factor in determining your rankings. As an industry veteran, I can assist you in navigating the complex world of off-page SEO and boost your website’s visibility in search results. We’ll dive into the importance of off-page SEO, how it differs from on-page SEO, and actionable strategies for off-page optimization. Quick Summary What Is Off-Page In SEO? Off-page in SEO is the steps you take outside your website to boost its search engine rankings. It aims to improve your site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority by getting endorsements from other reputable online sources. These can be in the form of backlinks, social media shares, or even just simple mentions on other websites. Why Is Off-Page Important? Off-page SEO is important because it helps search engines recognize your website as a valuable and trusted resource. Google considers off-page SEO factors like backlinks and brand mentions to decide where your web page should rank [1]. On-Page SEO Vs. Off-Page SEO On-page SEO involves everything you can directly manage on your website, while off-page SEO includes actions outside your site. On-Page SEO consists of optimizations you make on your website to enhance its search engine performance. This includes content creation, proper keyword usage, title tags, meta-descriptions, internal linking, SEO-optimized URLs, and image alt text. These ranking factors are crucial for search engines to understand your site’s relevance and are entirely within your control. On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to external factors like backlinks and mentions on other websites. It involves social media marketing, influencer outreach, and building links, which help boost your website’s credibility and ranking. While you can influence off-page SEO, you can’t control it entirely, as it relies on external sources. How To Do Off-Page SEO There are several tactics you can follow to do off-page SEO. Here are five of them: 1. Link Building Link building is getting other websites to link to yours. These links, called backlinks, help show Google your site is important. The more quality backlinks you have, the better your chances of ranking high on search engines. Links are really important for us to find content initially. So it’s like if nobody links to your website ever then we’re going to have a hard time recognizing that it even exists. – John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google There are two key factors to consider: authority and unique domain. Authority refers to how much search engines respect and trust a website. If you want to build a reputable website, getting links from other platforms helps boost your site’s reputation. Unique domains are like having a diverse group of friends. Search engines see your site as more reliable and trustworthy if you’ve got links from different, quality websites. So, it’s not just about quantity but also the variety of sources. To build a more effective link-building strategy, consider the following: Guest Posting Reach out to websites in your niche that accept guest posts. For example, if your expertise is in digital marketing, find sites that have previously published a guest post on the topic, and pitch them your unique article ideas. Find broken links Find broken links on high-authority websites, create relevant content on your site, and then contact the webmaster to replace the broken link with yours. It is a win-win situation, as you help them fix a problem while earning a valuable backlink. Resource Pages Identify resource pages in your niche and pitch your content as a valuable addition. If you have an in-depth guide on gardening, you can approach websites with gardening resource pages and suggest adding your guide to their list. 2. Content Marketing Content marketing is creating valuable content and spreading it across different channels. These are some of the best content marketing strategies: PR (Public Relations) Public relations is maintaining a positive image and reputation for your brand, product, or service. It involves creating and promoting stories that highlight your brand’s strengths and achievements, connecting with journalists and media outlets, and handling any negative publicity that comes your way [2]. Social Media Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are online playgrounds where you can share content, engage with your audience, and build relationships with potential customers. By posting regularly, interacting with your followers, and sharing valuable content, you can create a solid online presence and attract more people to your website. Remember to keep it fun, engaging, and true to your brand. Influencer Marketing Influencer marketing is collaborating with famous online personalities or influencers with a loyal following that matches your target audience. These influencers can help spread the word about your brand through sponsored posts, product reviews, or even mentioning you in their content. Podcasts Podcasts are an excellent way to share your knowledge, connect with experts, and engage with your audience. Being a guest on popular podcasts or hosting your own can also help your SEO. When you’re featured on a podcast, they often include a link to your website in the show notes, which can earn you some backlinks. Forums Forums are online communities where people discuss and share their thoughts on specific topics. By participating in relevant forums, you can showcase your expertise, help others, and even drop a link to your website (if it’s relevant and valuable). 3. Local SEO Local SEO is about optimizing your website and online presence to rank higher in search results for local searches. It’s very important for businesses that rely on customers from a specific area, like your favorite mom-and-pop pizza place or the dentist just around the corner. By focusing on local SEO, these businesses can attract more customers to their community. One key off-page tactic for local SEO is setting up and optimizing your Google Business Profile. This is like your online business card, showing essential info like your business name, address, phone number, and operating hours. A well-optimized profile can appear in Google’s local search results and on Google Maps, making it easy for people nearby to find you [3]. Another crucial part of local SEO is having consistent NAP citations (Name, Address, Phone number) across the web [4]. The key is ensuring your NAP info is accurate and consistent everywhere it appears online, like on your website, social media profiles, and local business directories. 4. Reviews People love to hear what others say about a business before deciding to give it a shot. Plus, Google loves it when your site has solid E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), and reviews are a big part of that. Ask your happy customers to share their experiences online. Most people are glad to help out a business they love, so just remind them how much their review means to you. Also, make it a habit to respond to all reviews, whether they’re singing your praises or giving you some tough love. A thoughtful reply shows you genuinely care about your customers’ experiences and always want to improve. Doing this will create a loyal customer base and show Google that your business is trustworthy. 5. Events Hosting events is an excellent way to boost your off-site SEO game while connecting with your audience and creating excitement around your brand. Whether it’s an online webinar, a local meetup, or a full-blown conference, events can drive social engagement and attract those valuable backlinks. When promoting your event, people will talk about it, share it with their friends, and mention your brand in the process. Also, do not forget your event landing page. People visit to learn more, register, or share because they think it’s cool. Organizing an event can take effort, but the benefits can be well worth it. FAQs Is Off-Page SEO Good? Off-page SEO is good. It is crucial in improving your website’s visibility and rankings. By focusing on off-page SEO tactics, you can establish your brand’s authority and credibility, ultimately driving more traffic and conversions. What Are Some Off-Page SEO Elements? Off-page SEO elements are external factors that influence your website’s rankings. These factors include backlinks, social media, and online directories. Other off-page elements include reviews, events, and PR, which can all help to build your online reputation and improve your SEO. What Is The Most Important Factor Of Off-Page? The most important factor of off-page SEO is backlinks. High-quality backlinks from authoritative websites signal to search engines that your site is trustworthy and valuable. It’s important to note that not all backlinks are created equal. Backlinks from low-quality or spammy websites can hurt your site’s rankings. Boost Your Rankings With Off-Page SEO Off-Page SEO can make or break your website’s success. By implementing effective link-building, content marketing, local SEO, social media engagement, and tactics, you can improve your website’s credibility, visibility, and authority. Remember that off-page SEO is a Read More Read More

The post What Is Off-Page in SEO? (And Why It Matters) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

What Are Featured Snippets & Why They Matter

Matt Diggity — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 07:59:01 +0000

In the ever-evolving digital marketing and SEO landscape, featured snippets are essential to boost your website’s presence significantly. With years of experience in the field, we have compiled this comprehensive guide to help you understand featured snippets and how to leverage them to your advantage. By following our insights, you’ll learn how to optimize your content and enhance your website’s visibility. Quick Summary What Are Featured Snippets? Featured snippets are specially formatted search results that appear above the organic search results on Google. These snippets aim to provide quick and accurate answers to users’ queries, making it easier for them to find needed information. Featured snippets include paragraphs, bulleted or numbered lists, tables, and videos. What Types Of Featured Snippets Are There? There are four main types of featured snippets: paragraphs, lists, tables, and videos. Here is a brief for each of them. Why Are Featured Snippets Important In SEO? Although claiming a featured snippet spot can improve your Google rankings and provide you with a big boost, this isn’t always the case. 1. Skyrocket Your Ranking A featured snippet is a secret weapon for boosting your website’s ranking. They pop up right above the regular search results, meaning your site becomes more visible and easier for people to find. This will lead to more traffic to your website. In the past, trying to rank on Google’s first page was your main goal; however, this is insufficient today. It’s no longer enough to rank for 10 blue links. – Brian Harnish, Lead SEO at iLoveSEO Brian explains that because a featured snippet appears above the top result, this potentially draws more traffic. As evidence, Search Engine Land discovered that the featured snippet box steals a lot of traffic from the top organic result. The featured snippet gets around 8% of all clicks. They are essential for getting noticed and drawing more visitors to your site. 2. Gives Your CTR a Boost When you get a featured snippet on Google, your click-through will increase. People are more likely to click on your website since it stands out and answers their questions immediately. However, there is a flip side! Why bother visiting your site if someone sees the whole answer in the snippet? Featured snippets also increase the no-clicks searches, which could hurt your CTR. Here’s a tip: try targeting keywords with a high CTR rate. How do you know them? You can use Google Search Console to display a keyword’s CTR. By choosing keywords with a high CTR, you can ensure that even if someone gets a bit of the answer from the snippet, they’ll still want to check out your site for the whole story. 3. Raise Brand Awareness Getting featured in a snippet is like Google giving you a high-five! It shows that your brand knows its stuff, and users can trust you. The extra exposure can help people recognize your brand and think more highly of your website. 4. Stay Ahead With Voice Search Optimization Many people use voice-activated assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, so ensuring your content is ready for voice search is super important. The Backlinko study shows that over 40% of voice search results are from featured snippets. That means if you’re optimizing for a featured snippet, you’re also making your content voice search-friendly. It’s like killing two birds with one stone, ensuring your website stays fresh and easy to find no matter how people search. How To Optimize For Featured Snippets? To optimize your content for featured snippets, you can employ a few strategies. Here are some featured snippet optimization tactics to consider: 1. Find SERPs With A Featured Snippet The first step in optimizing for a featured snippet is to find SERPs that feature a snippet. This approach will give you an idea of the featured snippet opportunities available, the type of content Google is looking for, and its preferred format. To find SERPs with a featured snippet, search for your target keyword and see if a snippet appears at the top of the page. Also, you can use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to discover search queries with featured snippets in your niche. These tools will also help you analyze your competitors’ snippets to find gaps or opportunities to outrank them. 2. Optimize For That Specific Featured Snippet When you find a SERP with a featured snippet, study its format, content, and keywords. Is it a list, a table, or a paragraph? Which keywords does it focus on? Use this information to tailor your content accordingly. For example, if the snippet is a list, structure your content as a list with clear headings and use similar keywords to make it more snippet-worthy. 3. Optimize Your Page Around Several Different Long Tail Keywords A featured snippet often appears for long-tail or question-based queries. Based on our experience, we found that optimizing your content with different long tail keywords increases the chances of appearing in multiple featured snippets. Therefore, we recommend using keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or AnswerThePublic to find relevant long-tail terms and naturally weave them into your content. 4. Improve Your Rankings There is a 0% possibility that you will trigger featured snippets if your page does not appear on Google’s first page. So, if you’re not there yet, work on improving your on-page and off-page SEO. For on-page SEO, focus on keyword optimization in title tags, header tags, meta descriptions, and internal linking. Build high-quality backlinks, social media engagement, and influencer outreach for off-page SEO. 5. Find “Low-Hanging” Opportunities Look for keywords where you’re already ranking on the first page. These are your “low-hanging” featured snippet opportunities. Optimize your content further for these keywords by improving readability, adding value, and ensuring it’s up-to-date. This way, you can increase your chances of being featured in a snippet. 6. Use the Inverted Pyramid Style The inverted pyramid writing style involves presenting the most crucial information first, followed by supporting details. This approach is excellent for winning a featured snippet because Google values concise, straightforward answers. To apply this style, start your content with a summary or a basic answer to the query, then provide additional details or explanations. 7. Use “Trigger” Words Some words and phrases can increase your chances of winning featured snippets. Try to use these trigger words in your headings or questions within your content. If you managed to do that, you would increase your chances of triggering featured snippets. FAQs What Are Video Featured Snippets? Video featured snippets are results that display a video at the top of the search page. These snippets offer engaging, helpful information best demonstrated through video content. What’s The Difference Between A Rich Snippet And A Featured Snippet? The difference between a rich snippet and a featured snippet is that the rich snippet is an enhanced search result with additional information. On the other hand, the featured snippet directly answers a user’s query, usually in 40-60 words. Do I Have to Pay for Featured Snippets? No, you do not have to pay for featured snippets. Search engines like Google automatically select and display a featured snippet based on the content’s relevance, quality, and usefulness. Maximize Your SEO Potential With Google’s Featured Snippets Feature snippets are a powerful SEO tool that can significantly boost your website’s visibility, enhance your brand’s reputation, and ensure your content is voice search-friendly. To maximize the benefits of a featured snippet, it’s essential to approach them correctly. Don’t forget to check out our guide on how to steal a featured snippet for even more valuable tips and tricks. Additionally, you can join The Affiliate Lab, where you can gain access to expert insights and verified strategies. In the ever-evolving digital marketing and SEO landscape, featured snippets are essential to boost your website’s presence significantly. With years of experience in the field, we have compiled this comprehensive guide to help you understand featured snippets and how to leverage them to your advantage. By following our insights, you’ll learn how to optimize your content and enhance your website’s visibility. Quick Summary What Are Featured Snippets? Featured snippets are specially formatted search results that appear above the organic search results on Google. These snippets aim to provide quick and accurate answers to users’ queries, making it easier for them to find needed information. Featured snippets include paragraphs, bulleted or numbered lists, tables, and videos. What Types Of Featured Snippets Are There? There are four main types of featured snippets: paragraphs, lists, tables, and videos. Here is a brief for each of them. Why Are Featured Snippets Important In SEO? Although claiming a featured snippet spot can improve your Google rankings and provide you with a big boost, this isn’t always the case. 1. Skyrocket Your Ranking A featured snippet is a secret weapon for boosting your website’s ranking. They pop up right above the regular search results, meaning your site becomes more visible and easier for people to find. This will lead to more traffic to your website. Read More Read More

The post What Are Featured Snippets & Why They Matter first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—May 2023

Matt Diggity — Mon, 22 May 2023 13:39:04 +0000

Are you feeling on top of the competition now that you’re nearly halfway through the year? If not, this roundup should give you the edge you need with the latest data studies, guides, and news alerts. In the first case study, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how a site earned one million visitors. Then, you’ll get a breakdown of the latest review update and another breakdown of what it may target now and in the future. The guides are next. You’ll learn new skills to help you develop content from AI and find out what matters most to make the first page in 2023. The roundup closes with some headlines you shouldn’t miss. You’ll get confirmation that the Reviews Update is finally over, a notice to export your analytics data, the resolution of the ‘site name’ error last month, and some of the latest official guidance on creating helpful content. Examine SEO Case Study: 7 Lessons to 1 Million Monthly Visits https://ahrefs.com/blog/examine-seo-case-study/ Bill Widmer brings you this case study covering Examine.com’s journey to 1 million visits. This is an interesting case, as he notes because the site didn’t focus hard on either SEO or backlink outreach. Throughout the study, Bill details the unique ways the Examine.com team built its audience and credibility. He points out how the site has generated a significant number of mentions from journalists by creating highly valuable data content. Examine.com publishes expert analyses of food and supplement nutrition claims. This is highly valuable content for journalists, allowing the site to pull mentions from news giants like The Guardian. It has over 1000 of these backlinks now. As Bill points out, it owes this relevance to some incredibly high standards for its high-detail content. Only subject matter experts produce the articles, and each piece passes through three different editors (also experts) before being posted. It is a massive investment, but Bill also reminds us that Examine didn’t arrive here by guesswork. By policy, they audit their SEO every six months. This has allowed them to pursue this strategy with the confidence that it would pay off. See the full guide for even more lessons about how Examine reached a million visits—even after being hit by a recent update. Speaking of updates, the next study has some interesting facts about the most recent Product Review Update. It was more volatile than ever. Google’s April 2023 Reviews Update More Volatile Than the Previous Product Updates https://searchengineland.com/googles-april-2023-reviews-update-was-more-volatile-than-the-previous-product-reviews-update-data-providers-say-398825 Barry Schwartz brings you this post-review report on the April 2023 Product Update. It may have felt like this one was bigger or messier than the previous ones. It was, and Barry has the data on why. First, Barry points out this review went beyond previous product reviews by also covering He backs this up with a collection of visuals that cover insights from all the top tools, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Rank Ranger. These charts and graphs cover the times of peak volatility, the number of URLs newly appearing in the top 10 results, and breakdowns of the volatility by niche. For example, you’ll learn about the large impact this update had on health, finance, retail, and travel niches. Why was this update so volatile compared to the past one? The next case study by have some clues. The author argues that the update was targeting a wide-scale but unnamed factor. Google’s Newest Reviews Update Elevates Real-Life Experience https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/googles-newest-reviews-update-elevates-real-life-experience/ Lily Ray has an interesting interpretation of the latest reviews update, and in particular, a theory for why Google removed the word “product” from it. She argues that this update was targeted at real-life experiences. This is a big case to make, but she brought some evidence. First, she notes that Google has recently started to emphasize “experience” in its directions to searchers and search raters. Google defines experience more clearly in their Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines as “Experience: Consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic. Many types of pages are trustworthy and achieve their purpose well when created by people with a wealth of personal experience. For example, which would you trust: a product review from someone who has personally used the product or a “review” by someone who has not?” As Lily points out, Google has built out a number of references to similar terms like “authenticity” and “original research.” in recent history. She also has some data evidence from the recent update. For example, she showed that many big update winners emphasize personal experience. She uses mom bloggers as an example of a niche where the update rewarded sites that focused on personal experience. She also tracks rank changes in audio and entertainment sites that support her theory. Check out the article for her complete argument. I take a wait and see approach to this theory for now, but it’s worth considering as future updates roll out. You’re ready to jump into the guides, starting with a look at how content is evolving with the expansion of AI. How Content Is Evolving Thanks to AI https://moz.com/blog/content-evolving-with-ai-whiteboard-friday Ross Simmonds bring you this Moz Whitebaord on how AI is likely to change the development of your content at every level, from workflow to creation. Near the start of the guide, you can find a graphic that fully illustrates how he expects AI to work for you as it continues to develop. He tracks and explains the changes that are possible for research, brainstorming, briefs, drafts, and publishing. In the rest of the piece, he goes into greater detail on all of this. For example, he talks about how AI can amplify human abilities in the planning stage by generating ideas, expanding them into outlines, and giving you drafts to review before you’ve even really started your day. He argues that SEOs should start focusing on using AI as an augment to the experience and strategy that they bring. Everything AI is still in flux. We don’t yet know how good it will get or how much it will really cost to use effective models. The next guide will focus on the present. It looks at what’s necessary to reach the first page right now. How to Get on the First Page of Google in 2023 https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-get-on-the-first-page-of-google/ Joshua Hardwick brings you this look at what he thinks it takes to make the first page. This isn’t just a list of general tips, though, Josh takes you through the entire decision process that takes a failing page and prepares it to compete with the current Page 1 winners. Like many modern guides, it treats understanding search intent as the first priority. He reminds you that the first step is always finding out what is already ranking for the niche. If all results are in one format (for example, a “how-to” guide), that’s likely the only format that will be competitive for that term now. No keyword mastery can overcome this requirement. The full guide takes you through each modern requirement and lays out the tasks you need to complete to move to the one. It’s a good guide for beginners and a decent troubleshooting checklist for experienced SEOs who may have fallen behind on the trends. Now that you have some new skills. let’s jump to the big headlines of the last month. First, the most recent big update has now ended. April 2023 Reviews Update Is Officially Over https://www.searchenginejournal.com/april-2023-reviews-update-is-officially-over/485471/ Roger Montti brings you this announcement from Google about the reviews update that hit your sites starting on April 12th. As of April 25th, the review is officially considered concluded, and any ranking changes will likely have other causes. As we already noted in the case study at the top, this study was confirmed to have affected a lot more than products. Google announced that the update covered reviews about services, destinations, digital products, and more. Only 3rd party reviews (such as GMB reviews) were confirmed not to be included. Roger takes you through some of the post-update chatter from top SEO forums. For many, the mood was not great. SEOs are showing exhaustion with the number of updates they’ve endured in a short amount of time. Many reported large drops. The article closes with some advice on recovering if you’ve experienced drops. You’ll get some more actionable advice in the next news item. It gives you the deadline for saving your valuable analytics data. Export Historical Data From Universal Analytics Before July 1, 2024 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/13510998 Google’s team brings you this announcement that you’ll need to export your historical data out of Universal Analytics (UA) or risk losing it all. While the title only mentions one deadline, there are 2 of them here you’ll need to note if you’re still using this service— The announcement provides you with links to solutions you can use to export your data. They’ll give you the full steps for exporting to existing cloud storage, generating CVS report downloads, or using Google Sheets to Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—May 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Grow Traffic by 60.99% & SEO Topical Authority (Case Study)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 08 May 2023 09:05:20 +0000

Whether you’re working on a brand new website, or building your existing site’s organic presence, it’s important to showcase your topical authority to both Google and your audience. They want to see that the information you provide, or the products that you sell, are of great quality and are coming from a credible source. That’s why it’s essential to present yourself as an authority through your content and your backlink profile. In this case study, you’ll learn the exact steps that my team at The Search Initiative took to increase our client’s organic traffic by 60.99%. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Before that, let’s find out a bit more about the website’s goals and the main challenges faced during the campaign. The Challenge The client is a website selling health supplements in the United States, who joined the agency having already decided that they wanted to migrate their dated website and build a fresh site from the ground up with SEO in mind. One of the main challenges of this campaign was to make sure that the migration was carefully planned and executed to ensure that the site’s original rankings and traffic were sustained. We also added E-E-A-T signals that established the client as a trustworthy and authoritative voice within the industry – read on to learn how to do this. The next focus was to produce well optimized content for the product pages by writing compelling descriptions that convert as well as producing supporting blog content to build topical relevance and improve keyword visibility for informational keywords. Finally, to build the backlink profile of the new domain, we boosted the newly optimized product pages by executing a link building strategy, including HARO (which you’ll learn all our tricks soon). Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Executing an SEO-Friendly Site Migration Making the decision to migrate your entire website shouldn’t be taken lightly. In some cases you might not have a choice, which is why it’s worth being aware of the risks and challenges that you might face along the way. Apart from potentially completely losing or breaking parts of your website, a site migration can also have significant impacts on your SEO. I’ll walk you through the process of an SEO-friendly site migration below, but for now, let’s look at what a site migration actually is. What Is a Site Migration? A site migration is the process of making significant changes to a website’s structure, technology or design. Here are some examples on why you might want to consider a site migration: Unsure about which hosting provider to use? Check out my video below. How Site Migrations Can Impact SEO A site migration is a substantial task that requires rigorous and thorough research and planning before you even begin to execute the strategy. With many moving parts and teams involved, it’s important to be aware of the SEO impacts that this can have. For example, without careful planning, you may lose your site’s precious rankings and traffic due to incorrect URL mappings and redirects or, you may encounter slow site-wide loading times as a result of incorrect server configurations. Even after the migration is complete and everything has gone to plan, it’s crucial to monitor progress to ensure that your site maintains and/or builds as much organic visibility as possible post-migration. SEO Site Migration Checklist I’ve put together this checklist so that you can be sure that your migration will be executed in an efficient and SEO-friendly way. Due to the scope of the work and risks involved, it’s good practice to plan your site migration for a time where, should things go wrong or there is a temporary dip, the impact is minimal. This is of course, assuming that your business has some seasonality to it. A site migration before or during the holiday season is not advised. The last thing you want to do is lose out on all of the potential traffic from a peak season as a result of your migration not being executed properly. Likewise, some days of the week may be quieter than others. For example, you may find that the start of the week is the best time to do your migration as fewer people browse your site at this time. Personally, I always migrate on Saturdays. Therefore, make sure to pick a smart migration date that allows time for you to monitor progress and iron out any issues that are presented post-migration. Using an SEO web crawler tool of your choice (i.e. SEMRush, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb etc), crawl your website so that you have a comprehensive record of everything that is on your website before the migration. For example, this will ensure that you have: You should also create a backup so that if for whatever reason the launch of your new site doesn’t go to plan, you can always revert back to the original if needed. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to backup your website. This precautionary step is vital in making sure that you have peace of mind before launching. The next step is to create a copy of your website so that you can test and revise all of the changes that you intend to make – this is called a staging site. This staging site should be uploaded to a new server and ideally, should be on a separate domain or subdomain so that you can compare your new website to the original site before the launch. This’ll allow you to check and verify important things like making sure that the URLs from your old site are correctly redirected to the new site. Another important step is to make sure that you block access to this staging website from Google. This is to prevent both the staging site AND the original site from being indexed by search engines and in turn, potentially competing against each other for rankings. There are several ways you can do this: Add the following line of code to your pages: <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> You can’t carry out a migration without a clear and well organized URL map. Mapping your URLs involves keeping a list of all of your existing URLs so that you can match them up with the new URLs on your new website and implement the necessary redirects correctly. This is why crawling your original website comes in useful. In addition to your crawl, you should also compile your URLs from your XML sitemap (this is a file that serves as a roadmap for Google to access your pages). You can access your sitemap via the following URL: example.com/sitemap.xml Your URL map can be as simple as this: Original URL New URL Redirected? olddomain.com/old-url/ newdomain.com/new-url/ Yes/No If you’re changing the structure of your URLs or combinings old pages into a single page, remember to map all of the combined pages’ URLs to the correct new URL. When it comes to actually migrating the content (i.e. your HTML files, images etc), I strongly recommend doing so in small chunks. The more pages you move at once, the higher the chances of something going wrong. So take your time and carry out the migration whilst carrying out checks and tests at each stage. This’ll make it easier for you to identify any potential issues that may arise. This is also your chance to update any of the content if you need to. Without implementing proper 301 redirects, your new pages will not receive the traffic and PageRank (ranking power) of the old pages, which will significantly impact the new site’s rankability. 301 redirects are a way of indicating to users and search engines that the location of a web page has permanently moved. Using your URL map, you can go through each of your pages and implement a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL. If for whatever reason you have an old URL that is no longer needed, you can redirect it to another relevant page on your website, or serve a custom 404 page to let users know that the page no longer exists. Once you’ve redirected your URLs, you also need to remember to update all of the internal links (hyperlinks from one page on your site to another) on your new website. You can find all of the internal links from your website crawl that you did right at the start of the process. You should change all of the internal links from the old URLs to the new URLs to avoid unnecessary internal redirects. Imagine you had the following scenario. If you don’t update the internal link, then Page A would have an internal link to Page b. But, when clicked, Page b would redirect to Page B. This creates an unnecessary internal redirect that when multiplied across thousands of requests, can seriously affect page load times. Therefore, you should update the internal link so that, you have: Although your Read More Read More

The post How to Grow Traffic by 60.99% & SEO Topical Authority (Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—April 2023

Matt Diggity — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 10:37:30 +0000

First, you’ll get hard data from the latest case studies. The studies cover the state of AI in the marketing industry, the winners and losers of the last big update, and whether going viral helps with SEO. Next, the guides will give you some new skills to put to work. You’ll learn how to find out if PBNs are still working, how to apply AI to create SEO-friendly content, and how to do your own tracking of Google Update changes. The top SEO headlines are waiting for you at the end. Google has announced the broad core updates are done and provided some details about how they catch fake reviews. There’s also a new reviews update that’s no longer just about products. The State of AI in the Online Marketing Industry: 2023 Report https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-survey Mark Webster, writing for Authority Hacker, brings you this massive survey on how digital marketers use their new AI toys. More than 3,800 marketers were included in the survey. They were asked dozens of questions to reveal insights like the following examples: The respondents came from various backgrounds, including website owners, freelancers, agency owners, and more. The results suggest that AI already powers many marketing operations at different levels. The survey also revealed some of the pioneering users’ frustrations. 63% of respondents cited inaccuracies in the copy as a major issue with the current functionality. Despite high trust in some other areas, fewer than 15% of users report trusting keyword data generated by AI. Still, everyone seems eager to forge ahead. 90% of marketers are confident that they will be able to learn and adapt to these new tools. Check out the full article for a complete breakdown of how SEOs report using A.I. Surfer AI Launch Date Announced for May 23, 2023 https://surferseo.com/ai/ Surfer’s AI tool’s release date has been announced. This is the same tool that Matt Diggity helped design which takes care of article research, outline creation, content creation and SEO optimization in a single button press. Watch the case study where Matt talks about his website that grew from 0 to 50,000 visitors per month, with pure AI content. To sign up for the waitlist and take advantage of the launch bonuses, head on over here: https://surferseo.com/ai/ Next, you’ll get a better understanding of the impact of the last Core Update through a look at its winners and losers. Google’s March 2023 Core Update: Winners, Losers & Analysis https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/googles-march-2023-core-update-winners-losers-analysis/ Lily Ray lets you know who is celebrating after the end of the last big update. Her analysis looked at 7,000+ domains and the positions that they held before and after. This update’s winners included some of the biggest sites on the internet. Below, you can see them listed next to the absolute change in visibility they achieved— These were the top 5 biggest losers, based on the absolute loss of visibility they experienced— In her analysis of the list of 7,000 sites, she judged that eCommerce and shopping were the winningest categories, though a significant amount of the growth went to a few huge players (such as Amazon). Reference/dictionary sites showed up in both lists. Bigger reference sites appeared to benefit greatly, whereas smaller reference sites lost a ton of visibility. Lily also noted some strange trends in the travel industry. Sites that directly sell services (such as home sites for hotels) did well, but affiliate sites that rated and reviewed hotels all suffered. This may be an early warning sign of Google’s changing priorities in search. The final case study of the month asks (and answers) how much going viral is really worth as a strategy. Does Going Viral Help With SEO? Not Really https://ahrefs.com/blog/viral-seo/ Patrick Stox brings you this look at the real SEO benefits of having a viral moment. As he notes early on, a viral moment can bring on a huge influx of news stories and social media mentions. That should mean a big change in visibility, right? That’s not what Patrick found. He used an interesting example: The Four Seasons Landscaping company that was (presumably due to a scheduling mixup) the host of a presidential press conference. This business received hundreds of new links as a result of this event, many from the largest print and TV news sources in the United States. Patrick uses analytical sources to show you how the company reacted and benefitted from these new links. As he points out, this company isn’t even hitting the first page for most of its key terms (and most competitors are also small businesses). The company claims, at the time this article was written, that they had netted only 3 new clients from the attention. Patrick follows up with several more examples you can check out in the complete article. Each time, he points out mistakes that these companies made, but the trend remains clear that an explosion of media mentions doesn’t seem to deliver growth on its own. With the case studies for the month closed, you’re ready to move on to the guides. First, you’ll learn about the state of PBNs after the last round of updates so you can decide where they belong in your strategy. Pbns & the Google Spam Update – Do They Still Work? https://rankclub.io/pbn-link-spam-update/ Rob Rok takes a data-driven dive into the performance of PBNs after a series of updates rocked the link-building world. As he noted, “search spam” was a major target of the recent updates. Many suspected that links like PBNs would be targeted. He set up a series of tests to determine how the updates had impacted PBNs. Using a method from one of my old blogs, he sent links from PBNs in his network to a number of small, stagnating test sites. From there, he waited several months to see how the test sites would respond to the fresh link from the PBN. His testing showed a strong and sudden reaction from all the test sites. A few sites jumped into the top 10 results for related terms. Rob concluded that the updates didn’t harm the viability of PBNs. Every single test site saw a response, and they were all positive. Check out the full article to see the data from the test sites and some more analysis from Rob on how these results were possible. Next up, the good people at Moz will help you start putting AI to use with new recommended practices. AI for SEO and Content Marketing: A Friend, Not a Foe (For Now, at Least) https://moz.com/blog/ai-for-seo-and-content-marketing Ann Smarty takes you through a look at how you can start getting friendly with AI. First, she argues that most SEOs shouldn’t feel threatened unless their content never expresses a human opinion or reflects expertise (the two things she argues AI can’t do). It’s not going to replace your pillar pieces, but the value she does see in AI is as a sort of virtual assistant that can be activated throughout the day to kickstart, simplify or automate SEO tasks. She provides you with a long list of ways you can use AI, including all of the following examples she explains in the article: She closes the guide with some extra news about upcoming AIs that are promising even more applications in the future. She introduces you to some projects that may soon help you create your own reliable stock art and convert blog posts directly into videos. For the last guide of the month, we’re jumping back into talking about the updates. It will teach you how to use simple metrics in GA4 to handle your own update tracking. How to Compare Hourly Sessions in Google Analytics 4 to Track the Impact of Major Google Algorithm Updates (Like Broad Core-Updates) https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/ Glenn Gabe brings you a new update-tracking solution he developed based on a Twitter reply. He was recently asked if there was an easy way to compare Google’s organic traffic hourly (for example, while an update was rolling out). A report like this is possible with GA4 , and Glenn helps you build it out so you can see what’s happening to your site live. Glenn takes you through a complete tutorial of his process so that you can follow it yourself. The nine steps cover all the settings you’ll need to apply to get the report that provides the right information. On top of the helpful steps, he uses visuals to show you where to find all the right session, segment, and timeframe options. This guide is a short one because the process is really simple when you know where to look. Once you’ve figured it out, it will be set up every time a new update hits. You may be waiting awhile because, as our first news item states, the last update is confirmed complete. Google March 2023 Broad Core Update Done Rolling Out https://searchengineland.com/google-march-2023-broad-core-update-done-rolling-out-394724 Barry Schwartz brings you this confirmation from Google that the March 2023 Core Update has finally concluded. It was finally listed as Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—April 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—March 2023

Matt Diggity — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 18:35:05 +0000

With Google updates, advancing AI capabilities, and possible new search engine players entering the field, this is no time to be uninformed. Fortunately, this latest update is packed with studies, tips, and announcements about all of these urgent issues and more. First, you’ll get a knowledge boost from four fresh data studies. The studies cover what an analysis of 10,000 results can tell you, what consumers really think of generative AI, what the last Google update did to SERPs, and what 9 years of data can tell you about Google’s future. Then, you’ll pick up a few new skills from the guides. They cover some top use cases for ChatGPT, best SEO practices for paywalls, and an analysis of whether AI has “killed” affiliate marketing. The latest news closes out the roundup. Catch up on Google’s latest update announcements, the surprising effects of Lighthouse 10, Google’s new best link practices, and reports of search cooperation with Apple. Affiliate SEO: We Analysed 10,000 Search Results to See Who Ranks https://detailed.com/affiliate-serps/ Glen Allsopp brings you some insights his team picked up after analyzing about ten thousand affiliate-product SERPs. As he states early on, his team wanted to see: Are ‘general’ sites like Forbes completely taking over, or do single-niche affiliate sites still rank well? His team initially spent weeks hand-collecting keywords that point to physical products. They refined their list by focusing on confirmed product keywords like: The team found some dramatic results. First, of the top 100 most represented websites, just 5 were independent brands. In a graphic included in the article, you can see a sample of these supersites, including sources like Amazon, NYTimes, Forbes, and Tech Radar. Next, his team found that for many results, independent affiliates didn’t appear at all. Many results pages were split between major publishers. For example, Forbes alone had first-page rankings for 2,047 of the 10,000 key phrases. The news isn’t all bad for independent affiliates. Glen and the team found that the independent affiliates that did stand out were getting around 1.3 million visits a month. The rest of the study includes pages and pages of facts and insights for affiliates about featured snippets, the speed at which you can develop an independent affiliate site, and the viability of niche sites compared to other types. Both established and independent publishers will have to reckon with AI. In the next study, you’ll learn what consumers say about it. New Data: What Consumers Really Think About Generative AI https://www.kevin-indig.com/new-data-what-consumers-really-think-about-generative-ai/ Kevin Indig brings you this look at the consumer view of AI. He wanted to explore the rates of user trust, adoption, and usage to better understand how online buyers were dealing with the changes. This turned into an official survey that approached more than 1,000 participants. These participants were then surveyed on a number of AI-related questions, including: While the study is filled with statistics developed from the data, the general trend is that consumers are adopting AI technology very quickly. Already 70% of people report using it, and those who use it seem to be highly encouraged to use it additional times. Respondents used Chat GPT for an interesting collection of tasks, including creative writing, problem-solving, and math. Those polled also seemed to consider it relatively trustworthy as a source of information. 70%+ found AI outputs at least a little credible. Check out the full study to learn more about how normal customers are responding to AI. In the next piece, you’ll need to go back to caring about what search engines think. You’ll get a breakdown of how the Helpful Content System update landed. How Google’s Latest ‘Helpful Content System’ Update Is Impacting SERP’s https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/news/how-googles-latest-helpful-content-system-update-is-impacting-serps/ Lily Ray brings you this detailed breakdown of Google’s latest updates, in a piece adapted from her PubCon Austin 2023 presentation. Lily focuses on this update in particular because, as she argues in the piece, it may have a significantly larger impact than everyone expected. She starts by pointing out that the Helpful Content Update also shipped with another new feature—a sitewide signal she calls the “unhelpful content classifier.” This signal sniffs out content that doesn’t break rules but provides low added value or is not particularly helpful (in other words, SEO spam). Lily suggests the possibility that this signal is the early version of a detection system that may be used to spot and penalize AI content. As further evidence, she lays out who was most affected by the update. She lists the following sites as getting a surprising amount of attention from the update— A common factor with this set of sites is that they have problems creating unique content. The right guitar chords are always the right guitar chords, for example. That all of them were hit suggests that the update targeted otherwise good content that was simply too plentiful online. How might that targeting ability be used in the future? As Lily states in closing, Google is not necessarily hostile to AI. The latest messaging on AI suggests that Google does not object to it if… These moves may simply reflect Google unwillingness to let users be buried under a slew of freshly-generated AI results. While we’re on the subject of higher-quality AI content, that’s the focus of the very first guide of the month. ChatGPT for SEO: 9 Best Use Cases (And 4 Suboptimal Ones) https://ahrefs.com/blog/chatgpt-for-seo/ Si Quan Ong and the Ahrefs team have narrowed down (what they argue are) the best AI chat use cases for SEO. In the guide, they list and explain each of these use cases to you—focusing on the specific needs of SEOs. They suggest that ChatGPT may have a valuable part to play in SEO operations in roles such as… For each of these use cases, you’ll be given some great advice for how to use ChatGPT to pull them off. Each description is filled with lists of prompts and images of the bot in action to show you how to get the desired result. After listing some high-potential use cases, the team also treats you to a list of situations where they feel ChatGPT is not used effectively. These include— Check out the full guide to find out why they think ChatGPT can’t handle these tasks satisfactorily and what might change in the future. Next, you’ll be treated to a highly practical guide for getting the best SEO around paywalls. Best Practices for Paywalls and SEO https://www.seoforgooglenews.com/p/best-practices-for-paywalls-and-seo Barry Adams brings this warning to the growing number of online publishers who are experimenting with subscription services. As he points out, the SEO rules can change when you apply a paywall to your sites. He has some ideas for your implementation. First, he breaks down the four different types of paywalls that you can create for your sites. These are— For each of these paywalls, he tells you how users are impacted and what to expect. After that he starts to explain how paywalls interact with Googles. The important thing, he argues, is that publishers need to make sure that Google can see their content. As it so happens, Google has already engaged with paywall publishers, and they’ve released some recommendations. Google recommend metering and lead-in content as paywall solutions. Google has increased options for seeing past these forms. Also, Barry recommends that you use structured data to let Google know it is reviewing paywalled content. Check out the guide for a complete set of guidelines for doing SEO around paywalls. For the final guide of the month, you’ll get one affiliate’s prediction of a future under AI. Did AI Just Kill Affiliate Marketing? https://empireflippers.com/did-ai-just-kill-affiliate-marketing/ Greg Elfrink starts with a question that’s hard to ignore. He asks not is AI dangerous, but if it has already killed at least one market. It’s a long and detailed argument, but Greg takes you through his vision for the long-term impact of AI. He explores many ideas across the entire piece and defends the following personal predictions— The last note may sound optimistic, but it’s something else. He argues that this may be one of the last windows for people to break into affiliate marketing. Soon, it will be significantly easier for anyone to produce enough content to populate a large site. The age and authority you can claim now will significantly increase in value. He closes with some advice about building a brand right now so that AI will be less of a threat. That closes out the guides for this week, and it’s time to jump into the news. First, you’ll learn about one of the latest updates to hit Google. Google Unwraps February 2023 Product Reviews Update With Language Support https://www.seroundtable.com/google-february-2023-product-reviews-update-34949.html Barry Schwartz brings us this breakdown of Google’s most recent product review update. This one hit around February 21, 2023. Google provided a timeline of two weeks for the update, and it has been announced to be complete as of March 7th. The update arrived for more languages than usual, and rolled out for English, Spanish, Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—March 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

What Is a Webinar? Benefits of Setting up a Webinar In 2024

Matt Diggity — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 18:46:20 +0000

The term “webinar” is a portmanteau of “web” and “seminar” and refers to a live or pre-recorded presentation, lecture, or workshop that is conducted over the internet. The introduction of audio and video streaming in the early 2000s allowed webinars to become more interactive and engaging, with presenters able to deliver live presentations to audiences worldwide. In recent years, the popularity of live webinars has exploded, with the COVID-19 pandemic driving a surge in remote work and online events. Today, webinars are used by businesses of all sizes for a wide range of purposes, from thought leadership and education to webinar marketing and sales. If you want to find out more about how webinars work and their benefits, you are in the right place. Quick Summary What Is A Webinar? A webinar is an online video presentation event that hosts live seminars, lectures, or workshops, usually streamed on a video-sharing platform or webinar software. You can also call a webinar a video conference because audiences watch this web-based video meeting from various remote locations. The goal of a webinar sounds as it’s called: WEBsite – semINAR – a seminar that is hosted on a website. Just like what Microsoft called their first webinar software NetMeeting (or interNET MEETING), launched in 1996. [1] For an online video presentation to qualify as a webinar, it has to be: Why Conduct A Webinar? Here are the top 7 reasons why every business owner should be conducting a webinar: Increase Customer Loyalty: Marketers have proven and confirmed most webinars to increase customer loyalty. This results from your strong relationship with them via face-to-face marketing. Improves Customer Experience: With webinars, you can effectively close the value gap of your customers, helping them harness the full potential of your product. In return, this makes your product easy to use, improves their customer experience, and compels them to keep using your product. Opportunity To Access Foreign Audiences: One of the biggest reasons for conducting a webinar is that you can invite other experts and influencers to be guests. In return, this will give you access to their unique follower base, increasing your prospects and lead outreach. Better ROI For Time And Money Invested: Webinars are inexpensive and mainly free to host. They also don’t take much time – an hour maximum. But the return on investment is mind-blowing. Flexible And Scalable Form Of Marketing: With webinars, you can reach thousands of people from the comfort of your home. And you can host as many as you wish in a month. Once the webinar has been fully recorded, you can keep sharing it with thousands or millions of audiences. Better Market Research: Since you’ll be interacting with real people – real customers, leads, and prospects – hosting a Q&A webinar can help you better read the minds of your customers. And with the polls conducting features in most webinar software, you can survey thousands of individuals immediately. How Does A Webinar Work? A webinar is presented in real-time using a video conferencing tool, with a speaker or multiple speakers delivering a live presentation or lecture. Your audience is busy. Most people won’t remember the date and time of the virtual event. So it’s your job to keep reminding them multiple times. After all, your leads won’t do any good if they don’t watch your webinar and make a purchase. – Neil Patel, Founder Crazy Egg What Are The Different Types Of Webinars? Webinars come in several types and formats. Although you can be creative about how you want to conduct it, here are the top 10 webinar formats used by thousands of video marketers and proven to work! Product/Service Pitch Or Demo In this type of webinar, you already have the product or service you want to sell to your audience. All you have to do is pitch it. Or demonstrate it. This type of webinar allows you to educate webinar attendees about the features and benefits of your product or service. Do you know that 69% of consumers surveyed say a product demo helps them make a purchase decision? And 80% of customers are more confident purchasing a product after watching the video product demonstration.[3] Q&A Session What better way to clear all the doubts in your prospect’s mind than by providing the answers to all their questions for a whooping 30 – 45 minute Q&A session? In this type of webinar, all you have to do is sit back and read the participant’s questions in the comment sections and answer them publicly. This kind of webinar converts more because, at the end of the session, you’d have earned the trust of your prospects. Industry Expert Panel Who says you have to do all the presentations yourself? It’s now a convention for hosts to invite industry experts in for a webinar panel of discussion to share their thoughts and educate your audience. They could talk about the future of the industry and their personal experiences and even help you with Q&A sessions. Expert Panel webinars are always a hit. And for several reasons: Publicity, Rich Content, And Influence. This skyrockets your chances of getting the audience to take massive action. [4] Industry Expert Interview This webinar format is similar to the Q&A and Industry Expert Panel. In an industry authority interview, you can ask the guest questions about their background, industry experience, and actionable advice for your audience. You can also allow your audience to ask the audience some questions in a Q&A Session. Client Case Study Case studies are another genius type of webinar. First, pick one of your business’s best case studies. Invite the client to the virtual event, and ask them to talk about how your product or service has helped them resolve their challenges. Let them talk about why they are passionate about advocating your brand. Casual Chats Some webinars are just meant to build relationships and solidify bonds with new customers, like casual chats. A casual chat webinar usually consists of you – the host – and a small number of clients – usually 10 to 20– as participants. Here the mic is opened for everyone to talk. They could discuss the industry, how your product is helping their business, what they don’t like about the product, and suggestions for future updates. Customer Onboarding Webinars Unlike other webinars that seek to generate leads, new customer onboarding webinars are hosted to welcome new product/service users. It’s a webinar where you thank, reassure, and re-educate your new customers. It helps you keep new buyers relaxed about their buying decision. Product Features Update As the name implies, product features update webinars are hosted with the sole purpose of updating users about newly added features on the product. You can demonstrate how the new feature works. And also inform them about outdated functions that have been terminated. Employee Training Webinar According to a study, 75% of companies surveyed use webinars to train their employees.[5] Because the average employee only has about 1% of the workweek to upskill, hosting weekly training webinars is necessary. [6] This webinar encourages employees to share their observations and suggestions. It’s a critical aspect of team building, especially if you manage a remote team. Corporate Meeting Webinar In the era of virtual programs, business partners and executives don’t have to meet physically to host a meeting. Using webinars, you can host business meetings with your top executives, investors, and business partners in different formats. What Are The Benefits Of A Webinar? Here is a curated list of some of the top benefits of a webinar event. 1. Building A List Of Highly Interested Prospects For a prospect to sign up for an event weeks before it’s scheduled, sit and listen to your pitch for about an hour; they must be interested in your product or services. It wouldn’t take much to convert them to paying potential customers, and you can easily upsell your other offers to them. 2. Positioning Yourself As The Industry Expert Experts have one thing in common: they love to teach. Whether through a blog post, YouTube videos, Podcasts, Ebooks, Newsletters, or Social Media Content. Hosting webinars is another way to reassure your market tab you are the go-to solution for their challenges. The more information you share, the more influential you become and the more actions you can get your audience to take. 3. Personalizing Your Brand This is 2023; people now buy more from Brands when they know who’s behind it. It’s the Know Like Trust (KLT) at work. [7] Webinars help you get in front of a camera and build genuine customer relationships. 4. Make More Sales According to Zippia, 73% of B2B webinar participants became qualified leads, while 20-40% of B2C attendees became leads. We’ve also established that 80% of potential customers will have more confidence in a product after watching a video demonstration. 5. Automatic Lead Generation The beauty of webinars is that you can record them and keep sharing them with prospects for Read More Read More

The post What Is a Webinar? Benefits of Setting up a Webinar In 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—Feb 2023

Matt Diggity — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 09:52:12 +0000

SEO is on the precipice of perhaps its biggest shakeup ever. This roundup will get you up to speed on some of the most important research, guides, and news items around ChatGPT and other big changes. You’ll get to see the data studies first. You’ll find out what the numbers say about whether AI has already replaced human writers and the results of Google’s first case study in years. Then, you can learn from some fresh guides. They’ll teach you how to work with pillar pages and how to automate the dullest SEO tasks. The last section contains the most unmissable headlines. You’ll get the latest details about the huge Yandex leak, an unconfirmed Google Update, AI detection tools, and more. Let’s jump in… [Investigation] Has AI Already Replaced Human Writers? https://www.authorityhacker.com/has-ai-already-won Gael Breton brings you this dive into the world of AI content that’s already being placed on top sites. The investigation started with the CNET’s admission that they’ve published more than 75 AI-generated stories in recent history. The investigation found the same byline or tech used for AI content on CNET was also appearing on other websites owned by the parent company, including sites like bankrate.com and creditcard.com. As Gael points out, though, publishers don’t have to report using A.I. to create stories. Using tools (still in testing), he and the team found that it was highly likely that AI was being used on Forbes and across the internet provider reviews niche. He also provides some analysis into how well A.I. articles are performing at bringing in human readers. See the whole article to find out how A.I. measures up against some of the site’s top authors. Next, we have a surprise case study from Google years after the last one. It’s no surprise that Google likes people to follow the rules, but the results of this case study have some big implications for sites that rely on video. How Vimeo Improved Video SEO for Their Customers https://developers.google.com/search/case-studies/vimeo-case-study Google’s Search Central team brings you this case study into how Vimeo addressed one of their biggest challenges by applying Google’s best practices. Vimeo’s problem was that they relied on their customers to handle the work of basic SEO, applying structured data, and submitting sitemaps. Customers weren’t doing this on their own, so many top videos by the service weren’t showing up in search. By adopting Google’s best practices and baking them into the way the product worked, they were able to get around these problems. For example, they made the indexifembedded and VideoObject markup part of their rules, and now customers don’t have to do anything for videos to be indexable. The complete case study contains additional advice on how Vimeo massively improved the searchability of all of its videos by applying the best practice rules without any complex SEO work. It’s a solid analysis for any site that relies on videos and may offer you some clues to handle ranking problems. That concludes the case studies, but there’s a great set of guides coming up. First, you’ll learn why pillar pages do better than blogs, and how to build yours to do the same. Pillar Pages: Why and How You Should Add Them to Your Content Strategy https://moz.com/blog/how-to-use-pillar-pages-in-content-strategy Lauren Fox brings you this guide into pillar pages and where they belong in your content strategy. She defines a pillar page as one that comprehensively covers a broad topic. These are pages that are often thousands of words in length, and provide a complete overview as well as ways for readers to dive deeper into a topic. As she points out early in the piece, research at her company has shown pillar pages outperform normal blog pages in generating traffic, backlinks, and even fresh subscriptions for features like newsletters. She then goes on to explain how you can develop these pillar pages. You’ll learn how to develop them so that they improve your topical authority. You’ll also find out some strategies for mapping supporting pages and creating pillar pages of your own. You’ll have plenty of time to devote to thoughtful content by the time you’re done with the next guide. It teaches you how to automate some of the dullest SEO tasks. How to Automate Dull SEO Task https://ahrefs.com/blog/automate-seo-tasks/ Siew Ann Tan brings you these detailed descriptions of how to automate two different time-consuming SEO tasks. She takes you step-by-step through the work of automating the process of sending assignments to writers and verifying emails for outreach. For the first task (sending assignments to writers), she lays out how to set up an Airtable database for writers and article data. Then, she shows you how to use Zapier to automate different parts of the workflow—all the way to automating the creation of the docs writers will use for delivery. She provides the same level of detail for the next task, describing how you can build a process that finds emails, checks them, and filters your list down to the valid ones in an automated flow. Though this guide only explains two tasks, it can tell you a lot about how to build automated processes for other SEO work. For now, you’re ready to move on to the news. Some major events have happened in the last month, starting with the infamous Yandex leak. Yandex ‘Leak’ Reveals 1,922 Search Ranking Factors https://searchengineland.com/yandex-search-ranking-factors-leak-392323 Danny Goodwin brings you this story about one of the biggest stories in recent search history. Yandex was the subject of a massive leak on January 27th. If you aren’t familiar, Yandex is currently the 4th largest search engine by global market share. A former employee is alleged to have leaked the entire source code repository onto a popular hacking site. The original link contained 44.7GB of stolen files, including information on nearly 2000 different ranking factors. There is already some great analysis. One thread from Alex Buraks dives deep into what these leaked facts can tell us about Google. As he points out, these companies share a RankBrain function, PageRank, and the use of text algorithms. Yandex is also staffed by many ex-Googlers and, according to some Russian sources, requires you to use the same strategies to succeed at ranking. Beyond the standard ranking factors you’d expect, Danny highlights some of the strange ones that have been uncovered so far. Factors like the number of unique visitors and the total percentage of organic traffic play a role, for example. SEOs have only just begun to play with this trove of data. Expect to see many more details about it in an upcoming roundup. For now, you may have seen some volatility in late January. Was it caused by an unconfirmed Google Update? Unconfirmed Google Update Impacting Product Reviews Sites on Thursday, January 26th? https://www.seroundtable.com/unconfirmed-google-product-reviews-update-on-january-26th-34820.html Barry Schwartz brings you this look at a possible update. The mystery is yet to be solved, but you won’t want to miss the facts if you’re in the widely-affected product review niche. Around January 26th, site owners in the product review niche in particular began to chatter about strange dips and jumps that they were seeing in their analytics. Glenn Gabe recorded some shocking surges and drops in a twitter thread a few days later. Glenn was insistent in several messages with followers that Google was pushing some kind of site-level algorithm change. He claimed that his experience documenting these domains let him know that this was not some post-holiday adjustment. Barry expands on Glenn’s graphs with graphs from all of the major Google tracking tools. Mozcast, SEMrush, RankRanger and others all consistently found that something big was happening that day. By February 5th, SEOs in the comments were again reporting big fluctuations. Google has still not provided any guidance or admitted to any changes. With changes as recent as the 5th, whatever this is may still be rolling out. The next big news story works as a companion piece to the A.I. writer study you saw at the top. It’s the announcement of an A.I content detection tool—by the makers of ChatGPT. OpenAI Releases Tool to Detect Ai-Written Content https://www.searchenginejournal.com/openai-releases-tool-to-detect-ai-written-content/478085/ Matt G. Southern brings you this release announcement from OpenAI, the team behind the popular ChatGPT utility. They have released their own AI detection tool as a measure against people using their product for misinformation campaigns or academic fraud. Early testing has shown that the tool is effective at identifying AI text about 25% of the time. That may sound not sound great, but it’s not only OpenAI that has struggled with identifying AI content. It only estimated human-written text as AI about 10% of the time. If you want to start playing with this tool right now, you can here. Matt takes you through the process of putting text into the classifier and then interpreting the results. Based on the percentage, you’ll get a message telling you that the text is likely AI, unlikely AI, or something in between. Matt’s own testing found that the tool has some Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—Feb 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Grow Traffic 114.25% With a Content Driven SEO Plan (Case Study)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 14:47:57 +0000

Great content is the bedrock of SEO. Without it: In this actionable case study, learn the exact strategy that my team at The Search Initiative took to increase our client’s organic traffic by 114.25% in 12 months. In this article, you’ll learn how to: But first, let’s find out some more about the site’s goals and the main challenges that were faced during the campaign. And if you prefer to consume your content via video, you can watch the full break down here: The Challenge The client is a finance lead generation website targeting the United Kingdom. The main objective of the campaign was to drive further organic traffic to the core landing pages and diversify the types of keywords that the client was ranking for by targeting terms with an informational search intent as opposed to just commercial intent. The site had many core landing pages which targeted commercial intent keywords, but was lacking in content that focused on ranking for information search terms. This was a missed opportunity to address different stages of the user’s journey as well as create content rich pages that could be used to build backlinks and to improve internal linking. We created a content plan for groups of topically related articles known as Power Hubs (aka Content Hubs), which you’ll learn how to do soon. The content plan also involved creating new core landing pages (aka “money pages” that are the most important for your service i.e. product pages for an eCommerce website) to target informational keywords. As the content strategy primarily focused on creating new pages via the Power Hubs, the next challenge was to carry out an outreach strategy with the aim of boosting their rankability while simultaneously building the overall authority of the domain. Finally, we identified two core technical drawbacks facing the website: poor main menu navigation which resulted in a bad user experience and lots of orphan pages (i.e. URLs with zero internal or external links pointing to them) which prevented the pages from being crawled by Google. Follow the steps outlined below to find out how you can overcome these challenges for your own website. Targeting Informational Keywords With Power Hubs There are four main types of keyword groups each of which have a specific purpose or intent. They are: It’s important to optimize your website to target a wide variety of keyword types as they correspond to different stages of the searchers journey. For example, users searching for informational keywords tend to be at the beginning of their search journey as they’re likely researching a topic that they aren’t familiar with whereas those searching transactional terms are further along the journey as they’re closer to making an actual purchase or performing an action (i.e. subscribing to a newsletter). This client’s website was lacking informational content that catered to the former group of searchers which meant that they were missing out on ranking for a large subset of keywords related to their niche. Instead of writing stand alone informational articles on your blog, you can grow the amount of informational content on your website by writing and publishing Power Hubs. What Are Power Hubs? Power Hubs (aka content hubs) are content pieces that comprise a single pillar page that is supported by a group of supplemental pages each of which are topically related to each other. These pages are then connected to each other with hyperlinks i.e. the pillar page links to each of the cluster pages and vice versa. What Are the SEO Benefits of Power Hubs? Publishing Power Hubs have the following SEO benefits: How to Find Potential Topics for Power Hubs I’ll show you three different techniques to find potential topics for Power Hubs – two of which are free! Ahrefs Keywords Explorer The first method is via Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool. 💡 Top Tip: use the Terms filter on the left hand side to see groups of topically related keywords that contain similar (or common) words. This is a great way to find your core topic for the pillar page. Let’s look at the keyword opportunities for “art”. In this case, you can see that there are several keyword variations related to what nft art is with a parent topic of “nft art” – making it a great keyword choice for our pillar page. This is because the pillar page should target a broader topic (“nft art”) whilst cluster pages target more specific subtopics. As you did before, use the groups in the left sidebar to find topically related keywords. Without even clicking on any of the groups from the left sidebar, you can start to spot certain keyword groups and topics for your cluster page. Each of the above could be a cluster page that goes into detail about how people can create, buy and sell NFT art. For example, here are some 133 additional keywords that you can target for “how to make nft art”. Related Searches If you don’t have Ahrefs, you can also use Google’s Related Searches section to find pillar and cluster topics. In this case, we have “nft art” again. As you can see, Google and Ahrefs’ results both align as we’re seeing similar keywords appearing. The pillar page can target “nft art” with cluster pages targeting specific terms like “how to create nft” and “how to sell nft art”. People Also Ask Another great (free) way to find keyword ideas for your pillar and cluster pages is via Google’s People Also Ask section. This is especially useful for finding informational keywords. All three methods can be used to put together a comprehensive list of keywords to target for both the pillar page and the supplementary cluster pages. Before you know it, you’ve got the building blocks for your Power Hub… 💡 Top Tip: If you really wanted to take things to another level, you could repeat the same process to create a Power Hub within your Power Hub. I’ll explain… Let’s go back to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and look at the additional keywords that we could target for “how to create nft art”. Use a similar approach to finding cluster page ideas by looking at whether there are further ways to group keywords. In this case, we have groups for “digital” and “3d” NFT art. This means you can turn your cluster page about “creating NFT art” into its own pillar page, with its own cluster pages. After identifying these keywords, the next step is to start writing your Power Hub! How to Write Content for Power Hubs Let’s take a look at how you should go about writing your content hubs: Here’s what you should look out for: Based on this, write your content so that it aligns with the content that Google has already rewarded on the competing pages. Always remember to write content that: Internal Linking Strategy for a Power Hub One area where Power Hubs differ slightly, is with the internal linking strategy. What Is Internal Linking? Internal linking is the process of adding a hyperlink from one page on your website, to another page on your website. Importantly, in the context of SEO, the links you add to other pages on your website should be relevant to the linking page. For example, if you have a website that sells mens socks, you might have an internal link from a blog article about Christmas gift ideas for men to one of your product or category pages. What Are the Benefits of Internal Linking? Internal linking has benefits for you, the user and search engines like Google. How to Structure Internal Links for a Power Hub Power Hubs provide many internal linking linking opportunities, for example you should add internal links from the: Following the above will create a network of links for Google and users to follow. Frequently Asked Questions About Power Hubs What Can a Power Hub Include? Apart from written text, Power Hubs may also include a range of other types of content that are beneficial to improving the overall user experience such as: What’s the Goal of a Power Hub? The main purpose of a Power Hub is to provide informative and educational content that is suitable for all users. This means that you should aim to include content that applies to both beginners and advanced users alike. Ultimately, you want to include as much information that showcases your expertise within a particular topic as possible. How Do Pillar and Cluster Pages Differ? The main difference between pillar and cluster pages is that: Improving Keyword Visibility for Informational Keywords As mentioned before, it’s important to ensure that your website targets a range of keywords so that you capture users at different stages of their search process. The client’s site was well optimized for transactional intent keywords (i.e. where users are looking to perform some sort of action such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter), but the site was lacking pages that targeted an informational intent. This Read More Read More

The post How to Grow Traffic 114.25% With a Content Driven SEO Plan (Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—January 2023

Matt Diggity — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 08:01:31 +0000

The first roundup of the year is filled with everything you need to stay on top of the competition. First, the guides will help you understand why SEO pros need to master ChatGPT prompts, how to measure SEO properly, and the risks of trying to mimic your biggest rival’s strategies. The case studies will give you insights from the hottest SEO research. You’ll get a full breakdown of the year’s changes, the top recorded Google searches from among ~20 billion keywords, and proof that removing a product carousel affects organic traffic. The latest headlines are waiting for you at the end. You’ll want to know what we’ve learned about the latest link spam update, why several updates have been delayed, and what’s waiting for you on the Google Analytics 4 landing page report. Why SEO Pros Need to Master Prompts: The ChatGPT Revolution https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-pros-need-to-master-prompts-the-chatgpt-revolution/473780/ Vincent Terrasi brings you this look at why prompts may be a greater part of SEO in the coming years. Prompts are the phrases that you use to provoke a response from an AI (such as ChatGPT). In this guide, Vincent claims you must prepare by starting to master prompts now. He defines “Promptology” as crafting your prompt to receive the most effective response in the shortest amount of time. He gives you some tips to get started. He begins by identifying some of the problems He provides you with sets of solutions for each problem and even follows up by helping you fix problems with AI image prompts. He gives you some solutions to repair prompts that deliver images with the wrong resolution or dimension. He closes with some interesting tips on how you can use AI to write the prompts for you. Check out the full guide for a variety of helpful tips. Also read our guide on using ChatGPT for SEO. Next, you’ll learn how to measure the value of SEO campaigns. The ROI of SEO: How to Measure SEO ROI (With Formulas) https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-roi/ Carlos Silva has some advice on how to measure Return On Investment (ROI) when it comes to implementing SEO for yourself or a client. He teaches you the formula SEO ROI = (value of conversions – the cost of investment) / cost of investment. The rest of the guide helps you understand each of these variables so that you can easily plug in the figures from your own project. Carlos’ information is thorough. The first step, calculating your SEO investment, covers all the bases so you won’t forget any costs. You’ll be reminded to track in-house services, freelancers, and the tools you pay for to track your results. He provides several different recommendations for how you can measure the value of the conversions based on how you collect them, such as customer lifetime value (LTV). At the end of the guide, he even gives you some advice for how you can forecast your SEO ROI ahead of time. Several tools are recommended, and you’ll learn how to find the data you need for forecasting in each of them. While you’re thinking about long-term strategy, the final guide of the month may also help. It covers the risks of basing your SEO on what you see others doing. What Is the Risk of Focusing on a Competitor’s SEO Strategies? https://www.searchenginejournal.com/competitors-seo-strategies/473258/ Adam Riemer thinks you should be careful when using your biggest competitors as a guide for your SEO strategy. It seems natural to assume that the top players in the niche must know what it takes to win, but there are risks you have to consider. Over the course of the guide, Adam Reimer covers some of the most significant risks involved with copying a competitor’s strategy. For example, he points out that the most visible leader will also be the most copied by everyone else in the niche. You’re competing with all of them when you choose to follow the leader. Everyone is publishing the same content, and some might be a lot more aged than yours. Doing something innovative in your niche can offer a faster road to growth because you won’t be catching up with the effort of others. He also warns you against assuming that the changes you can track are the key to your competitor’s success. Just because you can see changes and growth does not mean the changes are responsible for the growth. What you copy may be your competitor’s mistake. The full guide contains more advice on responding to competitor strategies without taking on the risks of copying them. With the guides complete, let’s jump into the case studies. This first one is more of a breakdown, but you’ll get a detailed summary of the biggest changes in SEO. SEO 2022 in Review: E-E-A-T, ChatGPT, Search Essentials, and More https://searchengineland.com/seo-year-in-review-2022-390384 Danny Goodwin brings you this detailed look at the SEO 2022 year in review, emphasizing the changes that had the biggest impact on SEO practices. It summarizes the big algorithm updates, tools, company acquisitions, and more. The piece works like a glossary of everything that happened in SEO last year rather than a guide. It covers a wide range of topics, and for each topic, it gives you a bullet point of an important event with a link so that you can read it directly from the source. You’ll learn about: It’s not an exaggeration to say just reading this list will catch you up on SEO. You could have just come out of a coma that lasted all of 2022 and be ready to jump back into SEO by the time you’re done reading it. While reflecting on what happened last year, you may appreciate learning what terms have risen to the most popular in the world. The next data piece covers the top contenders out of nearly 20,000,000,000 keywords. Top Google Searches(From Our Database of 19.2 Billion Keywords) https://ahrefs.com/blog/top-google-searches/ Si Quan Ong brings you these detailed lists that will help you understand what’s trending online. He and the Ahrefs team have organized all of the top terms in the world and separated them into categories. You can quickly browse to see all the top terms for: Each term in the list is paired with its rounded search volume so that you can easily see how many searches they’re really generating. The lists are an interesting resource on their own, but if you are an Ahrefs user, you’ll find some extra helpful information at the end. Si teaches you how to use Ahrefs search tools to locate the top search in any given country or any given niche. You’ve picked up a lot of big-picture details so far. The final case study of the month will dive deep into a specific issue. Is a product carousel on your site causing traffic problems? Does Removing a Product Carousel Improve Organic Traffic? https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/seo-split-test-lessons-removing-product-carousel/ Jandira Neto breaks down the value of removing a product carousel. Jandira used a real eCommerce customer’s site to test the theory that removing the feature would have an affect on organic traffic. Like most Search Pilot studies, this one started with a poll of the readers to predict the results. Most respondents thought the results would be inconclusive, while the next largest group thought the impact would be negative. Fewer than 28% expected a positive result. Jandira provides you with more context for the experiment. The customer had already tested removing this feature on other pages, and experienced significant traffic improvements. This experiment was intended to confirm that it would work the same way with other pages. Traffic began to increase immediately after the feature was removed. It increased by 4000+ sessions in the first day alone. By the end of the 11-day testing window, the page was looking at a 29% traffic improvement. Jandira has some ideas for why this might have happened. First, she proposed that the changes may have improved load times for visitors. She also suggests that the removal improved the page’s freshness signals. That covers the case studies for the month. Now, you’re ready to look over the latest SEO news. First, the announcement of the December 2022 Link Spam Update. December 2022 Link Spam Update Releasing for Google Search https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/12/december-22-link-spam-update Google announced a new link spam update on December 14th. The stated goal of the update was to leverage SpamBrain. This AI targets unnatural links on search results pages with the goal of preventing them from reaching searchers. The team claims that SpamBrain is now empowered to detect additional behaviors, such as sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links. Google did not recommend that users make any changes to their site to prepare for the update. The timeline for this update was originally announced as about two weeks from the time of the announcement. However, the next news item will explain why that did not happen. Google Helpful Content Update & Link Spam Update Delayed Rollout Due to Holidays https://www.seroundtable.com/google-helpful-content-update-link-spam-update-delayed-34643.html Barry Schwartz brings you this look at Google’s set of Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—January 2023 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

10 Best Web Hosting Services in Philippines (2024 Review)

Matt Diggity — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 16:03:52 +0000

The online world of the Philippines is booming due to increased internet use. Looking for web hosting providers can be a great way to start your business website, whether you are selling services or products online. The Philippines have been coined the social media capital of the world for years now, so it’s not surprising that Filipino people spend lots of time browsing the internet. We have researched and used over twenty hosting services popular in the Philippines to bring you the best options based on price, features, load time, security, and more. 1. Hostinger PH (Editor’s Choice) Hostinger is one of the least expensive solid hosting services starting at just $0.90 a month. Hostinger is well-known for its shared cloud and VPS hosting. It also supports PHP and MySQL, provides SSD storage, unlimited storage and bandwidth, and a global service network. They also offer 24/7 customer support, a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee, and data centers in the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Singapore, and Lithuania. In our experience, Hostinger PH is a solid shared hosting option with low prices for cheap hosting. 2. BlueHost BlueHost was founded in 2003 and has become one of the largest web hosting providers for secure and affordable hosting worldwide. Bluehost provides shared hosting as well as website-building software. BlueHost features a free SSL certificate, support for PHP and MySQL databases, free technical assistance, and a file manager and FTP account. It also provides customer support through live chat, email tickets, and phone. They have data centers located in India, Utah, London, China, and Hong Kong. BlueHost’s pricing starts at just $2.95 a month when you pay for the whole year or $9.99 monthly. In our experience, BlueHost offers low-cost hosting solutions with excellent support. 3. A2 Hosting A2 Hosting is among several of the best web hosting providers with all the features you need to build a quality website. They offer live chat, ticketing, and phone customer support 24/7, unlimited SSD storage and bandwidth, secure website migration, PHP, Perl, and Python support, free automatic backups, free SSH tools, fast WordPress servers, and free SSL certificates. A2 Hosting will also provide a 30-day money-back guarantee, 99 percent uptime, and data centers in the United States, Amsterdam, and Singapore. 4. SiteGround SiteGround is a reliable web host. They provide you with a fixed amount of storage space and excellent customer service. Their page load time is consistent; they provide simple integration with Git and offer free daily backups and many collaboration tools. They also provide a 99 percent uptime, two free months in case of a loss of uptime, fast customer service response time, and data centers in Australia, the United States, London, the Netherlands, and Germany. SiteGround base plan starts at $3.99 per month. In our experience, SiteGround offers reliable services with excellent customer support. 5. WPEngine WPEngine is a WordPress web host service that allows businesses to grow quickly with creativity, flexibility, efficiency, and functionality. WPEngine has over 100,000 customers in 150 countries. They provide CDN and SSL, free domain options, 24/7 support, backups, free migrations, advanced security, and one-click staging. Their customer support is quick and efficient, and they have data centers throughout the United States, Montreal, and Amsterdam. Their hosting starts at $35 a month. In our experience, WPEngine has an excellent customer support and great tools for a hosting provider, but they are more expensive than most hosting companies. 6. GoDaddy P.H. GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest domain registrars. With their server search and domain name software, buying a domain name with GoDaddy is simple. GoDaddy provides professional support 24/7, excellent load time and performance, on-demand resources, a simple control panel, 99 percent uptime, and data centers in Amsterdam, Mesa, Phoenix, the U.S., and Singapore. GoDaddy’s plans start at $149 per month. In our experience, GoDaddy is an excellent service with the most domains available. 7. HostGator HostGator is well-known among popular hosting companies and hosts over 15 million domains. They offer WordPress hosting, a 99.99 percent uptime guarantee, and 24/7 support. HostGator offers unlimited monthly data transfers, plans packed with features, excellent website-building software, and shared hosting. Their hosting services start at just $2.75 per month. In our experience, HostGator offers some of the best web hostings for a low cost. 8. LiquidWeb Liquid Web is a web hosting provider with nine server locations and over 600,000 domains. They offer VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting. They also have pre-installed WordPress, SSD storage, server backups, monitoring, unlimited traffic, a 60-day money-back guarantee, a 100 percent uptime guarantee, and excellent 24/7 support. Their dedicated server hosting starts at $169 per month, and VPS hosting starts at $25 per month. In our experience, Liquid web offers reliable hosting services, but they are more expensive than other hosting solutions. 9. Dreamhost DreamHost is a web hosting provider established in 1997 that now hosts over a million websites. This web hosting provider offers a shared hosting service that includes apps for WordPress hosting, a website builder, free connectivity, and storage space. They also provide unlimited data transfers monthly, excellent security, and various domain management tools. DreamHost has a 97-day money-back guarantee, a 99.9 percent uptime, excellent customer service, and data centers in the United States. Their shared hosting services start at just $2.95 a month. In our experience, DreamHost offers affordable hosting services, the best money-back guarantee, and excellent customer service. 10. NameCheap NameCheap is a web host that started in 2000 by providing affordable domains. They now web host over 10 million domains. This hosting provider offers SSL licenses, security services, and premium web hosting. Namecheap delivers some of the best web hosting services with quick-loading pages, a 100 percent uptime guarantee, cPanel, and an up-to-date dedicated web server. They also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, 24/7 support, and data centers in the United States. Their shared hosting plans and web hosting service start at just $1.98 a month. In our experience, NameCheap offers affordable hosting solutions with reliable dedicated hosting. Buyer’s Guide Before you build your website and choose the best web hosting provider, there are some key elements to consider to make the process smooth. Know What Features You Need – It all comes down to the features you truly need and how much you are willing to pay. Certain web host services provide low-cost services, and others focus more on essential features. By focusing on features that you need to build or manage your website, you can avoid features you don’t need. Pricing – It is simple to look at a low price and instantly be sold; however, you will realize that some lower-priced plans don’t offer the features you are looking for. The key is to find the perfect ratio between affordability and essential features. You will also want to check for hidden fees to ensure you get precisely what you want from your hosting service. Speed and Reliability – Statistics show that 40 percent of website users leave a website if it takes over three seconds to load. Speed and reliability are critical to the success of your website. Security – The best web hosting companies provide SSL for security, frequent backups, monitoring for unusual activity, malware protection, and a firewall. Usability – Advanced features don’t mean anything if the interface is too complicated. You may want a simple interface or more extensive options depending on your needs. Match the interface to your level of expertise. Support – Often, customer support for web hosting can be something you don’t think about until it’s too late. When it comes to maintaining your website, customer support is essential. Scalability – Most companies providing hosting services allow you to upgrade to a higher plan when the need arises quickly. As you build an audience for your webpage, you may need more features and support for your website than before. Choosing a hosting service that gives you the ability to grow is critical. Domain names and websites are considered internet real estate. – Marc Ostrofsky, Entrepreneur, Marketing.com Types of Web Services Before choosing a web hosting company, it is also essential to know what types of web services are available and what each one does. Shared Hosting – Shared Hosting is when your website is hosted on a server that hosts other websites. The main advantage of shared hosting is low prices, but you are sharing storage with other websites. Reseller Web Hosting – Reseller hosting is an upgraded version of shared web hosting. Reseller hosting is helpful if you plan on reselling the web hosting to another website creator. Cloud-Based Hosting – Cloud-based hosting allows you to upgrade when needed and adjust their capacity to manage web traffic by adding the required hardware. Cloud-based hosts link hundreds of servers together to create one large server and allow you to pay for what you use. Virtual Private Servers – VPS private servers act as standalone servers. It acts like a dedicated server without outrageous prices. Dedicated Web Servers – Read More Read More

The post 10 Best Web Hosting Services in Philippines (2024 Review) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

56 Ways to Make Money Online Without Paying Anything

Matt Diggity — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 03:39:02 +0000

Making money online without paying anything is a dream for many people. And truth be told, it can be difficult to find legit ways to earn money online that require zero investment on your part. That’s why we’ve spent hours scouring the internet to find the best ways to make money online without investing a single dime. In this list, you will discover the 56 best ways to earn money online, how much can you make, and how to get started with each method. So without further ado, let’s get into the first method. How To Make Money Online Without Paying Anything 1. Start Affiliate Marketing: $5,000/Month Affiliate marketing is simply the process of earning a commission by getting others to purchase products or services through your unique referral link. When someone clicks on your link and makes an action, you will earn a commission. This action could be anything from making a purchase to signing up for an email list or taking a free trial. You can find affiliate programs for just about anything online these days, from fashion and beauty to tech and software products. To earn money online with affiliate marketing, all you need to do is: All this takes time to learn and master, but once you do it can be a great way to make money online without any upfront costs. Check out our free online webinar today to find out how you can easily make money online with affiliate marketing. Watch this video to learn how I make six figures per month with affiliate marketing. 2. Become A Blogger: $2,000/Month If you’re passionate about a certain topic, then why not share your knowledge with the world by starting a blog? Not only is blogging a great way to share your passions with others, but it can also be a great source of revenue. There are 4 ways to make money online blogging: All of these methods can be used to make money online without paying anything. The only investment you’ll need to make is in your time and effort to grow your blog. 3. Become A Dropshipper: $3,000/Month Dropshipping is a type of eCommerce business where you sell products without having to carry any inventory. When a customer orders a product from your store, the order is then forwarded to the supplier (Amazon, AliExpress, etc,) who will then ship the product directly to the customer. In other words, you’re essentially a middleman. Dropshipping is a great way to start your own online business with little to no money because you don’t need to invest in any inventory. Feel free to check our article where we compared affiliate marketing and dropshipping. You can create a dropshipping store on Shopify or WooCommerce, and there are several suppliers you can choose from, such as Amazon and AliExpress 4. Start A YouTube Channel: $2,300/Month Studies showed that YouTube has become the second largest search engine after Google. YouTube receives over 2.6 billion visitors per month, and each one of these visitors spends 30 minutes on average. With that said, it’s not surprising that people are making a lot of money on YouTube. In fact, many are becoming millionaires from their YouTube channels. The great thing about making money on YouTube is that you don’t need to invest money upfront. All you need is a YouTube account and your phone. If you can engage your audience and produce quality content, then you can make money on YouTube. 5. Become An Instagram Influencer: $1,500 Per Post Instagram has about 500 million daily active users. That’s a lot of people! And if you can capture even a fraction of that traffic, then you can make some serious money. Instagram influencers often make money online with brand partnerships. They get paid to promote a product or service on their Instagram account. They can also make money online through affiliate marketing, selling digital products, or offering services. To make money online as an Instagram influencer, you need to have at least 30,000 followers. I’m not saying you can’t make money online with less than 30,000 followers, but it’s going to be a lot harder to find brands that are willing to work with you. The key to making money on Instagram is to have a large following of engaged users. If you can do that, then you stand a chance to make some serious money. 6. Become A Brand Ambassador: $3,500/Month Brand ambassadors are basically people who promote a brand. They can promote the brand on social media accounts, at events, or even in person. As a brand ambassador, you can make money through commissions, sponsorships, or even a salary. To become a brand ambassador, you’ll need to be passionate about the brand and have a good social media following. Once you have that, you can contact brands and start promoting their products or services. 7. Become A Social Media Manager: $6,000/Month Social media is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s a great way for brands and celebrities to connect with people and build relationships. On the other hand, one small mistake can cause a PR disaster, especially with today’s cancel culture. That’s why many – if not all – brands and celebrities use social media management services to help them navigate the ever-changing landscape of social media and build a positive online presence. As a social media manager, you can make money online through a salary, commission, or even freelance work. 8. Start A Podcast: $2,000/Month Podcasts are becoming more and more popular each day. People love listening to them because they are super entertaining and take no effort to consume. You can listen to a podcast while driving, working out, or even doing the dishes. It’s like a helpful background noise that helps make the monotony of life a little more bearable. If you’re passionate about a certain topic, then you can start your own podcast and make money with it. The great thing about starting a podcast is that you don’t need to invest any money upfront. All you need is a microphone and some time to record your episodes. 9. Become A Twitch Streamer: $3,000/Month If you have a knack for gaming and know how to entertain an audience, then you can make money online by streaming games on Twitch. Twitch is a live-streaming platform that’s become very popular with gamers. And if you can build a following, then you can make money online from Twitch donations, subscriptions, and sponsorships. To get started, all you need is a gaming PC and an internet connection. You can then sign up for a free Twitch account and play games for money. 10. Become A Game Booster: $700/Month This one is a bit weird but you can earn decent money by helping people boost their in-game ranking. There are a lot of people out there who are willing to pay for this service, especially in competitive games like CS:GO, League of Legends, and Fortnite. So if you’re good at games and know how to boost someone’s rank, then you can make some good money by joining boosting services such as Hero Boosting. 11. Play Crypto Games: $100/Month Crypto games are a new and exciting way to make money online. These games use blockchain technology to create a decentralized gaming platform that is fair and transparent. When you play the game, you win in-game tokens, which are cryptocurrencies that you can then cash out for real money. There are a few different crypto games you can play, such as Axie Infinity and Thetan Arena. So if you like playing video games and are looking for a fun and easy way to make money online, then playing games is a great option. 12. Watch Ads For Money: $50/Month Believe it or not but you can actually make money online by watching ads! You can sign up for a service like Swagbucks or MyPoints and get paid to watch ads or do other small tasks. It’s not much money but it’s an easy way to make some extra cash online. Plus, it’s a fun way to kill time if you’re bored and have nothing else to do. 13. Earn Money Online By Reviewing Songs: $0.05/ Song If you’re a music lover, then you can make money by reviewing songs. There are companies out there that will pay you to listen to new songs from upcoming artists and give your honest opinion. So if you have a good ear for music, then this can be a fun and easy way to make money by joining platforms like Current Rewards and RadioEarn. 14. Take Online Surveys: $1/Survey Another easy way to earn money online is by taking online paid surveys. There are a ton of companies out there that will pay you for your opinion. You can sign up for a service like Survey Junkie, or Opinion Outpost, since they are some of the best online survey tools. It’s an easy way to make some extra Read More Read More

The post 56 Ways to Make Money Online Without Paying Anything first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Make Money from Drawing Online in 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 03:08:53 +0000

You don’t have to be a famous artist in order to make a living from your drawings. There are many ways to make money from your physical and digital drawings. Whenever I thought I’d seen it all in the digital space, a new opportunity suddenly comes up that didn’t exist in the recent past. And it never ceases to surprise you. Creating great images can engage viewers in a powerful way, and when you can grab the attention of an audience, there lies a chance to make a lot of money. Whether you are wanting to freelance, find a job, or start a business, you can use your drawings to make a profit. Is There a Need for Artist Drawings in ? Not long ago, the options to make money as an artist seemed narrow. There were very few paths for an artist to take. It used to be a feast or famine for artists, where they either had to make it big with a professional art studio and gallery or struggle to get attention and stay in relative obscurity. With the invention of the internet, everything changed for aspiring artists. It became clear that websites required not only good text but also appealing graphics to be effective. It turned out that businesses were willing to pay a lot of money to create quality websites because they increased sales and credibility. Demand has only increased since the invention of tablets and smartphones, where most internet browsers are mobile browsers. The need for digital art has spawned the rise of new job positions, such as graphic designers, visual designers for games and mobile apps, and art directors. Many of these positions have great salaries but also hold opportunities to build your own business or freelance. Whether you are looking to make studio art, business murals, or digital visuals, the demand for drawings remains high. Digital vs Physical Drawings Digital art is created using computer software such as Photoshop or Procreate, while physical drawings are created using traditional materials such as pencils or pens on paper. Digital drawings offer more flexibility and can be easily edited and shared, while physical drawings may require more care to preserve and may need to be scanned or photographed in order to be shared digitally. Below, you’ll find out the advantages of each and what will best suit your goals and preferences. Advantages of Traditional Art Many artists the tactic and immersive experience when creating traditional art. Many artists value the connection to the materials they use. While digital art can be printed, my buyers appreciate the tangible result of a traditional painting. It can be hung on a wall, placed on a shelf, or given as a gift, providing a sense of accomplishment and pride in the finished piece. Many people perceive physical art as more authentic or genuine. If you choose to make money in the fine art field, you are going to have an easier time with traditional mediums. Physical art does not rely on technology, and as such can be enjoyed and appreciated for years to come, regardless of advances in technology. Digital Art Advantages Digital artwork continues to grow and evolve along with the evolution of internet platforms. High-salary drawing positions are available in the entertainment, marketing and advertising industries. Here are some of the reasons why digital art is hugely popular among artists Easy Corrections Making mistakes or changing large portions of creative work is far easier on a digital program than on a physical piece of paper. That removes pressure on artists, especially if they need to pump out a fair amount of volume with their drawings. Modern art software may not have the same feeling as paper, but it holds the advantage of helping artists be more efficient. No Art Supplies Developing a professional art studio can get expensive fast. The regular costs to get production up and going are costly. Renting studio space can get very expensive as well, and the ongoing costs of traditional art supplies can add up. With digital drawing, you can accomplish most jobs from your home with a computer and a drawing tablet or screen. Easy Clean-Up Digital art doesn’t require a physical studio or a dedicated area of your home. Part of running an effective business is managing the time it takes to set up, take down, and clean up can be time-consuming. Between the mess and the time consumption, digital art production is an enticing path. Sharing and Distribution Digital art can be easily shared via email, or on social media. This makes it easier for collaboration with an online team and quick communication across different creative departments. It also makes it easier for artists to reach a wider audience and share their work with others on social media. What You Need to Get Started Equipment If you plan to create physical art products, you’ll need the pencils, easels, canvas, and paints traditional artists use. Making money online with digital products requires a computer and some digital art hardware, such as screens or tablets built for artists. Software The software you use is vital to making professional art, particularly with digital products. The best software is going to be specific to your artistic needs. Here are some of the best software products for artists: Portfolio In this digital age, making a portfolio is easier than ever and can be done for free. You can create a website or an online portfolio through Google Drive to showcase your work. Preparing a portfolio to show is vital if you are looking to land a job for a staff position or a freelancer. Take the time to present your best work and what would be most valuable for prospective employers and clients. How to Make Money Drawing 1. Sell Your Drawings The internet has revolutionized how artists can market themselves and make money drawing. With many online art galleries popping up each day, maybe you’d like to try your hand in this business as well. Not, only can you promote your creative work at art fairs, swap meets, galleries, and art shows, but many online marketplaces allow you to share your artwork in front of thousands of potential buyers. You can make a lot of money drawing online. In addition, many social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and Meetup enable artists to get more exposure regardless if they make physical or digital products. And the best part is that you can also turn your drawings into a digital product that you can print on demand. 2. Sell Your Art as an NFT An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a digital asset representing ownership of a unique piece of digital art. NFTs are a relatively new way of selling art and are best suited to artists with a portfolio of digital art and an existing follower base. If you’re interested in selling your art as an NFT, here are some steps you can follow: Choose your platform: Several platforms allow you to sell your art as an NFT, such as OpenSea, Magic Eden, and Nifty Gateway. Each platform has its own fees, features, and requirements, so it’s essential to do your research and choose the one that best suits your needs. Create your NFT: Once you’ve chosen a platform, you’ll need to create your NFT. This typically involves uploading your artwork, adding metadata such as a title, description, and artist name, then setting the price. Some platforms may also allow you to add additional features, such as a video or audio component, to your NFT artwork. Promote your NFT: Once your NFT is live, you’ll need to promote it to reach potential buyers. While each platform will have its own audience, you should use social media, email marketing, and other online marketing techniques to promote your NFT further and drive traffic to your sales page. Complete the sale: When someone purchases your NFT, the platform will handle the payment and transfer of ownership to the buyer. You’ll receive the agreed-upon amount minus any fees or commissions, and the buyer will receive the digital asset. 3. Create Logos and Branding Material You can also make money drawing by using your creative skills and offering services as a freelance graphic designer or by starting your own graphic design business. You could also offer print-on-demand services alongside. Art prints are very popular these days. According to Payscale.com, the average graphic designer makes $48,012. More senior designers can have an average salary of over $100k. To create logos, art prints, and branding material, you’ll need to have a strong understanding of design principles and be proficient in design software such as Adobe Illustrator. You’ll need to showcase your skills, attract potential clients through your online store, create a portfolio of your work and be able to print on demand. This can include logos and branding material you’ve created for past clients or for personal projects. To land clients and make money drawing, you’ll need to market Read More Read More

The post How to Make Money from Drawing Online in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Earn Money Online for Students – 45 Ways

Christopher Caparoso — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 03:01:36 +0000

There are a lot of expenses that come with being a college student. You need money for books, tuition, rent, and let’s face it, sometimes you just need to have some fun. I’ve been making money on the internet for over a decade and I know a thing or two about getting started and earning money online as a student. That’s why I’ve put together this list of the 45 best online jobs for college students that don’t require any experience or special skills. So, whether you are looking for a part-time job or want to start a side hustle, there is something for everyone. How to Earn Money Online as a Student 1. Affiliate Marketing: $5,000/Month Affiliate marketing is a marketing model in which businesses pay commissions to affiliates for generating traffic or sales. You can easily earn money online with some affiliate marketing skills. Making money online doesn’t have to be hard. For example, if you have a website about dogs and you recommend a dog food product and someone clicks on your affiliate link and buys the dog food, you would earn a commission, usually a percentage of the sale. The reason why I believe affiliate marketing is the best way for college students to make money is that it’s a very hands-off business model. Students have a very busy college schedule and affiliate marketing allows you to make money passively. Once you have put in the initial work of setting up your website and creating content, you can earn commissions while you sleep! And, there is no limit to how much you can earn. The more traffic you generate, the more sales you make, and the more money you can earn! If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing and how it works. check out this free beginner guide. 2. Start a Dropshipping Business: $3,000/Month Dropshipping is a business model in which businesses sell products that they don’t actually have in stock. It works as the following: You find a trendy product that you think will sell well. You set up an online store and list the product for sale. When someone buys the product from your store, you order it from the supplier and have it shipped directly to your customer’s doorsteps. Obviously, you will be listing the products at a higher price than what you pay the supplier, so you will earn a profit on each sale. The beauty of dropshipping is that you don’t have to worry about stocking inventory or dealing with shipping. And, you can start a dropshipping business for very little money! 3. Start a YouTube Channel: $2,300/Month You watch videos online for sure? How many youtube millionaires have you heard of? I can think of a few off the top of my head: Pewdiepie, Mrbeast, and Jake Paul. All of these YouTubers started with zero subscribers and now they are earning millions of dollars per year! And, you can make money on YouTube as well. You can start a youtube channel about any topic that you are passionate about. Whether you want to vlog about your life, review products, or teach others about a certain topic, there is a niche for everyone! Making youtube videos is a lot of work, but it is definitely worth it if you can build a large following. 4. Start a Blog: $2,000/Month If you are shy or don’t like being in front of the camera, then starting a blog may be a better option for you. Blogging is similar to youtube in that you can write about any topic that you are passionate about. And, once you build up a large enough following, you can start monetizing your blog through Google Adsense, affiliate marketing, and sponsored posts. The great thing about starting a blog is that it is very inexpensive to get started. All you need is a domain name and a good hosting provider, which can be purchased for less than $100 per year. Some free blogging platforms, such as Medium and NewsBreak even pay you to blog for them! 5. Start a Podcast: $2,000/Month Do you think you can be the next Joe Rogan? If so, then starting a podcast may be a great way for you to earn money as a student. Podcasts are a bit harder to monetize than blogs and youtube channels, but it is still possible to earn a decent income from them. 6. Start a Twitch Channel: $3,000/Month If you are an entertainer at heart and love playing video games, then you can start a twitch channel and make some more money on the web. Twitch is a live streaming platform that mainly focuses on video gaming. But, you can also find channels that live stream creative content, such as music, cooking, and art. 7. Become a Booster: $700/Month Are you good at video games? If so, you can earn money by becoming a booster. Yes, we all hate boosters, they are ruining our games, they are the scum of the earth and all that, but they do earn a decent amount of money. So, if you are good at video games and don’t mind being hated by the community, becoming a booster may be a great way for you to earn money online as a student. 8. Sell Your Course Notes: $5,000/Month Let’s be honest, most of us don’t really pay attention in class. And, even if we do, we don’t really remember everything that was said. But, there are always those few college students who take great notes and remember everything that was said in class. If you are one of those college students, you can start selling your course notes on websites like Stuvia and Nexus Notes. 9. Sell Your Old Textbooks: $500 On average, college students spend around $1,225 a year on textbooks. And, when you are done with your textbooks, you can sell them back to the bookstore for a fraction of the price. But, there is a better way to sell your textbooks. You can sell them online on websites like Facebook Marketplace and Textbooks. 10. Work as a Freelance Writer: $5,000/Month Every business is moving online, which means that there is a huge demand for content. And, where there is demand, there is money to be made. If you are a good writer, you can start working as a freelance writer and make about $0.03 per word. Not bad, right? And, if you are good at writing resumes, some resume writing services can pay you $500 per resume! You can find hundreds of freelance writing jobs on boards, such as Upwork and Problogger. 11. Work as a Proofreader: $1,500/Month If you are a good reader and have a keen eye for grammar and punctuation mistakes, then you can work as a proofreader and earn money. Proofreading is a great online job for college students because it is relatively low-stress and can be done in your free time. The average proofreader earns about $20 per hour, which means that you can easily make $1,000 per month just by working a few hours per week. You can begin booking proofreading jobs on services like ProofreadingPal and Kibin. 12. Work as a Translator: $4,000/Month Do you know more than one language? If so, you can start working as a translator and earn money. There is a huge demand for translators, as businesses are moving online and need to provide customized experiences for their customers in multiple languages. Additionally, many online college students need help translating their course materials and assignments, so there is also a demand for college student translators. You can start by joining services like Gengo or Blend. 13. Work as a Language Tutor: $2,400/Month If you are a native speaker of a language, you can start working as a language tutor and earn money. Language tutors are in high demand, as more and more people are interested in learning new languages. You can start by joining a service like Italki or Preply. 14. Do Data Entry Online Jobs: $300/Month Data entry is one of the easiest online jobs for college students. All you need is a computer and an internet connection, and you can start earning money. It doesn’t pay a lot, but it is a great way to earn some extra money in your spare time. You can find data entry jobs on services like Upwork or Freelancer. 15. Work as a Tester: $10/Test Before developers can release their products, they need to make sure that their website or application is free of bugs and that everything is working properly. That’s why they hire testers to test their products and give them useful feedback to help them improve their products. You can find a lot of testing freelance jobs on websites like UserTesting or Testing Time. 16. Work as a Search Engine Evaluator: $800/Month Google and other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to provide the best results for their users. To do this, they need Read More Read More

The post How to Earn Money Online for Students – 45 Ways first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

3 Best Ways to Make Money from Coding and Programming in 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 02:59:09 +0000

Are you interested in learning how to earn money from coding? Below, you’ll find out the various ways you can monetize your coding skills. From getting a job as a web developer to creating and selling WordPress plugins and themes, this article covers it all. I’ve had quite the experience with coding, so you’ll get to learn the pros and cons of each option and tips on how to get started. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced coder, this article will help you if you’re looking to turn your passion for coding into a profitable career. Quick Summary 1. Get a Job as a Web Developer As a freelance developer, your main job is to create and maintain websites and applications. You’ll do this using HTML, CSS, and a one programming language such as JavaScript. Web developers also have to work with other departments like web design, graphic design, and so on. They may also be required to handle other things like SEO, monitoring web traffic, improving website performance, and handling problems in order to limit downtime. Types of Web Developer Jobs There are many different types of developer jobs. Front End Developer A front-end developer works on the client (or visitor) side by building and maintaining the parts of the website or application you can see. This is ultimately what allows users to interact with the website or application. You still require a decent amount of tech skills for this job as it is different from what a web designer does. Back End Developer A back-end developer specializes in building and maintaining the server side of a web application. As a back-end developer, you oversee data storage, security, and performance. You’ll often need to know a programming language such as PHP, Python, Ruby, or Java and use frameworks like Django, Rails, or Spring to build web applications. This work is typically not visible to the end user, but it is essential for the overall functionality and performance of the web application. Full Stack Developer A full-stack developer can perform the functions of both a front and back-end developer. This means they manage both the client and server sides of websites and applications. WordPress Developer WordPress developers are also mostly full-stack developers who specialize in building websites using WordPress creation tools. They are trained to use WordPress plugins and themes and work to make WordPress websites user-friendly and more functional. Sell Plugins and Themes WordPress is exceptionally well-known, and many people choose to build their sites using it. According to an article published by ManaFerra, there were 835 million WordPress websites in 2022. This means that there is a huge need for various plugins and themes. WordPress developers can also work on their own plugins and themes and sell them to WP users. Testing WP Software and Making Improvements WordPress developers can also use their skills to test WP software and make improvements. This could be testing functionality, scalability, performance, etc. The ultimate goal is to optimize various software used by WordPress users. The Pros and Cons Of Being A Web Developer Next Steps To find out where to start, it’s a good idea to research what others are doing right now. Look for popular coding courses on Udemy, for example. Or check which YouTube channels offering coding tutorials are doing really well. 2. Develop Games or Apps Another way to earning money coding is to become a game or app developer. This requires an understanding of C++ since this is the most commonly used programming language in game design. Video game developers are responsible for both designing and developing games. This includes games for PC, consoles like Playstation or Xbox, and mobile applications. They generally get ideas from the design team and then code the base engine based on these designs. Another type of coding field to go into is app development. Apps frequently use Java as the main programming language, so it’s a good idea to gain knowledge and experience in this. This type of work often entails creating mobile apps. You could also create your own apps and your own blog and earning money coding by selling them. The Pros and Cons How to Get Started Get qualified. Game developers are often required to have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field. That’s because this job requires lots of technical skills. Develop solid coding skills. Even with a degree, it’s good to ensure you understand the coding you’ve learned and that you do have some coding skills. This may involve brushing up on your Math skills which are really important when improving your coding skills. software development engineering skills. When it comes to creating games or apps, you may need to know how to use various coding languages and technologies including C, C#, C++, Java, Python, Lua, and MySQL. Explore your creative skills. Asides from coding skills, in smaller companies, you may need to come up with ideas or storylines as a game or app developer. It’s a good idea to focus on your creative side and get extra experience in graphics, storytelling, etc. Build a portfolio. Whether you’re a freelance app developer sourcing potential clients or you’re looking to land a full-time job as a game developer, having a portfolio is essential. You can design your own game apps to do this. Read this guide to get more information on how to make a game developer portfolio. Get an entry-level game developer job. Not only is this a great way to earn a full-time income, but it also gives you access to the job market. This allows you to gain experience and build your professional network. Next Steps Learning to code and getting experience in the field are the first steps. Once you’ve gotten to a place where you can develop a game or app, you can pursue opportunities to make money. A good platform to find work as a game developer is Gamasutra Jobs. You can check it out here. 3. Start Freelancing as a Programmer This is a great way to earn money online. Freelance programmers are much more flexible than the previous coding jobs we mentioned. That’s because you can do various tasks like writing code, coding for software development, mobile apps, or any application. By working as a programmer you’ll also get to improve your coding skills very fast. Programmers in general, maintain, debug and troubleshoot software to keep it running smoothly. As a freelancer, you’ll need a sound understanding of various coding multiple languages because the work is so varied. Freelancers work with different clients, and each may require you to use different programming languages and platforms. So, you can choose from whatever programming languages you are best familiar with. The Pros and Cons How to Get Started Get Qualified. A bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field can be handy. It is also recommended that you take coding courses to expand your skills. Choose a niche. There are so many types of programming jobs that you may not know which ones to apply for. It’s a good idea to explore the various available niches and narrow your interest to a few similar ones. Get experience by building a portfolio. Once you have the skills and have chosen a niche, it’s essential to put into practice what you’ve learned. The best way to do this is to create a few pieces to add to a portfolio. This is what you can use to show your work to clients. Create your own website. As a freelancer, having your own website is a good way to showcase your skills and market your brand. In fact, some clients will request this. Market yourself. Being a freelancer is having your own business. The work won’t fall on your lap, you need to market yourself and your brand. Set up portfolios and profiles on freelancing platforms. This may be one of the best ways to get jobs as a freelancer who is just starting out. We’ll list some of the best sites to find freelancing gigs below. Best Sites to Find Online Freelance Coding Gigs Legiit.com Legiit.com is a comprehensive freelance marketplace platform for businesses, agencies, and many other areas. It also offers payment protection for freelancers and helps to ensure legitimate clients. Upwork Upwork is one of the top platforms for freelancers to connect with clients. It gives you access to a job board to search for jobs in line with your skills. It also allows you to create a profile and portfolio. UpStack This freelancer job platform is particularly for developers and programmers. Upstack boasts longer-term projects and remote jobs in various programming fields, including WordPress developer jobs. Fiverr Fiverr as a platform offers clients various services from web development to content creation, so there are lots of job opportunities for programmers on this site. They also ensure secure and paying clients. Freelancer.com Freelancer.com is another popular platform where freelancing programmers can find stable and consistent work. Read More Read More

The post 3 Best Ways to Make Money from Coding and Programming in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Top 27 Ways to Make Money Online in Canada (2024Guide)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 02:57:29 +0000

earn money online and finding a remote job has become more popular and attractive, particularly over the past few years. More and more Canadians are looking to stay in the comfort of their own home but still want to make a good living and even make extra money on the side. Whether you are starting a business, finding a job, freelancing, or building passive income, there is something profitable for everyone. Below, you’ll find out the best paths to making money online so you can choose what fits best for you. Quick Summary 1. Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is a hugely profitable route with annual revenue of billions of dollars. This industry has made a tremendous impact on the bank high interest savings account of many affiliates. When you sign up as an affiliate, you partner with companies to drive traffic to their website or your own. You post a link, and if people click on it and buy the physical or digital products, you get a commission from the sale. Post links on social media, articles, blogs, newsletters, and anywhere people read digitally. These links can not only be very lucrative, but they also can keep making you money when you are sleeping or spending time with friends and family. There is no limit to the number of partners and links you can have in affiliate marketing. If you’re looking to get into the world of affiliate marketing, check out this webinar that gives you pro tips on how to succeed in affiliate marketing. 2. eCommerce eCommerce is where you digitally or physically sell products online. Most looking to build an eCommerce business create a website using a platform that makes it easy to execute electronic transactions and distribute the products to customers. Look at our market research on the best eCommerce platforms this year. If you are getting into eCommerce, it will take more than just throwing up a website to be successful. online store want to make sales, but they must actively drive traffic to their site. Learning how to do SEO and link building is crucial to standing out online. 3. Freelancing Freelancing work is usually performed through a contract that lasts for the length of a project or an agreed time, whether it be days, months, or years. Let’s be clear that freelance work is not guaranteed. You can freelance anything as long as it is a skill people are willing to pay. It doesn’t matter whether you are an entertainer, a writer, a web designer, an accountant, a life coach, or a content creator. You can make money online in any of these routes or more if you can market and deliver the product or service virtually and someone is willing to pay for it. 4. Proofreading Do you have an eye for good grammar and sentence structure? Can you spot writing errors that most others miss? If you are a meticulous editor, proofreading could be both enjoyable and profitable. You could take the freelancing route through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, or you can take a traditional route by getting a full or part-time job remotely. Most of these positions require that you complete one or several short tests to demonstrate your language skills. Check job postings on Indeed, Flexjobs, and Problogger. 5. Trading Stocks You don’t need your MBA or a stock trader license to trade stocks. Today it is easier than ever to buy and sell from your phone or computer. Investing could be a fantastic online money maker if you love numbers, spreadsheets, and the stock market. But you don’t need to love math and charts to understand investing. Many programs read the market for you, even some that tell you when to buy and sell stocks. TD Ameritrade is great for beginners and if you are interested in self-directing your investments. If you don’t want to direct your account, Wealthfront helps automate your portfolio to free up your time for other things. 7. Become a Virtual Assistant While there are still many secretaries and assistants that drive to work and sit at a desk, there has been a growing demand for a virtual assistant, particularly for small online marketplaces. A virtual assistant can take calls, set appointments, organize your calendar, and almost any other administrative duty from the comfort of their own home. Most are hired part-time or for a specific project. Many virtual assistants set up a platform through Upwork and Fiverr, but you could also do freelance work or land a job. 8. Teach English If someone gave you lesson plans of what to teach, do you feel you could do it? Many countries, particularly in Asia, are in demand to teach their young children English virtually. You get to interact through camera and audio with children directly and see their skills grow, which can be very rewarding. Be aware that if you are teaching lessons in a different part of the world, you might need to stay up late or get up earlier than you are used to. If teaching English interests you, browse VIP Kid, Skooli, or QKids. 9. Become a Tutor Teaching is a great way to earn extra money online if you are fluent in English. Teachers often look for ways to boost their income but still use the valuable skills that they have learned. But you don’t have to be a certified teacher to get paid well as a tutor. Students, young and old, who came back to school after the many stay-at-home orders during the Covid pandemic of 2020 have fallen behind in many basic skills. There is a need to help students from elementary to college catch up on all subjects, from writing, reading, history, science, math, and more. If you’re interested, check out these top online tutoring sites: 10. Test Websites and Apps When it comes to testing websites and apps, there is no technical degrees or education required. All you need to get started is a computer and a strong internet connection. Some websites require that you also have a microphone and webcam, but not all. As a tester, you are looking at the functionality of a website and are reporting back your results. If you are able to be a bug tester, you can make even more money testing. User Testing is one of the more popular sites where you could earn $30 for 30 minutes of work. The only complaint is that newer testers may only receive 1-2 testing opportunities a week. UTest has a larger learning curve that could also result in bigger results, with some full-time testers making over $3,000 per month. Before you receive paid work, you have to pass a sandbox test demonstrating your ability to spot bugs and other hindrances to websites. Most testers will earn around $10 for 10 minutes of work testing, but some sites have more volume and need more testers, while others don’t have as much work. Know that some of the higher paying and higher volume gigs are also more selective with their applicants. 11. Use Your Voice to Earn Money If you have a strong voice and can read confidently, there is a growing opportunity for narrators and voice actors to earn some extra money part-time or even turn it into a full-time career. Voice animation actors could be required to go into an actual studio, but are many hybrid and online opportunities to read scripts and make sound bytes. Video game characters need good voice actors, and these companies can be more flexible about working online than animation studios. Narrators are more in demand with the growing popularity of listening to books rather than read them. A strong voice is appealing to advertisers when creating commercials. Many educational companies build online curricula and need graphic designers, writers, and voice actors for their videos. Looking in the educational field can fly under the radar of competition that often looks to apply for jobs with animators and audiobooks. Regardless of which option you choose, if you plan to do this from home, you must take the time to create a studio that will mute unwanted noises when recording.. This setup doesn’t have to be a soundproof booth with expensive sound gear. Most voice actors can use their computer, a microphone, and software that records, adjusts, and isolate sounds. Some voiceovers use soundproof paneling and make a spare room the recording room. If you don’t have a whole room you can dedicate, you can create a small booth in a room with blankets, pillows, and cushions. 12. Create and Sell Online Courses Online education has become increasingly popular over the past few years. This online education boom is mainly outside of the public education and college fields. Anyone with some knowledge and the ability to successfully teach the knowledge to people can build a course to sell. These courses consist of anything you know and want to share, whether it is guitar lessons, how to build a Read More Read More

The post Top 27 Ways to Make Money Online in Canada (2024Guide) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Make Money Online Tutoring: 12 Best Job Sites in 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 02:45:37 +0000

Thinking of becoming an online tutor? Online tutoring jobs can be a great way to make money online. And the salary can be quite good. I know this because back in the day, I used to tutor as well. But, I’m sure you have a ton of questions before jumping in. Do tutoring jobs pay well? How can I make more per hour as a tutor? And, will I need a bachelor’s degree to tutor students online? Fortunately, I have answers to all of those questions. Discover how to make money tutoring online below. Quick Summary Can You Make Money as an Online Tutor? You can make money as a tutor online once you find your first few real clients and begin to generate referrals. News travels fast when parents or students find an outstanding tutor. The best tutors find themselves forced to turn down work because they have too many inquiries. After establishing your own tutoring business and filling your schedule, you can increase your per-hour rate and inform your lowest-paying clients. Can You Make a Living Off Tutoring? You can make a living off tutoring services if you invest the time and remain open to learning about one of the world’s fastest-growing industries. Many educators start their careers by signing up with tutoring platforms. These platforms are almost always hiring, provide access to thousands of potential clients, and offer valuable resources to help tutors improve. Around the globe, millions of people make a living off tutoring. However, many factors affect how much you can expect to make from your tutoring jobs. How Much Money Can You Make From Online Tutoring? You can make more than $100K from tutoring jobs. However, building a book of business and generating a consistent revenue stream will take time. Your circumstances will determine how much money you can make from tutoring opportunities. Some of the most crucial factors for private tutoring income include: Tutors with previous teaching experience and a college degree can earn a considerable sum each year. Many online tutors earn six-figure salaries at tutoring companies and other tutoring jobs. How Do I Become an Online Tutor? You can become an online tutor by finding open positions, meeting the specific job requirements, and possessing the necessary educational background, if any. Other online teachers start as freelance tutors, attract new students, and create their own schedules and lesson plans. Let’s look at some of the most common requirements for tutoring jobs. Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. – Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father of the United States of America What Are the Job Requirements for Online Tutoring? The job requirements for online tutoring jobs vary dramatically depending on the type of tutoring services provided. For self-employed online tutors, there are no job requirements. Prospective tutors who wish to teach English to Chinese students through an online platform will need to possess at least a couple of years of experience or be TESOL/TEFL accredited. Tutor applicants who want to assist graduate students in pursuing advanced degrees will face additional scrutiny. Some of the job requirements for tutoring grad students in advanced subjects may include: Do I Need a Degree for a Tutoring Job on the Internet? You do not need a degree for a tutoring job on the internet. Many high school students teach lower-classmen for pay. And, many of them do it over the internet. Likewise, a current college student can teach traditional school subjects to high schoolers and middle schoolers. However, most tutoring companies will require a bachelor’s degree, especially if you want to earn money teaching students as part of an SAT prep course. The Best Online Tutoring Jobs to Make Money Now As more students from emerging economies come online, the tutoring business continues to expand. Online tutoring sessions now occur between two individuals who may live on opposite ends of the planet. And, you can find one tutoring company after another that will put you in contact with Discover some of the best online platforms to find tutoring jobs and make more money below. 1. Skooli Skooli pays tutors on a per-hour basis. All you have to do is sign in to view your tutoring requests and schedule your next sessions. While you remain online, you can receive instant tutoring inquiries that allow you to earn money on the fly. This popular video instruction platform also provides a virtual whiteboard that allows you to demonstrate concepts visually. At Skooli, you can tutor students in K-12 subjects, business courses, languages, and test prep. 2. TutorMe Assist K-12 students 24 hours a day at TutorMe! Like most tutoring jobs that involve a digital platform, TutorMe pays its tutors a flat hourly wage. Your ability to stay on the platform and help students with test prep and course material depends on your ratings from previous clients. If you receive too many negative ratings, you may stop receiving tutoring requests. Keep in mind that TutorMe accepts only a small percentage of applicants and requires a degree or enrollment in a top-tier university. You may need to apply more than once. 3. Tutor.com Accelerate the learning process for your students at the most popular internet tutoring platform: tutor.com! Brought to you by The Princeton Review, tutor.com pays more per hour than most video chat tutoring companies. Create your own schedule depending on how much time you have to spend tutoring. Agree to on-the-spot tutoring sessions. And start earning money for tutoring. Once you get comfortable with the tutor.com system, you will be well-positioned to meet lots of new clients due to the company’s universal recognition. 4. Yup Is there an internet tutoring platform dedicated specifically to mathematics? Yup! Yup represents the most popular place for instructors to find tutoring jobs in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. Tutors earn money per hour while teaching students from around the world. Applicants must possess two or more years of teaching experience and pass Yup’s entrance exams. Then, they must successfully complete a practice tutoring session. Yup will give you a weekly schedule, and you are expected to be online to field tutoring inquiries. 5. VIPKid Teach English to Chinese students with VIPKid! VIPKid caters to Chinese citizens who wish to learn American English but can not make the trip to study at American schools. Many tutors find it challenging to get their applications accepted at VIPKid because the company is highly selective. You must have one year of teaching under your belt and be eligible to work in the United States or Canada. The pay is above average and includes performance bonuses. 6. Chegg Find a place where you can excel as a tutor by helping students with homework at Chegg! As one of the largest providers of tutoring jobs, Chegg caters to students in middle school, grad school, and everything in between. All tutor applicants must possess at least one degree or be enrolled in a 4-year program. Chegg represents one of the best options for international tutors because the company accepts applicants from all over the world and pays an above-average per-hour rate. 7. Smarthinking Don’t teach harder; teach smarter with Smarthinking by Pearson! Smarthinking assists students in kindergarten, high school, college, and the workplace. Much of the tutoring jobs at Smarthinking involve language, reading, and writing. To apply, search the Pearson job board and follow the instructions for any tutor positions that you find. In general, Smarthinking requires that you possess at least two years of teaching experience. Applicants must have a degree in the subject they wish to teach. 8. Wyzant Start making money as an online tutor today by signing up with Wyzant! Wyzant makes getting your foot in the door much easier with its mostly automated application system. All you have to do is pass a quick exam, create your profile, and speak with a Wyzant representative to start taking students within a couple of days. Set your pay rate and earn high ratings from students to receive more work. Don’t forget to offset Wyzant’s 25% cut by bumping up your desired pay. Due to its unique business model, tutors make more money per hour on average at Wyzant than on other platforms. 9. Varsity Tutors Land a job while you continue your studies at Varsity Tutors! Varsity Tutors has a spot open for anyone 18 or older. So, you can start earning money online while wrapping up your senior year of high school. Submit your high school transcripts and complete a remote interview to gain access to the Varsity Tutors platform. Once inside, you can start accepting online tutoring jobs. Varsity Tutors make their students schedule 90-minute sessions. At up to $35 per hour, you can make a living pretty easily at Varsity Tutors if you take many appointments. One thing that sets Varsity Tutors apart is that it allows in-person tutoring and online sessions. 10. Brainfuse Connect with students from disadvantaged geographical regions on Brainfuse. Brainfuse was created for students Read More Read More

The post How to Make Money Online Tutoring: 12 Best Job Sites in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Make Money on YouTube: 10 Effective Ways in 2024

Matt Diggity — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 09:41:04 +0000

Making money on YouTube is easier than you might think. You don’t need to be a massive star with millions of subscribers to start earning money. My team and I have built multiple YouTube channels that make thousands of dollars per month from ads, sponsorships, and product sales. And in this article, you will discover how to make money on YouTube even if you don’t have a lot of subscribers. So whether you are just starting or looking for ways to increase your YouTube income, this guide is for you. Quick Summary How Do YouTubers Get Paid? YouTubers can get paid in a variety of ways, the most common being through: How Many Views Do You Need on YouTube to Make Money? To earn YouTube Ad revenue, you need more than 1,000 subscribers and over 4,000 watch hours in the past year. But ad revenue isn’t the only way to make money on YouTube. You can only have 1,000 views per month and still make thousands of dollars. For example, you could be an affiliate marketer promoting SaaS products and make a full-time income from that. It all depends on your monetization method and the quality of your traffic. How Much Money Can You Make on YouTube? You can expect to make about $4 per 1,000 views via ads, $30 per 1,000 views via affiliate marketing, and $1,000 per sponsored post, depending on the size of your channel. 10 Ways to Make Money with YouTube Channel 1. YouTube Partner Program The first and most obvious way to earn money on YouTube, is by showing ads on your videos with YouTube partner program. To do this, you must be a part of the YouTube Partner Program. The YouTube partner program allows YouTube to place ads on your YouTube videos, and in exchange, you will receive 55% of the ad revenue. For example, if an advertiser paid $100 for 10,000 ad views. You get $55 from the YouTube partner program, while YouTube keeps $45. This may not seem like a lot of money, but if you have a large channel with millions of views, it can add up quickly! Here is how to join the YouTube Partner Program: Step 1: Make Sure You Meet the Requirements To join the YouTube Partner Program, you must meet the following requirements: Step 2: Apply to the YouTube Partner Program Once you have made sure you meet all the requirements, it’s time to apply to become a YouTube partner. Here’s how to do it: Click on your YouTube Profile Picture in the top right corner of your screen Click on YouTube Studio From the left menu, scroll down and click on the Monetization tab If you don’t meet all the requirements, you’ll see a NOTIFY ME WHEN I’M ELIGIBLE button, click on it and grind to grow your channel till you get to 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours Once you meet the requirements, simply review and accept the YouTube partner program terms Step 3: Link your Adsense Account After accepting the YouTube Partner Program terms, the next step is to link your Adsense account to your YouTube channel. Click on the START button on the sign-up for AdSense card Re-enter your password for verification Select the Google account you want to use for AdSense You will be asked to sign in if the Google account already has an Adsense account. If not, you will be asked to create one. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish creating your google adsense and linking it to your YouTube account Step 4: Wait Till Your Application Is Reviewed After you have completed all the steps, your application for becoming a YouTube partner will be reviewed by YouTube. This process can take up to 30 days. You will be notified by email once your application has been approved or denied. If you are approved, congratulations! You can start making money on YouTube by showing ads on your videos! If you are denied, don’t worry. You can always reapply after 30 days of receiving the rejection email. Just make sure you fix the issue that caused your application to be denied in the first place. How Much Can You Make from YouTube Ads? The average YouTube channel can make about $18 per 1000 ad views or $4 per 1,000 video views. 2. Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is where you promote a product or service and earn a commission for every sale you make, usually a percentage of the total sale. For example, if you promote a course that costs $1,000 and earns a 40% commission, you will make $400 for every person who buys the course through your link. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you can promote products or services you are passionate about or know a lot about and make a great income from doing it! Here is how to start with affiliate marketing: Step 1: Join an Affiliate Network The first step is to join an affiliate network. An affiliate network is a platform that connects affiliates (like you) with merchants (brands and companies that have products or services to sell). Some of the most popular affiliate networks are: There are many other affiliate networks out there, so make sure to do your research to find one that is a good fit for you. Step 2: Find a Product or Service to Promote Once you have joined an affiliate network, it’s time to find a product or service to promote. You can browse the merchant’s website or the affiliate network to find products or services to promote. Most networks also have a search function that you can use to find products by keyword. Step 3: Get Your Affiliate Link Your affiliate link is a unique tracking link the merchant will give you so they can track how many sales you generate. To get your affiliate link, simply login to your affiliate account and look for the merchant’s name. Then click on the “get link” or “generate link” button next to the product or service you want to promote. Step 4: Add Your Affiliate Link to Your YouTube Videos Make a video about the product or service you are promoting and include your affiliate link in your video descriptions. Just make sure to tell people where they can find your link so they can buy the product! How Much Can You Make as an Affiliate Marketer on YouTube? You can expect to make approximately $30 per 1,000 affiliate clicks. This number can vary greatly depending on the product you are promoting, the commission you earn per sale, and the conversion rate (the percentage of people who buy the product after clicking your affiliate link). 3. Sponsored Posts YouTube influencers with a large and engaged following can also make money by partnering with brands and companies to promote their products or services in a video. This is called a “sponsored post,” and it is basically an advertisement for the brand. There are many reasons why a company would want to sponsor a post on your YouTube channel. But it’s mainly because they know that people trust people, not brands. As a YouTube influencer, you are the “viewer’s expert friend,” so when you recommend a product or service, they are more likely to listen to you and take your advice. You should focus on creating an engaged and loyal following because that’s what brands look for when sponsoring a post. Pro Tip: Make sure your sponsorships are relevant to your YouTube channel and audience, or you will lose credibility with your viewers. Here’s how to find sponsored post opportunities: Step 1: Join Influencer Platforms There are many platforms that connect brands with influencers. Some of the most popular platforms are: All you need to do is sign up for an account and fill out your profile. Step 2: Negotiate Your Rate Once you have been matched with a brand, it’s time to negotiate your rate. Remember, you are in control here! Your charge rate will depend on several factors, such as your YouTube channel’s engagement, reach, and influence. Step 3: Create the Content Once you have agreed on a rate, it’s time to start creating videos. Before filming, ensure you know exactly what the brand wants. Do they want a review? A how-to video? A vlog? Get as much information as possible to create the best content possible. How Much Can You Make from Sponsored Posts on YouTube Here is how much you should expect to charge for sponsored posts, based on the number of genuine YouTube subscribers you have: 4. Sell Your Merchandise According to a 2019 study by Prodigi, 85% of people have bought a piece of merchandise from a creator at some point in their lives. Most of them bought it because financially supporting their favorite creator made them happy and closer to the creator in some way. So if you’re considering selling merchandise, you’re on the right track! Not only can it be a great Read More Read More

The post How to Make Money on YouTube: 10 Effective Ways in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Start Freelancing and Make Money in 2024

Matt Diggity — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 22:59:31 +0000

Do you want to make money working from home? Are you looking for a way to bring in some extra cash? If so, freelancing may be the perfect solution for you. Freelancing can be a great way to earn money on your own terms, and it doesn’t require a lot of upfront investment, but it can be quite overwhelming to start on your own. After spending only a few hours researching we’ve created this guide to show you an exact process to start making money through freelancing. So whether you are just starting out or are a seasoned pro, read on for all the information you need to know about making money freelancing. What Is Freelancing and How Does It Work? Freelancing is a type of work where individuals are hired to complete specific tasks or projects for freelance clients. Freelancers are typically self-employed and freelance work on a contract basis. This means that they are not employed by a company on a full-time basis, but rather work as needed. You can think of a freelancer as an independent contractor. They are hired to complete a specific task or project, and once that is finished, they are free to move on to the next client. Why Should You Work as a Freelancer? 1. Set Your Own Hours One of the biggest benefits of freelancing is that you are in control of your own schedule. You can work as much or as little as you want, and you can take on freelance projects that fit into your lifestyle. This flexibility is perfect for those who need to balance their freelance work with other commitments, such as parenting or caring for a sick relative. 2. Work From Anywhere in the World Another great benefit of making money freelancing is that you can work from anywhere in the world without sacrificing your income. In fact, you can relocate to a cheaper country and have the same – if not more – purchasing power as you did in your home country. All you need is a reliable internet connection and a laptop, and you are ready to make money freelancing. This is perfect for those who want to escape the town or city they live in, or for those who want to travel and work at the same time. 3. You Become Your Own Boss One thing people love most about the freelancing lifestyle is that you don’t have to work with people you don’t like. As a freelancer, you are your own boss and can choose which projects to work on and who to work with. This is perfect for those who want more control over their freelancing career and don’t want to be tied down by a traditional job. Why Shouldn’t You Work as a Freelancer? 1. Inconsistent Work Load One of the biggest downsides of freelancing is that work can be very inconsistent. There may be times when you have too much work and can’t keep up, and other times when you have no work at all. This can be very stressful if you rely on your freelancing income to pay your bills. To avoid this, it’s important to have a financial cushion that you can rely on during lean times. If you’re the type of person who thrives on consistency and hates surprises, then freelancing may not be the best freelance career choice for you. 2. Lack of Motivation Another downside of freelancing is that it can be easy to lose motivation when you don’t have anyone telling you what to do. Since you are your own boss, it’s up to you to stay on track and meet deadlines and trust me, this is not as easy as it sounds. If you’re the type of person who needs someone looking over your shoulder to get work done, then freelancing is probably not for you. How Are Freelancers Paid? Freelancers are paid in a variety of ways, depending on the project and client. Some common methods of payment include: How Much Money Can You Make Freelancing? The Payoneer’s 2022 Global Freelancer Income Report found that the average freelancer earns $28 per hour. However, how much money you can make freelancing depends on a number of factors, such as your skillset, experience, and the type of work you do. For example, a solo writer with three years of experience can expect to earn $50-$100 per hour, whereas a beginner writer may only earn $20-$30 per hour. The bottom line is that how much money you can make freelancing is up to you. If you’re willing to work hard and market yourself, then there’s no reason why you can’t earn a full-time income from freelancing. What Are the Best Niches for Freelancing? The best niches for freelancing are those that offer a high hourly rate and consistent work. Some of the best niches for freelancing include: How to Make Money Freelancing: 1. Choose a Freelancing Niche There is a lot of debate about whether it’s better to specialize in one freelancing niche or to be a “jack of all trades.” You may think that it’s better to have a variety of skills so that you can appeal to multiple freelance clients, but the truth is that it’s usually better to specialize for a few reasons: Being an expert helps you stand out from the crowd and makes you more attractive tomultiple clients. You can charge a premium for your freelance services. New usually prefer to work with freelancers who have a deep understanding of their needs and can provide specialized solutions. It’s easier to build a reputation as an expert in one area. You’ll be more likely to get repeat clients. So, how do you choose a freelancing niche? There are a few factors to consider: Once you’ve considered these factors, it’s time to choose a niche. We recommend taking a look at job boards and freelancing platforms to see what freelance services are in high demand. Upwork is a great place to start as it’s one of the largest freelancing platforms in the world. Spend a few minutes browsing through the job postings and you’ll quickly get an idea of which niches are in high demand. Pro tip: Niche down. If you’re just starting out, we recommend choosing a subniche within your chosen freelancing niche. For example, if you want to be a solo writer, you could start by specializing in Payoneer’s 2022 Global Freelancer Income Report or even take it one step further and specialize in writing product descriptions for ecommerce stores or be a writer in a specific niche like web hosting or DIY & crafts. Not only will this help you stand out from the crowd, but it will also make it easier to build a portfolio of work and attract high-paying clients. As you get more experience and build a reputation, you can start branching out into other areas. 2. Determine What Services You Want to Offer The next step is to determine what services you want to offer within your chosen niche. For example, if you’ve decided to specialize in social media management, then your services might include: And if you are a writer, then your services might include: The key is to focus on the services that you’re good at and actually like doing. There’s no point in offering a service that you’re not passionate about or that you’re not good at because it will only lead to frustration and will likely result in unhappy clients. Remember, the goal is to build a sustainable freelancing business that you enjoy running. If you’re not sure what services to offer, we recommend taking a look at the job boards and freelancing platforms again. This time, take note of the types of services that multiple clients are requesting and see if you have the skills to offer those services. 3. Develop Your Ideal Client Persona One of the best things about making money freelancing online is that you get to choose who you work with. You’re not stuck working with multiple clients that you don’t like or that don’t appreciate your work. One way to do this is to develop what’s called an “ideal client persona” or a “customer persona.” A customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal client that takes into account factors like: The more specific you can be when developing your ideal client persona, the better. For example, if you are a content writer, your ideal client could be a 40-year-old SEO specialist from the United States who needs content written regularly for their client’s websites. They are struggling to find the time to write the content themselves and is looking for a reliable writer who can not only write great copy but who also understands the basics of SEO so that they can help their clients rank higher in search engines. Or your ideal client could be a web designer who handles the majority of the design and coding for their client’s websites Read More Read More

The post How to Start Freelancing and Make Money in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Grow Organic Traffic by 131% With Cold Email (Case Study)

Antonio Gabrić — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 07:30:26 +0000

Cold email outreach is still widely used for link building. However, the conversion rates have decreased drastically as many link builders utilized cold outreach the wrong way. Spending time on prospecting, finding email addresses, crafting email copy, and sending emails just to receive a couple of responses is very frustrating. So, what can you do to increase response rates, and get those high DR links? Below, you’ll find out the cold email outreach strategy that landed us more than 1,500 backlinks with an average domain rating (DR) of 68. Discover the tactics you can replicate and get featured in HubSpot, Ahrefs, G2, Zapier, and many other high-authority websites. The goal of this case study is to share tips that you can use in your cold email campaigns to get higher conversion rates. You’ll learn how to: Before you jump into the details, it’s important to understand a bit of context about the goals, approach, and tools used. Cold Email Is a Powerful Tool for Building Backlinks & Growing Organic Traffic (If Used Correctly) Creating good content that delivers value to the audience helps attracting backlinks, but it is not enough. Competing in a cold email software niche is extremely difficult, and most competitors publish a lot of fresh and quality content that is supported with backlinks from high-authority websites. The solution was to start actively building backlinks through cold outreach. The biggest issue with cold outreach is that everyone is doing it, and to build backlinks at scale, you need to be creative with your approach. Given the fact that Hunter is a tool that helps you with cold outreach, it was a no-brainer to use Hunter for all aspects of cold outreach — from finding valid email addresses to automating cold email campaigns. You can go crazy and spend quite a lot of budget on tools, but in nutshell, you only need Ahrefs and a system for tracking backlinks (Google Sheets does the work). This is how it looked before starting with active link building. The domain had quite a strong backlink profile, but the organic traffic and rankings plateaued, which wasn’t enough to keep up with the competition. We started actively building backlinks through cold outreach in January 2021. This is how it looks today. In just a year and a half, more than 6,000 relevant backlinks were built, and organic traffic increased by 2.3x. All that in an extremely competitive industry (it’s hard to find any keyword with a keyword difficulty lower than 25). Below, you’ll find out the key takeaways learned along the way and how you can apply them to your link building strategy. Takeaway 1: Guest Posting and Claiming Unlinked Mentions Have 13.7% Conversion Rates Key takeaway: When starting with guest blogging, getting featured in high-authority publications in your industry will be tough without a strong writing portfolio. Most editors ask that you share a couple of writing samples published under your name. The best approach here is to start writing for smaller but relevant blogs in your niche with positive traffic and authority growth trends. Slowly build up your writing portfolio and start pitching to higher authority websites. We’ll cover how to pitch to these higher authority sites shortly… Key takeaway: Before starting with tracking mentions, it is essential to mention that this tactic doesn’t work for everyone. Hunter is an established brand, and it was known before we started with this tactic, so for this tactic to yield results, you need to have an established brand to start with. Here is what you can do instead… Create image link bait content and reclaim unlinked attributions. The simplified process looks like this – create custom images and upload them to stock image sites such as Pixabay. Make sure to include all the details for attribution, so if people use your images, they can adequately attribute them to your website. The biggest challenge is that many people will use your stock images, but the link will often lead to the stock image website instead of yours. That’s where tracking the mentions come in handy. By setting up mention alerts, you can reach out to the sites that have used your image but linked to the stock image website. You can ask them to link to your website instead. Additionally, you can periodically use the reverse image tool to find where your images have been used without proper attribution. Tips on implementing this strategy: Key takeaway: Although the open rate was good and the highest response rate compared to other campaigns, the conversion rate is noticeably the lowest. The main reason is that many prospects respond with unrealistic paid options. Extra tip: How to achieve a 40% response rate for your guest blogging campaign Another good tactic that works well is collaborating with link-building partners and introducing each other to editors with whom you previously published guest posts. This is how you can get into a conversation with high-quality websites such as Zapier and G2 (and publish a guest post there). Here’s a template you can try. In the email opener, mention a shared connection and compliment their blog post. Also, if they have already published a guest post before, there is a high chance that they are interested in publishing another guest post. Key takeaway: The skyscraper tactic was popularized by Brian Dean from Backlinko almost 10 years ago. People tend to scrape lists and use the shotgun method — send as many generic emails as possible with minimal personalization. It worked before, but now it will likely hurt your email deliverability and sender reputation. What you can do, however, is try to send fewer emails and put your time into personalization. We do this, but over time noticed that open rates were slowly declining as well as conversions. This is, so far, the lowest-performing campaign we have run. Takeaway 2: Follow-Ups Can Increase Response Rates by 66% Crafting a winning subject line can be tricky. It really depends on the industry and context. At Hunter, we tried generic, one-word subject lines, as well as longer and personalized ones. Here’s what you can take away from the results: While reaching out to high authority websites and asking for a guest post opportunity, the more personalized your subject lines are, the better. Our best-performing subject line for guest post pitching is: {{company:”your company”}} x Hunter.io collab idea? Our worst-performing subject line for guest post outreach was: Content collaboration 🤝 For doing a skyscraper method (it still works, but the performance is decreasing), short, but personalized subject lines prove to work the best: {{first_name:”Hey”}}, collaboration? Longer, but personalized subject lines don’t work that well: {{first_name:”Hello”}}, I think you may find it useful. Key takeaways: Subject lines that worked best for us: Takeaway 3: Follow-Ups Can Increase Response Rates by 66% According to Backlinko, follow-ups are an essential part of cold outreach. Sending multiple follow-ups can increase replies by 66%. Here’s how it works for us: Roughly 65% of all replies come from follow-ups. Here’s another campaign where we sent emails to 600 recipients: Roughly 47% of all replies are coming from follow-ups. It’s safe to say that follow-ups are mandatory in any cold outreach campaign. Maybe the person you’re reaching out to is getting hundreds of emails per day and simply skipping your email. Or maybe they skimmed through their inbox quickly and forgot to open your emails. There can be many reasons why someone doesn’t get back to you. We tested multiple sequences, and what works for us is the following sequence: In case you didn’t get a reply at all, you can snooze the conversation and reach out again in a couple of months. Alternatively, you can find other potential decision-makers and try reaching them. Takeaway 4: Find the Right Decision-Maker & Don’t Quit After the First Sequence One of the most challenging parts of cold outreach (apart from crafting a personalized email) is reaching out to the right decision-maker. Cold outreach is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and it depends on the context. For instance, if your outreach goal is to score a backlink from a specific website, then the right decision-maker would be someone who manages content at the company. There are cases when you can’t find the contact information of a decision maker because the company is too small or their only available email address is a generic one such as info@company.com. In these instances, it’s fine to reach out to the CEO or the founder or simply to any available email address. The open and response rates will be lower, of course, but many times, they will refer you to the right person. Or, you can ask for the right person to contact. Here is an example of a follow-up email used: And here you can see the results this email achieved: As you can see, 20.5% of all replies come from the second follow-up, where you ask for an alternative contact. Most of these replies are helpful and point you Read More Read More

The post How to Grow Organic Traffic by 131% With Cold Email (Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – December 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 08:25:41 +0000

This latest roundup is filled with everything you need to prepare for the coming year. Catch up on all the latest case studies, guides, and news items SEOs use to make their big moves. First, you’ll get the latest data from the case studies. You’ll find out what 700+ link builders think works (and doesn’t). Then, you’ll learn which metric correlates most closely to organic visibility and which traffic tools most closely match Google’s own measurements. The guides will help you hone your skills and judgment. This month, you’ll discover whether and when it’s valuable to buy backlinks, what ChatGPT can do, and how to develop an authoritative content funnel. Finally, you’ll dive into the hottest news and discussion topics roiling SEO. There’s a new December Helpful Content Update, official guidance from Google about links, and new spam policies. Survey of 755 Link Builders Shows What Works in 2022 https://www.authorityhacker.com/link-building-survey/ Mark Webster of Authority Hacker brings you this look at what link builders think after Google recently announced that links may be less critical in the future than they are now (more on that in the news section). He took this as an admission that links were a significant ranking factor. However, as he points out, this is a topic where SEOs get very little guidance and support from Google. Mark set out to find how SEOs felt instead. The survey samples 755 professional link builders on what works. This included around 500 niche site owners and a selection of about 200 agencies, freelancers, and in-house teams. Among other interesting results, he found that: One of the most striking results of this survey is how many link builders prefer to buy their links. Far from being a fringe group, link purchasers are an overwhelming majority. You should check out the case study for a complete list of everything the Authority Hacker team learned and a deeper dive into each of the implications of the research. Having links still matters, but what matters most about them? The following study will help you understand what factors play the most significant role in performance. Study: Which Link Metric Correlates Closest to Organic Visibility? https://moz.com/blog/link-metric-serp-correlation-study Domenica D’Ottavio brings you this look at which link metrics matter the most if you want to achieve visibility in SERPs. The Moz team analyzed the rank of 6000 commercial keywords focused on the home retail sector, broken into 15 miniature sectors such as beds, sofas, desks, and lighting. The metrics measured for the study were: The study found that topical link profile relevance was one of the most significant factors. It had a positive correlation with organic visibility for 10 of the 15 sectors studied. While relevance stood out as the factor most closely related to performance, the full study suggests that no factor can be left unconsidered when building links. All of them were essential for reliable organic growth. Check out the complete study to get a lot of additional detail into what works best for links. For the final case study, you’ll learn what 3rd-party tool has the best insights into how Google operates. Which 3rd-Party Traffic Estimate Best Matches Google Analytics? https://sparktoro.com/blog/which-3rd-party-traffic-estimate-best-matches-google-analytics/ Rand Fishkin brings you this case study generated from more than 1,000 participants in a Sparktoro study. The participants voluntarily submitted their own private Google Analytics (GA) data so that it could be measured and compared against the metrics provided by: This study aimed to discover the most reliable 3rd-party traffic provider. To measure this, Rand and the team chose to use GA’s user metric (measuring unique visitors) and compare it to the figure that most closely corresponded for each tool. For example, SEMRush uses a “visits” figure, while Ahrefs “traffic performance” figure, and so on. These figures were taken and compared to the numbers created by GA. Rand and the team found that the most accurate tool depended upon the type of site that was being analyzed. The results showed SimilarWeb as one of the best choices for larger websites. However, Datos stood out for smaller websites. In general, all the tools struggled to match the accuracy of GA, which made Rand more skeptical of 3rd party results. Check out the complete article to get more insight into his learning and the reasons for his conclusions. For now, you are ready to move on to the guides. The first one explores the value of links right now. Should You Buy Backlinks in 2022? It Depends https://ahrefs.com/blog/buy-backlinks/ Joshua Hardwick brings you this look at the state of link buying in 2022 and provides some analysis and arguments to consider if you want to pursue link buying as a strategy. First, he covers many of the speculative risks of buying backlinks. Many SEOs fear, based on reports by Google, that purchased links may lose value or result in penalties. Most SEOs (75% of them if the first case study is accurate) don’t seem worried. Should they be? Joshua goes on to break down some of the reasons that SEOs don’t seem worried. First, he theorizes, they don’t have much of a choice. Anyone who has built links knows the process rarely gets far before a link prospect asks for cash. Many top-ranking blogs and informational sites charge for links even if they don’t openly advertise them. Google also has to catch you before there are penalties. Many paid links simply look the same as earned links. With that out of the way, he goes on to fully detail how links are working now. You’ll learn what prices you’ll pay for common links, such as niche edits and paid guest posts, and how links can be built safely. For the next guide, you’ll move on from links and learn about content. The Authoritative Content Funnel https://moz.com/blog/authoritative-content-funnel-whiteboard-friday Amanda Milligan takes you through the process of developing and deploying an authoritative content funnel. Authoritative content is a vital type of content that demonstrates expertise or offers deeper information about a topic. This type of content is notoriously hard to develop, but Amanda makes it easier for you by laying out all the goals you should be reaching for and the types of content used to achieve them. She covers how you should use and develop: Amanda gives you detailed information for each type of content, including how they leverage authority and what type of impression they can create in the reader’s mind. Check out the complete guide for some great resources to help you plan your content. Next, you’ll learn about some of the implications of ChatGPT 3 and what it might mean for the future. We Asked ChatGPT 3 Customer Experience Questions. Here’s How It Responded https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/we-asked-chatgpt-3-customer-experience-questions-heres-how-it-responded/ Jennifer Torres brings you this look at some of the implications for ChatGPT 3—a recent release of an AI bot that has been getting significant attention from SEOs and other groups that sell online. If you need an introduction, this recent guide will tell you what ChatGPT 3 is and why it’s provoking strong reactions across the board. You’ll also get to see what it looks like to use this (currently) free app from the inside. For a more SEO-oriented analysis, you should see Nathan Gotch’s recent video about ChatGPT as a “Google Killer.” It has been provoking some strong reactions from the SEO community. What ChatGPT is capable of may still remain to be seen. It could be the path to effortless content or something visitors tire of very quickly, and Google updates attack relentlessly. If you want to learn more about how ChatGPT has changed SEO, watch this video. That closes out the guides, and you’re ready to jump into the month’s news. It starts with a brand new helpful content update. Official Announcement: December Helpful Content Update https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1600171901669605376?s=20&t=Dm90h6Vh10dbbossFvW0JQ Google’s own Search Central team brings you the announcement that an update is rolling out now. The announcement was made on the 6th but noted that the update had already been in motion since the previous day. So far, Google has told us nothing else. The last Helpful Content Update caused a lot of volatility. It’s too early to say if this one will be like that or a minor update that addresses problems from the first one. You’ll be able to find some analysis of this update in the next roundup. If you have been hit by the update, I recommend watching this video: For now, consider Google’s recent announcement that links have less impact now than they did previously. Google: Links Have Less Impact Today Than in the Past https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-link-signal-impact/472922/ Roger Montti looks at recent statements from a Google SEO office hours video. In it, a Googler claimed that backlinks have less impact as a ranking signal than they did in the past. This isn’t an entirely new position (John Mueller made a similar statement in November 2022), but it has left some SEOs wondering what the future holds. As you saw in the case studies, SEOs have hardly backed down from building Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – December 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—November 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:03:06 +0000

Start November on the right foot with our latest roundup. We’ve got the guides, case studies, and news items you need to hold your competitive edge. First, you’ll pick up some new tricks from the guides. You’ll get a comprehensive understanding of topical authority, learn how to apply semantic SEO to different niches, and how to measure the marketing channels that are hardest to measure. After that, you can reinforce your hunches with some new data from the case studies. They’ll give you new insights on whether author authority is a ranking factor and what pages are most likely to get “zero clicks”. At the end, you’ll get the latest news. You’ll want to know the latest about the final Spam Update of October, Google’s latest API features, and a new feature called “site names”. What Is Topical Authority In SEO & How To Build It https://ahrefs.com/blog/topical-authority/ In a piece hosted by Ahrefs, Jake Sheridan takes you through the steps of ranking for all of the important keywords in your niche using topical authority. He helpfully introduces the concept for those who need a refresher. Topical authority is what you have when your website becomes the go-to source for a given topic. This is often done by covering the topic so comprehensively (and well) that users don’t need to go anywhere else. As an example of why this matters, Jake shows you fresh SERPs for “mountain bike gifts”. Despite a difference of potentially billions in traffic and sales, Amazon is currently losing this SERP to a small (DR 23) site that only talks about mountain biking. That, and stunning results like this, should excite anyone with a small site who is facing down a big competitor. The catch, as Jake points out, is that Google provides almost no information about how it is measured or how it is weighted compared to other factors. However, he has some ideas. Jake takes you through the steps you can follow to get an approximation of where you stand and start improving. Among other tips, he recommends that you focus on topic-based research and develop clusters (which he fully explains). Check out the full guide to learn more about the potential of topical authority and putting it to use. In the next guide, you’ll learn about the potential of semantic SEO and some niches that can really benefit from it. How To Apply Semantic SEO To Different Niches https://moz.com/blog/niche-semantic-seo Claire Brain of Moz wants you to know how to apply semantic SEO. She argues that it can be applied effectively to nearly every niche. First, she gives you a refresher on what semantic search is and how it works. Semantics are the meanings of language and the study of how those meanings change in different contexts. Naturally, search engines want to understand this so they can deliver the most relevant results. As she covers in the piece, optimizing for semantic search has many benefits. It can deliver a better experience for users and can provide them with more consistent results across different devices. After that, she gets into the meat of the topic, teaching you how to apply this SEO concept across a range of different niches. She provides you with instructions for applying semantic SEO to: Each of these sections is detailed, with niche-specific advice and different tactics depending on how users are likely to respond. Understanding what users want can be a real challenge sometimes, but our final guide has some advice for getting even the most evasive data. How To Measure “Hard-To-Measure” Marketing Channels https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-marketing-channels/ Rand Fishkin brings you this fresh look at how to find out where you stand with your marketing channels when the data simply isn’t provided for you. He starts with a good explanation of how we got here. As we began to be able to access reams of data from almost every ad marketing campaign, social profile, or website, marketers increasingly grew paranoid about the channels that weren’t as forthcoming. For example, Rand explains how hard it is to prove visitors come from real-world signage, or even channels like podcasts. Without that data, marketers were reluctant to budget. That meant losing out on some opportunities. Rand provides some examples of difficult-to-measure channels, including: He then follows up and advises how these channels can be measured through unconventional signals. For example, he recommends steps like tracking your brand instead of the product name. People hearing about you for the first time from non-internet are likely to Google your company first. He also recommends that you take tracking “unattributed” traffic seriously and watch the trends for proof that you’ve earned some prominence. He further expands this into an in-depth plan that could be used by marketers or site owners to take advantage of this data. Check out the Rand article for some great infographics that simplify everything he’s laid out for you. That closes the guides for the month. In the first case study, you’ll learn whether author authority can be considered a ranking factor. Is Author Authority A Google Ranking Factor? https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ranking-factors/author-authority-ranking-factor/ Miranda Miller brings you this in-depth look at whether author authority exists as a ranking factor. As she points out, credibility is already vital to users, and search engines have every incentive to be able to deliver accurate, useful information to searchers. However, that doesn’t mean Google is giving boosts to authoritative authors, or if it is, that those systems are complete and functional. Absent any statement from Google, we’ll have to rely on evidence, and Miranda has collected that for you. First, she introduces you to some important patents that were filed in the early 2000s, she also provides a string of conference speeches, white papers, and other documents on the subject from when Google was first trying to develop this capacity. She points out that Google was filing patents to identify the authors of unlabeled content as recently as 2020. She also shows you that the Search Quality Rater Guidelines state that a low content creator score can cause an overall low-quality score. So, is she convinced that Author Authority is a ranking factor? Not completely. She gives her final verdict as “unclear”. As she points out, readers care about good quality regardless of how Google feels, and that’s enough to take authorship seriously. For the next study, you’ll learn the results of the latest “zero-clicks” research. Zero-Clicks Study https://www.semrush.com/blog/zero-clicks-study/ Marcus Tober of Semrush brings you this latest analysis of the zero-click phenomenon. As he reminds you, “zero clicks” refers to the trend of searchers simply not clicking any link in their search results. This may happen because users don’t like the results or because they simply get the answer without clicking. The Semrush team used data from their own tool to anonymously sample 20,000 users for a deeper look into this trend. Marcus observed and organized five clicking behaviors to see when the users applied each one. His team measured: Among the test group, 25%+ of searches ended in no clicks. The users chose organic clicks nearly half the time, and other types of clicks took up the other roughly 25%. Marcus considered the zero-click rate to be surprisingly high. Nearly 30% of people were refining or replacing their original search. He further breaks down the results across different types of searchers (PC vs. mobile). The whole case study contains some compelling data that may be useful for those who are dealing with this problem in their SERPs or just want to understand where the future or search might go. Let’s close with the latest news. First, Google’s latest spam update is complete. Google October 2022 Spam Update Completed In ~42 Hours https://www.seroundtable.com/google-october-2022-spam-update-done-34286.html Barry Schwartz brings you this look at the latest spam update that was completed in record time. The whole update (launched on October 19th) was already completed by the 21st. For comparison, the previous update in 2021 took 8 days to complete. However, Barry notes that some updates were done even faster—some as quickly as 24 hours. Barry dives a little deeper into what it might mean that the update was resolved so quickly. For example, he notes that there were few complaints among SEOs about this update compared to others. That may suggest it was a very light touch in the first place. At the end of the article, you’ll be provided with a quick rundown of the update and what happened if you haven’t had a chance to catch up. This includes the targets, penalties, global coverage, and other facts (when available) about the update. Check out the full article for a breezy breakdown of what happened. You’ll also find some links to the other spam updates if you want to compare them or examine how the impact has changed. For the final news item of the month, Google has introduced the interesting feature of “site names”. Introducing Site Names On Google Search https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/10/introducing-site-names-on-search Google brings you this new update that allows sites to set a name Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—November 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

What Is Keyword Mapping in SEO? (And Why It Matters)

Matt Diggity — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 15:14:43 +0000

Are unoptimized, redundant, and cannibalized pages holding your website back? Keyword mapping is one of the main things we use to attract more attention from search engines and start growing again. It’s a simple step-by-step process that anyone can handle with only a handful of tools. Leveraging our in-depth knowledge and proven success in search engine optimization, we’re here to guide you through the powerful and accessible process of keyword mapping. This guide teaches you what the keyword mapping process is, and gives you easy steps to follow to build your first keyword map. After that, you’ll get some advice on the benefits of building a map, and some ideas you can use to put your new map to work. What Is Keyword Mapping? Keyword mapping is the process used to develop keywords and assign them to the right pages on your site. A completed map, as you’ll learn, is just a spreadsheet that contains your plan for how to organize your pages and assign them their respective keywords. When you’re done, you’ll have a keyword assigned to each page, and a much better understanding of how your website is covering topics. Keyword maps will help you focus your SEO efforts on your website, speed up your problem-solving, and optimise your content creation for search engines. You’ll learn more about the benefits and uses of keyword mapping a little further down. First, you need to know how to build a keyword map. How To Do Keyword Mapping To begin the keyword mapping process, open up a fresh spreadsheet in Excel, Google Sheets, or another program of your choice. You’ll need this to record information, but it will not require any expertise with spreadsheets. From there, you can start keyword mapping by following these simple steps. Let’s break these steps down so you can follow along. Prepare Your Keyword Map Sheet To prepare your sheet, you’ll first need to decide what information you’ll be tracking. You’re trying to get all the different pages to each align to the right single keyword. I recommend that you track as many related factors as possible (for example, their titles, targeting, and URL). If you use the following categories as column titles, you’ll be able to build robust keyword maps that can tell you a lot at a glance: You can sort these columns in any order that’s intuitive to you. When completed, your keyword map will look like this: It doesn’t look like much right now, but you’re ready to start filling it in. Begin by choosing what pages will be covered by your keyword mapping strategy. Add Your Top-Performing Pages Take your top-performing pages (or all your pages if you have a small site or like to be extra thorough) and enter their addresses down the URL column you’ve created in the sheet. If you are a beginner, an easy way to get your complete list for your own site is to open your site map and copy the links. You can apply your own judgement to which pages are your top performers. All pages that have decent search volume and serve search intent should be included. You can also include pages with great on-page optimization or popular resources. You should also include pages that cover topics you want to grow into—even if they aren’t generating traffic yet. That way, you’ll already have a plan you can plug them into when you’re ready to expand. Enter The Details For Your Chosen Pages Fill in the following columns for each page you’ve added to the URL column: As an example, let’s imagine you’re doing search engine optimization for a small dog training company in Boston called “Sun Family Dog School” with the domain SunDogSchool.com A map for this fictional company might look like this at the end of this step: Don’t worry about the rest of the columns for now. You’ll fill them in after the research step. This may look like a daunting amount of data to enter, but the free program ScreamingFrog makes it nearly effortless. This handy, free little desktop app can scrape the URLs, titles, descriptions, H1, and word counts from any site. Download the program and follow these instructions to get all the data needed for this step. It’s truly as easy as copying-and-pasting. Now that you have chosen your pages and filled out the data, it’s time to bring in some research and your select target terms. Choose The Terms You Want To Target From Keyword Research You will now need to consult your keyword research and select the terms you want represented on your website. Tip: Keyword mapping isn’t a type of keyword research, it’s a method of applying your keyword research to ensure better coverage of topics. For that reason, this guide won’t cover keyword research in detail. Don’t worry if you’re still new at SEO. If you need to perform some research first, this keyword research guide will get you ready for the next steps. It will teach you a proper keyword search intent process, and introduce you to keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEO tools like Google Analytics. You’ll also learn to understand issues like keyword cannibalization and learning from competitors keywords. For now, create your keyword list or open the one you’re currently using for your site. With your keywords in front of you, it’s time to identify the ones that you want to rank for, organise them into groups, and develop them into a set you can use for mapping keywords. Here’s how to complete each step: 1. Refine Your List Of Your Keywords Create a new sheet to store your map keywords (ideally in another tab in the sheet you’re already using). This tab is where you’ll put the keywords you want to target from your research. You can simply copy them all into the first column of the new tab. You can give it a title like “unrefined list” to keep things straight. Let’s revisit the dog trainer example again. A list of their keywords might look something like this: Remove any keywords with poor keyword difficulty scores or traffic potential. Remove terms without the right intent from the list if you did not already do so during the research phase. Make sure you’ve avoided terms with excessive keyword difficulty. Read over the refined list and verify that it includes entries for every topic you want your site to cover. If any are missing, you’ll want to do some extra research to expand your list. With this step completed, you’re ready to organise the terms from your unrefined list into groups of similar keywords. 2. Organise The Keywords By Topic Take the keywords you have remaining and group all of them by topic. Create a new group every time you find a certain keyword that doesn’t fit into the existing keyword groups. Tip: If you’re using a new sheet tab, you can just use the next column to the right every time you need to create a new group. This lets you see the number of groups and what they cover at a glance. If you are a beginner, you should notice that each group has similar words in them. For example under “Dog Training” you see “dog training near me”, “dog training” and “dog training classes”. Continue this process until every keyword has been sorted with other similar ones. When all are grouped, you want to identify the seed keyword for each group and place it at the top of each column. The seed keyword is the high-level keyword that covers the rest of the group keywords. You can use this seed keyword process to find them. While you’re searching out seed keywords, you may find that some of your seeds share the same keywords. This is the kind of insight you hope to get when you perform keyword mapping. You’ll figure out what to do about that in the next section. For now, when you find that keywords serve the same intent, group them together. When there are no more groups to create, move onto the next step. 3. Develop Your Seed Keywords With Tools Or Search Engines Now that you have a strong list of seed keywords, you want to take a brief detour back to research. This time, you’ll be researching each of your seed keywords by name. This is how you can easily find even more keywords for your pages. Use a tool like Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to see related searches for each of your seed keywords. If you’re on a tight budget, you can use Google Search Console or even Google search results to do this. Lets take a look at an example. You can also easily check competitors’ websites to find ideas to borrow without any keyword expertise. For example, our fictional dog trainers might pick up a keyword or two just by observing who is ranking for their services locally. When doing Google Searches, don’t miss out on tiny features like Read More Read More

The post What Is Keyword Mapping in SEO? (And Why It Matters) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

39 Best Small Business Ideas to Start in 2024

Matt Diggity — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 16:50:00 +0000

The best small business ideas come from a place of passion, experience, and opportunity. Drawing from our extensive experience in entrepreneurship and small business development, we’ve meticulously curated this list of the top 39 small business ideas to set you on the path to success in . These ideas are especially helpful if you’re looking for a low-cost startup business idea, work-from-home opportunities, or are interested in starting an online business. We’ve also included some profitable business ideas and side hustles that can earn you recurring passive income without large overheads. Whether you want to quit your 9 to 5 job or invest strategically in a passive-income business, we’ve got you covered. Most Lucrative Online Business Ideas 1. Start an Affiliate Website Affiliate marketing is not a new concept. It’s been a buzzword in the marketing and “make money online” spaces for a while now. If you’re looking for the best of all options or a business idea that offers: … affiliate marketing is it. If you’re new to affiliate marketing, here’s how it works in a nutshell. Many brands sell products or services online. If you help them make more sales by promoting their products or services, you can earn a commission for the sales you generate. Think of it like brands outsourcing their marketing to you. Not every brand offers affiliate commissions for sales, but thousands do across various industries. Check out our guide on the best affiliate programs to give you some small business ideas. You can also join an affiliate network with hundreds of brands and their affiliate offers. These networks save so much time when it comes to finding the best affiliate programs for your website. Regarding earning potential, affiliate marketing is a proven passive income business model among bloggers. We surveyed over 790 bloggers and affiliate marketers, and here is the breakdown of their earnings. Monthly Income bracket % $0 – $500 34% $500 – $1,000 4% $1,000 – $5,000 21% $5,000 – $10,000 7% $10,000 – $50,000 23% $50,000 – $100,000 3% $100,000+ 5% From the above results, you can see 38% of people we surveyed are earning a job replacing income and at least 8% of them are earning that per month! But it’s worth noting that affiliate marketing doesn’t work straight away. It’s not a “get rich quick” scheme. That’s why many people who think it doesn’t take much effort can get stuck in the lowest bracket earning less than $500 per month. If you want to avoid getting stuck there, check out The Affiliate Lab. It is one of the top courses available to take you through everything you need to know to set up a successful business in affiliate marketing, even if you’re a beginner! Getting started with affiliate marketing is far easier than you might realize. You don’t need a degree, and you can bootstrap your success if you’re on a low budget. With such a low barrier to entry, there’s no doubt you can start an affiliate business today if it’s something that sounds interesting to you! 2. Start an Ecommerce Store Since the COVID pandemic, eCommerce and online sales have seen accelerated growth. More people are now buying online, including generations who were slow to adopt digital technologies. We’re currently seeing a growth rate similar to where we would have been 4-6 years from now had the pandemic not happened. This means that you have a world of opportunity awaiting when it comes to selling online! The most direct route you can choose is to either resell or manufacture a product and sell it through your own eCommerce website. Some easy product ideas include: You can check out our guide on the best eCommerce platforms to get started. Depending on how much time and energy you want to put into selling online, you can also set up alternative eCommerce channels such as: We also share a few easy eCommerce small business ideas (which don’t even require you to have a website) further down in this post. Just make a product and start selling online today. The opportunities are endless! If selling online with an eCommerce store and website sounds up your alley, we recommend getting started with BigCommerce. It’s as simple as: Choose what product you want to sell. Create a BigCommerce account. Upload your product information and images. Choose a theme to design your website. Set up your shipping and tax information. Test everything works properly. Go live & start selling online! Launching is fairly simple. But, in order to build a successful online shop, you’ll also need to start marketing it and driving traffic to your website. Marketing is the difference between eCommerce stores that sink and those that swim. Check out our eCommerce SEO guide to learn how to generate recurring monthly traffic online. If you’re ready to start selling online today, get started with BigCommerce. 3. Start a Blog or Niche Website If you like the idea of starting an virtual business, but you’re not sure if affiliate marketing or eCommerce are the right options for you, you can start a blog or niche website instead. Any low-cost online business idea typically sells one of three things: Your products (eCommerce) Other people’s products (dropshipping or affiliate) Your time and expertise (coaching or consulting) With a blog or niche website, you can include all of these and diversify your income stream. However, you must treat it like a business from day one if you want to earn a living from your website. It’s also important to note that you don’t need to invest much to start a website. This video shows how much you should budget to build a website. You can get started for a very low cost by using the following tech stack: If you’re starting a niche website, you can focus it entirely on a particular topic and establish yourself as a subject matter expert and authoritative source. You can also start a more general blog that has the potential to grow into an authority site and cover multiple niches. Either way, the world is your oyster, and you’re in complete control of your business if you build a website instead of relying on income from third-party platforms. For instance, if you only relied on FaceBook to build a business and one day you find FaceBook has shut down your account for an obscure infraction to their TOS, that’s a significant risk. But if you build your own business website, you’re in control and can easily set up an email list so you can reach your audience directly without anyone being able to take that away from you. So, if you’re keen to get started with building your own website and monetizing it, here’s our guide on the most common ways you can make money with your website. We also recommend checking out Elementor and Siteground to give you the essential tools for getting started today! 4. Buy an Existing, Profitable Website If you’re sitting on some cash and are looking to invest in a turn-key online business, you can buy an existing profitable business using any of the above monetization methods. Check out our blueprint for buying a profitable website to get started. There are hundreds of websites available that have great potential. You can create a business that buys websites for a low price and then flips them for a premium after you build its audience. Or you can buy a high-performing website you would like to hold onto for a while. Either way, there are no limits. You can buy a website no matter your budget. Check out these marketplaces to get started: If you’re not sure what niches to invest in, check out our guide on the best niches for making money online, which is informed by data from Empire Flipper’s best website sales. 5. Consulting If you have developed subject matter expertise or experience in a specific industry, you can start a consultation business for a relatively low cost. Consulting is a very good business idea where you can charge a premium rate yet have very little overhead. Don’t let that scare you into thinking you need to be a world-class expert to get started though! There are certain types of consulting that are accessible even to beginners. For instance, you can start a business that offers: If you have accrued expertise in a specific field, you can also consider things like: The wonderful thing about starting a consulting business is that you can work from anywhere in the world. You don’t need to stock products or manage staff because all you’re doing is leveraging your knowledge and expertise. For instance, let’s presume you’re starting from scratch without any expertise to draw from. You could register for a low-cost course teaching you everything you need to know. Here’s a great example of one for travel consulting. You can start a professional consulting business in only six weeks or sooner if you complete the course Read More Read More

The post 39 Best Small Business Ideas to Start in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

The Pitfalls of Unsubscriptions: Trends Associated With Membership Cancellations

Christopher Caparoso — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 14:04:15 +0000

The Pitfalls of Unsubscriptions:Trends Associated With Membership Cancellations If you’ve tried initiating the cancellation of a service you previously subscribed to, you may have noticed it takes you at least twice as long (if not longer) on average to locate the ‘cancel subscription’ button and get the process going.The dark pattern is called ‘the roach motel’, where the deceptive design makes it easier for you to sign up for the service but makes it especially difficult for you to leave, quite literally like an insect trap.While some modern services that have fewer chances of subscribers canceling their memberships (Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc) have a relatively easier unsubscription process, it could definitely be more straightforward. In this study, we analyze and compare close to two dozen services across various categories, ranging from digital news publications to beauty box services, audio, and video streaming platforms, and meal kit delivery services to ascertain exactly what trends most industries follow to make unsubscription easier or difficult. We examine and report on the usual pitfalls expected during the unsubscriptions, sorted by categories, and develop a point system on the ease or difficulty level of the overall process, so you know exactly what to expect. Key Takeways:Traditional services including digital news publications like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal employ ‘subscribers-hostage-tactics’, with an almost punishing chain of events leading up to the cancellation of their services.The more modern subscription services like video and audio streaming services including Apple Music, HBO Max, etc, are less worried about losing subscribers and have easier unsubscription methods.Netflix and Spotify are the easiest to unsubscribe from, following a pattern of fair business practices, mostly ascribed to relatively new services. Spotify leads the charge with an overall seamless cancellation procedure.However, some services like online unsubscriptions for physical meal kit delivery services may not follow the same pattern. Food box services like Blue Apron use dark patterns to make it virtually impossible for less tech-friendly people to opt out of the service.Miscellaneous services like Amazon Prime, Ipsy, and Birchbox also have an unsubscription black hole, with a medium to hard overall unsubscription process. Ipsy takes 10 whole clicks, with a difficult-to-locate ‘cancel membership’, making it the ‘hardest subscription service’ to unsubscribe from. Video Streaming Services Category Background:Out of all the categories, Video streaming services have seen a consistent increase in subscribers, and with the exception of a few plunges in subscription numbers, the trend isn’t expected to die down anytime soon.Category Winner:While the numbers may be worrisome for people at Netflix, they do speak highly of the ease of unsubscription process at the video streaming giant. 5 clicks once you’re signed in, and you’re basically done. Netflix comes in 2nd in the ‘ease of unsubscription process’ in overall categories with a fantastic score of 18 total points.Category Trend:Typically most video streaming services have a fairly easy unsubscription process, are possible solely via online channels, and take 5 clicks at the maximum to opt out of the monthly subscription. Across the category, the unsubscription process is fairly straightforward and most services perform in similar patterns. Audio Streaming Services Category Background:Audio streaming services have been around forever, but listeners have seen many popular services come and go every few years. Spotify has existed for the better part of 16 years but has had a lot of competition from other platforms such as Apple Music.It thrived when it went global in a major way last year though, offering free and premium services in more than 180 countries. Despite the fact that Apple Music is available in close to the same number of countries, it doesn’t have a free version, which is why Spotify comes out on top.Category Winner:The clear category winner is Spotify, which has not only the highest number of global subscribers at the moment but also has a free version for everyone, regardless of location, which makes it all the more popular. The unsubscription process is straightforward, where you can suspend the premium account but still have access to Spotify’s songs library.In fact, Spotify reigns at the top of our ‘Easy to unsubscribe’ list (overall), scoring a total of 20 points with the general ease of unsub process, online cancellation, and easily visible cancellation button. Category Trend:Again, like video streaming services, the general trend for audio streaming services unsubscription usually entails a less complicated procedure, where the rules and cancellation process is easy to understand. Like most modern services that aren’t afraid of the future, audio streaming services make it easy for consumers to opt out of subscriptions when they feel like it. Food Subscription Services Category Background:Meal kits and food box subscriptions have seen a steady rise in popularity with a surge in demand during the 2020 pandemic lockdown. With limited access to grocery stores and pandemic anxiety, the food box subscriptions saw an exploding growth trend in subscriptions and are touted to overtake all digital subscriptions in 2022.Category Winner:The category winner for the best unsubscription food box service is Green Chef which has an online cancellation procedure, a relatively easy-to-see unsub button, and a low difficulty level overall. Category Trend:With an array of services entering the market every month with better and more tailored food choices, consumers may be tempted to shop around for a service they like best instead of sticking to just one. However, food box and meal kit subscriptions do not make it easy at all to cancel the service. Although consumers may find it relatively easy to pause the meal kit subscription for weeks or even skip a couple of months, canceling the service is a whole other ball game. According to JMG ENTERPRISES, a YouTube account, figuring out how to unsubscribe from Blue Apron for his mum turned out to be an extensive time taking procedure, where there’s no clear process to follow for membership cancellation. Digital News Subscription Services Category Background:Newspapers subscriptions have been falling for decades, especially because people can now get news via other sources, for example, TV, social media, and free online publications. Print journalism has been dying a slow death in today’s fast-paced world, and newspapers leverage that to blackmail subscribers to cancel their unsubscription plans.Category Winner:The clear category winner for a relatively easy unsubscription process overall is Washington Journal, where subscribers can initiate a membership cancellation online or via email. While specifically in this category, no digital newspaper has an easy way out, and all of them have a hard time letting customers go, with many roadblocks and speed bumps all the way to intentionally make leaving deliberately taxing, The New York Times ranks at a dismal 8 points as the lowest in the category.Category Trend:Most reviewers say digital newspaper unsubscription is a maze-like process that is not easy to solve. It is designed to keep the subscribers not only in, but make it immensely difficult for them to leave.Despite the fact that signing up for any of the digital or box subscription services takes less than half an hour on average, even trying to initiate the cancellation of said service may take anywhere from a few minutes to hours or even a few days on average. Newspapers, especially The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are notorious for making people jump through hoops and making them call the helpline during very specific official hours to cancel the subscription.Surprisingly (or perhaps not), digital newspapers subscription may require customers to call for cancellation initiation only in the US or the UK, globally subscribers can just cancel the subscription online. This indicates that the service providers intentionally make the process so cumbersome that most people end up taking months to finally follow up with their cancellation. Newspapers are aware people are suffering from ‘subscriptions fatigue’ that limits the number of publications they are willing to pay for.And that number is decreasing every day. The digital publications are forced to apply ‘subscriber hostage tactics’, making subscribers explain in great detail to a customer care representative why they’d want to unsubscribe and try to convince them otherwise.The New York Times even posted an opinion piece in 2020 about why subscribers shouldn’t cancel that newspaper subscription, and how ‘The only thing canceling your subscription to a newspaper will do is hasten the death of journalism itself.’ Miscellaneous Services Category Background:Miscellaneous services include all kinds of subscription-based services like Amazon Prime including Amazon Prime Video and Music, popular monthly beauty boxes like Ipsy and Birchbox, and pet box services like Barkbox that don’t fall in any of the above categories.Category Winner: Birchbox, with its medium to hard unsubscription process, wins the miscellaneous category. The worst performing service, Ipsy takes close to 10 clicks (maximum in all categories) to finalize cancellation and takes online and an email to get it done. Summing up Through this study, we examined the unsubscription process as a whole and what it usually entails for 23 services from different categories including video and audio streaming platforms, food box services, digital news publications, and other miscellaneous services. We found that while popular subscription platforms including Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal have a very easy unsubscription process, it would Read More Read More

The post The Pitfalls of Unsubscriptions: Trends Associated With Membership Cancellations first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – October 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 06:50:55 +0000

Catch up on the latest SEO trends with this October roundup. We’ve got the data, guides, and news you need to stay ahead of the competition. First, you’ll get actionable data from a stack of compelling case studies. You’ll look at the winners and losers of the core update, how focusing on one topic may be all you need, and evidence that the Helpful Content Update punishes AI content. Next, you’ll learn the latest techniques from the SEO community’s best recent guides. You’ll find out how to do a core web vitals audit, how to pull off programmatic SEO, and the value of request blocking. The roundup closes on the news. Google confirms the end of the product reviews update, announces new local search updates, and updates search console errors about “short content”. Winners & Losers Of The September 2022 Core Update & Product Reviews Update https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/winners-losers-of-the-september-2022-core-update-product-reviews-update/ Lily Ray brings you this comprehensive breakdown of who won or lost the latest major update. First, she warns you that data collection is more complicated now than usual. Google launched multiple updates in a short amount of time, and isolating their effects is near impossible. Due to these conditions, Lily’s analysis combined all the tested domains and didn’t attempt to sort them based on which update affected them. What you’ll see is how the domains are faring in the period before and after the update period. The biggest winners saw as much as 200% growth in visibility. They included huge institutional sites, with the most successful ones being: wikipedia.org amazon.com wiktionary.org facebook.com cdc.gov Lily also documented the sites that lost out on the most visibility. The top 5 that took the most brutal hit were: youtube.com yourdictionary.com Merriam-webster.com linkedin.com fandom.com The data was followed up with some analysis. For example, she noted that music sites massively benefitted from the updates. She theorized that Google may be shifting to show more music media results (rather than lyrics or bios) when songs are searched. Check out the complete study for a lot more data and analysis, including some consequences for niches like stock photography, dictionaries, and eCommerce. Next, you’ll learn how valuable a focused content strategy can be. How We Increased A Client’s Leads By 384% In Six Months By Focusing On One Topic Cluster https://moz.com/blog/increase-client-leads-with-topic-clusters Lydia German brings you this look at how her team massively increased leads for a client by using a content strategy of hammering a single topic. Her team discovered early in the SEO process that searchers responded to one service and term in particular (company liquidation). They focused on just this term and produced a massive guide for the topic that brought even more attention. Lydia documents how the guide was expanded into a hub, and even details how the strategy was measured and cleared with the client. She also documents the work her team did to fix technical problems on the page and promote the completed hub. The end result of a strategy focused on just one service offered by the client was an increase from 95 to over 450 leads. The complete study includes more about how the strategy was implemented and the numbers behind the results. This study is a good argument for thoughtful content, and the next one provides another. In the final case study for this month, you’ll hear one SEOs argument that Google is directly targeting AI content. Case Study: AI Content Punished By The HCU Update https://www.kevin-indig.com/case-study-ai-content-punished-by-the-hcu-update/ Kevin Indig brings you some evidence that you should think twice about using AI content. Before he begins his analysis, he gives a quick example of how easy it is to detect poorly written AI content. He documents how Throughtheclutter.com (a celeb bio site with generated content) went from more than a million visits to zero after the Helpful Content Update. He runs a snippet of the content used by this site through several tools to note how easily and with how much confidence they can detect AI-generated content. He shows that even clear and legible content can be easily recognized. So far, Kevin’s data only supports the idea that the worst offenders are being targeted. Some sites that use AI content, but then polish and edit it, seem to have been left alone. Kevin closes with ideas for how teams can adjust their workflow to avoid risk. That concludes the case studies for this month. The guides are next, starting with a look at what you need to know to perform a solid web vitals audit. 5 Things To Know In A Core Web Vitals Audit https://www.rankranger.com/blog/core-web-vitals-tips Jan Willems Bobbink guests on an episode of the In Search SEO Podcast (a full transcript is included) to cover what goes into a successful audit and improvement of your site’s core web vitals. He argues that five elements are important for ensuring an effective audit: He starts the interview by breaking down and explaining the importance of web vital reports for anyone who might need to catch up. After that, he begins going over his arguments for why his elements make your audits more valuable. For example, his explanation of the first element includes a description of how the visitors who have the worst experiences on your site (because of slow or far away connections) can drag down your site’s overall reputation. He suggests solutions that may be necessary when struggling visitors pass beyond a certain threshold of your total visitors. For example, you can divert some of this traffic to a closer server or recommend the app for users who get poor performance on the site. The full guide contains a comprehensive explanation and advice for all essential elements. You should check it out if you need to improve your core web vitals score. Don’t miss the following guide if you need to make significant updates quickly. You’ll learn how one SEO says you can take advantage of programmatic SEO without getting on the wrong side of Google. 5 Ways Programmatic SEO Can Generate Growth https://ipullrank.com/5-ways-programmatic-seo-can-generate-growth Andrew McDermott defines programmatic SEO “as code-generated web pages that produce a large number of specialized content using data pulled from your database”. He argues this kind of content is capable of powerful growth even when AI content is being targeted. He argues that the essential difference is that programmatic content exists to be useful and serve searchers’ needs. Andrew also argues that enterprise brands are in a uniquely protected place to test out programmatic content without the usual risks because of how Google treats their results. For them, he argues, programmatic SEO offers a lot of growth with little risk. Andrew lays out everything you’ll need to know to start using programmatic SEO. He covers all the steps he uses to implement this SEO strategy and explains each step in enough detail so you can follow along. In the later parts of the guide, he provides a series of use cases to help you apply programmatic SEO more insightfully. If you enjoyed the technical aspects of this guide, the final one for the month will be right up your alley. You’ll get an explanation of a “render gauntlet”, learn why it can cause problems for your site, and discover what you can do about it. Render Gauntlet (Request Blocking) https://ohgm.co.uk/render-gauntlet-request-blocking/ Oliver H.G. Mason takes you through a problem he experienced with a client’s site, and how he ultimately solved it. The initial problem was that pages were being crawled but not indexed. Oliver discovered that the core content on the page wasn’t consistently recorded as rendered by the URL inspection tool. To illustrate the problem with this issue, he takes you through an example of opening Nike’s site and disabling a single one of the bundled script files. None of the core content on the page runs unless the dozens of scripts involved are all successful. Oliver discovered his client’s site had 25 such bundles that needed to load correctly for any content to be rendered. Google wasn’t consistently up to the task of passing through that many obstacles (the render “gauntlet”) to understand the page. Oliver theorizes that presenting too much of a gauntlet causes Google bots to skip over pages without fully rendering them or processing what they would have learned from the rendered content. He provides you with several solutions. Early on, he points out that getting the page rendered server-side would solve this issue (although it would not alert you to the problems). He also suggests you return any content you want Googlebot to see in the initial HTML. That closes out the guides for this month. The last month’s top headlines are next. For the first story, Google has confirmed that its major product reviews update is officially over. Google September 2022 Product Reviews Update Rollout Complete https://searchengineland.com/google-september-2022-product-reviews-update-rollout-complete-388260 Danny Goodwin brings you this coverage of the official end of the Product Reviews Update. This was the last of three major updates that nearly ran concurrently with one another. Over the last month, Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – October 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Should You Work With An Affiliate Marketing Agency?

Matt Diggity — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 16:32:27 +0000

Building a business can be time-consuming and difficult without the right connections. That’s why it’s beneficial for some business owners to embrace affiliate marketers works programs. Running a successful affiliate campaign is not something that many company owners have experience with. That’s why so many businesses hire top affiliate agencies. An affiliate agency can help you supercharge your program and get high-quality website owners to feature your products and your business in front of their large audiences. I have built and flipped many multiple figure website traffic myself and in this article I will help you decide if your business is ready to partner with top affiliate agency. Quick Summary How Can Your Business Benefit From Affiliate Marketing? Your business can benefit from affiliate marketing in a number of ways. Affiliate marketing is a powerful business model that gets other people with an established web following to recommend your products and services to their audience. In exchange for a commission, these reputable influencers will send paying customers to your business to help you grow your organization rapidly. Affiliates utilize social media marketing, search engine optimization, and even paid search marketing to generate leads that want to pay for your products. What Affiliate Marketing Agencies Do Affiliate marketing agencies form relationships with affiliate networks and publishers in different sectors. The best affiliate marketing agencies help connect the right publishers to the right programs to encourage a successful affiliate campaign. If you’re new to the idea of affiliate marketing, it might seem overwhelming to try and convince effective publishers to take on your business and start selling your products. This is one of the biggest benefits of an affiliate marketing company. This skilled business already has relationships with affiliates that can take on your new affiliate marketing program and help it become a success. Instead of spending time trying to convince publishers to become your affiliates, the affiliate agency does all the work for you. Why Are These Agencies Beneficial For Business Owners? Affiliate marketing agencies are highly beneficial for business owners because they will help expand to a larger audience of customers. As long as your business has the supply to meet a larger demand of customers, you can increase your profits and company success by working with an affiliate agency to get into the affiliate marketing space. Trying to enter this market yourself is a slow and challenging process. You’ll spend too much time testing different marketing strategy ideas and trying to develop a functional program. Instead of wasting all that time, you can work with an affiliate agency that already understands how to create an effective program and how to fill it with willing affiliates. When you partner with the right affiliate agency, you won’t have to worry about how to get a powerful affiliate publisher to work with you; you’ll have an established network to work with from the very beginning. For an added cost, you get marketing strategies developed by a company with a proven track record, and you get a service-oriented team that will boost your initial efforts to build up a team of powerful affiliates that work for your business. Working With Top Agencies Before you can realize any of the benefits that a marketing agency has to offer you, you’ll have to choose a capable company to partner with. Unfortunately, there is a huge number of professional affiliate marketing agencies in the workforce today, and may struggle to choose the right company to work with. We’ll explain how to choose the ideal affiliate agency below, but if you’re in a hurry to start strategizing and taking advantage of all the benefits that affiliate marketing has to offer your business, you can start working with one of our favorite agencies featured below right away. PartnerCentric This company is based in New York and started in 2006. It’s known for delivering a rapid return on investment for its clients above all else. The company has worked with the Motley Fool, Upwork, Aquasana, Bean Box, iPrint. com, London Fog, and many other notable companies. The business delivers in-depth reports and works with emerging businesses up to massive companies. Gen3 Marketing LLC Gen3 has been offering services since 2012 and has worked with companies like Motorola, Crocs, and New Balance. The business is known for cultivating long-term relationships with clients and helps build scalable outreach campaigns while helping with SEO and Amazon PPC too. Daisycon 2002 – Vodafone. Daisycon is an older affilient agency established in 2002 that works primarily with businesses from Europe. The company is known for its contract with Vodafone and Doktor Online and provides effective user acquisition strategies, social media marketing, and more. Hamster Garage Hamster Garage stands out for its impressive ability to give clients an in-house affiliate marketing team feel without having to hire a full-time team. The company has worked with impressive clients such as Canva, Airbnb, and Turo and understands explosive growth. The business is good for companies with mobile apps and startups that want to grow rapidly. Blue Cherry Group This company opened its doors in 2007 and focuses heavily on developing successful affiliate marketing strategies based on historical data and increasing a business’s annual revenue. The team also specializes in search engine optimization, paid search, and Amazon optimization. DMi Partners DMi Partners began in 2003 and focuses heavily on social media marketing for its clients. The company has extensive media partners and is skilled at brand reputation. The agency is skilled at affiliate marketing thanks to its huge network and uses data-driven strategies to succeed. Oak Digital Oak Digital is a newer agency in the affiliate marketing sector starting in 2015. The company has made a name for itself with top-tier clients such as the UFC Store, Freshly, the Detroit Pistons, and Angie’s List. The business maintains a 95% client retention rate and offers powerful services. Customers enjoy competitive analysis information, weekly reports, and regular monitoring to determine program profitability. The company evaluates new versus returning customers for profitability as well and helps adjust e-commerce development, social media marketing, and email marketing based on that information. MonsterClaw LLC MonsterClaw LLC built a name for itself on freelancing service oDesk, which later became Upwork. The company has worked with big names such as Grasshopper and ScraperAPI and serves small businesses as well as larger companies today. The organization provides a dedicated affiliate manager, helps with setting up affiliate tracking software and tools, and provides a comprehensive affiliate marketing strategy to each client. Acceleration Partners Acceleration Partners is one of the biggest agencies in the market today and has worked with huge companies such as Noom, Cricut, Target, Adidas, LinkedIn, Proactiv, Stubhub, and more. The business is best known for its recognition from global brands, and it pushes ahead results using data-driven strategies and powerful reports. What Makes The Best Affiliate Marketing Agencies? There are different strategies for choosing the best affiliate marketing agencies. Once you understand these strategies, you can move on to looking at options that you’re considering and determine whether they are right for your business. Each of the top affiliate marketing agencies has a few things in common. They have extensive experience with affiliate marketing. They work with major publishers that have an excellent reach in different markets. These companies understand digital marketing, and they have the tools to build a reliable affiliate campaign. There are differences between the best affiliate marketing agencies as well, and those differences are what will help you determine which company you should be working with. Not every agency uses the same affiliate marketing program. Some have experience with different network providers and some measure different goals. There are agencies that specialize in working in certain industries as well. When you’re searching for the top affiliate marketing agencies to work with, you’ll have to look for those important indicators to help you decide who you should work with and who you should avoid. Learn Who Competitors Are Using One of the easiest ways to start looking for affiliate marketing agencies is to examine which businesses your competitors are using. If your competitor is successfully using affiliate marketing for growth, you may be able to get similar results by using the same agency that the business is using. It isn’t always possible to see what clients an agency has, but many times agencies list their past clients as proof of their work. Spend time trying to determine which companies your competitors are using, and you’ll have a list of proven affiliate marketing agencies to get you started. Look For A Clear Marketing Plan Even if you aren’t an expert at digital marketing, it’s still beneficial to ask a potential marketing agency to explain their marketing plan for your business. Most experienced agencies will have a clear plan that follows a specific order. If the agency doesn’t want to share a strategy with you, that’s a red flag, and you should avoid that company. When the agency has clear goals and steps it Read More Read More

The post Should You Work With An Affiliate Marketing Agency? first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How To Grow Traffic 90.97% With A Custom SEO Plan (Case Study)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 12:18:29 +0000

If you aren’t keeping every aspect of your website’s SEO performance in tip-top shape, you’ll struggle to see much organic growth. Every SEO campaign is different – some websites require more focus on just one or two of the core components of SEO (content, backlinks, and technical factors) whereas others may require optimization and improvements across the board. These SEO issues can be discovered by carrying out an SEO audit of your website which can uncover a whole range of action points that need to be addressed. That’s why it’s always essential to audit, analyze and optimize what’s already on your site. In this case study, you’ll learn the exact steps that my team at The Search Initiative took to increase our client’s organic traffic by 90.97%. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Before that, let’s find out a bit more about the website’s goals and the main challenges faced during the campaign. The Challenge Before joining The Search Initiative, the site was struggling to break into the first page of the search results for many important keywords. Therefore, the main goal of this campaign was to grow the site’s organic traffic with a focus on optimizing the editorial content. The client is a real estate website targeting people who want to rent and/or buy properties in Southeast Asia. This site saw a spike in referring domains. This was an attempted negative SEO attack, which is when a competitor intentionally attempts to sabotage your SEO efforts by building many poor-quality backlinks. If you believe your site has been deliberately attacked in this way, it’s best to audit and tidy up your link profile – read on to learn how to do this. The website had a lot of content, with many articles that were 10k+ words long. However, there were lots of keywords that these pieces of content were struggling to rank for. In cases like this, you should carry out a content optimization strategy that focuses on improving these long-form pieces for low-hanging keywords that were ranking just outside of the first page. Finally, we identified two core technical drawbacks facing the website: hundreds of internal redirects and missing breadcrumb navigation. As a real estate website with hundreds of listings across multiple cities and locales, missing breadcrumb navigation resulted in unnecessarily poor user experience as it made it much more difficult for visitors to navigate the website. Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Pruning Your Link Profile With A Backlink Audit Your backlink profile is like a tree. Now and then, you want to snip off and prune a few faulty branches (low-quality backlinks) to ensure that the rest of the tree (link profile) is healthy. I.e., There are no spammy backlinks. This is a procedure you should carry out periodically by only checking the most recent links pointing to your site. But sometimes, the number of backlinks may suddenly shoot up, which could signify foul play. Google is able to ignore these spammy links in “most cases” but that means that some might slip through. If you get 1000 spam links, how many of these weren’t ignored? 50? 100? It’s not worth the risk, you need to take action. You’ll find out how to analyze the quality of a backlink pointing to your website later, but first, let’s see how you can identify whether your site’s link profile has seen unnatural growth, as described above. Identifying A Negative SEO Attack What Is A Negative SEO Attack? Your backlink profile may be the victim of a hostile SEO attack where your competitors (or another entity) purposely build hundreds, if not thousands, of unnatural, poor-quality links towards your site. Such an attack aims to trigger a Google penalty (or manual action) so that you lose rankings. If this happens to you, you will want to conduct a backlink audit to identify and disavow (ask google to ignore) these malicious links. How To Identify A Potential Negative SEO Attack To manually identify a potential negative SEO attack on your website’s backlink profile, you can use the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool. If you see a sharp spike like the one above, your site’s likely had a damaging SEO attack. As mentioned above, Google’s algorithms are getting better at identifying and ignoring poor-quality backlinks – but they aren’t perfect, so you’ll still need to cover your bases to make sure that your tree doesn’t have any faulty branches. This unnatural link velocity isn’t ideal – so it’s still worth seeing which links you can preemptively tell Google to ignore by disavowing them. Top tip: you can set up alerts on Ahrefs to automatically monitor new (and lost) referring domains to your website. This will enable you to quickly spot any unnatural increases (or decreases) within your backlink profile and allow you to act sooner to prevent any potential SEO damage to your site’s performance. Head over to: Alerts > Backlinks > New alert > Enter domain > New backlinks > Set email interval > Add Once you’ve identified that your site’s seen an unnatural links spike, the next step is to identify the bad links. It’s also worth noting that the spike may actually be a good thing. For example, one of your articles may have gone viral, so you may have naturally received a bunch of links. Either way, here’s how to identify whether these links are good or bad for your SEO. Investigating A Potential Negative SEO Attack Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to investigate a potential negative SEO attack using Ahrefs Site Explorer: When filtering these results, you’ll likely see some patterns cropping up. Let’s go through some of the most common culprits regarding links-based negative SEO attacks and how to spot them. Patterns To Look Out For: The Usual Suspects When identifying faulty backlinks from a negative SEO attack, there are a few usual suspects that you can look out for as giveaways for potential foul play. Why? Because these types of links are extremely cheap and easy to get in large quantities – meaning they aren’t too sophisticated. Remember, most of these websites aren’t legitimate. They’re often built especially for these tactics and won’t have any SEO value. Blogspot Domains Blogspot domains are incredibly cheap and easy to build. This makes them perfect for webmasters to exploit and use to build spammy links to your domain. You can identify these quickly by clicking on “More filters” on the top right of the Backlinks report. Select Domain name and type in “blogspot”. Click Apply and Show results. You’ll now see all backlinks from Blogspot domains. In this example, there are 66 poor-quality Blogspot domains pointing to this website within the specified timeframe. Web Directories In most cases, adding a listing to a web directory is free. Again, this makes it easy for spammers to build hundreds, if not thousands, of links on irrelevant and/or suspicious-looking directories. They generally look something like this: Find potential spammy web directories by filtering the backlinks using the same method above, but instead, search for domains that contain “directory”. Comment Spam Comment spam usually results from automated software being used to place lots and lots of comments on blogs or forums towards a particular website. These links generally use exact match anchors, i.e. the clickable text of the links are keywords you are likely targeting. This can be problematic because a high number of keyword-rich anchor texts within your link profile will likely raise some flags in Google’s eyes as being unnatural, which could lead to your website being penalized via a manual links-based penalty. Here’s an example of a forum link taken directly from Google’s guide on Link Schemes. Scroll down to the Anchors report right at the bottom of the Site Explorer tool on Ahrefs – this shows you an overview of the most commonly used anchor texts to link to your website. If you spot lots of exact match (keyword-rich) anchor texts linking to you, it’s likely that these could be comment or forum spam links. In some cases, you may even find some extremely unnatural or even suspicious anchors used to link towards you. These are much easier to spot as they’ll likely have nothing to do with your website. Next, click on “View full report” to dig a little deeper. This is because the report only shows you the top 10 most common anchors (see screenshot below) – and there may be lots more! Here, you want to order by “/ dofollow” links because dofollow links are the kind that specifically instructs search engine bots to “follow” the link. Whereas sites that link to you using a nofollow link, are highly devalued by Google’s crawlers. Click on Details, then Referring domains, to explore further. In most cases, a website will only link to you once – so if you see that a site is linking to you a lot, it’s a strong indicator that something’s not quite Read More Read More

The post How To Grow Traffic 90.97% With A Custom SEO Plan (Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

12 Affiliate Marketing Books Everyone Should Read in 2024

Matt Diggity — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 14:21:09 +0000

With the number of affiliate marketing books, courses, and affiliate program management guides out there, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Luckily, I’ve been in the business of making profitable affiliate marketing sites for years, and in this article, you’ll learn about some of our favorite affiliate marketing books. If you can read one or two, you’ll boost your prior knowledge about affiliate program management more than most people. When you’re done reading a few of the best affiliate marketing books, you’ll have insider information and it will be much easier for you to start your affiliate marketing journey. Best Affiliate Marketing Books in 1. Evergreen Affiliate Marketing Evergreen Affiliate Marketing is a book by Nate McCallister published in 2019 that focuses on affiliate marketing strategies and concepts that will stand the test of time. Nate McCallister claims the principles in the book will remain relevant for another 20 years. This book is worth checking out if you want a good overview of the affiliate marketing industry or even have an affiliate site that you want to boost. It covers various valuable affiliate program topics for an affiliate marketer, such as content creation, free affiliate marketing strategies, copywriting tips, and many other make-money online topics. The affiliate marketing book also covers mindset concepts that help keep you in the right frame of mind, even when you don’t see immediate results. It opens you to the world of experienced affiliate marketers. 2. From Nothing: Everything You Need to Profit From Affiliate Marketing The full title of this book is “From Nothing: Everything You Need to Profit From Affiliate Marketing, Online Marketing, Blogging, Online Business, and More” and it’s written by Ian Pribyl in 2019. Ian Pribyl started making money online through digital marketing when he was 16, he achieved super-affiliate status on various marketplaces and launched a video training course called The Free Internet Marketing Project. Most of the lessons in this book are taken from that course. His book aims to show people that it is possible to start an online affiliate business with less than $100 in your bank account. It contains 360 pages that detail a complete step-to-step blueprint for building an online affiliate business. The book covers subjects such as picking a niche, building an authority site system, keyword research, writing quality content, promoting your website, becoming an expert affiliate manager, and much more. 3. Affiliate Marketing for Dummies Affiliate Marketing for Dummies 2020 is written by Ted Sudol and Paul Mladjenovic. It’s another great entry in the classic “For Dummies” series. Affiliate Marketing for Dummies focuses on the essentials of affiliate marketing and it’s tailored toward complete beginners. The introduction of the book is all about how affiliate marketing works, the potential benefits of affiliate program, and the initial steps needed to start. It also provides some advice on how to avoid get-rich-quick schemes. Once the basics are covered, the book will show you how to do keyword research as an affiliate marketer, build a website, an introduction to search engine optimization, create content, email marketing, and much more. There also is a list of recommended tools for the best affiliate marketers. Overall, Affiliate Marketing for Dummies is a good starting point to learn the affiliate marketing basics. 4. $100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No $100M Offers is not about affiliate marketing specifically but it helps improve other skills that are needed to be successful in the affiliate marketing industry. It’s a short 164-page affiliate marketing book published in 2021 and it’s often on sale for $1 on Kindle. $100M Offers tells the story of how the author, Alex Hormozi, went from being broke to earning $120M within 48 days across multiple industries by using the affiliate program concepts in this book. As the title suggests, the focus of the book is all about how to create irresistible offers. It’s mostly about copywriting and leveraging your position in an industry. This is one of the affiliate marketing books that will teach every affiliate marketer how to find highly profitable niches, create high-value offers (with add-ons), and implement smart guarantees that are difficult to refuse. It won’t give you a step-to-step affiliate marketing plan on how to build a successful affiliate marketing business, but it does cover some very important concepts for affiliate program management. Highly recommended. 5. Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib The 1-Page Marketing Plan was written by Allan Dib and published in 2016. The book has lots of interactive affiliate marketing terms, such as the 1-Page Marketing Plan canvas, which is a worksheet for your affiliate business broken down into three categories: Before, During, and After. The idea is to use the affiliate program tips in the book to fill in the canvas with the most efficient strategies for each section. It really helps business owners create a solid and simple affiliate marketing plan for their business that they can easily follow. You’ll learn a lot of great advice such as how to get new customers, earn more profit from existing customers, close sales, beat your competition, use direct response marketing techniques, create affiliate marketing campaigns on a small budget, and much more. It’s another short and sweet 234-page book that I suggest everyone read at least once. The principles will carry over into your affiliate marketing business. 6. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Deep Work by Cal Newport is about learning how to focus on difficult tasks without distractions. With attention spans getting short, Deep Work will show you how to concentrate on challenging tasks. Affiliate marketers have to deal with a wide variety of tasks, many of which are tiresome. What sets the successful affiliate marketer apart from the rest is a consistent work ethic, and this book can really help you with that. In the book, Shallow Tasks are described as tasks that don’t require much mental energy, such as browsing Facebook, watching movies, and whatnot. These are the basic affiliate marketing terms that should keep you going years to come. Deep work is the opposite; learn how to focus on a challenging affiliate program task that provides value—for instance, finding a profitable niche, or competition analysis. I highly recommend affiliate marketers read this one! 7. Ogilvy on Advertising Originally published in 1985, David Ogilvy’s advertising book is a little dated, but many of the same principles apply to the modern world. During his time, David Ogilvy was one of the world’s most successful advertisers. The Ogilvy on Advertising book covers a wide range of topics surrounding advertising such as; how to find an advertising job, advertising that works, writing successful copy, how to start and run an agency, conducting accurate research, and much more. It’s mostly old-school copywriting tips and tricks. While a little old, the lessons can help new affiliate marketers with the advertising side of their business. If you want to become an affiliate marketer, this Ogilvy on Advertising is a great resource. 8. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan is another one of best affiliate marketing books with heavy focus on the creative advertising industry. The book has been updated several times for relevance, and the latest edition includes strategies on how to use social media marketing (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook advertising, etc) for your affiliate marketing campaigns. Every affiliate marketer should study advertising and copywriting because you’ll have to use those skills to promote your products. Granted, the products aren’t your own, but you still need to learn how to convince people to click the link. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This will teach you how to come up with fun and creative ads to promote your products. While the focus is on traditional paper advertising (magazines, newspapers, etc) the principles still apply to the digital world. It’s a fun book that has a lot of gold nuggets about affiliate marketing, not to mention plenty of real-life examples of successful advertising campaigns. 9. The Magic of Thinking Big The first edition of The Magic of Thinking Big was published in 1959 and many of the same insights hold up today. The book will show you how to focus on your affiliate marketing business, believe in yourself, think creatively, and stay consistent. It will do wonders for your business confidence! Most of the chapters are dedicated to helping you create a six figure business mindset and attitude. Many of the strategies and tips in this book are backed up by real-life case studies. If you want a solid foundation on business principles, The Magic of Thinking Big is the book for you. A must-read for any aspiring affiliate marketing entrepreneur! 10. Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message so Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller will reveal insider affiliate marketing secrets on how to create an affiliate network by working with your your Read More Read More

The post 12 Affiliate Marketing Books Everyone Should Read in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Make Money Online as a Teen – 40 Easy Ways

Matt Diggity — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 15:19:00 +0000

As a teenager, it can be tough to make money. You’re not old enough to work at most jobs, and you probably don’t have a lot of stuff you can sell online. No worries, I’ve been working online since I was around that age as well. And you can too! I have spent hours researching and comparing different online jobs for teenagers and have come up with the following list of the 40 absolute best ways you can make money online fast even if you are a teenager and don’t have any experience! So whether you’re looking for a part-time job or just some extra spending money, you will definitely find something on this list that works for you. How to Make Money Online as a Teen 1. Affiliate Marketing: $5,000/Month Affiliate marketing is where you promote other people’s products and earn a commission for each conversion. Conversion can mean either a sale or a lead (such as someone signing up for a free trial or an email list). To do affiliate marketing you need to: Affiliate marketing can be one of the best online jobs to make money as a teen because it requires no initial investment and you don’t need any experience or a CV to get started. All you need is a laptop, an internet connection, and some free time! If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing and how it works, check out this free online webinar. 2. Dropshipping: $3,000/Month Dropshipping is a type of eCommerce where you sell products that you don’t actually have in stock. Here is how dropshipping works: Look around for a trendy, useful product that you think people will want to buy Find a supplier online who will manufacture and ship the product for you Set up an eCommerce store using Shopify List the products on your eCommerce store at a higher price than what you’re paying for them Use digital media channels to market and drive traffic to your store When someone buys a product from your store, an automatic order will be sent directly to the supplier The supplier will ship the product directly to the customer’s door You will earn cash for each product that is sold! Dropshipping is a great way to make money because it is relatively low risk and you can start with very little investment. All you need is to find good products and market them well, and you can easily make a few thousand dollars per month! 3. Blogging: $2,000/Month Blogging is where you write articles on a specific topic and publish them online. You can write about nearly anything, game guides, product reviews, personal experiences, or anything else you can think of! All you need is a domain name and a reliable web hosting provider, and you can start blogging today! There are 4 ways to make money through blogging: Advertising: You can sell advertising space on your blog to companies who want to reach your audience. Affiliate Marketing: You can promote other people’s products on your blog and earn a commission for each sale that you generate. Sponsored Posts: You can write sponsored posts for companies and include a link to their product or service. Digital Products: You can sell digital products such as eBooks, online courses, or software on your blog. For more information on how to make money blogging, click here. 4. YouTube: $2,300/Month YouTube is not just a way to watch videos while eating, it’s also a great way to make money! The average YouTuber earns $2 per 1000 views. This might not seem like a lot, but if you have a popular YouTube channel with millions of views, it can really add up! Also, don’t forget that you can make money through affiliate marketing and sponsorships on YouTube as well! 5. Twitch Streaming: $3,000/Month Twitch is the most popular live streaming platform out there with over 450 million visitors per month! If you’re a good gamer or have some other talent that you can show off, you can make a lot of money streaming on Twitch! You need to be a twitch partner to make money, and you can do that by having at least 50 followers, streaming for at least 25 hours in the last 30 days, and having an average of 3 or more viewers for your streams. Twitch streamers make money through subscriptions, advertisements, donations, merch, and affiliate marketing as well. 6. Play Crypto Games: $100/Month Another way to make money if you are a gamer is to play crypto games! Crypto games are simply online games that are built on the blockchain and use cryptocurrency as their in-game token. For example, if League of Legends was built on the blockchain, then BE could be their cryptocurrency and as you win games, you would earn BE. You can then sell your BE for real money! The blockchain gaming industry is still in its early stages, but it is growing rapidly and there are already many popular games that you can play, such as Axie Infinity and Thetan Arena 7. Game Boosting: $700/Month Game boosting is when you help other people progress in online games by playing games for them. This can be anything from helping someone level up their character or get them out of bronze. Boosting can only be done in very competitive online games, such as League of Legends, Apex Legends, and CS:GO. So if you are a high-level player in any of these games, you find many opportunities to make money on platforms like Hero Boosting. 8. Apps, & Websites Testing: $10/Test Before launching a new game, app, or website, companies will pay people to test it out and give them feedback. This is called beta testing, and it’s a great way to make some extra money! There are many online jobs for teens on beta testing platforms like UserTesting or Testing Time, so make sure to check them out. 9. Online Surveys: $1/Survey Online survey sites are a great way to make some extra money in your spare time! Many companies will pay you to answer questions about their products or services on Online surveys. All you need is a computer and an internet connection, and you can start earning money today! You can find many opportunities on survey sites like Survey Junkie or Opinion Outpost. 10. Watch Ads: $50/Month Did you know that you can get paid to watch ads? This is not a scam, many websites and apps will pay you to watch short video ads, such as Swagbucks and a MyPoints. You won’t get rich from this, but it’s a great way to make some extra cash in your spare time! 11. Review Songs: $0.05/Song Artists are always looking for feedback on their new songs, as won’t only help them improve their music but also if their song is good enough, it could go viral. They just need the exposure, and they are willing to pay for it. Many websites will pay you to listen to and review new songs, such as Current Rewards and RadioEarn. 12. Micro-Tasking: $200/Month Micro-tasking is simply completing small tasks online for companies or individuals. This can be anything from online research to data entry or transcribing audio. There are many micro-tasking platforms out there, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Clickworker. 13. Reward Apps: $100/Month You can get discounts, free stuff, and even cash by using reward apps! It’s a great way to make some extra cash online. There are many different types of reward apps, but the most popular ones are probably InboxDollars, Ibotta, Rakuten, and Swagbucks, which allow you to earn points by doing simple tasks like shopping online, watching videos, taking surveys, etc. Some apps, such as HealthyWage and Evidation can also reward you for reaching your fitness goals, walking a certain number of steps, or even eating healthy! 14. Data Entry: $300/Month Companies are always looking for people to do data entry because it is a time-consuming task that not many people want to do. This is a great way to earn some extra cash as a teen. And this makes it one of the most popular online jobs for teens because it is easy to do and doesn’t require any experience. All you need to do is type up data into a spreadsheet or database. Many companies will pay you to do data entry, such as Axion Data Entry Services and Capital Typing. 15. Search Engine Evaluation: $800/Month Have you ever wondered how Google decides what shows up first when you search for something? Well, they have an algorithm (a piece of code) that decides which web pages are the most relevant for your search. But in order for an algorithm to work properly, it must be trained by humans first. And this is where you come in! You can get paid to evaluate search results and give your feedback on whether they are relevant or not. This gives the search engine more data and Read More Read More

The post How to Make Money Online as a Teen – 40 Easy Ways first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – September 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 09:23:35 +0000

The end of 2022 is fast approaching, but don’t worry. September’s roundup includes everything you need to hit your metrics before the new year. First, sharpen your skills with the month’s guides. You’ll get a breakdown of where algorithm updates may be headed, find out why it’s getting harder to rank for commercial keywords and learn to identify warning content flags. After that, bring confidence to your SEO choices with the latest data. The first case study takes a deep dive into Zapier’s successful strategy, while the second introduces you to UX and SEO red herrings. The roundup closes on the news. You’ll get the latest headlines about the new Core Update, Google’s Helpful Content Update, the new “quick read” signal, and updates to structured data guidelines for articles. Google’s Helpful Content Algorithm Update: Hypotheses from 23 Years of SEO Experience https://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/helpful-content-google-algorithm-update/ Wil Reynolds calls on decades of experience to bring you this analysis of the Helpful Content Update. If you aren’t caught up, Wil provides a good summary of the goals, affected industries, and new signals that were included in the rollout. He then breaks down for you who is getting hit with traffic drops and why they are likely in violation of Google’s new priorities. He explains why he suspects they were targeted and who is most likely to be endangered by future updates. For example, one prediction he makes is that publishers that focus on a broad range of topics are in the most danger of being targeted. He identifies sites such as Forbes and CNET as being at high risk. He argues that these sites and others like them may suffer because they don’t specialize, don’t provide unique value, and use automated content. If you’re worried you might be affected, Wil closes the guide with some ideas to get your site and content back in line with what Google wants to see. Your site content isn’t the only SEO factor that may become more challenging. The next guide looks at why you may be having trouble ranking for select commercial keywords. Why It’s Getting Harder to Rank for Some Commercial Keywords (+ What You Can Do About It) https://moz.com/blog/harder-to-rank-for-commercial-keywords Dominick Sorrentino has identified a culprit if you’ve recently had trouble competing for commercial terms. He experienced the problem himself, and his research led him to discover that listicles were taking over the top spots in the niche. This isn’t an isolated phenomenon. He provides data-driven evidence that this problem is widespread and has resulted in serious shifts in many commercial SERPs in just the last year. Dominick and his research team found that the number of lists in the top five positions “…increased by 35.5% from 2021 to 2022”. Throughout the rest of the guide, he explores what can be done now and what kind of actions you may need to take in the future. He suggests you should respond to this trend by seeking out more mentions in list-type content in your niche (for example, directories). “Infiltrating” lists by having your company added to existing high-performing lists can be an effective shortcut. He also recommends that you start producing some of your own list content for commercial SERPs that are rewarding it. These are low-investment solutions, which is good because no one can really say for sure that Google intends for this to happen. Directories have started flexing their growing power (such as by charging extra for new listings) in ways that may attract responses from Google. The last guide of the month also has some content advice for you. It will help you spot and resolve localization problems. 4 Warning Content Localization Flags https://www.rankranger.com/blog/content-localization-warnings Isaline Muelhauser guest starred on the In Search SEO Podcast to bring you troubleshooting tips for when localization goes wrong. She covers some of the ways that content localized for different languages can warn you that it’s not performing as intended. She highlights four warning flags in particular: Over the course of a long interview, Isaline teaches you how to spot each of these problems, and explains the threat that they pose to your long-term success. As an example, she helps you understand the significance of traffic coming from the wrong country. She explains that this warning sign often appears when content is written for a language, but not a specific region. This can be an easy mistake to make. For example, dozens of countries have French as an official language, but they don’t always use words in the same way. If you hire a French writer to produce french-language content for a Canadian website, you may find you’re getting traffic from France without intentionally targeting it. This problem can be solved easily enough by making sure your localized content is produced by locals. Isaline provides the same thorough explanations for the other warning flags. You’ll read the latest case studies. First, you’ll learn how Zapier is bringing in millions of dollars worth of traffic with a powerful SEO strategy. 6 Things I Love About Zapier’s SEO Strategy: A Case Study https://ahrefs.com/blog/zapier-seo-case-study/ Mateusz Makosiewicz takes you on a deep dive of Zapier’s blog strategy. As he points out early in the study, Zapier’s products don’t even have a lot of monthly searches. Yet, the blog brings in more than 1.6 million visitors every month. He breaks down how they did it. To start, he organizes the practices being used by Zapier into a series of principles that you can apply to your own site. He uses traffic data, examples, and visual aids to explain the importance of these principles and how to put them into action. The case study includes breakdowns of how Zapier: This study is a valuable resource for people who want to achieve SEO success in a niche with little or no search demand. Almost all of these practices allow you to benefit from niches with more volume while you’re building your brand. In the next and final case study, you’ll learn how to stop yourself from chasing the wrong solutions to your biggest problems. UX and SEO red herrings: A Case Study https://www.kevin-indig.com/ux-and-seo-red-herrings/ Kevin Indig brings you this data driven list of the “red herrings” that can cause you to make bad assumptions while trying to diagnose SEO and UX problems. He sets the stage by creating an example around three big sites: Wish, Zulily, and TheRealReal. All of these sites had factors in common before they experienced serious traffic loss. All of these sites made users log in to shop, they all used the same business model, and they all declined around the same time. This might be enough to cause some SEOs to start planning updates around these factors. However, using data, Kevin shows that none of these obvious factors provide a complete explanation. He points out that other factors show up on a deeper look including: Kevin’s point is not to claim that these additional factors are more legitimate, but instead to point out that different interpretations can point you in wildly different directions. Without enough research, you’re at risk of wasting time chasing the wrong problem. That covers the case studies for the month. Next, you’ll take in some of the biggest headlines, starting with the latest core update. Google September 2022 Broad Core Update Is Live – What We Are Seeing Now https://www.seroundtable.com/google-september-2022-core-update-34078.html Barry Schwartz brings you a quick summary of the new Core Update that Google started rolling out on September 12. According to the official announcement, the update is expected to continue through the 26th. The update is reported to affect all content. It is also reported to work by promoting good pages rather than applying new penalties to bad ones. While Google has not released a list of changes, Danny Sullivan and other Google representatives have been answering questions from SEOs. Barry collected some threads from Google reps like Danny Sullivan that cover the goals and the scope of the update. That’s all we know for now. Let’s look back on the last big update to hit, and the new signal that it introduced. Google’s Helpful Content Update Introduces A New Site-wide Ranking Signal Targeting “Search engine-first Content”, and It’s Always Running https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-helpful-content-update-new-ranking-signal/ Glenn Gabe breaks down a new site-wide ranking signal that may play a key role in all of your future content. This new signal arrived with the Helpful Content Update. It specifically targets content Google recognizes as either “low-quality”, or “made for search engines.” Once applied, the signal will impose a penalty that will make it more difficult for your pages to appear in search results. If you host a lot of low-value content, the signal will be applied to your entire site. Google’s Danny Sullivan clarified that this signal will impact all content on your site when it is applied, not just the content that is judged to be low quality. The signal is designed to fade away when content becomes compliant again, but you won’t be told which content resulted in Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – September 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

20 Affiliate Marketing Tips For Marketing Success In 2024

Matt Diggity — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 06:23:22 +0000

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make passive income, but it can also be very challenging. There are a lot of things to learn and a lot of things that can go wrong. Drawing from my extensive experience and success in the field of affiliate marketing, I am excited to share these 20 powerful tips that will guide you toward affiliate marketing triumph, helping you navigate the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities in this lucrative online business model. These invaluable insights will set you on the right path, enabling you to sidestep common errors often made by affiliate marketers. Quick Summary Affiliate marketing requires a strategic approach, including choosing the right niche, creating high-quality content, and finding great affiliate programs. It is important to have a solid affiliate marketing plan in place, including understanding your target audience, disclosing affiliate links, and leveraging a multichannel strategy. To become a successful affiliate marketer, you need to be astute and have a complete step-to-step blueprint for building an online affiliate business. How Does Affiliate Marketing Work? Affiliate marketing works as a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer acquired by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. For example, if you joined the Amazon affiliate program and promoted their products on your blog, you would earn a commission on any affiliate sales that you generate. To maximize your affiliate income in 2023, consider joining reputable affiliate networks, collaborating with affiliate partners, and implementing an effective affiliate marketing program that includes tracking affiliate links for successful marketing. Affiliate Marketing Tips 1. Find A Good Niche Let’s face it, some niches suck, and there is just no money to be made in them. For this reason, the first, and most important tip, in my opinion, is to find a good niche. My definition of a perfect niche is one in which there is an actual demand for the affiliate product or service you are promoting, is evergreen and will never run out of style, has very little to no competition, and is something you are actually interested in. Luckily, your niche doesn’t have to be perfect, you just need to find a niche where there is enough demand and competitors you can actually beat. Here are a few affiliate marketing strategies to help you find a good niche: To help you even further, we analyzed over 300 affiliate websites and came up with a list of the best niches for affiliate marketing. Here are some of our findings: 2. Provide Real Value Don’t get it twisted, affiliate marketing is a business, and like any other business, your goal should be to provide value to your customers. People are bombarded with so much content and so many products these days, that the only way to stand out and actually make affiliate sales is by providing real value. What I mean by providing real value is creating relevant content that is actually helpful and informative, not just a sales pitch. Here are a few affiliate marketing tips to help you provide real value: 3. Talk Benefits Not Features When you are promoting a product, it is very easy to focus too much on all of the features. While features are important, they are not nearly as important as the benefits of those features. Your goal should be to talk about how the product can benefit your reader, not just what the product does. For example, if you are promoting a blender, you should talk about how the blender can help your reader make healthy smoothies, not just that the blender has a powerful motor. One way to do this is to ask yourself “why?” Let’s say you are promoting a blender, and you start talking about how the blender has a powerful motor. Why does that matter? Well, a powerful motor means that the blender can blend anything, even tough ingredients like kale and ice. Why is blending ice important? Well, it means that your reader can make healthy, refreshing smoothies without having to worry about the ice chunks. See how that works? This is the type of language you want to use when promoting a product. Talk about how the product can benefit your reader, not just what the product does. 4. Understand The Sales Funnel Online affiliate marketing business requires a good understanding of the sales funnel, which is the process that potential customers go through when they are considering a purchase. There are 4 stages to the sales funnel: 5. Understand the Different Types of Content There are different types of content, and each type serves a different purpose: Each type of content has a different purpose, and you need to choose the right type of content for each stage of the sales funnel. 6. Consider Search Intent Back in the day, people could rank with any type of content as long as they stuff their keywords into it. But Google and other search engines have gotten a lot smarter, and now they are able to understand search intent. This means that if you want to rank in Google, you need to create content that matches the searcher’s intent. There are four main types of search intent: The easiest way to find the keyword’s search intent, besides common sense, is to take a look at what is already ranking in the SERPs. Just type in your keyword and see what comes up. If most of the results are blog posts, then you know that informational content is what Google wants. If most of the results are product pages, then you know that transactional content is what Google wants. And so on. 7. Become An Authority If I gave you 2 articles one from Healthline and one from my personal blog, which one would you trust more? Chances are you would trust the article from Healthline. Even if I have a much better article, you would still be more likely to trust the article from Healthline. This is because they have built up their authority over the years by creating high-quality content. And that’s exactly what you need to do to become a successful affiliate marketer. Your goal is to become the go-to person in your niche. The person that people trust and turn to when they need information. Here are a few ways you can build your authority: 8. Join Multiple Affiliate Programs One mistake that a lot of new affiliate marketers make is only joining one affiliate program, usually, the one that pays the most or that has the biggest collection of products. This is a mistake for 3 reasons: First, you should diversify your affiliate revenue online. This is important because it protects you in case one of the affiliate programs decides to change their commission structure or stop working with you altogether. Second, it boosts your conversion rate. Having a few options to choose from gives the customer a sense of control and they are more likely to buy something if they feel like they have options. Lastly, it gives you more content to promote. If you only have products from one affiliate program to promote, you will quickly run out of things to say. 9. Listen To Your Community It’s important to listen to your community and give them what they want. Make sure to reply to each and every comment your community leaves on your blog or social media platforms posts. This doesn’t only help you learn more about them but also builds a relationship with the community, so they see you as a real person and not just some faceless marketer. You should also take the time to survey your community every now and then and ask them what type of content they want to see from you. Do they want more reviews? More interviews? More how-to guides? Any products they want you to review? Asking your community what they want will not only help you give them better content, but it will also make them feel appreciated, which will make them more likely to buy from you. Here are a few ways to know what your community wants: 10. Be Trendy Always be on the lookout for new trends in your online affiliate marketing niche. If you can get in on a new trend early, you will have a big advantage over your competition. People are always looking for new and better products, so if you can be the affiliate marketer that provides them with what they’re looking for, you will be successful. 11. Be Transparent One of the most important things you can do as an affiliate marketer is to be transparent with your target audience. This means being honest about who you are, what you do, and how you make money. If you told your audience that you’re an affiliate marketer and that you’re making affiliate revenue by promoting products, they will be more likely to trust you and buy from you because Read More Read More

The post 20 Affiliate Marketing Tips For Marketing Success In 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—August 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 08:43:20 +0000

The third quarter of the year is coming to a close soon. How are your goals going? If you intend to make the final part of the year the best it can be, you’ve come to the right place. This roundup is filled with the insights you need to take the lead in the search results. First, you’ll get the month’s top guides. You’ll find out how to handle advanced keyword research, why expertise matters, and how to investigate traffic drops. Next, you’ll get the data from some of this month’s best case studies. The results will tell you if you can increase your traffic by 50%+ using keywords, what 5 micro studies say about the 2022 Broad Core Update, and what 20k keywords say about Google’s first page. Finally, the month’s top news articles will prepare you for the future. Get the facts on the July 2022 Product Review Algorithm, the newest search quality rater guidelines, and an update on the phasing-out of Google’s cookies. Advanced Keyword Research: 5 Tips For Finding Untapped Keywords https://ahrefs.com/blog/advanced-keyword-research/ Joshua Hardwick thinks that the traditional method of finding keywords (by searching seed keywords and then narrowing them down) may not always give you the best results. He has some alternative methods for you to test out. In the guide, he’ll teach you how to: For example, the first technique helps you find the keywords that are most effective for new pages. Joshua teaches you how to find and analyze these pages to identify the keywords that Google is rewarding quickly. Joshua explains all these techniques in detail and provides good images for the steps to help you put them into practice easily. Targeting the right terms is an important part of ranking. However, the next piece argues that there’s something that matters more… Why Expertise Is The Most Important Ranking Factor Of Them All https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/why-expertise-is-the-most-important-ranking-factor-of-them-all/ In this article adapted from her MozCon presentation, Lily Ray brings up some arguments for why you should focus on the “Expertise” part of E-A-T. Lily starts by laying out a timeline of Google’s messaging on E-A-T, and points out the emphasis they have placed on expertise in recent years. Then she breaks down how expertise is likely being applied now (as evidenced by some analysis of Google features). Next, she explores some real-life sites that are thriving under the new rules. You’ll learn how some bloggers, field service techs, and other types of websites benefit from showcasing expertise. She gives you a lot of actionable analysis about how those websites communicate their expertise by looking at the factors these sites have in common. It may surprise you that some of these factors are as simple as always writing in the first person. The complete guide includes additional tips and a full slideshow from the presentation. Trying to do what Google wants doesn’t always work. You may see some dips after trying something new. Fortunately, our next piece gives you an in-depth look at how to diagnose what’s going wrong. Guide To Assessing A Drop In Google Organic Traffic https://www.mariehaynes.com/guide-to-assessing-traffic-drops/ Marie Haynes brings you this comprehensive guide to pinning down the cause of lost traffic. First, she identifies a long list of the problems that are most likely to be involved. Her guide covers situations that include: For each of these situations, Marie explains how you can analyze whether it’s the cause, why it results in traffic loss, and what you can do to fix it. SEOs at all experience levels can find some ideas here, but this guide works exceptionally well as a diagnostic tool for newer SEOs who haven’t faced these situations. Start with the factors you most suspect are causing your traffic loss, then see if the symptoms here match. That concludes the guides for this month. Next, we’ll look at the case studies, starting with how some extra time with your keywords and clients can produce amazing benefits. How We Increased Organic Traffic by 65% Using Keyword Research Working Sessions https://moz.com/blog/keyword-research-working-sessions Daniel Wood has some ideas for how you can find better keywords through deeper collaboration with your clients. He tested a practice he calls “keyword research working sessions” to determine whether client input would result in better keywords. Keyword research working sessions are meetings between SEO teams and clients to put both sides on the same page. It is a chance for SEOs to understand better how terms are used in the industry and for clients to clarify what they prioritize regardless of what terms perform best. He includes some additional advice on how to structure these meetings and how to draw out the responses that make them valuable to both sides. For Daniel, the session proved incredibly valuable. The practice resulted in a year-over-year organic traffic increase of 65%. In addition to that, the clients reported increases in revenue. Dan argues that there are more long-term benefits the test didn’t measure, such as increased trust from clients. Our next piece dives into the recent broad core update and gives you a deeper look into the algorithm at work. The Google May 2022 Broad Core Update – 5 Micro-Case Studies That Once Again Underscore The Complexity Of Broad Core Algorithm Updates https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-may-2022-broad-core-update/ To Glenn Gabe, the most recent core update didn’t feel like the others. He wanted to figure out what had changed and produced a series of case studies examining the effects on sites in various niches. Glenn used websites belonging to his clients for these studies. This allowed him to access key data for the following events that became part of the study. His studies cover: He tracked the changes to these sites after the May 2022 update began rolling out. For each one, he described his predictions and compared them to what the update actually did over the following months. For example, in the study of the e-commerce site, he confirmed a theory that the May and future updates would begin to punish less-relevant content. In this study, an otherwise well-ranking site suddenly experienced sudden drops. However, the drops only hit blogs that were irrelevant to the rest of the site. Glenn diagnosed this as an effect of Google’s increasing concern over relevancy. The site was able to recover when the irrelevant content was removed. The complete guide includes several insights for SEOs who work in any of the niches covered by the case studies. It can be hard to figure out what Google wants sometimes, but our final study picked up some clues by looking at the state of more than 20,000 keywords. What 20,000 Keywords Say About Google’s First Page https://www.kevin-indig.com/what-20-000-keywords-say-about-googles-first-page/ Kevin Indig analyzes why the top 5 spots matter more than ever, thanks to a declining number of first-page results. The decline is due to the search features that now replace results. However, their use is not always consistent. He analyzed 20,000 keywords to determine how many results were actually appearing in their SERPs, and why. He takes you deeper into the connection between keywords and the number of results, and identifies different relationships exposed by the data. He found: The study is packed full of actionable analysis. For example, he explains how these results prove that targeting shorter keywords can make SEO campaigns less predictable and that when you do so, you should focus on winning the SERP features like the featured snippets. Check out the complete study for advice on how to restructure SEO work to be more effective. That concludes the case studies for the month. Now, it’s time for you to catch up on the news. First, you’ll learn about the new Product Review Algorithm that dropped in late July. Google July 2022 Product Review Algorithm Update Rolling Out Now https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-july-2022-product-review-algorithm-update-rolling-out-now/459209/ Matt G. Southern brings you this look at the latest product review update that began rolling out on July 27th. As has been the case with past updates, there was no warning for this one ahead of the day it was announced to be in effect. There was also no direct guidance from Google on the factors being changed and what SEOs should do about it. However, the review is believed by many SEOs to refine further Google’s ability to recognize “authentic” reviews. The update is believed only to affect sites that feature review content. Google has suggested that no sites are penalized in this update. However, websites with fluffier reviews will likely lose ground as better content is recognized and boosted by these changes. The update was confirmed to be completed on August 2nd when Google updated its update page with new details. This speedy timeline surprised many SEOs who were used to updates ranging from 14-21 days. We’ll likely know much more when SEOs have finished running their own tests and case studies. For now, you should catch up on the Search Quality Rater Guidelines updates that started rolling out at almost the same time. Google Updates Search Quality Raters Guidelines On July 28th https://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-search-quality-raters-guidelines-33837.html Barry Schwartz has some details Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—August 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – July 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 07:56:09 +0000

Looking for a new way to get ahead? You’ll likely find it in this month’s roundup. There’s a lot to unpack in this list of case studies, guides, and SEO news. The case studies are first. You’ll get the latest data on how to use semantic search, where GSC clicks are going, and whether freshness signals in your titles can improve SEO. Next, the guides will help you sharpen your skills. You’ll find out how to build topic clusters, use new SERP features, estimate any site’s traffic, and balance the value of links. Finally, you’ll get caught up with the latest news. You’ll learn about the instability that followed the last core update, how Apple may be launching a search engine and how Google will be simplifying its search console reports. Using Knowledge Of Semantic Search To Improve E-A-T https://www.mariehaynes.com/using-semantic-search-to-improve-eat/ Marie Haynes brings you this detailed look at how to improve your E-A-T scores by applying semantic search principles. In this presentation, she showcases and explains years of Google statements to help you form a clearer picture of how it all works. You’ll learn the answers to most of the top questions about how semantic search works, including: By the end of this well-researched breakdown, you’ll have a better idea of how to assess content with E-A-T in mind, clarify your entity information, and create effective topic hubs. If you are new to any of these topics, then this is just the resource you need to catch up. Our next piece confronts the possibility that you may not be getting all the data you need for analysis. You’ll find out why Google Search Consoles may be withholding some (or even all?) of your keywords. Almost Half Of GSC Clicks Go To Hidden Terms – A Study By Ahrefs https://ahrefs.com/blog/gsc-hidden-terms-study/ Patrick Stox of Ahrefs wants you to know that you can’t completely trust the keyword data you’re getting from GSC. He argues that you may not be seeing all the keywords that are driving clicks to your site. In fact, you may be seeing less than half of them. The team analyzed nearly 150,000 sites. From there, they examined how many keywords were hidden, and how badly sites were affected. They found that there was a significant amount of variation, with some sites missing 100% of their clicks. Patrick follows up the analysis with some tips that you can use to find out how much data you may be missing from your own reports. You’ll get a set of step-by-step instructions to produce a report that tells you more. The study closes with some analysis of why your data may be hidden. For example, he cites statements by Google that some data is protected for privacy reasons. Google may judge that the locations and exact words of some searches give away too many details about the person. You may not know all the keywords to drive clicks to your sites, but titles are still easy to test. The next case study examines whether giving them a freshness update can provide substantial benefits. Can Improving Freshness Signals In Titles Benefit SEO? https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/last-updated-in-title/ Emily Potter of SearchPilot brings you this study on the impact of improving freshness signals in your meta titles. Google may rewrite many titles, she argues, but changes can still produce positive results you can track. This study shows you that some title updates may be really worth your time and effort. The case study covered here examines the impact of freshness signals in particular. Freshness signals are indications that a page is still active and being refreshed regularly. In your metas, these signals might be communicated through phrases like: The SearchPilot team used the first phrase in a split-test, resulting in an 11% improvement during the testing period. Check out the full study to learn more about how you can get similar results. That covers the case studies for the month, and the guides are next. The first one teaches you how to build better topic clusters. 6 Steps To Effectively Build Topic Clusters https://www.rankranger.com/blog/topic-cluster-tips Begum Kaya brings you this in-depth look at how to build topic clusters more effectively than you have in the past. You can find the original podcast episode at the link, along with a full transcript if you prefer to read it. She covers most of the introductory information you need if this topic is new to you, including what clusters are, and their benefits. Then, she goes further and provides you with a series of rules you can follow to avoid mistakes, optimize the distribution of content, and measure the impact. Begum brings a significant amount of e-commerce experience to this talk. It shows in the quality of the examples she uses. If you work in e-commerce, you may be able to benefit more from this guide than the average reader. Because of the potential benefits, organizing your topic clusters should be high on your to-do list if you haven’t already done so. The next piece will give you a preview of Google’s future plans with some of their active SERPs experiments. Amazing Search Experiments And New SERP Features In Google Land (2022 Edition) https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/amazing-search-experiments-new-serp-features-google-land-2022/ Glenn Gabe brings you this comprehensive look at nearly a dozen Google experiments that have happened recently or are still being tested by the company. You’ll get some rare details about nine of them, and what they tell you about Google’s plans for the future. The tests he covers for you include: Let’s dive into the first one as an example. Explore Wonderland refers to a new section that has been appearing at the bottom of SERPs and providing new kinds of visual-packed content. Glenn provides you with several images of these, so you know what to expect. He also includes some analysis from the SEO world about the possible meaning of these new tests. Maybe the feature represents some merger of Discover and SERPs? The guide is filled with interesting analyses about what’s coming next. In our next guide, you’ll learn something you can put into action right now. You’ll learn a method you can use to find competitors’ traffic numbers. Find Out How Much Traffic ANY Website Gets: 3-Step Analysis (With TEMPLATE) https://www.robbierichards.com/seo/how-much-traffic-website-gets/ Robbie Richards has a method that may help you find out the traffic details of any competitor. As he points out, this information is typically hard to get without access to their Google Analytics account. The method that he uses starts with total website traffic and then works downward to isolate data into the segments you can use. He shows you how to find all the following kinds of data for your competitors. He goes further by showing you how to find out what traffic a competitor’s website gets at the subfolder, page, and even keyword levels. You’ll also learn how to track down paid traffic numbers. The guide is built around SEMrush, but 4 workable alternatives are covered in the end section. In the final guide of the month, you’ll learn how to make better choices when judging the relevance of links. Link Relevance Vs. Content Relevance In Link Building https://moz.com/blog/link-relevance-vs-content-relevance Paddy Moogan wants to help you understand the important differences between two link valuation factors: Link relevance and content relevance. Throughout the guide, he argues there are multiple points of relevancy that must be assessed when choosing a link. He identifies link relevance, content relevance, page relevance, and domain relevance, in addition to anchor text. He tells you how to look for each one, and why they are likely to make a difference in the success of your link-building strategy. He also provides you with some of his own insight into which of these factors weigh more, and how they compare to outside factors such as authority and trust. The guide closes with some extra advice on how to ensure links are content-relevant in particular. That’s it for the guides this month. Next up are some of the big news items you can’t afford to sleep on. First, we looked at some evidence the Google May Update wasn’t as complete as announced. Google May 2022 Core Update – Big Tremors After It Was Complete? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-2022-core-update-big-tremors-33577.html Barry Schwartz is asking if the May Core Update is really over after instability continued through mid-June. As you learned in the last roundup, the update was officially announced as complete on Jun 9th. However, big tremors continued to hit site data for weeks afterward. Barry collected some of the chatter and some of the evidence that was showing up on charts. For the chatter, at least, the news seemed surprisingly good. SEOs across WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World were talking about seeing reversals for sites that were hit hard. However, some SEOs did report serious declines. Check out the article to get the full set of graphs tracking the volatility. Google has more reason to be concerned about how users are feeling, as of late. News is spreading that Apple may soon launch its Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – July 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How To Increase Traffic By 96% (SEO Case Study)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 12:09:41 +0000

Regardless of your website’s size, the keys to a successful SEO campaign are (on-page), links (off-page), and technical factors. Your content acts like the body of a race car, and it’s referring backlinks like race fuel. The technical factors act like the nuts and bolts allowing everything else to perform at its best. If you miss either of these then your website will struggle to rank much like a race car struggling to get down the track. In this case study, you’ll learn the exact steps that my team at The Search Initiative took to increase our client’s organic traffic by 96%. You will get a crash course in the three pillars of SEO (on-page, off-page, and technical factors) through the lens of this case study. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Before getting into the details of the strategy, here’s some important information about the website’s goals and the main challenges that were faced. The Challenge The main objective for this campaign was to increase the amount of quality organic traffic on the site to grow the number of leads. The client is a US-based SaaS (Software as a Service) B2B company that builds and offers cloud software with web pages targeting a range of countries including English speaking countries such as the U.S.A., as well as Japan, China, Korea, and France. With this in mind, one of the main challenges was index bloat. There were over 30k crawlable URLs on the English version of the website alone – quite excessive for a SaaS website. Fixing these crawl budget issues and uploading the XML sitemap which was missing when the client joined TSI was a priority. More on that, below… The client’s hreflang (a way to tell Google about the language and target location of your content) setup had not been implemented correctly. This is a very important element of international SEO and needs to be addressed to avoid potential duplicate content issues. Although the core landing pages of the site were relatively well optimized, there was a lack of supporting content to drive traffic towards them. This is because the client’s blog was not active, with just a handful of articles published. This was tackled by researching and writing informational blog articles to target long-tail keywords. This helped build the client’s topical relevance within the niche as well as provide internal linking opportunities towards the main pages on the site. The final step was to build authority with a link-building strategy that focused on building page authority on the website’s most important pages: the homepage and service pages. Follow the steps below and find out how you can also overcome these challenges for your own websites. Crawl Budget Management What Is Crawl Budget & Why Is It Important? Google only has a limited amount of time and resources that it can allocate to crawling and indexing the World Wide Web. Therefore, Google sets a limit on how much time it spends crawling a given website – this is known as the crawl budget. The crawl budget is determined by two elements: If you have a large website with hundreds of thousands of pages, you’re going to want to make sure that only the most important pages are being crawled i.e. that you aren’t wasting your crawl budget on unimportant URLs. Crawl budget management is about making sure that you’re stopping Google from crawling irrelevant pages that cause index bloat. How To Fix Index Bloat Index bloat occurs when Googlebot crawls too many pages of poor quality. These pages may offer little to no value to the user, be duplicated, be thin in content, or may no longer exist. Too many unimportant and low-quality pages being crawled wastes precious crawl budget as Google spends time crawling those URLs instead of the important ones. Our client’s English site had over 30k legacy event pages indexed – these were pages that included very little content about industry events within the client’s niche i.e. a flier for the event along with essential information such as dates and times. Let’s look at some of the most common culprits that cause index bloat and how you can find them using a site search: You may also come across these kinds of pages: There are several ways to tell Google which pages you want crawled, and which ones you don’t: Here’s the robots.txt file for my site: You can generally find your robots.txt by accessing: yourdomain.com/robots.txt The basic format for blocking Google from crawling your page(s) is: User-agent: [user-agent name] Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled] Here’s an example: User-agent: * Disallow: /author/ The above rule prevents all robots from accessing any URL that contains /author/. Find out more about the best practices for your robots.txt file here. <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> If you have a WordPress website, you can do this easily via a plugin like Yoast SEO. On any page, scroll to the Advanced tab on the plugin and where it says “Allow search engines to show this Post in search results?” select No. An important thing to remember is that you need to ensure that these pages haven’t also been blocked on your robots.txt file. Otherwise, Googlebot will never see the “noindex” directive, and the page may still appear in the search results if, for example, other pages link to it. Find out more about how to manage your crawl budget here. XML Sitemaps While your robots.txt file is used to prevent search engine bots from accessing certain pages, there’s another important file that you need to guide Google in the right direction regarding which pages you do want it to find and index. That’s the XML sitemap – which our client happened to have missing from their website. What Is An XML Sitemap & Why Is It Important? The XML sitemap is a “map” of URLs using Extensible Markup Language. Its purpose is to provide information about the content on your website i.e. the pages, videos, and other files, along with the respective relationships between them. XML sitemaps are important because they allow you to specify your most important pages directly to Google. Here’s an example of what a sitemap looks like: https://diggitymarketing.com/sitemap.xml Providing this information makes it easier for crawlers like Google to improve crawl efficiency as well as understand the structure of your web pages. Think of it as a table of contents for your website. By doing this, you’re increasing your chances of your web pages getting indexed more quickly. Here’s an example of a basic XML sitemap: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>https://domain.com/</loc> </url> <url> <loc>https://domain.com.com/blog/</loc> </url> </urlset> More often than not, your XML sitemap will likely look like this auto-generated one from Yoast: https://lakewoodrestorationpro.com/page-sitemap.xml Why? Because it’s much easier to use a plugin/tool to generate your sitemap than to hardcode it yourself manually. How To Create An XML Sitemap There are many ways to create an XML sitemap for your website depending on your CMS. Your sitemap should now be automatically generated and available at either com/sitemap.xml or yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml Name your file “sitemap” it will be saved in .xml format. There are also XML Sitemap generators like XML-Sitemaps.com where all you need to do is: One thing to note about the methods detailed above is that they may contain URLs or pages that you do not want to be included. For example, crawlers like Screaming Frog may include paginated pages or /tag/, /author/ pages – which as you learned above, cause index bloat. So, it’s always good practice to review the generated files and make sure that only the right pages are there. There’s also the option to code your XML sitemap manually, this is fine for small websites with very few pages but perhaps not the most efficient for massive sites. Regardless of which method you choose, remember to upload the sitemap.xml file to the public_html directory so that it will be accessible via domain.com/sitemap.xml. How To Submit Your XML Sitemap To Google To submit your XML Sitemap to Google, go to your Google Search Console and click Sitemaps > enter the location of your sitemap (i.e. “sitemap.xml”) > click Submit. That’s it! Remember to also add a link to your XML sitemap within your robots.txt file using the following directive: Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml If you have multiple sitemaps, simply add another directive, so you have something like this: Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-1.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-2.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-3.xml This final step makes it that extra bit easier for Google (and other crawlers) to find your sitemap and crawl your important pages. Many plugins like Yoast automate this process for you, they’ll automatically add your sitemap into your robots.txt file. Implementing hreflang Attributes Correctly Implementing hreflang attributes correctly is an advanced technique that should only be done by experienced web developers, SEOs and those who understand the risks. However, if your website’s content is available in multiple languages, then the hreflang attribute is especially important for you. If you set this up correctly, you could essentially clone your Read More Read More

The post How To Increase Traffic By 96% (SEO Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—June 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 08:21:11 +0000

How are your goals looking as we start entering the second half of the year? If you need an edge, we’ve got the case studies, guides, and news items that will give you that.. This month’s case studies will give you the data you need to stay ahead. You’ll learn how to use SEO to win at affiliate marketing, what 23 million internal links can tell you about best practices, and some surprising results from recent tests. Next, the guides will give you some expert analysis on how to adapt to both the May 2020 Core Update, and the big Product Reviews update from March. Also, you’ll learn about 100+ tools that work as free alternatives. Finally, you’ll get a quick rundown of news headlines you can’t miss, including how Google started trialing a new feature. Wirecutter SEO Case Study: 5 Ways To Win At Affiliate Marketing https://ahrefs.com/blog/wirecutter-seo-case-study/ Michal Pecánek brings you some top insights from a huge case study of Wirecutter’s SEO success. It’s hard to avoid Wirecutter if you’re in the affiliate space. It’s one of the largest review sites in the world, with more than 12 million organic clicks a month. The case study looks at how Wirecutter achieved this powerful position and how affiliate marketers (or any SEO focused on reviews) can emulate their success. For example, Michal shows you how Wirecutter maintains excellent E-A-T signals on every important piece of content. You’ll learn how the website does this through authoritative “why you should trust us” sections, appropriate backlinks, and prudent monetization warnings. In the later insights, you’ll also find out how Wirecutter maximizes the user experience, leverages category pages, and keeps its content fresh. Every insight is well explained with examples you can use to take the same steps on your own site. One issue Michal covers is the importance of internal links, and you can get even more information on that in the following case study. You’ll find out what millions of internal links can tell you about best practices for linking on your sites. 23 Million Internal Links – A Google SEO Case Study https://zyppy.com/seo/internal-links/seo-study/ Cyrus Shepard brings you this comprehensive look at internal links in action. The study covers 23 million links distributed across nearly 2,000 websites. In this article, Cyrus shares essential correlations that he has pulled out from the study that you can use to help you improve your internal linking. First, he cautions you that these are only correlations. Correlations are not always causation, but what you learn may point you toward relationships that Google will never formally explain. Cyrus identified many intriguing correlations, including… The complete case study includes several more findings and more detail about each. You’ll also find some analysis at the end to help you apply it. The final case study of the month also has a lot of actionable advice. It’s a quick rundown of 5 studies that had counterintuitive results. 5 Surprising SEO Test Results https://moz.com/blog/5-surprising-seo-test-results Emily Potter brings you some tests that may contradict the conventional wisdom accepted by many SEOs. These tests were performed on client accounts, so it’s not data that you’ll find elsewhere. The tests covered decisions that will be familiar to you if you often work with SEO clients. As an example, in one of the first tests, the clients implemented a way to force Google to show only custom meta descriptions. It worked, but it turned out visitors preferred the generated ones. In another example test, the team wanted to know the consequences of adding prices to title tags for some product pages. While searchers often reward more information, this test saw noticeably lower traffic for all pages involved. In a final example, the team assessed the impact of adding keyword-rich descriptions to alt-text. This also resulted in no detectable impact, though Emily shares some good reasons you should do it anyway. Check out the full article for more tests and their surprising results. Now, let’s move on to the guides for the month. First, you’ll find out how SEOs are interpreting the recent May 2022 Update. Google Core Update May 2022 First Analysis https://www.sistrix.com/blog/google-core-update-may-2022/ Steve Paine offers you a pro’s breakdown of the year’s first Google Core Update. His analysis gives insight into how the update is playing out, and what steps you may need to take to stay ahead. You’ll learn more about this update and Google’s announcement in this month’s news section. For now, let’s focus on what the early data can tell us about winners and losers. The major trends suggest that video sites were among the biggest winners. Sites like YouTube and TikTok were highly elevated over text results for various SERPs. Highly-specialized knowledge sites also won out over dictionary and Wikipedia-style sites. Steve closes out his guide with advice to help you determine which pages need to be improved to comply with the new changes. He also shows you how to identify the pages that are working well so you can apply their on-page SEO rules to other pages. Check out the complete guide for an extensive list of the winners and losers and how much change they experienced. Next, you’ll learn how you can apply what SEOs have learned from March’s Product Review Update. Analysis Of Google’s March 2022 Product Reviews Update (PRU) – Findings And Observations From The Affiliate Front Lines https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-march-2022-product-reviews-update/ Glenn Gabe brings you this breakdown of the 3rd Product Review Update that started rolling out near the end of March. In it, he breaks down the trends that have appeared as the update has been finalized. The things he has learned have been organized into different insights, each with an accompanying explanation. Most of his recommendations are directed toward affiliate marketers, but any SEO with a product site can benefit. The insights include: Glenn also referenced some strong evidence that sites may not see the actual effect of this update for months more to come. He identified a cut-off point that may be affecting sites that made content upgrades too close to the update’s rollout. Your site may need to endure a period of recrawling and reindexing to be graded on the new best practices. This guide should give you all the early steps to start making improvements to review-style content. Tools can help you complete a lot of SEO work faster, and our next guide will introduce you to 100+ free ones. 110 Top SEO Tools That Are 100% Free https://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-free-seo-tools/302553/#close Jon Clark brings you this handy resource you can refer to the next time subscription fees strain your budget. He’s collected more than a hundred different tools that can help you out in a pinch. The tools are organized into different categories, so you can quickly jump to the one that solves your problem. The categories include: Each category has around ten different tools, and Jon has taken the time to explain what sets each tool in the same category apart. These tools, alongside those we recommend in our video below, will help you get ahead without breaking the bank. Now, let’s move on to the news. We’ll start with Google’s official announcement on the core update. May 2022 Core Update Releasing For Google Search https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/05/may-2022-core-update Danny Sullivan brings you this official announcement from Google Search on the release of the recent 2022 Core Update. Unlike our last item on this topic, this one will cover what Google has divulged about its process and intentions. The update was officially announced on May 25th. Google’s stated objective was to refine search results further and make them “more helpful and useful for everyone.” What we saw in practice further reinforced Google’s E-A-T standards and some additional focus on rewarding video content. Google updated the post on June 9th to announce that the rollout was complete. This does not necessarily mean an end to changes for sites affected by the update. Google has reported that some factors are designed to steadily weigh more in the algorithm over months rather than right away. One potential factor SEOs can’t stop thinking about lately is User-Generated-Content (UGC). The following news item examines what Google had to say about its role as a ranking factor. Is User-Generated Content (UGC) A Google Ranking Factor? https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ranking-factors/user-generated-content/#close Kristi Hines brings you this great collection of references that cover UGC. As you may already be aware, UGC is content created by users, fans, and critics across the internet. This type of content (taking the form of blog comments, forum posts, and reviews) can be plentiful, but is it useful? Kristi organized the evidence, starting with some direct answers from the Google Team. On multiple occasions, Google has stated that spammy content on your site is a risk even if it was created or published by users. In a statement in 2020, Google employee John Mueller encouraged website owners to ensure that any user-generated content “meets your standards for publishing content on your website.” He also suggested that Google doesn’t differentiate between your content and Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—June 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Magento Review (2024): Pros, Cons & Performance Tests

Matt Diggity — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 17:52:06 +0000

Magento eCommerce platform is the old school but trusty magician of eCommerce and enterprise businesses worldwide. Powering 0.6% of all websites, Magento is known for the raw power it can offer your business. However, as a digital marketer with extensive experience in the eCommerce industry and various platforms, I can say that it also requires the adept skills of an experienced web developer to unlock its full functionality. So, it may not be the best fit for every business. Magentos’ grit and talent requirements are well-matched by its extreme customizability, scalability, and richness in features. If you’re wondering whether this platform is worth using for your business, read our Magento review below to discover its full potential. What Is Magento? Magento is one of the most robust eCommerce platforms in today’s market. It powers around 20% of the world’s eCommerce solutions and 0.8% of PHP-powered websites globally. Not to mention over $155 billion worth of transactions occur through eCommerce solutions powered by Magento each year. The Magento eCommerce platform has earned its reputation for the sheer amount of customizability and power it offers enterprise-level businesses and large online stores. Over the years it has scaled its performance and features to better serve enterprise-level businesses, no matter how large or complex their technical requirements are for selling online. However, unlike the most popular platforms available today, such as Shopify or WordPress, this eCommerce platform is not an all-in-one, plug-and-play, hosted solution. Because of this, even after its acquisition by Adobe (more on this in a moment), Magento’s market share and adoption rate are relatively low compared to others. As you’ll see from our review, the Magento eCommerce platform is not suited to every business or every online store. It has a steep learning curve and requires a decent technical budget. Who Does Magento Suit Best? A Magento will suit best someone who has a talented web developer and wants an eCommerce website with many bells and whistles. It offers the ability to adapt and evolve your store on the fly, making it the ideal choice for scaling any type of eCommerce business. You can also move so many parts in the Magento backend that makes the learning curve worth it if you want to grow your business-to-business (B2B) or direct-to-consumer (D2C) online store without having to re-platform later. However, if you operate any of the following types of businesses, Magento will not be the right solution for you: Are Magento Commerce and Adobe Commerce the Same Thing? Yes, Magento Commerce has now become Adobe Commerce. In 2018 Adobe announced its acquisition of the Magento eCommerce platform for $1.68 billion to expand its digital experience software into the world of business-to-business and direct-to-consumer eCommerce. As such, new users of Magento typically call it “Adobe Commerce.” However, developers, merchants, and business owners using Magento before the acquisition still call it “Magento” or “Magento Commerce.” Magento’s name is now Adobe Commerce for official purposes, though we’ll still refer to it as Magento in this article as that’s what most people are most familiar with. Are Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce the Same Thing? Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce are not the same things. Before the acquisition of Magento, developers had a choice of two versions as well. As the name suggests, Magento Open Source is an open-source platform that allows you to set up your store’s own hosting and server environment. Of course, as with any open-source software, you (or your developers) can also directly access the code and make any customizations you desire! However, Magento Commerce (now known as Adobe Commerce) is a cloud-hosted eCommerce platform with more built-in features and functionality. Features With Magento’s customization options, you can unlock a world of opportunity as long as you have the proper budget, resources, and technical skills. 1. Ease Of Use & Adoption Magento has earned a reputation for its steep learning curve. It is not beginner-friendly, and it is also not suited to anyone who: Magento opens up a world of options for businesses that intend to scale their online store or who want to push the boundaries of what’s possible when selling online. It offers state-of-the-art scalability and flexibility through its native features and the range of Magento extensions available. Without the skills to mold the platform to your needs, you would be missing out on the versatility and flexibility Magento is known for! Thankfully, finding information to help you set up Magento stores is reasonably straightforward. If you’re a developer, you can learn so much from the revamped Adobe documentation for Magento. For example, you can study how Magento handles and stores data on its data storage page[1]. There is a specific set of standard tables formed in the backend of a MySQL database depending on which fields you activate for usage after the website goes live. You no longer need to piece together such information from forums and blog posts you find on Google. Also, once you know how to navigate the folder structure and other backend features, Magento is much easier to configure to your requirements! Inventory management of your eCommerce store will be easier than ever. As another example, in the app/design/frontend subfolder, you will find all the custom themes that you download from theme providers like Theme Forest. You can easily connect these to the Magento interface once you know your way around. Like many other content management systems, the Magento interface also uses the Model View Controller or MVC configuration. However, from a technical side, the primary feature is that it uses blocks and helper functions to move data across the website. The more experienced you are with developing websites using open-source platforms like Joomla or Drupal, the more accessible Magento will be for you to get started with. 2. Customizability Magento’s unbelievably powerful suite of features is its highest-rated perk. It has all the components of a fully functional eCommerce website rolled into one: Magento extensions and configurations (although requiring advanced technical skills) also provide enormous flexibility to customize your Magento store to your heart’s content. In addition, you can check out the Magento marketplace to find thousands of extensions[2] for your store. If the goal is simplicity or pushing a shop out as soon as possible, easier-to-use platforms, like Shopify, may be the best course of action. But even with more intuitive eCommerce solutions and frameworks sprouting like daisies left and right, Magento is the best choice if you want a tried and tested framework with a massive track record, power in scalability, and flexibility in features. 3. Solid Website Management for Admins If you are a business owner or developer, you are not just limited to one digital storefront when doing admin work within a Magento store. You can have a multi-site setup where you can manage or be an admin on multiple Magento sites at the same time, in the same view. You can also add as many extensions as you want in the admin panel of any Magento-powered website. But you need to balance it with how much complexity you’ll be adding to the process of website management. Admin panel placement and design is one of the most prominent guidelines in Adobe’s developer docs for best practices[3] of Magento, and it’s worth a read before you change anything. You can also proceed without adding a single Magento extension to customize the native admin panel. It’s already tailor-fitted perfectly for the successful operations management of a dynamic eCommerce business. There are specific views for customers, products, product catalogs, reports, dashboards, and other systems. 4. Powerful Business Intelligence for eCommerce Platforms Business intelligence is all the rage these days. As your store scales, the need for decent data channels and business intelligence grows. With Magento, you won’t miss out on any insights into your customers. A compelling feature of Magento is that it captures data on behavior that is specific to online shoppers and critical for your store’s conversions. For example, it is able to identify patterns in abandoned carts of customers who initially add items but leave the cart before the checkout and payment stages. It also provides data on customer segments. However, many industry-leading technology professionals are also recommending that customer segments can be replaced by algorithmic marketing and recommendation engines. With extensions on the Magento marketplace, you can unlock advanced functionality like this, which would otherwise be inaccessible on simpler platforms like Shopify. Without any modifications, even Magento’s native platform offers powerful business intelligence for online stores. Compared with other open-source software, you do not need to configure your reports and analytics to show critical dashboards with powerful marketing and sales reporting insights. However, if you are using a generic CMS that is not explicitly built as an eCommerce platform, you will have to code most of these reporting capabilities from scratch. Given that Magento connects seamlessly to most types of databases, you are also not limited to specific data visualization tools. You can use AWS Quicksight if Read More Read More

The post Magento Review (2024): Pros, Cons & Performance Tests first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—May 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 23 May 2022 11:58:21 +0000

Do you need to make the most of your second quarter? Stay on top of the SEO world with this month’s roundup of guides, case studies, and news items that you shouldn’t miss. First, you’ll pick up some new tricks from the month’s top guides. Some of SEO’s top minds will teach you how to build large amounts of backlinks quickly, and how to identify when your increased traffic is coming from spam. Next, the case studies will give you the data you need to make better decisions. You’ll learn what the numbers can tell you about link rot, header changes, and SEO aggregation. Finally, you’ll get the latest news. Discover why Google is getting discussed over their recent algorithm update, changes to featured snippets, visual search features, and a minor controversy over content. How I Built 5,660 Backlinks In 30 Days https://backlinko.com/reverse-outreach Brian Dean from Backlinko has some advice on how you can manage an amazing feat—building more than 5000 backlinks in a month. You’ll be introduced to a link-building technique that Brian refers to as “Reverse Outreach”. Brian claims it has significantly more potential to scale than other popular ways of attracting links, such as The Skyscraper technique. To pull it off, you’ll need to flip the script and build content that demands attention (and links) from authority sites. First, you’ll learn how to find what Brian calls “journalist keywords”. You can identify these keywords by using the People Also Ask Google search feature. Topics heavily associated with data-collection-related keywords (for example, topics such as “how many people use X) can point to journalists trying to collect information. Read the complete guide to discover how you can find journalist keywords, how you can build content that takes advantage of them, and where to get the data you need to say something worth quoting. A better backlink strategy can net you a lot more traffic. However, not all traffic gains are proof of success, as you’ll learn in the next guide. How To Identify Whether Your Increased Traffic Is Spam https://moz.com/blog/identify-traffic-spam Zoe Ashbridge of Moz has some ideas for how you can find out if a traffic spike is truly a cause for celebration. She’s devised a checklist that you can use to identify spammy traffic. You’ll learn how the following easily-accessible Google Analytics metrics can prove the presence of spam traffic. Throughout the guide, Zoe teaches you where to find these metrics, how to read them, and which readings suggest that you’re getting hit with spam. She closes with some additional advice on how you can take action against spam traffic. You’ll learn when it’s appropriate to request disavow actions against backlinks, and a method for filtering spam traffic before it starts affecting your data. That concludes the guides for this month, but the upcoming case studies have a lot more advice you can use. At Least 66.5% Of Links To Sites In The Last 9 Years Are Dead (Ahrefs Study On Link Rot) https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-rot-study/ Patrick Stox brings you this case study on link rot. Link rot is a term that describes the tendency of links to stop working overtime. Your links may stop working for many reasons, both intentional and unintentional. The study looks at more than 175 million different links tracked over nearly a decade. It has some insights that may improve your link-building planning over time. You’ll learn why links rot. For example, the study shows that almost half of all links rotted because they were “dropped”. A link is considered dropped when it falls out of the index. This happens when the pages hosting your links can no longer be crawled or indexed, or when the domain itself no longer exists. The full article lays out many other reasons your links can fail. You’ll discover why links can rot due to removal, crawl error, 301/302, and other causes. Now that you’re armed with some new knowledge on link building, let’s look at a different side of SEO. The next study examines a small on-page change that can drive a lot of clicks. SEO Split Test Result: Small H3 Change, Big Click Result https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-split-test-result-h3-header-tag/ Brian Moseley guides you through this split test that studies the impact of optimizing h3 titles. The study was performed on pages from a massive stock photo site. The SEMRush team hypothesized that changing the words (and intent) of a single generated h3 that appears across thousands of pages could increase the clicks driven to the test pages. 3,500 photo and image pages were selected and sorted into variant and control groups. The variant group had the h3 that pointed to additional searches changed from “related tags” to “related photo searches”. The variant pages received 30% more clicks over the life of the study than the control group. While this exact change may not be relevant to many sites, it’s a good reminder that simple SEO fundamentals—even on lowly h3s—can still have a deep impact. If you’re looking for some grander SEO ideas, the next case study has just what you need. It looks at how Uber Eats became an online juggernaut with SEO. Uber Eats: SEO Aggregation Case Study https://www.kevin-indig.com/ubereats-scaling-seo-with/ Kevin Indig brings you this detailed look at how Uber Eats surpassed the value of its parent service (Uber) by positioning itself as an SEO aggregator. As Kevin reminds you, aggregators are sites that drive traffic with (often user-generated) inventory and details. For UberEats, the menu listings, pictures, and descriptions generated by the merchants they partnered with became a powerful traffic driver. You’ll find out how the fledgling service was able to use content marketing and other strategies to cover a huge range of keywords. They could easily generate content like “best [type of food] near [city]” and simply link to their top-reviewed merchants for that region. Merchants also filled their UberEats pages with as much content as possible to drive delivery orders. UberEats was able to rank in many areas just on the power of the merchant-provided content. Check out the full case study to learn more about how UberEats mastered being an aggregator, and how their war with services like Doordash is playing out in the smallest SEO details. That covers our case studies for the month. Next, you’ll get the month’s biggest headlines, starting with a look at the latest algorithm update. Larger Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On April 20th & 21st https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-on-april-20th-33292.html Barry Schwartz brings you this quick look at a Google Update that rolled out near the end of April. Tracking tools such as SEMRush, RankRanger, and MozCast detected high volatility from the point the update began on the 20th, and continued through the 21st. You’ll find some speculation that this is a continuing part of the March Product review update that ended officially on April 11th. Google may be still working on finetuning that large set of changes. Whatever Google is doing, they are not ready to announce it. They still have not confirmed the update or offered any details of what it might be about. Google has been more forthcoming about some of the other big changes and updates this month. Next, you’ll find out what’s coming for featured snippets. Google Tests Big Changes To Featured Snippets https://searchengineland.com/google-featured-snnippet-test-from-the-web-other-sites-say-383702 Danny Goodwin brings you this look at two new featured snippets that are now appearing in a limited number of SERPs. The new snippets are “From the Web” and “Other Sites Say” “From the Web” snippets appear to feature links and websites from up to 3 other websites. It seems to be used in cases where there are differences of opinion, and Google wants to avoid appearing to endorse one opinion. For example, this snippet appears at the top of searches for reviews. The chosen snippet is given a paragraph, and in the new “From the Web” snippet section, competing voices are given a sentence. “Other Sites Say” snippets seem to appear in searches for factual information, and serve to provide additional facts that may not appear in other results. For example, this snippet appears on top of searches for “benefits of carrots”. The main snippet discusses cholesterol benefits, while the “Other Sites Say” snippets provide additional links dealing with blood sugar control and hypertension. These features offer additional opportunities for you to claim snippets even if there’s already one in place. Next, you’ll learn how Google offers you an entirely new way to search. Google Now Lets You Search For Things You Can’t Describe — By Starting With A Picture https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/7/23014141/google-lens-multisearch-android-ios Sean Hollister brings you this look at a new beta search feature in the US that may someday have serious implications for SEO. The new feature lets you drag a picture into a search bar, and then apply notes that find similar items according to your keywords. For example, imagine you find some shoes you like, but they’re in the wrong color. Using this feature, you can take a picture of the existing shoe, and add the search “in red”. This search Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup—May 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

SEO for Online Reputation Management: 2024’s Best Strategies

Matt Diggity — Mon, 09 May 2022 12:04:35 +0000

In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how to take control of the SERP for brand searches, with super easy (and cheap!) techniques that my grandma could do in a spare Sunday afternoon. We’re talking about online reputation management (ORM): the process of pushing negative search results down off page 1. Imagine this scenario: You’re a politician that recently got smeared for a big mess up. You want that negative online reputation to go away. This is where a company’s online reputation management SEO comes into play. Over the years, my agency The Search Initiative, has performed dozens of Online Reputation Management campaigns for our clients. I’m about to share the key essentials from these campaigns. You’re about to learn: Quick Summary Why Is Online Reputation Management So Important? Online Reputation Management is so important because it controls the reputation of your personal brand via the page (or pages) that rank on your brand’s search terms, aka keywords. The easiest way for a user to decide if they want to trust a brand is with a Google search. If someone Google’s “Diggity Marketing” or “Matt Diggity”, I want good things coming up on page 1. Whether your client is an online retailer with a bad news story ranking high or you have a new info product that’s losing branded search traffic (and control) to affiliates; being able to control what shows up on page 1 is massively beneficial. ORM can also be a very attractive skill set to future clients and employers, or even have a dedicated Online Reputation Management service. In this post, I’ll be taking you through my sure-fire system to gain (or regain) control of any brand’s online reputation, using a mixture of real brand marketing and parasite Search Engine Optimization. Parasite SEO was a term created in the early 2000s by Eli, the founder of the now defunct Blue Hat SEO blog. Eli’s definition of parasite SEO still stands true to this day: Using large, authoritative websites to build pages that allow you to “hijack” the root domains ranking signals. It’s truer than ever that Google favors large, authoritative websites. In fact, Google gives them certain leeway in terms of techniques they can get away with using. As you have seen throughout the last 12 months of updates, Google’s algorithms are moving more and more towards authority and thus, authoritative websites. This means our job of doing Online Reputation Management is easier. Techniques for Powerful Reputation Management with SEO These are the core techniques that I use to boost my site’s own ranking signals as well as give users a clear idea about what my brand’s about. While there are other ways to do ORM within the SEO spectrum, these are by far the simplest and most effective techniques available to us. And I’ve tested a lot of them. Boost Your Existing Rankings The easiest and totally free way to start cleaning up your brand’s reputation is by boosting your site and its appeal within the SERPs – Having a knowledge graph, sitelinks and multiple additional positive pages, reviews or posts ranking sends huge trust signals to users. Optimizing Your Site’s Entity Google will associate keywords with your branding if you build a compelling enough case for it to do so. For example, DiggityMarketing.com’s brand is “Diggity Marketing”, not “Matt Diggity”. But Google will still give me a sitelink pack when you search for “Matt Diggity”. When you’re optimizing your brand’s SERP, you want to first create as strong an entity stack around your brand’s keyword/s on your own website as possible. There are a few ways you can do this: Your pillow links such as social profiles and citations also play a big role in authenticating your website and its surrounding details – This is especially true for local sites and local SEOs looking to optimize a site’s GMB rankings using NAP. Optimizing Your GMB One of the easiest ways to get instantaneous trust signals to a user is by (first creating and then) optimizing your GMB to automatically insert a knowledge graph that authenticates the business as real in the user’s eyes. Protip: I’ve been building GMB’s and sending citations even for affiliate sites as a trust factor. Consistent citations can also have a major role in optimizing your GMB, but that’s another guide for another time. GMB Reviews Google will always display their review stars the highest on the page for a business branded search query than any other site or that site’s schema element. This means Google’s reviews (Which can arguably impact your GMB rankings[1]) are the most important trust signal to be sent to a user, and thus the ones you want to be optimizing for the most. It’s against the GMB guidelines to offer anything in return for a review but having an active email list or social media marketing accounts with engaged customers can provide a handful of positive reviews in a very short amount of time if you catch my drift. As a side note, just because it’s against the guidelines doesn’t mean that you can’t buy them. You didn’t hear that from me though. How To Remove Negative Reviews Just because you (or your client) has gotten a negative review on Yelp or TripAdvisor, it doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. Every website has its own unique process and system and appeal process. The support staff of these sorts of websites tends to be more sympathetic if you give evidence of the reviewer leaving multiple negative reviews within a short timeframe. Identifying the Review & Asking For its Removal As I said, every website has its own unique process, but most of them will be some form of ticket or contact support form with or without an upload feature to give additional evidence. Once you have the way of how to report the review, you need to give the company hosting said review a good enough reason to remove it. Most of these won’t require you to do any further digging yourself, but if you do almost all sites will only ask you to do it both on their website and physically within your own books/receipts. Unfortunately, if the review doesn’t break any of these additional rules then it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to remove it. Thankfully, there is always another tactic you can employ to knock it out the SERPs. Blanket Page 1 And Push Down Negative Pages Unless you’re some sort of super hacker, you’re unlikely to find a member of staff that’ll willingly remove a negative review on a site unless you’re paying to be listed on there in the first place – And even then you’ll still run into a bunch of restrictions and headaches. The easiest way to get negative pages knocked out the SERP for your brand is by putting stronger pages that you have control over and above them. Luckily, there are a bunch of authoritative websites out there that allow you to create totally free pages that can rank well for our brand’s name. Social Profiles are the Easiest SERP Control Associating social media accounts with a brand’s entity is one of the easiest jobs an SEO has. The root authority of huge social media marketing websites like Facebook, Twitter & YouTube makes for easy rankings without having to utilize links in most cases, or at least not a huge number of them anyway. If you look at my own SERP, you’ll note that the raw authority of my social media presence outweighs any interview, podcast, or guest posts on much lower authority domains than my own – Even though most of these profiles don’t have any readable content for Google to understand they’re linked to my brand, the brand association and root authority of the domains are high enough to rank them above pieces with 1,000+ words of content. Just make sure you’re consistent with your branding used on each profile, and the URL you’ve created around them and if you’re consistently posting on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram then you can even start getting additional feed elements in the SERPs from those sites which take recent posts and put them in a SERP block. Getting A Video Carousel Google’s use of video carousels within the SERPs worries some brands[4]. Its prominence can take up multiple organic positions on desktop but it can also be used to great effect when you’re trying to knock content down for your own brand terms, by re-optimizing existing videos or creating new video content with the brand’s keyword featuring within the first 50 characters of the video’s title. You’ll want a minimum of 3 videos optimized around your branding or you won’t even be able to get a carousel. Ideally, I’d go for 5, and they don’t need to be anything special nor have a huge view count for this to work. Google will normally feature the channel trailer video (If you have set one) first in the carousel if Read More Read More

The post SEO for Online Reputation Management: 2024’s Best Strategies first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – April 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 10:12:45 +0000

Don’t miss this roundup if you like to stay competitive. Google has released a slew of updates and new features you’ll need to know about to get ahead. You can get caught up with this month’s top guides, case studies, and news items. The guides this month will teach you how Google docs can help write your meta descriptions, how to get started in machine learning, and how to make use of new analytics and search features. Next, you’ll get caught up on the latest SEO studies. You’ll discover how Google’s approach to title rewrites has changed over the long term, today’s top SEO trends, and the SEO benefits of going public. At the end, you’ll find the news you need to plan your next big moves. You’ll get the latest about the product review update, the new “trust” update, and some interesting new facts about Google’s approach. Google Docs Can Write Your Meta Descriptions https://searchengineland.com/google-docs-can-write-your-meta-descriptions-383257 In this short guide, Danny Goodwin shows you an easy way to generate effective meta descriptions using only GDocs. This strategy can help you develop a lot of titles quickly. Using the auto-generated summaries can also give you insights into how Google interprets a page and what it expects to see in your meta descriptions. To use this method, you’ll need the content summary generator that Google released for business customers beginning in March 2022. Danny teaches you how to get these summaries, spot problems, and use the clues they give you to craft great descriptions. Taking advantage of Google’s machine-learning tools can help you quickly generate tons of well-targeted descriptions. In the next guide, you’ll learn how to use machine learning to accomplish many other SEO tasks. Getting Started In Machine Learning With Lazarina Stoy https://www.rankranger.com/blog/machine-learning-seo You’ll learn what it means to fully implement machine learning into your SEO in this interview with Lazarina Stoy by The In Search SEO Podcast. Lazarina starts by helping you get through some roadblocks that can get in the way of adopting machine learning solutions. You’ll be introduced to some of the limiting beliefs that can stop you from adopting these tools, and learn how to evolve your thinking. Further into the interview, you’ll learn how to identify situations where machine learning can provide the most value. You’ll also get some tips on scrutinizing the output from any new machine learning efforts. Gaining experience with these new tools now can make you formidable down the road. Of course, even some old and familiar tools can introduce new uses. The following guide will help you use some of the latest tools in Google Analytics 4. 10 Of My Favorite NEW Things You Can Do With Google Analytics 4 (Thread) https://twitter.com/CharlesFarina/status/1506044840282271745 Charles Farina shows you some exciting new things you can do after the latest GA4 update in this detailed Twitter thread. He takes you through his ten favorite changes, which may include some you’ve missed. You’ll learn how the tool can now more effectively handle audience conversions, time measurements, funnels, debugging, and other important tasks. Most of the points include image references you can use to find these new functions in your own dashboard. It’s always nice to have information you can use right away. However, if you like to be ahead of the game, our final guide gives you some analysis of what may happen next with Google Discover. What Discover’s “More Recommendations”, Journeys In Chrome, And MUM Mean For The Future Of Google Search https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-search-future-discover-journeys-mum/ Glenn Gabe looks at how Google’s capabilities are growing with Discover’s search assistant. You’ll be taken through his analysis of what’s being tested on as many as a billion users right now. Then, you’ll learn what it may mean for your SEO efforts in the future. The guide gives you a deep introduction to some of the features in testing on Discover. You’ll learn about More Recommendations, a feature that takes searchers to a task dashboard with hundreds of new guiding options. You’ll also learn how features like Collections and Journeys are speeding searchers through tailored paths to the information they want. Glenn closes with some insights into where Google might be taking you in the future. He argues that you’ll need to be ready to adapt to these changes by studying the sites currently being promoted for searches in the new features. That closes the guides for this month. In the first case study below, you’ll learn more about the long-term effects of title tag rewrites. Title Tag Rewrites: 7 Months Later https://moz.com/blog/title-tag-rewrites-7-months-later Dr. Peter J. Meyers brings you this review of Google’s enforced title changes several months later. These changes inspired some backlash from the SEO community and led to Google promising a lighter hand. Dr. Meyers takes you through the data that tells you how their approach changed (and if it did). You’ll get this insight through a measure of more than 10,000 titles that were isolated and tracked to determine how Google’s approach to your titles has changed. The tracked changes are organized into categories to help you understand which of your titles are at risk. Dr. Meyers also offers an analysis on Google’s promises. The numbers suggest that Google didn’t change much after the initial public outcry. As many as 50% or more of your titles are likely to be changed. You should plan accordingly. The following data piece may also help you with your future planning. It looks at some of the biggest trends in digital marketing to help you understand where the industry is moving next. Top Digital Marketing Trends For 2022: Oracle Survey Results https://www.searchenginejournal.com/digital-marketing-trends-oracle/443718/ Miranda Miller brings you this look at the top trends in SEO. These insights come from a mass survey of nearly 1000 SEOs involved in leadership and management roles. You’ll learn what these top professionals think about: The study closes with various other statistics you can use to get a jump on your future planning. You’ll learn about how tech stacks, data insights, and the mood of the professional overall. These results could help you align your practices with the best SEO agencies. If you’re already at the front of the pack, you may care more about big next steps like going public. The final case study can reveal how that will affect your SEO. 4 SEO Benefits Of Going Public (A Unique Study) https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-benefits-of-going-public/ Michal Pecánek brings you this look at how going public affects your SEO. As he points out, this can be a massive boon for your business. You can often get a flood of linked and unlinked media mentions across high-traffic investment, stock, and business sites. You’ll learn how Michal thinks you can best take advantage of this event and what the data says about how it played out in the past. In particular, you’ll learn what types of pages get attention, how the knowledge graph changes, and whether going public may be considered a ranking signal on its own. That concludes the case studies for the month. Next, you’ll get the most notable headlines in SEO, starting with the most recent product review update. Latest Product Review Update https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1506668262540513283 Google directly provides you with this announcement about their product review updates. They claim that the latest changes are designed to ensure reviews come from people with first-hand knowledge. Along with this announcement, they provide you with some updated guidance on how you should present the reviews on your site. While you may find these tips helpful, the updates mostly reinforce the existing best practices. I did my own inspection, and it appears no new criteria were added. You should be fine if you were already following my recommendations from previous updates. Catch up here: This isn’t the only trust-based change Google was making this month. Next in the news, you’ll be learning about Google’s new highly-cited feature. Check The Facts With These Google Features (New “Highly Cited” Trust Label) https://blog.google/products/news/fact-checking-misinformation-google-features/ Google has announced that your content may now be eligible for new “highly-cited” trust labels that are being tested in SERPs. The label is intended to apply to searches that deal with important factual information. The label may appear when a guide, research paper, or other resource is frequently linked by other authoritative sites covering the same topic. This feature could have serious consequences if you deal with YMYL certification. Now, searchers will be able to rapidly scan results to see which ones are qualified as credible. You should only be seeing the effects of this test in English results for the time being. Google has not announced when the changes will begin affecting results. If you’re hungry for even more Google news, they released some key facts about their operations during a spotlight on Danny Sullivan’s career. Google: We Reduced Irrelevant Search Results By 50% & Made 5,000 Changes In 2021 https://www.seroundtable.com/google-reduced-irrelevant-search-results-by-50-in-seven-years-33135.html Barry Schwartz brings you some interesting tidbits from Google’s look back on Danny Sullivan’s career as their Public Liaison for Search. Their profile on his work for the Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – April 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Doubling Organic Traffic (YMYL SEO Case Study)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 05:01:57 +0000

Over the past few years, Google has focused on ranking pages based on the authority, relevance and trust conveyed by a website’s content and backlinks. That being said, increasing a website’s authority, relevance and trust has become more difficult than ever before. If you have concerns that your site is falling behind your competition when it comes to these three factors, you’ll want to follow the steps outlined in this case study. Below, you’ll find how my team at The Search Initiative more than doubled our client’s organic traffic. You’ll learn how to: But, before you implement the strategy used, it’s important you know the site’s background, goals, and the main challenges that you’ll need to overcome as well. The Challenge The primary goal for this campaign was to increase the traffic from non-branded search terms (i.e. keywords that don’t include your brand name in them). Considering that the client is an independent insurance broker targeting the UK market, one of the biggest challenges we faced was the fact that the search volumes for many keywords in this niche are extremely low. After all, most people tend to search for their life insurance only once in their life. However, what we quickly identified is that despite the low search volumes, the revenue potential for each visitor could be substantial. As a YMYL (Your Money Your Life) website, the client’s site was lacking in E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trust), which is extremely important if you want to rank. We focused on building more E-A-T by optimizing the content on the site with text that established the client as a trustworthy source of information. We also added informational content, specifically FAQs, to the client’s website to increase their chances of ranking for featured snippets. The final piece of the puzzle was to build the site’s authority with a competitor-based link-building strategy. While E-A-T is essential for YMYL niches, it’s also an important factor for all websites that are looking to stay ahead of the competition. Below, you’ll find out, step-by-step, how to achieve these results so you can replicate them on your own websites. Optimizing For E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trustworthiness) If the content on your website could potentially impact a person’s happiness, health, financial stability, or safety – then it qualifies for Your Money Your Life (YMYL). In August 2018, Google introduced a new set of guidelines for it’s third-party Quality Raters (QRs) (QRs are real humans who check the quality of web pages) to measure the expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (aka E-A-T) of a site. The guidelines outline certain signals that the raters should look out for based on characteristics of the content along with other ranking signals like backlinks, performance etc. In the case of this client, we needed to establish E-A-T within the insurance market so that Google and readers could see that the information provided was written by a credible source, from a respected firm. What does E-A-T actually mean though? Let’s break it down: There are certain steps that you can take to earn the trust of both Google and your visitors. Take a look at some ways that you can optimize your website for E-A-T. Building Authorship Including information about who’s responsible for the content on your website is crucial for building authorship. Why? Because it’s something that Google specifically asks its QRs to find. Adding author information, like a short description and links to other online profiles, helps to raise your author’s (and your website’s) expert status. This helps Google (and your readers) see that the information that you’re providing is written by a credible, trustworthy source. For example, if an author is visible on other authoritative pages within your niche (or their own social media channels), where they post (high-quality) content, then mentions or direct links from those sources can be beneficial for improving your website’s E-A-T. Here are some tips to help build more authorship on your website: Here’s an example of the About page from What Hi-Fi: Following the above steps makes it easier for both your readers and Google to establish the content creator’s E-A-T. Adding Contact Information User experience and transparency are important factors that Google considers when looking at E-A-T. You should make it as easy as possible for your visitors to get in touch with you. Here are some tips on how to do this: This includes contact information such as your address (if you have one), email address, telephone number, etc on your website. Here’s an example from the TSI website, where we’ve included our contact information in the footer of each page. A Positive Reputation According to Google, a positive reputation is one of the characteristics of “high-quality content”. Google instructs its quality raters to conduct “reputation research”. In other words, what people say about your business or brand online, matters. Google is trying to calculate the overall public sentiment for your brand and website. The odd negative review of a product or service isn’t going to hurt you – Google acknowledges that no website will have a perfect set of purely positive reviews. But if, for example, a particular product is receiving mostly negative reviews, or your brand is being talked about negatively in the press – then this is likely going to affect Google’s assessment of the quality of your website. You can’t control what people say or write about you, but you can monitor it. For example, you can set up a Google Alert to notify you when there are new mentions of your brand (or individuals from your website) online. Learn more about how Google perceives reputation here and find out how to manage your online reputation in the video below. Building Topical Authority Topical Authority is all about a website’s perceived authority within a particular niche or subject. This signals to Google that you have a deeper understanding of your subject matter and therefore, can be trusted. Having strong Topical Authority is vital if you’re looking to improve your E-A-T and, as a result, rank in the SERPs. To build Topical Authority, you need to create content that showcases your knowledge across every aspect of your niche. In our client’s case, this was insurance. Look at how your website’s content compares to that of the competition – i.e. identify information that is missing from your website but is included in your competitor’s sites. It’s important to remember to cover all bases of the user’s journey. For example, a Law firm will have service pages that target specific commercial keywords like “personal injury lawyer london”. But to build Topical Authority, you’ll also want to target informational keywords that help support these pages e.g. “what is personal injury law”. You now have a list of relevant keywords that you can create content around to further expand your site’s Topical Authority. To find out more about Topical Authority, watch this interview with Koray Tugberk. Reviewing & Updating Old Content As “freshness” is one of the ways Google judges the quality of content, regularly updating older content is a good way to get back on the search radar. Doing so can give you a ranking boost and subsequently increase traffic. This is especially important for YMYL sites (it’s specifically mentioned in Google’s guidelines – see below), or for time-sensitive content where facts, regulations, etc may change over time. For example, if you have a website where you review the latest turntables, you should avoid having articles like “Top 10 Turntables Under $500 for ”, as Google and your readers will see that it’s out of date. For this example, one way to identify outdated pages is by using a site search like this: site:yourdomain.com intitle:2021 Note: you can replace ‘2021’ with any year In the example below, you can see that the site’s page title includes 2021 instead of 2022. You should also update the “post-last-modified” date to be as recent as possible. If your website primarily contains informational content, it’s important to make sure that you regularly review it to ensure that it’s as up-to-date as possible. Content Optimization: Dealing With FAQs Regardless of what kind of website you have, you’ll likely need to rank for informational keywords. For example: Many informational keywords tend to be posed as questions – which means that you can add valuable content to your website to answer queries that users may have about what you’re covering. Below, you’ll find out how to find FAQ keywords to target, how to optimize them to increase your chances of appearing as a featured snippet, and how to use structured data to markup your FAQs. How To Find FAQs Here are three simple ways to find FAQ related keywords to target on your website: People Also Ask To find potential FAQs using People Also Ask: Related Searches To find potential FAQs using Related Searches, scroll down to the bottom of the search results page to find Related Searches. Google presents these related searches to help searchers find more information that is related to their original Read More Read More

The post Doubling Organic Traffic (YMYL SEO Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – March 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 13:18:10 +0000

March is filled with a surprising number of changes for SEO. Don’t miss this roundup if you like to stay ahead of the pack. First, you’ll learn some new skills from the top guides. You’ll find out why traffic matters for links, what to do when rich snippets steal your clicks, how to pick Google search entities, and why score data can lead to bad decisions. Next, you’ll get some data you can put to use from the newest studies. You’ll learn the results of a split test with substantial implications for how you should structure your titles. You’ll also find out why you may have recently lost a favicon. Finally, you’ll get up-to-date with insights into Google’s latest AI announcement, the status of the Core Web Vitals update for desktops, and the newly-released results from the Pirate Update. Why Traffic Matters For Links In 2022 https://authority.builders/blog/why-does-traffic-matter-for-links/ Are your links being ignored lately? You may find some answers in my most recent post. You’ll get a history of how the value of a backlink has changed and learn what it takes to get the most out of links right now. The guide covers what you need to know about the relationship between traffic and ranking—namely, traffic is a more important factor than it has been in the past. You’ll find research demonstrating the value of traffic and some rules you can use to analyze links. After the theory, you’ll get some step-by-step instructions that can help you find links that move the needle on your site’s rankings. The steps cover identifying links with traffic and estimating the value of the link opportunities you find. The right links can take a page to the top, but even a #1 ranking page may lose clicks to a snippet. Next, you’ll learn what to do when this happens. What To Do When Rich Snippets Steal Your Clicks https://ipullrank.com/rich-snippets-steal-your-clicks John Murch provides this look at how you can respond when a rich snippet starts stealing the clicks you need. As he points out, this can happen even when you hold the top position. In this guide, you’ll learn a series of steps you can take to seize back your clicks. You won’t need a lot of technical knowledge to pull these off. In most cases, it’s a matter of learning how to analyze your content to identify why you’re losing out. You’ll also figure out how to evaluate the intent of your keywords, find more opportunities for structured markup, and leverage the power of “people also ask” features to reclaim lost clicks. At the end, you’ll find some additional tips on building your next content piece to capture featured snippets from the start. One key to claiming more clicks is understanding where your content fits on the knowledge graph. Our next piece looks at learning more about how your topics fit and achieve topical relevance. GSC SEO: Picking Google Search Entities https://www.rankranger.com/blog/google-search-console-entities#tw Darrell Mordecai brings you this detailed look at identifying Google entities and using them to maximize your SEO. You’ll get a quick introduction to entities if you aren’t familiar with the concept. In very simple terms, entities are known quantities that Google uses to verify and interpret other information. These entities are mapped across the knowledge graph. Darren explains how you can use Google Search Console to find entities and build a network of content that covers all the correct information for topical relevance. He breaks down how you can achieve this by improving pages or creating supporting content. He also includes instructions you can use for tracking your new queries over time, a step he argues is essential if you want to be able to scale your results. While you’re planning content for the future, you may want to think closely about how you’re using the data you have. The following guide warns even experienced SEOs about the risks of making the wrong decisions from data. Why Domain Authority (Moz), Authority Score (Semrush) And Domain Rating (Ahrefs) Can Lead To Wrong Decisions https://www.sistrix.com/blog/why-domain-authority-moz-authority-score-semrush-and-domain-rating-ahrefs-can-lead-to-wrong-decisions/ Johannes Beus wants to warn you that there are some pitfalls to using scores such as Domain Authority or Domain rating to decide the viability of any campaign. Google doesn’t have a complete picture of the internet. It draws only from what it can (or will) crawl and, even then, only assesses a portion of that data for ranking purposes. All of the major tools that provide scores are stuck drawing from an even smaller pool, and they can’t be sure they’ve covered the same territory as Google. They also aren’t connected to the Google ecosystem and, therefore, can’t really predict when or if links will be evaluated. The full piece includes further analysis and examples you can use to understand the limits of SEO scoring systems. This isn’t to argue that these scores aren’t useful or even essential in some cases, but you should understand how much risk of error to calculate into your strategies. That covers the guides for this month. Next, you’ll get to see some data from a couple of case studies starting with a look at whether sentence case or title case delivers better SEO results. SEO Split Test Result: Should You Sentence Case Or Title Case Your Title Tags? https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-split-test-result-should-you-sentence-case-or-title-sase-your-title-tags-/ Brian Moseley brings you the next in a running series of SEO split tests that cover getting the most juice out of different elements of your SEO. This one examines whether title case (capitalizing every word) or sentence case (capitalizing only the first word) delivers an edge for your Title Tags. The study was performed using a site where all pages were currently in title case. 70 pages were divided into variant and control groups. The variant pages were all switched to sentence case, and the results were tracked to determine the impact on clickthrough rates. The effects of the study were nearly immediate. The variant pages experienced drops in traffic that went beyond predictions. The loss wasn’t attributable to the pages losing rank because of the changes. It was clear that the change was having an impact at the point of clicking-through. The full study describes the motivations, methodology, and results of the study in great detail. It could be a valuable read for you if you’re planning out the style rules for your next big content project. While we’re on the subject of making an impression on the SERPs page, you may have lost a favicon recently. Our next item examines the reasons that can happen. Favi-gone: 5 Reasons Why Your Favicon Disappeared From The Google Search Results [Case Studies] https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/favicon-problems-google-search/ Glenn Gabe has some ideas for you if you have recently lost a favicon or seen it replaced with a less-appealing generic option. Unfortunately, there are many reasons that this can happen, and you may have to troubleshoot your problem one issue at a time. This article can help you do both. Throughout the piece, you’ll learn some of the most common causes of this problem, including: For each of the causes, Glenn provides you with some background on the problem and what steps you can take to fix it. He closes the article with some additional advice on creating and submitting favicons that will be less prone to disruption in the future. That closes out the studies for the month. Next, there are some SEO news headlines that you shouldn’t miss if you like to stay informed. First is a breakdown of Google’s recent blog post about using AI. Google’s Blog Post On How AI Powers Search Results And What It Means For SEO https://www.mariehaynes.com/google-ai-and-seo/ Marie Haynes provides you with this SEO-centered analysis of Google’s recent writeup on AI by Google Fellow and Vice President of Search, Pandu Nayak. In it, you’ll learn more about how Google is using AI than we’ve been allowed to know in the past. Marie dove into what was said in the release to pull out some critical implications for SEOs. Marie breaks down the statement from Google, and highlights the excerpts that may have the most impact on you as an SEO. She also calls on some background information and experts to cover: She also examines the meaning of Google’s increasing emphasis on high-quality product pages, and closes on some predictions of where SEO goes from here. It’s a highly in-depth analysis that should appeal to you if you care about future-proofing your SEO efforts. Speaking of readiness, you should be ready for the full rollout of the page experience update. It’s finally coming to desktops. Page Experience Update Rolling Out For Desktop Searches https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/11/bringing-page-experience-to-desktop Google’s new page experience update was announced to be rolling out around the end of 2021 and will have some significant implications for you if your sites aren’t ready. As Google clarifies in this release, this is the same page experience update that was already rolled out for mobile devices. The update applies the Core Web Vitals scores to all desktop rankings. That means you’ll need to Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – March 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How Much Money Do Bloggers Make? The Truth About Blogging

Matt Diggity — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 08:06:53 +0000

As a seasoned blogger and digital marketing expert, I can attest to the immense earning potential within the blogging sphere. Bloggers’ incomes can span a broad spectrum, ranging from a modest few hundred dollars to astonishing millions per year. On average, a diligent blogger can earn approximately $3,137 per month. However, the most proficient bloggers boast monthly earnings exceeding $100,000. These impressive figures hinge on factors such as the blog’s niche, traffic volume, and monetization strategies. In this comprehensive guide, we will demystify the process of earning money through blogging, analyze the income potential of bloggers, and provide actionable insights on launching a thriving blog. Additionally, we will evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of pursuing a blogging career, empowering you to make an informed decision about your online endeavor. How Do Blogs Make Money? 1. Affiliate Deals Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways for many bloggers to make money. Essentially, affiliate marketing is a commission-based system where you (the blogger) recommend products or services to your readers, and if they purchase those products or services through your affiliate link, you earn a commission. For example, let’s say you have a blog about fashion. You could sign up for an affiliate program with a clothing retailer and promote their products on your blog. If one of your readers clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you will earn a commission from the sale. The commission rates for affiliate programs vary widely, depending on the niche, the retailer, and the specific product or service being promoted. In general, however, most affiliate programs will pay out between 2 and 50 percent of the sale price. So, if you recommend a $100 dress on your blog and someone purchases it through your affiliate link, you would earn anywhere from $2 to $50 from the sale. 2. Ads Another popular way for bloggers to monetize their blogs is through display advertising. Display advertising is when you allow companies to place ads on your blog. These ads can be in the form of banner ads, text links, or even product recommendations. Typically, you will be paid based on either a per-click or per-impression basis. For example, you may be paid $0.5 for every time someone clicks on an ad or $5 for every 1000 times an ad is displayed on your WordPress blog. So, if you have a lot of traffic to your blog, you can potentially make quite a bit of money from display advertising. Of course, the amount of money you can make from Google AdSense will also depend on the niche of your blog and the quality of your traffic. For example, a blog about bodybuilding is likely to generate more blogging income from google ads than a blog about baking because the bodybuilding niche is much more expensive and there are many more products to promote. Additionally, a blog with 100,000 unique visitors per month is going to generate more income from ads than a blog with 1000 unique visitors per month, even if they are in the same niche. This is because advertisers are willing to pay more for exposure to a larger audience. 3. Sponsored Posts Sponsored content is when a company pays you to promote their product or service on your blog. This can take the form of a review, an interview, or even just a simple mention in a post. For example, let’s say you have a blog about pet supplies. A pet food company may reach out to you and offer to pay you to write a review of their new product. If you agree, you would then write a blog post about pet food and include a link to the company’s website. Sponsored content can be a great way to make more money because you are essentially being paid to promote a product or service that you are already talking about on your blog. You can also sell backlinks within the sponsored content. A backlink is when you include a link to other blogs in your post. For example, if you have a blog about search engine optimization, you could sell a backlink to an SEO company. This link will help them rank higher on Google, and they will pay you for the privilege. The amount of money you can make from sponsored content will depend on a number of factors, including the niche of your blog, the DR or authority of your blog, and the quality of your traffic. 4. Social Media Promotion Similar to posts that are sponsored, social media marketing is when a company pays you to promote their product or service on your social media accounts. This can be done by posting about the product on your account, or by running a sponsored ad. For example, let’s say you have a blog about pet supplies and you also have an Instagram account with 10,000 followers. A pet food company may reach out to you and offer to pay you to post a photo of their new product on your Instagram account. If you agree, you would then post a photo of the pet food on your Instagram, and include a link to the company’s website in the caption. 5. Create Courses Or eBooks If you have a lot of knowledge about a particular topic, you can create online classes or eBooks and sell them on your blog. This is a great way to monetize your blog because you can sell these products over and over again. For example, let’s say you have a blog about graphic design. You could create a course teaching people how to use Photoshop, and sell it on your blog for $50. There is a lot of money to be made in creating online classes and eBooks, but it does require a lot of work and effort upfront. You will need to create the content, design the course or eBook, and then market it to your audience. And to be honest, not everyone is cut out for it. But if you are, it can be a great way to monetize your blog. 6. Consulting Another way to make more money from your blog is by offering consulting services. This can be done in a number of ways, but often involves helping people with a specific problem or teaching them how to do something. For example, let’s say you have a blog about SEO. You could offer consulting services to businesses who want help improving their ranking on Google. Or, you could offer coaching services to people who want to learn how to do SEO themselves. Consulting is a great way to make more money from your blog because you can often charge a premium for your services. This is because you are offering a service that is in high demand and that can help people achieve their goals. You can also work as a consultant for a company to help them with their blog or website. This can involve anything from teaching them how to use WordPress and how to improve their content strategy to giving them feedback on their website design or product. 7. Private 1 On 1 Coaching This is similar to consulting, but it is usually done on a more personal level. With private coaching, you are working with someone one-on-one to help them achieve a specific goal. This can be done in person, over the phone, or even through video chat. Private coaching is a great way to make money from your blog because you can charge a higher rate for your services. This is because you are offering a more personal service that is tailored to the needs of the individual. 8. Conference Speaking Speaking at conferences isn’t only a great way to get your name out there and to build credibility and network with more people in your industry – it can also be a great way to make money. Of course, you won’t get paid just to show up and speak – you need to be invited as a keynote speaker or panelist first. But, once you’ve been asked to speak at a conference, you can typically expect to receive a speaking fee as well as have your travel and accommodation covered. In some cases, you may also be able to sell products or services at the conference – which can further increase your earnings. 9. Book Deals If you’ve built up a large enough following, you may be able to score a book deal. While this won’t happen overnight, it is something that you can strive for if you want to make money from your blog. Book deals usually involve an advance, which is an upfront payment that you receive from the publisher. You will then earn royalties on each book sold. The amount of money you can make from a book deal will vary depending on the publisher, the type of book, and how many books are sold. 10. Freelance Writing Starting a blog Read More Read More

The post How Much Money Do Bloggers Make? The Truth About Blogging first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – February 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 13:02:50 +0000

If you want to keep your momentum going into the new year, you’ve come to the right place. Our February roundup includes the tips you need to stay on top. We’ll start with the case studies. First, you’ll learn how well PBNs work in foreign SEO. Then, you’ll discover one SEOs method for achieving 600%+ growth. Next, you will pick up some new skills from our top guides of the month. They’ll teach you how to reclaim keyword data that’s been lost, how to use better SEO formulas in Google sheets, how to extract core web vitals data, and how to keep paywalled content SEO compliant. At the end, we’ll cover the month’s can’t-miss news items for SEO. We have google announcements for you covering new robots tags, mobile search features, and manual penalties that are coming down. How Well Do PBNs Work In Foreign SEO? (A 2022 Study) https://rankclub.io/how-well-do-pbns-work-in-foreign-serps/ Rank Club brings us this comprehensive look at how PBNs work in the foreign SEO market. Using the data gathered from the study, the team sought to answer questions like: The study covers more than a dozen different countries, including both English-speaking and foreign language SERPs. The case study includes separate graphs for each of the covered countries. The team found that the tested PBNs achieved positive results in approximately 85% of cases. They also found that the PBNs take between 6-14 days to take effect. You’ll find additional insights in the full article, including some conclusions about the potential of PBN links. Next, we’ll cover how one SEO massively increased organic traffic through content changes. SEO Case Study: How I Increased My Organic Traffic 652% In 7 Days https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique-2-0 Brian Dean brings us this look at how he used the skyscraper technique to massively improve his organic traffic. The Skyscraper technique is a content strategy where you find the best, most linkable content in your niche and create content that improves on it. Brian applies this strategy to a single lagging page to determine its impact in this updated case study. He didn’t even need to create a new piece of content, just update an old one based on his research. The result of this strategy was that the content’s organic traffic improved by 652.17% in only a week. In addition to the data, Brian provides you with the step-by-step process he used to achieve these returns. The guide sections include some great advice—backed up by heat maps and other resources—on optimizing your content around user intent. Optimizing content takes good data. Unfortunately, some data is getting harder to find with the recent Google Analytics platform updates. Let’s jump into the guides, starting with looking at how you can reclaim data that’s been lost. ‘Not Provided’ In Google Analytics: How To Reclaim Your Keyword Data https://ahrefs.com/blog/not-provided/ Mateusz Makosiewicz of Ahrefs brings us this look at finding data that is currently marked as “not provided”. Google has covered up some keyword data to protect consumer privacy. However, this data is not totally gone. You can still analyze it and pull insights out of it. Mateusz discusses several other ways to source this data. First, he shows you how to set up Google Search Console to track and deliver the data you’re missing in monthly reports. He lists all the filters you’ll need to make this possible so you can set up the solution easily. Next, Mateusz covers some free downloadable tools to provide you with the missing information. The guide closes with some advice on putting the missing data to work in your SEO strategies. If you’re looking for better ways to analyze that data for SEO and content audits, the following guide will help. It covers some of the best formula shortcuts you can use to speed up your work. The Best Google Sheets Formulas For SEO & Content Audits https://shellshockuk.com/best-google-sheets-formulas-for-seo-content-audits/ Shelley Walsh brings us this compact guide on managing SEO data better with Google Sheets formulas. She covers a range of useful formulas, including ones that allow you to do all of the following to your existing data: One great thing about this guide is that you can put it into action right now just by copy-and-pasting. If you’ve been using outdated or simplified formulas to get your data in order, you can upgrade your entire sheet in a few minutes. If you’re looking to extract a specific type of data, our next guide may have what you need. It’s a zoomed-in look at how to get Core Web Vitals data from Google. 6 Core Web Vitals Extraction Methods For CrUX With Pros & Cons https://www.searchenginejournal.com/extracting-cwv-crux-seo/ Jose Hernando of SEJ brings us this look at how to extract core web vitals data. He starts with a quick lesson on how Google measures these signals and what kind of data will tell us whether we’re doing a good or bad job. The guide focuses on how to recover CrUX (Chrome UX) data. Fortunately, this data is not difficult to find and interpret. Jose takes you through the six sources you can use to find this data, including: For each one, he tells you what data is available and how you can access it with step-by-step instructions. For each one, he provides a pros and cons list so that you can tailor the source you use to your needs. In our final guide for the month, you’ll learn how to pull off an uncommon SEO skill—making paywalled content search compliant. (Thread) How To Be SEO Compliant If You Have Paywalled Content https://twitter.com/antoineripret/status/1483813748821405700 Antoine Eripret brings us this Twitter thread/guide on how to get credit for content that’s behind a paywall. The guide takes you through all the steps you’ll need to follow to ensure that the right crawlers can access your content. You’ll learn how to add the right markup, how to keep paywalled content safe from unauthorized users, and some troubleshooting steps you can take. He provides helpful examples from major newspapers like the New York Times and La Monde. You’ll get to see some of the techniques used by these sites to get the right results. There is some excellent discussion below the thread about different ways to make this work. That’s it for the guides. Next, we’ll look at the biggest news items for the month. Google Gives Sites More Indexing Control With New Robots Tag https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-indexifembedded-robots-tag/434396/ Matt Southern brings us this look at the new robots tag and some new features coming with it. As he details, this new tag will give you more control over which content gets indexed in search results. The new tag will override the noindex tag in situations where both are present. As an example, Matt points out that you can keep a whole URL out of results with a noindex tag, but apply the new tag to specific content sections. This will allow the sections you choose to be indexable when other websites embed them. This news story closes with some quick advice on how you can start testing the new tag on your own sites. Next, we’ll be looking at a new feature for mobile searches. New Google Mobile Search Feature: People Search Next https://searchengineland.com/google-people-search-next-mobile-search-feature-379370#.YfQRwPo6w7Q.twitter Danny Goodwin brings us this look at a new search feature coming to all mobile “near me” searches. It’s called “People Search Next” and provides searchers with quick links to common next searches. The feature is not replacing any others, so it will appear alongside the existing search features People also ask and People also search for. As Danny demonstrates, this feature is already appearing for many mobile searches. In some examples, it was placed above older features. Google has stated that the feature will expand beyond mobile “near me” searches but has not provided a timeline. The company has also not specified what SERPs are most likely to produce this feature. Publishers With Manual Actions For Discover & Google News https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalties-news-publishers-manual-actions-32842.html Barry Schwartz brings us this look at a series of manual action penalties applied to publishers active in Google Discover and Google News. The penalties landed throughout January and included all of the following violations: Barry illustrated the extent of these penalties with testimony from several major SEOs. Glenn Gabe and others experienced a wave of clients who needed help getting a penalty removed. Several examples of internal GSC notices are provided. These penalties only apply to Google Discover and Google News rankings. You probably have nothing to worry about if you’re not fighting in that space. If you are, now would be a great time to review the Google News policies. Come back for our next SEO news roundup to learn how to stay ahead of new penalties. We’ll keep you up-to-date with that and so much more. Got Questions or Comments? Join the discussion here on Facebook. If you want to keep your momentum going into the new year, you’ve come to the right place. Our February roundup includes the tips you need to stay on top. We’ll Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – February 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Hostgator Vs GoDaddy: 2024 Comparison [Backed By Data]

Matt Diggity — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 19:24:32 +0000

If you’re grappling with choosing between Hostgator and GoDaddy, two of the world’s most popular web hosting providers, you’re in good hands. As an experienced digital specialist, I’ve rolled up my sleeves and dived deep into both services. Although they rank among the top five globally, with GoDaddy leading at a 17% market share and Hostgator in fifth at 5.12% market share, popularity doesn’t always equal performance. That’s why I’ve put both services to the test, comparing over ten features and conducting performance trials. My comprehensive Hostgator vs GoDaddy analysis will provide you with clear insights to help make your decision a data-driven one. What Is Hostgator? Founded in 2002, Hostgator quickly made a name for itself in the hosting market. It has hosted over 2.5 million websites and operates with over 1,000 full-time staff. So it’s no surprise why Hostgator was acquired in 2012 by the Endurance International Group (EIG) for an aggregate purchase price of $299.8 million. What Is GoDaddy? Founded in 1997 in Arizona, GoDaddy also powers over 2.5 million websites. With 7000+ employees on its roster, GoDaddy is among the biggest hosting companies in the world. Now, you might be wondering whether there’s any difference between these services, given they both compete in the cheap web hosting space and offer budget solutions. Stick with us to the end for all the juicy details on how Hostgator and GoDaddy compare. Hostgator Vs GoDaddy: Web Hosting Plans Compared Let’s start this analysis by comparing the plans each company offers. All in all, Hostgator and GoDaddy are two of the most popular services because they offer affordable prices. The types of hosting plans offered by both Hostgator and GoDaddy are very similar. The best hosting plan for you will depend on what features you need in your web host. So let’s take a look at how their plans stack up against one another first before choosing outright which provider is right for you. 1. Shared Hosting When looking at Hostgator compared to GoDaddy pricing, first impressions can be deceiving. Both hosting providers offer cheap deals on the condition that you sign up for a 2-year or 3-year hosting plan. GoDaddy is using loss-lead pricing strategies. Just like Hostgator. They won’t make as much money from the initial sale but will win more customers by dropping their rates low enough to attract new clients. They recoup profits through upsells or renewals down the track. When doing your research, make sure you look beyond the initial deals available. Especially when it comes to how many years you need to sign up for to secure cheap monthly rates. That’s how you get a better sense of the total costs. Promotional Pricing Renewal Pricing Winner: Hostgator is a clear winner on shared hosting if the price is a concern for you. 2. WordPress Hosting Both GoDaddy and Hostgator offer managed WordPress hosting for small businesses and online stores. We’ll get into the features offered by each hosting company later in this article. For now, here’s how their WP hosting compares on price. Promotional Pricing Renewal Pricing Winner: Hostgator clearly comes out on top with regard to pricing for WP hosting too. 3. VPS & Dedicated Hosting Plans Now, we can’t compare dedicated and virtual private server hosting to shared hosting directly as they are quite different from each other. Make sure you read the fine print to know what type of server situation you’re getting into with your web host. A quick word about cloud hosting is also needed here, given Hostgator offers this and GoDaddy doesn’t. True cloud hosting offers dedicated servers and a stack of other customizable options. Hostgator’s cloud hosting services aren’t what would be considered “true” cloud services. They’re more like shared hosting on steroids. We’ve written more about this in our Hostgator vs SiteGround review. So for our purposes in this article, we won’t look into the cloud hosting option much further. VPS Hosting Winner: GoDaddy offers lower-priced VPS hosting than Hostgator. What’s more, there is an even cheaper tier starting at only $4.99/month for only 1GB of RAM. As far as renewal pricing goes, GoDaddy wins again since it allows customers to lock in the promotional price as the renewal price. The condition is that you must renew for another 3-year term. Concerning resources, GoDaddy and Hostgator have somewhat comparable plans regarding RAM capacity and the number of CPUs offered. However, Hostgator consistently offers more SSD storage. Even if SSD storage was the most important feature for your needs, it still works out cheaper for you to upgrade to a higher plan with GoDaddy than to wear the significant price increase of Hostgator’s renewal fees. Check out GoDaddy’s VPS details[1], and Hostgator’s VPS details[2] side by side if you’re looking for specific features for any of your WordPress websites. Dedicated Hosting At first glance, it would appear that Hostgator is significantly cheaper than GoDaddy. However, the value and resources of GoDaddy’s plans far exceed those of Hostgator. For instance, Hostgator’s three pricing tiers offer 8GB, 16GB, and 30GB RAM, respectively. GoDaddy’s lowest tier starts at 32GB RAM and is most comparable to Hostgator’s highest tier. It’s also worth noting that to get the discounted price, you’ll need to pay 36 months upfront with Hostgator and 24 months upfront with GoDaddy. Honestly, if you can afford to pay that much upfront, your website will likely need a better-performing solution than what either GoDaddy or Hostgator can offer. Winner: It’s a tough one, but we’re handing it to GoDaddy due to the level of resources delivered. If you’re making your decision on price alone, Hostgator’s smaller plans are better to get you started but will cost you a lot more when it’s time to renew. They also won’t offer anywhere near the same functionality or resources. On this note, let’s dive into the features and performance of each of these hosting companies next. Hosting Features Comparison When shopping for hosting, price should not be the only deciding factor. There are many hidden terms, conditions in the fine print, and feature exclusions requiring further investigation. There’s also the matter of validating each company’s marketing claims as far as performance is concerned. In the following sections, we unpack the performance and in-built features of both GoDaddy and Hostgator. We’ll also share the data from tests we’ve run to quantitatively prove which is the better option between these two web hosts. 1. Ease Of Use Both GoDaddy and Hostgator offer beginner-friendly dashboards that integrate with cPanel-based solutions. Dedicated and virtual private server hosting options require more technical knowledge as they offer customized server setups on some plans. But, for most customers who use shared hosting, the range of 1-click installs, intuitive dashboard, and navigation elements are easy to use. Winner: Both are just as intuitive and easy to use as each other. 2. Speed It’s no secret that loading speed directly impacts user experience and SEO. Thanks to studies by Amazon and Deloitte, we also know that slow-loading websites are constantly losing money. In Amazon’s case, 100ms extra in load time costs about 1% of revenue [3]. Back in 2006, when Amazon’s engineers first discovered this, 1% of revenue amounted to about $107 million. Today, that’s over $3.8 billion in annual revenue! Slow hosting services are the number one culprit that could also be costing you a tonne of hard-earned cash. So we put GoDaddy and Hostgator to the test to see who puts their money where their mouth is. GT Metrix Pingdom Winner: The data couldn’t be clearer! GoDaddy is miles ahead compared to Hostgator. You can also check out our post on the fastest hosting companies to see how GoDaddy compares to others. 3. Uptime: Uptime relates to a server’s reliability and can lead to direct income losses when a server is down. The web hosting industry standard for uptime is 99.90%. Most hosting providers (including Hostgator & GoDaddy) will guarantee at least this amount. However, even 0.09% of downtime per year is over 8 hours that your site is not accessible by your customers. If this happens during a peak sale season or during a critical time when you’re expecting many visitors to your website, the effects could be very damaging. So here’s how Hostgator and GoDaddy compare when it comes to uptime and server reliability. Hostgator Uptime There was a time when Hostgator guaranteed 99.99% uptime (the highest amount guaranteed by any of the major hosts back then). However, we’ve noticed that Hostgator’s server performance has declined over recent years. Instead of improving its server infrastructure, Hostgator opted to reduce its uptime guarantee to 99.90%. This allows Hostgator’s servers to experience up to 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year instead of just 52 minutes – per the original guarantee. If we also look at Pingdom’s uptime monitoring [4], Hostagtor’s average uptime since 2015 has been 99.89%, less than the industry average. Despite this, in our tests, we observed that Hostgator’s shared hosting servers were relatively Read More Read More

The post Hostgator Vs GoDaddy: 2024 Comparison [Backed By Data] first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

What’s The Best Info To Commercial Content Ratio For Affiliate SEO? [Data-Backed Study]

Matt Diggity — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 13:01:26 +0000

In December 2020, many affiliate websites completely lost their rankings due to Google’s Core Algorithm Update. If your site’s rankings were also wiped out by this update or if you just want to make sure your sites won’t be affected by it in the future, this post is for you. At the time, I had crawled over 600 affiliate websites to tease out what commonalities there were on sites that gained rankings vs sites that lost rankings following the update. You can watch that analysis here: One of the core findings was that the ratio between informational content to commercial content seemed to play a part. In particular, affiliate sites with high proportions of commercial content seemed to be hit the hardest. This post is a follow-up and presents an analysis of the ideal ratio of commercial content to informational content. I’ve uncovered some golden nuggets that I’m excited to share with you! How This Analysis Was Conducted With the help of one of my rockstar staff members, we collected data on a total of 1,517 affiliate websites across 32 different industries that are winning after the Dec 2020 core update. The criteria for selecting websites was simple: The goal of our study was to look for sites that either weren’t affected or that experienced a positive effect (even if this positive effect occurred down the track, per the websites that lost and then reclaimed their rankings). As a result, our data-driven study allowed us to reveal the general ratio between info to commercial content that worked for the affiliate sites that were clearly winning after the December 2020 core update. Average Informational To Commercial Content Ratio For our analysis, “informational content” is defined as anything that does not include affiliate links and does not target keywords with commercial intent. The sole purpose of info content is to answer questions or to educate the reader. On the other hand, commercial (or “money content”) typically has the following features: Of course, these parameters don’t cover every single commercial page out there. There are definitely outliers that we probably missed. But for the most part, these parameters will do the job and give a decent picture for us to work from. We ignored the small percentage of “other” pages that did not fit into either of these criteria. These include the home, about, contact, and category pages to name a few. Key Insights Average % of Information vs Commercial Content for the Full Set of Surviving Sites By analyzing the ratio of info to commercial content, we wanted to determine some industry guidelines for affiliate sites moving forward. Thanks to this data, we no longer need to rely on speculation and “gut feeling”, you can see the average ratio of the winning sites above. Naturally, there’s a big distribution and a handful of outliers compared to these averages. But, as you’ll see in the scatter plot below, the majority of sites that survived the December 2020 update have a heavy focus on informational content. We also looked at the data according to different industries. As you’ll see below, there’s a broad range of commercial to informational content ratios with the exception of “Coupons”, a clear outlier. However, all other industries had a higher percentage of informational content than commercial content on average. Note: The percentage of info to commercial content in this bar graph doesn’t total 100% due to that small percentage of “other” content we mentioned earlier. Affiliate sites in the “Automotive” industry have the lowest amount of commercial content sitting at 20% on average. On the other end of the scale, “Office Supply” and “Music” have 42% and 39% commercial content respectively. A 22% difference in the amount of commercial content only goes to show how, like everything else in SEO, the ratio of info to commercial content required for a website to thrive differs with each industry. Now let’s look at specific segments of the data and how different factors influence the info to commercial content ratio. Info To Commercial Content Ratio For Niche Vs Authority Sites We noticed a correlation between the ratio of commercial content and whether a site was classed as a niche or authority site. For our purposes, niche websites only focus on one specific topic or vertical within an industry. For instance, a website that only focuses on the best table saws is considered a niche site. By contrast, authority sites have content on multiple different topics. For example, a website like Best of Machinery, which reviews all types of garden and power tools, would be classed as an authority site. Within our dataset, on average, niche sites have 6.6% more commercial content than authority sites. Niche Sites We also noticed that industries dominated by niche sites correlated with higher amounts of commercial content. Note: The percentage of info to commercial content in this bar graph doesn’t total 100% due to that small percentage of “other” content we mentioned earlier. For instance, over 80% of total sites in the following industries were niche sites. They’re also at the top of the list for industries with the highest amounts of commercial content: Now let’s compare to authority sites. Authority Sites When we look at the distribution of authority sites in specific industries, it’s interesting to note that different industries rise to the top compared with niche sites. Note: The percentage of info to commercial content in this bar graph doesn’t total 100% due to that small percentage of “other” content we mentioned earlier. It’s also clear that with the exception of “Coupons” (a clear outlier in our study), the winning authority sites have a lower percentage of commercial content compared to niche sites, regardless of industry. Commercial To Info Ratio For Sites With High E-A-T Factors There is a subset of websites that require a large number of signals indicating expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-A-T). Typically, these sites fall into what’s known as “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) niches. If your site falls in this category, a high amount of commercial content could get in the way of your trust-building signals. In our study, we analyzed affiliate sites in four YMYL niches including: Typically, YMYL sites fall below the average benchmark of 29% for the percentage of commercial content. Key Takeaway Play it safe if your affiliate site is in a YMYL niche. Keep your commercial content to a maximum of 25% and aim for over 70% expert, informational content. Does Website Size Affect Commercial To Info Content Ratio? Given the above insights about niche sites, we also checked out whether there is any correlation between a website’s size and the ratio between commercial to info content. Smaller sites tended to have higher proportions of commercial content though our data did not suggest a different threshold for websites of different sizes. It could also be the case that larger websites that publish more content each month run out of commercial content they could publish. Key Takeaway When you’re starting out, you can tip the scales towards more commercial content, even if the ratio is higher than your industry’s average. There’s no shortage of small websites out there with more than 40% commercial content! However, as your website grows, you should aim to tip the balance towards more informational content. Ideally, you should be aiming for over 65% of informational content. Publishing Velocity & Info To Commercial Ratio Publishing velocity relates to the rate at which new articles are added to a website. Like most affiliate marketers, you probably don’t have the resources to compete with big-budget sites like NerdWallet or the Wirecutter as far as monthly content production is concerned. So we looked at publishing velocity to see whether you might be at a disadvantage due to publishing fewer articles a month. In our analysis, we looked at six patterns related to publishing velocity based on how many new articles went live over a 6 month period. These include: Regardless of how many articles a month are published, the data indicates a fairly narrow band of 24% – 33% commercial content compared with 62% – 72% informational content. Key Takeaway It doesn’t matter if you publish more or less content per month; it’s still best to stick to your industry’s average info to commercial ratio. If you’re not sure what that is, aim for a maximum of 30% commercial content and at least 65% informational content. So, What’s The Ideal Ratio Of Info To Commercial Content? No matter how you cut it, the ratio of commercial to info content that Google is rewarding fits into a fairly tight spread. Authority sites tend to skew towards more informational content, whereas niche sites typically have higher proportions of commercial content. This pattern holds true for most industries with a few exceptions, including: Is 60/40 A Safe Ratio For Info To Commercial Content? Some industries have loads of websites with over 40% commercial content. In fact, around 29% of all sites we looked at had more Read More Read More

The post What’s The Best Info To Commercial Content Ratio For Affiliate SEO? [Data-Backed Study] first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – January 2022

Matt Diggity — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:22:07 +0000

If you want to jump into the new year like a pro, you need to keep ahead of your competition. That’s where our roundup comes in. We’ve got the latest guides, case studies and new stories from SEOs top minds. First, we’ll cover the month’s biggest guides. You’ll learn how to avoid the most common link prospecting mistake. Then, you’ll get some deep insights into the 2021 product review update and recent local algorithm update. Next, we’ll dig into the month’s most informative case studies. You’ll discover whether FAQs help SEO, what improves core web vital scores, and how one site more than doubled its leads with content optimization. We’ll close on the news. Google has announced that the big year-end updates are over, and that they’ll be testing a design overhaul for the search bar. Link Prospecting and The #1 Mistake SEOs Make https://authority.builders/blog/link-prospecting/ This guide was developed after seeing many SEOs make the same serious mistake when it came to link prospecting. In it, you’ll find out why the keywords SEOs use to find link opportunities are leading them toward bad prospects. You’ll be introduced to the threat poor link prospecting poses, including research into how some practices can lead to manual penalties. Over the rest of the guide, you’ll learn how to find prospects in a better way by targeting people motivated to work with you. The guide closes on how to build link magnets that attract the best links in your niche. I hope it will be of some value to any SEOs who regularly build new links. Next up, we have some in-depth analysis into the latest major Google update. Google’s December 2021 Product Reviews Update – Analysis and Findings https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-2021-december-product-reviews-update/ Glenn Gabe brings us this detailed look at the product reviews update. He documents the fallout of the update as it rolled out and examines what sets the winners and losers apart. The fallout, as it turns out, was pretty substantial. Glenn provides some examples of sites that were hit by volatility. Some experienced significant traffic loss, some lost snippet slots, and some received sudden boosts to their visibility. He went on to identify the factors that winning sites appeared to share. Strong organization was common on sites that came out of the update on top. Great visuals, actual experience, and explanations of the review process also stood out among winning sites. The guide covers many more insights and provides a convincing number of examples. It will be helpful to any SEOs in the product review niche. For our final guide, we’ll be looking at Google’s other update and what it means. The Vicinity Update: What You Need to Know About Google’s Largest Local Algorithm Update in 5 Years https://www.sterlingsky.ca/vicinity-algorithm-update/ Joy Hawkins brings us this look at an update that flew under the radar of many SEOs. The changes started in November and weren’t announced by Google until December 16th. In the announcement, Google claimed they had completed a “rebalancing” of local ranking factors. This update, according to Joy, was one of the largest to hit local results since the Hawk Update in 2017. Her analysis suggests that the update had a major impact on proximity as a search factor. Proximity is a factor that accounts for the distance between the searcher and the businesses appearing in local results. The closer a business is to a searcher, the more the proximity factor favors that business’ result. Google has steadily made proximity a more prominent factor in local search rankings. More precisely, it has made it harder for businesses without proximity to rank locally. This update may have been the final nail in the coffin for businesses trying to rank in distant cities using SEO. Joy further explains the findings through a small case study of lawyer sites. The legal niche is particularly competitive, and it experienced a lot of volatility as the rollout continued. Joy noticed that many powerful lawyer sites lost the ability to compete in distant areas. The complete guide contains advice essential for anyone working in local search. Next, we’ll break into the case studies that dropped over the last 30 days. We’ll start with a study on the value of FAQs and FAQ schemas. Does Turning On-Page Content into FAQs and Adding FAQ Schema Help SEO Performance? https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/turn-page-content-into-faqs-and-add-schema/ Daniel Haugen brings us this look at the SEO value of FAQs. FAQs and their related schemas have a reputation for improving content performance. This case study takes a long look at whether that’s true, and if it is, what kind of impact you can expect from these content changes. For the test, the experimenters applied a very light touch. Most of the original content was preserved, but the headings above them were changed to questions to make them FAQs. The FAQ schema was then applied, and the page relaunched. The results were promising for anyone who has been promoting a FAQ strategy. Performance improved shortly after launch and continued to improve. Additionally, the page attracted several snippets even though they hadn’t been deliberately targeted. Read the study to learn how much growth you can expect from a FAQ strategy. Next, you’ll learn what the data says about improving core web vitals. Improving Core Web Vitals, A Smashing Magazine Case Study https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/12/core-web-vitals-case-study-smashing-magazine/ Barry Pollard brings us this look at how Smashing Magazine managed to detect and fix the Core Web Vitals score problems limiting their growth. The problem-solving and information-gathering parts of their journey are preserved here as a case study. The magazine’s problem came from the Large Contentful Paint score. This score measures how quickly the page supplies content to the user. It can be tricky to narrow down what’s hurting this score. It involves a lot of site speed optimization factors. Images such as author images were quickly identified as the problem. The magazine had to deliver the images from a separate assets domain, so it had limited options. They were able to solve this problem with a range of different solutions. The study thoroughly documents the trial and error steps that eventually led to a solution. Even the solutions that didn’t work in this case study are well-explained enough that they may work for other SEOs. Our final case study will focus more closely on content. It’s a look at how one team massively increased a law firm’s leads with just content optimization. How We Increased a Law Firm’s Leads by 174% With Content Optimization [Case Study] https://moz.com/blog/content-optimization-case-study Lydia German shows us what is possible with content optimization with a case study focused closely on one legal client. The case study fully documents the methods that the team used to improve the performance of the content. It includes how they used content audits, gap analysis, and competitor audits to target where content was needed most. The process and justifications they used to make each change are also explained for anyone who might want to craft a content optimization plan themselves. The complete plan included creating new content, deleting swaths of old content, and making technical fixes. The results were impressive. The team was able to more than double the number of leads and clicks coming into the law firm. Check out the full case study for ideas if you have a legal client, content that needs help, or just an interest in the content optimization process. For now, let’s move on to the news. First, we can confirm that the product review update is finally done with us. Google December 2021 product reviews update is finished rolling out https://searchengineland.com/google-december-2021-product-reviews-update-is-finished-rolling-out-377654 Barry Schwartz brings us this look at Google’s recent update announcement. The product review update is officially over. It formally started on December 1st, meaning that the implementation and tweaks went on for more than 20 days. In retrospect, this update was an interesting one. As Barry notes, this update was significantly larger than the April update. It also produced more volatility among targeted sites. While review sites got the most attention, in the aftermath we can see that the update hit sites that were outside of that niche. Products began ranking for their own “review” keyword phrases, in some cases. The impact of this review can help us see Google’s intentions somewhat. For example, this review was larger than the last one, but it wasn’t a replacement. It expanded on and reinforced the rules that started coming into effect in April 2021. Google appears to feel confident in the direction of its product review philosophy. If you were hoping for a reprieve after getting hit in April, there’s little hope of that now. Master the product review standards as soon as possible. Finally, we’ve seen signs that Google is testing a design overhaul for their search bar. Google is Testing a Design Overhaul for their Search Bar on Desktop https://brodieclark.com/google-desktop-search-bar-overhaul/ Brodie Clark brings us this analysis of the search bar changes Google is pushing through right now. If you haven’t seen these changes in the wild yet, he Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – January 2022 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

15 Best Pay Per Call Affiliate Programs And Networks (2024)

Matt Diggity — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 09:11:10 +0000

As an affiliate marketer, there are multiple ways to monetize your traffic or audience, from display advertising to affiliate links and CPA (Cost per Action) offers. However, it’s essential to consider other options, such as pay-per-call affiliate programs. While pay-per-call affiliate programs operate in somewhat murkier waters of internet marketing, they can be incredibly profitable, with some of our Affiliate Lab members earning payouts in the hundreds of dollars. Advertisers are willing to pay handsomely for hot leads. The key to success is sifting through the dirt to find real gold. And today, together with our team of experts, we’ll do just that. Drawing from our extensive experience and in-depth knowledge, we are here to guide you through the intricacies of this niche, helping you navigate the challenges and seize the opportunities it presents. Top Pay Per Call Affiliate Programs to Promote 1. Marketcall Marketcall is a pay-per-call affiliate network based in the United States but with offices/call centers in multiple countries. They have offers spanning a number of industries, including: These are all lucrative niches because they’re about solving immediate problems and/or are for high-paying advertisers e.g. home solar power systems. They add new offers for their affiliate program regularly, so you always have new offers to work with, and you get a dedicated personal manager. If you choose this affiliate program, you also get comprehensive call-tracking technology as a standard. 2. Offervault Wouldn’t it be great if there was a search engine that listed pay-per-call networks and in-house pay-per-call affiliate offers instead of having to search for them manually? That way, you could focus your time on driving phone leads. That’s exactly what OfferVault provides. As their pay-per-call affiliate, you can search by specific affiliate networks, categories, and countries you prefer to work in. But they also have a section dedicated to pay-per-call affiliate offers that shows you the payout, the network the offer is part of, and what countries the offer is available in. 3. Service Direct Service Direct is one of the few specialist affiliate networks, but it actually started as a web development company. The change came from realizing that businesses with a new website needed one thing more than anything else – qualified leads. So they shifted their focus to supplying businesses with purchase-ready phone leads. Today, they work with hundreds of clients in multiple countries and several key verticals. So you can expect to find offers for plumbers, attorneys, CPAs, dentists, veterinarians, body shops, and even dog walkers. You even get to preview what each type of offer pays[1] before you sign up with them. These aren’t offers from the world’s leading brands – they’re local and household services (plumbers, HVAC, etc) that the average person needs immediate help with and is willing to pay for that. 4. Lead Smart Lead Smart is a business with a simple mission: to ensure that their lead gen customers get results without having to pay upfront. What also sets Lead Smart apart from its competitors in the pay-per-call industry is that its pay-per-call campaigns focus on household services in the United States. These include everything from HVAC and electrical services to pest control, home services, home improvement, and landscaping. The benefit here is you won’t have to filter through dozens of unrelated call campaigns if your current audience needs household services. 5. Astoria Company The Astoria Company has been a player in the performance marketing industry since 2006, focusing on generating B2C leads for companies in several verticals. Their 200 pay-per-call offers include everything from payday loans to legal services, online education, mortgages, solar power, and auto insurance. Their campaigns are only active in the United States, though, so they’re not as global as some other performance marketing networks. But Astoria Company does make up for that with a lot of industry expertise. 6. National Debt Relief Affiliate Program National Debt Relief is a debt consolidation service with 34,000 5-star reviews on Trustpilot. Their service helps clients combine dozens of smaller debts into one single monthly payment. But they also work to renegotiate your existing financial burden to decrease it, but only for specific types of debt, including credit cards, personal loans, some student loans, and medical bills. So this can be a very lucrative offer if your target audience needs help with managing their debts or business financing. Surely, lots of people need some debt relief. 7. eFax eFax is a service that allows you to send and receive faxes without actually owning a fax machine. Faxes are still in use today – predominantly by businesses that need a physical signature on a document and not just an email or electronic signature e.g. the legal, law enforcement, and medical professions. There’s still a strong demand for fax services despite the introduction of replacement technology. 8. Aragon Advertising Aragon Advertising is an award-winning pay-per-call affiliate network with a global presence and a business history dating back to 2012. You get access to hundreds of pay-per-call offers across many verticals by signing up with them. Some examples of these are tax debts, life insurance, household services, legal advice, senior health, health insurance, and wildlife control – but that only scratches the surface of what’s available. They’re also happy to work with any legitimate call center wanting to buy or sell calls, with the capacity to handle millions of calls per month via paid and toll-free numbers. They vet each call center before they’re allowed to trade in their marketplace, which helps maintain quality standards. 9. PX Previously known as ReviMedia, PX is an interesting twist on the idea of a pay-per-call affiliate network. It’s made up of private and public marketplaces where advertisers and publishers can buy or sell leads. The PX Open Exchange is where affiliates will find hundreds of offers spread across 15 verticals in the insurance, household services, and finance niches. This is a pay-per-call affiliate network built with the success of your online marketing efforts in mind and uses advanced technology to make that happen. 10. Click Dealer Click Dealer is a pay-per-call affiliate network with over a decade of industry experience and expertise in managing pay-per-call offers and inbound initiated calls. Affiliate publishers will find over 2,000 advertiser offers available on this network spread across these niches: These are lucrative markets that can generate a lot of revenue when combined with targeted affiliate marketing campaigns. Top-performing affiliates can also enjoy a host of perks, including bonus payouts and private parties for top performers. 11. Paychex Not all businesses are big enough to justify having a full-time employee managing payroll or HR functions for them. Paychex fills that gap by providing a service where companies can outsource these functions to fully trained professionals. This allows a business to run with lower overheads while still offering its staff a full range of professional employee services. So, as an affiliate, you have an enormous potential market to work with here – literally every small business in North America. 12. CuraDebt Total household debt in the United States now stands at over $15 trillion. That’s why credit repair affiliate programs like CuraDebt are in demand. Your visitors get a service that allows them to trim down their overall debt burden while combining multiple debts into a single payment made each month. This includes tax debt and other unsecured debts such as personal loans, credit cards, store cards, etc. And being better at managing your debt is the first step towards real credit repair. All you have to do is generate calls for CuraDebt to pocket some serious commission payouts. 13. Goojibear Goojibear specializes in one facet of digital marketing – lead generation via phone calls sent to advertiser call centers. But with a focus on mobile optimization as their primary inbound call source. Their affiliate offers cover the products and services where you’d expect people to call for a quote e.g. payday loans, pest control, astrology readings, car insurance, legal services, etc. Goojibear has hundreds of offers in these and other verticals for you to promote to your visitors. You can expect to earn an average of around $15 per call. 14. Palo Mobile Palo is a pay-per-call network that’s been serving businesses in need of qualified calls for over a decade now. They have performance-based campaigns in multiple verticals, but their most popular are in the legal, healthcare insurance, and financial services niches. Simply because these are problem-solution niches, there is a lot of potential revenue to be made. Just bear in mind that Palo’s affiliate vetting process is pretty rigorous, so they’re not a network for raw beginners. 15. Digital Market Media Many businesses live or die based on how many leads they can generate. And a qualified inbound call is almost invaluable because any person who has taken the time to call a business is in a buyer’s mindset i.e. they’re ready to spend money. The team at Digital Market Media understands this because offering qualified leads is their entire business model. They Read More Read More

The post 15 Best Pay Per Call Affiliate Programs And Networks (2024) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Double Monthly Traffic Within Six Months – [eCommerce 2024 Case Study]

Matt Diggity — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 11:40:10 +0000

Do you have an eCommerce website with hundreds of category pages and thousands of product pages? Learn how to grow your organic Google traffic in this follow along case study. I’ll guide you step-by-step so you can learn the same tactics that my team at The Search Initiative used to double our client’s organic traffic on their eCommerce sneaker website within six months. You’ll learn how to achieve similar results by: Before jumping into the strategy, here’s a summary of the main challenges that the site was facing when the client joined our agency. And if you prefer to consume your content via video, you can watch the full break down here: The Challenge This eCommerce site operates in one of the most saturated and competitive markets – fashion. More specifically, the site sells sneakers from the biggest brands across the globe, which means that it has thousands of product pages and hundreds of category pages. The main objective of this campaign, which commenced in April 2021, was to increase the site’s keyword visibility and search traffic to the website in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2021. To achieve this, we focused on optimizing the content and technical aspects of the site to provide the best experience for customers. The product and category descriptions on many of the client’s pages were poorly optimized with standardized text that didn’t convert. We therefore had to focus on making sure that these descriptions were well optimized so as to engage and inform the user. In addition, the site had hundreds of product pages that were not categorized properly which meant that navigating the site was difficult for customers. After optimizing the product pages with better descriptions, we build backlinks towards them in order to improve the site and page’s authority. Below, you’ll find out, step-by-step, how to achieve these incredible results so you can replicate them on your own website(s). Category & Product Page Optimization The category and product pages are probably the most important pages on your eCommerce site. These are the pages where you’re convincing users to buy what you’re selling. So it’s crucial that the content on these pages is optimized for both search engines (keywords) and users (content). In this section, you’ll learn how to optimize the content on your category (or collection) pages, as well as how to write descriptions for your products. Optimizing Category Pages The main purpose of category (or collection) pages is to organize the products you sell into logical groups, making it easier for visitors to “browse” and find what they’re looking for. Optimizing isn’t just about ensuring that your content includes the keyword(s) you want to target. You want to make sure that the content on your category pages is optimized to address the user’s search intent for the primary terms you want it to rank for. If the answer to both of these questions is no, here’s what you need to do: You may come across some keywords with mixed intent, i.e. the results displayed may address more than one type of intent. This is usually the case for broader search terms with a higher search volume like “cheese”. The top result from the above example is informational. If you scroll down a little further, you can see that Google ranks pages that satisfy an informational intent. Scrolling down even further, you can see that the results have changed and now address a transactional intent instead. In cases like this, you want to optimize your content to match the pages closest in intent to yours. For example, if you are selling cheese on your website, you should align your content with similar eCommerce pages that are ranking in the top positions. For instance, for an eCommerce website selling sweatshirts and looking to rank for “mens sweatshirts”, you may find that the competing pages have a lot less content than you on their collections pages. The above top-ranking page only has a couple of sentences at the top explaining the kind of products that the user can find, but yours (like our client’s) may have lots of content at the bottom of the page. Therefore, to align your page with this competing page, you would look to move your content “above the fold” (i.e. above the products) and add a “Read more” functionality. Why? Because it’s clear that having lots of text at the bottom of the page offers little value to the user as they may never reach the bottom. Adding the “Read more” functionality allows you to include your most important keywords within the first paragraph, which is displayed to all users. It also provides a better user experience because visitors who want to learn more about the products you offer have the choice to click through to read more without impeding the experience of those who don’t. For more insights into how to audit and optimize your content (for any page), check out this article. How To Write Product Descriptions Your product descriptions are a deciding factor on whether a visitor purchases on your site or not. The best product descriptions convey the product’s value to the visitor and convince them to buy it. Here are the top tips on how to write well-optimized product descriptions for your eCommerce website: 1. Write For Your Target Customer Write descriptions with your target customer in mind, not search engines. Remember that different products may be suitable for different types of customers. Factors like budget and experience will determine which products your customers look at. For example, using language like “great for beginners” or “perfect for beginners” can help make the user’s decision much easier as they’ll be able to quickly decide whether the product is right for them or not. The length of your product descriptions should also be based on your target customer’s needs i.e. the buyer’s awareness. High Buyer Awareness Customers who have a high buyer awareness will already have a good understanding of the product and why they need to purchase it. Here’s an example of a product description from Asos for men’s plain t-shirts that targets a customer with high buyer awareness. There’s no need to include hundreds of words of content to describe a product that everyone knows. Instead, the user’s likely going to skim the key pieces of information about the product such as the color, sizing, fit etc. Low Buyer Awareness Users with a low buyer awareness will need a lot more information about the product in order to convince them to buy. Here’s an example of a product description for a TV on John Lewis’ site that targets a customer with low buyer awareness. This product description contains considerably more information about the product than the t-shirt example. The site also includes drop down sections detailing the product specifications and delivery information. This is because choosing a television is more of an investment than a t-shirt, so the description needs to be thorough enough to convince the customer to click through and make a purchase. High And Low Buyer Awareness There’s nothing stopping you from writing descriptions that cater to both types of customers. You can have a shorter description with the most important facts/features about the product to cater a customer with high buyer awareness followed by more detailed information about the product. Here’s an example of a camera from Jessops, which caters to both types of users… There are short bullet points summarizing the key features and specs for the camera for high buyer awareness… … and more detailed information underneath for those with low buyer awareness. 2. Be Informative Users want to know everything they can about the product before deciding on whether to buy or not, so ensure that you include as much information about the product as you can. Apart from the basics like the product name, company name, and manufacturer name, here’s a list of all of the kinds of things that you should consider including (if applicable): 3. Make Your Descriptions Unique It’s no secret that having duplicate content on your site will affect your chances of ranking in the search results. Therefore, the biggest mistake you can make with product descriptions is copying and pasting the manufacturers’ descriptions on your site. Here’s a description taken directly from Dyson’s page for its hairdryer: Here’s an eCommerce site that’s copied and pasted the description word for word. Now, how many web pages have the exact same copy? 731 to be precise… Unsurprisingly, the above page doesn’t rank for any keywords that are related to “dyson hair dryer”. In fact, the page only ranks for 1 keyword (“hair dryer david jones”). This goes to show that Google doesn’t want to display multiple versions of the same content to its users and that it’s crucial that you ensure every product has its own unique description. 4. Think About The Layout How you structure and format your product descriptions is just as important as the copy itself. Make use Read More Read More

The post How to Double Monthly Traffic Within Six Months – [eCommerce 2024 Case Study] first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

What it SSL and Why it Matters (6 Different Types)

Matt Diggity — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 12:35:56 +0000

Knowing that sensitive information processed through your website is secure is as important for you as it is for your customers. Whether you own a blog or an e-commerce site, SSL is the difference between protecting your customers’ data or leaving it open to hackers. But what is SSL, and why is it important? By the end of this article, you’ll understand what SSL is and its functionality. Drawing upon my extensive experience in web security and encryption technologies, I will guide you through the intricacies of SSL, helping you safeguard your website and instill trust in your customers. I’ll also discuss how it differs from other secure internet communications. In addition, you’ll learn what a Certificate is, how to obtain one, and which is most suitable for your site. Quick Summary What Is SSL? SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. ssl secure sockets layer is a security protocol that provides privacy, authentication, and integrity to internet communications. The purpose of an SSL protocol is to ensure secure communication and a secure channel between web browsers and web servers. When you enter sensitive data on an SSL-encrypted website (such as credit card details used for online payments), the data is deliberately disarranged by encryption algorithms to keep it from being seen or modified by hackers. This is what’s known as a secure session, and it keeps user data secure. The correct data is visible only to the website to which you have provided it. However, SSL does not limit the protection of data to a website and end-user. The encryption and decryption processes also function between one web server and another. An example of this would be Outlook Web Access and Microsoft Exchange, or any other site storing personally identifiable information. What Is An SSL Certificate, And How Do SSL Certificates Work? A ssl secure sockets layer Certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates a website’s identity. In doing so, it is able to make an encrypted secure connection. This prevents hackers from gaining unauthorized access to personal information. When you enter credit card details on a web browser, the information is transferred to a web server. SSL encrypts this information and makes it secure sockets layer ssl from interception. Without SSL, this data would be open and potentially viewable to hackers. If a trustworthy source provides the web server’s SSL Certificate, then your website is more likely to be trusted by web browsers and operating systems. SSL Encryption Keys SSL protocol uses encryption keys, also known as Public and Private keys, to establish an encrypted link between the server and the browser. Either the private and public key cannot exist independently – they belong as a key pair. However, they are not the same. A message encrypted with a public key cannot be decrypted with the same public key. Only the private key can decrypt the message. This is because the private key contains a unique set of characters that encrypt the data locked by the public key exchange. So, even if hackers intercept authentication documents they will not be able to decrypt the encrypted data without the private key. The process is sometimes referred to as an “SSL handshake.” Each set of encryption keys is unique to their site and stored on their servers’ and visitors’ browsers. How Can I Tell If A Site Has SSL? You can tell a site had SSL by looking at its URL, you’ll also notice the padlock icon next to web addresses in the address bar. If you click on them, you’ll see the digital authentication. All HTTPS websites have their traffic encrypted by SSL. Web browsers use HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure – the secure form of HTTP) to connect to web servers. This appears in the URL of a single-domain SSL certificate. The 6 Different Types Of SSL Certificates There are six types of SSL Certificates: Below, we’ll take you through each Certificate type in detail. We’ll also discuss what they do and how they differ from each other. 1. Extended Validation Certificates (EV SSL) This Certificate is the most secure type of SSL. The biggest difference between this type of Certificate and other types of SSL authentication digital certificates is that they are granted only after the identity of the domain owner is verified. To obtain this Certificate, you’ll be required to undergo an authentication process. You’ll need to specify: 2. Organization Validated Certificates (OV SSL) OV SSL Certificates are more affordable than EV SSL Certificates. They have some attributes that make them preferable to users who do not need an EV SSL. The most significant of these is that OV Certificates do not require a full company verification. This means that the authentication process is much faster. In addition, they are cheaper than ev certificates which, as stated previously, are more secure. 3. Domain Validated Certificates (DV SSL) Domain Validated certificates are the cheapest and most popular type of SSL Certificate. They require domain validation only. This means that the website owner must prove that they control the website they’re requesting a certificate for. However, they do not need to verify their identity. 4. Wildcard SSL Certificate A Wildcard Certificate is a special kind of Domain Validated SSL Certificate. Unlike a single-domain SSL authentification, it can secure an unlimited number of subdomains on a domain. For example, say you were securing our main site www.diggitymarketing.com. By implementing a Wildcard SSL Certificate, you could secure: 5. Multi-Domain SSL Certificate (MDC) Multi-Domain SSL Certificates are another kind of Wildcard SSL Certificate. However, the two are not the same. While Wildcards cover multiple domains on one server, Multi-Domain SSL authentication protect both multiple domains and their corresponding sub-domains. So, with a Multi-Domain SSL you are able to have one certificate for multiple domain names. It is also possible to use one SSL authentication certificate multiple servers. 6. Unified Communications Certificate (UCC) Unified Communications Certificates are also Wildcard SSL Certificates. They can secure an unlimited number of different domains. The biggest difference between a UCC and other types of Wildcard Certificates is their ability to secure communications for voice, video, text, and IM apps. How To Get An SSL Certificate You’ll need to obtain the SSL authentication certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority (CA). You can only do this once you have completed the domain validation process. As stated by Google: You’ll need to generate a private key and a certificate signing request (CSR). Then, submit your CSR to the Certification Authority (CA) that issues the SSL Certificate. The Certificate Authority will then authenticate who you are and whether or not you control the domain(s) for which you’re requesting the certificate. If you cannot verify ownership of the domain, you will be unable to obtain the Certificate. Once your identity is confirmed, your Certificate Authority’s digital signature will confirm your SSL authentication certificate containing: Don’t worry if this sounds confusing. These days, many hosting providers have a simple process to help you obtain an SSL certificate with only a few clicks. For example, WPX Hosting offers free SSL authentication certificate to all customers, and it only takes a few minutes to add an SSL certificate to your website. Siteground also provides free SSL authentication certificates on shared hosting accounts, and GoDaddy offers similar services at competitive prices. How Much Does An SSL Certificate Cost? The cost of an SSL authentication certificate depends on the kind of certificate you’re planning to obtain. It also depends on who your CA (Certification Authority) is, and what kind of vetting process they use. A basic Domain Validated SSL Certificate can cost as little as $9.95. Some hosting providers will even provide your SSL authentication certificate free of charge, or as part of your hosting package. Setting this up can take as little as 5-10 minutes. However, a fully-fledged Validation SSL Certificate could cost as much as $600 per year. Before issuing an ev certificates , your CA needs to authenticate your identity. They also need to confirm that you control the domain for which you’re requesting the certificate. It can take weeks for this certificate to be issued. The CA will use what’s known as an ‘intermediate certificate’ to issue you with your SSL authentication certificate. If the ownership of your domain changes hands, then this must be reported to your CA. This way, they know who will have access to the SSL authentication certificate. SSL vs TLS TLS stands for Transport Layer Security. Whilst both SSL TLS ensure secure web browsing through the “SSL handshake”, TLS is a newer and more advanced form of SSL. A handshake is an essential part of any website’s security and identity authentication process. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed an update to SSL over twenty years ago. Today, Transport Layer Securities are the only SSL and TSL protocols still available. The key difference between SSL nd TLS protocols is that SSL protocol secures your browser sessions when you’re connected to a website. However, TLS secures all communications between Read More Read More

The post What it SSL and Why it Matters (6 Different Types) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – December 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 11:36:10 +0000

You’ve made it to the end of the year, but this week’s roundup will give you no excuses for slowing down. We’re closing out 2021 with an excellent set of guides, case studies, and news items. First, we have some guides that show off SEOs latest tricks. You’ll learn how to create topic clusters using Wikipedia, how to get a lot more insight into your bounce rate, and why indexing is getting harder. Next, we’ll look at some case studies. You’ll find a huge analysis of the winners and losers of the last big update and some hard data on building better titles. We’ll close our roundup with the news. Google released some important statements about product reviews, mobile indexing, and crawl bugs. Thread: Does Wikipedia Give You Enough Data To Create A Topic Cluster (For A Niche You Know Nothing About)? https://twitter.com/jsvxc/status/1461011937437777921 Twitter user @jsvxc brings us this Twitter thread shared by several big SEOs this month. He’s developed a fast (5-minute) method to pull topic clusters out of Wikipedia pages when you know nothing about the niche. He details how to run wiki pages through either Ahrefs or other free tools. He provides tips on finding the keywords with intent and how to generate more keywords from free tools like MissingTopics. Using the example of a “personal injury lawyer niche”, he shows how he could generate a list of intentional phrases and answerable queries using only the Wikipedia page as a reference. He admits that this process is designed for situations where you don’t have the time or budget, to perform more intense research. If this guide helps you plan out some content, the next one on the list will help you optimize it. It teaches you how to measure and optimize your bounce rate. How To Calculate, Audit & Improve Bounce Rate For SEO Success https://www.searchenginejournal.com/bounce-rate-how-to-audit/ Kayle Larkin brings us this nuts-and-bolts look at how to take bounce rate seriously as one of your SEO KPIs to track. This guide aims to help you find out what yours is, determine if it’s good or bad, and improve it. Kayle starts by providing new SEOs with definitions and links to Google resources to get them up to speed. She goes over implementing your Google Analytics tag and setting up event tracking for behaviors that align with your objectives. Then, she dives into more technical work. Over the rest of the guide, she teaches you how to organize bounce rates by marketing channels, set up advanced filters for your data, and troubleshoot problems. For many SEOs, bounce rate alone isn’t considered a useful indicator for sites. Kayle addresses this and gives advice even experienced SEOs can use to drive people further into a site. Organic traffic is often a major focus for bounce rate improvements. Before you can develop organic traffic, you’ll need to get indexed – our next guide details why you may find that a lot harder than it used to be. Why Getting Indexed By Google Is So Difficult https://moz.com/blog/why-getting-indexed-is-difficult Tomek Rudzki, writing for Moz, brings us this breakdown of why some websites, particularly large ones, are waiting longer for indexing. For example, he reveals that many of the largest e-commerce stores online fail to get 15% or more of their pages indexed. Then, he dives into a long, growing list of reasons why even pages on authoritative sites are not getting indexed properly. He defines and provides the solutions for all of the following common problems: He includes some instructions for checking your index rate and a list of ways that you can increase the probability that Google will index your future pages. At the same time, he warns that Google has finite resources. In some cases, indexing problems may result from Google downgrading the priority of certain types of pages. That’s it for the guides. The upcoming sections will cover some big case studies that dropped over the last month. First, we’ll look at a big breakdown of the Google November 2021 Core Update. Google November 2021 Core Update: Winners, Losers & Analysis https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/google-november-2021-core-update-winners-losers-analysis/ Lily Ray brings us this look at how the latest major core update changed our world. This update was a contentious one. It dropped just a week before Black Friday, and many e-commerce sites were worried that the impact would disrupt their biggest sales. Let’s see how things broke down. Lily and her team examined nearly 1,500 domains across dozens of niches for this case study. They found a significant number of changes. According to her analysis, reference-style sites were the biggest winners. These included dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other types of educational sites. Several of them saw 200% or more gains in visibility. News and publisher sites took the biggest hit. Major news sites like APNews, Forbes, and Reuters saw statistically significant drops. Lily theorizes that this may be because the algorithm is being retooled to favor fresher content. The full analysis also includes major swings in niches such as health, law & government, and stock photography sites. Google tends to make adjustments to each core update, so stay tuned for additional discoveries. Our next case study examines whether brand names or target terms matter more in titles. The Result Of An SEO Split-Test: Does Adding Your Brand Or Target Terms To Titles Matter More? https://www.semrush.com/blog/the-result-of-anseo-split-test-does-adding-your-brand-or-target-terms-to-titles-matter-more-/ Brian Moseley brings us this look at the value of including brand names vs. target terms in your titles. He measures whether your brand name or a target term appeals more to searchers’ intent. For the test, Brian was given access to a massive recruitment site that helps employers find staff. He changed the titles on nearly 2500 pages. For one group, he made sure the title was always short enough to adequately display the brand name at the end. For the second group, he cut the brand name to include descriptive terms for the service, such as “employees”. The result was that the pages with the brand name performed significantly better than the pages that used the target terms. Brian explored several reasons this could have happened. First, he pointed out that searchers use brand names as a quality signal, especially for big brands. He also theorized that the use of target keywords in titles may have confused searchers. The target terms added to the titles didn’t always match the topics covered on each page. Adding these terms may have led searchers to believe these pages covered different information. Our final case study also looks at title tags. The author has analyzed nearly a million of them to extract some actionable insights. 6 Important Insights About Title Tags (953,276 Pages Studied) https://ahrefs.com/blog/title-tags-study/ Michal Pecánek brings us this look at the state of title tags after Google’s recent changes and minor rollbacks. If you’ve been following the story since September, you know that Google started generating titles for a significant number of searches. After some well-publicized cases of searches returning bizarre titles, Google appears to have backed down a little. They claim that they use existing titles around 87% of the time. Starting from this point, Michal began a project to document what was happening with title tags by examining 953,276 top-10 pages. Using this research, he produced his own data. First, he learned that 7.4% of top-ranking pages don’t even have a title tag. That’s a surprisingly high number for sites that are all in the top 10 for their queries. This may be explained by snippets answering queries better in certain searches. Michal was also able to document how often Google rewrites tags and how they choose to do so. He found that Google rewrites titles 33.4% of the time. That’s quite a bit higher than their advertised rate, but remember this test group only includes top-10 pages. They may be more likely to face changes than sites outside that range. He also found that in 50% of cases where Google changed the titles, they preferred to use the existing H1 title. The data suggested that Google has a special zeal for rewriting long titles. They are 57% more likely to change a long title. Michal’s full writeup contains a lot of other insights that may help you keep your existing titles. That covers the case studies for the month, and we’re ready to look at the news. First, Google has some news about product reviews. Product Reviews Update And Your Site https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/12/product-reviews-update-and-your-site Google recently announced changes to the product review update that landed in April 2021. The new update, rolling out now, will build on Google’s feedback and data from the first one. The new best practices released with this update should be noted by any SEOs working with review sites. First, quality reviews are expected to provide resources that allow users to experience the product. That may include videos, recordings, images, or other media. Second, quality reviews are expected to offer links to multiple sellers so that the reader can choose from multiple retailers. The Google release doesn’t say much Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – December 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

14 Best Real Estate Affiliate Programs in 2024

Matt Diggity — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 05:23:55 +0000

Are you interested in tapping into the lucrative real estate market through affiliate marketing? With my personal experience as an affiliate marketer, I have put together this expert guide to help you navigate the world of real estate affiliate programs. These programs offer numerous opportunities for resourceful affiliate marketers. In this guide, you’ll first learn what real estate affiliate programs are and what kind of products you can promote. Then, I’ll introduce you to some of the top-performing real estate marketing programs that have worked well for me and my fellow Affiliate Lab members. The Top 14 Real Estate Affiliate Programs Are you ready to start collecting some serious real estate affiliate income? Here’s our list of the best real estate affiliate programs to help you get started: 1. All Things Real Estate All Things Real Estate is a high-quality real estate affiliate. They sell everything necessary for a successful business in the real estate niche. The stock includes everything from home-showing prop decorations to signage, stationery, and advertising materials. Real estate affiliates can earn money by helping them sell all these products on a cost-per-action basis. You’ll get a 10% program commission every time you make a sale. Prices range from a few dollars to thousands of dollars for bulk orders. There are a ton of different products to promote, so this can be one of the best real estate affiliate programs for sites that haven’t picked a specific real estate niche. Once you’re accepted to this real estate affiliate program, you’ll be provided with free banners and a dashboard to track sales. 2. Architectural Designs Architectural Design is a popular real estate website and a house plan gallery that hosts thousands of detailed home plans in every style. These plans are protected as intellectual property in most countries, so licensing fees must be paid to access and use them. The website also charges a further premium for detailed plans and build-ready CAD (Computer-aided Design) files. The total transaction value can make this one of the top real estate affiliate marketing programs for any website focused on home design. You can earn money by promoting these plans. It’s a standard cost-per-action setup (hosted on the CJ Affiliate network) where you’ll get paid a 5% commission every time one of your referrals makes a purchase based on your affiliate link. That rate may seem low at first, but many of these plans cost more than $1000, and fewer are cheaper than $700. 3. Avail.co Avail.co is a landlord management software that helps landlords find tenants, view credit history, sign leases, and collect payments for their rental properties in real-time. The app can be used on computers, tablets, and phones, and the ease of access has made it quite popular in the real estate market. As a real estate affiliate, you can help Avail drive new subscriptions. You’ll get paid a $20 bounty for each person you refer to the program. One of the highlights of this affiliate program is the broad popularity of the tool. Many people involved in online real estate already know about it. That means less work for the affiliate marketers who want to close the sale. Everything is hosted on the ShareASale affiliate marketing network. The network is responsible for handling most of the tracking and payment policies. 4. Buildium Real Estate Buildium is a property management software that lets landlords and real estate companies handle a range of financial, accounting, and tracking tasks related to their rental properties. They can accept payments, monitor expenses, and generate custom reports about their rental activity. As a real estate affiliate in the program, you’ll get paid a 25% affiliate program commission on all new monthly subscriptions to the service. These plans start at $150/month and top out at $5,000+ a year. The high commission and transaction value are the highlights of the affiliate program. It’s one of the best real estate affiliate marketing programs for property-management-focused sites. It’s hosted on the Impact Affiliate network. This network sets most of the tracking and payment policies that affect affiliate marketers who want to join. 5. Corporate Housing By Owner (CHBO) Corporate Housing by Owner is a website that connects corporate property owners and managers with travelers who need to rent furnished rooms. It provides a range of management and marketing tools to each owner who pays for a listing. You’ll make money off of each person who follows your affiliate links to the site and buys a listing. Travelers can sort and browse what’s available at no cost. According to Corporate Housing by Owner, The average commission earned from the purchase of a listing is about $40. The affiliate program, hosted on the ShareASale network, has a collection of creative banners ready to go on your website as soon as you sign up. 6. Dealcheck.io Dealcheck is a website that lets online real estate investors and real estate professionals analyze rental properties, flips, and multi-family buildings. Members can use the tools to import dozens of property data points and estimate property purchase costs and potential profits. As part of this real estate marketing program, you can get paid by promoting subscriptions ranging from $10 to $20. This isn’t the highest rate, but one of the highlights of this product is that it is well-known and popular. The wide adoption of the product can help you to coax people through your affiliate links. It’s easier to make money with this product compared to those with less renown. Real estate affiliates are supported with a collection of existing images and banners to aid in promotion. 7. Foreclosure.com Foreclosure.com is a property search engine that specializes in foreclosures. Subscribers to the website can access property details before they are posted to the mass market. The site attracts a lot of property investors who are hungry for discounted properties. This could be one of the best real estate affiliate marketing programs for investor-focused sites. Partner advertisers can get paid a 25% commission for promoting subscription memberships to the website. Those subscriptions come at a flat $40. One of the highlights of this affiliate marketing program is that high-volume affiliates can become eligible for enhanced partner agreements. 8. Land Century Land Century is a property search engine that focuses on empty lots and distressed properties. It charges a subscription fee for posting listings and serves subscribers trying to unload one property or hundreds of them at once. As a real estate affiliate, you can earn up to a 15% commission on referral traffic or sales. The standard subscriptions range in cost from $15/mo to $145/mo. Corporate subscriptions are also available at custom prices. The potential for orders that include hundreds of listings at a time could make this one of the best real estate affiliate marketing programs for sites that deal with flipping, low-value properties, or empty land (think homesteading or survival niches). 9. Leads Bridge Leads Bridge is a marketing platform and lead management platform widely used by property investors. It allows subscribers to target specific audiences, track existing leads, and synchronize data. If you sign up for this real estate affiliate marketing program, you can claim a 20% commission on all sales made through your website links. Subscription costs range from $23 to $999+. The promotable subscriptions include newsletters and booked demos. There are a lot of ways to make money. Real estate affiliates are supported with pre-built links, banners, videos, and even social media posts. 10. Lex Levinrad Lex is a speaker, podcaster, and author of seven best-selling books on making money in real estate. Fans and investors looking for a real estate education can sign up for boot camp real estate courses and personalized coaching on his site. As a real estate affiliate, you can promote various real estate courses, including the Wholesaling Real Estate Boot Camp, Fixing and Flipping Houses Boot Camp, and Partnership Program. The real estate coaching services are not promotable. One of the highlights of this real estate affiliate marketing program is that Lex is widely recognized among property investors. This could mean a lower cost per lead for real estate-related affiliate marketing sites. Affiliates are paid a 50% commission for all sales. This is one of the top rates on this list, and the programs cost hundreds of dollars. 11. Property M.O.B Property M.O.B is a website that offers real estate wholesaling training for people new to the real estate industry. The website currently hosts 25+ comprehensive programs covering everything from entering the probate market to real estate advertising. As a real estate affiliate, you can promote any of the products on the website for a 50% commission. The high rate is one of the highlights of this program. This is one of the best commission rates in the industry, though the total transaction costs are fairly low. All real estate affiliates who join will be given access to a collection of banners and other creative assets. They’ll also be able to log into their portal Read More Read More

The post 14 Best Real Estate Affiliate Programs in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – November 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 13:47:43 +0000

We’re approaching the end of yet another year. If you want to keep your momentum up for the next one, this roundup is filled with the tips, tricks, and discoveries you need to know. First, we’ve got three new guides for you. You’ll learn how to thrive despite low traffic, how to rank images for mobile searches, and how to turn theories about Google Quality Guidelines into action. Next, we’ve got some case studies from the top minds in SEO. You’ll learn what the data says about the value of CTAs in page titles, the accuracy of keyword tools, and the impact that Google’s policy of rewriting titles has on split-testing. In the end, we’ll cover the news. You’ll learn about the indented results that are rolling into SERPs, the big spam update, and some of the buzz about the future of AMP. Also, you’ll get a peek at our huge Black Friday deals. 3 Metrics for Thriving Despite Lower Organic Traffic https://www.kevin-indig.com/growth-memo/3-metrics-for-thriving-despite-lower-organic-traffic/ Kevin Indig brings us this look at how you can make a website thrive even if you’re currently struggling for traffic. He argues that as long as you optimize the right metrics, you can get closer to your goals while building up an audience. The first metric he covers is direct traffic. Direct traffic is traffic that arrives directly to your site without the use of a search engine. This includes people who click on your ads, arrive from apps, or who know your address by word of mouth. Kevin gives you some ideas of how you can push this metric up through superior content that can make your site a destination. He also provides you with some examples of sites that are doing it right that you can match. The full guide covers two other metrics (referral traffic and returning visitors) and provides you with more ideas and examples to drive them. It’s good advice for anyone who’s struggling with a newer site or needs to thrive in a low-traffic sub-niche. Next, we’ll be looking at one way you can drive up organic traffic: Getting images to rank in mobile search results. How to Get Images in Mobile Search Results https://www.sterlingsky.ca/images-mobile-serps/ Joy Hawkins brings us this look at how to get your images to appear for mobile search results. This is important, she notes, because mobile searches treat images differently. On mobile results, images can appear beside all text searches. They don’t work on computers. Joy argues that you can take advantage of this fact to ensure that your results stand out in all kinds of searches. She shows you how to make sure that your images appear in a step-by-step process. The guide includes a lot of tips that may not seem intuitive until you try them. For example, posting an image at the top of the page makes it more likely to be noticed by Google and displayed in results. She also provides a series of recommendations for what image you should use, what information they should include, and links to additional guides that can help. Overall, it’s great advice for any site that can benefit from accompanying images, such as a field service website. The next guide is effective for pretty much any kind of site. We’ll be looking at a simple breakdown of how Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines work in practice. Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines Demystified for SEO https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-quality-raters-guidelines/ Vince Nero of Ahrefs gives us this guide to making the rater guidelines work for you. As he mentions in his introduction, these guidelines are Google’s most complete descriptions of what they want from your site in document form. However, as he also points out, this document is nearly 200 pages long. Unless you’re in the mood for some heavy technical reading, this guide may be just what you’re looking for. First, he goes over the basic topics covered in the guidelines (such as E-A-T, ownership, and “needs met”) and provides clear explanations for them. Then he lays out a series of tips that can help you implement the requirements that matter most to SEOs. He recommends that you pay attention to what other sites say about you, that you directly respond to positive and negative reviews, and that you clarify authorship/qualifications for important claims—especially on Your Money, Your Life (or YMYL) sites. Many more tips are provided in this short guide to help you bring your site into compliance. Now, we’re ready to start looking at the month’s top case studies. First, how worthwhile is adding a CTA to a page’s title tag? Case Study: Should You Add a CTA to a Page’s Title Tag? https://www.semrush.com/blog/case-study-should-you-add-a-cta-to-a-page-s-title-ag-/ Brian Moseley of Semrush brings us this look at the impact CTAs have on organic traffic. As you may know, CTA is an acronym for “Call-to-Action”. It’s a marketing practice of adding action verbs onto statements to encourage browsers to take the next step (ex. “Buy now”) He starts with a poll he published before releasing the case study in which 60% of respondents predicted that adding a CTA would improve traffic. Let’s look at how that played out. For the case study, over 800 category pages without CTAs were sorted into variant or control groups. The control groups remained the same while the variants had fresh CTAs added to the beginning or end. The test was carried out over 21 days. Over those days, the results showed a clear advantage for the sites that were updated with CTAs. These pages experienced a statistically-significant increase in clicks of 8.3%. Check out the full case study to find some extra analysis on the results and some discussion of why searchers may have shown the preferences that they did. Next, we’ll be looking at another case study with big implications for most sites: Just how accurate are traffic estimates from tools? Are Keyword Tools Traffic Estimates Accurate? (Case Study) https://www.authorityhacker.com/traffic-estimates-accuracy/ Mark Webster of Authority Hacker brings us this look at the accuracy of traffic estimates from keyword tools. First, he asked 47 website owners to (anonymously) provide their complete search data for a one-month period. Then he signed up for subscriptions to six of the biggest SEO keyword traffic tools: For the results, he shows us how each tool estimated the traffic for the 46 sites and how closely each estimate stuck to the real traffic. He generated graphs that show us how much each tool over-reported or under-reported their results. Those results came with caveats, of course. As he pointed out, the “most accurate” tool wasn’t the most accurate in all cases. Additionally, some of the more accurate tools tended to over-report results, while slightly less accurate tools avoided that problem. The full study includes a lot more discussion on how to read the results and what it tells you about which tool to use. Our final case study is a little more “meta” than the others. It looks at whether Google’s tendency to rewrite titles affects what we can learn from split-testing. Does Google Rewriting Titles Prevent Us From Testing Them for SEO Impact? https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/blog/google-title-rewrites/ Will Critchlow of SearchPilot brings us this analysis of what we can or cannot learn from meta-title split testing now that Google is rewriting more than 80% of them. He starts with his conclusion: That split-testing is still valuable and can still tell us a lot about what titles searchers respond to enthusiastically. He defends this in several ways. First, he points out that Google even titles that are changed are rarely changed significantly. Most changes come down to the title being shortened to display properly across a range of devices. He also points out that it’s still possible to build tests that can isolate changes that occur unevenly across results. In other words, the right tests will still be able to tell you if your testing results in measurable differences. The complete analysis comes with a lot more advice on crafting SEO tests and benefits from split-testing titles. Will also argues that Google’s incoming infinite scroll feature (mobile results will no longer have a “page 1”, just one infinite page) will make this testing more valuable. We’re now ready to move on to the news. First, we’ll check out one of Google’s feature rollouts. Indented Results Roll Out at 40% of SERPs https://moz.com/blog/indented-serp-results Dr. Peter J. Meyers of Moz brings us this look at the indented results that Google has started pushing live after months of testing. Indented results are groups of organic results that come from the same domain. Now, when you use certain terms, you’ll see a normal result, along with several others indented underneath it. These indented results guide you to specific pages on that domain that may be more in line with your intent. As an example, Peter shows a search for the Spirit Halloween store. The main result shows you the homepage for the business, while an indented result takes you to a map for stores near you. This feature is now showing Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – November 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Buying a Website: How To Buy a Site In 2024

Matt Diggity — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 07:52:57 +0000

The year 2023 presents new opportunities and challenges for website buyers due to the rapidly changing online landscape. The process of buying a website can be complex, and there are several factors to consider, such as the niche, traffic, revenue, and the seller’s reputation. In this article, I will draw on my experience in website building and buying to provide you with practical insights on how to purchase a website in 2023. By the end of this article, you will be equipped with the necessary information and tools to make informed decisions when buying a website. Buy vs. Build When creating an affiliate site, you have two options: Newbie affiliates typically lean towards the idea of building a site from scratch. This makes a lot of sense because you’ll learn tons about SEO, managing a domain, etc., when you take this approach. The “buy a website” option is viewed as an approach best suited to more seasoned affiliate marketers or SEOs. But it’s a bit more nuanced than that. It comes down to dollars and cents. But first, let’s look at the pros and cons of each model. Pros and Cons Building a Website Buying a Website Evaluating Potential Purchases Here’s an overview of the steps of the evaluation criteria you should follow when figuring out if a site is worth buying or not. Verifiable Ownership Just because a person claims to own a website doesn’t mean they do. That’s the quickest way for you to get scammed out of tens of thousands of dollars. You can verify ownership in several ways. One would be to ask them to upload a small HTML file to their website. Failure to do so is one of the many red flags you should look out for. The second, and more reliable method, is to ask the seller to add you as a user on their Google Search Console account. Not every site owner will want you to see their Search Console account, but there are zero excuses for not using the HTML file method of validation. Just never, ever accept screenshots as proof that someone is a site owner. Do An Audit What site owners don’t tell you about their site is often as important as what they do share. But even the most clued-in SEO or affiliate marketer can’t pick up on structural or technical issues that could become a headache later. Like if every page on the site was recently 301’d before they sold it, or that it’s littered with duplicate content – neither of these is a good sign, for example. That’s why a site audit should be a mandatory part of your process for buying a site. You could do this manually, but it’s just way quicker to use a free trial with Semrush, Ahrefs, or Sitechecker. Site History The person selling you the affiliate site might not be the previous owner – it’s entirely possible that they purchased it from somebody else, revamped it, and then flipped it. Or that the domain name has been owned by several people over the years, using it for a different purpose, or not using it for anything at all. But you can’t leave that to guesswork, not even for a new domain. Instead, you should run the domain name through two different tools (and 100% free): This tool crawls the Internet and takes a snapshot of websites, in this case dating back to 1998. Large green circles indicate multiple snapshots, and small blue circles mean a single snapshot exists. This gives you a reasonably accurate picture of the evolution of a particular site and if it was ever used for something like porn, gambling, or something else that you might not want to be associated with. You should always run a WhoIs check on the domain name of any website you’re thinking about buying because you can see things like: In the above example, you can see that the domain name was registered in 1994, has only been active on 3 domain registrars with a single drop, and only ever used 5 different web hosts. What you don’t want to find are domain names that are just a few years old, have multiple drops, changed registrar dozens of times, and have had more DNS changes than you’ve had hot dinners. Another issue is the domain extension – is the site using a Top Level Domain (.com, etc) or something a bit more off-center like .biz? I recommend you avoid any affiliate site using a free domain or domain name using numerals or special characters. That’s never a good look. Also, I don’t buy sites unless they have a .com domain name extension because it’s the default domain extension that people type into an address bar. Domain Authority Although it’s not a deal-breaker, it’s a good idea to check how much authority the domain name behind the website has. What is domain authority? It’s a value from 0 to 100 based on the number of incoming links and/or root domains pointing to your site, which then influences your site’s ability to rank for keywords. So a site with a DA (Domain Authority) score of 70 will rank for high-difficulty keywords far more readily than a site with a DA score of 10. More authority on your site will help you build trust. You can measure site authority with tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, and Majestic, for example. And I would recommend that you check the site authority of the site using at least one other tool such as the Moz Link Explorer or Ahref’s Website Authority Checker. The reason is that site authority can be faked for any existing website, but again if you’re purchasing through a broker, this shouldn’t be an issue. Private sales are an entirely different story, however, so you need to be vigilant. There’s no such thing as the “perfect” domain name, but checking the actual site authority vs. what the seller claims will stop you from buying a dud domain. Yes, you can always improve the backlink profile of a domain name with a faked DA score. But the point is that you shouldn’t have to – you paid good money to avoid that particular task. Backlink Profile You should always take a careful look at a site’s link profile by auditing it. What you’re looking for are anomalies like really high thought leadership but where 95% of the links are shit, where most of the incoming links use exact match anchor text, or even that a large number of stupidly high DA sites recently started linking to the site because this is one way to spoof the DA score. Truth be told, if you’re buying through a broker, they’ve already checked this for you – or they should have. Alternatively, the average person with access to a decent backlink checking tool like Ahrefs can spot a toxic link profile a mile away. Rankings The evaluation criteria for rankings requires ascertaining whether a large percentage of your site’s traffic comes from maybe just a handful of high-traffic pages or keywords. Or even worse, just a single keyword – gulp! While it’s true that 80% of a typical affiliate site’s traffic comes from 20% of the content, you still need to err on the side of caution when you’re about to drop a few grand on a site. So, ask yourself what would happen to the site’s revenue and income potential if that small number of high traffic pages got deindexed by Google? For example, is there informational content on the site that you could monetize if all the commercial keywords tanked? Ongoing rankings are never guaranteed for any website, but be careful about putting all your eggs in one basket (or one keyword!) Keyword Research After you have bought your new website, you will want to increase the traffic, which means finding new keywords to target for your marketing strategy. This should only be done for sites you have an active interest in acquiring and not every single site that looks worthwhile. You don’t need to be an SEO expert to do this type of research. Look for a mixture of targetable long-tail keywords for informational content along with a handful of commercial terms that you can target for revenue generation. You need to provide food for the search engines if you want to continue to grow your future site and make more money from it. P.S. If you do want to level up on your research skill set, check out my guide on how to do advanced keyword research. Traffic Sources Not all traffic is created equal, so it’s always worth digging into a site’s Google Analytics to find out exactly where visitors are coming from. It’d be all too easy to assume that every unique visitor was brought in via the SERPs, but they could just as easily be arriving via social media posts. Again, don’t rely on screenshots for this kind of Read More Read More

The post Buying a Website: How To Buy a Site In 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – October 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 06:40:22 +0000

Are you looking to make some last major moves before we start thinking about next year? Our latest roundup has some tips and research that can help you make the last quarter your best quarter. First, we have four thick guides. They’ll teach you how to beat Google title rewrites and how to build deep links with PR tactics. You’ll then learn how not to get tripped up by copying a competitor’s mistake and how to do faceted navigation better. After that, you can jump into two actionable case studies. The data will tell you how many footer links are a good idea (I bet it’s more than you think) and whether you should really be stressing about big changes from the next update. We’ll close on the news. Have Tiny, unannounced updates plagued october? The data seems to say so. We’ll also look at one of the funnier interactions coming out of Bing and Google’s big case in the EU courts. 5 Ways to Beat Google Title Rewrites https://zyppy.com/blog/5-ways-to-beat-google-title-rewrites-and-a-new-seo-traffic-tool/ Cyrus Shepard brings us this look at how to beat Google title rewrites. As he notes, Google has recently become surprisingly aggressive when replacing this key metadata. Once, it tended to target results where the titles were missing. Now, it will replace even crafted, researched titles. Moz did some recent research on the scale of this problem and found that up to 58% of all titles were being rewritten. If you want to keep your titles out of that figure, Cyrus has five pieces of advice that he covers in great detail. Using clear steps and visual aids, he tells you how to: It’s all good advice, but as he points out, changes may be coming soon. At least some of the effects seem to be unintentional and may be subject to rule changes in updates. Let’s move on to some techniques that may survive better over the long haul. Our next guide has some ideas on how to use content & PR to build deep links. How to Use Content & PR to Build Deep Links https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/how-to-use-content-and-pr-to-build-deep-links/ Tom Jeffery of ScreamingFrog brings us his advice on how content and PR can be mobilized to generate deep links for your sites. Deep links are links that bypass your home page and take users directly to content that’s “deep” in your site hierarchy. Links that go directly to product pages are an example of deep links. The definition has also grown to cover links that take mobile users to content within an app. No matter what type of deep links you need, Tom argues that you may need more of them. He shows us a graph of how his team used deep links to turn a “COVID restrictions by state” page into a lead-generating powerhouse for an insurance company. Building normal links to highly commercial content can be a challenge. Tom recommends that you use content PR techniques that can attract deep links from media, such as building themed “gift guides” around products that are well-stocked but not well-linked You can also create competitions and then use product page links to show the value of the prizes given away free to the winners. Media outlets may link directly to the prize when covering the competition. Finally, he suggests writing thoughtful content about your industry. As a business owner, you have some existing credibility in your industry. Using your own experience to present yourself as a thought leader on important topics can attract links. These are long-term strategies, but the glimpses he gives us into how these techniques have paid off for clients are compelling. Next, let’s turn our gaze on the competition. We may fear what they’re doing right, but what they’re doing wrong can also trip us up. What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research https://moz.com/blog/competitive-research-pitfalls Travis McKnight of Moz brings us this look at how to avoid the pitfalls of competitive content research. Competitive analysis has become a major buzzword in SEO for the last few years. Our roundups have included several guides about the data you can analyze to find what your competition is doing or targeting. This guide asks: What if they’re wrong? What if your competitor doesn’t know what they’re doing right, and they’ve decided to spend oodles of money in the wrong direction? You don’t want to follow them, and Travis has some tips that may help you avoid doing just that. His long guide includes advice on how you can: Putting these methods into practice can protect you from pointing your resources in the wrong direction. Our final guide of the month can also help you point your resources in the right direction with faceted navigation. Faceted Navigation: Definition, Examples & SEO Best Practices https://ahrefs.com/blog/faceted-navigation/ Sam Underwood of Ahrefs brings us this important piece about how to develop faceted navigation for your website. Faceted navigation is a kind of UX pattern that carries visitors to their destination faster. It has SEO benefits, but as Sam points out, a lot of risks to control. Faceted navigation is what it’s called when a website filters listings on category pages by their attributes. For example, imagine you’re looking at a list of flights and want to see only the ones leaving on a certain date. The sorting options (often appearing in a nearby menu of checkboxes) are a type of faceted navigation. If you’ve ever narrowed down a long list of flights, hotels, or other products, you understand the value of these options. However, Sam wants to make sure that you understand the risks. The guide covers the potential and consequences of these problems in great detail. Sam follows up with steps you can take to control the risks or repair the damage. Next, we’ll move on to the two case studies for the month. The first will look at the results of a split test study on internal links. SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Adding Internal Links to Home Page Footer https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/adding-internal-links-to-home-page-footer/ Daniel Haugen of SearchPilot brings us this look at whether you can positively impact organic traffic by adding more internal links to the home page footer. The team theorized that it was possible to increase organic traffic just by adding new links, but they were concerned about how Google would react. They decided to perform the research as a split-test with a control page and variant pages that steadily managed more links. The control and variant pages started with roughly 30 internal links to various categories in the home footer. Variant pages were tested with up to 100 total links in this spot—so many that the font had to be adjusted to a smaller size to display them properly. The results were good overall for the hypothesis. The team found that the pages with the new footer links enjoyed greater traffic on both desktop and mobile searches. No negative SEO consequences showed up in the data, though the UX risks are pretty clear in the highest ranges. The next study examines the strength of core updates over time and examines whether they are getting more or less powerful. Are Core Updates Becoming Less Powerful? [Study] https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-core-update-trends/ Mordy Oberstein brings us this look at Google’s Core Updates and whether the company may have adopted a philosophy to make them less impactful on landing. He admits that this hypothesis may surprise some people who have seen devastating impacts from recent updates. However, he has a lot of data to work from and data points that some SEOs may find hard to argue against. He set out to analyze the rank volatility of every update from the 2018 Medic update. While updates existed long before this point, Mordy chose to start here because this is when Google began openly discussing updates with the public and announcing them as events, rather than just treating them like typical software updates. There have been many updates worth studying in that time: After examining the volatility across each of these updates, the study turned up several important conclusions. Among other findings, the team discovered that the average level of volatility seen during an update has decreased by 51.7% since the January 2020 Core Update. His thorough writeup covers the study in more detail and dives deep into why the changes are happening and how updates have evolved to target different niches more effectively. The whole thing is worth your time, but for now, let’s jump into our news items. We’ll start with a quick review of the algorithm update that shook things up early this month. Huge Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On October 2nd & 3rd https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-32185.html Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable brings us some industry chatter about a big update that apparently dropped between Oct 2nd and 3rd. SEOs across some of the web’s biggest forums sniffed out the update when their site traffic started dropping between 30-50%. Barry provided readings from most major tools so that you can Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – October 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How To Do a Backlink Audit (And Link Building Plan) In 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 12:51:08 +0000

If you want to know whether your website is in good SEO shape or not, you need to check your backlinks. I’ve been doing SEO since 2009. I have played around with both white hat and black hat SEO techniques, and I can tell you from my own experience that your backlink profile health can make or break your SEO efforts.. That’s why a backlink audit is crucial for your website’s search engine ranking. In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to do a backlink audit using Ahrefs backlink audit tool. I personally found this tool to be the most helpful. You’ll also learn how to analyze such links on your backlink profile so that you can identify any bad backlinks to your site that may prevent it from ranking to its potential. Once you’ve done a complete link audit, the next step is to continue to build websites link acquisition authority. Therefore, in the final chapter, you’ll find out how to create a Link Requirement Estimate Plan for your site – it’s a report that looks at how many backlinks/referring domains you’ll need to outrank your competitors. Quick Summary What is a Backlink Audit? A backlink audit is all about analyzing the quality of links towards your website from other domains with the aim to make sure that there aren’t any unnatural or spammy backlinks that could potentially hinder your site’s SEO performance or result in a Google Manual Penalty. Why is a Backlink Audit Important? A backlink audit is important because links are one of the most powerful and important ranking factors in Google’s Search algorithms. There’s no denying the importance of links and, by extension, the art of link building has on your website’s ability to rank. A Backlinko study of one million search results found that backlinks correlated with search engine rankings more than any other ranking factor. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that links can also be one of the most problematic components of your site’s SEO health. When you buy a car, you have to put the right fuel in it to make it run. In the same way, backlinks are like a website’s fuel where the right links provide the boost it needs to move forwards (rank). Apart from helping you find the potentially dangerous links, performing a link audit also helps provide an insight into your backlink profile and how you may want to strategize for a future link-building campaign. This is something that ties into the Link Requirement Plan section of this article. Backlink Audit Checklist Before we begin, here’s a breakdown of every backlink audit tool you’ll need to identify potentially dangerous backlinks to your site. Get An Overview of Your Link Profile (And Your Competitors) The first step in this link profile audit process is all about getting to know the state of your site’s link profile before digging deep into the links themselves. The simplest way to do this is via Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool. Site Explorer > Enter your domain > Choose the “*.domain/*” mode Scroll a little further down, and you’ll see two graphs which show the number of referring domains (i.e. domains linking) and referring pages your website has seen over time. This graph is useful because it shows any sharp increases (which may be a result of a negative SEO attack), or decreases (which may represent a sudden loss of links) that may be of importance. You can compare both the referring domains and the link velocity graph with your competitors. To find out more about link velocity, check out the video below. Scroll further down, and you’ll find a table that shows the most common anchor texts used to link to your website. With this table, you can quickly identify whether the anchor text distribution of your link profile is natural or not. If you see mostly branded, URL based anchor texts, you have little to worry about. If you spot any anchors that are spammy (i.e. they have nothing to do with your website), or over-optimized (i.e. they are mostly keyword-rich), then this indicated that you will likely need to dig a little deeper by scrutinizing the full anchor text report that Ahrefs provides. You can do this by clicking on “view full report”. This information will come in handy later on! Follow the above steps to get an overview of your competitor’s backlink profile too – this will help you see where your website stands in comparison. Find & Pool Your Backlinks To perform your backlink audit, you need to gather data first! To get the most comprehensive data on your link profile, we recommend using as many sources as possible, but the main source we will use here is Ahrefs. To grab your backlink data head over to: Overview > Backlinks > One link per domain > Export > Quick/Full Export > Start Export From the export, delete all columns except: Now that you’ve collected all the information you need about your backlink profile, it’s time to analyze the actual backlinks! Analyze Your Backlinks Below we have listed a few metrics that you should look to speed up the process of analyzing all your backlinks. Each of these will help you answer the question, is this a spammy backlink? Domain Authority Your website’s Domain Authority is the perceived amount of authority your site has based on the quality and quantity of your backlinks. A link from a website with a high authority indicates that the link is of higher “quality”. Ahrefs has a logarithmic scale for Domain Authority called Domain Rating, in general: It’s worth noting that not all domains with a low DR score are spam sites. In these cases, other factors such as the language, number of keywords, link relevance should be considered. Page Authority Page Authority (or Ahrefs’ URL Rating) indicates the strength and authority of the linking page as opposed to the domain. A higher URL Rating suggests a higher quality page in terms of its ability to rank in the search results. Anchor Text We’ve already seen the importance of what types of anchors are used to link to your website. Referring Domains Websites that have a higher amount of referring domains indicate higher authority and ranking power. Use this metric in conjunction with Domain Authority. Organic Keywords The most valuable links are those whose domains rank for lots of keywords. Organic Traffic This metric tells you how much organic traffic the linked pages get. Getting links from websites (and pages) that are bringing in organic search traffic themselves offers more value to your website. Ahrefs’ metric isn’t quite as accurate as Google Analytics, but since you aren’t the site owner of the domains linking you, this is the best way to know how much traffic the backlinks pointing to you are getting. Total Backlinks More often than not, a website will only link to you once. A quick way to find potentially harmful or spammy referring domains is to identify any websites that have multiple links to your website. Two or three links is fine, but if these domains have 100s or maybe even 1000 backlinks linking to you, then it’s worth taking a closer look. Link Relevance Ideally, you want your inbound links to come from websites within your niche. If you have an eCommerce or niche website that sells vegan products, then a link from a health magazine is much more valuable to you than a link from a website about interior design. However, this doesn’t mean that you should disavow any domains that aren’t related to your website – because they may still be authoritative, bring in lots of search traffic, rank for lots of keywords etc. Language Use the “Language” filter on ahrefs to identify potentially harmful links from websites in different languages. If your website is in English and you see an unnatural amount of links coming from sites in various other languages, then it’s likely that these sites will offer little SEO value. Dofollow vs Nofollow There are two main types of backlinks: Dofollow links and Nofollow links. Dofollow links pass authority, Nofollow links don’t. Use the “Link type” filter on Ahrefs to identify any dofollow backlinks that are harmful to your site. Pattern Matching As you’ve probably noticed, it’s almost impossible to do a backlink audit manually, so it’s worth having a few tricks up your sleeve to quickly and efficiently spot those toxic links and reduce your toxicity score… … using pattern matching! Check For Manual Links Penalties An SEO’s worst nightmare (when it comes to link building) is finding out that Google has penalized their site. Link building has always been, is, and always will be one of the most lucrative of SEO components. It’s crucial that you follow Google’s guidelines and do not use any link schemes that manipulate Google’s PageRank algorithm. To check for manual penalties from Google: head over to Google Search Console > Security & Manual Actions Read More Read More

The post How To Do a Backlink Audit (And Link Building Plan) In 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – September 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 07:22:33 +0000

September finds SEOs on some shaky ground. A lot of updates have come in a short amount of time and not all of them were announced. This roundup covers some of the updates, plus the latest in SEO tricks and news. First, you’ll learn all about the link-building strategy that could get you links from powerful sites like BBC.com and Vice.com. Next, we have a deep analysis of the title tag update that may cover more than you’ve heard. Then, we’ll follow with a study on how category descriptions impact optimization. Next, we’ll cover some of the month’s most actionable guides. The first writer puts forward his personal list of nearly 20 SEO boosting practices. Then, you’ll learn how to calculate ROI with Google Analytics and whether exact match domains work anymore. Finally, we’ll look at the news. It’s all Google this month. You’ll learn how they’ve changed generated titles, completed the experience update, and (oops) admitted to losing a few days of your data. What is Digital PR? Why It Matters in Quality Link-Building https://authority.builders/blog/what-is-digital-pr/ Starting this list is a guide I wrote for Authority Builders on how to use Digital PR to give your website a serious boost in the SERPs. Digital PR is a marketing strategy that helps you build high-authority dofollow links to your website from real news articles on powerful sites. A solid Digital PR campaign can see you land dozens of killer links from some of the biggest sites on the web. In the guide, I walk you through exactly what Digital PR is, and how it differs from Traditional PR and Press Release Link Building. I then walk you through, step by step, the strategies you can use to land these kinds of links for yourself. You’ll find out: The guide takes you through each of these steps in detail. You’ll learn how they work and how to put them into action. In this next case study, you’ll learn more about the recent Google Title Tag update and how it affects us SEOs… Google Title Tag Update: A Highlight for Extraction Methods & Approaches to SEO https://brodieclark.com/google-title-tag-update/ Brodie Clark brings us this look at the title tag update and includes a small case study that demonstrates how it works right now. He begins with a quick history of how title tags have changed. As he points out, Google has done plenty of experimentation with features like the pixel limit. Google also has spent the last few years modifying and replacing snippets at will. So what changed with the most recent update on the 17th/18th of August? Google appears to have updated how they choose title tags. Brodie found that the new ones tended to be shorter. They tend to remove locations (if there are more than one) and add brands at the end. The SEO Lily Ray was responsible for the case study at the end. She bore down on one page that changed its title and chose the words from outside the page. Eventually, she found that the new title had been pulled from a tag page. You may be waiting to hear what changes you have to make to your site. Brodie didn’t have any advice on optimizing your site for this update. Our stance is that we’re going to wait and see. We have a lot of tests running right now to determine the best way to optimize title tags with the update in place. Stay tuned. Our next case study also deals with content that may be too long. It’s a case study that looks at the impact of removing fluffy category content. The Short and Long-Term Ranking Impact of Removing Long and Fluff E-Commerce Category Descriptions [Case Study] https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/ecommerce-category-description-case-study/ Glenn Gabe brings us this in-depth case study into the actual SEO performance of category descriptions. Imagine you have an e-commerce site with a lot of different categories. For a while, SEOs were recommending that you provide tailored content for each page. You knew people would probably never read the content, but the point was to provide context clues for search engines. Glenn uses this study to take a second look at whether this work really matters. Are we helping search engines give meaning to hundreds of pages, or are we just annoying our readers with a lot of content they don’t want? The study involved an e-commerce site that was updated in stages over several years to watch the effects. In the first phase, the descriptions were all cut to about 30% of their original size. In later phases, they were cut to a single paragraph. The case study found that cutting down descriptions didn’t have any short-term effects. The rankings held. Over the long period, the pages all experienced regular growth to the point that many now rank #1 with no other changes. With the case studies out of the way, we’ll move on to the month’s guides. We’ll start with one SEOs list of his favorite techniques. 19 Ways to Increase Organic SEO Traffic (With Examples and Templates) https://www.robbierichards.com/seo/increase-organic-traffic/ Robbie Richards brings us this look at his favorite 19 methods when a site needs a traffic boost. He covers a lot of the most popular ways to get a site moving. However, even experienced SEOs may pick up something new from this list. Each method is explained step-by-step. You’ll see images of how your templates should change as you’re putting each of the steps into practice. If any of them are new to you, take this chance to pick up some solid strategies. They’re up-to-date, and Robbie will let you know exactly how to pull them off. If these methods work for you, you’ll also find the next guide helpful. It teaches you some ways you can calculate your SEO ROI just by using Google Analytics. How to Calculate Your SEO ROI Using Google Analytics https://moz.com/blog/calculate-seo-roi-with-google-analytics Adriana Stein of Moz brings us this guide on how to measure SEO ROI using some figures that you can find in your Google Analytics console. As Adriana points out, GA is worth using because it helps you break down your audience, set goals, and work toward improvements. She breaks down several figures you can use to calculate ROI from Google Analytics. Let’s use the first one as an example. First, she covers page value. This measurement assigns an average monetary value to all pages viewed in a session where a transaction occurred. It helps measure pages that are important for your site but aren’t where conversions take place. Adriana provides a formula you can use to put a base dollar value on your pages based on its role in the conversion process. Using that information, you can show that the page either improved or declined based on SEO actions that were taken. The rest of the guide will take you through the other measurements, including several that make the most of e-commerce tools in GA. For now, we’ll check back with one of SEO’s (former) most popular practices. Do exact match domains work anymore? Do Exact Match Domains Still Work Anymore? https://www.searchenginejournal.com/do-exact-match-domains-still-work/283759/ Winston Burton of Search Engine Journal brings us this look at whether exact match domains (EMDs) are worth the premium cost in modern SEO. EMDs are domain names that match the keyword the site is targeting. For example, an EMDs for a New York City barber would be www.NYCbarber.com. These domains had a reputation for delivering easy SEO gains in the past. The logic was that if your domain perfectly matched a keyword/phrase, Google would recognize your site as being relevant to that phrase faster than a site by another name. Winston argues this argument is dead at this point for several reasons. For one, Google updates have targeted the relationship between “spammy” domain names and ranking in several updates. There’s no reason now to think the relationship is strong enough to matter. Second, Winston points out, EMDs are most applicable to local results, and domain names are barely applicable there. Instead, sites rank based on their map placement and content’s compatibility with SERP features. Winston says EMDs can still be valuable, but they need to be researched for the impact they will have on your customers before you pay any extra. Many of the EMDs that can benefit are already owned, and usually expensive. I agree that they still work. However, I choose not to purchase them very often for a couple of reasons. First, they cap out the content you can talk about on your site. Imagine that you create a page that’s a little outside the site topic but performs shockingly well. In some cases, you’d want to pivot the whole site around that page now that you know the appetite is there. You don’t have that flexibility with an EMD. If you want to go off-topic, you’ll be fighting uphill for relevance. Second, EMDs are harder to sell. The lack of flexibility means more risk for buyers that market changes could make the Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – September 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

13 Best Metaphysical Affiliate Programs of 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 03:46:53 +0000

Here’s something to get you thinking. The demand for all sorts of natural crystals is starting to steal market share from the diamond industry. It would appear that more people than ever in Western countries are now on a path to spiritual awakening. And that includes all Millennials who are ditching mainstream religion to follow Wicca and other more pagan belief systems. As a seasoned affiliate marketer myself, my estimate is that the market for the metaphysical is set to explode over the next few years. That makes right now a good time to position yourself ahead of the coming surge. All you need is the right set of metaphysical affiliate programs to work with. We asked the members of our Affiliate Lab group who are crushing it in this niche to share the referral programs that work best for them. Here are our top picks… Top Metaphysical Affiliate Programs 1. Hay House Hay House is a publisher of self-improvement books, audiobooks, and other materials. The company was founded by Louise Hay after she used the power of positive thinking to allegedly cure herself of a life-threatening illness. They provide a way for independent authors of spiritual and self-help books to publish their content and reach customers in 30+ countries. Your visitors will find products spanning crystals and chakras to the Law of Attraction, vegetarianism, astrology, and more besides. You can earn affiliate commissions to the tune of 50% on all sales, plus they provide lots of support for their affiliates in the form of creatives. Note: Their program is invite-only and you need to be able to demonstrate that you can generate organic traffic to their offers. 2. Live and Dare Meditation Live and Dare is a meditation training program created by international author, speaker, and popular blogger Giovanni Dienstmann. The goal is to help you move from what he calls “monkey mind to monk mind”, finding inner calm through daily meditation. Your visitors get access to 12 online courses, more than 50 guided meditations, mentorship from experienced practitioners, and a supportive community made up of other members. The lessons are short so will suit people with very little time. They also offer a free course, which could act as an effective pre-sell for affiliate marketers. This program is managed in-house and pays 40% commission on courses and 10% on coaching programs. 3. Sivana Next up on our list is Sivana Spirit, an online retailer of yoga clothing. But they also sell a range of natural gemstone jewelry, crystals, and meditation supplies, such as incense and smudging sticks. Your visitors will find everything from singing bowls to books on healing and spirituality in their online store. The only potential downside here for affiliates is that their meditation supplies aren’t prominently featured on their site. So that means deep linking to products is probably a good idea. One of the interesting sub-niches within their products is their singing bowls because they retail for up to $255. You’ll need an account with the ShareASale affiliate network to sign up for their affiliate link. Affiliates can expect an average order value of $82 per sale, and around $8 in commission per referral. 4. Trinity Road Trinity Road claims to be the leading online and offline supplier of products for Christians, and more specifically Catholics. That includes everything from candles and crucifixes to rosaries and vestments for those in positions of spiritual leadership within a community. They even stock Catholic coffee along with travel mugs and tumblers for good measures. What might surprise you is that there are around 1.3 billion registered Catholics in the world, so this is anything but a fringe or niche market. So how does this Christian affiliate program compare to the other metaphysical programs in this roundup? They pay 8% commission on all sales and have a pretty decent 3-month EPC. 5. Sounds True Sounds True program is another great affiliate program for both experienced and new affiliate marketers. Sounds True program was founded in 1985 by Tami Simon who wanted to share spiritual wisdom with the entire world. A little under 30-years-later the company has grown to 110 employees managing the 3,000 titles they publish across printed books, audiobooks, videos, and online classes. And these aren’t just random authors either – they’re some of the leading names in the spiritual and metaphysical niche like Michael Beckwith, Thic Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, Jason Silva, Valarie Kaur, and many others. Sounds true affiliate program pays a 35% commission on all sales. Some of their courses cost $137, so you’d earn $47 on that one referral, for example. 6. 15-Minute Manifestation 15 Minute Manifestation is a program that is pretty much the same thing as the Law of Attraction or Cosmic Ordering [1]. It contains a number of MP3 audio tracks that train you to dismiss any misguided or incorrect beliefs that prevent you from manifesting the life you’ve always wanted. But you only have to listen to these tracks for 15 minutes each day, hence the name of the product. Does it work? We have no idea. But we do know that the topic of cosmic ordering gets hundreds of thousands of organic searches per month. This is a ClickBank product, so make sure you have access to their affiliate network before you do anything else. Affiliate marketers receive a 35% cut of all sales referred. This program pays about $106 per sale. 7. Sage Goddess Sage Goddess affiliate program is an e-commerce store that sells a huge range of items suitable for audiences interested in all things metaphysical and spiritual. Your visitors will find everything from Reiki supplies to crystals, smudge sticks, meditation cushions, magical candles, meditation benches, or even temporary tattoos. And that’s just a random sampling of their product lines – there are thousands of other items in stock at any one time. They do also offer online courses, where you can learn tarot, numerology, and other such skills. So that’s another way to monetize your traffic. The Sage Goddess affiliate program pays a 7% commission rate on all products sold, but please bear in mind that they use 24-hour cookies, unlike most of the other affiliate programs in our roundup. So you’ll need to send warm traffic to specific product pages if you want to make money here. 8. BetterListen! Better Listen is a publishing company that focuses on promoting the spoken word teachings of some of the most outstanding thinkers in the world. Their library covers everything from mindfulness and meditation courses to books and audiobooks on religion, philosophy, spirituality, science, psychology, and personal growth. It’s an ideal place to send visitors who are interested in learning more about pretty much any subject from modern science to spirituality, and where both of these topics potentially intersect. How much is this spirituality program worth to the average affiliate? They offer a 15% commission rate on purchases made by new customers, so there’s no option for recurring commission here. 9. 7-day Prayer Miracle 7-day Prayer Miracle is a digital product that aims to teach you the skill of focused intention through prayer. So it’s similar to what you’d learn in a course on the Law of Attraction. Except this is a catholic company. The difference is that instead of simply wishing for the life of your dreams you use a specific type of prayer, as used by the prophet Daniel, to manifest miracles in his own life. This product contains several eBooks covering the prayer itself, divine hearing, and divine numbers, but you also get a prayer journal and a series of MP3 to tune your mind into the “miracle frequency”. As an affiliate marketer, you can expect to earn up to $250 per sale by promoting this offer if your visitor buys all 3 up-sells. There’s also the opportunity to earn recurring commissions with this affiliate program 10. Tiny Devotions Love Tiny Devotions was founded in 2010 and is a female-owned online store that started out selling Mala beads for use during meditation practice. Mala Beads are basically the same thing as regular prayer beads, but in the case of Love Tiny Devotions, their bead necklaces and bracelets use crystals that provide the wearer with a specific additional benefit e.g. be calmer, more focused, etc. Their bracelets and necklaces are available in a wide range of materials, with a finish to suit almost every taste. They’ve also expanded their product range to include other jewelry, essential oils, and even tote bags, so you might pick up some incidental commissions there. The big question though is can you make money online by promoting their affiliate programs? Yes, although with an average commission payout of $6 per sale you’re going to have to push other affiliate programs on your site or blog. 11. Soji Energy Soji Energy is one of the most unique spiritual affiliate programs we uncovered during research. What your visitors get are water bottles, water dispensers, and essential oil rollers that contain natural crystals, so Read More Read More

The post 13 Best Metaphysical Affiliate Programs of 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – August 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 05:10:58 +0000

Need some fresh momentum after the recent core update? You don’t want to miss this roundup. It’s filled with advice, data, and news that’s ready to be applied directly to your sites. To begin, you’ll find out the practices one SEO used to sell a young site for six figures. Then, we look at a presentation on how SEO changes for large sites and a simple flowchart you can use to know when to use a canonical. Next, we’ve got a set of highly actionable data studies. The first one defines the characteristics that are most likely to make your content perform in Discover. Then, we look at a deep dive on why Wise.com stays winning in SERPs and another study on how updates affect image search. We’ll close on the news. Google has announced they now recommend declaring authors in markup and that they’ll now show why specific search results were ranked. Finally, we’ll look at whether a coming WordPress update has the power to boost the core web vitals of a WP site. (Thread) How I Sold a 10-Month Old Website for Six Figures https://twitter.com/TedFrench/status/1425414187455496194 Fellow Affiliate Lab member, Ted French brings us this popular Twitter thread on the practices he used to sell a website for six figures (a $200,000+ profit) after only ten months of SEO work. As he explains in the thread, he has been working on niche sites since 2015. The sites that he develops are mainly monetized with affiliate links or display ads. Like some of his recent sites, the domain for this guide was purchased at auction right after its registration expired. Ted doesn’t discuss the site’s niche but lets us know the metrics he used to choose this site from the auction. He values “big daddy” links more than DA, DR, or other scores. This site happened to have some, and it became the basis for his work. He details all of his steps after taking possession of a site that fit his needs, including: This short thread contains insights on basically all the big decisions you’d make between getting a site and making it pay. The next guide in line is going to focus on large sites rather than small ones. SEO for Large Websites (Presentation Writeup) https://www.domwoodman.com/posts/seo-for-large-websites/ Dom Woodman brings us this look at how SEO changes when working with large/enterprise sites. He lays out the new tools that you’ll need to manage and maintain large sites. His advice covers: This advice is covered comprehensively in the article, complete with examples of template sheets and links to all the tools. It’s essential reading if a large site is challenging you. Our next guide is a bite-size cheat sheet on when to use a canonical, but it inspired a lot of goodwill from even experienced SEOs when it was released. (Infographic) Should I Use a Canonical? https://twitter.com/SEOWorksUK/status/1420048645374754818/photo/1 Billie Geena brings us this quick breakdown of the decision flow to follow when using a canonical. The chart starts with a look at two pages being compared to one another. The chart then flows through all the decisions you’ll need to make to find the correct answer. You can access the infographic, the tweet above, or through the image link here. I think this graphic could make an excellent bookmark for anyone who has trouble getting this decision out of the way quickly. The flow covers almost any issue that could leave you with analysis paralysis and takes you to the next decision. Now that you’ve picked up some things from the guides that came out this month, let’s jump into the case studies. We’ll start with a data-backed look at why content performs on Google Discover. Google Discover: 10 Characteristics of Top-Performing Content [Study] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/best-google-discover-content/414620/#close Lily Ray brings us this look at the common characteristics of content that thrives on Google Discover. The study analyzed 7,200 URLs to determine what optimizations are shared by the top-performing pages. Based on the data, she revealed the following ten characteristics that you can apply to your content: Check out the full guide for more information on how each of these characteristics is defined and to see examples of how they appear in SERPs. Our next item will deep-dive into one particular site and how it has maintained its power in SERPs. Wise.com SEO Case Study: 5 Reasons Why Their SEO Rocks https://ahrefs.com/blog/wise-seo-case-study/ Michal Pecánek brings us this in-depth look at how to do SEO right, with Wise.com as an example. Wise.com is a financial tech company that manages international money transfers. This is a highly competitive niche, but Wise has carved out a position that nets the site nearly 6.5 million visits a month. Using Ahref readings, Michal took a crack at identifying what put this site in such a powerful position. He tied their strength to some of the following practices: His study looks at these practices in detail, shows how they appear in the data, and provides image examples. There’s enough detail that you could easily steal their mojo and put it to work on your site. Our final data study piece looks at some of the fringe readings from the core update and seeks to answer the question: Can core updates impact image search rankings? Google Broad Core Updates and Image Search: Can core updates impact Image Search rankings in addition to Web Search and Discover? https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/ Glenn Gabe of GSQi takes us through this look at how core updates can affect image search rankings. He started looking for the answer after fielding a technical question on Google. However, Glenn was surprised enough by the scope of what he found to do a fuller writeup. He starts with a refresher on how Google ranks images in the first place. He explains that ranking in image search is mostly tied to landing page combinations. That means (roughly) Google may rank images based on how well the hosting page gives context to those images. Glenn argues that this relationship could explain why a surprising amount of image search movement was recorded in the brief analysis. He provides several examples of sites that were hit, and sites that were not—theorizing that the hit sites may have lost SERP features. Danny Sullivan of Google dropped into the conversation at one point to clarify that, yes, core updates may hit image results or any other type of content. Glenn closes with some advice on how to check if your site has been impacted. You should check out the rest of the piece to learn more about how to spot hits to your images rankings and how to recover. With the last case study out of the way, we’ll move to the news. We’ll start by looking at what it means that Google is now recommending authors be declared in markup. Google Recommends Declaring Authors in Markup https://www.sistrix.com/blog/who-wrote-that-content-google-recommends-declaring-authors-in-markup/ Johannes Beus of Sistrix brings us this quick look at what it means that Google wants authors to be declared in markup. This follows the Aug 6th introduction of the new author.url property. The new property was released to give SEOs the chance to help Google determine the correct author of a given article. While Google has done a lot of work to detect authors automatically, this new change will allow site owners to push for recognition more directly. As Johannes points out, this effort doesn’t have the best track record. Both the Google+ channel and the Rel author tag were released to meet this same need. Both were discontinued shortly afterward. Whether this new property sticks or not, some SEOs may benefit from being early adopters. Some site owners in YMYL-niches depend on recognized authorship to rank and will probably benefit from getting on board with new initiatives as soon as possible. Google Now Shows Why It Ranked a Specific Search Result https://searchengineland.com/google-now-shows-why-it-ranked-a-specific-search-result-350659 Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land brings us this surprising move by Google to reveal what ranking factors allowed sites to reach the top of SERPs. The feature, covered in this official release, expands the “about this result” box to identify the factors used to deliver the result. For example, when you perform a search, this box may now tell you: It’s not hard to understand why SEOs might be excited about this change. While this box may not share detailed data about weights and signals, it may provide driven SEOs with a more precise game plan to target the results above them. This feature is already rolling out and estimated to appear in 100% of US searches by the end of August. WordPress 5.9 May Boost a Core Web Vitals Metric by Up to 33% https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-core-web-vitals-boost/413627/#close Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal has some news for us about a WordPress update that could save a lot of time. WordPress is one of the most widely used CMS systems globally, and their next update may boost the core web vitals of millions of sites using it. The change being discussed would alter the default loading Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – August 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

10 Best WordPress Hosting Service Providers (2024 Review)

Matt Diggity — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 03:50:28 +0000

With an estimated 64 million websites relying on WordPress, it’s no surprise that this user-friendly platform continues to dominate the website-building landscape. A dedicated WordPress hosting provider is essential to elevate your site’s performance, user experience, and security. As someone who has personally benefited from investing in WordPress hosting providers, I can attest to the advantages they offer. By optimizing their services for WordPress sites, these providers streamline performance and enhance online security due to their singular focus on one CMS. If you’re using WordPress or considering it for your website, it’s wise to explore the top hosting options available. In this article, I’ll share my thoughts on them and recommendations to help you find the ideal WordPress hosting provider for your needs. Best Options for WordPress Web Hosting Compared From shared hosting to managed, you have many options for the best WordPress hosting provider. Here’s a quick reference guide to show you the basics. Here are the top 10 WordPress hosting providers available right now. 1. WPX Hosting (Editor’s Choice) It’s hard to beat WPX Hosting. It comes with an incredible range of features, all of which are available on even the lowest-priced plan. WPX is an industry leader when it comes to WordPress hosting services. Main Features Overview Even if you’re just looking at site speed, WPX is the hosting service another web hosting provider has yet to beat. That’s particularly true if you’re specifically looking for a WordPress hosting provider. WPX focuses on the best WordPress hosting, which is only good news for you. Out of all the best WordPress hosting companies on this list, VPX offers one of the best hosting services for a WordPress website. On the technical side of things, the impressive server speeds and the addition of the free CDN make for a complete package. From tech support to the focus on the best WordPress hosting service, WPX is simply one of the top options for hosting your WordPress website. You can get access to WPX with a 90% discount on the first month. Simply click the button below and use the coupon code MATT90. (90% off the first month with coupon MATT90) 2. SiteGround If you want the best, most professional customer service from WordPress hosting companies, a managed hosting plan is the best option. This is a much more costly choice, but the support that you get is worth the expense. Main Features Overview WordPress recommends a handful of hosting companies, including SiteGround. Combine that with industry awards and consistently positive reviews, and it’s no surprise that SiteGround remains as popular as ever. That makes it one of the best WordPress hosting providers when you’re keeping a tight rein on your budget. SiteGround is an excellent middle ground. The tech support is hard to beat, and they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if you don’t like the service. 3. DreamHost There aren’t many hosting companies that WordPress officially recommends for the best WordPress hosting. DreamHost is one of them, along with BlueHost and SiteGround. While the others have their benefits, DreamHost offers competitive monthly rates. Main Features Overview DreamHost is a great choice for people starting with WordPress hosting providers. Whichever plan that you choose, the price is always competitive. You also get a 100% uptime guarantee, unlimited websites on the higher tier plans, and you’ll receive a payment if your site ever goes down. There’s also an impressive 97-day money-back guarantee, which you won’t find with any other hosting provider. It’s an excellent service that’s hard to beat. 4. Hostinger Hostinger provides website hosting for as little as $1.99 a month. You might think that would give you extremely limited use of features, but you still get the essentials. That means your site still looks professional and has the right loading speeds, but without the expense of the pricier hosts. Main Features Overview Whichever plan you choose, you get a 99.99% guaranteed uptime, and your site speed will be fast for up to 10,000 visitors per month. The addition of the Lightspeed cache means that your site will be quick, and it works alongside all of the most popular plugins. The renewal price is a lot higher than the introductory price. It’s a big jump, but that reflects how much of a bargain those first-time costs are. The full price that you pay on a renewal is still competitive. Hostinger offers some of the best WordPress hosting services for those people keeping tight control over their budgets. It’s WordPress optimized, great value for money, and simply one of the cheapest best WordPress hosting companies around. Their WordPress hosting services don’t have everything you need, but it remains one of the best WordPress hosting services currently available. 5. Kinsta Primarily focused on managed hosting, Kinsta is powered by Google’s Cloud Platform. By using the Google infrastructure, Kinsta becomes incredibly easy to use and is extremely accessible. Main Features Overview Kinsta is pricey, especially when compared with options like Hostinger. You get what you pay for, though, and Kinsta has a wide range of features covering the basics and the more advanced. While other WordPress hosting services try to do everything, Kinsta keeps things simple. They offer only WordPress hosting-specific plans. So despite the high prices, Kinsta is well worth exploring if you’re looking for something that will allow your WordPress site to scale. Their WordPress hosting services are top of the game. 6. Flywheel If you’re just getting started with managed hosting, Flywheel offers a range of excellent features. It’s considered a more budget-friendly option in terms of managed hosts. Main Features Overview If one site is all you need, the two lower-priced plans are more than enough for most people. Comparatively, Flywheel is very affordable and comes with a wide range of outstanding features. It’s certainly something to consider if you want to move away from worrying about micromanaging the back-end of your site. There are cheaper hosting options available, but Flywheel is a good all-rounder that should be considered if your budget is flexible enough for it. 7. Bluehost An industry leader, Bluehost currently powers around two million websites. It’s one of the official WordPress hosting services. It’s an excellent option to look at if you’re just about to build your first WordPress page. Main Features Overview If you’re currently paying for shared hosting and considering a more managed service, then Bluehost now offers this. Their managed service is called WP Pro and comes with the three-year contract demand, but the price remains low at just $14.99 per month. All in all, Bluehost is one of the best WordPress hosting service options. It’s ideal for those on a smaller budget. 8. Nexcess One of the reasons why Nexcess is worth looking at is its pricing plan. Unlike other web hosts, all of the features on Nexcess are available with every plan. So even if you go for the lowest price, you don’t miss out on anything. Main Features Overview There are seven plans to choose from, and the only real difference between them is how many websites you can have. The top tier allows for unlimited websites. Nexcess does come with a free trial period, so they’re worth taking a look at. And at less than $13 a month for a fully managed hosting provider, Nexcess is hard to beat. Nexcess is a lot of hosting for a small amount of money. 9. A2 Hosting Automated free site migrations are increasingly common with the big web hosting companies. Some of these are offered for free, while others will charge you for the move. What A2 Hosting does differently is that they don’t automate the process. Main Features Overview Overall, A2 has fast servers at a decent price point. The tech support is exemplary. Whether you want shared WordPress hosting plans or a more managed plan, A2 has the options to match your needs. Even a basic shared WordPress host plan comes with 100GB of storage, more than most WordPress hosting services. The unlimited free email is hard to beat too. The fact that this is all available on a basic plan is impressive. If you upgrade to a more expensive plan, the performance only improves. You can boost your website’s performance so that it can handle as much as nine times as many site visitors. 10. GoDaddy Starting at just $2.99 per month, GoDaddy is one of the biggest names in hosting. They’ve gone through some changes over the years. Their previously challenging user interface is easier to use, and site navigation is much simpler. Main Features Overview GoDaddy is a good option, despite being one of the cheapest. The special offers that are included with some plans could make the costs even more tolerable. It’s not for everyone, but its ease of use alone makes it worth looking at. Just be very aware of the renewal times and their costs. What Should You Look for in a WordPress Hosting? The best WordPress host plan for you and your Read More Read More

The post 10 Best WordPress Hosting Service Providers (2024 Review) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

What a Data Dump From Empire Flippers Told Us About the Best Niches for Affiliate Marketing

Matt Diggity — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 04:28:47 +0000

As a seasoned affiliate marketer and founder of several successful niche websites, I understand the challenges that come with choosing the right niche for your affiliate marketing business. That’s why I was excited to partner with Empire Flippers to conduct a comprehensive data study on more than 300 affiliates, display advertising, and Amazon associate sites sold since 2019. We’ve broken down this data to give you some niche ideas and help you choose the most lucrative affiliate marketing niches for your 1st or 50th site. We’ll start by using the data to highlight the most important findings. Then we’ll take an eagle-eyed view of how all the sites in our study handle content, links, and time spent. Finally, we’ll reveal and analyze our favorite niches for affiliate marketing (in our opinion). If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. Quick Summary What We Learned—Insights and Revelations We took the 300+ sites we received as part of the data dump and organized them by affiliate marketing niches, assets, and monetization model. From there, we compared the groups against each other to get some answers that can be carried into your next affiliate marketing campaigns. Which niche brings in the most affiliate revenue? Which niche benefits most from a content-heavy or link-heavy affiliate marketing strategy? Here are some of the things we’ve learned. We’ll tell you more about the context of each of these insights in the sections below. Tables have been included to help you understand more about how these sites stand up to other niches. You may have questions about how some affiliate marketing niches performed. We’ll cover our list of some of the best niches for affiliate marketing in more detail right after these insights. The News & Education Niche Reported the Highest Average Adjusted Monthly Revenue at $8439 Per Month News & Education held the lead for revenue after we tidied up the data a little. That tidying was necessary. You can find affiliate programs in the education niche that pay over $80 to $120 for each sale. At first, the Religion & Spirituality niche appeared to be one of the most profitable niches by a long shot, with a commanding lead at $24,842. Sure, this is an interesting niche (and probably an evergreen niche if the last 5000 years of history are any indication), but we just didn’t have the faith to place it among the most profitable affiliate marketing niches without some digging. Before we simply took that number as proof of a trend, the team dove a little deeper into the data. What we found was that only two sites sold in that niche for the life of the data. One was making well over $20k, and the other was barely clearing $1000 a month. Unfortunately, our view of the Religion & Spirituality affiliate niche was badly contorted by the high-earning whale of a site. However, there are multiple metaphysical affiliate programs out there with lucrative commissions. We found a few other niches that had the same problem. We didn’t get enough data points to assess the following affiliate niches: Because of this, we removed the above niches from the list and came up with the “Adjusted” list below. So, beyond news, which niches have the best revenue when you adjust for measurable niches? Our data gave us this top 10 list of the highest revenue-earning niches for affiliate marketing. The Adjusted top 10 Revenue-Earners These sites report the most revenue, but that doesn’t solve our whole ROI equation. The most profitable affiliate marketing niches are the ones that also have low costs. We’ll be looking deeper into the best affiliate marketing niches later. Let’s look at the data about the baking hobby niche and whether low revenue means it’s not the best profitable niche. The Baking Niche Reports Some of the Lowest Monthly Revenues at $773 Per Month The baking niche had some of the lowest reported revenue among the affiliate marketing niches that could be examined. Don’t hold that against it, though. Remember, our data only includes sites that sell. The decent number of baking sites that made it into our analysis suggests that these sites don’t need much revenue to make it to market. That could make baking a safe (if possibly a little saturated) niche market for your first successful affiliate marketing business. These sites mostly host recipes and often monetize through affiliate offers for the ingredients or kitchen accessories you need to complete the recipe. Sub-niches and micro-niches may focus on a single type of recipe, such as cocktails. You may be interested to know who the baking niche is sharing the bottom of the ladder with. The table below covers the five lowest-earning niches and the average monthly income reported at the time of sale. The Bottom 5 Revenue-Earners Again, remember that this table only assesses the revenue. Low revenue niches can still be profitable niches. If you need niche ideas, a less competitive niche with lower revenue can be a great place to start your affiliate marketing business. The Medical Niche Reports the Best ROI on Content With a Revenue/Content Ratio of $33.14 Per Published Page The Medical niche was a standout winner of the revenue/content ROI among all the other lucrative affiliate marketing niches. Affiliate marketers reported approximately $33 a month for each published page on their site. A lot of factors may go on to explain why medical niche content performs so well compared to content on other affiliate business sites. For one, you don’t need that many pages of content to target some narrow medical issues (for example, snoring). If you’re looking for some alternatives for your next investment, the image below shows the rest of the niches that get great ROI for content. The Top 10 Niches for Content ROI For several other reasons, we believe that the medical niche is one of the most profitable affiliate marketing niches, and the best overall. After a few more insights, we’ll take a deeper dive into what this lucrative niche is doing right. The Office Niche Reports the Best ROI on Link Building With a Revenue/Backlink Ratio of $5.61 Per Backlink The office supply niche significantly beat out some of the nearest competition to establish itself as a profitable affiliate marketing niche that gives the best revenue return for backlinks built. Bear in mind, we’re talking about overall backlinks to a site, not individual referring domains. This niche is a bigger player than the name may suggest. It’s less about staplers and paper and more about high-end PCs, standing desks, and custom ergonomic chairs. Many of these items have great commission rates. Office supply was already a healthy niche in the past. Now that more people are working from home, it is growing significantly faster than before. This could be a profitable niche for you with a little market research. For comparison, we’ve included our list of the top 10 niches that deliver revenue for backlinks. The Top 10 Niches for Backlink ROI You may notice there is some crossover with the particular niches featured here. The medical, bed & bath, apparel, and music niches all found their way into both the top content ROI and top affiliate link ROI lists. That’s a good indication that these could be some of the most profitable niches for new affiliate marketers or affiliate program veterans who want to boost their margins. The Survival & Security Niche Reports the Best ROI on Time With a Revenue/Hour Ratio of $2860.25 Per Hour Wow! Quit your job today because survival is quite possibly one of the most profitable affiliate marketing niches offering $100,000 for a solid 40-hour workweek. Right? Unfortunately, probably not. And I talk about more below, you should be careful about trusting hours worked numbers. They aren’t based on anything except self-reports, and even if they weren’t, we have a problem… Once again, this is one of those particular niches where a whale undermines our data. In this case, it’s a giant affiliate business site that was earning tens of thousands. In the same period, only a few other (much smaller sites) sold in that specific niche. For your interest, we’ve included the rest of the top 5 niches for this measurement. The 5 Best Niches for Revenue/Hour ROI Non-Amazon Sites Earn the Most Compared to Other Monetization Models, With a Monthly Average of $5540 Among the monetization models of the studied sites (affiliate marketing, display advertising, and amazon associates), affiliate marketing was a clear winner. The affiliate marketing sites in this study brought in more than $5000/week in average revenue. I would argue that it’s no surprise to see this model do this well. Affiliate marketing has long offered better commission rates than other monetization models. With Amazon associates, there’s one game in town. They set the commission rates, and you can like it or take a hike. With affiliate marketing, there are a million offers out there, and big Read More Read More

The post What a Data Dump From Empire Flippers Told Us About the Best Niches for Affiliate Marketing first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How To Do a SEO Content Audit For Your Website in 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 05:19:41 +0000

You’ve probably heard the saying, “content is king.” While having a technically sound website and strong link profile are great accelerators for SEO dominance, these days, they’ll hardly move the needle if you don’t have a solid content strategy. As an experienced digital marketer who has built multiple successful affiliate websites, I understand the importance of content in driving results. Making sure that things like your page titles (aka title tags), headings, and meta description are optimized for your primary keyword is important too, but thorough content audits will help seal the deal. In this article, you’ll learn how to perform a website content audit in detail and highlight why you should make it a part of your SEO and content marketing strategy. You’ll find out the importance of writing content that is easy to read and is written with the intent of the core keyword you want to target in mind. I’ll also show you how to ensure that you don’t have landing pages with thin content, duplicate content, and keyword cannibalization. Lastly, we’ll look at how to audit your content for E-A-T signals which will help build your site’s authority. This content audit spreadsheet checklist will help maximize your content marketing efforts and reach your SEO content goals, as we’ll make sure that no stone is left unturned. Quick Summary What is a Content Audit? A content audit is the process of analyzing the main text of your web pages to ensure that it is helpful to your users and bots like Google. This process can help find and fix issues such as low readability, duplicate content, or keyword cannibalization, all of which could hurt the hard work you’ve put in with your SEO efforts. Remember, content audits aren’t about optimizing page titles, headings, and meta descriptions. If you want to audit these, you should use Screaming Frog (or any other crawler of your choice). A content audit spreadsheet ensures that your site’s content assets (i.e., landing pages, blog posts, etc) are created with both Google and the end-user in mind. Why Do You Need a Content Audit? You need a content audit because it will help you identify and take stock of which pages on your site work well and which don’t. Content audits are primarily about improving content metrics such as readability so that users will be more likely to spend more time on your website. For example, if you are running an eCommerce business, the amount of time your users spend browsing your website directly impacts your sales. Conducting a content audit also ensures that you’re providing your audience with the best possible experience while making sure that the text is optimized for Google. To put it straight, content audits will help refine your site’s content assets as well as increase conversion rates and social shares. Content Audit Template & Checklist I’ve compiled a list of key Google analytics tools, a content audit data template, and a checklist to make this process as smooth as possible for you. Content Audit Tools Search Intent What is Search Intent? The search intent of a keyword is the underlying reason for the user’s query – i.e., it’s about understanding why and what the user is looking for. There are four main types of intent: Important: not all informational keywords are questions. For example, users searching “Elon Musk” are likely looking to find out more about Elon Musk. Why is Search Intent Important? Search intent is important because the primary goal for Google is and always has been to provide users with the best and most relevant results for their queries. While you could pretty much get away with ranking in the top 5 positions with links and mediocre content before, this content strategy doesn’t work in today’s SEO climate. Google’s understanding of a piece of content and its ability to provide relevant results is continually improving through machine learning techniques like Natural Language Processing and its BERT algorithm. If your content marketing strategy doesn’t account for what the end user is looking for, how can you expect your SEO goals to be met? As a result, it’s one of the most important steps in this content audit process. Search Intent Audit Checklist The best way to “audit” intent is to compare your content to the sites that are ranking in the top positions for your core keywords. Then, you want to check whether your content aligns with what Google is rewarding. It’s likely impossible to audit every single page on your site, especially if you have an online store with 100s or maybe even 1000s of products. Therefore, you should start by making a list of the most important content pieces you want to audit first. Kind of like a content inventory! A quick Google search for your core terms will show you what kinds of results Google (and in turn users) is looking for. For example, below, you can see that for a transactional query like “Samsung phone cases”, Google leads with paid ads/shopping results. During your audit, you should: For example, a user searching for “how tall is the Eiffel Tower” is probably looking for a short, numerical answer. Whereas someone searching “why do we yawn” may be looking for a more in-depth answer. Answering these questions as part of your website content audit will allow you to pinpoint exactly what your target audience is looking for from their query. It will also help identify where you should place certain pieces of content. For example, if you target a keyword like “how to do a cartwheel,” you may find that the top ranking results include a video right at the top of the page. Therefore, to match the intent, you would do the same. Readability What is Readability? Readability refers to how easy it is for users (and search engines) to understand and read the content on a web page. Why is Readability Important? Making readability a part of your content audit process is important because reading a big block of text isn’t great for user experience. This may lead to an increase in the bounce rate (which you can track on Google Analytics) as users may simply lose interest and leave because they felt overwhelmed with information. Therefore, you should ensure that your website’s content is easy to read so that visitors don’t leave. Readability Audit Checklist A great (and free) tool for auditing the readability of a piece of content is Hemingway. It’ll give you a readability score and provide suggestions on how to simplify the text. Thin Content What is Thin Content? More often than not, “thin content” is referred to as content that is too short. However, there’s more to it than just length. A more accurate definition is content that offers little to no value to the target audience. It just so happens that most landing pages that are considered thin content by SEOs tend to be short in length. A quick way to spot these is via the tool Screaming Frog, which will allow you to order your site based on the number of words. The page below has lots of text, but is it actually valuable to the user? Not really. The most common types of pages that are considered as thin content contain: Why Should You Carry Out A Thin Content Audit? Let’s take a look at why your auditing content strategy should include checks for thin content by looking at it from both the user and search engine’s perspective. For Users As mentioned above, thin content pages offer little value to the searcher. As a result, they hinder the user experience and will likely lead to a higher bounce rate. You want to create pages with rich content that satisfies what the searcher is looking for. Otherwise, users will simply leave and visit a competitor. Because of this, other engagement metrics like the average time on page and conversion rates will also be impacted. For Search Engines Google evaluates content on both a page and domain level; and bases the frequency at which it crawls your site on the quality of your site’s content. This means that: If you’re still not convinced, a site with too many thin content pages can be penalized by Google with a manual penalty. Check out the video below, where Google’s Matt Cutts explains what it means if your site has been penalized with a thin content manual penalty. Thin Content Audit Checklist When going through your content inventory for thin content, look out for the following: Duplicate Content What is Duplicate Content? Duplicate content refers to content that is identical or very similar to existing content on the Web. So, this… And this… …would both be considered as duplicate content. It’s important to note that Google acknowledges that content that is the same or identical in most cases are “not deceptive in origin”. In other words, duplicate content is primarily an issue when content is “deliberately duplicated across domains in Read More Read More

The post How To Do a SEO Content Audit For Your Website in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

58 Best Niche Site Ideas and Examples (2024 Guide)

Matt Diggity — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 00:35:04 +0000

One of the questions about affiliate marketing I get asked more often than anything else is, “Matt…which niche should I choose?” I totally get why people ask that – they’re afraid of investing 12 months of their life in an affiliate site that flops. Being cautious is a good thing. But newbie affiliates take this to an extreme where they spend months trying to come up with a niche site idea. And they still can’t choose one. To save you time and effort, I’ve researched 58 niches of all shapes and sizes for you, which you won’t find anywhere else. You won’t find these anywhere else. Oh, and I’ve even included an example of a successful niche site for each topic. Don’t waste another minute trying to come up with a niche idea – leverage my expertise and insights to choose the perfect niche for your business and start generating revenue today. Ideas for Food Niche 1. Microgreens Microgreens are the juvenile (younger and smaller) leaves and stems of a range of larger plants, vegetables, and herbs. Up to quite recently, they were only used as a garnish for a meal. But an entire industry has sprung up around them in the last few years because they’ve become very fashionable among the foodies of the world. There are even stories of CBD farmers quitting to become microgreen farmers instead. They’re also expensive to buy, which means there’s profit potential for affiliates who want to build a site in this niche. Gardening sites can be far more profitable than you might think – Kevin Espiritu’s Epic Gardening is proof of that. 2. Hydroponics Urban gardening and farming is something practiced by roughly 1/10th of the global population. A drive towards sustainability in Western economies has seen a boom in products and services related to growing at least some of your own food. But not everyone has a garden and soil to grow herbs, fruits, and vegetables in. Enter home hydroponics systems, or what has now also become known as “aero gardening”, where you can grow food on your kitchen table, a windowsill, or even a spare closet. The home hydroponics niche has years of stable activity behind it, with an obvious search spike in 2020 before things settled down again. As long as the current drive towards more environmentally friendly living continues, there’ll be a constant demand for products and services in this niche. 3. Bread Recipes Humans have made bread for around 10,000 years, and it’s a surprisingly important part of who we are. So there are always people looking for information on how to bake their first loaf of homemade bread i.e they need recipes. The topic itself also lends itself to several audiences, including foodies, preppers, and parents looking for an activity to keep their kids busy. That makes it an evergreen niche, so there should be ongoing demand for bread recipes for the foreseeable future. 4. Cheap Dinner ideas This niche covers an evergreen subject – how to eat well but for not a lot of money. Even outside times of economic uncertainty, most families are looking for ways to save money on their food bill. To give you some perspective, the average cost of a homemade meal is $4 per person, compared to the average cost of eating out at $20 per person. So, your potential audience is college students, struggling parents, single moms, and just plain old thrifty livers. Interest in this niche has enjoyed steady growth over the last decade, with a somewhat unexpected drop in early 2020 before recovering again. In short, there will always be a demand for ideas for cheap meals as a way to save money. Ideas for Hobby Niche 5. Bass Guitars You won’t have to look far to find affiliate sites promoting guitars and guitar accessories. But very few of them pay any attention to bass guitars, even though bass players are just as passionate about their music as any other musician. You’re not a bass player…? Don’t worry – you can always niche down a little further by targeting “bass guitar for beginners” and publish content about becoming a bass player. After digging into this niche a little further, I found that most of the informational keyword slots in the SERPs are occupied by either generic forums, bass forums, or paid membership sites. So there’s a gap here for some really good affiliate sites to compete with the handful of authority sites. 6. Candle Making Kits The arts and crafts market is expected to increase in value to almost US$50 billion within the next 5 years. And candle-making is an integral part of that vertical. Candle-making kits are an interesting sub-niche, particularly because there’s a decent amount of traffic and not much competition. But you could also expand a site about candle-making kits into a larger authority site once you have a solid foundation to work from. This niche sees the peak of its activity during November, December, and January, so you’ll need to factor that into your overall monetization plans. Note: This is a micro-niche topic, so you might need to grow the site a little before it can generate enough money to replace your day job. Basically, the topic of “candle making kits” will eventually be a single category of a much larger site about candles and candle making. 7. RC Planes Now we have a niche that appeals to both children and adults alike. Kids want their first RC plane to play with, while grown men want to get their hands on the radio-controlled plane they always hoped to get as a gift but never did. Like an F-16 or an A-10. An additional perk here is that RC planes aren’t cheap, with even a basic model costing a few hundred dollars. So combined with consistent organic search trends, there’s the potential for this to be a profitable niche. Do bear in mind that RC plane fans are real enthusiasts, so they’ll expect your content to be authoritative and your reviews to be real. 8. Sewing Machines This is a niche with multiple potential audiences. You could promote sewing machines and related accessories to homemakers and amateur fashion designers. But there’s also the homesteading and sustainable living audience to work with – people who believe in repairing clothing instead of discarding it. And then there are the hobbyists who enjoy buying a sewing pattern and bringing it to life. What they all have in common though, is they need information on the best sewing machines, sewing tips, etc. You’ll also find some affiliate sites already ranking in the SERPs, so you don’t have to guess whether this niche will be worth the time and effort. Ideas for Kids Niche 9. STEM Toys STEM stands for Science Technology Engineering and Math, so STEM toys are designed to encourage kids to become more interested in these subjects. The United States currently ranks 24th for science and 38th for math internationally. So there’s a push for kids to become far more active in these sciences. But this is made fun because kids perform activities like building robots, solving puzzles, playing educational games, and learning how to code. This is great news from an affiliate’s perspective because it means there’s a new generation of potential customers born every day. STEM toys is a very seasonal niche where the bulk of your earnings will come in between November and January. 10. Birthday Party Ideas Parents want their kids to have the kind of birthday they’ll remember for years. The challenge they face is coming up with a new idea for a party with each new birthday that rolls around. And this problem is magnified if they have more than one kid to entertain. So this is a niche with definite demand from frustrated parents who want their kids to have a great day…but have no idea how to make that happen. They want an A-Z plan, with a theme thrown in and everything they need to order in one place. While this niche is focused on activities and themes for kids’ birthdays, there’s nothing to stop you from niching down to “Birthday party ideas for men” or “40th birthday party ideas for men”, for example. 11. Dirt Bikes Dirt bikes are becoming increasingly popular, with annual sales increasing by 4% to 6% each year. And while adults do spend time and money on dirt bikes, they’re also very popular with kids. Deciding to purchase a dirt bike means knowing a lot about them, which is where you step in as an affiliate publisher. Your audience will want information on everything from the type of dirt bike they should own to how to maintain it. This is the type of niche where it’s advisable to either own a dirt bike yourself or hire a content writer who does. Bikers are a very particular audience – they’ll spot a faker a mile away. Ideas for Technology Niche 12. Gaming Keyboards Read More Read More

The post 58 Best Niche Site Ideas and Examples (2024 Guide) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – July 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 04:49:19 +0000

The next set of core updates just hit, and you probably need some answers. In this roundup, we’ll be looking at the analysis of what’s happened, as well as some other important tricks and advice that dropped this month. We’ll start with three big case studies. First, we’ll look at an analysis of the July Core Update. Then, you’ll find out what 3.6 billion articles can tell you about building evergreen content. Finally, you’ll learn whether data proves that content performs better when it’s easy to read. Then, we’ll move on to the month’s guide. It covers how to optimize for your own In this July SEO news roundup, from core update analyses, to deep-dive case studies, we’ve got you covered. Also find out how branded search can lead to some ….. Finally, we’ll cover the news. First, Google released a search spam algorithm update. They’ve also announced that they won’t be blocking 3rd-part cookies on schedule. Finally, John Meuller declared that sometimes “there’s no SEO solution.” We’ll take a look at what all this means. Analysis: Google Core Update July 2021 https://www.sistrix.com/blog/google-core-update-july-2021/ Steve Paine of Sistrix brings us this look at the Google core updates that rolled out through July. This update is the next phase of an update that first began rolling out in June. The new phase was announced on July 1st and has been rolling out since then. So many updates have dropped in a short amount of time that it’s honestly hard to separate all of the effects. However, Steve has plenty of Sistrix data about the sites that gained and lost visibility, and he noted several interesting movements. Some sites in the entertainment sector did really well. Spotify, for example, jumped in June and then jumped again in the July updates. Last.fm was also a big winner. Not all sites were so lucky. More than a few financial sites took a beating in the spam update that happened around the same time. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Google has been holding these sites to higher standards in the last few updates, and now they may be experimenting with new criteria to judge the sites that survived the last hits. Another interesting effect was that some sites improved after being hit in previous updates. Steve shows that some sites that were mauled during the December update (losing more than half of their traffic in some cases) suddenly recovered. Check out the article for more analysis and a long list of the top winners and losers. Next up, we’ll look at what more than 3 billion data points can tell us about what makes content evergreen. We Analyzed 3.6 Billion Articles. Here’s What We Learned About Evergreen Content https://backlinko.com/evergreen-content-study Brian Dean of Backlinko brings us this look at how to understand evergreen content. A lot of factors were considered in this analysis, including the format and promotional channels. He broke his findings into some snackable bites that can easily be applied to the content you create going forward. For example, he found that lists represent one of your best chances to go evergreen. He also discovered some types of content that had very little chance of achieving evergreen status. His analysis also showed that where content launched or was promoted could play an important role. The full guide contains even more analysis about building content with a high chance of going evergreen. Our final case study also deals with content. It’s a study that looks at whether the readability of your content plays a role in its SEO performance. Flesch Reading Ease: Does It Matter for SEO? (Data Study) https://ahrefs.com/blog/flesch-reading-ease/ Michal Pecánek of Ahrefs brings us this analysis of how the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) Score impacts content performance over time. You may have seen this score used in many content-analysis tools (for example, the Hemingway App). It tells you how easy your content is to ready based on factors such as the size of words use or the length of sentences. But does this score matter? Michal starts by pointing out that Google has never defended this score outright. He quotes John Mueller saying in 2018 that he wasn’t aware of any algorithms that accounted for FRE. The data that Ahrefs collected across 15,000 keywords seemed to confirm that it’s not a factor. Their study revealed no correlation between the FRE score of content and how well it ranked. With that said, Michal was split on whether it should be applied to your content. For one, he points out that poor readability can contribute to many other problems that do affect performance. Bounce rates and low dwell time from frustrated readers can signal to Google that your content is just not serving searchers’ needs. However, you can also frustrate your readers by trying to dumb down content just to chase a score that’s less important than your message. To back this up, Michal provides some additional data on topics. He reveals that the top-ranking engineering pages online tend to have awful FRE scores. However, top food pages have much better scores. He concludes you’re better off sticking to solid writing practices than focusing on FRE. That concludes the data studies for the week. Let’s move on to the guide. How to Optimize for Your Own Branded Search https://moz.com/blog/optimize-for-branded-search Ann Smarty of Moz brings us this look at how to tailor your SEO for branded searches. Branded searches are terms that contain your brand or product name. It can include your business, product, or key team members. As Ann points out, these kinds of searches can be really important to your strategy. For one, they come with high intent. Someone who is looking up your brand is probably close to buying. They’re checking out your company, and what they see on SERPs can be a huge influence. Ann recommends that you assess your position by starting with the suggestion box. When someone types in your brand (even before they’ve clicked on search), you want to know what’s being recommended to them. Quite often, it’s competitors with terms such as: These same types of suggestions tend to fill the “people also ask” box. As she points out, you can’t stop this from happening, but you can optimize for these search terms to guide people back to your own site. For example, you can start building FAQ schemas to provide direct answers to questions about your brand competitors. You can also publish blogs around them or address them in your knowledge base. When your site is the top result or snippet for these brand mentions, you control the conversation. You’ll find some more advice and spreadsheet templates for monitoring and reacting to changes in your brand searches in the guide. For now, let’s move on to the news. We’ll start by looking at some of the “what” questions behind Google’s spam algorithm update and what it’s reported to do. Confirmed Google Search Spam Algorithm Update On June 23rd & 28th https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-spam-algorithm-update-june-23rd-31649.html Barry Schwartz of SEO Roundtable brings us this look at a part of the recent core updates. The spam-specific update started and ended in late June with very few details except for the fact that it was happening. The first part of the spam update took place on the 23rd. A second part followed on the 28th, and both were complete by the end of the day. Barry and other SEOs have learned a little more about it since launch. In a conversation with Barry, Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed that the update was global and that it would cover image results and others. The reaction from the community was mixed. On several forum conversations that Barry covered in the article, people reported that many sites were hit. Others claimed that the update was necessary because the recent core update enabled many new types of spam. You can track the volatility in several tool graphs that Barry provided in the piece. For now, it doesn’t seem that the spam update has resulted in as many changes as other recent updates. However, Google hasn’t ruled out additional spam updates to further control the effects. Google isn’t moving swiftly in all their updates. In our next news piece, you’ll learn why Google has delayed the plan to block third-party cookies until 2023. Google Delays Blocking Third-Party Cookies in Chrome Until 2023 https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22547339/google-chrome-cookiepocalypse-delayed-2023 Alex Castro of the Verge brings us this look at Google’s decision not to phase out third-party cookies. The controversial decision (dubbed the “cookiepocalypse” by some users) has now been delayed by more than a year. In a published statement, Google declared that the delay was planned in compliance with the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) law. This law recently resulted in many sites implementing popups to users to allow them to choose cookie options. Google has chosen to work more closely with regulators to ensure that the update doesn’t violate anti-competitive practices. Google has promised to provide more specific dates Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – July 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

10 Best Supplement Affiliate Programs in 2024

Matt Diggity — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 23:42:44 +0000

As a seasoned affiliate marketer and healthy nutrition enthusiast, I have a deep understanding of the thriving supplement industry, which is valued at over $42.6 billion annually in the US alone. This consistently growing market presents a lucrative opportunity for niche websites to prosper. Having spent years researching and testing numerous supplement affiliate programs, I have cultivated an extensive network of successful affiliate marketers through my membership in The Affiliate Lab. With insights from industry professionals who are thriving in this niche, I’ve compiled a list of top-performing supplement affiliate programs. Utilizing my expertise and first-hand recommendations from The Affiliate Lab’s accomplished members, here are the top picks for supplement affiliate programs to elevate your niche site’s success: 1. Wolfson Wolfson is a health and wellness supplement brand founded in the UK but serving an international audience. Their product range is designed to appeal to several niche markets. Affiliate marketers love this supplement affiliate program. ‘Har Vokse”, for example, is a marine protein-based supplement to slow down hair loss, while their ‘Battle Ready Fuel’ protein bar and protein powder products are for people who enjoy pushing their workouts to the limit. Each product is also extensively tested by both sports nutrition experts and top athletes. The Wolfson supplement affiliate program pays a 40% commission on products that retail for $30 – $50 for a 1-month supply. It’s also one of the top-performing supplement affiliate programs. 2. Seed Seed is a supplement company that understands that it is difficult to look good on the outside if you’re not healthy on the inside. That’s why they created ‘Seed’ – a prebiotic and probiotic wrapped up in one handy little pill. So your body’s bacteria remain balanced at all times and your biological ecosystem benefits as a result. ‘Seed’ is backed up by a ton of scientific research, and was developed under the guidance of medical professionals. A 30-day supply of ‘Seed’ costs $49.99. The base commission for this bulk supplements affiliate program starts at 25% but can be increased to 100% for full Seed partners. Qualifying for the higher commission rate for the affiliate program requires that you attend Seed’s online university[1] and pass a 10-question exam. Which is a bit of a hassle but it is definitely worth considering if this particular affiliate program matches your intent. 3. SomaLife SomaLife is a nutraceutical supplement company serving this market since 1998. Their all-natural products are designed to help you age more slowly, enhance your sports performance, or even help improve your memory. So that means Soma Life products can appeal to everyone from the Boomer generation to athletes who just want to make the most of their next workout. Their supplement affiliate program offers a lifetime cookie and a 15% commission rate. You’ll need an account with the Link Connector affiliate network to promote this offer as affiliate marketers. 4. Market Health Market Health is an affiliate network that promotes its range of products. So although you get to promote multiple supplements you won’t have to deal with several different affiliate managers. You’ll also find that they’re not just focused on the weight loss or bodybuilding niche. This supplement affiliate program has products to help with tinnitus, reverse hair loss, reduce cellulite, and beauty supplements to slow down the aging process. How much you’ll earn with this affiliate program will depend on your particular audience i.e. your niche. But you can earn up to $75 per referral for their tinnitus product, which makes it one of the best supplement affiliate programs in this roundup by earning potential. 5. MoreNiche Selling supplements online might seem like a pretty recent trend, but MoreNiche has been doing exactly that for over two decades. But they’re not just another affiliate program – they’re an affiliate network that specializes in supplements. Their products target several specific and profitable niches including: You can also work with their products on a white-label basis if you prefer. So how does this offer compare to the other supplement affiliate programs featured in our roundup? You earn at least 20% commission on all referrals generated through your text links or banners, you get paid twice monthly, and they even offer payment via Bitcoin. 6. Enhanced Labs Enhanced Labs supplements were created by bodybuilders and sports nutrition specialists for people who take their fitness seriously. A lot of companies use that same rhetoric, but Enhanced Labs products are different because they claim to contain more active ingredients, and more actual ingredients, by weight than any of their competitors. Their product range includes pre-workout powders, testosterone boosters, immune system enhancers, weight loss supplements, sleep promoters, and muscle builders. Their affiliate program has an average order value of $103 and a baseline commission rate of 27%. This affiliate program is also happy to offer a higher commission rate to publishers or influencers who can drive lots of warm traffic to their affiliate offers. 7. Vitamin Shoppe Vitamin Shoppe is – of course – a vitamin and supplement company with over 700 stores operating in the United States. They aim to be your one-stop source for health and nutritional supplements for specific conditions or just generic mineral and vitamin packs. Your audience can choose from any of the 7,000 products they have in stock at any one time. What sets them apart from their competitors is that their products are not only varied but also affordable. This affiliate program pays a commission rate of up to 10% on all referrals. 8. GNC Supplements GNC (General Nutrition Centre) has sold vitamins and supplements since 1935, with an ongoing mission to, “…inspire people to live well”. Their performance and wellness products, including each protein powder, are manufactured using the most natural ingredients, while also being based on actual scientific research. GNC supplements cater to a wide range of personal wellness issues and conditions as well as sports performance. Their products are also priced in “impulse buy” territory. Promoting this affiliate program means you’ll earn a 4% commission on purchases made by new customers referred through your links. But that increases to 5% on monthly sales totaling $5,000 or 6% for monthly sales over $10,000. 9. New Vitality New Vitality is another of the supplement companies in this roundup with decades of experience in helping their customers to, “Be healthy. Live better”. While they do sell supplements for women, the majority of their products are geared toward a male audience. These include energy and virility boosters as well as products for prostate health. A typical New Vitality supplement costs around $40 for a 1-month supply. So an affiliate marketer can expect to earn around $6 per sale based on their 15% commission rate from this affiliate program. But there is the potential for much higher average order values with products of this type. 10. HerbsPro HerbsPro is a direct-to-consumer supplier of all things health-related, including a full range of supplements., vitamins, minerals, etc. Their online business model means that their customers get up to 60% off the normal retail pricing for 50,000 products they have in stock. Your visitors can choose from a complete range of products including protein powders, weight management products, pre, intra, and post-workout products, testosterone support, etc. This affiliate program has an average order size of $54 and offers a 10% commission on referrals for affiliate marketers. HerbsPro does offer free shipping on orders over $49, so that’s worth a mention in your pre-sell for this affiliate program. Supplement Affiliate Site Ideas Okay, so now that you have some supplement affiliate programs to work with you’ll need to come up with ideas for your site. The best advice I can give for the supplement niche is to go narrow and not broad. For example, don’t try to be the Amazon of the supplement industry. Instead, think about sub-niches like: And then simply find an affiliate program to match your niche of choice. Affiliate marketing niches where people urgently want or need to solve a problem also tend to be where you can make the most money e.g. acid reflux, joint pain, acne, etc. If you look for problems that need a solution within the supplement industry you’ll find that ideas for your niche site aren’t that difficult to come up with. Is the Supplement Niche Worth It? Yes, the supplement niche is worth it, as long as you steer clear of giving medical advice (YMYL). You’ll have noticed that some of the affiliate programs listed above pay up to $75 per lead/sale. That means 100 sales per month would net you $7,500 in commission payments. Every month. The trick is to look for diets that are just starting to trend, find affiliate programs for products or services to match that demand, publish content to your site, and then simply bank the affiliate commissions. FAQs: What Are Cookies? Why Are They Important? Cookies are small data files stored on a user’s web browser that can track certain user activities. They are important in affiliate marketing programs because Read More Read More

The post 10 Best Supplement Affiliate Programs in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – June 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 06:53:52 +0000

Half of the year is behind us now. With brand new core updates dropping, it’s clear that we can’t take all of our old strategies into the next quarter. If you want to stay caught up, you’ll need to know about the fresh releases we’ll be covering in this month’s roundup. First, you’ll learn some new moves from our guides. They cover how to build white-hat links for local businesses, how to perform different kinds of keyword research, and whether fixing broken links is worth your limited time. Then, you’ll get data you can use from the month’s top case studies. You’ll gain insight into the winners and losers of Google’s most recent core update and how to make it into Google Web Stories. Finally, you’ll see some news from the last 30 days that you shouldn’t ignore. It will cover a (previously) unconfirmed search ranking algorithm, Google’s updates to video best practices, and new penalties for sites that engage in questionable claims. How to Build Safe and Effective White Hat Links for Local Businesses https://authority.builders/blog/local-link-building/ I recently published this guide on how to build local links safely. You might assume that building local links is easier, but regional relevance is vital with these links. That can make for an additional challenge that can be tough to overcome—especially when your local region only has a small number of sites to approach. In my guide, I identify seven different strategies that you can use to build (completely white hat) links for local sites. For example, I lay out how you can: The guide takes you through each of these strategies in detail. You’ll learn how they work and how to put them into action. Excellent keyword research will help you target better sites for this work. In the following guide, you’ll learn about four different kinds of research to perform. There Are Four Kinds of Keyword Research; Make Sure You’re Doing the Right One(s) https://sparktoro.com/blog/there-are-four-kinds-of-keyword-research-make-sure-youre-doing-the-right-ones/ Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro brings us this look at keyword research and how it’s a lot broader than you might assume. He starts by establishing four different kinds of research: As he explains, there are some critical differences in how research is performed based on why the research is necessary. He lays out the goal, the process you should use, and tools that can help you get the job done for each one. The first one (SEO/PPC) is what most people have in mind when they think of keyword research. The goals and processes of that type are well understood. So, let’s use the last one as an example of what he thinks you should be doing differently. For market/audience research, he identifies the goal as learning more about the audience’s preferences so that you can use the data to answer questions like: For the process, he suggests that you should be building personas to match to keywords, rather than just finding top keywords for the niche. He also lists several tools that may help. You can find all of this information for all four research types involved in the complete guide. For our last guide, we’re going to take you back on-site. We’ll look at whether fixing old broken links is worth enough to be a priority. Does Fixing Old Broken Links Still Matter to SEO? https://moz.com/blog/does-fixing-broken-links-matter-seo Cyrus Shepard of Moz brings us this look at the utility of fixing old links. He starts by asking us if we’re familiar with the following scenario: You’ve taken the time to fix a broken link, and you’ve noticed that nothing has happened. As Cyrus points out, this has happened to a lot of people. He starts by looking at some of the reasons that it can occur, for example: He also suggests some methods you can use to identify which reason may be responsible for your fix not working. He closes out the guide with some additional advice and judgment calls on how you should handle broken links. He explains that fixing links is mostly worthwhile. Then, he covers how to prioritize freshness and redirect broken links to relevant URLs. That’s the last of the guides for this week. Next, we’re going to look at some of the data published over the previous 30 days. We’ll start by looking at the winners and losers of the June core update. Winners and Losers of Google’s June 2021 Core Update https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/winners-and-losers-of-googles-june-2021-core-update/ Lily Ray of Amsive Digital brings us this comprehensive look at the June 2021 Core Update and the sites that benefited (or didn’t). If you missed it, Google announced that a core update would be rolling out in two parts. The first part of the update rolled out in early June and was confirmed as completed on June 12. The second part will follow later in July. For now, Lily has the score on who is winning or losing. The analysis is based on the Sistrix Visibility Index. After that, the category of each domain was collected using Similarweb categories to assess how particular niches were affected. She starts by providing the 50 domains that achieved the most significant increase in visibility. That’s followed up with the 50 sites that saw the worst decrease in visibility. As she warns in her preamble, these updates are based on thousands of factors. No one should feel confident that they’ve isolated the reasons that a given site won or lost. However, some strong trends among categories of sites may help us understand this update better. Lily found that: There’s a lot more to digest in this case study, so be sure to add it to your reading list. For now, we’re going to see what the data says about a much more narrow subject: How to make it into Google Web Stories. How to Make Google Web Stories [2021 Study] https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-web-stories-study/ Olga Andrienko of Semrush brings us this look at how you can make it into Google stories based on the data from 2,400 different search results. As you may already know, Google Web Stories is a visual type of content that allows creators to combine video, audio, and other multimedia into a tappable sequence. Google features story results for some searches, and this study looks at what the featured stories have in common. Among other factors, the study examined: The study collected some data that may be very helpful if you want to rank your own stories. For example, Semrush discovered that: In the complete study, you’ll find plenty more information that you can use to optimize your own stories to appear. Given the favorable position they receive in SERPs, getting it right may be well worth the investment. With our data pieces out of the way, we’re ready to take a look at the latest news. Let’s start by examining an unconfirmed search ranking algorithm update that may have dropped in early June. Unconfirmed Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update June 11 & 12 https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-june-11-12-31586.html Google has been doing a lot this month, but as Barry Schwartz tells us in this piece from the Search Engine Roundtable, not all of it was discussed officially (at least at first). Several updates showed up in site data that were not previously listed in Google’s update reports. We later learned that this was a last-minute tweak of the June update. Analyzing what happened may give us more insight into what Google was trying to accomplish… Barry collected some of the chatter about the final push in this piece. Multiple SEOs in a Webmaster World thread reported massive hits to their sites, with “50% drops” being independently reported by several people. There were also claims that affiliate sites have dropped hard from top positions—some even leaving the first five pages. Barry provided some context for this chatter with some tool data. You can see the changes that happened in his charts of MozCast, Semrush, and RankRanger fluctuations. While Google doesn’t announce all of their changes right away, they were helpful enough to provide some early documentation for another change this month. Google has expanded its “video best practices” document with some notable new passages. Google Just Added a New Section to Their ‘Video Best Practices’ Doc https://twitter.com/brodieseo/status/1401032364004806657 SEO Brodie Clark caught a quietly-updated change to Google’s video best practices. The change involves how pages should be optimized for SafeSearch to keep adult content separate from content intended for all audiences. Google is instructing you to do as much as you can to help them understand the nature of a page. They strongly recommend (bolding theirs) that you group any adult videos away from other videos on your site. For example, they should have their own category page. They also ask that you add metadata to all adult pages—specifically, the content rating markup. They provide some examples in the doc for you to copy-paste if needed. While the guidelines don’t state it directly, the updates suggest that non-compliant sites risk being labeled as adult content. If adult content on your site ends up Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – June 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

SEO KPIs: What To Measure For SEO Success In 2024

Matt Diggity — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:42:59 +0000

Are your SEO strategies truly effective? Without tracking the right SEO KPIs, you’re navigating blind. I’m Matt Diggity, an SEO veteran since 2009 and founder of multiple successful digital marketing ventures. I’ve mastered the art of SEO through years of experience and I’m here to share the most important SEO KPIs that are foundational for tracking your company’s SEO effort and the tools to help you do it. Quick Summary 1. ROI from SEO Efforts Before diving into the SEO key performance indicators, you should look at the ROI of your current search engine optimization campaign. You should look at the particular SEO actions you are taking and assess what the return for the time and money you have spent is. For example, if you invest $100 in creating a new blog post and it generates $1,000 in revenue over its lifetime, your investment in content is well-justified. In contrast, if you spend money or time on a different SEO strategy and generate little to no return, your investment is not justified. Your SEO strategy should have a tangible return, whether it’s more time for you as a business owner or in generating more revenue. Content is the backbone of your SEO campaign. If you are producing high-quality content for your website, the other SEO efforts will pay more dividends. The effectiveness of your SEO actions like creating content will be tested by other most important SEO KPIs like search visibility and conversions. 2. Conversions One of the first key SEO metrics that a company should evaluate is conversion. According to Yoast, conversion occurs whenever a visitor to your site performs the desired action. Examples of a conversion include: Conversion is closely related to other KPIs like conversion rate optimization (CRO), which we will discuss later in this post. Conversion is one of the best KPIs to assess your SEO ROI because it is tangible, and the results directly impact the bottom line. Even if you manage to bring in thousands of site visitors per day, you will not make any revenue if you can’t convert them into customers. Organic conversions lead directly to more money for your business. Some actionable examples of how you can increase the number of conversions include: 3. Organic Traffic Organic traffic refers to the number of (unpaid) site visitors who come to your website from organic search results. This is different from the overall traffic a page receives from direct URL searches, traffic from social media or paid traffic. Search traffic is the most straightforward SEO KPI measurements. Since SEO is focused on generating organic search engine visibility and traffic, this is one of the primary KPIs to track a site’s SEO performance. The better the SEO plan, the more organic sessions a site will get. To analyze how your traffic is performing, you should generally review it over longer periods of time. Comparing your traffic between specific days is not a good performance indicator. Comparing weeks or months are better time frame and can indicate your traffic’s direction. If you see a slight drop in traffic, it could be rooted in a variable like seasonality. If there’s a significant drop in traffic, there’s likely a larger root cause affecting how your organic traffic is performing. For example, a major plugin failure or a Google update can cause your search traffic to dip significantly. Google’s Analytics has extensive analytics on how a site’s traffic is performing. You can analyze exactly which posts bring in the lion’s share of traffic from organic search results and use that data to optimize posts and create similar ones to bring in more search traffic. 4. Keyword Rankings Many studies have shown that the bulk of search engine users click on a result within the first page. In fact, there’s a great discrepancy in traffic between the rankings on the first page… For example, a #1 ranked page will get much more traffic than a #2 ranked page. This is why it is essential to track your page’s ranking for a particular keyword. Organic traffic alone is unreliable in determining if your SEO strategy is on point for a particular keyword. Some keywords are seasonal in their traffic. Tracking keyword rankings in organic search results enables you to analyze whether your efforts are working regardless of the traffic you receive. For example, some keywords may receive little to no traffic throughout most of the year, even if you are in the first position. But this can quickly change over the Christmas period… By tracking your keyword ranking and ensuring you have the #1 position, you are in the prime spot to bring in significant traffic when searches skyrocket for that particular keyword over Christmas. You can explore keyword rankings thoroughly in keyword tracking tools like Accuranker. Keyword tracking tools provide extensive analytics on your keywords’ rankings. These tools allow you to see what’s working in your keyword rankings, track competitors, and much more. 5. Conversion Rate from Organic Optimization Conversion rate optimization (CRO) entails optimizing your website and landing pages based on user behavior to help achieve desired action (conversion). CRO is different from raw conversions, and it reveals how well many of your page’s elements, like copy, are performing. For example, if you have 100 customers from a landing page, your raw conversion is 100 regardless of traffic size. Assuming you have 10,000 visitors, converting 100 visitors means you have a 1% conversion rate. If you implement CRO strategies, you can improve that 1% to 3%. Instead of having just 100 customers from the same landing page, your raw conversion number will be 300 customers. CRO enables you to maximize your current traffic to ultimately increase your raw conversion. 6. Number of Backlinks Backlinks are extremely important in improving the SEO of a website. They are essentially links from another site to your website. Search engines look at referring domains as votes of confidence. Ahrefs performed numerous studies on backlinks and found that sites with more referring domains typically have more search traffic and higher SEO rankings. But, not all backlinks are quality links… “In fact, from years of testing, I’ve found that the authority of the page linking to you matters more than any other factor”. Brian Dean Founder of Backlinko This shows that companies should seek to get links from reputable sites with higher domain authorities. There are three factors that Google look for in link building: Using tools like Ahrefs allows you to gauge how many links your successful competitors are building and how many links you should be building for your site to remain competitive in your niche. This will enable you to systematically scale your backlinks and ultimately get the top ranking for a given keyword. For more help with building backlinks, I use Authority Builders. 7. Amount of New Content Created Creating new content is like casting a vast net to catch more search traffic. The more optimized content you have, the wider the net; this ultimately leads to more traffic being generated for your website. Creating new content alone is insufficient. The content must be high quality and optimized for search engines and better user engagement; the days of publishing small 500-word articles are gone. For best performance on SERP, content must thoroughly address the intent of the keyword it is targeting. For further assistance with creating optimized content, we recommend using Surfer. 8. Organic Visibility (Organic Impressions) Organic visibility refers to the number of free impressions your website is getting on search engine results pages. The more organic search search engine visibility you have, the larger the pool of users that can potentially click your website. Organic search visibility is a prerequisite to getting traffic to your website. It indicates that your website is showing up on Google’s search results. You’ll need to focus on making sure your website is at the top of the results that your target audience is searching for. This will help turn those impressions into clicks to your website. 9. Bounce Rate Bounce rate is a percentage between 0-100% that shows the number of visitors that leave after landing on your website. The higher the bounce rate, the higher the percentage of people that are leaving after landing on your site. A lower bounce rate is indicative of visitors staying on a site and reading the content. A high bounce rate is not necessarily bad. If the visitor of your website has a high buyer intent, they may spend a short amount of time on a page before finding your contact information. Although the visitor stayed on the page for a short period, the desired outcome was achieved. For sites that have more informational content, having a higher bounce rate may indicate that the content is not compelling or valuable enough. In that case, a high bounce rate is detrimental. In the end, bounce rate is subjective based on the specific goals of your website. 10. Average Session Duration The average session duration measures how Read More Read More

The post SEO KPIs: What To Measure For SEO Success In 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Marketing Services SEO: Growing Monthly Website Traffic By 3012% – Case Study

Matt Diggity — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 11:59:54 +0000

Starting a new website from scratch? I’m going to share with you the steps my team at The Search Initiative took to grow a relatively new marketing service website’s monthly organic traffic by a whopping 3012%. From this case study, you will learn how to achieve these results by: The Challenge This client operates in the marketing industry within certain states within the US, specializing in several different marketing services. The client came to The Search Initiative with the aim of becoming an authoritative voice within their niche. This meant making sure that the content on the site, in particular, expressed topical authority or E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trust). Although keyword difficulty wasn’t going to be too high for the areas that the client covered, we knew that since we were pretty much starting from scratch, there was still some catching up to do in all aspects of SEO. The following is a step-by-step guide on how you can achieve incredible results with your SEO campaign. Focus On Content If you’ve ever had trouble ranking for a website focusing on a specific niche, or couldn’t rank a new product/review/location page on an authority site, it’s very likely that the root cause for this is a lack of topical authority (which is also sometimes referred to as topical relevance). This video goes into detail about how to build topical relevance with interlinking: What do I mean by “topical authority”? For that, you need to understand that these days, Google ranks domains that have several pages targeting a specific topic. Whereas before, you could rank with just a single landing page. This means that if you’re trying to rank a page on a topic, Google wants to see additional supporting content on your site that links to it. By building a cluster of pages to support the main page you want to rank, you’re essentially establishing topical relevance in Google’s eyes. Topical authority is currently one of the hottest topics (for lack of a better word) in Search – and rightfully so. Working toward topical authority can help you expand your site’s keyword visibility by ranking for a broader net of search terms. Let me show you how… Building Topical Authority With Supporting Content In order to establish and build topical authority, you need to make sure that you’re answering as many questions as you can about your topic, new product, or if you have a local SEO site, a new location that you want to target. So, instead of purely focusing on the core landing pages of your website, you can build topical relevance by creating supplemental content. To find out more about Topical Authority, watch this interview with Koray Tugberk. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of what you’ll need to do: Step 1: Identify The Core Topic It’s likely that you’ll already have a topic in mind. For example, you may be launching a new product/service for your online business, or you may be branching out your local business to operate in a new city or region. Alternatively, like us, you may have a new site that targets a micro-niche. For example, you may have something like the following: If you already have a topic in mind, you can skip on to Step 2. But what if you don’t fall into either of the above scenarios and don’t know where to start? Let’s say you have a site that reviews turntables, and are looking for a new topic to cover. Here’s how you can find new topics and keywords to cover using ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer tool: 1. Search For Broad Keywords 2. Review The Parent Topics Looking at the parent topics, you may identify that you don’t have any articles about “pioneer turntables”. Step 2: Create Supporting Articles For The Chosen Topic Now that you have your chosen topic, you’ll want to create some supporting articles for it – I recommend around 4 articles to support your main landing page on the topic. To find relevant keywords for these supporting articles, use Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer to: 1. Find Competitors for the Topic 2. Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Keywords Pick a primary keyword for your main landing page along with primary keywords for the supplemental articles too. Step 3: Add Contextual Links From Supplementary Articles to the Main Page This step is really important. Google follows links to discover new content to rank. Therefore, you need to add contextual links from all of your supplementary articles to your main article within the topic. Add your contextual links in the middle of the body of an article. Doing this will help Google see that your supporting article is being reinforced by your main article on that topic. When it comes to deciding what anchors to use for onsite links like this, you don’t have to be as careful as you would for off site link building. For example, here’s one way you may want to link to your main page from the four supporting articles: With this method, you’re essentially creating clusters of content that are topically related. This allows you to pass value from the smaller articles to the main content piece and, as a result, have a better chance of ranking that core page. User Intent A significant element of your content strategy should be focused on nailing the user intent (or search intent) of your pages. For example, if you search for “buy nintendo switch”, Google displays results that allow you to purchase the games console – which is what you’d expect. User intent is about making sure that your pages reflect what the searcher is looking for. Unsure about how to identify what kind of content you should include on your pages to address the search intent for the keyword you want to target? A simple search for your core keywords will tell you exactly what kind of content Google is rewarding for that term. For example, you can see below that for “best turntables”, all 10 of the top ranking pages are review/opinion-based articles. Doing this will help refine your content so that it satisfies the search intent of the keyword you want to target. On-Page Inventory After you create a content plan and start executing it, don’t forget about the existing content you already have on the site. Every word matters, and your old content needs to be held to the same standard. Therefore, you should also perform an on-page inventory on the core landing pages of your site. Page Titles Your page titles should be engaging, descriptive, not too long (max 65 characters) and include your primary keyword as close to the beginning as possible. Avoid page titles like this: Long Sleeve Sweatshirts For Men & Short Sleeve Sweatshirts For Men | SweatShirts.com It’s too long and repetitive. Aim for page titles like this: Buy Long & Short Sleeve Sweatshirts For Men | All Sizes On Sale Headings Headings help users quickly find what they’re looking for, as well as help search engines understand the layout and structure of your content. Here are some actionable steps you should take when optimizing your headings: Meta Descriptions Meta descriptions won’t help your website rank but should still be optimized as they are displayed within the search results. A well written meta description can be the deciding factor on whether a user clicks through to your site or not. URLs One of the first things that Google mentions in its SEO Starter Kit is URLs. Establishing E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trust) Google measures the perceived expertise, authority and trustworthiness of a site by looking at certain signals such as the characteristics of the content in addition to other ranking signals like links. Establishing E-A-T becomes increasingly important for YMYL (Your Money Your Life) websites where the information or services provided on a site may have a direct impact on a visitor’s wellbeing. For example, in our case, the client wanted to establish E-A-T within the marketing landscape. This means that the client’s potential customers (and Google for that matter) would expect the content on the website to be written by a marketing expert from a well-established and respected agency. Let’s break this down a little further. Expertise is achieved by the writer or creator of the content expressing a higher level of knowledge about the subject at hand. Authority is achieved if the content is created by an established or well-respected agency as opposed to a student or a lesser-known/experienced organization. Trust is achieved through ensuring that the content is factually correct or can be backed up by other sources to prove its credibility. Let’s take a look at how you can demonstrate E-A-T on your site: In fact, it’s specifically mentioned in Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines. For example, if you have a website that reviews turntables, you’re going to want to ensure that you’re reviewing and talking about the latest models. Therefore, you want to avoid having articles like “Top 10 Turntables Under $500 for 2020”, as Google and your readers will Read More Read More

The post Marketing Services SEO: Growing Monthly Website Traffic By 3012% – Case Study first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

6 Best WooCommerce Hosting for Ecommerce in 2024

Matt Diggity — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 00:06:29 +0000

As an experienced eCommerce strategist, I understand the vital role of website performance in online success. To effectively grow your WooCommerce website, you must prioritize appealing design, seamless user experience, and, most importantly, lightning-fast loading speeds. Research indicates that rapid-loading sites experience significantly lower bounce rates and higher revenue potential. Drawing on my expertise in the field, I’ll help you navigate the process of selecting the best-managed WooCommerce hosting plans to ensure your site is optimized for success. In this guide, we’ll examine critical factors to consider when evaluating hosting options and present six top-tier choices tailored to your eCommerce needs. Let’s boost your site’s performance and profitability together. Best WooCommerce Hosting Providers Compared Here’s a snapshot of how the six WooCommerce providers and how they compare. 1. WPX (Editor’s Choice) WPX is the best WooCommerce hosting company. This WooCommerce web host provides excellent WooCommerce hosting services and specialized support for WooCommerce and WordPress websites. WPX is unlike other WooCommerce hosting providers. Here’s a quick overview of the things that make WPX such a great company. Snapshot Features Why WPX WPX is the best WooCommerce hosting company. Several tests have shown that WPX offers faster hosting speeds than competitors. Site speed is a crucial factor that will underpin the success of your eCommerce store as it will provide your audience with an improved user experience. Moreover, a fast loading site speed can give you an edge in the SERPs. Alongside the fast servers, you’ll have access to a support team that responds to any customer inquiry with an average response time of less than 30-seconds. It is also considered the best WooCommerce hosting site for a small online business with downloadable products. The pricing for WPX hosting is straightforward as well. WPX is an affordable hosting provider. You get great customer service, your site is hosted on fast servers, and you get access to a free CDN. You can also secure a 90% discount on the first month if you try out the service by clicking the link below. (90% off the first month with coupon MATT90) 2. SiteGround SiteGround is one of the most highly rated WooCommerce providers. Below is an overview of some of the stand-out hosting features that make SiteGround an excellent choice for any WooCommerce website. Snapshot Features Why Siteground WooCommerce endorses SiteGround as the best hosting provider for new WooCommerce websites. The web host company has fast servers, good infrastructure, WP engine, a great WooCommerce plugin and a customer support team on hand to meet all your inquiries. The option to choose where you host your site is one of the neat features of SiteGround. It’s certainly something that makes the company stand out on this list. All these benefits and more make SiteGround a worthwhile WooCommerce hosting provider. 3. Flywheel Flywheel provides blistering speed, and expert help desk services, and helps optimize your WooCommerce store. Let’s look at some of the standout features of Flywheel below. Snapshot Features Why Flywheel Flywheel is affordable with the type of features that you would expect from some of the best-in-class hosting providers. That includes reliable, fast servers and a good customer support team for your WooCommers store. Flywheel also has dedicated plans that cater specifically to WooCommerce store owners and are optimized as such. If that didn’t catch your attention, it is also worthy to note that Flywheel has servers worldwide and a free Content Delivery Network. That combination ensures your site will always load fast wherever in the world your audience comes from. 4. Cloudways Cloudways Woocommerce hosting offers a unique approach to site hosting. They have a flexible pay-as-you-go system that only requires users to pay for the resources in real-time. They also allow first-time users to have a free trial without any charge. It’s much better than the free Google cloud platform. Aside from the normal hosting types, Cloudways offers a unique platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud-based web hosting, setting it apart from other WooCommerce hosting solutions. Snapshot Intrigued? Let’s look at some features. Features Why Cloudways The flexible signing up packages of Cloudways already make it attractive to customers, especially if they’re on a budget. The Cloudways team offers fast hosting and good customer support. What’s more, Cloudways has an app library of eCommerce tools you can use to create an engaging WooCommerce store. 5. Hostpapa The Canada-based hosting company, Hostpapa, provides shared reseller and virtual private server (VPS) hosting. They have a dedicated team that offers online WordPress support in various languages such as English, Spanish, German and French. So, you know you’ll get automatic WordPress updates as well. Snapshot Here’s an overview of some of the core Hostpapa features. Features Why Hostpapa If you are looking for an environmentally friendly web host, Hostpapa is the right fit. Aside from Hostpapa’s commitment to nature, the company has a great page loading speed and world-class staff to take care of all your hosting needs. 6. Bluehost Bluehost is endorsed by WooCommerce as one of its most trusted hosting servers. Bluehost offers cheap plans streamlined for all your WooCommerce needs. The hosting plans come with an already installed WooCommerce, a free domain name, and much more. Snapshot Features Why Bluehost Bluehost’s plans make it a desirable choice for anyone who runs WooCommerce stores. Bluehost has a range of hosting plans. It’s a good round company offering managed WordPress services. Many of the plans offer unmetered bandwidth. Make sure to read the fine print, though, as even though the plans are unmetered, you will need to pay more as your web traffic increases. What is WooCommerce Hosting? WooCommerce hosting will ensure fast load times and low CPU usage for your site. WooCommerce and WordPress specific features include object caching, proper management of Ahrefs and SEMrush crawlers that chew up your CPU power, and much more… You’ll learn a bit more about why those issues are important later on in this guide… WooCommerce hosting will also offer the type of dedicated support you’d expect from a general web host. For instance, with the best WooCommerce hosting, you should get good customer support staff with advanced knowledge of WordPress, features like high bandwidth, and storage space. These are all important features you need from your hosting to run an online business. What Are the Benefits of Woocommerce Hosting Over Generic Hosting? The benefit of WooCommerce hosting is that people can access your site faster because the server is optimized for the WooCommerce plugin. Furthermore, there are fixes and firewalls in place to reduce server demands, which makes your plan cheaper. Here are some of the benefits of WooCommerce hosting over generic hosting plans. 1. Automated Setup The best WooCommerce web hosting platforms provide an automated setup for a new WooCommerce store. The automated setup is a small-time saver when starting a website, especially if this is your first online store. 2. Performance A good web host has WooCommerce specific features. Two key areas where WooCommerce hosting is optimized for performance are caching and database calls/optimization. For a high-traffic WooCommerce store, you need object caching. Which you are only going to get with a great WooCommerce hosting provider. Without object and page caching, WooCommerce pages load slower. That directly impacts search rankings and revenue. Crawlers like Ahrefs and SemRush can also affect the performance of your WooCommerce store. These SEO crawlers consume a lot of CPU power when crawling your cart and wishlist, slowing your WooCommerce store. A good hosting plan will add firewall rules to block them from your online store. This article, which covers Cloudflare rules for WordPress [1], covers the topic in more detail. 3. Improved Customer Support You want to work with a company that understands how to solve the problems you face with your WooCommerce site. A WooCommerce hosting platform should have support staff who understand how to fix common issues with the WooCommerce site. That expertise translates into cost savings. WooCommerce stores should all have a great storefront theme and a great support team. A good customer support agent on your WooCommerce site will also save you time as they can resolve the problem with your online store the first time you message them. 4. Increased Security Malicious hacking and injecting code into your site can cost your business thousands of dollars in lost revenue. The best options have WooCommerce specific features in place to reduce the risk of hacking. A few companies will go that step further by notifying you when they identify hacking and solve the problem with your WooCommerce store. You want that peace of mind if you’re running a successful WooCommerce store. 5. Daily Backups Backups provide you with access to old versions of your eCommerce website. They should be done either daily or weekly. If your eCommerce site is hacked, you can load a backup. Cheap hosting companies will often take advantage of you when you have these issues. They will charge a lot of money to solve your problems. You want to choose a web host that will Read More Read More

The post 6 Best WooCommerce Hosting for Ecommerce in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

8 Best Magento Hosting Services You Should Consider in 2024

Matt Diggity — Thu, 27 May 2021 01:29:13 +0000

As a seasoned web hosting expert who has worked with numerous Magento websites, I understand the importance of selecting the right hosting provider to ensure optimal performance, security, and reliability. Your website’s success hinges on the foundation laid by your hosting provider, and my experience in the industry has given me invaluable insights into the most reliable options available for Magento users. In this guide, I’ll share my knowledge of the best Magento hosting providers, taking into account factors such as server performance, security, customer support, and scalability. This comprehensive evaluation will help you make an informed decision when choosing the right hosting provider for your Magento-based website. First, let’s review the essential factors you need to consider when selecting the best Magento hosting provider, ensuring you have a solid understanding of your requirements and priorities. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to confidently choose a Magento hosting solution that aligns with your specific needs and goals. Best Magento Hosting Providers Compared Now that you’ve learned the key features to keep an eye out for when choosing the best Magento hosting providers, it’s time to look at the seven best options. 1. SiteGround (Editor’s Choice) In my opinion, the best Magento hosting is SiteGround. With SiteGround, you get amazing tech support, Magento support, and security features on all hosting plans. You can choose from any of their Magento hosting plans. The entry-level plan starts from around $5 a month. Hosting features of the Magento entry plan include 10GB of storage space, bandwidth for 10,000 site visits a month, and free backups. Below is an overview of SiteGround and its key features. Features Why SiteGround SiteGround is the best Magento hosting provider. It has the features you need and expects from a great company. That includes fast hosting and the option to select the data center where your content is hosted. This is great if you’re targeting a certain geographic area. Furthermore, SiteGround also provides good support. This is important for all Magento hosting providers, as you want to use a company that can answer your queries promptly and resolves issues just as fast. All these reasons make SiteGround the best solution. Access SiteGround with a 60% discount by clicking the link below. 2. MageMojo/Webscale MageMojo (which has now rebranded to Webscale) is considered one of the best Magento hosting companies available today. Their technicians and staff can quickly resolve any problems with a Magento or Magento 2 website. Below is an overview of MageMojo, so you can see what makes it stand out amongst other Magento hosting providers: Features Why MageMojo MageMojo is one of the best managed Magento hosting companies. The servers are Magento optimized, ensure fast load times, and can deal with traffic spikes. That is critical because site speed impacts your search rankings and sales (a site that loads slowly has a lower conversion rate than fast sites). In addition to features like fast site speeds, you’ll have a great support team in place to help you resolve any issues. The customer service team responds quickly to inquiries. Unfortunately, MageMojo is expensive compared to the other providers on this list. If you’re looking for a Magento-optimized hosting provider, though, it is affordable. Click the link below to secure your discount. 3. Cloudways Cloudways is a good choice for anyone seeking the best Magento hosting services. What separates Cloudways from other Magento hosting providers is that it offers platform-as-a-service cloud hosting[1]. Below is an overview of the Magento hosting features and company strengths and weaknesses. Features Why Cloudways Cloudways offers competitive pricing on all its Magento cloud hosting plans. The competitive pricing is backed up by fast load times and a good customer service team. Access Cloudways by clicking the button below. 4. HostGator Hostgator is one of the cheapest Magento hosting providers. The company provides hosting services for more than 800,000 store owners. They offer VPS hosting, shared hosting, and dedicated hosting. This Magento review will focus on the VPS hosting plans, which are recommended for eCommerce Magento store owners. The VPS plans start from $19.95 per month. This comes with 2GB RAM, 120 GB of storage, and unmetered bandwidth. You can host unlimited websites on their most expensive plans. Below is an overview of everything you ought to know about Hostgator. Features Why Hostgator Hostgator leverages those economies of scale to provide affordable Magento plans. You can also host unlimited websites on the more expensive plans, and they have a competitive offering. If you’re hosting Magento websites, and customer service isn’t your primary concern, Hostgator is a great option. 5. A2 Hosting A2 Hosting uptime and loading speed are one of the best in the industry. They host Magento on their Turbo Boost and Turbo Max Plans. When it comes to security features, A2 is your best bet. The Turbo Boost plan comes with unlimited storage, free site migration, and automatic backups. You also get access to 2GB RAM. This plan starts from around $10 per month. On the other hand, A2’s Turbo Max plan starts at around $15 per month. The Turbo Max plan has the same features as the Turbo Boost plan, including 4GB RAM. Below is a quick overview of A2 Hosting. Features Why A2 Hosting A2 hosting is one of the best Magento hosting providers. One of the things that make the company stand out is the fast web servers. They also offer great support. When considering their service, it’s good to think of the first year as an introductory pricing offer. Many Magento users select A2 because of their experience with Magento. 6. Hostinger Hostinger offers some of the cheapest web hosting plans on the market for Magento users. They offer different web hosting services with different price packages. You get access to bandwidth from 100 GB, with the most expensive plan giving you unlimited data transfer. Storage ranges from 10GB to 100GB based on your preferred price package. For Magento hosting, pricing starts at less than $10 per month. You can find an overview of their Magento web hosting service below. Features Why Hostinger Hostinger provides cheap fast web hosting. If you’re just starting and you’re price-sensitive, the competitive pricing, regular discounts, and special offers make this company worth checking out. Secure the best price with Hostinger by clicking the button below. 7. InMotion Hosting InMotion hosting is a good choice for companies that have a customer base in North America. They have two data centers in Los Angeles and California. InMotion offers amazing features such as a 90-day money-back promise and unlimited bandwidth. Their support staff can be reached through live chat, phone, and email. The company has affordable hosting plans for people running Magento sites. They offer shared plans and dedicated servers. You can find more information about the company below. Features Why InMotion If you’re looking for the best options for hosting Magento sites, InMotion should be on your list. You can check our InMotion review. The company has fast servers and good infrastructure. The main issue is the support team is not fast at responding to inquiries. Click the button below to learn more about the InMotion Magento packages. 8. GoDaddy GoDaddy offers one of the best Magento packages on their VPS, Business, and shared plans. The shared and VPS plans start at under $10 per month, and the Business plan starts at around $20 a month. You can find more information about the company below. Features Why GoDaddy GoDaddy is a large, established company. Because of their size, they can invest in server farms and provide you with low prices on their hosting plans. GoDaddy is not the best Magento hosting provider because you often lose that focus on great support with large companies. Why Should You Choose Magento Hosting? You should choose the best Magento hosting to ensure that your website is run as smoothly as possible. While general hosting could work for Magento online stores, choosing the best Magento hosting is the key factor for a well-run site. Below are some reasons you should choose Magento hosting. 1. Managed Hosting Setting up and maintaining your online store can quickly get technical. That’s an issue if you are not tech-savvy. Magento hosting providers should have staff with hands-on expertise in handling issues that come with Magento websites. You’ll be able to get support with Magento-specific queries. That expertise translates into saving time and costs. You can quickly resolve any issues with your site so you can focus on making sales. 2. Performance A generic host may offer good hosting features; however, do they have their servers optimized for hosting Magento websites? A relevant provider will also ensure your site is PCI compliant[2]. With a PCI-compliant site, you can offer integrated payment gateways and process credit cards securely. 3. Increased Security You wouldn’t want to have to worry about hackers and malicious intruders when running your eCommerce store. Magento hosting providers typically have DDoS protection in place, along with a decent firewall and anti-malware Read More Read More

The post 8 Best Magento Hosting Services You Should Consider in 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – May 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 24 May 2021 05:12:53 +0000

As the year’s third quarter nears, you’re in a great position to consider what you need to change to meet your most aggressive year-end goals. If you need some new strategies to turn things around, this roundup may help. First, you’ll pick up new skills from the guides. You’ll learn how to use topic clusters to master content marketing, what local justifications are (and why they matter), and how “jump links” could be your next secret weapon. Then, you’ll get some actionable data from new case studies. They cover how some SEOs have recovered from the December Update, what’s changed with Google’s product review update, and some web vitals scores for every industry. Finally, you’ll get the latest news. We’ll look at what Google has said about new ways to report indexing issues and what you can expect from their spam-fighting A.I. How to Use Topic Clusters for Content Marketing to Rank, Convert, and Strategize https://surferseo.com/blog/topic-clusters/ Michał Suski of SurferSEO brings us this look at how to use topic clusters to power your content marketing. He claims that topic clusters are a 100% on-page, content-focused method you can use to raise your site’s authority without links. He defines topic clusters as a method for organizing your content so that you can serve the needs of both SEO requirements and visiting humans. He takes you through the process of setting up Pillar Pages and Supporting Pages so that you can cover both broad overviews and smaller parts of a particular topic. Employing this strategy can take a lot of work, but Michał provides some strong arguments for why it matters. As he points out, topic clusters make it very easy for bots to make sense of your pages. They also boost your topical relevance, deliver a better user experience, and give your audience a reason to come back. Check out the full guide to discover multiple methods of building topic clusters. You’ll also be treated to a thorough case study into how topic clusters helped a site with no DA score start ranking for 3,000+ keywords—without building a single link. Topic clusters are a great way to target intent. Our next guide also has some advice on how you can do that. Local Justifications Are a Big Deal, and You Can Influence Them https://moz.com/blog/influence-local-justifications Miriam Ellis of Moz brings us this look at local justifications and how much of a difference they can make for your SEO efforts. She starts by helping us understand what local justifications are. As she explains, a local justification is a snippet of text that appears in the local packs that note if a shop/website sells the item listed in the searcher’s query. Imagine you were searching for a new grill. If you type “Grill in (city)” into Google, you’ll get a list of retail stores near you. At the bottom of each listing, you may see text that says “sold here” or “this website mentions X.” That’s a local justification. It matters, Miriam argues, because these justifications can be influenced to empower your local SEO. She points out that 57% of local packs (in a test group of 2000+) featured justifications. Those number shouldn’t be too surprising, because there are now a lot of different ones: For each of these justifications, Miriam provides some advice for how you can influence Google to provide a justification for your listing. You should take advantage of this quickly if you’re in local SEO. Our final guide for the month also has some advice on how you can plant a visual advantage in your search engine result. Jump Links – The Secret SEO Weapon https://seonotebook.com/notes/jump-links-the-secret-seo-weapon/ Steve Toth of SEOnotebook brings us this look at a tactic that has allowed his much newer site to go toe-to-toe with the New York Times for some important SERPs. He claims that the source of this power is jump links. Jump links (sometimes called anchor links) are links that appear in Google results and direct you to a specific spot on the page. Steve hypothesizes that Google loves these links so much because they deliver users to the specific section of the content that answers their query. Not everyone has as much luck with jump links, but Steve takes a special approach to them. He suggests that the key to great performance from jump links is building them into your headers and making sure that you’re structuring them in the form of a question. He recommends that you keep them short and include at least 3 per page. As long as you don’t have a lot of competition yet, this can deliver some impressive results. That’s all for the guides. Let’s move on to the case study. First, we have several months of research that document how one site that suffered serious losses from the 2020 core update has managed to recover. How I’ve Recovered From the Google December 2020 Core Update https://vladkhvatov.com/google-algorithm-update/ Vlad Khvatov brings us this look at how his site recovered from the big hit it took after the December 2020 update. He started with more than 100,00 users a month. For the first few months of 2020, he was lucky to get a few hundred hits a month. Now, that his site is finally growing—fast—again, he has some advice for the rest of us. He started with a major overhaul of his site. He implemented a silo structure for his existing content, rewrote a ton of content that had been stolen, and added 41 pages of new content. He also prepared for core web vitals, improved his site speed, and disavowed nearly 500 links. He documents all of his steps with details about how he pulled them off. He also goes into what it cost him and how much it may cost you to do the same work. It’s valuable data if you’re looking to do a major overhaul, especially if your site is an affiliate site like his. The next case study is also of particular interest to affiliate marketers. It covers one of the most affiliate-focused updates in years. Google’s Product Reviews Update – Analysis and findings from a major algorithm update impacting affiliate marketers, review sites, and more https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-product-reviews-algorithm-update/ Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive brings us this look at Google’s Product Reviews Update. As he explains, the update was expected to reward in-depth reviews and leave thinner content at a competitive disadvantage. Using a series of graphs and live examples, Glenn lays out what happened in extensive detail. He starts with a breakdown of how the launch rolled out and who it affected. After that, he dives into some analysis. He starts by providing some examples of sites that dropped. Anonymous image examples of the kind of content that caused these sites to drop are provided. He also provides some examples of stronger content that did well following the update rollout. He assessed some other factors that may have caused sites to get hit by the update. The aggressiveness and organization of content may be a factor. Whether or not the affiliates disclose that they are affiliates and identify their authors may also play a role. Glenn covers significantly more details in the piece. It’s essential reading if you have an affiliate site, especially if the recent update hit yours. The next case study may have something for everyone. Core Web Vitals Scores for Every Industry https://corewebvitals.iprospect.com/ The team at iProspect has provided this useful resource for those who are preparing for the upcoming Core Web Vitals rollout. They’ve tracked 1,500 sites across 15 industries to assess who is ready and who may be at serious risk of losing out. In the beginning, you’ll find a breakdown of what the Core Web Vitals are: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) I won’t spend too much time on what they cover here because past SEO news roundups have already featured articles that fully broke these scores down. Instead, let’s look at the unique value that their research provides. For the 15 industries that they’ve analyzed, they provide lists of the top-scoring sites and the worst-scoring sites. For each of the sites that appear in either list, they provide LCP, FID, and CLS scores. You can use these lists and the sites that appear in them to develop a great idea of what an effective (or less so) site looks like. You can go to each of the top-scoring sites and borrow from the work they’ve done to prepare. With that covered, we’re ready to move on to the news. Let’s start by looking at your new reporting options if you have an indexing issue. Google lets you report an indexing issue https://searchengineland.com/google-lets-you-report-an-indexing-issue-348264 Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land brings us this news about one of Google’s latest features. You should now be able to report indexing issues directly to the Google search team from the footer of the URL inspection help document. This is a feature that Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – May 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

The Definitive Technical SEO Audit Guide For 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 10 May 2021 06:28:17 +0000

To put it simply, if your website’s technical SEO isn’t on point – you’re not going to rank well on Google. As a professional digital marketer with over 10 years of experience in conducting technical SEO audits, I understand this very well. Having great content and backlinks isn’t enough when it comes to ranking in the top positions of Google search. If you really want to dominate the search engine results pages, you want to make sure that your website’s Technical SEO is perfect. Conducting a full technical Search engine optimization audit can be a pretty daunting task. Lucky for you, I’ve broken down each of these SEO elements and have provided a helpful SEO audit checklist with ready-to-use templates for you to follow. From the most basic level of ensuring that Google can crawl and index your content to more advanced techniques that look into site speed, mobile SEO, JavaScript SEO, and more, I’ll be with you every step of the way. Quick Summary What is a Technical SEO Audit? A Technical SEO audit is a process that is meant to identify and fix the technical issues that could make it harder for Google to crawl, index and rank your site. And to put it simply, make life easy for Google, and they make life easy for you. Common issues often discovered during a Technical search engine optimization audit include poor site architecture, broken links, slow page load speed, or display issues on mobile devices. The technical SEO audit is an important part of a website’s SEO strategy and should be one of the first things that you look into to improve your visibility in the Google search results. Why Are Technical SEO Audits Important? Technical SEO Audits are important because even if you’ve spent a long time creating excellent content, your users may not even see it if there are issues with your website’s crawlability and indexability. However, even if your site can be found by internet users, its rankings could be hurt by performance-related technical factors. Page load time is a ranking factor, which means that a slow website is unlikely to reach top spots in SERPs (search engine results page). Internet users are even less patient than Google crawlers and will leave your website if it takes ages to load. Likewise, a poorly structured website can also lead to confusion among your users. A site that is easy to navigate leads to a better user experience, and consequently, generates more leads. During a technical search engine optimization audit, you could also find out that mobile users face numerous problems while browsing your website. Given the fact that mobile devices generate more than half of worldwide web traffic, such issues could lead to a terrible loss of revenue. Let’s also not forget that mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor. Technical SEO Audit Checklist Here’s what tools we recommend in order to complete your Technical site Audit: Crawlability & Indexability As we’ve already mentioned, making sure that your site content can be crawled and indexed is a critical aspect of technical SEO. Google “crawls” the internet through links in order to find content. If they can’t find it, then it doesn’t exist in their eyes. In this section of our technical SEO audit guide, we’ll walk you through the various in which you can audit your website for technical SEO issues related to crawling and indexing. Robots.txt What is the Robots.txt file and Why Is It Important? A robots.txt file is a file that instructs search engine crawlers which pages or files they can and can’t access on your website. For example, if you have an eCommerce site , then you don’t want search engines to access sensitive pages like the cart or checkout page. It’s worth noting that… The robots.txt should not be used to hide pages from Google (or other search engines). Why? Because your web page may still be indexed by Google if other sites have linked to it with descriptive text. Robots.txt Audit Checklist Here’s what ours looks like: https://thesearchinitiative.com/robots.txt And here’s the robots.txt for: https://searchengineland.com/robots.txt Below are examples of search engines and their respective user-agents (i.e. what the search engine identifies as): Helpful tip: use the asterisk (*) wildcard. This is a special character that allows you to assign rules to all user-agents. # this directive blocks all crawlers User-agent: * Disallow: / # this directive grants access to all crawlers User-agent: * Allow: / Below are some examples of wildcards you can use: For example, the below set of rules prevents all user agents from accessing URLs in the /product/ subfolder that may contain a question mark. # this directive grants access to all crawlers User-agent: * Disallow: /products/*? # this directive grants access to all crawlers # This directive blocks all user-agents from accessing PDF files. User-agent: * Disallow: /*.pdf$ For example, if your robots.txt had the following set of rules: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /subfolder-a/ User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /subfolder-b/ Google would still follow both directives. But, it could quickly get pretty confusing if your robots.txt has many rules. Therefore, something like the following is much better and cleaner: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /subfolder-a/ Disallow: /subfolder-b/ Technical SEO Fact: the robots.txt file was originally introduced to prevent search engine bots from overloading websites with multiple requests. XML Sitemaps What is an XML Sitemap? An XML sitemap (or sitemap) is an XML (Extensible Markup Language) file used to tell search engines where to find the most important content on websites. XML Sitemap Audit Checklist Below, we’ve outlined some simple checks that you should follow when auditing your XML sitemap as part of your technical site audit. Here’s an example of how this might look like: If you want a full list of possible on-page optimizations, I’ve put together a guide on how to audit the On-Page elements of your web pages. Here’s the XML sitemap for The Search Initiative: https://thesearchinitiative.com/sitemap.xml If you do not currently have a sitemap, you can create one manually or by using a tool like this XML Sitemap Generator from Screaming Frog. If your website is on WordPress, your life is about to get much easier as there are many SEO plugins such as Google XML Sitemaps and Yoast that will automatically generate your sitemap(s) for you. Index Bloating A very common technical SEO issue that most websites tend to face, is index bloating. Sometimes, Googlebot (Google’s web crawler) will crawl and index pages that simply offer no value to the end-user. These pages “bloat” your index and use up precious crawl budget as Google spends time unnecessarily crawling and indexing them. Below are some simple checks you can make in order to identify the types of pages that cause index bloating. Once you’ve carried out these checks, follow this awesome guide from Ahrefs on how to go about removing them from Google’s index. Pagination Paginated pages being indexed by Google can cause serious duplicate content issues. This is a common problem for eCommerce websites that may have thousands of products and hundreds of categories. To quickly check whether your paginated pages being indexed, use the following site searches: In the below example, we can see that the Zara website has over 14,000 paginated pages that have been indexed. Tags Adding tags to your WordPress or eCommerce sites is useful in organizing the content on your website, but it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. To quickly check whether you have any tagged pages indexed in the SERPs (search engine results page), use the following site searches: Don’t believe this is important? Here are the before-and-after results of a client we had in the eCommerce space where one of the things we did was remove /tag/ pages from the index. Check out the full case study here. HTTP Pages If your website isn’t on HTTPS (you really should move over to HTTPS!), then it’s a given that all of your HTTP pages will be indexed. However, if you’ve made the move to HTTPS, there’s still a chance that some of the HTTP versions of your pages are indexed. To check this, use the following site searches: We can see below, that the Zara website also currently has over 2k HTTP pages indexed by Google – these are unnecessarily wasting crawl budget and creating duplicate content issues. Serving Both www. and non-www. Pages If your website serves pages with www., then it’s important that there aren’t any non-www. pages being indexed by Google as this causes further duplication. To check this, use the following site searches: If we look at the River Island website, we can see that by default, it serves www. pages: https://www.riverisland.com/. However, there are still almost 56k pages without www. indexed by Google. Having this many duplicate pages can be incredibly problematic and impact a website’s performance in the search engine rankings. eCommerce Empty Category Pages As a customer, one of the worst feelings is landing on a page to find that the website whose Read More Read More

The post The Definitive Technical SEO Audit Guide For 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – April 2021

Matt Diggity — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 05:02:05 +0000

The first quarter of the year is closing soon. Now is the time to think about what’s working, what isn’t, and how you’re going to end the year on top. In this roundup, we’ve got some great ideas on where you can find an edge. First up is an abundance of case studies. The data has revealed some new ways to write the best headlines and how many google searches end without a click. You’ll also get to hear Google’s response to the research on clicks. Next, you can upgrade your skills with the month’s top guides. You’ll learn how to recognize three under-utilized signals for SEO and how to use the Google knowledge graph to ensure your content features in answers. At the end of the list, you’ll find some top news items. Google has announced a product reviews algorithm update, a fellow affiliate has achieved a $6 million exit, and Google has dropped the newest version of analytics. Also, we may be waiting longer for the core web vitals update. 100m Posts Analyzed: What You Need To Write The Best Headlines https://buzzsumo.com/resources/hundred-million-best-headlines-study/view/#digital-content Louise Linehan of BuzzSumo brings us this analysis of how to write the best headlines based on 100,000,000 posts. By digging through trends, she provided some compelling answers to questions all marketers need to ask. As an example, let’s look at three big questions and what the research revealed for each of them. For the first one, the research revealed that the ideal length for headlines was 11 words and 65 characters. Descriptive headlines that were long enough to explain the information significantly outperformed snappier headlines at half the length. The best number to use in headlines appeared to be “10”. However, all of the next most popular numbers were all in the single digits. So, readers like at least ten, but more than that may strike them as too big a time investment. The research revealed that certain phrases placed at the start of a headline were more likely to create interest. At the top of the list (by a lot) were: The rest of the research is filled with some great insights that you shouldn’t miss. For now, let’s look at some search-centered research. Sparktoro published a controversial (we’ll get to Google’s reply) look at how many searches end without a click. In 2020, Two-Thirds of Google Searches Ended Without a Click https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended-without-a-click/ Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro published this follow-up to a 2019 study that showed slightly more than half of all Google searches ended without a click. His latest research (with data sourced from SimilarWeb) shows that from January to December 2020, 64.82% of searches on Google ended without the user clicking on another web property. Rand believes even that number is undercounting the real difference. The research also revealed that the rise of mobile searches played an outsize role in these results. The click-through rate for searches on desktops is still close to 50%. However, for mobile searches, only 21.99% of searches end in a click. Mobile devices account for far more searches around the world than desktops do. Rand suggests that the stunning lack of click-through on mobile may be a direct and intended result of Google’s mobile-first strategy. Rand closes with some concern about the massive and still-growing power of Google as both a leader in search and in advertising. He predicts that zero-click searches are likely to become even more common in the future. His work here attracted a lot of attention, including from Google. In the next piece, we’ll look at Google’s official response. (Reply) Google Search sends more traffic to the open web every year https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-sends-more-traffic-open-web-every-year Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison, brings us this reply to the zero-click discourse. In it, he argues that Google Search continues to send billions of clicks to websites every day, and notes that it has sent more traffic to the open web every year since Google launched. He starts by introducing several factors that should be considered when looking at the changes in clicks. First, he points out; people reformulate their queries. Sometimes, several searches will fail before the user finds the term that produces the results they want. Danny argues that features like “related searches” encourage more zero-click searches than existed in the past. Danny also argued that Google has massively improved its capacity to deliver quick facts. He believes that people increasingly use Google without any intention of clicking because they just want a fast answer without commercial intent. Finally, he argues that many people still prefer to connect with a business directly. Many people perform searches to get a business’s name or address but then choose to contact that business through other means. The discussion will continue and likely be shaped by Google’s next move. Speaking of next moves, let’s look at why one SEO believes mobile-only indexing will cause the biggest SEO shakeup of 2021. Why Mobile-Only Indexing Will Cause The Biggest SEO Shake-Up Of 2021 https://ipullrank.com/why-mobile-only-indexing-will-cause-the-biggest-seo-shake-up-of-2021 Mike King of iPullRank brings us this look at what the switch to mobile-only indexing may mean for the world of SEO. He argues that there are some changes you need to make right now if you don’t want to be left behind in one of the biggest shake-ups to hit SEO in years. The issue he hones in on is parity between mobile and desktop results. He reveals that in a data set of more than 5 million sites, 30.31% of URLs served different internal links for desktop devices than they did for mobile devices. He also found that only 16.29% of pages served the same word count between Mobile and Desktop. This is an issue because Google has indicated that it has already begun transitioning to mobile-only indexing. Those sites that are currently benefiting from links and content that show up only for desktop users are about to lose a significant amount of juice. Fortunately, Mike has some solutions for people who need to act now. He includes methods that you can take to determine if parity issues are affecting your site. He also includes a handy Excel Template you can use with Screaming Frog with step-by-step procedures. He also introduced a new free tool of his own creation called Parito that handles the work of discovering parities. Now, we’re ready to move on to the guides. First, we’ll look at whether click-based signals can be considered a part of SEO and which ones matter most. 3 Vital Click-Based Signals for SEO: First, Long, & Last https://moz.com/blog/click-based-seo-engagement-signals Cyrus Shepard brings us this look at the role engagement signals play in SEO. He starts by admitting that Google is pretty tight-lipped about the practice. While Google has admitted that they use interaction data to assess results, they often refuse to address specifics. In recent answers, they’ve described click data as “noisy” without explicitly denying their use. Cyrus suggests that SEOs can’t get a straight answer because Google doesn’t really want the relationship between engagement signals and SEO to be understood. However, he also argues that there are relationships you can confidently infer based on existing SEO. He defines three engagement metrics: As Cyrus points out, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether or not Google confirms the role these signals play in SEO. All of them are broadly healthy for your site because they all mean more visitors and more attention. He breaks down how you can improve all of these signals and measure your work with metrics for the rest of the guide. Next, we’ll be looking at another possible ranking factor that isn’t widely discussed: The Google knowledge graph. What Is the Google Knowledge Graph (and Does It Affect SEO)? https://www.semrush.com/blog/knowledge-graph/ Michelle Ofiwe of Semrush brings us this look at what the knowledge graph is, how it influences SEO, and how you can make sure your information appears on it. To start, she takes us through an explanation. The Google Knowledge Graph is a database that contains billions of facts on various subjects. It covers everything from niche topics to medicine and science. She uses the example: “When was Semrush founded?” and points out that this simple query will return information about the founders, headquarters, and links to social media profiles. Should this matter to you? She argues that it should. As clicks decrease overall, the feature-centered information drawn from the knowledge graph is getting the most eyes. She has some ideas for how you can make sure that your information is available in the knowledge graph, including: Each step is filled with descriptions that can help you put them into practice yourself. That closes out the guides for the week. Let’s move on to the news, starting with Google’s announcement of a product review update. Google announces product reviews algorithm update https://searchengineland.com/google-product-reviews-algorithm-update-347568 Barry Schwartz is here to let us know that Google has released a new quality algorithm update that promotes “outstanding” product reviews. Google defines these reviews as those that: “..share in-depth research, rather than thin content Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – April 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

10 Best GoDaddy Hosting Alternatives (2024 Updated)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 22:20:42 +0000

GoDaddy has long been a popular choice for domain and web hosting services, holding the title of the largest domain registrar and catering to over 20 million subscribers. However, with our extensive experience in the hosting industry, we understand that its dominant market position doesn’t guarantee it’s the best option for everyone. There are numerous GoDaddy alternatives that may better align with your specific needs. In this article, drawing on my hands-on experience, I’ll walk you through ten of the best GoDaddy alternatives for domain and web hosting. You’ll learn the unique features of each option and what makes them suitable GoDaddy alternatives. Web Hosting Alternatives to GoDaddy A web hosting provider performs a wide range of hosting plans and services for your website, including providing web space, maintaining servers, keeping your software and hardware up-to-date, and troubleshooting. Now, let’s do a deep dive into the best GoDaddy alternatives for hosting. Below, I’ll reveal the five top GoDaddy competitors: 1. WPX (Editor’s Choice) WPX is one of the best GoDaddy alternatives on this list. In my opinion, even better than GoDaddy. WPX is ranked number one on Trustpilot for managed WordPress hosting and has earned rave reviews on many review sites from their customers. Through its own high-speed, custom Content Delivery Network (CDN), and high-tech SSD servers, WPX ensures your WordPress site performs excellently even under heavy traffic loads. What sets WPX apart from all its competitors is its industry-leading quick customer service response time. If you send a query, you’ll receive some sort of response from the LiveChat support agents within 30 seconds. This service is available 24/7, so you can send your queries day or night, regardless of which part of the world you are in. Fast response times are great, of course, but as a customer, you want the issue resolved quickly. Again, WPX stands out in this crowded market for its excellent hosting service. The first level of support agents can handle most issues without escalating to the next. What’s more, WPX has a simple and intuitive admin panel for you to manage your site. It is fast, easy to use, and full of tutorials to guide you every step of the way. To summarize, let’s run through the pros and cons of WPX. What’s WPX Best For? WPX is the best GoDaddy alternative. It is geared towards sites that already have web traffic rather than people who are just starting a website. However, they offer an excellent service for both markets. WPX also specializes in sites hosted on WordPress, and has quickly become the best hosting company for WordPress. Considering all the features and pros of WPX, they are an excellent GoDaddy alternative. If you want to go with a company that provides the best web hosting service for SEO, choose WPX. I managed to sort out a good deal with the team at WPX. 90% off the first month’s subscription with the coupon code MATT90 2. SiteGround SiteGround provides reliable website management, especially for small and medium sites. SiteGround offers WordPress hosting, WooCommerce hosting, and cloud hosting. Here are some benefits and some disadvantages of Siteground. What’s SiteGround Best For? SiteGround is an excellent service for companies managing an online store on WooCommerce. SiteGround also has great general hosting plans for nonprofits, smaller marketing agencies, church website hosting, and other businesses. If you thoroughly compare SiteGround and GoDaddy, you’ll notice SiteGround is undoubtedly the better option. 3. Bluehost Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting providers on the market. The company is owned by Endurance International, which also owns Hostgator. But, there are many differences between Bluehost and Hostgator. When it comes to Bluehost vs. Godaddy, the fight is tough! What’s Bluehost Best For? Bluehost is generally regarded as one of the best low-cost hosting companies. The service is good for people who are just starting a new website. We found that their shared hosting is also ok for a PBN host. 4. HostPapa Based in Canada, HostPapa provides shared hosting, reseller hosting, and virtual private server (VPS) hosting. Since launching in 2006, the company has become a go-to hosting provider for shared hosting, especially. 5. Namecheap Namecheap is a domain reseller and a GoDaddy hosting alternative. Namecheap sells SSL certificates, privacy protection services, and more in addition to selling domains and full hosting packages, and hosting plans. Let’s look at some pros and cons of Namecheap: Domain Registration Alternatives to GoDaddy A domain name registrar is a company that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. A domain name registrar is different from a reseller, like Namecheap, which acts as a middleman between you and the domain registrar. GoDaddy is one of the largest domain hosting companies in the world. There are some great domain registrars like GoDaddy that offer a similar service. Below are the five best GoDaddy alternatives for those looking for Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs). 1. PorkBun Porkbun is an ICANN-accredited domain registrar. This GoDaddy alternative sells domain names along with complementary products such as SSL certificates and hosting services. They make the registration process easy, affordable, and enjoyable. Porkbun makes searching for a domain name easy. They have a clean interface that is simple to navigate. Porkbun is cheaper than other registrars. You can get steep discounts on domain names here compared to other registrars. Porkbun provides a straightforward service at an affordable price. We asked Alex Drew of ODYS global, his opinion on PorkBun: “There are other GoDaddy alternatives in terms of new domain registrations, one of the most promising being PorkBun.com. We’ve been using them for quite some time now to register a couple of new domains for our business… They’ve been in the game since at least 2010 and always had a no-BS, straightforward approach to registering domains as well as super competitive prices.” Alex Drew ODYS Global 2. NameSilo NameSilo is a low-cost provider of domain name registration and management services. The company offers domain transfer, privacy protection, and integrations. NameSilo offers transparent pricing. They have an extensive list of pricing for top-level domains (TDLs). NameSilo also competes with other registrars in terms of value. Their domains are slightly more expensive, but they offer a competitive price for renewals. NameSilo offers a lot of TDLs options that go beyond generic domain names. Overall, NameSilo does offer a good service if you’re looking for a domain registration alternative to GoDaddy. It comes highly recommended by Kalin Karakehayov at SEO.domains. 3. Dynadot Dynadot offers services such as domain name registration, email hosting, website builder, and web hosting. When it comes to domain registrars, Dynadot is a great company. Dynadot is a Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) registrar. The pricing for domains is competitive. Dynadot has an API, which is essential for people running large PBN or buying and selling domains. Dynadot is best for advanced users who have the technical skills to manage software installations. 4. Gandi.net Gandi.net provides domain name registration, web hosting, and related services. One commendable thing about Gandi.net is the transparent domain prices. You can see the cost of registration, transfer, and renewal. Gandi.net is one of the best GoDaddy alternatives. Head over to the site to find out more. 5. Internet.bs Internet.bs is a domain name registrar accredited by ICANN and other bodies. The company is based in the Bahamas, with offices in Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The company provides domain name registrations, transfers for top-level domains, web hosting, and SSL certificates. They also provide automated domain renewals. Internet.bs has an easy-to-use control panel that gives customers control over their domain portfolio. People who use Internet.bs also get free private WHOIS for life with all domain name registrations. Here are some pros and cons of Internet.bs for you to consider if you’re looking for an alternative to GoDaddy: Why Look for GoDaddy Alternatives? Founded by Bob Parsons, GoDaddy is the “Big Daddy” in the world of domains and hosting, but there are plenty of GoDaddy competitors. Here are a few reasons why you should be on the lookout for a GoDaddy alternative. Which Godaddy Alternative is Better? While GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar globally, several other domain registrars and web hosting services exist. When it comes to domain registrars, stay away from resellers like Namecheap. Instead, go directly to a domain registrar. I shared five great GoDaddy alternatives. If you’re running a PBN or buying and selling domains in bulk, you’ll want a solution with an API. Four out of five sites on our list have an API. If you’re looking for great hosting, we recommend WPX hosting. With its feature-rich and customer-friendly service, you can host and set up your website with ease. GoDaddy has long been a popular choice for domain and web hosting services, holding the title of the largest domain registrar and catering to over 20 million subscribers. However, with our extensive experience in the hosting industry, we understand that its dominant market position doesn’t guarantee it’s the best Read More Read More

The post 10 Best GoDaddy Hosting Alternatives (2024 Updated) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – March 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 05:05:02 +0000

The world is starting to get back to work with the shutdowns ending. If the last 30 days are any indication, the world of SEO is already back at full speed. Many great pieces have been published, and this roundup will carry you through some of the best. First, we have a bumper crop of guides. We’ll start by looking at how to create linkable assets, what you need to know about Google Passage Ranking, and how beginners can approach link building. You’ll also learn about some pro email outreach strategies. Next, we’ll look at some data studies that popped up last month. You’ll learn what the data says about the importance of topical authority and discover what’s possible with a look at the world’s most extensive list of content marketing examples. At the end, you’ll find some of the biggest news drops in the last 30 days. Is Google adding dozens of new manual actions? Are they pulling back on featured snippets? Is SEO Andrew Ansley being extorted by a journalist who hates GoDaddy’s customer service? We’ll find out … Creating Linkable Assets https://authority.builders/blog/creating-linkable-assets/ I’m starting this list with a labor of love that I published at Authority Builders. A lot of great pieces have been written about where to source good links. I wanted to make a guide on how to build the kind of content that attracts links. This kind of content is known as a “linkable asset.” Knowing how to create linkable assets is important because out of all the blog posts ever published online—millions upon millions of posts—only 6% have ever received a single backlink. Think about how many wasted hours that represents. Probably more time than was spent building all the great monuments of the world put together. I think it’s possible to make it into that 6%, and this guide details the process. I studied some of the most successful content online and organized them into categories. You’ll find more categories and descriptions on how to recognize them in the full article. I also laid out some steps you can follow to turn any of these types of content into successful linkable assets. You should find everything you need to start link building. Creating great content can reward you with more than just links. Passage ranking has recently gone live, and the next guide includes some important releases on how to make the most of it. What Is Google Passage Ranking: 16 Key Points You Should Know https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-passage-ranking-martin-splitt/388206/ Roger Montti brings us this look at some of the answers that Google has provided for questions about passage ranking. Passage ranking refers to Google’s new power to pull out and rank sections of your content rather than the entire page. Google’s Martin Splitt provided the answers during a recent virtual conference. The whole video chat can be seen here. It includes a lot of advice that experienced SEOs may be able to use. SEOs who are just starting out may benefit more from our next item: a beginner’s guide to link building. The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-building Tim Soulo of Ahrefs brings us this helpful guide that can be easily passed off to the beginners that you know or are mentoring in SEO. It covers the basics of link building, including why links matters, where to find them, how to assess them, and how to start building. It also includes a list of the best tools for beginners. This is a helpful resource because a lot of the big guides about link building have outdated advice at this point. This one starts with some of the most up-to-date arguments for why you need links and the impact that they have on your site. I liked that this list provided a lot of good sources and told beginners how to take advantage of them. It covered: The final section lists some of the best tools available that beginners can use to research backlinks, research content, and perform email outreach. It’s a great guide to send to anyone who has been passing their link-building questions to you. Our next (and final) guide for this roundup includes a novel technique for picking up links using email outreach. 4 Unique Link Building Strategies involving Email Outreach https://www.nichepursuits.com/link-hunter-review/ Shane Dayton at Niche Pursuits brings us this podcast interview with Jeff Oxford. In the interview, Jeff lays out some unique approaches that he has taken to attracting links from top sites. He covers several strategies, including: I found the first idea particularly interesting. Jeff lays it out like this: You reach out to sites with great but outdated content (not hard to find with all the recent updates), and offer to rewrite it for them to get it fresh for 2021. This doesn’t involve much work on your part. You need to identify the passages that are no longer applicable and replace them with fresh advice. While you’re at it, you can insert links to more modern guides on your sites and see if they pass review. There’s also some advice on how you can sell this pitch to the sites that you’ve targeted for outreach. If you’ve used this strategy a couple of times, you can use stats as proof that your rewrites will bring their content back to life. He also covers how to earn links by creating specialized listicles. You identify several blogs you want links from and then organize them into a niche list. For example, you could do: Top 80 Crossfit Blogs, Top 60 Animal Welfare Blogs. Reach out to the sites to find out if they’ll link back. They may appreciate being mentioned enough to give you a free link. There’s a lot of other great advice here that’s worth checking out. Jeff is an insightful guy who has spent some time in the Chiang Mai SEO community, and he often comes up with great stuff. Let’s move on to the case studies. First, we have some data that demonstrates the importance of ‘topical authority’. Importance of Topical Authority: A Semantic SEO Case Study https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/importance-topical-authority-semantic-seo Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR recently shared on OnCrawl how he increased monthly traffic from 10,000 to 200,000 over the course of a few months by using semantic SEO and topical authority. The semantic web refers to the way that information is organized on the web. It allows machines to read data by using taxonomy (referring to the relationship between objects) and ontology (the nature of objects). Recent Google moves, like the introduction of BERT, have been focused on making Google more effective as a semantic search engine. Koray used these principles to optimize his content, based on the principle he describes below: “To be an authority for a topic in the eyes of a semantic search engine, a source should cover a thing’s different attributes within different contexts. It must also reference similar things and things in parent and child categories.” Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR Throughout the study, he shows how he optimized his sites without using any of the following traditional SEO strategies: Instead of these traditional strategies, he recommends that you take steps such as: He includes data to support these ideas throughout the study, along with tips on how you can implement them yourself. These tips are more practical to advanced users who have high-level tools at their disposal. For those advanced users, the data could be game-changing. The next case study on our list is helpful to users at any level. It’s (supposedly) the world’s largest list of content marketing examples. Content Marketing Examples: The World’s Largest List https://growthbadger.com/resources/content-marketing-examples/ Kyle Byers of GrowthBadger brings us this massive, browseable library of content marketing examples. While it’s not exactly a case study, it is a great resource that you can use to find samples of effective content fit for campaigns. It’s helpfully broken down so that you can sort by either the format or type of strategy. Based on either category, you can narrow the list down to only one of the following subcategories for each of the large categories: You don’t just get image examples, either. Each entry includes a description of the sample and some ideas for how you could put something similar into practice. It’s a great destination when you’re having trouble brainstorming your next content marketing strategy. Now, let’s move on to the news. First, we’ll look at Google’s 12 new types of manual action penalties. Google Adds 12 New Types of Manual Action Penalties https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-adds-12-new-types-of-manual-action-penalties/395539/ Matt Southern of SEJ brings us this look at 12 new types of manual action (as in, issued by a human reviewer) penalties being introduced by Google. All of them are responses to violations of Google News and Discover policies. In the past, only violations of Google Search policies were targeted with manual penalties. Now, your site may attract penalties if your site appears in either of these features and you do the following: If you manage to have a penalty applied to your site, you Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – March 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – February 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 04:38:04 +0000

SEO’s best minds are clearly back at work. An impressive set of articles were published this month, and this roundup will take you through the best of them… We’ll open with some case studies. First, you’ll learn what three separate case studies have to say about what went down with the December 2020 update. After that, you’ll learn how many URLs you can “request indexing” for before you hit a limit. Some fresh guides are next. They’ll teach you about the latest best practices for PBNs, how to find keywords without help from historical data, and how to analyze SERPs to rank more effectively. Finally, we’ll look at the news. There was a search ranking algorithm update on January 28th that you shouldn’t miss, plus a Google-employee’s ruling on what does and doesn’t qualify as “duplicate content.” Google’s December 2020 Broad Core Algorithm Update Part 2: Three Case Studies That Underscore The Complexity and Nuance of Broad Core Updates https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/december-2020-google-core-algorithm-update-part-two-case-studies/ Glenn Gabe brings us this look at what we can know about the latest core update from three different case studies. The first case study covers the results of a news publisher who focuses on a highly-specific niche. This site was hit hard over 2020, even though it appeared to be doing most things right. As Glen put it, the site had E-A-T galore. Several core authors produced the news stories. They were qualified and their authorship was prominently displayed. Additionally, the site had over 2 million inbound links, including some of the most authoritative sites in the world. None of this stopped them from getting hit in the January update and again in the May update. Glen recommended tackling this with a series of steps targeted to problems with news sites including: By the time the December 2020 update rolled around, the site’s traffic grew by $140%+. It’s a story that may offer some options to other struggling news sources. The second case study involved a site that did not welcome the December update. This affiliate site lost more than half of all its traffic. Through several graphs, Glen diagnosed what he believes is the cause. In this case, he thinks that low-quality content has been allowed to overwhelm the core site content. It’s difficult to say because this study hasn’t been concluded yet. Affiliate sites that have been hit may want to stay tuned. The final case study looked at a site that had every reason to praise the December update, especially after it had been hit so hard by the May update. This site was large-scale, and it was operating in a tough niche. The May update destroyed more than 40% of its traffic. Again, Glen noticed that a growing pile of thin content defined the site. It also had some problems with intrusive ads and mobile issues. While these issues were steadily corrected, nothing changed until the December update, when the site regained 40% of its traffic—almost overnight. These case studies can offer a lot of ideas to sites that have been hit across 2020. If you want to make some major changes to your own site, you may be interested in knowing how many URLs you can request indexing for at one time. Our next case study may have your answer. How Many URLs Can You “Request Indexing” For in GSC? [Case Study] https://nickleroy.com/blog-posts/request-indexing-gsc-limit/ Nick LeRoy brings us this quick look into how many indexing requests GSC will tolerate from you at one time. The “request indexing” feature was completely missing from GSC for several months. Many SEOs were excited to see it come back, but they may not have noticed that the functions have changed slightly. Nick’s case study helped to clarify some of those changes. Before the tool was taken offline, the limits had been tracked to about 50 URLs/day. Nick tested the new limits with a site that launched with more than 500,000 new pages. These limits may be concerning for SEOs who rely on fast indexing or might be launching new sites soon. Nick theorized that the new limits may be there to prevent automatization of the whole process. It’s something to watch. For now, let’s move on to the guides. We’ll start with Rank Club’s look at the best PBN practices for 2021. 2021’s PBN Best Practice Guide [Backed by Data] https://rankclub.io/2021-pbn-best-practice-guide Rob Rok of Rank Club brings us this data-backed look at how to use PBNs right in 2021. He didn’t theorize about what might work. Instead, he tracked what his busiest customers were doing and turned it into a set of recommendations. He broke the guide down by Tier 1 and Tier 2 PBN links. Tier 1 links are the PBN links that you build directly to your site. Tier 2 links are the PBN links that you point toward your incoming links to increase their power. For each set, he tried to answer the biggest questions. For Tier 1 links, he focused on questions like: Q: How fast can I build PBN links to my site? A: Approximately 3.29 per month. Q. How many PBN links can I build to my website? A: The average number built to one domain is 7.12 Q: Do PBN links work on YT videos? A: Isolated testing has shown they do, but as of yet, clients are not using them that way. For Tier 2 links, he focused on questions like: Q:How many Tier 2 links should be sent to a given URL? A: The average is 2.63, though clients have been successful in building as many as 13 at a time. Q: How many Tier 2 links can be built at a time? A: The average number of links per order is 20.53. Q: Should I use tier 1 and Tier 2 links together? A: Nearly 25% of all PBN users choose to use both of them together. Nearly a dozen more questions and answers are covered across the full guide. Many of the questions and answers are reinforced with graphs, charts, and other helpful data representations. Now that you’ve learned something you can do with links, let’s look at how you can improve your keywords. Moz has some advice on how you find keywords when you can’t rely on historical data. Finding Keyword Opportunities Without Historical Data https://moz.com/blog/find-keyword-opportunities-without-historical-data Imogen Davies brings us this in-depth look at what options you have when researching a keyword with no historical data. As she points out in the introduction, Google has confirmed that 15% of daily queries are combinations that have never been searched before. A lot of opportunities are likely to be buried in those queries, but it’s hard to imagine successfully ranking for them when there’s no reference point for what works. Standard keyword tools aren’t going to be helpful here because they’re built around analyzing historical data. Imogen recommends three alternative strategies: For mining “People Also Ask,” Imogen suggests that you should start by going large-scale. Use SERP API tools or repeated searches to track all of the related searches that real people make. Scraping autosuggest is the next recommendation, and it’s easily done with the URL query string she provides for you to paste right into the search bar. It provides you with a complete list of all the suggested queries that are associated with your keyword. She recommends that you follow up on either of these strategies by grouping everything you find into topics and themes. This will help you plan your content and get ahead of competitors on unserved queries. Our next piece has some more advice for you on how to serve your searchers better. This time, you’re going to do it by analyzing SERPs. How to Analyze SERPs to Win Big in Rankings https://cxl.com/blog/analyze-serps/ Adam Steele, writing for CXL, brings us this look at how you can analyze SERPs to win big in rankings. He starts with a short history lesson on how SERPs have changed. He points out that features are frequently the top result for most searches, and that nearly all searches are now intensely customized for intent. This emphasis on intent has turned out to be a great thing for SEOs. Now, we have a simple, visual way to confirm what Google thinks a keyword means. All we need to do is perform a search and analyze the SERPs that appear. Adam’s guide takes us through how we can use that analysis to confirm that a content plan will satisfy the keyword’s intent. He starts with a clear example. He performs a search with the word “Apple” and shows what comes up. There isn’t a single first-page result for the fruit. Instead, it’s all about the tech company. Good luck ranking for the word “apple” if what you’re selling comes by the bushel. He also points out that making even small shifts in the query can change the intent significantly. As an example, he points out the difference between the terms “my SEO sucks” and “why does my SEO suck.” Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – February 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

SEO Testing: The Secret To Maximize Your Website Traffic and Profits

Matt Diggity — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 13:25:57 +0000

Search engine optimization (SEO) requires constant testing to be effective. If you don’t understand what changes drive growth (or why visitors respond the way they do), you’ll waste your time guessing at solutions while your competitors leave you in the dust. In this article, as someone with significant SEO expertise, I will provide a comprehensive understanding of SEO testing, the challenges of acquiring actionable data from Google Analytics, and how to conduct SEO tests that effectively improve your crucial performance indicators. Upon concluding this article, you will not only recognize the transformative potential of SEO testing but also benefit from three of my recent test results that defy traditional SEO principles. To begin, let’s briefly define SEO testing and examine its different manifestations. What is SEO Testing? SEO testing refers to the experiments you perform to measure how search engines and users react to your site. There are many tools you can use to get data about each web page (such as Surfer, Ahrefs, and other free tools), but no Google Analytics tool or SEO checker can tell you what effect changes will have. The purpose of SEO testing is to manipulate different search traffic factors to determine if the changes result in an increase or decrease in organic traffic or your position in search results. There are many ways you can run SEO tests, including: Like your high school science classes, SEO testing relies chiefly on utilizing experimental and control groups’ concepts. The experimental groups are the cases (pages or entire sites) that experience your test variable (such as trying a new link strategy). The cases in the control groups are untouched. Their rankings and organic traffic will give you the reference point to determine whether or not the experiment worked (or not). Great testing depends on well-built tests. Instructions on how to create great SEO tests will be covered a little later… But first, it may help you precisely understand what kind of benefits you can enjoy if you do the work to develop reliable SEO tests. What Impact Does an SEO Testing Have on SEO? The impact that testing has on your SEO strategy is immeasurable—no pun intended. It provides all of the following concrete benefits: Testing Gives You the Power to Be First Whenever you run an SEO test, you put yourself in a limited category of people on the industry’s cutting edge. Some of the most effective SEO tactics ever discovered have been neutered by Google search console shortly after they reached the wider community. If you’re a tester, you get to be in the rare company of people who use the latest techniques while still being powerful. That enables you to operate in the most profitable niches. Testing Helps You Develop a Ranking System That Works Repeated testing gives you the power to separate what you can and can’t know about SEO, based on experience. This allows you to skip time-wasting techniques and move directly to those with the most significant, most reliable SEO performance impact. That makes you a far more efficient SEO. This ability is one of the critical differences between amateur SEOs, and the kind who can successfully dominate even the most competitive niches. Testing Can Make You Algorithm-Proof If you test SEO changes often enough, you can develop a second sight for the trends that are guiding search engine updates. You’ll spot trends before they’re officially announced, and adjust your practices to avoid penalties. What are the Challenges of Performing Accurate SEO Tests? The biggest challenge with SEO testing is collecting untainted data. Your results become tainted when they become affected by outside factors or wrong assumptions. These obstacles make it impossible for you to say which results are a product of your experiments. Challenge #1: You Must Make Sure Your Variables Are Stable To understand what’s happening on each web page in the experiment, you need to isolate what changes affect your data. Stabilizing your variables means working to prevent changes from happening that are outside of your test. For example, if you are trying to measure the effect of content upgrades, you need to prevent your link profile from changing during the testing phase. If a lousy link gets disavowed or a useful link gets added, your site’s changes could easily mask any result of the content upgrades. Challenge #2: You Need to Make Test Cases as Similar as Possible The first thing you need to do is make each experimental and control group nearly identical. This will allow you to start measuring the changes once you start altering the test site. When you come back to check website changes, you’ll have a better idea of how they happened. Here are just a few examples of why you’ll have trouble with that: Challenge #3: You Need to Expect the “Random Ranking Factor” The random ranking factor is a phenomenon coined by SEO Terry Kyle (founder of WPX hosting). It is best illustrated with an example… Imagine that you launch five identical sites or landing pages on the same day. They are in the same niche, use corresponding keywords, and employ the same design style. You will likely notice the following: This is not a precise rule, but many SEOs have recorded the effect over the years. For reasons that are nearly impossible to measure efficiently, some sites simply behave as if they are blessed while others act as if they are cursed. What’s the Solution? There is one primary solution to the challenges that SEO testing poses. You need to increase the number of test cases. The solution is to simply increase the number of test cases. One control page is never going to be enough, and neither is one SEO test page. Adapt to this challenge by creating larger groups for each test group and control group. Have 10 URLs in the control group, and 10 in the experimental group…or better yet, 50. Then, you’re going to measure the results by taking the average of the changes in both groups. Maximizing the number of test cases helps to resolve our three biggest challenges in the following ways: For example, if we have 50 test cases, then we know that a single random backlink hitting one of them isn’t going to throw off our test. For example, it helps you control all the minor differences caused by URLs, age, and other factors that play a role in SEO. We now have enough information to identify sites that behave differently. This will help prevent us from either getting overconfident or giving up on a great technique just because it failed randomly. Let’s look at all this through an example. Example Test Pretend you have a blog in the wellness niche, and you want to test the effect of double-counting keywords in the title tag. If you have 30 posts with organic traffic, a simple experiment might involve creating two groups: If you’re curious about how a test like this might play out, don’t miss the ‘clickbait title’ test that will be revealed near the end. For now, let’s focus on what roles these groups play: Naturally, testing like this is going to depend on the funding you have. If you can afford it, testing ten sites instead of 5 (or 20 instead of 10) will allow you to create a more accurate average. If your budget is very limited, you can test across multiple pages with only 1 or 2 sites. However, there will be more room for error with those numbers than most experienced testers will tolerate. The more web pages you can create for a test, the more effectively you can cancel out noise. Sometimes, the most effective way to cancel out noise is to remove important factors altogether. Best Practices for SEO Testing Follow these rules to draw some better data from each SEO test: Set Aside Enough Time Beyond your money budget, you need to put a significant time budget in place. Once again, the more time that you can give your experiment, the more sure of the accuracy of any data that you collect. Some results (especially offsite related) may take months to yield a difference. Exercise Attention to Detail If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. The more information you’re tracking, the more awareness you’ll have of how sites are different, so you must be tracking even when you’re not testing. I can illustrate this with a real-life example. At one point, I had a great site in the Brazilian testosterone niche. One week, we suddenly jumped from page two to page one. I was only able to figure out why, because of my tracking. It turns out, some links I snagged from a local citation package were worth a lot more than I imagined it would be. Thanks to my research, I caught the factor. Thanks to that insight, I now had a new strategy to use for many other sites. Recent Findings in SEO Nothing illustrates the impact Read More Read More

The post SEO Testing: The Secret To Maximize Your Website Traffic and Profits first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – January 2021

Matt Diggity — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 04:51:14 +0000

Are you looking to hit the ground running coming into the new year? You can, thanks to a fantastic SEO community that closed out the last year with some of their best work. First up, some epic guides. They’ll teach you how to build links to the right pages, the best SEO practices in 2021, and how to use trend analysis to understand your audience. Then, we’ve got three thick case studies. You’ll learn what an in-depth analysis can tell us about how search intent evolved in 2020 and the December core update. You’ll then see a breakdown of the sites that were the biggest winners and losers of the last core update. We’ll close with the month’s news. You’ll get the latest on the second wave of the core update (and whether it’s finally over). The SEOs Guide To Building Links To The Right Pages https://authority.builders/blog/which-pages-should-you-build-links-to/ We all agree that you should build backlinks, but it’s harder to find advice on what pages need backlinks the most. That’s a gap I’ve tried to fill with this guide on carefully choosing the pages that should receive links. In this piece, I try to answer the questions: What kind of content should you link to? Does the skyscraper outreach technique work? Should you build links to your home page? Let’s start with the first one. When deciding what content you should link to, you should consider two important categories—information and commercial. Most SEOs believe you should only build links to informational content. I disagree. I think there are some interesting potential positive effects in building links to commercial content. If you link directly to a page, that page gets 100% of the link juice. It’s not diluted as it goes through the tiered links. Don’t you want your commercial pages to have that power? Next, let’s re-examine the argument behind the Skyscraper technique. This technique depends on your creating a massive piece of content that can attract links. Then, you put internal links throughout the content so the link juice will spread around your site. Again, does it work? I tested this theory myself. If you want a page to rank and rank within a reasonable amount of time, you need to build links directly to it. Finally, should you be building links to your home page? Your home page isn’t often keyword optimized or a money page. However, if you want your backlink profile to appear organic, you need to make sure that the homepage is getting links. A typical site has 40-60% of its backlinks pointing to its home page. An easy way to keep the ratio balanced is to send citations to your home page. Sign up for business directory or industry listing sites to make it easy. Backlinks are an essential part of SEO, but the next guide claims to cover the entire topic. Let’s look at Backlinko’s guide to SEO in 2021. The Definitive Guide To SEO In 2021 https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year Backlinko brings us this massive guide into all the factors that will be defining SEO in 2021. Is it genuinely definitive? That’s for you to decide, but no one can argue that Backlinko isn’t giving it all their effort. In a series of chunky chapters, they cover many of the most important topics in SEO. In them, they provide their personal advice for handing topics like: Each chapter is laid out with a significant amount of detail, including steps and visual aids. The chapters are followed by a “quick tips” section that they use to break down some of the practices they believe are going to be most effective in 2021: We’ll likely see this guide continue to evolve as the year moves on. For the next guide, let’s focus on what it is that our audience wants. This guide will teach us how to analyze trends. Trend Analysis: How to Understand Your Audience’s Search Behavior https://www.searchenginejournal.com/trend-analysis-audience-search-behaviors/390673/ Kacie Gaudiose brings us this guide to understanding disruptions in user search behavior. As she points out, trend analysis has always been an essential part of marketing. Now, we have some new tools to shed light on how users are behaving. She recommends a stripped-down process that only requires your insight and some free tools. You’ll need a tool to see search volume data. As an example, she breaks down the difference between pre-quarantine and quarantine search interest. She explains how audiences search patterns have changed (and affected): Using quarantine as an example and Google Trends as her tool, she shows how significantly searches have changed. “Video games” proved to be a noteworthy sample. “Video games” as a term experienced a significant peak at the start of quarantine. It experienced its biggest search peak in 5 years. “Video game consoles” also rode this wave. Lounge clothes, baking, outdoor living, and other niches also experienced these changes. Kacie has some ideas on how we can turn those insights into actionable strategies. First, she recommends using the “Related Queries” feature in Google Trends to get a more detailed look at what’s driving search trends. For video games, a significant number of new searches were driven by phrases like: This tells us that people aren’t just looking for video games. They’re looking for ways to connect with friends or family. That’s information that we can use to develop targeted content for the keywords. Now we can easily build content, metadata, and internal linking. Now, we’re ready to talk about the month’s case studies. It starts with a massive research project on search analysis. The Great Search Intent Analysis of 2020: Top SEOs on User Intent + Big Data Case Study on Intent Changes https://surferseo.com/blog/search-intent-case-study/ Michał Suski of Surfer SEO brings us this seriously in-depth look into how the most prominent SEOs meet the demands of user intent and follow up with a significant data study. He starts with a bold declaration: That user intent is becoming the foundation of content optimization—even equal to backlinks, technical SEO, and content in the page evaluation process. All of the SEOs he asked agreed with him. So he polled a ton of SEO experts such as Matthew Woodward, Gael Breton, Robbie Richards, Viola Eva, and myself to find out whether there was a consensus answer to the following questions: In answer to the first question, the SEOs all agreed that they considered understanding user intent to be a core practice. Some, like Kevin Indig, argued that user intent was so crucial that no other ranking factor applies if you can’t properly analyze it. The second question involved more varied answers. The SEOs suggested such varied tactics as analyzing the whole of page 1 or looking at the SERP features for closely-related keywords. The case study may provide more insight. The Surfer team looked at how search intent has changed over time by crawling 37,000 keywords in Sept 2017. They were recrawled after the BERT update, May Core Update, and then the December Core Update. The team noted that there were significant changes to the intent of the keywords after each major update. Many keywords were reverted or reset between the updates, but 15% of all keywords changed cumulatively. This tells us something about the direction core updates are heading. In the next item, we’ll dive deep into the most recent one. December Core Update Analysis: Sorry Google, You Have a Spam Problem [Opinion] https://www.seobility.net/en/blog/december-core-update-analysis/ David McSweeney of Seobility brings us this breakdown of the December update and some issues with it that SEOs shouldn’t miss. First, it was big. As he notes in an early graph, SEMrush detected that nearly 10% of searches experienced some changes. For some sites, these changes meant the loss of 50%+ of their traffic. David tried to answer two questions with his analysis: He theorized that this update was another attempt at enforcing the E-A-T standards that were recently introduced. As he points out, though, it’s not hard to find searches where these standards aren’t being met. He tagged me in for part of the analysis. I submitted some stats for a health site that has been well-rewarded by the update. This example site isn’t currently applying any E-A-T principles. It’s a repurposed site that’s getting by almost entirely on links. As further evidence, he investigated some claims made on Barry Schwartz’s site about SEOs who were having trouble beating cloaked redirects. Sure enough, keywords like “Free Classifieds” are returning explicit adult results. David seems to feel that the update mostly missed the mark, but he had some closing advice for SEOs who got hit. For the time being, his advice is to keep working on satisfying user intent, developing E-A-T signals, and earning good backlinks. Google may be struggling to identify these sites right now, but they are putting a massive amount of effort into figuring it out. For our next case study, let’s take a more in-depth look at who lost and won. 1,000+ Winners and Losers of the December 2020 Google Core Algorithm Update https://www.pathinteractive.com/blog/seo/1000-winners-and-losers-of-the-december-2020-google-core-algorithm-update/ Writing Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – January 2021 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – December 2020

Matt Diggity — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 02:09:47 +0000

We’ve made it to the final month of the year, but that’s no excuse to slow down. This month has been a significant one for SEO knowledge. What you’re about to learn can help you rocket-boost your operations into the new year. First, I’ve got three deep data dives for you. You’ll get to review an analysis of real link building campaigns, what the research says about optimizing for snippets, and how to recognize the anatomy of an SEO attack. After that, you’ll review an unusually-rich set of guides. You’ll learn how to use Google Discover to drive traffic, how to leverage keyword mapping, and how to match the user intent to SERP features. Finally, we’ll look at the month’s most prominent news. You’ll learn the details of the latest December core update, what was covered in Google’s crawl stats announcements, and why auto-generated news stories dropped and then vanished earlier this month. 7 Real Link Building Campaigns Analyzed (And Why They Work) https://youtu.be/wgciR42EbC8 Mark and Gael of Authority Hacker bring us this intensive look at real-life link building campaigns. Multiple sites were put under the microscope to examine exactly what they were doing and how they were doing it. They covered high-ranking websites in all of the following niches: The two hosts examined the backlink profile for each of these sites and dissected what work was being done to build them. The first casino site—Slotsia.com—provides a great example of the type of things Mark and Gael were able to learn. They quickly pointed out how this site could attract high-value links from news sites by creating a “top party cities” feature that attracted local newspapers. The CBD site they reviewed—Waytoleaf—ranked number #1 with tactics many might assume are outdated. They built posts on blogging sites and then promoted those posts with forum comment links. That work was apparently worth 800,000+ visits a month. These are just a couple of examples. The strategies were radically different but gave both sites top rankings in their niche. It’s worth checking out every site in this video to build some new ideas for your own backlink efforts. Now that you have some ideas for links let’s look at some data about on-page changes you can make to rule SERPs. How to Optimize for Google Featured Snippets [Research] https://www.semrush.com/blog/featured-snippet/ A.J. Ghergich of SEMrush brings us this research into how to optimize for Google Snippets. The study looked at which keywords were involved, where they appeared in the results, and how the winners earned them. To complete the research, 1 million SERPs with featured snippets were isolated from 46 million different mobile searches. Patterns were pulled out of the isolated data to reveal some interesting statistics, including: The research revealed which keyword categories were most likely to trigger a snippet. In the top five were: The biggest priority for most SEOs is likely how to earn the snippet. The research had some interesting things to say here, too. Queries also significantly increased the chance of a snippet appearing, but the starting word made a huge difference. For example, 77.63% of keyword phrases starting with “why” triggered a feature, while phrases beginning with “where” triggered one only 18.59% of the time. That’s only a taste of everything in this large set of data. Actioning what you learn from these statistics may allow you to capture features like never before. Now that we’ve gone over some data about getting the attention you want, let’s take a look at some you don’t. The next piece covers the anatomy of a negative SEO attack. The anatomy of a negative SEO attack https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/26/the-anatomy-of-a-negative-seo-attack/ Manick Bhan, writing for Search Engine Watch, brings us this look into the most common types of negative SEO and what steps you can take to recover after an attack. He identifies the following types of attacks: For each of these, he shows you how they work and how they might appear when they first seep into your backlink profile. These examples are reinforced with images of how these attacks can be recognized in the wild. After that, he goes into the steps you can take to protect your profile from attacks. Depending on the type of attacks, He lays out some methods you can use to recover, including: That covers the research for this month. Now, let’s into the guides that will give you step-by-step instructions on how to be a better SEO. First, we’ll look at what Ahrefs has to teach us about how to rank and drive traffic with Google Discover. Google Discover: How to Rank and Drive Traffic https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-discover/ Michal Pecánek brings us this guide into how to make the most of Google Discover—the automated personalized mobile feed that tracks and then delivers stories based on your online activity. Discover may be Google’s shot at providing the social media experience right from the search page, and it seems to be effective. As Michal points out, the Ahrefs blog had received over 150k clicks from Discover in just the last six months. Michal analyzed how Discover generates a feed, how it organizes stories into categories, and what caused people to click links. His advice includes: Michal closes by reminding us that outstanding performance on Discover is only a byproduct of applying these tips. Even without attention from Discover, these practices can improve your SEO and bring in more diverse traffic. Our next guide is also focused on how you can bring in a large spectrum of traffic. The writer argues that the right keyword practices can help you competitively rank for hundreds of different keywords. How to Leverage Keyword Mapping for SEO Success https://www.searchenginejournal.com/keyword-mapping-seo-success/ Viola Eva brings us this argument for the necessity of mapping. She defines the goal of keyword mapping as assigning a large target keyword cluster to each page. That cluster should include the main keyword, all variations, and the supporting keywords. She claims that large topic-spanning content pieces based around keyword mapping are vastly superior to multiple independent pages focused on one aspect of a topic. It hasn’t been very long that it made sense to focus on such a large body of words to do SEO properly. However, as Viola points out, this requirement opens the path to a lot of possibilities. For example, she shows the stats for a particularly well-performing piece of content built for a software client. Thanks to the ways this content was mapped, it is currently ranking for more than 600 different keywords, including: To try to target these keywords independently, Viola argues, would have significantly increased the risk of cannibalization. By mapping keywords based on a wide range of terms, you can create evergreen content with a long lifespan. She closes with some advice on how you can avoid cannibalization. You can use tools or just review the 1st page for each keyword in Incognito mode to determine if the same results come up. To follow up on this argument, Ahrefs has some freshly updated advice on doing keyword research for SEO. How to Do Keyword Research for SEO https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-research/ Tim Soulo of Ahrefs produced this recently-updated guide that takes you through the complete process of keyword research. This is a true beginner’s guide that will tell you everything you need to know from start to finish. It may also help if you’re an experienced SEO but haven’t updated your research procedures in a few years. In six chapters, it covers: Each chapter is filled with examples, images, and warnings about what to do if you run into snags. The Keyword targeting section is an excellent example of the kind of value this guide provides. It covers how to identify search intent and structure titles using your keywords to meet that intent. It tells you how to analyze any content you’re going to build based on the content type (for example, blog or landing page), content format (how-to, listicle, opinion piece), and content angle (with a budget, without a budget, etc.) If you’re the type of SEO who fields many questions from beginner friends, it’s the type of guide you can just link to and trust that they’ll get good advice. The keyword research tools it recommends at the end are all free, which makes it even more useful for this purpose. Our next piece moves into some more experienced territory. We’ll be looking at how to combine user intent and SERP features. Successfully Combining User Intention and SERP Features https://www.sistrix.com/blog/successfully-combining-user-intention-and-serp-features/ Kevin Indig of Sistrix brings us this look at how to combine user intention and search features. As he points out early on, Google’s strategy for the future depends on search features. Through these visually-rich results, Google hopes to implant itself into the entire customer journey. Kevin claims that by focusing on a SERP strategy feature, he has doubled the traffic to his G2 family of sites every year. The rest of the article lays out the strategy that he uses. First, he highlights the importance of focusing on only Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – December 2020 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

E-Commerce SEO Case Study – How to Increase Traffic, Transactions, and Revenue

Matt Diggity — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 09:11:47 +0000

Throughout this case study, you will learn the techniques that were used to increase transactions on an e-commerce website by over 90%. This was done by building a custom, but replicable, strategy for a long-standing client of 2 years. You will soon learn the technical, onsite, and backlinks approach that allowed this e-commerce client to grow their traffic by 48% year on year. This traffic growth saw transactions increase by 93.20%, which generated an additional $49k for the year for the client or a 39.45% increase in overall revenue (from $123.6k up to $174.5k). The Challenge The client is a niche-specialist in the confectionery industry, offering high-end chocolates to customers in the USA and around the world. The kind of chocolate you eat until you explode. They specialize in both wholesale and retail chocolate sales and want to attract professional clients from the food industry as well as “off the street” buyers. Building relationships, authority, and a brand following are very important in this business. The client approached The Search Initiative two years ago and was looking to increase conversions, develop a solid link building strategy, and have an in-depth, on-site SEO audit to improve their traffic metrics. The following is a walk-through of the steps you can take as an e-commerce site manager to achieve similar gains to our favorite chocolate client. Perform a Technical SEO Audit Crawl Management One of the more common issues faced by e-commerce sites is crawl management. If Google crawls areas of the site that have no use to the bot or users, it can be the result of faceted navigation, query strings, or sometimes, Google’s temperamental flux. Crawling such pages is a waste of Google’s time, as these pages generally have no use for Google due to them being very similar / duplicates of an original page. Since Google only has a finite amount of time on a website before it bounces off, you want to be able to control that as much as possible. You need to make Google only spend time on pages that have value. This means value pages are more likely to be crawled more often and new changes on the site are more likely to be picked up quicker. What’s even better is: Google tells you what its algorithm “thinks” of your pages! How? In Search Console -> Coverage report! One of the areas that are especially worth inspecting with the greatest care is Coverage report > Excluded > Crawled but not indexed. When reviewing Search Console, you should be looking for URL patterns. In the “Crawled but not Indexed” section of Google Search on our client’s site, we found many random query strings URLs Google recognized, but wasn’t indexing. These URLs “in Google’s eyes” had no value. After manually reviewing them, we discovered that Google was right. To prevent the search engine spending more time on these URLs and wasting its crawl budget, the easiest approach is to use robots.txt The following directives were included in the robots.txt file: User-agent: * Disallow: /rss.php* Disallow: /*?_bc_fsnf=1* Disallow: /*&_bc_fsnf=1* This was enough to take care of it! Please bear in mind that when you are cleaning the index with the use of robots.txt, there will be a part of Search Console > Coverage report which will start going up: Blocked by robots.txt This is normal. Just make sure to review the URLs reported there every now and again, ensuring that only the pages you meant to block are coming up. If you suddenly see a big spike or URLs you did not want blocked, it means either you made a mistake or Googlebot crawled itself somewhere you did not know about. Index Management Index management involves removing pages that contribute no value to the user in Google’s Index of your site. Google’s Index of a site is a list of all the pages it could return to the user of a given website in the Google SERPs. Unlike crawl management, pages that should not be in the index are not always cases where they present no value to Google. For example, “tag” pages are useful for internally linking articles or products and therefore have value in that they can help Google understand the relationship between pages. However, at the same time, these pages are not the type of pages you want to see in the SERPs, and by having them indexed, Google will crawl them more regularly Consequently, ‘bloating’ the index in this way holds your site back, as the search engines use their limited resources – or crawl budget – to assess pages that did not convert or are naturally thin in content. The client had the site set up in such a way that internal search results and tag pages were also being indexed. These provided no value to a user whatsoever, nor would they effectively contribute to better rankings from the search engine’s perspective. The most common pages that usually mess up index management include: The tricky part is, you have to identify all URL parameters/types of pages that have no value to the SERPs, and then you can noindex these pages. As a quick note, it is important to understand that there are cases where index management and crawl management are both under the same umbrella. For example, Google may be crawling non-value query strings and indexing them at the same time. As a result, this is both an indexation issue and a crawling issue. Double the fun. Broken Links Broken links are a troublesome issue that needs to be resolved if you want a well-oiled website with free-flowing authority across your important pages through PageRank. Having broken links prevents users from navigating the site easily and effectively. It can also result in users missing the opportunity to navigate their way to valued e-commerce pages! A broken page or a 404 page is, in essence, a page that returns an error due to the URL not existing or no longer existing. It’s commonly caused through old pages being deleted that still have internal links pointing at them from within your site. The client had 404 errors in abundance, and many internal links were broken; the result of changing their site in the past and not updating the link structure (or doing a proper URL mapping). To find and resolve these, you need to crawl the website. Any popular crawler like Sitebulb, Ahrefs or Screaming Frog will do the trick. Here’s how you can do it using Sitebulb. Under Link Explorer > Internal Links > Not Found you can identify where the internal links to these 404 URLs are. After this, you should go through these URLs one by one and remove the broken links manually. Where possible, replace the links pointing at non-existent pages, with a link to a relevant, working page. This is particularly beneficial if you are replacing a link from an old, no longer existing, product page, to a new, functioning product page You may need to fix hundreds of these broken links using this manual technique. All this effort is to ensure no link equity gets lost between the pages you want to rank, especially the money-making pages. Yes, it’s mundane. Yes, it’s necessary. Yes, in most cases, it’s worth it. Internal 301 Redirects In addition to finding broken links, crawler tools are also great at picking internal redirects. This causes hops between intermediate URLs instead of going directly to the linking page, which is the optimal route. It looks quite something like this: If you follow the Red Arrows: The link points from the source to a page which is redirected using a 301 HTTP response code, to only then, finally, land on the correct page (returning 200 OK code). In short: Not Good! Now, follow Green Arrow: The link is pointing from the source, directly, to the correct page (200 OK). There is no interim “hop” in a way of the redirected page (301). In short: Good! With this, don’t get me wrong. One internal redirect is normally not an issue in itself. Sites change, things get moved somewhere else. It’s natural. It becomes a problem when a site has many internal redirects – this then starts to impact the crawl budget of the site, because Google is spending less time on core content pages that actually exist (200) and more time trying to navigate a site through a thicket redirected pages (301). Similar to solving broken links, you have to run a crawl and go through the links identified manually to replace them with the correct, final page URL. Page Speed and Content Delivery Optimization I cannot stress enough how important speed optimization is. In this day and age, it’s a no-negotiation must for a site to be responsive to users. A slow site that takes time to load, in most cases, results in users bouncing off the site, which is not only a loss in traffic but also a loss in potential sales. And guess what Read More Read More

The post E-Commerce SEO Case Study – How to Increase Traffic, Transactions, and Revenue first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – November 2020

Matt Diggity — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 05:01:28 +0000

With the holiday season almost upon us, this month may be your last chance to buckle down and meet your goals. Fortunately, this month’s rich set of guides and data breakdowns will give you the edge you need to make two months of progress in one. The guides are first. They’ll teach you why online businesses make the best cash flow investments, how to create copy for higher conversions, and a possible cause for high rankings that don’t correspond to increased click-through rates. After that, you can catch up on the latest data. You’ll learn a process for predicting the ROI of SEO, whether there’s evidence that Google’s next update will leverage BERT, and Youtube’s dominance of Google video searches. Finally, you’ll get the latest SEO news. It includes a breakdown of Google’s AI announcement, some recent chatter on how site sections can impact an entire site’s rank, and an official announcement of my Black Friday deals. Why Online Businesses Make the Best Cash Flow Investments https://diggitymarketing.com/recommends/empire-flippers-cashflow-investments/ Sarah Nuttycombe of Empire Flippers brings us this defense of why online businesses make the best cash flow investments. A cash flow investment is an investment that is intended to deliver early and constant dividends instead of maturing at a later date. Sarah argues that online businesses excel as cash flow investments, possibly better than any other alternative out there. She starts her case by comparing online ventures to traditional cash flow investments such as rental properties, dividend stocks, or savings accounts. As she points out, these conventional and trusted investments have some severe drawbacks, including: She then compares those limitations to the natural advantages of online businesses, namely that: She makes good arguments for each benefit, based on the many ways that websites can be leveraged into different opportunities. Reading through this guide could give you some new ideas on making your own website’s pay. One reliable method to make websites pay is to make the content perform better. The next guide in line has some ideas on how you can do that. SEO Copywriting: The 19 Best Tips To Increase Traffic and Conversions https://www.seobility.net/en/blog/seo-copywriting/ Chris Collins of SEObility brings us this guide based on his theory of how to optimize. He begins by pointing out, any copy you create has two jobs from the start. It must attract people to the page (SEO), and it must work to convert the people who are attracted to a specific action. Working toward one goal alone won’t work. With that in mind, Chris launches into a series of themed tips around serving both goals simultaneously. Among other suggestions, he recommends that you: In addition to these off-the-beaten-path tips, he also has many tips on handling some of the most common advice you receive on writing copy, such as building better titles and doing competitor research. Excellent copy is great, but copy alone isn’t going to help you win the war on SERPs. You need great image SEO, too. Our next guide will help you diagnose an image search problem that may be holding you back. Image Packs in Google Web Search – A reason you might be seeing high rankings but insanely low click-through rate in GSC https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/image-pack-rankings-in-google-web-search/ Glenn Gabe of GSQI brings us this guide on how to respond to an odd ranking situation: You’re winning the ranking war with your images (at least according to GSC), but no one is clicking. You then search yourself and find out that your (apparently dominant) result doesn’t even appear in the search. This isn’t a new situation. In his research, Glenn found that many people were experiencing it and some suspected that a bug might be responsible. He decided to do a bit of his research to determine the most likely culprit. First, he theorizes that SERP’s features may not perform well at all for images. As in, most people were likely to skip the image packs and scroll down to the results. It’s also true, he points out, that every image in a block gets the same rank—meaning #1 isn’t as high as you think it is. He points out that clicking an image in the pack doesn’t take you to the website that hosts the image. It takes you to the image results—where you’re free to copy, enlarge, or perform other actions on an image without ever visiting the site. Furthermore, he shows that knowledge panels (another major destination of ranking images) work the same way. Clicking on the set of images that appears will take you to another SERP feature. He concludes that due to these factors, an error is not likely the cause of images that rank #1 and don’t translate to clicks. It comes down to that images just may not be very fertile ground for getting website visits, no matter how well they do. That covers the guides for this week. Our next roundup set is going to focus on the numbers. We’ll start looking at how you can generate ROI projections for SEO based on traffic and revenue. The ROI of SEO – How to predict traffic and revenue https://www.kevin-indig.com/the-roi-of-seo-how-to-predict-traffic-and-revenue/ Kevin Indig brings us some helpful revenue formulas for different SEO-related business models, packaged with some advice on how to project the value of SEO recommendations made to clients. His advice comes down to a section he originally included in an earlier guide: With that in mind, he launches into a project for selling revenue that relies on two relatively simple steps: He recommends that in your proposition, you narrow traffic predictions for five possible focus areas: Starting with any of these areas, Kevin presents a step-by-step process you can use to project how the traffic may increase. He recommends that you: Each of these steps is laid out with complete instructions, and some tool recommendations you can use make them easier. He follows up with a series of formulas you can use to customize this method for e-commerce, marketplaces, SaaS, and other business models. It’s helpful stuff if you like the business end of SEO, but let’s get back to the elbow-grease end of it for our next item. It looks at the evidence that Google passage indexing is leveraging BERT. Could Google passage indexing be leveraging BERT? https://searchengineland.com/could-google-passage-indexing-be-leveraging-bert-342975 Dawn Anderson at Search Engine Land brings us this look at passage indexing, and whether the next update will utilize BERT. Before I go any farther, let’s refresh your memory on both those terms. BERT is a part of the Google algorithm that launched as part of the major update in late 2019. The acronym stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.” If that’s not helpful, don’t worry. All you need to know is that it greatly expanded the algorithm’s capacity to understand the context in human speech. Our other term, passage indexing, refers to Google’s capacity to rank specific passages of a whole piece of content and display them in SERPs. So, back to the main question: Is this technology used to power Google’s work to deliver key passages directly to searchers? Some of Dawn’s evidence points to “no,” or at least “not necessarily.” First, the update that’s going to come for passages isn’t about retrieving passages; it’s about ranking them. That’s a different sort of technology. Second, as Dawn points out, BERT as a model isn’t quite ready to index passages across every search. BERT is only being utilized in about 10% of all searches so far, and if it is being used to massively index passages, it’s probably getting help from other, larger models. Regardless of the model that’s being used—and this article goes into many of them—the takeaway for SEOs is mostly the same: Modern content needs structure and focus more than ever. “Keywords” will increasingly matter less than clarity when it comes to ranking. Our next set of data looks at how video is performing in SERPs and whether there is any way to rank if you aren’t on the internet’s leading video platform. YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020 https://moz.com/blog/youtube-dominates-google-video-results-in-2020 Dr. Peter J. Meyers at Moz brings us this look at YouTube’s truly dominant hold on Google Video searches. He opens with the results of a case study that looked at more than 2.1 million searches. If you’ve tried ranking video content before, you probably know that YouTube is dominant, but would you have guessed that results from that site control 94% of all page one carousel results? The carousel is the primary way that videos are presented in searches, so controlling the carousel is the same as controlling those searches overall. The case study further revealed that the next top video results (Khan Academy and Facebook Video) couldn’t even break 3% of the share when put together. The study also went further by looking at the popular “how-to” category of video searches. In this category, Google was even more dominant, landing between 97-98% of all carousel results. Expanding the test to 10,000 search phrases across separate categories didn’t change the results, Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – November 2020 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – October 2020

Matt Diggity — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 03:36:17 +0000

You’ve got three months left to make this year the one that breaks all your records. With everything you’re going to learn in this roundup, that may be more than enough time. We’ll start with a pack of guides. You’ll learn how (and when) to use tier 1 vs. tier 2 PBNs, why websites are an evergreen business, and how you need to change your tactics to handle in-house SEO. Then, we’ve got data you can use to impact your operations. Learn how top SEO companies are optimizing their sites, whether emojis in subject lines can affect your open rates, and what causes rank volatility by the numbers. Finally, we’ll close with two news items you can’t miss. Learn the results of SEOs voting on the best Facebook group and whether we have reason to believe that Google will soon be launching authority profiles. PBNs: Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 (When to Use What) https://rankclub.io/tier-1-vs-tier-2/ Rob Rok of Rankclub brings us this look at modern PBNs, and two types of links that play different roles. He identifies tier 1 and tier 2 links and describes when you should use them. Tier 1 PBN links are the links that you build directly to your site. Tier 2 links are the ones that you build to your inbound links. For example, if you land a link from a major news site, the tier 2 links you build toward that page (rather than your own site). For both types, Rob explains the use cases where they do the most good. He recommends that you build tier 1 links when: He recommends that you build tier 2 links when: The advice applies to most situations where you need to build links, and the next piece is also going to be relevant to nearly everyone—both beginners and jaded veterans. The people at Flippa make the case that websites are an evergreen business. Websites Are an Evergreen Business – Here’s Why https://flippa.com/blog/websites-are-an-evergreen-business-heres-why/ Ron Stefanski argues that websites represent an evergreen business model with nearly unlimited potential compared to brick & mortar enterprises. He defines evergreen businesses as those that don’t need aggressive marketing to generate profits and offer investors less risk. There aren’t many people in SEO who would disagree. However, understanding his arguments may help you get over some doubts or unlock some extra potential from your websites. He points to the facts that websites: To support these arguments, he lays out how they apply to sites in key niches. He uses Weight Watchers as one example. WW is a site that has been around for more than a decade and benefitted from how easily websites can adapt. That adaptability has allowed the site to effortlessly float from focusing on diets to lifestyle programs and devices without ever having to stick to just one. Wherever the audience for weight loss goes, WW can follow. These kinds of transitions would be disastrous for a brick and mortar business whose customers expect to find specific items in stock. Websites chiefly focus on information, though, so they can go wherever the interest does. As evergreen as websites are, their evolution isn’t always voluntary. What it takes to optimize a site is still in flux. The next guide is going to help you catch up with the latest strategies for in-house SEO. How to Master the Art of Inhouse SEO https://www.kevin-indig.com/how-to-master-the-art-of-inhouse-seo/ Kevin Indig brings us this comprehensive look into in-house SEO, why it’s different, and how you should do it. He starts by breaking down the differences between agency SEO and in-house SEO. For example, in an SEO agency, account management is almost as important as SEO itself. You have to balance client demands with the ideas that produce results. You’ll often have to deal with lengthy approval processes. In-house SEO is different, Kevin argues. Here, you’re much more likely to own your project and have free reign to experiment. However, that doesn’t mean in-house SEO is free of conflict. For example, in-house SEOs may have trouble getting resources—especially design and engineering resources critical to their work. This often happens because SEO is slow to work, and these resources often have their own projects. For this problem, Kevin identifies some solutions: The guide is filled with additional advice, including how to solve the problem of technical SEO being lumped as a marketing expense and the challenges of showing SEOs value. It’s great advice for anyone starting in SEO or just making the transition to working in-house. That covers the guides for this month, but there’s a lot more to learn in the upcoming case studies. To start, let’s look at how the top SEO companies optimize their websites by the numbers. How Top SEO Companies Optimize Their Websites https://sitechecker.pro/top-seo-companies-study/ Ivan Palii of Sitechecker has a lot to tell us about how the top SEOs in the world are optimizing their sites, but he’s happy to let the data do most of the talking. The top tactics are broken down across 30+ graphs that cover: After the graphs, he used public data to track exactly what top SEOs were doing to their websites. He spotted SEOs like Nathan Gotch making small tweaks to meta data to improve CTR. In other examples, he caught Adam Enfroy doing some title experiments, and Brian Dean fixing some typos. It’s a great look at the exact tweaks that practicing SEOs are using to keep their sites optimized. In the end, he showed that only 9 of 100 of the top SEO websites didn’t make any changes. In SEO at least, it seems that fortune favors the busy. With the next case study, let’s look at some advice you can apply off-site. You’ll learn whether emojis boost your outreach or land you a 1-way ticket to the spam folder. Emojis in Email Subject Lines: Do They Affect Open Rates? [DATA] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/emojis-in-subject-lines/378280/#close Shelley Walsh of Search Engine Journal brings us this massive case study involving nearly 4 million emails, and the impact emojis in subject lines have on open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes. Using SEJs own massive mailing list as a test group, Shelley sent a series of messages through June and July. Emojis were added or withheld from SEJ’s: She hypothesized that the attention-drawing properties of emojis didn’t make up for the downsides. As she puts it: Just because you get attention, it doesn’t mean your reader likes it. The question, though, is what did the data say? On the first measure—open rates—the results seemed clear. Subject lines without an emoji had an open rate of 52.94%, compared to 47.06% for emojis. CTR was a little different. In 11 out of 15 campaigns, the CTR was slightly higher when there was an emoji in the subject line. However, the news only got worse from there. Emojis not only drove a higher rate of dropped subscriptions, but their use also resulted in more abuse reports to Google. Too many of those can cause your outreach address to be labeled as spam. Let’s turn back to website optimization for the final case study of the month. We’re looking at what causes rank volatility, as demonstrated by several studies. What Causes Rank Volatility and How to Deal With It https://www.rankranger.com/blog/rank-stability-studies Darrell Mordecai of RankRanger brings us this look at the possible sources of long-term volatility. He does so by making case studies of volatile pages. The first case study is a page on the website Allrecipes. This page jumped back and forth more than ten positions over 20 days for the keyword “learn to cook and bake.” At least, in this case, he found the problem easy to diagnose. The SERP itself was a mess of different intents, and Google’s algorithm has not figured out which intent should be served for the keyword. His recommendation for this problem was to research and include subtopics that had more stable SERPs. This wouldn’t stabilize the page’s position for the main keyword, but he theorizes it would ensure good traffic from other SERPs. Another case study in the set looked at the performance of easyjet.com for the keyword “UK flights.” This page was reliably holding position 11 before it hit some turbulence that forced it either up or down, depending on the day. Once again, this page was hardly alone in seeing shifts. The SERPs for UK flights did bizarre things like promoting a page 20 positions overnight, and then revoke all of that growth the next day. In this case, the volatility was traced back to a bug. Google admitted to the bug after some prompting, and the SERPs stabilized. While this isn’t a fix, understanding whether you’re looking at a mistake, a Google update or a penalty should be a part of your problem-solving process. He reminds you that you can do so by checking bug reports on places like Search Engine Roundtable. With the case studies out of the way, we’re ready to get to news and community updates. We’ll start by looking at the Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – October 2020 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – September 2020

Matt Diggity — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 04:56:50 +0000

The last quarter of the year is here. It’s time to ask yourself if you’re beating your personal records from last year or losing ground. If it’s not looking good, this roundup may be the boost you need to clear the final stretch and come out a winner. In this month’s guides, we’ll cover Ryan Stewart’s 1-day SEO hack, a breakdown of the three stages of link building, a new method for finding local SEO keywords in bulk, and a neutral look at whether PBNs are still performing. Then, you can catch up on the latest research with case studies. You’ll see the data on building backlinks with a stat page, a breakdown of Google user behavior, and whether your SERP position affects how much room Google gives your description. We’ll close with the news. This month, a college kid fooled tens of thousands of people with an AI-generated blog, and Apple made moves that suggest it may be launching a search engine. Get More Organic Traffic in 1 Day?! https://youtu.be/_KZ5-MrxBEU Are there any hacks left in SEO? Ryan Stewart often says ‘no,’ but now he thinks he found one. He’s bringing us a technique that he used to create 1-day growth on three different test websites. Ryan theorized that if he purchased an old post on one website, then redirected it to a new copy of that post on a different website, the new page would inherit the old one’s power. He based this technique on an earlier test by Brian Dean (who authored one of the upcoming case studies this month). Brian bought an entire SEO website to merge into his site, but Ryan wanted to prove that even a single page could work. Ryan started with the top-performing post for a keyword he desired. The process was simple. He pitched the current owner, asked if he could buy the whole post for his site (priced at $650), and requested that the original page be 301’d to the article’s new home. When the original owner agreed, the new page on Brian’s website experienced this in one day: That may sound easy, but he cautions us that it’s not. For one, it’s expensive. Anyone giving up a post strong enough to pass this kind of power will expect a fat check. Additionally, this sort of redirect operates like an endorsement. There may not be a price a website owner will accept if it means sending their nurtured traffic to a sketchy site. Don’t worry. As he explains, you can still work this strategy by doing something as simple as buying a site at auction. It’s a great hack, though it’s expensive in proportion with its value. If you prefer cheaper DIY strategies, the next guide will help you do that with local keyword research. If you don’t have the budget to acquire these types of links, don’t worry. Our next guide will introduce you to a lot of new options as you learn what to build along the 3 stages of link building. 3 Stages Of Link Building: What Links To Build And When https://authority.builders/blog/3-stages-of-link-building/ Authority Builders brings us this deep look into the why, how and when, of building links in 2020. These link building tips start with a theory on how we paint the picture that we want Google to see when it looks at our links. That theory goes like this: Each backlink is graded by the power, relevance and trust it signals to Google. Power is measured by how authoritative the linking page is on its own. This is difficult to measure now that PageRank is no longer public, but we often still see the effects of it working when we build links. Relevance is measured by how contextually appropriate the link is to the page. Relevance comes from: The niche of the linking page The overall niche of the linking domain The niche of the anchor text Trust is the most difficult to measure, but this article has two possible theories for how it is measured. The first hypothesis is that Google relies on (possibly handpicked) “seed sites” that are older, heavily trafficked, and known for high-quality content. These sites are marked as trusted, and the sites they link to inherit some of that trust, which they can then pass on to other sites. The second hypothesis is that trust is a byproduct of ranking. Domains and pages that can be ranked (fewer than 10% of all existing sites) pass on trust to the sites that they link out to. Using these three priorities, Authority Builders then breaks down three stages of a site’s life, and what matters most. The stages are marked by: The Sandbox: This stage covers when your site is brand new, and truly authoritative links look suspicious. The theory goes that the best links to build in this stage are relevant guest posts because they’re brand new content (like your site). Trustworthy stage: This stage covers the time when your website has established itself as helpful to its audience. In this stage, you should focus on power, by doing outreach to sites that are already powerful. Link insertions are a good way to get into better sites. Authority mode: This stage covers your site as soon as new content placed on it can start ranking immediately. This is the time when trusted top-tier editorial links start to matter. They can be built by investing in shareable content and media mentions. This blueprint is measured with a case study in the article that shows a brand new site brought to the point that it can attract 120 quality backlinks per month. The results are great, but following this blueprint will take a couple months. The next guide will help you make some progress in days with local keyword research. How to Identify Local SEO Keywords in Bulk https://localu.org/how-to-identify-local-seo-keywords-in-bulk/ Deciding which keywords to target for local searches can be a hassle, especially if you’re trying to help a company with dozens of locations and a variety of products/services. Digging for the keywords that return local results can take hours, but Fion McCormack may have a solution for us. His method starts with an unstructured list of all the keywords you want to test for local relevance. You can grab these from whatever tools you use (SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.) to find bulk keywords. When you have them, you’re going to: Convert that list of keywords into Google search query URLs (create the URL that is produced when you run the search through Google) Import the URLs into Screaming Frog Set a unique identifier (Fion used the “more locations” element that Google places at the bottom of all map packs) Run SF on your URLs to automatically filter the list by local results only That sounds easy, right? It is, but only because Fion was nice enough to provide us with all the sheet templates, Excel functions, and SF commands that turn this job into a breezy string of copy-pastes. It’s always great to learn a new technique that makes your work simpler without getting a speck of dust on your white hat. In the next guide, though, we’re going to wade into an issue that’s a point of contention in the SEO community—The world of PBNs. PBNs: Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask https://www.searchenginejournal.com/private-blog-networks/377296/ If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m no stranger to PBNs. I’ve done large-scale PBN case studies and covered techniques you can use to measure the link juice PBNs provide and test PBNs before adding them to your network. I’m not that neutral on them, so my readers may find Jeremy Knauff’s coverage in this guide refreshingly even-handed. He covers the questions most newbies are nervous to ask, along with the technical details and pervasive myths that surround them. Pre-penguin, there was not much debate at all: PBNs were some of the best links you could build for the money. Where they are now is the focus of this guide. First, he establishes that PBNs are still very much with us. They have changed a bit. Today, they tend to be “living” sites with high-quality and regularly-upgraded content. As a result of this change, Jeremy points out, many people are using PBNs without being aware of it. Some of the most authoritative guest posting services use them, and many niche sites you might be tempted to do outreach to may also secretly be PBNs. From that understanding, the guide confronts some myths: Myth 1: PBNs don’t work: They do, and they may already be working for you. Myth 2: They’re garbage: They’re nearly impossible to tell from real sites when they’re built correctly, even to a human visiting them. Myth 3: Google can easily identify them: Avoiding the same registration info, hosting, themes, content, and links will make them look and act like a normal site In the end, Jeremy refrains from saying whether or not they should be used Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – September 2020 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – August 2020

Matt Diggity — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 04:02:43 +0000

If you prefer to live life on the cutting edge, this roundup is for you. Several of SEO’s most innovative minds have published pieces this month, and we’ve got them covered here so you won’t miss out. It starts with some chunky guides. You’ll learn how to get the perfect length for a blog post in any niche, some advice on doing a 100K launch with no ads, plus a neat method you can use to scale keyword research using Python (don’t worry, you can copy the code out of the article). After that, we’ve got two case studies for you. Learn what the data says about how to discover any website’s traffic, and whether Google is effective at crawling tabbed content. Google dominates our news section this month. You’ll catch up with announcements about a new paid GMB profile, the death of the structured data testing tool, what Google revealed during their recent congressional hearing, and what was up with all the recent rank fluctuations. How Long Should A Blog Post Be to Win the SEO Game https://surferseo.com/blog/how-long-should-a-blog-post-be/ Marta Szyndlar of Surfer brings us this new assessment of what blog lengths work best for SEO. There have been other studies on this. The article links to several of them (Hubspot, Neil Patel, and Backlinko) in the first section. However, Surfer takes a different approach to the question altogether. They, Marta argues, believe that “ideal length” is worthless to apply to most types of content. This is because there’s evidence that Google prefers different lengths depending on the topic. It’s not just the algorithm, either. Sometimes searchers want fast answers, and they’ll bounce from a long-winded article. The article quotes a personal experiment by Matthew Woodward, where he culled more than 20,000 words from an article after realizing his own content was many times the length of competitors. That action alone took his result from the 7th page to the 1st. The question becomes: How do you find the sweet spot? This guide recommends a simple competitor analysis process where you average out the right length from the top 10-50 results. You’re going to want to use tools to do it, but the guide covers the manual method first. That method involves merely clicking on results, copying all content (including any comments they have, because Google considers that part of the count, too), recording them in a sheet, and then averaging the results. Watch out. It’s possible to go wrong with even these simple instructions if you pick the incorrect results. The guide reminds you to try to match intent when considering competitors. Do not average results with a different form or purpose, or results that are apparent outliers. If you are a Surfer user, the following sections detail how you can use the various tools in the suite to do this work. You can sweep up all this information from the SERPs page, or just enter each URL into another tool to see the ideal length. Our next piece moves out of content with some advice on how to promote just about any product without using ads. How to do a $100k Launch with No Ads in A Single Month https://twitter.com/Charles_SEO/status/1269368908588281856 This great tweet-thread by Charles Floate covers the methods he used to generate more than $100k over 31 days that followed the launch of a new product. He did it without paying for a single ad. The product, in this case, was an eBook. Not everyone has the kind of reputation Charles does. His credibility certainly played a role in driving sales, but the process he used has implications for many types of products—notably how he generated hype. After optimizing his marketplace and landing page, he ran a non-ad campaign that included the following: Generating social proof reviews by distributing free copies to influencers and then leveraging the reviews/grateful comments as they came in Offering the book at a discounted price for 1-month Releasing older paid content for free to promote the new developments coming with the new eBook Filling outreach emails with free information to reinforce the value of the paid product Recruiting affiliates experienced with eBook sales All of these tactics can be used alone or combined with the rest. None of them even has a price tag if you handle them yourself. The closest thing to an ad buy here is working with affiliates, and the affiliates only get paid when you do. The next piece coming up will also appeal to the DIY’ers out there. It’s going to show you how to combine Python and a free Google account to scale keyword research. Using Python & Google Sheets to Scale Keyword Research for Local SEO https://ardentgrowth.com/using-python-and-google-sheets-for-local-seo-keyword-research/ Skyler Reeves of Ardent Growth brings us this new process for saving a lot of time on keyword research. It should be said that this guide may come across as a little complex for newer SEOs, but the process it describes could be valuable for a professional agency. The guide covers the theory and explanation of the process, along with how it can be used to collect better data, build more accurate predictions, and even automate the tricky parts. It starts with a Google doc filled with standard crawl data (quickly yanked from a free audit tool like ScreamingFrog). In addition to information like URLs, categories, links, and the number of live sessions, you’ll be looking at the existing keywords and how they compare to the best ones. The guide doesn’t cover how to find the best keywords—assuming you understand that already. It skips right to assessing your competitors by recording the following data from the top 3 competing pages for each of your target URLs: The content type (blog post, service page, a landing page) The number of do-follow referring domains An estimate of the page’s link velocity over the past 12 months The PA and DA of the URL With this data in hand, you can apply a series of provided formulas to rapidly determine what pages need your attention, and how much potential they have for improvement. Once the sheet is set up (which will take some time and elbow grease), it can be repeated in about 5 minutes. A whole website can be analyzed—and the recommendations justified with data—in an impressively short time. Sometimes the best research is the data you lift from people already doing the right thing. Competitor analysis is the subject of the first case study we’ll be covering. It’s going to show you how to find out how much traffic any website gets. Find Out How Much Traffic ANY Website Gets: 3-Step Analysis (With TEMPLATE) https://www.robbierichards.com/seo/how-much-traffic-website-gets/ This first case study isn’t a study in itself, but a process for performing mini studies when you need to know a competitor or research target’s traffic. Robbie Richards takes us through a process that can help you determine: Which of your competitor’s channels drive the most traffic? Which subdomains get the most visits? Which pages/posts pull in the most organic traffic? This process uses the SEMRush tool, but understanding how it works may give you the insight you need to do this same research using the tools you already have at hand. The data is recorded in a spreadsheet template that is provided for download. First, Robbie argues, you need to analyze website traffic based on how you monetize your site. For example: for Adsense/ ad revenue, you need to drive ad impressions and should focus on the top results. For an eCommerce store, you need to look at product category subfolders to see where they’re getting traffic with commercial intent. For an affiliate site, you’ll need to dissect traffic by keyword modifiers like “best,” “alternative,” “top.” Once you know what information you want to track, the guide details a 3-step process you can use to: Check global traffic data to understand visits and engagement Find out how much organic traffic a website gets (at the subfolder, page & keyword levels) Find out how much paid traffic there is These are covered using different SEMRush tools, but the article closes with some of the tools that you can use as alternatives. Tools like SimilarWeb, Alexa, and Ahrefs have many of the same functions. You’ll even get some screenshots to show you where to find that data in each tool. Our next case study is also concerned with traffic, but more specifically, with the effect that tabbed content has on it. SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Bringing Content Out of Tabs https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/seo-split-test-lessons-bringing-content-out-of-tabs/ Emily Potter of SearchPilot brings us this quick case study on the issue of tabbed content. In the past, SEOs have had trouble pinning down Google on the subject. This is content that is only partially revealed until a visitor clicks on something like “read more.” Accordions and drop-down content are other examples of this style. Many SEOs prefer this type of content because it makes for much cleaner pages. It’s almost necessary for the mobile versions of many sites. However, Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – August 2020 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

What Is Link Building? The Ultimate SEO Beginners Guide For 2024

Matt Diggity — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 06:18:29 +0000

Link building is a crucial aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) that involves the process of acquiring links from external websites to your own site. In other words, it’s the process of making websites link back to your site, and it’s one of the most important factors that search engines like Google use to determine the authority and relevance of your linked page. Whether you’re a novice eager to grasp the fundamentals or a seasoned SEO expert aiming to hone your expertise, we have crafted this comprehensive guide on link building to equip you with all the knowledge required to enhance your website’s search engine ranking. With over 13 years of experience in SEO, I’m excited to guide you through the fascinating realm of link building. Let’s dive in and explore its intricacies together! Quick Summary What Is Link Building? A Definition Link building is the process of getting pillow links from other sites. Backlinks (also known as inbound, incoming, or one-way links) are external links pointing to your website coming from a third-party domain. Whenever someone links to your site on a blog post, web page, or anywhere else on the internet, that’s considered a pillow link. There are several different techniques that fall under the link profile building umbrella. When SEO was in its infancy in the 90s, quantity was the name of the game. People even started to buy backlinks from link farms because increasing the number of links pointing to their site directly correlated with their position in the search results. Today, if you buy low-quality pillow links, you could get slapped with a penalty. The key to building pillow links successfully when investing in quality over quantity. Common white hat SEO link building strategies in include guest post links, broken/dead link building, and citation building. Why Are Link Building Strategies Important For SEO? Link building strategies are important for SEO for a number of different reasons. Acquiring quality pillow links is one of the best things that you can do for your website. In the SEO industry, it’s estimated that about 75% of your work will be focused on off-page optimizations. [1] SEO link builders also agree that links are in the top 2-3 most important factors for search engines. Despite that, a 2015 Buzzsumo and Moz joint study revealed that a majority of pages didn’t have any links pointed to it. [2] This means that even just a few pillow links can give you an advantage over the competition, so it’s important to include link building strategies for your overall SEO plan. Take a cue from Luisito Batongbakal of MonitorBacklinks.com: “For people to discover your website, you need to build pathways and big, flashing signs that lead them there. In digital marketing terms, this means you need more links.” How Search Engines Work The great thing about a search engine is that you can find almost any piece of information in just a few seconds. But how does Google know which web pages are the most relevant to the user’s search query? Links play a huge role in every single aspect of search. It’s the main way that users navigate the internet – more often than not, you have to click on a link if you want to go from one page to another. A search engine uses links in a similar way. Their bots “crawl” the internet for new links and, when they find one, they add it to their index of pages. When you search for a particular keyword, the search results are composed of those indexed links. Once a link has been indexed, it can be retrieved and displayed in the search results for a relevant keyword. Links are also an essential ranking factor. When search engines rank content and decide which to display in the top results, they take into consideration how many links are pointing to the page and what the quality of those links are. That’s because, in SEO, links are seen as a “vote of confidence”. The idea behind it is that a website wouldn’t link to you unless your content was valuable. With the introduction of PageRank in the 90s, Google was the first to consider pillow links as a major ranking signal. It was so effective at measuring a page’s quality that this move helped the search engine emerge as the most dominant player in the market. Over time, webmasters began trying to manipulate PageRank by getting as many pillow links as possible. As a result, Google and other search engines have had to switch gears and change how the algorithm considers pillow links. Search Algorithm The ultimate goal of a search engine is to provide the most useful, relevant, and high-quality results for any given search query. That’s why the algorithm keeps updating – Google and other search portals are always finding new ways to give users better search results and less spam. Search engines also try to understand the intention of the user whenever they search for a specific query – this is called ‘search intent’. Is the user trying to buy something? Trying to find a nearby business? Trying to learn more about the topic? Different keywords imply different search intent. Personalization plays a role here as well. Every user has a unique search history, and the algorithm tries to adapt to that. That’s why two people searching for the same thing (even from the same location) may get different results. The most important takeaway here is that there are many factors that affect site ranking and what appears in the search engine results page. There’s also a lot of competition. If you want to beat out all of the other sites to rank for your keywords, you need to put in the effort and do some SEO. Google, for example, looks at over 200 factors, including site speed, internal links, content quality, organic traffic, and the number of links pointing to the URL. Backlink profile metrics are (and have always been) a major part of the search algorithm – fixing your backlink profile strategy can be one of the most impactful things you can do to improve your rankings. Different Types Of SEO Search engine optimization can be divided into three categories. While each has the same goal – to improve your ranking in the search results page – each one targets different aspects of the algorithm: For the best rankings possible, you can’t just focus on any one aspect SEO. Even if your backlink profile is on-point, it won’t be effective if you’re linking to a low-quality site with technical issues. Whitehat vs Blackhat Everyone wants to rank highly. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to put in the hard work. This is especially common in off-page SEO. Instead of developing pages that other websites actually want to link to, some websites try to manipulate PageRank by artificially increasing the number of pillow links pointing to their domain. This is usually done through link buying, link farming, and other black hat tactics for building links. Google has had to clamp down on these link building strategies and penalize websites that try to game the system. That doesn’t mean that link acquisition is any less powerful these days; in fact, it’s quite the opposite – your pillow link profile remains to be one of the most important factors that impact your rankings in SERP. The key is to avoid shady link building strategies and instead focus on creating long-term value and building high-quality links. According to Search Engine Journal’s Adam Riemer, “Focusing on quality [pillow links] over quantity is what can help to protect your site as Google updates.” We’ll show you how to do just that later in this guide. How To Build High-Quality Backlink Profile Your link building strategy informs every other decision you make when it comes to link building, including which pages you target, what anchor text to use, and which quality sites to build links with. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a long-term link building strategy the right way. Step #1: Create A Site That’s Worth Linking To First things first, it won’t matter how tight your link building strategy is if you don’t have a linkable website. To earn pillow links, you need to convince link prospects that your domain is trustworthy and valuable to their readers. When creating a website, make sure that information is cleanly laid out with a professional design. You should also have an about page and contact form to further legitimize your site. Your main focus, however, should be link worthy content. Well-written, engaging articles are much easier to build pillow links from, and they provide something of real value to your audience. Step #2: Understand What You Want To Link To And Why Your target pages can make or break your strategy. For pillow link building, there are two main types of web pages: It’s generally thought that it’s more “natural” to build high quality links to informational pages. But you Read More Read More

The post What Is Link Building? The Ultimate SEO Beginners Guide For 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – July 2020

Matt Diggity — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 06:20:20 +0000

A few months after the last big update, we’re all finally starting to find our feet again. We’ve added some new terms to our vocabulary and some new tools to our skill sets. Now is the time to start thriving again, and this roundup is going to help you do that. We’ll start with some case studies. You’ll learn how one company turned SEO, outreach, and content into a $6B valuation. You’ll also see how effective guest posts are in 2020, a process for increasing traffic by more than 300%, and what the data says about category dilution. This month’s guides will teach you what role CSS and Javascript play in SEO, whether E-A-T can be employed as a ranking factor, and whether Google uses sentiment analysis. Then, you can catch up with the latest news stories. Find out if Google is using ‘sentiment analysis’ to rank pages, review an extended explanation of how Core Web Vitals are used and find out how you can start getting analytics data right in Google Search Console. The Canva Backlink Empire: How SEO, Outreach & Content Led To A $6B Valuation https://foundationinc.co/lab/canva-seo In this piece, Ross Simmonds takes a deep look into how Canva grew to be valued at $6 billion. It’s an important lesson for SEOs because this company managed its explosive growth by applying the same content and backlink principles that you use on your sites every day. They just did it in some impressively innovative ways. One of their early (and impactful) decisions was to create multiple landing pages for the same product. They did this to cater to the intent of customers that were coming in from different types of searches. The first landing page focused on serving people who were ready to order. It targeted terms like “create certificates” and “make your own template”. The second page, however, targeted terms like “free certificate template” to serve people who preferred information over action. The landing page optimization didn’t stop there. They also created a rapid-deployment template for their content so that new landers could be created on the fly for each relevant search term that gained popularity. Canva also excelled through their backlink strategy. All the pages that sprout off the main pages (close to 100 for the invitations category alone) each have long lists of backlinks. Today, they have more than 5 million total, including hundreds with 80+ domain rating scores. The backlinks were achieved by (among other strategies) buying other sites in the same niche and directing links on those sites toward the main brand rather than just closing them. There’s a lot to learn from Canva, but let’s narrow our focus to just one aspect of building backlinks for the next piece. Here’s a study Authority Builders just published on how effective guest posts are in 2020. How Effective Are Guest Posts In 2020? (100 Links Tested) https://authority.builders/blog/how-effective-are-guest-posts/ There has been a lot of debate about whether guest posts are really effective, including by some people from Google’s senior team. Matt Cutts dismissed the practice as dead. What does the data say? To find out, the Authority Builders team gathered a set of randomly-selected websites that work with us. The list was narrowed down to 100 pages by enforcing the following methodology: The URL must be ranked on pages 2-4 The URL must have no links currently pointing to it The first condition helped us single out pages that were trusted by Google but lacked the PageRank to make it to the first page. The second condition allowed us to isolate the results of the experiment while protecting the test sites from becoming over-optimized. With the list in hand, we put together a budget and built one new guest post to each page. For the links, we used an exact keyword for the anchor text. Some interesting things happened. First, 87% of the URLs we tested saw an increase in rank. Other pages had a spottier reaction. One jumped and then dipped again. Several others didn’t react until much later. However, those that did respond could do so very quickly. One page jumped ten positions in two days. You can check out the graphs for yourself, but we’re all pretty comfortable saying that guest posts are still going strong. Speaking of strong, let’s take a look at how one site increased its traffic by more than 300%. SEO Case Study: 313% More Organic Traffic with Real Examples https://ftf.agency/seo-case-study/ This case study examined three websites in different niches (Ecommerce, B2B, and Hospitality) to determine what factors played the most significant role in successfully increasing the traffic. The Ecommerce site was only a few months old when the experiment started, and it was taken from 35,000 to 225,000 organic visits. The B2B site went from 800 visits to 3,600. The already-successful hospitality site went from 210k visits to 306k. While this is a case study, the article begins to focus on the “why” and “how” just after the introduction. The data on the changes is followed by some detailed info on how each site was scaled with or without content, and how the backlinks were chosen. As a bonus, all that information is followed up by an item-by-item list of all the actions that were taken to improve the site. This guide portion takes you through the steps of: Crawling the site Analyzing the core SEO data Making recommendations Building a keyword matrix Conducting a content gap analysis Creating a content map Developing new content Promoting that content Building links 7000 words later, you’ll have a good idea of how to manage a modern SEO campaign, and the data to prove the traffic is worth what each of these steps cost. The next case study is a bit more bite-sized, but the implications could be huge for you if you’re involved in local search. 99 Problems But Category Dilution Ain’t One https://www.sterlingsky.ca/99-problems-but-gmb-category-dilution-aint-one/ ‘Categories’ is a Google My Business feature that lets you self-declare the purpose of a business on your, or your client’s, GMB pages. Experiments performed earlier last year suggest that Google responds quickly and negatively to category confusion. For example, if you select both “septic tank cleaning” and “ice cream” to describe your business, you’re not going to rank well for either one. But what about more closely related categories? Is adding as many relevant categories as you can harmful? Colan Nielsen of SterlingSky performed several experiments to find out. The first test case was a relatively successful GMB page for a personal injury law firm. This page had a lot of categories, and the experiment involved removing all except the most essential categories to see if ratings would spike as a result. In fact, they did not. A followup experiment with a different law firm produced the same results. Removing categories didn’t help or hurt. The final experiment looked at the effect of adding additional categories to a healthy listing for a dentist. A slew of new categories related to dental services was added. The outcome here was a lot more positive. While there was no change in ranking for the core keywords, there was an improvement for keywords related to the new categories that were added. In these examples, it seems that category dilution isn’t a real danger as long as those categories are related and relevant. Let’s move onto this month’s guides. In this first example, you’ll learn the role that CSS and Javascript play in SEO. Understanding CSS and JavaScript SEO https://seranking.com/blog/css-and-javascript-seo/ Most SEOs can get by without a lot of web development knowledge. However, there are limits to that. Site performance is a crucial part of SEO, and being able to optimize or resolve coding errors by yourself may be the only thing that can keep a project under budget. This guide by Sylvia Shelby covers what you need to know about both languages, and also provides processes you can use to close a number of related errors. The first part of the guide explains what these languages are, how they’re implemented on sites, and how Google processes them. Knowing this much can help you avoid many errors in the first place, and each explanation is well-illustrated with images and charts. The next part of the guide covers best practices that can make a big difference. For example, an infinite scroll can appeal to readers, but Googlebot can’t click or scroll as a user can. A simple solution covered here is to enable paginated loading. The solutions for a range of other problems are also covered, including situations when: Google can’t crawl CSS and JS files Google can’t load CSS and JS files Neither is loading fast enough Caching is not enabled All of these problems can halt your SEO growth if they aren’t handled. In the next guide, we’re going to look at another factor of your website with a murky relationship with ranking. Is Google E-A-T really a ranking factor? Is Google E-A-T Actually a Ranking Factor? – Whiteboard Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – July 2020 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Semrush Webby Thank You!

Matt Diggity — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 02:52:16 +0000

[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”section” _builder_version=”3.22″ transparent_background=”off” make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”off” custom_width_px=”1080px” custom_width_percent=”80%” collapsed=”off”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row” _builder_version=”3.25″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”off” custom_width_px=”1080px” custom_width_percent=”80%”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.4.7″] Thank you for watching my presentation Here’s your free resources as promised. While I have your attention, make sure to friend me on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube and be sure to introduce yourself. Step 1 Add me on Social Media! [/et_pb_text][et_pb_code _builder_version=”4.4.7″ hover_enabled=”0″] Follow @mattdiggityseo [/et_pb_code][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.4.7″ custom_margin=”67px|||||”] Step 2 Join Our Facebook Group to Connect with Thousands of SEO Entrepreneurs [/et_pb_text][et_pb_code _builder_version=”4.4.7″ custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false”] [/et_pb_code][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” _builder_version=”4.4.7″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”] Step 3 Download Your Resources! 1. The Diggity Marketing Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide It’s my firm belief that onsite SEO is one of the most misunderstood and overlooked aspects of ranking. Ironically, having solid onsite will get you higher in the rankings than any amount of backlinks. Follow the concepts in this guide… these onsite methods are exactly what I use to get my rankings. If and when you see returns, please tell me about your success story. Download Latest Version of the Diggity Onsite SEO Guide 2. Matt Diggity’s Backlink Blueprint Timeline Have you ever asked: How long do you wait to hit your money site with links or social signals? When do you build citations? What link velocity should you hit your money site with? Should you send links to your social profiles? In this guide, I’m going to provide you with a complete linking process and timeline – helping you get from “Day 1” to “Page 1”. Download the Backlink Blueprint Guide 3. Top 10 Hosts for PBNs If you’ve read my guide on PBN hosting you already know that the number one cause for PBN deindexes is, hands-down, poor hosting decisions. When I moved away from using cheap $1 hosts and SEO hosting, deindexes became a thing of the past. Simply moving all your sites to premium hosting isn’t as easy as it seems. Many hosts are terrible to work with. Others are extremely expensive. This guide will breakdown which hosts are the best for you and your PBNs. Find Out which PBN Hosts are the Best 4. An SEO’s Guide to Scaling an SEO Business Scaling an SEO business proposes a very unique set of challenges. SEO techniques change from year to year. What works today might not work for you tomorrow. How will your company stay up to date with the next algorithm change? Are you going to be able to get your head out of the day-to-day busy work, so you can focus on determining the next niches to go after? How are you going to expand your agency if you’re constantly on the phone with needy customers? The answer to all these questions boils down to how to scaling. In particular, scaling an SEO business… which is what I cover in this guide. Download the Guide to Business Scaling 5. How to 132X Your Website Profit – The Biggest Wins from 3 Case Studies In my SEO agency, The Search Initiative, we’ve collected quite a few huge wins when it comes to ranking, optimizing, and scaling affiliate SEO websites. In this guide I’ve highlighted three of the biggest winners and broken down what were the key factors that caused these sites to succeed: Femaly Beauty Niche: $500 to $16400 per month Weight Loss Niche: $4000 to $33100 per month Toy Niche: $500 to $45000 per month Find out exactly which SEO tweaks and conversion wins were able to get us an average of 132X profit on these three sites. Download these 3 Insane Case Studies 6. Video Tutorial: How to Use Social Signals to Justify Links and (bonus) get out of the Sandbox This video was captured in a live (paid) webinar I did in 2016. The concepts still hold up. You’ll learn how I use socials on a weekly basis in order to justify the links I’m getting to my site. In addition, find out how I use social signals in conjunction with press mentions in order to create a viral effect and launch your site out of the sandbox. Download Your Video 7. Video Tutorial: Topical Relevance and Local SEO This video was captured in a recent presentation I gave during the Chiang Mai SEO Mastermind event. Topical revelance is estabilished when you have enough referring pages on a given site, linking to the pages you’d like to rank, and thus, making the target page more relevant for Find out what is special about topical relevance as it applies to Local SEO. Download Your Video 8. Video Tutorial: How to Find the Right Synonyms to Fix Optimization Problems Learn about the power of Google Synonyms and how they can be used to help fix both onsite and offsite optimization problems. And… better yet, how to find these synonyms with a simple procedure. Download Your Video More Coming Soon… [/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section] [et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”section” _builder_version=”3.22″ transparent_background=”off” make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”off” custom_width_px=”1080px” custom_width_percent=”80%” collapsed=”off”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row” _builder_version=”3.25″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”off” custom_width_px=”1080px” custom_width_percent=”80%”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.4.7″] Thank you for watching my presentation Here’s your free resources as promised. While I have your attention, make sure to friend me on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube and be sure to introduce yourself. Step 1 Add me on Social Media! [/et_pb_text][et_pb_code _builder_version=”4.4.7″ hover_enabled=”0″] Follow @mattdiggityseo [/et_pb_code][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.4.7″ custom_margin=”67px|||||”] Step 2 Join Our Facebook Group to Connect with Thousands of SEO Entrepreneurs [/et_pb_text][et_pb_code _builder_version=”4.4.7″ custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false”] [/et_pb_code][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” _builder_version=”4.4.7″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”] Step 3 Download Your Resources! 1. The Diggity Marketing Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide It’s my firm belief that onsite SEO is one of the most misunderstood and overlooked aspects of ranking. Ironically, having solid onsite will get you higher in the rankings than any amount of backlinks. Follow the concepts in this guide… these onsite methods are exactly what I use to get my rankings. If and when you see returns, please tell me about your success story. Download Latest Version of the Diggity Onsite SEO Guide 2. Matt Diggity’s Backlink Blueprint Timeline Have you ever asked: How long do you wait to hit your money site with links or social signals? When do you build citations? What link velocity should you hit your money site with? Should you send links to your social profiles? In this guide, I’m going to provide you with a complete linking process and timeline – helping you get from “Day 1” to “Page 1”. Download the Backlink Blueprint Guide 3. Top 10 Hosts for PBNs If you’ve read my guide on PBN hosting you already know that the number one cause for PBN deindexes is, hands-down, poor hosting decisions. When I moved away from using cheap $1 hosts and SEO hosting, deindexes became a thing of the past. Simply moving all your sites to premium hosting isn’t as easy as it seems. Many hosts are terrible to work with. Others are extremely expensive. This guide will breakdown which hosts are the best for you and your PBNs. Find Out which PBN Hosts are the Best 4. An SEO’s Guide to Scaling an SEO Business Scaling an SEO business proposes a very unique set of challenges. SEO techniques change from year to year. What works today might not work for you tomorrow. How will your company stay up to date with the next algorithm change? Are you going to be able to get your head out of the day-to-day busy work, so you can focus on determining the next niches to go after? How are you going to expand your agency if you’re constantly on the phone with needy customers? The answer to all these questions boils down to how to scaling. In particular, scaling an SEO business… which is what I cover in this guide. Download the Guide to Business Scaling 5. How to 132X Your Website Profit – The Biggest Wins from 3 Case Studies In my SEO agency, The Search Initiative, we’ve collected quite a few huge wins when it comes to ranking, optimizing, and scaling affiliate SEO websites. In this guide I’ve highlighted three of the biggest winners and broken down what were the key factors that caused these sites to succeed: Femaly Beauty Niche: $500 to $16400 per month Weight Loss Niche: $4000 to $33100 per month Toy Niche: $500 to $45000 per month Find out exactly which SEO tweaks and conversion wins were able to get us an average of 132X profit on these three sites. Download these 3 Insane Case Studies 6. Video Tutorial: How to Use Social Signals to Justify Links and (bonus) get out of the Sandbox This video was captured in a live (paid) webinar I did in 2016. The concepts still hold up. You’ll learn how I use socials on a weekly basis in order to justify the links I’m getting to my site. In addition, find out how I use social signals in conjunction with press mentions in order to create a viral Read More Read More

The post Semrush Webby Thank You! first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – June 2020

Matt Diggity — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 05:42:54 +0000

Is your second quarter going the way you planned? May was a wild month for SEO. Changes came down that were not explained, but now, we know a lot more. The case studies, guides, and news items of this roundup will help you get back on track. We’ll start with some juicy case studies. This month, you’ll get a deep dive into the May Google Core Update, the numbers on digital PR as a link building strategy, and a data breakdown on the real power of rich snippets. Then, you can expand your personal toolset with the month’s most cutting-edge guides. You’ll learn how to make your content succeed, how to create SEO-friendly URLs, and how to take the business intelligence approach to SEO link building. Finally, we’ll cover the month’s breaking news. You’ll discover the real culprit of the ranking fluctuations, review Google’s closing notes on the May 2020 update, and find out why web vitals have replaced speed reports in Google’s search console. May 4th Google Core Update Analysis https://surferseo.com/blog/may-4th-google-core-update-analysis/ Surfer brings us the first of what will likely be many deep dives into the May Google Core Update. It was a big one, and the effects (not all of them intended, as we’ll discuss in the news items) were felt across most niches. What those effects were, is the subject of this piece by Michał Suski. He compared a list of thousands of keywords to find out how their SERPs looked on April 22nd, May 8th, and May 11th. Each keyword was analyzed against the following factors: domain organic traffic referring domains exact keywords density partial keywords keywords in title and H1 tag page speed metrics wordcount All of these were tracked to determine the content of the pages that lost or won in the update. This comparison resulted in several interesting implications for the future: Winners had more authority than losers on average Winners had about 60% more backlinks than losers Winners pages have 10% less content on average than losers Winners pages tended to be less “optimized” Among other insights in the article, it seems possible right now that Google may be drifting away from ranking signals that are easy to game, including precise-match keywords. This is hardly the last word on the May Update, but it may be a good starting point for your first optimization efforts. Link building seemed to win out, so let’s dive right into some more data about how to do that right. A deep-dive into the performance of digital PR as a link building tactic https://digitaloft.co.uk/digital-pr-success-study/ Rather than guest posts or collaborations, Digital PR campaigns focus on earned media coverage from online sites. The target of these efforts isn’t only the links built by the published story, but also by the people discussing and sharing the story. This method and its results have undergone an intensive round of testing by the people at Digital Loft. For the experiment, data was gathered from more than 500 digital PR campaigns. Some of the data was provided directly by agencies and other sets were drawn from already published case studies. They found: Digital PR campaigns earn an average of 42 links More than ½ of all links come from domains between DA20 and DA70. However, 20% of links come from DA70 and above DPR campaigns earn a smaller ratio of nofollow links than other link-building schemes An average DPR campaign sees 1000+ social engagements These findings could mean a lot to you if you have the kind of budget to do a PR campaign. Most of us are going to need to focus on more budget-conscious ways of attracting attention, including by claiming the best possible rich snippet. Rich Snippets: Everything You Need To Know In 2020 [With Case Study] https://www.seobility.net/en/blog/rich-snippets/ Snippets have enjoyed a lot of attention for the last couple of years. SEObility is here to show us what the data says about how to claim them and how they behave as of now. This piece is part guide and part case study. The guide portion covers some of the best practices for claiming snippets. The case study examines people using the schema, whether Google chose to recognize it, and if there is an upper limit on the snippets per search. The findings point toward some possibilities for anyone working to take control of a snippet: For ‘how-to’ related results, less than 20% of results are currently using the how-to schema In 20% of cases, Google failed to show the rich snippet even when top results had implemented the schema perfectly In all cases where the score was DA70 or better, the snippets were always present This study was gathered from a small (~100) sample group of keywords, but the implications are still important. There are a lot of snippets left to claim out there. Let’s move on to the guides. First, we’ll look at what Sparktoro can tell us about how to resonate with the “right” audience. Want Your Content to Succeed? Make it Resonate with the Right Audience (no, not that one) https://sparktoro.com/blog/want-your-content-to-succeed-make-it-resonate-with-the-right-audience-no-not-that-one/ Rand Fishkin is here with a new way of looking at how you can target your content more effectively. He starts by breaking down the limits of building and measuring content exclusively to convert. He makes the point that the audiences that make up powerful channels come from: Current customers: people who have already purchased Potential customers: people who are the right fit, but haven’t bought yet Potential amplifiers: journalists, other bloggers, event organizers, etc. Broader community: Content consumers who aren’t customers He claims that content marketers must recognize that a content audience can be much larger than a product or sales audience. Not everyone who reads is, or should even be treated like, a buyer. Instead, they can be treated like something that could be more valuable: amplifiers. Why market content to non-customers? Because—he argues—you can then use them to massively amplify your existence to people who are more likely to be customers. In the end, his argument is one for quality, and for building content that’s usable for more people. Next up, Ahrefs has some of their own ideas about how you can make a better impression. This time, by using SEO-friendly URLs. How to Create SEO-Friendly URLs (Step-by-Step) https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-friendly-urls/ We’ve known for years that Google prefers simple and appealing URLs, but many have struggled to define what that means as far as implementation. In this guide, Ahrefs guide lays out their interpretation of the most optimized URLs. They provide you with a well-explained series of rules that you can apply to your site including: Remove any special characters Limit the use of numbers Try to boil it down to a single keyword phrase Make it all lowercase (some servers can treat them differently) Structure it like a sentence The second part of the guide goes a little deeper. It looks at the anatomy of the rest of the URL (Protocol, domain, subdomain, slug, etc.) and discusses how you can work to optimize each part. They also provided a list of detailed recommendations for this part: Use HTTPs Choose your top-level-domain carefully Use subdomains only if necessary Avoid keyword repetition Avoid dates Nearly all of the advice in this article is directly actionable and easy to implement the next time you’re making changes. The next piece is a little more theory-driven but, hopefully, just as useful. It’s a guide to taking a business intelligence approach to link building. A Business Intelligence Approach To Link Building https://trafficthinktank.com/bi-link-building/ In this guide, Cody West of Traffic Think Tank argues for the benefits of treating your link building strategy as a serious business venture. He champions a method called Business Intelligence (BI) that uses data and scenarios to define goals and minimize risk. In the piece, he breaks down how to make the tactical, resource, and profitability considerations that go into a superior plan. You need to be able to answer questions that relate to your bottom line: How are you choosing the most important link from a domain? How many links do you need to build to close the “Domain Authority” gap? How much is that going to cost? The next part of the guide reads more like a deep-level backlink analysis guide that helps you work out a plausible ROI for your efforts. It details how you can make precise counts of the resources you need. Now, we’re ready to look at some of the top news of the month. First, we’re going to cover the real reason behind some of the ranking fluctuations that rocked May. May 2020 Local Ranking Fluctuations Were The Result of a Bug https://www.sterlingsky.ca/local-ranking-fluctuations-may-2020/ Near the end of April, many SEOs who were paying attention noticed that local rankings had become surprisingly volatile. It wasn’t just that the order was changing, they were erratic. Positions seemed to be fluctuating on a weekly basis. You may have noticed the second wave of ranking fluctuations that began around May 4th when the Read More Read More

The post Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup – June 2020 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.