Wednesday, October 8, 2014
The Benefit Of Building Top quality Manage
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Ford Puts First Truck Buyers Behind Wheel Of The All

Roofing Inspections
Enhance Search Engine Optimization By Following These Secret Millionaire Society Guidelines
Twister Peels Roofs From Buildings

Sunday, October 5, 2014
Where are The Good Roofers?
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Why Metal Roofing is The Best!
Factors to look out for when employing a contractor
Friday, October 3, 2014
Amateurs Help Guide To Vacation What You Should Know
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Use Social Media to increase your Sales
As a small business owner, there are many ways to promote your product or brand. One of these ways is free and can have a huge reach: social media. Unfortunately, a lot of the entrepreneurs I have spoken to recently feel that the effect isn’t worth the effort. We also see that in our reviews, by the way. It doesn’t matter if we review a photographer’s website or the site of an IT agency, most seem to invest little time in social media efforts or campaigns.
It’s hard to determine the ROI of a social media campaign. The tools that help in that determination are paid, most of the time. A small business owner that isn’t convinced about any ROI at all, won’t make that investment. Of course ROI is heavily depending on a number of factors. How do you convince the customer to buy in a tweet, for instance? Nigel’s comment on my previous post about social media got me thinking:
I also like social media but how do you target the “ready to buy” segment instead of people “Browsing”.
Nigel Abery, oaklaurel.com.au
You don’t buy a hammer to drive a nail in a piece of wood, but to build a bench. Growing an audience using social media, like I mentioned in my previous post, is a means to an end. The ultimate goal of all your social media efforts is of course to sell stuff and make money. It can even be the first step in a multistep process: get more newsletter subscriptions via Twitter to sell your ebook, for instance.
Now how will you be able to trigger that social audience to purchase your products or services? I did some digging on the interwebs. There is a lot to be found on the subject, but no user manual that works for everybody. Unfortunately, but not unexpected. It’s not an exact science, of course. But I’ve come up with some insights nevertheless
The obvious social media sales
Larger companies with a huge social media audience tweet or post their way to money. Now we have this new product, buy it. This will make your life easier, buy it. If you already have this product of us, you’ll want this product. Buy it.
It’s a direct trigger, that works due to the large audience. If you tell 1,000’s of people to buy something, you’ll get sales. That seems obvious. It will trigger at least someone for sure.
In most cases, social media efforts lead to long term wins, like someone that remembers that you are selling Lego t-shirts and finds you back on his Facebook timeline. But it should be possible to get direct buys without waiting for that Buy button to become globally available to everyone.
Obviously large brands with a huge following can become social entities of their own; small business almost never can. Just the other day I was talking to a local business owner about social media (Twitter). I asked him, if his personal profile had more visitors than his business profile. It did. In most small business cases, social media isn’t a business, but always the person behind it.
Small business
Where should you start, right? I think the social media efforts should be designed around your website, to be honest. If you consider social media a serious opportunity, you should make it work with your website, not next to it. If you come up with a nice idea to promote a product on social media, Twitter is limiting your message by 140 characters. Your optimized landing page on your website doesn’t have these limitations. If the landing page is for that Twitter campaign only, you could even measure the effect of the Twitter campaign without tagging your Twitter campaign in Google Analytics (or knowing what tagging an URL is in general).
Come to think of it, social media is a lead to a sale, not the sales effort itself in most small business cases. I have no scientific numbers to prove it, but it seems to make sense. Sure, you can set up a shop app on your Facebook page, but that would be the same as a great website. You are lowering barriers as visitors can become customers without leaving the social network site. And that is just Facebook. Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter don’t have these app possibilities. Yet.
The question remains how that small business owner can use social media for immediate or future profits.
Leading them to the sale
Social media is buzz for companies and people. Social media is people talking one to many. Social media is narrowing your business communication down to a niche. People just like to browse for things they might like. Unbounce did an article on cart abandonment a year ago, stating that “56% of shoppers aren’t ready to purchase but want to save their selection for later”, in their cart. I think it is safe to say that this behaviour has not changed. So what we should use social media for in this case, is to introduce that product to the customer.
Sales appear less ad hoc when it’s a new product to the customer. When there’s some kind of buzz around your product, people might start to want your product unconsciously. It will become more and more top-of-mind, and an eventual sale will be deliberate. Even though it might seem ad hoc to the buyer at that point. This might be a long term effect of your social media efforts.
At Yoast, our main focus is SEO / UX, analytics and WordPress. Most tweets of our team are about those subjects. Creating a niche like that will give you the social following that is already interested in (one of) your products. It did for us.
It is nice to just tweet about beautiful cars when you are selling bread, but those tweets won’t make you money. Tweeting about that new paleo bread you are selling online starting today could get you (immediate) sales, though.
Start early in the process of a new product or offer; “We are releasing a brand new plugin early next week!” or “Only on sale next week, get yours!” and create scarcity; “We’ll start with a test audience of 250 people.” All the basics of sales go for social media as well. You can easily create series, repeat your offer. I tend to use Hootsuite for that. I dislike the GUI of the browser version, but like the functionality. Buffer is another great tool you could try.
Create the need or wish for your product or services. And guide the potential buyer via your preferred social media outlets to your website to close the deal.
To sum things up
Direct selling via social media is coming, and could be an opportunity for small businesses. After reading a number of articles about it, my conclusions are that:
- I am looking forward to reading about new products on Twitter and hitting ‘Buy’.
- I hope Pinterest won’t implement such a Buy button soon, as that will cost me my allowance and more. Having to click a link to another website is a safe barrier.
- My gut feeling tells me too little small businesses are aware of shop apps for Facebook, like the Shopify app. Dig into that, especially when you have a local following on Facebook.
Current social media sales efforts should trigger a niche specific sale on your optimized landing page. We should write a post about optimizing that landing page. Bet you’ll be coming back for that!
This post first appeared on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!
Use Social Media to increase your Sales
SEO Is No One-Trick Pony
This past week, I was joined by Josh McCoy of Vizion Interactive in presenting an SEO workshop for attendees of the Integrated Marketing Summit in Kansas City. The workshop was four hours and the presentation totaled just more than 100 slides.
As you might imagine, there was a lot of stuff to talk about. By its nature, some of that content was a “bit” on the technical side, but we tried our best to speak “English” so that the attendees could walk away with fewer questions than they had coming in.
We wanted the workshop to be interactive, and welcomed questions. One question did strike me as something that I think too often is bantered in executive meetings throughout the world…
The comment (and question), as best as I can recall was something like, “You’ve covered a lot of technical stuff in this presentation, but can you just tell me what the one thing is that we can do to really improve our results for SEO?”
We didn’t dodge the question. I mean, if you had to pick one tactic, I would have to pick “create content.” But, that’s really too simplistic an answer.
I shared with this individual that sometimes content isn’t the answer. Each and every project is unique, the competitive set is unique, and every website (company) has its own set of unique challenges. I shared a few examples of instances where I had worked with large organizations that simply had an issue with getting content indexed. Once this “one thing” was fixed, it was a hockey stick. Traffic, in some cases, doubled. These companies already had authority built into their site (solid link profile/larger brands, etc.). And, in some cases, that “one thing” was the fact that their title tags were absolutely horrible (yes, there are still some with the title tag of “home” on their home/index page of their sites).
There are currently more than 1 million results for an “allintitle:” search on Google for “homepage” and nearly that many for the same search for “home page.”
But, these “one thing” opportunities don’t come around very often.
More often, you are engaging in an omni-channel approach to building authority, strategically developing content, technical stuff, and optimizing conversion rates as much as you are title tags.
This, in my opinion, is “today’s SEO.”
For many of you, this is not news. But, what became clear to me this past week is that there are still many who think of SEO as a “quick fix” or consider it a “do this one thing, and you’ve done SEO.” I’ve certainly read my fair share of wonderful columns detailing individual tactics that are involved in the SEO process, but I don’t know that I’ve seen one which tried to hit upon the various things that go into an SEO engagement, within the confines of one article. I will attempt to hit upon most of these, today.
Today’s SEO
A common expression in recent years has been that “if it’s digital, it’s optimizable.” If we’re really doing this well, our recipe to SEO success involves a lot of ingredients. Here are the few that jump out, to me:
Technical SEO
Once you have content, you need to make sure that it’s indexed. Developing a sound URL structure is very foundational to this effort (you would rather a URL such as www.sitename.com/products/name-of-product than www.mccoysbikeshop.com/Products.aspx?Categoryid=94&Productid=72 – example pulled from Josh McCoy’s post from two years ago on proper URL structure.) Alongside of this, you’ll want to develop and submit an XML sitemap and work on internal linking.
Content
The basis of SEO is that you have quality content that “speaks to” everything that you do. Finding the keywords/themes of this content is the art/science of SEO (you want to target keywords that have search volume, are relevant, AND that you stand a fair chance of ranking for; see Competitive Analysis, later). Once you have developed a list of targeted keywords, you must determine how these keywords match up with content that you current have on your website (or other properties – see Social Media Marketing) and what content you may need to develop (product/service page content/video/blog, etc.). When you’re creating content correctly, you are creating content that is original, high-quality content that speaks to your intended audience in the right manner, so that they might engage with the content (and your company) and possibly share that content, so that you can work toward earning links.
Competitive Analysis
As stated previously, everything in SEO is relative to the competitive set. You can spend a lot of time in this area of practice (and I suggest that this isn’t merely a “one-and-done” affair, either). At its core, the competitive analysis is about determining the opportunities that exist to do well in SEO (is there light at the end of the ROI tunnel?) and what you might need to do to be successful. My favorite tool remains SEMRush.com for a quick analysis of the opportunity. Enter in some competitor domains and see how much traction they have in Google (SEM Rush provides a “SE Traffic Price” metric, showing what it might cost – in AdWords spend – to get what these guys are otherwise getting “for free” via non-paid search). From there, you might also want to do some site: searches in Google to see how much content the competitors have indexed (and what kinds of content), to gain a sense for what you may need to build. You can also use any number of link research tools (OpenSiteExplorer, MajesticSEO, ahrefs/) just to name a few. Put all of this together in a spreadsheet and analyze the opportunity (and the opportunity cost/work) to get a sense for what the project is going to look like. A good illustration of the process, was developed by Aleyda Solis on Moz, but there are certainly more components that go into an in-depth competitive analysis. Some of those are outlined by Boris Demaria on woorank.
Analytics
To me, it is impossible to claim that you are an expert at SEO if you aren’t deep into analytics. At the end of the day, we are not optimizing for “rankings.” We are optimizing towards quality traffic increases and an increase in conversions/money.
Usability/Conversion Rate Optimization
In my opinion, an SEO engagement is all about “optimizing for results.” At the end of the day, if I’m the customer, I want money. I want ROI (more money back than I pay in). If it so happens that my “SEO company” happens to spend considerable time in usability/conversion rate optimization, then so be it. A 25 percent lift in conversions/sales is perhaps more important than a 25 percent lift in traffic (and certainly a hell of a lot more important than a general rankings increase). You can certainly use your analytics platform to identify where visitors are falling off and, in some cases, you can simply eye-ball test some things that are obviously wrong with the usability of a website. That aside, I do really like what Lucky Orange is doing with its real-time analytics product. You can see how people are navigating the site, in real time (as well as view recorded visits), gain insight on what the experience looks like in different browsers/platforms, get insight via heat maps for mouse movements, clicks, and scroll depth, and a whole lot more.
PR/SEO
For as long as I can recall, we have recognized the similarities in PR and SEO. PR “back in the day” may have strictly referred to “submit press releases to gain links,” but that has certainly not been the case for quite some time. PR is a way of amplifying your message. It’s outreach to journalists/influencers. It’s “promotion.” There’s a lot of great reading out there about how to synergize efforts. One such case study that was developed was this piece by Robin Swire on Moz.com. One very common practice for us is to set up alerts for our clients using HARO, to identify opportunities to contribute to pieces that are being published (folks seeking an expert opinion/contribution to an article that is being written). This is great for the agencies who have clients who are unwilling (unable) to commit the time necessary to write compelling “thought leadership pieces,” but may have time to contribute a few paragraphs. Often, these contributions will result in a link back to your site. Even without a link, I have think that Google is smart enough to pass some value through (as was hinted at last year, in Google’s John Mueller’s Webmaster Central hangout).
PPC
In a perfect world, you have enough money (and time) to support both SEO and PPC efforts. And, in a perfect world, there is a PPC budget that can be established/maintained for keyword research purposes. With PPC, you can obviously buy your way into position to gain traffic for specific keywords, and test them, so that you can determine if these keywords are worthy of being a part of the SEO effort.
Social Media Marketing
Much like PR, social media marketing is about amplifying content and trying to earn links, buzz, social shares, and build brand equity. The core of the effort may begin with hosting/maintaining a blog (with good/researched/resourceful content). Developing a blog is not something to take lightly. Please do NOT do this if you do not intend to maintain quality content on a regular basis. How often should you post? Every situation is unique, but I would say that if you don’t intend to update the blog AT LEAST once per week, then perhaps you should consider your options. Step one is determining how to structure your blog. There are reasons why you might consider sub-domain versus sub-directory versus a separate domain. From there, you will want to create an editorial calendar that helps to shape your content initiatives. That said, some of the best posts are those which – quickly – get posted on “hot topics” and are shared, immediately. If you are an early source on something, there is a better chance that you will earn links. Creating the content is one thing…promotion of that content, is another. This is where PR and social media promotion come in. You must get the right eyeballs on your content. If it’s engaging enough, folks will share it. If folks share it, you stand to earn a few links.
There are certainly many other elements that can go into a “full service” SEO engagement (I haven’t even talked about local SEO, video SEO, image SEO, mobile, or a number of other things), but I hope that this has helped to shape the discussion of “what SEO is,” and helps others to understand that it’s not – usually – any “one thing.”
The Original Search Marketing Event is Back!SES Denver (Oct 16) offers an intense day of learning all the critical aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search advertising (PPC). The mission of SES remains the same as it did from the start – to help you master being found on search engines. Register today!
SEO Is No One-Trick Pony
A New Click Through Rate Study For Google Organic Results
Advanced Web Ranking has released a study showing fresh data on the click-through-rate from Google’s organic search results. The data was taken from Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries reports from large accounts back in July 2014.
On average, 71.33% of searches resulted in a page one Google organic click. Page two and three get only 5.59% of the clicks. On the first page alone, the first 5 results account for 67.60% of all the clicks and the results from 6 to 10 account for only 3.73%.
Here is a chart showing the click through rate by exact position:
The study was first presented at SMX East yesterday by Philip Petrescu of Caphyon and then posted on Moz.
The full details of the study break down desktop versus mobile click through rates, branded versus non branded search queries and more. You can download the full study as a PDF over here.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)
A New Click Through Rate Study For Google Organic Results
Can Google Determine the Level of Quality in Your Content?
Can Google Determine the Level of Quality in Your Content? is a post by SEO expert Andy Eliason. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.
In the recently released Searchmetrics Ranking Factors Study, the case for quality content is once again highlighted as a critical SEO component. There should be any number of people out there who are rolling their eyes right about now, thinking: not another post about how “content is king.” We’ve heard it before. How many ways can you keep saying the same thing?
Well, that’s what I usually think, anyway, so I was a little surprised to see it presented as something that is “becoming increasingly important” in this report. They say “this was not the case for a long time,” which I found interesting. Quality content is not becoming important, it always has been. Right?
But then I got into the report a little further and really started to see what they meant.
From a strictly SEO point of view, content was always seen as necessary, but it usually took a back seat to other, more technical parts of the craft. Why?
Well, we say a lot about high-quality content, but who is really there to judge?
Content was a lot easier in the days of keyword density and strategic keyword placement. In those days, quality was how you managed to use the most unnatural long-tail keywords in the most natural ways possible, and hoped that no one noticed that really people didn’t actually speak like that. Or maybe you could just bold your keywords, and surely that helped the quality score shoot right up. (/sarcasm)
That kind of behavior, of course, is something best left in the past. After the release of the Hummingbird update, Google began to focus even more on semantic and context-based queries.
Do Context and Relevance Equal Quality?
One of the simplest ways to define “quality,” at least from a search engine’s perspective, is by determining the context and relevance of the content. In the past, this was a simple matter of using the right keywords in the right places. We’ve moved on from that level, though, and taken a more holistic approach.
Right now, targeting single keywords – or even keyword groups – simply isn’t enough to be effective in the modern online environment. Ever since the Hummingbird update, Google has been developing a more semantic approach to search, and that means they’re looking for semantically relevant terms (the report refers to them as “proof terms”) and other relevant terms that will speak to the overall value and relevance of the content.
This kind of “semantically comprehensive wording” certainly acts as signal that the page is relevant to a query, but consciously selecting these terms and phrases is going to be more difficult than just going through the standard keyword research. On the other hand, this should help lead to more natural content creation because if you really are generating valuable content, it should happen naturally.
The Best Part of a Semantic Focus
The benefit of this switch is that now, as writers focus on a more holistic approach, they should be able to reflect more topics in their text. This, then, makes the same page relevant for users with a varying range of search intentions. The same copy can start to rank even better for related, additional keywords without even trying. (Well, obviously, with a lot of trying, but you know what I mean.)
So, according to Searchmetrics: “If website editors want their content to rank better for specific keywords, the content should be created with the fulfillment of user search intent in mind.”
What does that mean, exactly?
It means that what we’ve been saying all along still carries a lot of weight. We always say that you should write for the user, and not the search engines. By focusing on their actual needs, you can provide the kind of quality content Google is looking for.
Is Quality about Readability?
Does your personal writing style figure into the overall quality of the content? Are you using words and phrases that are too complex for your audience just to try and sound smart? This year, Searchmetrics included a new development in its report, and that’s the legibility of the text.
It seems that the general trend is that text that is easier to read tends to rank higher. There’s even a suggestion of a mathematical formula to determine the level of legibility (get the report for yourself to check it out), but it’s unlikely that Google is using something like this to determine who well you write.
Rather, Google is equating readability with “easy to comprehend,” and so it’s probably looking at user signals, like time on the site and bounce rate to judge whether or not your users find your writing legible.
It’s interesting to note, then, that by using those signals, Google isn’t necessarily looking at quality but usability. Technically, this could mean that layout is just as important as what you say. (And when we get into rich media’s importance later, we’ll see that’s definitely a thing.)
Does More Content Equal Quality Content?
This year also saw a lot of increases in correlation to content length. The report said that: “This means that websites need to produce more content in order to remain competitive in search.”
So, that doesn’t seem to mean you need to write longer content, but just have more of it. There is a difference.
Keep in mind, though, more doesn’t automatically mean better. You still have to consider legibility and keyword/topic usage. You need to balance the amount of content with the quality features that signal your relevance. Having said that, though, it does seem that sites with more words in the copy hold onto higher ranking positions.
So ask yourself: is this another holistic thing? Is it about the site word count, or is this about the word count by page?
Rich Media Matters
Images and videos can always make content more appealing. They help increase the time on site and reduce bounce rate, which means they are an important factor in a definition of quality.
Image is all about style, though, so you can expect that this will only go so far. I.e. you’re not going to get more value out of relying on images alone. Right now, though, you’re better off leaning toward image rich at the moment.
So What is Quality to a Search Engine?
In the end, focusing on a single keyword isn’t really enough to show that your content is relevant and filled with quality signals. You need to look at topics and related terms. You need to see the site as a holistic thing. This will help you rank better for a number of related terms and establish your position in the top of the rankings.
Can Google Determine the Level of Quality in Your Content? is a post by SEO expert Andy Eliason. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.
Can Google Determine the Level of Quality in Your Content?
How I Doubled Traffic To Over 200,000 Organic Visitors Per Month, Overnight
This is a case study on how I doubled organic traffic to an existing website from 100,000 visits per month to over 200,000 visitors per month, overnight, using technical SEO and the osmosis technique.
This was done using a strategy that involves absorbing another operating website’s content, rankings, and ultimately traffic.
Here’s the website’s traffic the week before, from July 25, 2014 to July 31, 2014:
And here’s the same website’s traffic the week after, from August 1, 2014 to August 7, 2014:
And here’s what the lift looks like:
Here’s the website’s traffic for the month of June 2014 (prior to absorbing the other site):
And here’s traffic for August 2014 (with the osmosis taking place on 8/1/14):
So What is SEO By Osmosis
Just like in science where one membrane absorbs the property’s and molecules of another membrane during osmosis, this SEO strategy involves absorbing the content and rankings of another website so as to inherit it’s organic traffic.
So how do you do this?
The concept itself is actually very simple, but the implementation needs to be spot on or you could torch both websites, at least temporarily.
The process involves using one of two methods to essentially swallow the content of the other website, and then inherit it’s organic rankings and thus traffic.
How To Absorb All The Traffic
As mentioned earlier there is 2 ways to do this:
- Using 301 re-directs, or
- Using cross-site canonical tags
Both involve the same process of preparing for the cut-over; the content needs to be duplicated on the destination website by being uploaded to the destination site’s database.
If you’re going to use 301′s then it’s best to try to replicate the URL structure of the old site’s pages and if possible place these all in one new directory, so you only have to write one mod rewrite statement to repoint all of these URL’s to their new home.
In the example I use for this post I used a sitewide 301 re-direct to sub-directory on the destination website.
If you are going to use cross-site canonical tags the process has a few extra steps:
- The canonical tag needs to be added into the head of every page that you will be absorbing.
- Generate a fresh sitemap to make sure all pages are included.
- Brute-force submit this sitemap through webmaster tools 3+ times each day to forge Google to crawl and index those canonical tags.
- Keep an eye on the URL’s ranking for those pages and once you see 75%+ you need to set the old domain to return a 403 Forbidden Error.
What Makes A Good Osmosis Website
Finding a website that is a good fit for this strategy has a lot of implications, for example:
- The website needs to already have sufficient natural rankings and a sustainable base of organic traffic, although sufficient is a relative term here and will vary depending on your comfort level for risk and investment.
- The website should have content that is at least tangential or in some way related to that of the target destination website.
- Ideally the website will be built on a stack using the same kind of database, for example if I was going to do this for *this* website I would look for a site running a MySQL database (even more ideal would be if it was wordpress), so I could download and then simply upload to my database.
Finding websites at this scale (~100,000+ visits per month) available for acquisition is not easy, it’s much more likely that you will be able to find sites in the 10-30k visit per month range that you will be able to pick up for a few thousand dollars based on:
- Age of the domain
- Authority of domain (PageRank / DA)
- Number of unique visitors
- Monetization and revenue
Is This Traffic Sustainable?
You tell me, here’s the traffic numbers for September 2014:
Something To Be Aware Of..
It seems there is a somewhat rampant problem in Google with continuing to index old domains that have been 301′d, here are a few examples:
DEAR Google – WTF is keeping old 301 redirected pages in the index all about? 88K for one site.
— Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) September 23, 2014
However, the meta attributes, i.e. page titles and meta descriptions as well as URL targets (destinations) are all pointing to the correct version and bringing click-throughs to the right place, so in terms of traffic this still works – but in terms of continuity of user experience, this seems way off.
With that said in my experience this problem is less significant when you go the cross-site canonical route to absorb the traffic. Thank you to Ross Hudgens for providing me with Rishi’s tweet and examples.
For Future Updates
I plan to continue to acquire more sites and fold them into this same site to see if I can grow through traffic acquisition to over 1,000,000 visitors per month. To stay tuned on my progress (including sites I’m looking at buying and details on traffic and bids/offers) that I won’t share here, join my mailing list (it’s free).
Lastly, if you enjoyed this post, and especially if you didn’t, please consider taking a moment to leave a comment – I use comments as my number 1 indicator on how well a post topic or concept resonates with readers.
Thank you.
The post How I Doubled Traffic To Over 200,000 Organic Visitors Per Month, Overnight appeared first on SEO Nick.
How I Doubled Traffic To Over 200,000 Organic Visitors Per Month, Overnight
Searchmetrics SEO Visibility Gets Fully Integrated in cognitiveSEO
Some say we are workaholics, some say we are perfectionists. What we say is that we do our best to provide our customers with the best experience they can get from using a SEO platform. The fall comes along with a partnership we are proud to introduce to you today.
The cognitiveSEO + Searchmetrics integration provides unparalleled insight for any SEO Professional.
In the following lines we are going to present you the importance of this integration and the benefits that you will get from it.
What Is the SEO Visibility and Why It Is Important
First of all, you need to know that cognitiveSEO is the first well known SEO tool (and the only one at this moment) to have this sort of integration combined with all the other SEO related data crawled on demand for your site and competitors. In other words, there is no other place that you can get this variety of information for your site or for your competitors’.
What is the SEO visibility, you might ask, and why is it so important?
SEO visibility is essentially about monitoring the search performance of a website as it presents the historical development of a domain’s visibility in Google. It has 2 components, search volume and the position of the ranking keywords. It basically reflects how often a website shows up in the search results and also helps you track the “winners” and “losers” in terms of keywords, providing results based on tracked keywords. The SEO Visibility provides you with great value of the market environment and also helps you easily identify market trends and digital marketing strategies. The SEO visibility is calculated based on millions of keywords that are tracked in Google and their importance and traffic volume. Each keyword has a particular importance and based on that and the ranking of the tracked site a SEO visibility score is calculated. This score is updated weekly.
This new integration is available for all clients, regardless of the subscription they have and also on all the campaigns they are working on, whether they are One time snapshots or Recurring Campaigns.
This being said, allow me to showcase the main advantages that you will benefit from now on:
What Can You Do with the SEO Visibility?
1. Identify Historic Google Penalties for Any Site
In identifying a penalty, you should always check all possible hypotheses, by doing an in-depth analysis and looking at all the angles. Getting distracted by the obvious things might lead you to the wrong conclusion. Yet, at cognitiveSEO we are trying to make the penalty identification process as easy as possible because we know how important this matter is for our users.
With the integration of the SEO visibility chart, we take the “penalty identification” process to another level. Every time you’re trying to figure out what happened to a certain website, the first chart you should look at is the one with its visibility drop. Just by taking a glance at this chart you can easily see whether there are significant downhills in a website’s history that can reflect a Google “red flag” or whether that site’s online visibility is stable and doesn’t have dramatic ups and downs. What is very important to mention is that you can not only see the current situation of a site but also check out for penalties or boosts in a historical trend.
If you are a reader of our blog, you might be familiar with some of our case studies regarding penalized sites. If you are not a fan of our blog (with the hope you will become one :D), let me tell you that the SEO visibility and the “dropped”/ “improved” keywords charts are one of the most important graphs that we use in our in-depth investigation of a site’s situation. Here are some of our case studies where you can see the exact applicability of these charts and their importance in accurate penalty identification.
2. Analyze Competitors and Compare Yourself
Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. However, knowing your competition is even better. Understanding your competitors’ previous decisions regarding their strategies sheds some light on what gave them an advantage or what backfired.
You know exactly where you’re standing in your niche as you now have the possibility to make direct comparisons with your competitor, regarding your SEO visibility. Moreover, analyzing the evolution of the most important keywords for you and your competitor will give you the possibility to discover which keywords drive more visitors and which ones are those which pull the traffic down.
Having the possibility to make a side-by-side comparison and knowing the exact figures of the SEO visibility and keyword ranking fluctuation in your niche keeps you one step ahead of the competition.
3. Watch for Future Problems
One of the ways that can guarantee you being a top player in your niche is to be constantly up-to-date with how your site and your competitors’ sites are doing from a SEO point of view.
Thanks to our fully customizable dashboard, you now have the possibility to set a SEO visibility widget and closely monitor it. Having the visibility widget on your dashboard keeps you permanently connected to your site’s situation, helping you to avoid future problems at the same time or quickly solve the existing ones.
You will have an idea of your SEO visibility at just a glance. Therefore you will save lots of time and resources. Furthermore, you can make business decisions based on real time information as the SEO visibility and the keyword ranking graphs are updated weekly. This way, you can spot whenever an issue occurs and you can react more quickly. If you are to experience some massive drop in rankings or unnatural link activity on your site, just by taking a peek on the dashboard you will be able to react accordingly. I remind you that the dashboard is sharable, meaning that your team or your clients can consult, with your permission, the SEO visibility anytime they want.
You can see how being connected to the SEO visibility graph helped us catching the exact moments when some important sites where penalized and understand what exactly happened to those businesses.
4. Pitch New Clients Based on the Historic Performances
Our marketing communications world is changing at a rapid pace and pitching new clients can be quite a challenge sometimes. Yet, having a strong competitive advantage in front of other agencies can be a real breakthrough. Not only you can present your client the opportunities that he has on the market or dissect his competitors’ SEO strategies but you can now have instant access to his historical performances. You can notify the possible client if he is on an uptrend or a downtrend and for how long, you can easily explain his evolution by comparison with his competitors’ and, last but not least you can spot a past or a present penalty. All these data is top quality info and you might be the only one who can provide this sort of substance.
Adding the SEO Visibility to Your SEO Dashboard
Having the SEO Visibility widget within your reach brings a lot of benefits, as I’ve mentioned before. So, knowing how to set the widget on the dashboard is important in order to take advantage of all those benefits.
First of all, on the dashboard, you need to press the “new widget” button and choose from the widget type the “SEO visibility” one. Once you’ve done that, you can choose the website you want the widget to give you information on and also the country you want to see the visibility from. Once you’ve done that, you are set to go and monitor the SEO visibility at just a glance.
Several Other Improvements Worth Mentioning
Along with the updates that I’ve just presented you above, we also have some other not-so-big but important improvements that we’ve done to the tool. As I was mentioning at the beginning of the article, cognitiveSEO’s team is a very dynamic one, always aiming for perfection and happy customers.
Therefore, let me list some of the improvements we’ve made lately:
1. Page Customization
You can now choose to see what is most important to you in matter of charts and graphs. You can decide to visualize all the charts of the analysis or you can easily choose to see only the ones that matters the most to you and hide the others.
2. PDF Customization
Your reports will now look exactly what you want them to look like, containing only the information you want. You can download fully customized reports and present your co-workers or your clients with the whole analysis or with the charts and graphs that you choose only.
3. Better Crawling Algorithms
For a more efficient process, in order to not block the crawled sites we integrated some smarter crawling technology to crawl some of the sites that may present issues with our previous crawler.
4. Several Improvements Added and Bugs Corrected
Improving cognitiveSEO’s overall functionality is one of our main concern. Like any other tool, bugs or several issues may appear along the way. Yet, we fixed the reported bugs, we optimized the dashboard so it now loads faster and we made slight adjustments where it was the case.
Conclusion
Hope you will be as excited as we are with these great new features and you will take full benefit from them. We strongly believe that they will impact your business positively and will bring added value to your work. The SEO visibility and the keyword fluctuation rank charts are making cognitiveSEO even a smarter tool, providing you with a 360 degree view of the digital market context. cognitiveSEO is not just a SEO tool but a real help for every business, a complex digital marketing platform that offers now more benefits for the same price.
The post Searchmetrics SEO Visibility Gets Fully Integrated in cognitiveSEO appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Searchmetrics SEO Visibility Gets Fully Integrated in cognitiveSEO