Posts in category: SEO

So, you’ve probably landed on this guide because you’ve heard of backlinks and you heard they’re important but you need an in-depth example of what they are.

Before we get into exactly what backlinks are and show you some examples, it’s important to pay close-attention to this topic being that it is one of the most important ranking factors in Google.

There are not too many things that you have to get completely right but if you make sure your backlinking strategy is in place and execute on it properly, it can mean higher and quicker rankings, which lead to more passive inbound leads for your business.

Backlinks are not the easiest to grasp if you are a beginner but we’ll break each component of a backlink down step-by-step, so even a complete beginner can understand these backlink SEO examples.

What Is A Backlink?

A backlink is a link that is connected from one page to another. If another website is linking to you, this means you have a backlink. Now there are all different types of backlinks, good and bad ones. Strong and weak ones. Natural and spammy ones.

So how do you make sure you are building the right type of backlinks to your website? Keep reading to find out.

What Is The Difference Between A Good Backlink And A Bad Backlink

A good backlink is a link back to your website from a website that Google deems authoritative and trustworthy. A bad backlink is a link from a website that Google sees as spammy.

When you build good backlinks from another site, to your site it not only looks great in the eyes of Google but it also has a number of benefits for your website.

When a bad backlink is built from another website to yours, it can actually hurt your rankings. When google sees a website as spammy, the Google algorithm also picks up any other websites that that website is linking out to and makes an association between the two.

Too many of these links from spammy websites can get your own site penalized by Google.

On the flipside, if you build enough good backlinks to your website, you’ll rank highly in Google for multiple keywords and have the chance to be found by hundreds of thousands of people monthly.

How Many Backlinks Do I Need To Rank?

This is one of those “it depends” answers.

But, let’s talk about exactly what it depends on.

When you are trying to rank for a keyword, one of the first things you should do is analyze how many backlinks it’ll take to rank for that keyword. The way to find this out is by looking at how many backlinks the other sites on page 1 have.

How We Find How Many Backlinks A Website Needs To Rank

What we like to do is take the sum of backlinks from the first 5 Google results and then find the average number of websites for each anchor text group.

We will then use this to guide our backlinking strategy.

Let’s talk about the 4 most important anchor text types.

Branded: The name of the brand used as an anchor text. Example: www.website.com

Generic: A generic word that is used for the anchor. Example: “Learn more”

Exact-Match: An exact match anchor is an anchor that uses the exact keyword that you are trying to rank for. For example: “Chicago Plumbing Service”

Partial-Match: A partial-match anchor is text that includes a variant of your main keyword. Example: “Plumbers that service chicago residents”.

How Do I Find These Backlinks?

Backlinks for your website can be found across the entire internet. But especially with sites that are directly relevant to your niche.

So you may be asking now, “how can I find all of these websites quickly?”

There are a few search phrases you can type into Google and it will bring up all of the websites in your niche that will accept linking back to you from their site. Here is a list of them.

Use a tool like hunter.io, to easily find the email addresses of those blogs that accept backlinks to your site. Once you have your email it is time to craft your pitch.

How Should You Pitch A Website On Securing A Backlink From Them?

There are many methods and strategies you could use to secure backlinks from another site to yours. But the most common method used are guest post.

A guest post is an article that is written by you that is placed on someone else’s website, with the intention of linking back to your site and creating a backlink.

Although it is possible to build a good amount of backlinks through mass emailing, it is also a really good idea to try and build a relationship with blog owners. While this may take longer, it will improve your acceptance rate.

You can use this template when reaching out to blog owners.

Subject: Article placement for [target website name]

Hi [target name or ‘there’],

I heard that you accepted guest posts and I was just checking in to see if you were still accepting them?

I’m a writer that writes about a range of topics in the [your niche] space. I’m looking to expand my name in this area and Guest Posting has been a great way for me to do that.

Do you still accept them?

Here’s some of the content that I’ve written in the past:

[2-3x Previously Well Written article URLs]

If so, I’d be interested in hearing what your requirements are.

Kind Regards,

[your name]

Try to send 20 of these emails per day and you should be able to close a few people within your first month of outreach.

How Long Does It Take For A Website To Rank After It Has Gotten Backlinks?

Google can take anywhere from 2-6 weeks to pick up a new backlink that your site has acquired. Once it does, depending on the quality of the backlink and the anchor text, you should see your website, slowly begin to move up the serps.

How many backlinks it takes to rank all depends on the level of competition of whichever keyword you are trying to rank for. Some keywords are harder to rank for than others so the key to quick rankings would be to find easy-to-rank for keywords and try to rank your website for those first.

If you are competing with higher authority websites, it can take as long as a year and a half to rank alongside them and capture some of the traffic.

How To Check Your Backlinks

There are multiple tools that can be used to check your backlinks. Our favorite is Ahrefs because it gives a complete breakdown of how many backlinks you have and exactly where they are coming from.

Let’s take a big website like Moz.com. Ahrefs shows that Moz.com has 55.2 million backlinks. It also shows that 81% of those backlinks are dofollow.

Dofollow backlinks are links from other sites to yours that pass as “link juice”. Which just means some of that website’s power and authority is passing to you, ultimately helping you rank higher. All backlinks are dofollow by default.

Nofollow links are links that are coded to tell Google not to pass any power from an owners website to yours. These links are great for “anchor pillowing” and making a backlink profile look natural.

How Can I Get Backlinks For Free?

Conducting some blogger outreach like we explained above is one of the best ways to get free backlinks from other blog owners. You just need to make sure you can really provide value to their audience by creating great content for their readers.

Another backlinking strategy that is highly effective is broken link building. This means that you are reaching out to a blog owner that has a broken link on their website that used to lead to someone else’s website.

It’s possible to write a great piece of content (something directly related to what the broken link was ranking to) and ask the blog owner to replace the broken link with a link back to your site instead.

This style of outreach is so effective because it’s almost like you’re doing the blog owner a favor by telling them that they have a broken link.

A broken link can actually negatively impact a website’s ability to rank. So letting them know makes it seem like more of a favor for them than it is for you.

Start Building Links

If you’ve made it this far, you know completely know the basics of link building and what backlinks are.

It’s not hard for outreach to become extremely complicated if not done using a process. Once you have a process for reaching out to new blog owners, you can start to acquire multiple backlinks per week.

It’s not easy to create an outreach process, but our team has done this for a number of our clients and are able to build dozens of backlinks per month in order to achieve high rankings.

If your brand or business has had an online presence for any amount of time, it’s almost a 100% possibility that you’ve wondered how to get a good SEO ranking.

But there are a few problems that may get in the way of you having good rankings. There are two things that can hold you back from good SEO rankings and they are:

• Not knowing enough about SEO or having the time to do it yourself
• Not knowing how to spot a good company that can do it for you

Using the excuse of “oh, I’ll just get to it later” isn’t good enough anymore. 28% of searches that are conducted nearby, result in a purchase. This means that if someone searched a keyword in Google and your brand or physical location showed up first, there’s a high possibility that they’ll choose your company to do business with.

In this guide we want to tackle the two most common problems that businesses face when it comes to SEO and show you exactly what you need to do to start receiving an inbound flow of leads through search engine optimization.

The 2 Most Common Problems With Achieving High SEO Rankings

Not Knowing Enough About SEO

You’re a business owner who has been wanting to learn SEO but is maybe confused about the process of what it actually takes to rank your website in Google. While the process can be very complicated for someone new it can be broken down into two categories:

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO

Now, while both of these categories have multiple subcategories within them, this is really all it comes down to.

Let’s go deeper into each one of those.

On-Page SEO

Every business needs effective on-page SEO in order to rank in Google. On-page refers to everything that is directly on your website. At first glance, it may not seem as important as backlinks, but if you get this part wrong, backlinks won’t help much.

There are a few components of on-page SEO that should be executed properly.

Meta Title and Description

Your meta title and description are actually the first things your potential customer will see when they search for whatever product or service they need in Google.

Let’s start with a local example. We’ll use the keyword “Maryland Waterproofing” as our target keyword.

When you do a search for “Maryland Waterproofing” let’s take a look at the first result’s metadata and see what they’re doing right.

The first ranking website has the target keyword in their meta title and their meta description which let’s Google and the searcher know that this website is relevant to the search.

On-page Content

Once a searcher reaches your website, everything that is on the home page, service page or product page should be directly related to the keyword topic.

Including your main keyword a few times throughout your content is enough for Google to understand what your page is about and properly rank you.

Note: Do not try and overstuff keywords throughout your content just to try and rank higher. Always write for the user first and then optimize for the target keyword afterwards.

You can see that the search phrase appears on the homepage 3 times. Once in the title.

Once in a featured review.

The keyword is also used in the footer as well.

This is enough on-page SEO to get you headed in the right direction, especially if you have a local website where the competition is less competitive.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to any optimization that is done for your website to rank that does not take place directly on your website.

The most common type of off-page SEO you can do is link building. Simplified, link building is just someone else linking back from their website to yours. This can be considered “votes” to Google and lets them know that other people see your website as a resource.

So, how do you get backlinks?

There are actually a few different ways you can go about getting backlinks. Doing manual outreach to other website owners can be effective if done the right way.

The days of sending a pre-written, non-personal email and securing a backlink are long gone.

Now outreach requires building a relationship with other website owners. This does take time, but once done can be extremely effective in helping your website rank.

So which form of link building should you start with? Guest posting.

Guest Posting

We touched on this briefly above, but here we’ll get more into the strategy side of things.

Before trying to secure a post on a website, you should always run an audit on the site you are trying to link from.

You want to make sure that the website has:

• Real traffic

• Relevance

• Good metrics

• Balanced anchor text

Let’s get deeper into each one of these.

Real Traffic

Any website that you consider obtaining a backlink from should have a real source of traffic. Fake traffic can be purchased from a number of vendors online. They’ll usually advertise it at a price that is “too good to be true”, and if it sounds “too good to be true”, it usually is.

Try and also target websites that get at least 50 visitors per month. This is an indicator that Google has found the site useful and has given it some authority. Authority is needed to effectively pass ranking power from one website to another.

To check a site’s traffic you can use a tool in Ahrefs called the “Site Explorer”

When vetting for backlinks, you want to try and make sure that you are racing out to bigger blogs in your space. That way they are still relevant to your company without being a direct competitor.

But for this example, we will use a direct competitor.

Once we have the url, place the site link into the “Site Explorer” and do a search.

Once the data has populated, you should be able to see an estimated value of monthly traffic.

This would generally fit our criteria in this area because the traffic is estimated at over 50 visitors per month.

A free way to check to see how much traffic a site has is to use a Chrome extension called “Similar Web”.

It’s as easy as going to the extension store and typing in, similar web.

Once the extension is added to chrome, you can visit a potential target website, to get the traffic count. Sometimes if a site has really low traffic, you’ll get this message here.

Notice that Ahrefs showed data that this website gets around 70 visitors per months while Similar Web could pull no data. Free tools will not always show the most accurate data. Which is why it is much better to use a paid tool if you can.

Relevance

Seeing if a site is relevant to yours is just as simple as taking a look at the site and seeing if the articles are related to what your product or service is. The more a site is related to yours, the more relevance Google will detect between your site and there’s.

Note: Relevance is important in Google’s eyes because the more relevant to websites that are linking between one another, the more of a “push” you can see in your rankings, once Google detects the link.

Good Metrics

When we say search for a site with good metrics we mean a site that has a strong amount of domain authority, referring domains and domain authority. Let’s take our example competitor website we used earlier.

When searching for the site in Ahrefs, you can see the metrics you need to see using “Site Explorer”. In this specific example, the information tells us that our competitor website has 27 referring domains (websites linking to it) and a DR (domain rating) of 9.

Note: Look for a DR over 5 to go after and a minimum of 10 referring domains, if you are trying to rank a local business.

These stats look good to be a local website. So if this site was not a direct competitor, this would be an ideal website to go after, based on the metrics.

Anchor Text

The anchor text is referred to as the text of the link leading back to your site. If your anchor text looks unnatural, Google can spot this and penalize your site which can actually prevent it from ranking.

Your target website should have a natural anchor link selection. This just means there isn’t too much of one anchor type.

Our target website has a natural linking pattern. Notice, there aren’t too much of just one kind of anchor, they are spread out across multiple anchors.

This would be a great anchor text profile of a website we’d want to try and reach out to.

After this research is done, it’s time to start emailing the website owners and building relationships to try and get a link placed on their site.

Are You Ready for Higher SEO Rankings?

We have broken down the two things that need to be focused on when it comes to getting a good SEO ranking.

If you follow our guide and take the necessary steps laid out on this guide, you’ll have an optimized website and be on your way to getting the guest post to help rank your site in the search engines.

Our team has a systemized process to obtain a number of high-quality backlinks that will help move your site up the engines onto the first page of Google along with a team of experts that make sure your on-page SEO is perfectly done.

If you’re a business owner with a website, you’ve probably thought to yourself once or twice, how can I rank higher in Google search? Maybe you’ve even done a couple of Google searches for how to change SEO on Google?

We get it. And no, it doesn’t require an advanced degree in quantum mechanics to be able to decode Google algorithms – but we also know how difficult it can be to really unpack the concept of SEO, and all that it involves – reading an endless amount of articles, searching through endless YouTube videos just to come out of the other side more confused and lost than you were before you began.

More than 70 million posts are published online every month according to WordPress statistics. So it’s not difficult to find yourself lost in a sea of information, on just about any topic, including SEO!

To avoid the headache, maybe you’ve decided that you would like to outsource your SEO efforts to a freelancer or company – but then comes the confusion of not knowing which company is trustworthy and which freelancer is knowledgeable enough to produce significant results for your business.

This leads to wasted time, drained marketing budgets, and potentially harmful backlinks to your website that can actually push you further down the search engines instead of up them!

The good news is, you are very much not alone. There have been an untold number of business owners that have had this same problem that you have, and whom have finally been able to break through the confusion and start seeing results that put their lead generation on auto pilot and significantly increase their revenue.

We’ve created this guide to put you on the right track in learning how to change your SEO on Google so you can finally start harnessing the power of the internet for your business.

But before you can change your SEO on Google, you need to know what it is.

What Is Google SEO Anyway?

Google SEO is the process of growing your website’s traffic through organic search results, particularly in the Google search engine. This growth increases visibility of your website allowing more users to find and interact with your brand. These results are unpaid and do not include paid placements.

Understanding the Algorithm

While I’m sure you’re ready to dive straight into the tactics of how to start showing up higher in the organic results of Google, it’s important that you understand how the algorithm works.

According to Moz, Google makes changes to their algorithm almost 9 times per day. It’s no wonder that so many website owners complain about how difficult it is to rank.

Over the years it has become more troublesome to try and adjust to the continuous updates made by Google, especially if you were using blackhat SEO methods.

While Google has had several major updates in the past including penguin, hummingbird, pigeon and the mobile friendly update, Google’s most recent update, the May 2020 Core Update was announced on May 4, and had a huge impact on the rankings of businesses across multiple verticals.

While some businesses survived the update with no negative effects, posts like these started to become the norm.

Pro Tip: One of the best things to do when you’ve been affected by an update is to wait 2 to 4 weeks to get through the volatility period and to see a return in rankings. If you notice your rankings are staying the same, conduct a full website audit. SEMrush has an excellent tool for auditing a website.

Keeping track of the constant updates is easy with websites like Google Webmaster Central and The Search Review.

Now that you know what Google SEO is and some basic information about the algorithm, let’s dive into some strategies that’ll help you improve your visibility in Google’s search engine.

7 Strategies On How You Can Change Your SEO On Google

1. Keyword Research and Intent

Keyword research should be where this entire process starts for any business looking to change their SEO. There’s no way you can optimize your content if you don’t know exactly what search phrases you are intentionally targeting.

According to Search Engine Land, there are 63,000 searches on Google per second. This means that your potential customer is out there and they are searching for your product or service, but if you don’t know what key phrases they are looking for, you aren’t going to show up to answer their questions.

Our in-depth guide on how to write SEO articles in four easy steps goes deep into keyword research and how exactly to find the keywords your audience is searching in Google.

But the best way to conduct keyword research is to use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush and look for questions that your potential customers may be asking.

In this example, we’ll be using Ahrefs.

Start by putting a product or service that you offer into the search bar.

Next, click the search button and select the group categorized as “questions”.

Once you have the results, you can set the KD (Keyword Difficulty) score to a max. We recommend setting the mx KD to 35, especially if you are just beginning to blog or your website does not have a lot of authority.

Now you have a full list of terms that you can write great content around and start to attract your potential customers to your products and services.

1. Optimizing Your On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing content that is directly on your blog in order to gain more visibility in the search engines. This is the easiest type of optimization to perform because you are in complete control of the content.

There are multiple on-page factors that should be considered, so let’s cover each one.

H1

An H1 is the title that describes the overall topic of your content. It’s really important not to drop the ball on this particular on-page attribute. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your target keyword is included in your H1.

The target keyword here is: “How often does Google update Its Algorithm”.

Content

When actually writing the content for your article, you always want to make sure to include your primary keyword 2-3 times throughout the content without forcing it. If you’ve been online for more than 5 years, you know back in the day you could get away with keyword stuffing.

Times have changed big time. No longer is it acceptable to try and stuff a bunch of keywords in your article and expect to rank. Actually, doing this now may trigger negative SEO on your website, which would defeat the purpose of properly optimizing your content.

Also, placing your target keyword in the H2 title helps Google better recognize what your content is about. The main keyword “Google Algorithm” is also placed in the H2 heading.

Meta Title

The meta title is also another on-page factor that let’s Google know what you’re writing about. It is also important to place your primary keyword here as well.

One of the best WordPress plugins you can use to optimize your meta title is Yoast SEO.

Start by changing the “SEO Title” to include your keyphrase

Here’s what it looks like in the organic results.

Meta Description

A meta description describes what your specific web page is about using 160 characters or less. Your keyword should be placed here too, as well as some eye-catching text that makes the reader want to click to read more about your article.

URL Structure

Your url is the address of your web page and this can be optimized as well. According to Moz, your url can be a ranking factor in Google. Optimizing it can be as simple as placing your keyword into the url separated with hyphens.

Pictures

When adding pictures to your articles besides making sure they are relevant to your topic, you should also optimize them to target your main keyword. This is done by changing the alt tag.

These image descriptions allow for search engines to locate your page through your image. Images being optimized in conjunction with content makes it much easier for Google to understand what your page is about.

When using WordPress, after you upload an image you will have the option to add an “Alternative Text” to it. This would be where you place your keyword.

1. Optimizing Your Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is what you do away from your website to increase rankings and visibility in the search engines. These off-page factors can include:

• Social Accounts
• Backlinks
• Citations
• Videos

In this article we’ll be specifically diving into backlinks and citations.

Backlinks

A study conducted by Ahrefs shows that 55.24% of pages don’t have a single backlink.

This is probably one of the off-page activities that business owners struggle with the most. Getting a backlink from another website in your niche is not always easy, especially if you are not conducting the proper outreach. So let’s get into not only how to find websites that would want to link to you but also how to do proper outreach to secure a backlink for your website.

The first step in finding a potential website that may want to link to you is by first researching your keyword on Google and taking a look at the results. For this example, we’ll use the keyword “What is SEO”.

The first result we see is Moz.

The next step would be to take that specific url and place it into Ahrefs and check out the referring domains.

Once we have a list of the referring domains, we need to sort them by “Dofollow” because Dofollow links are the links that pass link juice from one article to the next and help to increase rankings.

These are all of the websites that have linked to this particular Moz article. All potential targets for outreach. Now let’s talk about a highly-effective outreach method.

Once you have decided which site you want to reach out to, to secure a backlink, now it’s time to email them with your pitch. The article we are trying to secure on their site is called a guest post.

Here is a script that you can take and use for your next outreach campaign.

“ Hey (name),

I’m the content editor for (name of your website) and a long time reader of (their website) since (year) when the site really started to take off.

I was doing some research and found some topic pieces that you could easily produce and pull in traffic for.

In fact (their competitors website) ranks for them and they have a small fraction of your authority:

1. Keyword Topic 1
2. Keyword Topic 2
3. Keyword Topic 3

I’d like to write one of these for you (free of cost, just trying to get more publication work).

I’ve actually done this before on (example website), who is now ranked (ranking) for this topic.

If this sounds good, please choose which topic you’d like, and I’ll start this evening.

Regards,

(Your name) “

This pitch offers the website owner value instead of just reaching out asking for a guest post. Try sending 5 of these per day to different website owners who have previously linked to content that is related to yours.

Citations

A citation is a reference to your online business that includes your business name, address, phone number (NAP). Citations can be listed on various different local business directories, increasing your brand reach and adding to your backlinks.

It is possible for citations to negatively affect your SEO if the information is not consistent across every directory. Some directories where you can place your citations are:

• Bing
• Facebook
• FourSquare
• Yelp
• Localeze
• Apple Maps
• Superpages
• Yahoo

Listing your business on these websites will give you more visibility and more chances for customers to find your business and interact with it. It also helps Google to find broad, yet accurate information about your company across multiple platforms.

A Few Other Ways You Can Change Your SEO On Google

The steps we have listed above are all strategies you can start doing internally and externally on your website to increase your Google ranking but here are some other important components to consider when optimizing your website:

Consistency – SEO takes time, yes, TIME – in all caps to let you know how serious we are here. One of the best ways to make sure you get found inthe search engine is to be consistent with your SEO. A study conducted by Ahrefs, showed that it takes anywhere from 2-6 months to rank, so continuously optimizing your site and building high-quality backlinks, will ensure success in the long-term.

Mobile Optimization – Nearly 60% of all Google searches are from mobile. It is critical to have a website that is mobile optimized, especially if you want to convert visitors into buyers. If you are using WordPress for your website, making your site is mobile-friendly is as simple as installing a plugin like Jetpack, that can properly manage your design, without you needing to mess with any code on your site.

You can also check to see if your site is already optimized for mobile by searching “google mobile-friendly test” in Google and pasting your website url in the box.

Tracking – The only way you’ll know if you’re making progress is to track your results. A good indication that a website is gaining some traction in the search engine is to track the keywords a site is targeting before you begin your SEO and during your campaign.

There are a lot of great tools for tracking your keywords. Some of these tools are:

• SEMrush
• Agency Analytics
• Serpbook
• Serpbot

It is ideal if you can keep track of your rankings at least once a week to get an accurate analysis of what optimization strategies may be working better than others.

Site Speed – This is usually not the first optimization strategy that a website owner would think of because it is not known to affect rankings directly, but it can most definitely affect your rankings indirectly.

A study done by dotcom-tools showed that 40% of internet users abandons a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

When your site takes longer than a few seconds to load, it’ll make visitors want to hit the back button without ever giving it a second thought. This results in a higher bounce rate, which could indicate to Google a “bad user experience”. In return, it’ll actually work against you in trying to rank higher.

To test your site’s speed, you can use the free Pagespeed Insights tool. One of the best ways to increase your site speed is by making sure you have a great hosting company to host your site on.

It’s Time To Start Ranking Higher

You’ve got the basics down.

Now it’s time to move forward and begin taking some steps to get your site optimized.

Be patient with yourself, especially if you’re new because SEO has a steep learning curve but we hope we have been able to simplify the process here for you in this guide.

Keep your head in the game and always stay learning.

If you’ve attempted to write SEO articles, you probably know how daunting and confusing it can be.

A study conducted by DemandMetric showed that on average, businesses with blogs generate 67% more leads than companies without one.

But reading through countless blogs and watching dozens of YouTube videos could leave you even more confused than you were before you began your research.

You may ask yourself a number of questions like:

• How long should my article be?
• What keyword(s) should I focus on?
• How frequently do I need to produce this content to see results?

The good news is that you are asking yourself the right questions.

The bad news is it can be difficult to find the correct answer.

This is what’s called information overload.

Too much of anything can be bad for you, including information.

We have seen this leave many business owners frustrated, irritated and discouraged.

This results in content written out of confusion and ultimately leads to your articles being buried in an endless sea of search results.

Need help with an SEO strategy that actually produces results? Talk to our team about your specific needs

Luckily, we’ve come up with a super simple way of writing SEO articles in just four easy steps, so not only can your target customer find you but so you can stop feeling overwhelmed by the task at-hand every time you want to write a new piece of content!

How To Write SEO Friendly Articles – In Just Four Easy Steps

1. Come Up With Amazing Topic Ideas

It’s not difficult to come up with topic ideas that are spot on with what information your audience wants from you IF you know exactly the type of customer you serve.

This isn’t to say that it still won’t be a bit difficult at times brainstorming different content topic ideas. Maybe you’re having trouble coming up with ideas on your own. This is where content ideation tools come into play and can get you off to a great start.

Let’s talk about two awesome tools you can start using today and how exactly to use them to start planning some great content your audience will drool over.

BUZZSUMO

Buzzsumo is an amazing research tool that allows you to quickly and effectively come up with content ideas that you KNOW has previously gained a lot of interaction in the form of backlinks, comments and social shares.

Start by coming up with a term or seed idea that describes what product or service your company offers.

Next, take a look at the search results and analyze what content has the most engagement around the particular topic you searched.

This can help you come up with a great topic that has been proven to be a social magnet to your target audience.

AHREFS

Ahrefs is another super useful tool that makes it easy to find what topics are being shared and engaged with in your niche.

Begin with selecting the “Content Explorer” tab at the top of the dashboard and typing in a product or service that your company offers, just like what we did with Buzzsumo.

After the search results have populated, take a look through and see which content is being engaged with and aligns with your business the most.

Between these two tools, you should have some initial ideas on what type of content is viral in your industry and potentially what types of articles your potential clients are out there searching for, which leads us into your next step.

2. Conduct Effective Keyword Research

Now that you have a general idea of what type of articles best resonate with you audience, now it’s time to use that information and find the exact phrases that users are searching for.

3.5 billion searches are made every single day on Google. (Internet Live Stats)

You can bet that your customers are online searching for solutions to their problems.

So you need to make sure that when your potential customer clicks that “search” button, that

you are there, front and center, to answer their questions.

Here are three tools you can use to come up with dozens of keyword ideas that are being searched each and every month by your audience.

SEMRUSH

SEMRUSH is one of the best content marketing tools available. One of their most popular features is the keyword tool.

Remember those topic ideas you found during step one? Grab one of those phrases and place them into SEMRUSH.

A quick way to find out exactly what specific questions your target customer is asking is by looking at the “questions” section.

Next step is to analyze the competitiveness of each keyword. Our goal (especially if you have a newer blog) is to go after what we call “the low-hanging fruit”. This means targeting keywords that are easy to rank.

A study conducted by Smart Insights showed that Google’s organic results that contain 3-4 words in the title results in a higher CTR than organic results with 1-2 words.

Pro Tip: Focus on keywords that have 4 or more words in them. Usually the longer the phrase, the lower the competition. More specific terms can also result in a higher ROI.

To make sure you are targeting long-tail phrases, choose “advanced filters” and set the “word count” to a minimum of four words and press “apply filters”.

After you have your list of results, take each keyword and conduct a google search. The main metric you want to place your focus would be the DA (Domain Authority). If you are a newer blog, look for websites with a DA under 50.

To get a quick glance at the DA, you can use a free toolbar provided by Ahrefs.

Side Note: The domain authority in the Ahrefs bar is displayed as “DR” (Domain Rating).

After some keyword research, we came up with the keyword “ how web design impacts content marketing” and these were the results.

We have 3 of the top 10 results that fit our criteria of a DR under 50, so this would be a great topic to produce content around. While you may not rank in a week, eventually over the course of a few months you will start to naturally move up the serps and capture highly-targeted organic search traffic.

For keyword research and topic ideas, SEMRUSH is an excellent tool.

GOOGLE

Sometimes our most useful tools are hiding in plain sight.

According to NetMarketShare, 80% of all internet users are using Google as their search engine.

While other keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMRUSH have highly accurate data, why not use the search engine that you’re trying to rank in, to get data from?

Google’s data is real-time data from actual humans.

Google also keeps a record of what is most often searched by others, that’s why when you type phrases into the search bar you’ll start to see other search terms appear, based on what others have previously searched, this is called Google Auto Suggest.

When using Google to come up with keyword ideas, it may require a little more brainstorming than using a keyword tool but using these modifiers can help get you off to a good start:

• What is (keyword)
• Who is (keyword)
• How is (keyword)
• How does (keyword)
• How can (keyword)
• Does (keyword)
• Is (keyword)

Once you jot down some potential long-tail keywords (keywords containing 3 or more words) now it’s time to do another Google search to see if at least 3 of the top 10 results have a DA under 50.

If so, you know you have a chance to rank for that keyword and you should prepare to write content on that topic.

Honorable Mention: We’ve decided to name Ahrefs as an honorable mention because of how great their keyword tool is. This in-depth keyword research guide written by Ahrefs themselves will get you off to a great start finding search terms for your business.

3. Begin Outlining Your Content

Okay, you’ve done some keyword research and you’ve got some pretty solid topics to begin producing content around, now it’s time to begin your outline.

You want to start by focusing on what is called your focus keyword.

Your focus keyword is the keyword that you’re going to be producing content around and is

the main topic of your article. This keyword should appear in a few places in your article

and those places are:

• Meta Title
• Meta Description
• H1
• Permalink
• Once or twice throughout the article

Let’s do a deeper dive into each of these points.

META TITLE

A meta title is a title that lets Google know exactly what your page is about and when it comes to SEO, it holds a lot of weight.

Placing your focus keyword here will tell Google this specific web page is about this specific

topic.

META DESCRIPTION

A meta description is a brief description summarizing what a specific article is talking about.

When crafting a good meta description, it’s not only good to place the keyword in it but also pique the reader’s interest by asking a question or placing a statistic in the description.

H1

The H1 is the actual title of your page. This is different from the meta title because the H1 is actually a part of your article, where the meta title is not. If we take a look at this site, we can see that the title of their page is wrapped in an H1 html tag.

PERMALINK

A permalink is another word for the url of your web page. Make sure to include your keyword in the url. The shorter the url, the better.

INCLUDING THE KEYWORD ONCE OR TWICE IN THE ARTICLE

This is the last step in making sure your web page is optimized. Including your focus keyword in the article just a few times is enough for Google to understand what the page is about.

The keyword should be placed naturally throughout the content and never “forced” into a sentence if it doesn’t make sense. This is what’s known as “keyword stuffing” and can actually have a negative effect on your SEO.

SECONDARY KEYWORDS

Secondary keywords are other keywords related to your focus keyword that helps Google further understand what topic your content is talking about.

Finding these keywords are as easy as just doing a Google search, scrolling to the bottom of the search results and copying the keywords from the “searches related to” section.

Using these keywords throughout the content and in your H2’s, will not only help Google with assessing what your page is about it’ll also help you rank for more keywords, which means more opportunities for your potential customers to find your content.

4. Publish Your Content

Finally, after all the work you’ve put in with your topic research, keyword research, your on-page SEO and outlining your content, you’re finally at the final step, publishing your content.

Before you hit that “publish” button on your post you want to make sure that you have a way to spread the word about your new piece of content.

Sharing your post on social media is a quick and easy way to get new eyeballs on your content. To make sharing your content easier, you can use a tool like Zapier.

Also, having a content publication schedule can give you great gains in your content marketing.

A 2019 study showed that search traffic made up 65% of total ecommerce sessions and 33% of that was generated through organic search while 32% was generated through paid traffic.

This does mean being consistent with when you publish new content. The more consistent you

Are the better your results will compound over time.

If you have an existing email list, let them know about your new piece of content. This is a great way to jump start the traffic to your article, which will send early signals to Google that people are interested in your content.

How To Move Forward Now That You Know How To Write SEO Articles in Four Easy Steps

There you have it.

You’ve got the basics down and now you’re ready to begin your content marketing strategy.

If you’re not using blogging as a strategy to increase your leads and sales through search engine traffic, you’re potentially losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

Now that you know how to effectively write SEO articles are you going to continue to accept the fact that your business may be losing money? Or are you going to take control of your organic marketing and increase your business’s revenue starting now?