Content or Backlinks
-
HI
I have resource issues and need to prioritise my time, I know both content & backlinks are important for SEO, but where will it be most beneficial to spend my time?
We are a generalist site, so this also makes things tougher. I have some core areas to work on, but want to be the most effective in the time I spend on them.
Thanks!
-
It's gets everything from Google but it doesn't give you search volume - just different types of questions / searches.
-Andy
-
Each one of these article pages has links and house ads on it that guide visitors to pages where the product and accessories can be purchased. These customer service pages appear in the SERPs, pull traffic and are a source of the sales that show up in our shopping cart.
We also link to these pages from sales pages. Some people would not do this because they think it is distracting, however, we know that people who land on our sales pages often follow these links. On our site, the average person has a 13 day gap between their first visit to our site and the first purchase being made, so we think that these links on product pages give them confidence in us as a vendor and also answers any questions that they have about the product.
-
For http://answerthepublic.com/ where is the data from - I can't for example find any search volume related to some questions on here, but is that expected?
-
Amazing thank you.
Yes product pages are definitely more focused on the user rather than having too much content, so it's just adding blogs or guides in other areas of the site, Thanks
-
These are some great ideas
Really value your feedback so thank you
-
It sounds like there is a lot of potential for you.
We have two types of sites, info sites with small stores and retail sites with large content libraries.
For the retail sites, our first source of articles is questions that we receive from our customers. These are articles about how to select the right model, features, size, etc..... how to make common repairs.... examples of how to use the products. We used customer emails as starters for these articles and beefed them up to a formal article that included lots of photos, tables, video, etc.
You might be able to get people in customer service to write these articles. Tell them that is a really important job. If they get the same question over and over and over, then having an faq page on the site that links to these customer service articles will allow people to get their answers in a self-service mode instead of bugging your staff.
Make your site the one that has more of this type of content than all of your competitors combined.
-
First of all, one of the best tools to use to find questions is http://answerthepublic.com/ butMOZ also have a very nice tool as well now.
In terms of what I would consider best, it is whatever is going to sit well on the site and make the most sense to be there.
Tread carefully with longer content on your product pages and make sure that however it is done, it doesn't ruin the user experience. I would say you might have to do a bit of both.
-Andy
-
Thanks EGOL
What I find frustrating, is none of the sites in top SERPs have any long pieces of this content, or good shareable content & no quality backlinks.
Apart from the big players like Amazon & Ebay, I have no idea why these sites are ranking.
My struggle is also the amount of areas and trying to product well researched content for the different categories on my own
Thank you!
-
Thanks Andy,
I've put together a couple of guides already, are there any tools I can use to find questions people are asking? I've used SEM rush but there isn't much around questions people ask.
Thank you for the pointers, I'll start putting some into practice.
Would you go for blogs & longer pieces of content or just the longer pieces?
-
We don't do linkbuilding for any of our sites. Instead we put all of our work into creating content.
If you are producing industry-leading content, have decent traffic already, and you have visitors who appreciate and spread the word about your content for you then this is a good strategy.
This is not a good strategy if your content is low quality or even medium quality because nobody is going to spread the word about it or link to it. And, you gotta be honest with yourself about this... don't think that because you wrote an article that you have a good one. You must compare it to the websites that hold the top positions in the SERPs and ask if yours is as good or better.
Someone might argue that if we added a linkbuilding service that we would do even better. That might be true. But instead of doing that I would rather pay someone to take over other duties and keep myself and my content team focused on more content and better content.
-
It's hard to say without doing some digging Becky, but for yourself, I would do the following:
- Create a content strategy. This should be articles of probably 1k words, well researched and informative. Perhaps half a dozen of them.
- See who is talking about / asking questions related to the niche and then fit these into your articles.
- Look on Social Media who is talking about these areas and reach out to them. Discuss this with them and ask them to take a look at what you have produced.
- Use something like Ahrefs content explorer to find other similar articles and where do they get links from - can you also get a link?
- Don't worry about asking for links, but be very careful how you do it - ask if you can be added as a resource and never mention the word 'link'
There is a lot more to this, but it should give you a few pointers to get started - however, it's not going to be a quick fix so expect to put a bit of leg work into doing this.
-Andy
-
HI
I've selected 6 areas to work on, but then I need to juggle other requirements in the business.
Those 6 areas are top level, within those there are any number of lower level categories - some of the businesses most important areas are hugely competitive.
At the moment for example, a priority is shelving - warehouse shelving primarily. I'm looking at what the competition do and I'm stumped - one ranking in first position hides content behind a tab and get their links from directories, so I can't see how they rank.
-
Some great pointers from Patrick there, and this is something that is more common that you might realise - a question that is asked daily.
As a generalist, it does make it a little more awkward because the ideal scenario would be to be creating amazing content based on your niche, but if you have multiple, that makes it a little different.
Do you have particular industries you are focussing on?
-Andy
-
Hi there
Great, relevant content leads to great, relevant links. If you build it, they will come.
Focus on creating great content based on audience research and then focus your efforts on distributing that content in an effective way that reaches your audience where they are actively digesting content and having discussions.
After you get into the mode of developing your content, focus on link building tactics that gets your content placed in front of the right audience. Don't just build links to build links. Expect this to take time, as Rand says, it's a flywheel.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Good luck!
P
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Big retailers and duplicate content
Hello there! I was wondering if you guys have experience with big retailers sites fetching data via API (PDP content etc.) from another domain which is also sharing the same data with other multiple sites. If each retailer has thousands on products, optimizing PDP content (even in batches) is quite of a cumbersome task and rel="canonical" pointing to original domain will dilute the value. How would you approach this type of scenario? Looking forward to read your suggestions/experiences Thanks a lot! Best Sara
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SaraCoppola1 -
How do the Quoras of this world index their content?
I am helping a client index lots and lots of pages, more than one million pages. They can be seen as questions on Quora. In the Quora case, users are often looking for the answer on a specific question, nothing else. On Quora there is a structure setup on the homepage to let the spiders in. But I think mostly it is done with a lot of sitemaps and internal linking in relevancy terms and nothing else... Correct? Or am I missing something? I am going to index about a million question and answers, just like Quora. Now I have a hard time dealing with structuring these questions without just doing it for the search engines. Because nobody cares about structuring these questions. The user is interested in related questions and/or popular questions, so I want to structure them in that way too. This way every question page will be in the sitemap, but not all questions will have links from other question pages linking to them. These questions are super longtail and the idea is that when somebody searches this exact question we can supply them with the answer (onpage will be perfectly optimised for people searching this question). Competition is super low because it is all unique user generated content. I think best is just to put them in sitemaps and use an internal linking algorithm to make the popular and related questions rank better. I could even make sure every question has at least one other page linking to it, thoughts? Moz, do you think when publishing one million pages with quality Q/A pages, this strategy is enough to index them and to rank for the question searches? Or do I need to design a structure around it so it will all be crawled and each question will also receive at least one link from a "category" page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freek270 -
Heading Tags & Content Count
Hi everyone I am looking into this page on our site http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/sack-trucks Just comparing it against competitors in SEMRush, the tool shows a wordcount of this page for over 4089 words, compared with http://www.wickes.co.uk/Wickes-Green-General-Purpose-Sack-Truck-200kg/p/500302 which only has 2658 - it has a lot more written content than our page - where is this word count coming from? Also looking at the same page on our site Woorank suggests we have the word 'sack truck' in the h1 and title too many times - it's only there once, but its this showing because its an exact match keyword? I'm just wondering if there is something wrong with the html or how the page is being crawed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Robots.txt and redirected backlinks
Hey there, since a client's global website has a very complex structure which lead to big duplicate content problems, we decided to disallow crawler access and instead allow access to only a few relevant subdirectories. While indexing has improved since this I was wondering if we might have cut off link juice. Since several backlinks point to the disallowed root directory and are from there redirected (301) to the allowed directory I was wondering if this could cause any problems? Example: If there is a backlink pointing to example.com (disallowed in robots.txt) and is redirected from there to example.com/uk/en (allowed in robots.txt). Would this cut off the link juice? Thanks a lot for your thoughts on this. Regards, Jochen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy0 -
SEO on page content links help
I run a website at the bottom we have scroller box which the old SEO guy used to contain all of the crap content so we can rank for keywords not on the page and put all of the links in to spread the link juice into the other inner category pages (some of these pages are only listed on our innerpages otherwise). We are trying to remove this content and add decent content above the fold with relevant long tail keywords in (it is currently decent but could do with expanding if we are removing this large chunk of text in theSEO box and some long tail keywords will be missing if we just remove it) we can add a couple of links into this new content but will struggle to list the category pages not on the left hand navigation. If we were to list all of the pages in the left hand nav would we dilute the power going to the main pages currently or would we be in the same position we are now? For example at the minute I would say the power is mainly going to the left hand nav links and then a small amount of power to the links in the SEO content if we put these into the nav will it not dilute the power to the main pages. Thank you for your time and hopefully your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Capitals in url creates duplicate content?
Hey Guys, I had a quick look around however I couldn't find a specific answer to this. Currently, the SEOmoz tools come back and show a heap of duplicate content on my site. And there's a fair bit of it. However, a heap of those errors are relating to random capitals in the urls. for example. "www.website.com.au/Home/information/Stuff" is being treated as duplicate content of "www.website.com.au/home/information/stuff" (Note the difference in capitals). Anyone have any recommendations as to how to fix this server side(keeping in mind it's not practical or possible to fix all of these links) or to tell Google to ignore the capitalisation? Any help is greatly appreciated. LM.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlS0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi everyone, I have a TLD in the UK with a .co.uk and also the same site in Ireland (.ie). The only differences are the prices and different banners maybe. The .ie site pulls all of the content from the .co.uk domain. Is this classed as content duplication? I've had problems in the past in which Google struggles to index the website. At the moment the site appears completely fine in the UK SERPs but for Ireland I just have the Title and domain appearing in the SERPs, with no extended title or description because of the confusion I caused Google last time. Does anybody know a fix for this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | royb0 -
Lots of optimized content but crappy rankings
Hi, I write content for the site http://www.healthchoices.ca. We were hit by Panda (a different issue that is resolved now) but even before that, I'd write an entire library of good content. An example: the plant sterols library. Here's an article as an example: http://www.healthchoices.ca/article/where-are-plant-sterols-phytosterols-found There are about eight on average in each medical library, and we cover topics from acne to sexual health. The other half of the business is a directory. We have thousands of local health are providers, a basic version with just an address, and a longer version where we optimize the text. Here's an example: http://www.healthchoices.ca/profile/ct-mri-scans/canada-diagnostic-centres We come up buried on the third page, far after directories with zero content or crappy content. What am I missing? I am getting very frustrated as I've been writing this stuff for a long time and nothing seems to come of it. Thanks so much, Erin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erinhealthchoices0