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
-
Which URL should I choose when combining content?
I am combining content from two similar articles into one. URL 1 has a featured snippet and better URL structure, but only 5,000 page views in the last 6 month, and has 39 keywords ranking in the top 10. URL 2 has worse structure, but over 100k page views in the last 6 months, and 236 keywords in the top 10. Basically, I'm wondering if I keep the one with the better URL structure or the one with more traffic. The deleted URL will be redirected to whichever I keep.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | curtis-yakketyyak0 -
Identifying Duplicate Content
Hi looking for tools (beside Copyscape or Grammarly) which can scan a list of URLs (e.g. 100 pages) and find duplicate content quite quickly. Specifically, small batches of duplicate content, see attached image as an example. Does anyone have any suggestions? Cheers. 5v591k.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
How to get backlinks
I know that we should get the reputable backlinks for the website But which websites I'm doing seo nobody wants to exchange backlinks so how can I get reputable backlinks related to niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ramansaab0 -
Duplicate Content Issues :(
I am wondering how we can solve our duplicate content issues. Here is the thing: There are so many ways you can write a description about a used watch. http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-no-date-stainless-steel-watch-wsilver-dial-5500/ http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-stainless-steel-date-watch-wblue-dial-5500/ Whats different between these two? The dial color. We have a lot of the same model numbers but with different conditions, dial colors, and bands.. What ideas do you have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KingRosales0 -
How does google recognize original content?
Well, we wrote our own product descriptions for 99% of the products we have. They are all descriptive, has at least 4 bullet points to show best features of the product without reading the all description. So instead using a manufacturer description, we spent $$$$ and worked with a copywriter and still doing the same thing whenever we add a new product to the website. However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too. I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content. I am asking it because we are a relatively new ecommerce store (online since feb 1st) while we didn't have a lot of organic traffic in the past, i see that our organic traffic dropped like 50% in April, seems like it was effected latest google update. Since we never bought a link or did black hat link building. Actually we didn't do any link building activity until last month. So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings? I see that our organic traffic is improving very very slowly since then but basically it is like between 5%-10% of our current daily traffic. What do you guys think? You think all our original content effort is going to trash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serkie1 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content
We have recently moved our company's blog to Wordpress on a subdomain (we utilize the Yoast SEO plugin). We are now experiencing an ever-growing volume of crawl errors (nearly 300 4xx now) for pages that do not exist to begin with. I believe it may have something to do with having the blog on a subdomain and/or our yoast seo plugin's indexation archives (author, category, etc) --- we currently have Subpages of archives and taxonomies, and category archives in use. I'm not as familiar with Wordpress and the Yoast SEO plugin as I am with other CMS' so any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. I can PM further info if necessary. Thank you for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BethA0 -
Duplicate content question? thanks
Hi, Im my time as an SEO I have never come across the following two scenarios, I am an advocate of using unique content, therefore always suggest and in cases demand that all content is written or re-written. This is the scenarios I am facing right now. For Example we have www.abc.com (has over 200 original recipes) and then we have www.xyz.com with the recipes but they are translated into another language as they are targeting different audiences, will Google penalize for duplicate content? The other issue is that the client got the recipes from www.abc.com (that have been translated) and use them in www.xyz.com aswell, both sites owned by the same company so its not pleagurism they have legal rights but I am not sure how Google will see it and if it will penalize the sites. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_81