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
-
Changing Url Removes Backlink
Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson210 -
Copied Content - Who is a winner
Someone copied the content from my website just I publish the article. So who is the winner? and I am in any problem? What to do? Please check Image. RkJ0p9l.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal0 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Sitemap and content question
This is our primary sitemap https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml We have a about 750 location based URL's that aren't currently linked anywhere on the site. https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/locations.xml Google is indexing most of the URL because we submitted the locations sitemap directly for indexing. Thoughts on that? Should we just create a page that contains all of the location links and make it live on the site? Should we remove the locations sitemap from separate indexing...because of duplicate content? # Sitemap Type Processed Issues Items Submitted Indexed --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 1 /sitemaps/locations.xml Sitemap May 10, 2016 - Web 771 648 2 /sitemaps/sitemap.xml Sitemap index May 8, 2016 - Web 862 730
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Please help with some content ideas
I was reading this post http://www.clambr.com/link-building-tools/ about how he had basically outreached to experts in the field and each one had shared this post with their followers. I am wondering how this could translate to our small business marketing and design blog I am really struggling for content ideas that will work in regards to popularity and link building.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
How to Fix Duplicate Page Content?
Our latest SEOmoz crawl reports 1138 instances of "duplicate page content." I have long been aware that our duplicate page content is likely a major reason Google has de-valued our Web store. Our duplicate page content is the result of the following: 1. We sell audio books and use the publisher's description (narrative) of the title. Google is likely recognizing the publisher as the owner / author of the description and our description as duplicate content. 2. Many audio book titles are published in more than one format (abridged, unabridged CD, and/or unabridged MP3) by the same publisher so the basic description on our site would be the same at our Web store for each format = more duplicate content at our Web store. Here's are two examples (one abridged, one unabridged) of one title at our Web store. Kill Shot - abridged Kill Shot - unabridged How much would the body content of one of the above pages have to change so that a SEOmoz crawl does NOT say the content is duplicate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
Penalised for duplicate content, time to fix?
Ok, I accept this one is my fault but wondering on time scales to fix... I have a website and I put an affiliate store on it, using merchant datafeeds in a bid to get revenue from the site. This was all good, however, I forgot to put noindex on the datafeed/duplicate content pages and over a period of a couple of weeks the traffic to the site died. I have since nofollowed or removed the products but some 3 months later my site still will not rank for the keywords it was ranking for previously. It will not even rank if I type in the sites' name (bright tights). I have searched for the name using bright tights, "bright tights" and brighttights but none of them return the site anywhere. I am guessing that I have been hit with a drop x place penalty by Google for the duplicate content. What is the easiest way around this? I have no warning about bad links or the such. Is it worth battling on trying to get the domain back or should I write off the domain, buy a new one and start again but minus the duplicate content? The goal of having the duplicate content store on the site was to be able to rank the category pages in the store which had unique content on so there were no problems with that which I could foresee. Like Amazon et al, the categories would have lists of products (amongst other content) and you would click through to the individual product description - the duplicate page. Thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Duplicate content for swatches
My site is showing a lot of duplicate content on SEOmoz. I have discovered it is because the site has a lot of swatches (colors for laminate) within iframes. Those iframes have all the same content except for the actual swatch image and the title of the swatch. For example, these are two of the links that are showing up with duplicate content: http://www.formica.com/en/home/dna.aspx?color=3691&std=1&prl=PRL_LAMINATE&mc=0&sp=0&ots=&fns=&grs= http://www.formica.com/en/home/dna.aspx?color=204&std=1&prl=PRL_LAMINATE&mc=0&sp=0&ots=&fns=&grs= I do want each individual swatch to show up in search results and they currently are if you search for the exact swatch name. Is the fact that they all have duplicate content affecting my individual rankings and my domain authority? What can I do about it? I can't really afford to put unique content on each swatch page so is there another way to get around it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0