I think the key with this approach is to be genuinely helpful and to avoid actually trying to sell a product. That's incredibly counterintuitive, but the product probably isn't the endgame for your consumer. What are they using it for? Be an expert resource on THAT.

The Home Depot blog is a really excellent example of this principle in action. Instead of selling their products, they're showing very creative and aspirational ways that people can use them. They did an entire DIY series on concrete. Concrete!

So they do all of these posts about concrete, but they're never pitching you a hard sell on it. The path to purchase is there if you want it, but really they're just focused on being experts on all of the wonderful, aspirational things you can do with concrete. It's very shareable and pinnable and I want every one of those projects in my home. They've planted the idea of buying concrete without selling it to me. It's very obvious they are an authority on concrete, and it doesn't matter that they're a seller. In fact, I'm more likely to buy it from them now because their expertise on it is clear.

So I started with that instead of outreach because when the content is that good, you can push it out on social and get a good response. You can share what you're doing with influencers and they won't mind because it's obvious you know what you're talking about. Next thing you know, they're coming to you for comment as an expert. The quality has to be there or you're right, you just look like you're pushing product and that does get tend to get ignored.

Agree 100%. I've interviewed several candidates lately who have completed an SEO program at a local, well respected, not-for-profit school and it became pretty clear as I spoke to them that I've got a lot of work to do to fix the misinformation.

On the other hand, I was really excited about a candidate who had a degree in Political Science, though he ultimately took a different job. I've been very pleased with the work I've seen from a co-worker with a degree in journalism. I find that a liberal arts education in general, but especially when the degree requires a combination of writing skill and critical thinking, sets people up pretty well for SEO work. I'm always surprised by how much SEO these candidates already know without realizing it - it's just that no one has ever organized everything for them or given it a name. Once they have that light bulb moment, they pick it up very quickly.

Personally, I've got a BA in Rhetoric and an MBA in International Business, and I find these to be invaluable for what I do. I know how to write, I understand how people use language, and b-school gave me a whole new perspective on what KPIs really matter and how my role fits into our business model.

My response is a big fat NOPE.

If the client isn't happy with the speed of back linking, then it's time for an education session in which you stand up as the expert they hired you to be and explain exactly why it's a bad, bad idea.

• Brokered links are often not contextual, which means they're not actually all that helpful.
• They tend to come from low quality sites, which means they're not actually all that helpful.

And that's just if you don't get caught. Getting away with black hat tactics is an intense, highly skilled, full-time endeavor. It's not a quick and easy way to anything. So even if you are willing to go there, given your inexperience with shady link building tactics, it's still a wretchedly bad idea since you've got no idea how to not get caught.

Best thing to do is to build a content and outreach campaign that builds links in an above-board manner that no one can take issue with. Believe it or not, that's actually probably easier than anything that link buying would steer you into.

FWIW, Google indexes title tags way beyond what it displays, possibly up to 164 characters. I've always considered that a valuable bit of intel to consider. (The post I linked to is ancient by SEO standards but I'd imagine it's still relevant, some nice work from Hugo Guzman.)

"which of course makes it harder to rank for key terms since they don't exist now in the meta title"

This is incorrect. The keywords are still in your meta title. Google isn't going to ignore them for crawling/indexing purposes based on what it chooses to display. They're still in your code, still getting crawled, still totally counting.

That said, if Google thinks your title is irrelevant, doesn't match the search query well enough, etc., it will display something it deems more appropriate given the page content and searcher's query. Take it as Google's hint that your titles may need some improvement.

I agree with seowoody that you should include your branding in your title line. I'm less crazy about John's suggested title tag. I used to work for an agency that specialized in lawyers of various stripes, and I know how the competitiveness really pushes hard into the gray there, the niche is so badly overoptimized, but it just looks spammy when the second kw just repeats 2 of 3 words from the first kw... and as you've discovered, Google may replace it anyway. I would use keywords but write it for the client, like "Estate Planning Attorney in Mt. View - Duree Law".

For me, this all depends on whether or not that content has any backlinks and/or gets good search traffic. If neither, then I'd remove it. But if people are still really actually finding the page through long-tail search, then maybe it doesn't matter too much if the trend is from 2008 since people still like it enough to search it out.

If it's linked or has social shares but currently gets no engagement, 301 it to the most relevant content that does. Logan mentions that can dilute the link juice, but you'd be directing it to a place that people actually want to go, so I think you'll be fine there. If it has no links, no social shares, and gets no traffic, it's just dead weight that dilutes your content quality. I'd rather have Google seeing high engagement with all corners of my site rather than just a small number of pages.

The point is that I think you'd do well to pay attention to what your readers are actually engaging with and let that be your guide on whether a particular piece of content stays or goes.

So, digging deeper into this issue, it turns out that we can't rely on status code as a reliable indicator of page validity for affiliate network URLs. Most of them turn up with a 200. Looking at possible custom solutions from affiliate compliance monitoring services now. No one seems to be doing this thing that I need to do, but it sounds like a great business idea for someone with coding experience and more entrepreneurial spirit than I've got. Just gonna throw that out there.

(b - a) / a

So in your case:

a = 90,914
b = 127,931

(127,931 - 90,914) / 90,914 = 0.40716501

Rendered as a percent, it's a 40.72% increase.

If you're doing % change on a number of pages, export the GA data to Excel, apply the formula there. I do this all the time with our merchant pages, and it's great for spotting trends if your business is even remotely seasonal.

However, if you're just doing single calculations on the fly and don't want to memorize the formula, there are tons of percent change calculators online. Most of them are boneheaded SEO, which is why I'm linking to the SERP and not to any particular calculator, but the numbers they spit out are sound.