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My understanding is they do look at H3 tags and valuate them as being higher emphasis than normal paragraph copy, however, they do not have a much "weight" in the on-page algorithm as the H1 or H2s. If having H3s makes sense for your page's content and helps the user better read and understand the content, I say H3s are positive and I would not hesitate to use them.
This makes sense to me as long as the other types of links (directories, forums, etc) are still high-quality. For example, if the directories they are making sure you are listed on are sites like Angieslist, YP, Manta, BBB, Yelp, etc. NOT low quality ones like freeseodirectory.com, directorytopranking.com, etc. it is a good thing and helpful for SEO. If you are a local business, this will help with your NAP as well, and showing up in Google Maps more often. Moz Local has a great list of these high quality directories and I would make sure the company you are working with is providing you reporting of their linkbuilding efforts and sources.
Asking what pieces of content they are sharing from your website would be a good question to ask as well, as one of the best forms of modern SEO and linkbuilding is having helpful, industry-relevant blog posts, infographics, or other pieces of content on your website and then going through the process of promoting it and requesting links to it from other websites, blogs, lists, and resource pages where it would be helpful and relevant. Brian Dean of Backlinko is a big forerunner of this type of linkbuilding, and has seen great success with it for multiple companies.
Very interesting situation Neil, it sounds like you did the right thing with looking at what the competition was doing, and then just making one change at a time, while using the Fetch & Render tool in GSC to see results faster.
While keyword density is a factor, Google is constantly trying to figure out the "searcher intent", and it is possible that adding this keyword in that seemed like a no-brainer changed Google's perspective of the page's "searcher intent". Just spitballing here of course, as there a ton of potential on-site factors at play. It sounds like you are on the right mindset though and I wouldn't totally throw keyword density out, just focus more on "content depth" and helping solve the searcher intent.
Depending on what type of website you have, usually, Tag Pages are automatically created when the tag is created. See an example of one here- https://seo-kansas-city.com/blog/tag/on-page-seo/, this is a tag that was automatically created via Wordpress when the tag "on page seo" was first added to a published blog post. Depending on how your website is setup you can either choose to not display tags on the sidebar, or condense your tags to be broader, so there are fewer used & listed.
One way to think about Tags is that they represent the "index" of your website, wheres Categories are like the "table of contents". You should also not add a tag page just for the sake of "tagging" it, you should do so because grouping posts by that particular tag will be useful to users on your website.
Hope this helps and best of success!
I personally would do bulk 301 redirects for this, and would not anticipate a negative impact on organic traffic. If anything, you are shortening your URLs which is a good SEO practice, you could probably look at shortening the "thisistheblogpost" part of the URL at the same time you are creating your 301 redirects to make sure the URL is a short as possible, while still including the blog post's target keyword or phrase. Hope this helps and best of success!
A lot of possibilities here, if you have just recently made the page changes you indicated above, I would recommend utilizing the Fetch and Render command in Google Search Console, and then Request To Re-Index the page. This will speed up the time it takes for Google to re-index your page with the changes you mentioned above (I have seen improvements in as fast as a day). You may need to verify your website in Google Search Console if you have not already in order to do this.
In addition to this, it may be beneficial to use more LSI (similar user intent) keywords on the page as it may be "over-optimized", for example if you have a page on lawn care that you want to rank for "lawn care in _____", try using "lawn services" and "lawn maintenance" in the H2s, image alt text, and content more instead of just re-using "lawn care" 99 times on the page. Also considering the length of the page is important as well, see if you can add a paragraph or two in new, unique content that mentions your keyword once or twice.
If neither of those work, it's time to start doing some backlink research to see what backlinks your competitors have that are ranking in the top 3-5 positions on Google for the keyword you are wanting to rank for. Use Moz' Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or SEMrush will be great in helping with this. I would also do a quick page speed audit, check the page's loading time with Pingdom and/or Google pagespeed insights. You may want to decrease the size of photos on the page or leverage cacheing (may need the help of a website developer depending on resources).
On-Site SEO is merely one facet of ranking your webpage higher, and if your keyword term that you are wanting to rank for is competitive you need to pay attention to technical SEO and Off-Site SEO and Quality Backlinks to the page as well, even if you have an "optimization score of 100" with whatever analysis tool you are using. Hope this helps and best of success!
If the blog posts have good user metrics on them (time on site, pages per session, etc.), it should, in theory, help your website rankings over time. The agency I work for has run into this as well, where the website traffic will increase, but leads will remain constant or won't increase near as much.
I say there is a positive benefit as your blog posts could get increase brand awareness, and maybe get referenced and linked to, which helps your overall website authority, but it is definitely a long game, and the short-term benefit will be very little.
If there is an opportunity for those blog posts to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and optimize them. You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old to the new ones, and re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.
I would recommend cleaning them up. You can also try https://brokenlinkcheck.com/, which is free to use and crawls your whole website. Having broken links is bad for users and also is a bad signal for Google for your website's helpfulness.
For Website Speed: https://tools.pingdom.com/
For Backlink Profile & Authority: https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/home
For On-Site SEO: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
For Broken Links- http://brokenlinkcheck.com/broken-links.php
Hi Bob! I still consider Best of The Web to be a valid, credible directory that is worth listing your business in.
Although it is a paid directory as Nigel mentioned above, there is a way to get a listing free using a Moz Local Audit.
1. Go to https://moz.com/local/search and run a local listings audit on your business
2. Look For Best of The Web in the "Direct Network" section
3. If you don't have a listing with them and Moz is not having connectivity issues, click "Create Listing"
4. When you do the listing creation process on botw.org it will be Free due to being a Moz referral.
EGOL is correct above, keep in mind there are a ton of other factors and your competition online (those ranking highly currently) are more than likely not standing still in an SEO sense (so it is a moving target usually).
The lower the competition, the "easier" and supposed "less time" it will take to rank on page 1 of Google is a good rule of thumb. It is also incredibly important to do competitive research on those in the top 3 positions on page 1 to see how long their content is, the quality of it, and the number of quality links it has pointing to it.
In my opinion, because they are H3s it should not be a problem. Googlebot should be able to tell they are part of a sidebar widget and, as long as they are to different pages and having unique anchor text, having the sidebar links in an H3 should not affect your rankings negatively in any way.
Depending on how large the website is, I would make sure that each page on the old website 301 redirects to the most similar and relevant page on the new website, assuming you are offering the same types of products or services. Unfortunately, there will probably still be a lapse to getting your rankings and traffic back up to where they were, but making sure all of the pages 301 redirect to new pages on the website (not all to the homepage), and then using a service like Moz Local or Yext to make sure all of your directory listings are switched over to the new brand name and website will make the transition smoother.
P.S.: This may also be a good time to take advantage of a press release, writing a blog post about the name change, and additional social promotion, this will allow you to explain why you made the brand change, and what your new values, services, etc. are.
I believe "URL" is the page on your website that is 404ing/Broken, the "Referring URL" is the website someone found your URL on and clicked through to. For example, if you had a broken link on a Facebook post you did, it would show the URL as "yourwebsite.com/examply" (broken link) and the Referring URL would be "facebook.com/yourprofile".
This depends greatly on the search query and what keywords you are targeting, for example, if you are writing an article on "how to eat chocolate covered bananas in outer space", you can probably rank your page on the 1st spot of Google with 0 links, even with a sub-par written article. However, the higher the competition, the more high-quality links are going to matter in my experience.
According to Google's Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the top 3 Google ranking factors- https://searchengineland.com/now-know-googles-top-three-search-ranking-factors-245882. Good content definitely comes before acquiring links, process-wise, but I believe links are just as important when it comes to ranking for competitive searches.
We will never know an exact percentage, but if already have great, in-depth, well-written content, act like links are 40-50% of the ranking equation & your efforts will be closer to being on-target than they are off.
I believe because of how the URL is siloed it is not that spammy, however, I do not believe having voyage twice in a URL is going to dramatically boost the rankings for that keyword. I am not too familiar with French, but I would go with option A due to it being a shorter URL and a more normal user experience (see https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-keywords-in-url)
I would recommend keeping the page "live", but 301ing the URL to the new domain. I would also try to make sure the new page is as possibly close to the existing page as possible if it is ranking well and you want to maintain that ranking. You still may see a drop in rankings in doing this (due to URL change, domain authority change, and other internal website factors).
The 3 keys to showing up on Google maps for (keyword + location) searches are having a claimed, completely filled out Google My Business profile that is verified via the business address, having consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone #) listings across the internet on sites like Yelp, Angieslist, YP, Merchantcircle, Foursquare, etc. (Moz Local is great for this!), and also having genuine customer reviews on your profile. Outside of those three, having more inbound links to your website that is on your Google Listing is said to be a factor, as well as having a business address in the city you are searching. Hope this helps!
In theory, it should result in your product page ranking more consistently. One way to help solidify your product pages rankings for your target keyword would be to add an anchor text link with your target keyword pointing to the product page within the blog post (which has more external links). This would help "transfer some authority" that the blog post has to the product page.
To be safe when making these changes to de-optimize the blog post, keep track of every change you make just in case you need to revert back to the way it was, and also keep track of the rankings for both the product page and blog post separately.
Hope this helps and best of success!
Hi Jeff,
In addition to Christian's recommendation (which I would do first), use Google Search Console's Fetch & Render Tool to request your non-indexed pages to Google's index. Sometimes this tool in GSC will have them indexed immediately.
It is not uncommon for deep links or internal pages of internal pages to not be immediately indexed. It is definitely important to use new pages to link our to other pages on your website, and if possible go in and link to your new pages from older (already indexed) pages on your website
Hi William, great looking page by the way! Some optimization tests and adjustments I would make are:
Hope this helps and best of success!
Like most things in SEO, it depends. There was an industry case study that Brian Dean often references, where they determined that shorter URLs tended to rank higher on Google. We have a personal example of this-
When trying to get our https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/ to rank for the local term "PPC Kansas City", we decided to shorten the URL and include the keyword in it, with a proper 301 redirection in place from the old to the new URL, we changed it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/, which shortened the URL by about 25 characters.
Granted the keyword now being in the URL string helped us as well, but doing this one change took our Google ranking from the bottom of page 2 on Google to the middle of page 1 on Google, and we still rank on page 1 for "PPC Kansas City".
In summary, I am a believer in shorter, keyword-focused URLs and definitely recommend trying to shorten some if you can!
Did you mean https://www.gizmocombat.com/? If you did, your website is live, but according to https://ismywebsitepenalized.com/gizmocombat.com, it is penalized by Google. You can get more insights on why if you set up and verify Google Search Console for your website and then look under Manual Actions.
I would recommend focusing on on-site optimization first. For the example you used- "/california-plumbers", you can include "California Plumbers in the Meta Title and H1, as well as a couple times within the content. It may also help to include variations of your keyword such as "plumbing contractors in California" or "local California plumbing repair" in an H2 and throughout the copy. Adding images, a video, map embed, internal links, and external links on the page can also help to boost its relevance.
Once you feel the page is more optimized, but not spammy or keyword stuffed, you can build internal links to it from other pages on your website. Also, keep in mind that building high-quality links to your overall website and doing technical SEO things like improving your website speed can also have an inherited positive effect on the rankings of your internal pages.
Hope this helps and best of success!
Agree with Miriam, especially if you have a larger company or one that focuses on a national presence.
If you are looking for a local SEO expert, I would potentially be happy to help, as that is more of my specialty.
Another option if you want someone who is located in your city is to see if Upcity.com has a list of SEOs for your location.
LuckyOrange is awesome, fairly cheap as well. You can view heatmaps, scroll stats and actual video recordings of users interacting on your website. We have used LuckyOrange for about 3 months now and have gained a lot of insight from it for our client's websites.
The video title, video length, likes, comments, etc all play a factor in this. It is especially important to have the keyword phrase you are wanting to rank for in the video title. For more info on this, Brian Dean of Backlinko published an in-depth YouTube SEO Guide that is pretty very helpful- http://backlinko.com/how-to-rank-youtube-videos. I recommend checking it out as well.
This resource poll is a little dated (2005), but I believe it is still relevant & is from Barry Schwartz's Search Engine Roundtable, which is considered a credible source in the search industry- https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002785.html.
Pulled directly from the SE Roundtable article, and in no order the most competitive industries for SEO are-
If I were to add one, I would say Home Remodeling/Construction has become fairly competitive in local SEO. Using Moz's Keyword Explorer can give more insight on this if you type in an industry term and then look at the difficulty score.
As Yaroslav mentioned above Google Keyword Planner is a good place to start. You can also check out or cross-reference search volume data with Moz's Keyword Explorer. I also like to use the Keywords Everywhere extension in Chrome.
Hard to answer as there could be multiple issues with your domain changes.
I would definitely make sure everything is 301ing properly to your current website version. Also, maybe throw a "rel canonical" tag on the homepage so Google knows it is the "Master Version", although this may only matter if you copy and pasted from one domain that was already indexed to a new one.
Lastly, it sounds like the Moz OSE tool may have just had a glitch or is maybe not recognizing the 301 redirect to your new domain. I would check try the Moz OSE tool again, and also check out https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection.
I would look for opportunities in Google Analytics or maybe even invest in some heat mapping software for the website (which usually isn't that expensive). Working on improving pages that have high bounce rate or low conversion rate first (as seen in Analytics is a great ongoing strategy.
In looking at the website, it may make sense to move your menu and logo to be above the slider images, and maybe have the property search fields above the fold as well, as these are what people will want to immediately interact with on your site.
I have taken his "SEO That Works" class and it is definitely worthwhile if you are serious about content-driven SEO. His methods definitely take an investment of time (and money if you are outsourcing) but the results he shows are pretty amazing. The SEO That Works class is also great if you are concerned about legitimate, white-hat ways to get authority backlinks.
This question pertains to local SEO, and businesses that want to rank for a certain city, service area or metro.
In looking at Ahrefs, it appears businesses that are BBB Accredited will get multiple "nofollow" links and possibly 1 "dofollow" link (on their actual profile), however businesses that only have a free (non-accredited) profile, only got a "nofollow link" and no "dofollow links". While it is definitely not a silver bullet and this is not always the case, in examing hundreds of local SERPS throughout 4-5 years in the SEO biz, there does seem to be some sort of correlation between businesses that are BBB accredited and also have their "BBB accreditation" badge with a link on their website.
Has anyone seen similar results or correlations for local SEO where they live? Is this a coincidence/anomaly?
It is best to have one blog on each site which posts cover relevant and helpful topics related to the website. Without much context or details this is somewhat harder to answer, but you always want to provide relevant and helpful content on your site's blog. Guest blogging can be a beneficial SEO Strategy if it is on a niche website and topically related blogs, but working on providing great, shareable and helpful content on your own website's blog should take priority,
Adding .html to the end of your URLs is not necessary and causes URLs to look less readable in my opinion. In taking over the site, definitely make sure to do proper 301 redirects and run a broken link check on it as well.
One way to do it is to enter whatever you are URL you are plugging into the Link Explorer, then go to "Linking Domains" on the left-hand menu. Once there you can do a "Command + F", or whatever the search command is on your computer, and then search .gov or .edu to see if the URL you typed in has an .edu or .gov links pointing to it.
Although I would start with Moz's Link Explorer, this may be a good link search to cross-reference with Ahrefs, as they will show you if the Domain has any .gov or .edu links in the general overview once you enter a URL to analyze.
Great recommendation by Donna!
I would also recommend the following
Professional Online Business Directories (Company.Com, Angieslist, BBB, Yelp, Manta, Alignable, Crunchbase, etc.)
Start Writing Relevant Content on Your Niche/Industry/Products etc. then promote and share content/posts.
Look out for any opportunities to be in a resources list or niche directory using the below Search Strings in Google
“industry” inurl:directory
“industry” inurl:links
“industry” intitle:directory
“city” inurl:directory
“city” inurl:businesses
“city” intitle:directory
Also, check out https://moz.com/blog/tribute-to-eric-ward which goes over "Link Strategies That Stand The Test of Time"
Correct, and yes the trust factor definitely makes sense to me. I just didn't know if anyone had a case study or experience of a business that wasn't doing much SEO, decided to get BBB Accredited, embedded the BBB badge on their website, and then saw a change in rankings due to it.
I have never used the BBB to search a business either and think that it may be more of a correlation than a causation, as a business that decides to get BBB accredited is also probably investing in SEO, a blog, other high DA directory listing, content marketing or a combination of marketing efforts that could be leading to high local rankings.
I think when you are looking at content for your blog, it is ok to have fun posts, staff highlights, etc every once in a while and it adds a personable feel to your blog, however if you are wanting to do a food blog with consistent posts being put on it, it should be separate as you don't want your website visitors confused about what you do or offer.
As far as search engine optimization goes, it shouldn't effect your rankings when doing just a post every now and then that is more fun or entertaining, however the vast majority of your posts should be industry-related and helpful. Doing the mini-food blog on a platform like blogger or wordpress, seperate from your website, would be a good idea for this in my opinion.
I would go with option 2, just update the URL, and then add a 301 redirect from old URL to new URL, so it doesn't cause any broken links. We have done this on our website and seen great results with updating it to include a target keyword.
For example, we had a URL- https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/, and then around December of this past year we decided to update it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/, in order to help rank for "ppc kansas city". We added a 301 redirect of course, to avoid any broken links or loss of page authority.
Our results from making this change (and added a little more content to the page) led us to move from position 16-19 on page 2 of Google, to now ranking in position 3-5 on page 1 of Google.
I have seen this before in Moz Open Site Explorer and the "Links" section of a Moz Pro Campaign as well. This appears to be an error and I believe can happen when Moz OSE counts a 301 redirect or a URL shortener (like goo.gl) as a linking root domain, but not as an External Inbound Link.
You are most likely still correct in your understanding if you were thinking that the linking root domain number is the total number of unique ".com's" that are linking to your website, where as the number of External Inbound Links are the total (according to Moz's data) number of links from all websites and pages, including all multiples on different ".com's".
Yasss! So the past few years I have been a die-hard Ahrefs fan to be honest. However, the new Moz Link Explorer is my new favorite tool for link analysis by far. Well done on this tool and the stout index as well Moz team!
Kate,
Sorry, I should have clarified, when I say external link I mean a link on your website page that goes to a resource or website outside of your website. For example, you can link to a plumbing tips resource website, a Wikipedia page that defines an uncommon industry term you mention, or perhaps the state website for California, California tourism website, etc. So it is on your website that goes off of your website, but if it is a relevant external link Google can give you a slight boost in rankings.
Building inbound links (links outside of your website that point to your website) naturally with the naked URL is a great way to go. If you have original pictures, videos, or creative web design, I am a big fan of utilizing content sharing websites like Behance, Ello, and Visual.ly to build links. You can also find some high quality directories that are non-paid that provide dofollow links; such as TopRatedLocal, Contractors.org, ResellerRatings, and Company.com.
Option #1 for sure. This way you get a link and hopefully traffic from them, while they are still able to reference your content.
Hard to say without seeing the website. I would recommend having 500+ words on any page you want to rank on Google (may have to have more depending on competition). Sometimes there can be a misreading if you have written content with a widget that displays on a page vs having it directly on the specific page's content.
It is also important to remember that while the content length is important, I would argue content quality and content depth should be more of a focus. Check out this recent Moz post- https://moz.com/blog/influence-googles-ranking-factor.
I know SEMRush and Bright Local can do this, (not sure about Moz Pro?).
Check out the 14 Day free trial from Bright Local at https://www.brightlocal.com/local-search-rank-checker/, I believe they are the most affordable option, that I know of at least.
A good way to manually check Google Maps rankings for free (although time-consuming) is to sign out of your gmail/google account, then within Chrome, open an Incognito window, which you can do by pressing the three dots at the far right of your extensions section. Do the search from the Incognito window and you can Block or Allow Google knowing your location once you do the search.
Great predictions Miriam! I also hope Google cracks down on fake Google listings and/or listings used for "selling leads" within an industry. 100% agree with your 5 new year tips and predictions, if I had to add a sixth one, i would say....
6). On-Site User-Experience Metrics. I am predicting that site user metrics such as bounce-rate, time on site, and pages viewed will become more of a ranking factor in 2018, and compared to your competition may lead to more SERP volatility than we have seen. Also CTR from a SERP on your listing may be more focused on, so write Meta Titles not just with your Keywords in mind, but with being compelling enough to receive clicks as well. My recommendation, get Google Analytics installed if you don't already to keep track of a lot of this website metrics! Heat Mapping Software/Plugins will also help with U/X improvements.
Great question Swendt! Linking from your blog to your product page or other blog post is a great SEO practice, as long as it is in moderation. People tend to disagree on what that is, but I've seen having 2-3 internal links, as well as 2-3 external links in a 500-1000 word blog post be a great SEO benefit.
Internal linking is an often overlooked SEO strategy that can help distribute authority to page's you want to rank on Google and be visited when someone is on your website, just make sure the links are relevant, helpful, and that you don't have so many that it hurts the user's perception of your blog quality.