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I would ignore what other people are doing.  The charity sector is not always known for it's super-efficient and industry leading digital marketing activities.  So although the advice that John Mondt gives is sound for many industries, he is right to include the phrase 'what's working' for them.  So don't just copy their link profile or go after links before carefully analysing them for quality and their potential to be relevant in the future.  I work in Dentistry and copying other dentists link profiles is more likely to land me with a penalty than take my DA anywhere special.

Charities tend to be filled with people (at the senior levels) who have pretty impressive backgrounds and CV's.  Also you're in a very strong position because charities are good for the world so no matter who you contact, you're always going to be coming from a place of positivity and wanting to make the world a better place.  This is huge.  So I would round up everyone at your charity on the board who belongs to any university, trusted organisation, professional body or other trusted domains and reach out to them for guest posting ideas and shameless plugs of your organisation.

Link building for a non for profit is about just putting together a great pitch about how you're helping the world and then asking for help to spread the word.  Don't be afraid to be totally authentic and honest about wanting to improve the visibility of your website (short of asking for links which is against the guidelines)

Hope this helps.  But I was looking at a big charity just now and there are CBE's on the board, people with honorary degrees from universities and people who are members of huge and trusted organisations.  So as a linkbuilder, i'd reach out to those people and put together a strategy of how to leverage those relationships to gain links.  Or in this case 'do PR' as white hat linkbuilding and PR are now pretty much synonymous. (used to say not synonymous, sorry, PR and linkbuilding are the same - that's a typo)

hope this helps.  PS: I love helping charities so maybe hit me up and I could help you in more detail. Obviously i'm not going to charge you but a mention from a charity website is always a great thing for us.  We just did a huge campaign for international women's day that bumped our DA three clear points.  Win!

You're playing a really dangerous game here.  The google algorithm maps the blogs to find correlations between who's posting on them and an unnatural link profile.  PBNs are in direct breach of the rules so you may get a great result but you also might get a penalty and be wiped out.

So it's up to you.  Sometimes this sort of thing works but you're playing Russian roulette with your revenue stream.  How much revenue are you making from google? Is it your only channel?  Can you afford to lost the entire channel for - say for example - two months while you try to undo the manual action for webspam?

I've seen the sophistication of the PBN products google uses first hand and it's not something I would want to mess with.  but if you are wanting to make a quick buck and aren't worried about the long term viability of Google as a channel then go for it.  But be aware that over-optimising anchor text is the sort of thing that will get google looking more closely at your site and then with the fact that the PBN has signals that show it's a PBN and then you'll wish you'd not ever tried to cheat.

This is effectively cheating. It's black hat. So proceed at your own risk.  Maybe you need to go over and ask the folks on some other forums where they are more into this type of stuff.  They will know how to get the best short term gains from things like PBNs.

No way.  Avoid at all costs.  Directories are completely useless for linkbuilding in 2018.

DIRECTORIES DO NOT WORK IN 2018 - you will harm your site. Directories are not the same as local citations.  Citation building is very important for a new site and you can do this manually with Moz Local or Get it done for yuou by Whitespark.  They are pretty cheap and do a decent job.

And I'm not just being a nay-sayer I've actually tested about 30 out all pointing to homepage and deep pages inside my site and it harmed them or didn't make any difference at all.  They were mostly paid and all used to have a good reputation but it's a bad strategy.  The only one that's remotely decent is called Joe Ant - that's showing up as a green light but it's referring no traffic at all so google's likely just ignoring it.

And in the future as things move on - more and more directories are going to get de-indexed and having links from de-indexed sites hurts your rankings.  I did my little test in January this year so it's bang up to date and I spent £1,350 on paid directories ranging from £5 a pop to £20 to some that were £250 and they were national and local and none of them worked. I ended up having to disavow them.

There are much better ways to get your first few links: Linkbuilding to stand the test of time and how to get your first 50 links

Also there's a great little tool called SEO Profiler - it's super cheap and has lots of bugs and it's pretty crappy compared with Moz or the big boys but I use it for three things: 1) top three position benchmarking, 2) it has a great schema builder that creates J-son and schema for you by magic and 3) it has this exhaustive list of 'starter backlinks' that is a great place to look for link opportunities that are nice and easy if you've got a new site or are starting out.

It's right what you say but i've seen some evidence that google is going even further now.  It's about establishing what are the doorways into your site from the serps.  Some people might be looking for just 'candy' and they may see your site in the serps.  But probably not since that's supremely competitive.

So the most efficient way I've found is to divide all the content up into 'categories' or topics.  So these could be toffees, mints, chews etc. Then you must take a view on what the user wants.  Do you think there are people out there who want to see pages about only hard mints with soft mints on another page.  Or have both of them on the same page. If you get too granular then you might fall foul of the new maccabees update that penalises for having loads of articles targeting keyword variations.

To give you an example from my business, I have veneers, dental implants, whitening and routine dentistry.  Then on each of those pages I have before and afters, prices, procedure, and pretty much everything on there using H2's and schema to pick up specific queries in blue as hyperlinks in the serps.

Comprehensiveness is very important. If I want my pages to rank they must include EVERYTHING users want to know about that thing. So for 'mint candy' i'll want to see hard, soft, sugar free etc etc.

Always be testing. I've had success incorporating reports and videos into the pages too.  So you could have a report about how your candy is made or a commercial from a mint candy company or whatever.

But most important is to model the topics of the high performing competitors and be comprehensive and helpful and answer the query. Don't worry too much about internal linking so long as the links are natural, use anchor text and obey your structure and hierarchy of topics.

My home page doesn't rank for anything. But we make millions of pounds a year from our Veneers, Implants and Whitening pages. So maybe you need to focus less on the homepage.

Ok so you have two avenues here and people focus usually on one and not the other.

I'm a local dentist and struggled with the map pack.  I find it easy to rank number one for terms with a local identifier like 'product+location' which always trigger the maps.

The problems you might encounter are that the maps are great but they take the user to the home page.  This is problematic because I'd actually rather them be taken directly to my product page and not have to navigate around to find what they're looking for.  So maps are great but they do have this annoying limitation in UX and I find from looking at user feedback from recordings (like from Hotjar) that they can get lost and pogo back to the serp - always bad.

The other limitation is NAP-W.  So it can be worth getting your NAP absolutely squared away - which it sounds like you have.  But I got some great results from doing an audit with a company called whitespark who basically do it for you for a few hundred dollars.  Moz also have a great tool but it's not working here in the UK at the moment.  However, my NAP was in a mess so you may well not need these although it's a small investment and got us from 7% to 14% in the maps (out of thousands of positions) so that's a LOT of map 1-3 positions.

So places you must go are:

1. INDUSTRY SPECIFIC (like universities and local clubs and trading links with local businesses and local bloggers)  Bloggers want money and for hardly anythign they will publish nice advertorial that will move the needle.

2. LOCAL - It has to be local.  google 'Hyper local citations' for some examples.

3. BUSINESS - and this is the one people neglect.  You sell a product but you are also a business so get in touch with local business groups, start up organisations and write articles about business.  Then you have two sources of links.  Your product and general business stuff too.  This is how I've had some massive successes.  Local newspapers will write about small businesses and the people and stories behind them.  Use this.

Avoid signing up to rubbish local directories.  They don't work.  I read in Search Engine Roundtable - (which is reputable) that there are still some good directories out there but I ran them through my systems and they are all absolute rubbish.  I respected that company and really lost a lot of respect for them when they were touting these crappy listing companies.  Probably paid. Who knows.

Remember NAP and directories are different.  You need to be listed in relevant citation sources like local newspaper directories for businesses but the old web directories are a waste of your time and money.

If you have professionals working in any of your client organisations get them to write for their university alumni - if they went to uni in their city this will skyrocket your local pack presence.

But if you are new it can just take time.  So be patient and don't try anything shady to try to game the system.  Google is getting smarter and smarter and what worked even 6 months ago will get you penalised after the huge quality and link algo changes that happened in March, April and possibly in May too (of this year)

Also remember link building cannot be done without building relationships with real people.  It's essentially now PR.  Doing real things with real people in the real world.  Gone are the days of basement linkbuilding.  Use your brain not the tools. And don't copy other sites because what they did 9 months ago might now be banned in the eyes of google. Sure model their successes but don't blindly follow their strategies - they might be working with less reputable agencies and you'll do yourself harm.

Yeah I agree there.  It's going to rival those other tools.  Ahrefs is kind of king of link metrics but I can become lost in the data and sometimes lose sight of all the other stuff I should be doing apart from link-building.  It's almost addictive and I find myself obsessing over the metrics that sometimes don't have an impact on my rankings.

The most impressive thing about Moz is the position tracking which is 100% accurate for me on a local and national level.  I'd love to see historical positions displayed in a chart.  Not sure whether I can do that in Moz already.  But it's really useful to look back at changes you've made and try to correlate them with position changes rather than just see this week's snapshot.  There's a tool called SEO profiler that does this but the problem is the positions are always wildly inaccurate! - so it's a great feature that's sometimes useless if it's not accurate. I'm thinking of jacking in my subscription to them if they can't even get the positions right. Also SEM Rush is showing all my rankings wrongly at the moment.  It's nothing like forecasting my traffic accurately so I figure It's also not forecasting my competitors positions accurately either.  I'm frequently going back to google and doing the work manually to see what the real positions are.  Moz does this very well. Always 100% bang on.

And then this Q&A forum.  Which is worth more than all the tools in the world put together IMO.

NOT  is the answer.

Directory submissions are the WORST way to spend your time and resources.  They just don't work. And I'm not being 'holier than thou' because I actually tried them out last year (because I test everything and have a fairly small site so thought it might work) but it didn't.  There was no benefit and the directories I used were all paid with links to internal pages.  It took me a couple of days (+ about $500) and after a month I ended up having to disavow most of them and then the others kicked me off after 6 months wanting more money!  It's a total joke.  Run by total jokers.

Even automating it is a very bad waste of time.  **If you're a local business and are actually talking about 'citations' then that's a different thing altogether. ** But directories died years ago.  Many of them aren't even in the index or google has algorithmically discounted them because they have literally too many links spread too thinly so each link carries a tiny proportion of juice.  And the ones that are in the index come back with very high toxic score in SEM Rush and AHrefs with the exception of one called Joe Ant.  That one is showing green lights.  So I didn'd disavow but i've not seen one single referral from them.

I also noticed an ENORMOUS increase in spam following my little test.  I get hundreds of submissions to my forms and site and even people calling.  I've also seen a significant increase in strange black-hat links added to my list.  This is not 'negative seo' but the scrapers and black hat people crawl the directories to find people still dumb enough to pay them (like me!!!) and see them as easy targets for other dreadful SEO products.

Avoid. Avoid. Avoid.

Absolutely correct.  Google disregards TM and R symbols so use them when you legally should for yours and other products and it will not impact your exact match SEO efforts.   I think they have a small effect on CTR in the SERPS because they show you mean business and are more professional and are also being professional when using the hard won TM's and R's of other brands (which is a legal requirement and you can get into trouble for not using them)

Did you know that if another brand doesn't have a R or a TM then you can mention them directly in your adwords too?  Just a fun fact.

This is a great challenge you have here because it's 100% achievable. These are some things to consider- it's not exhaustive by any means.

1. Set up your google my business profile and get it all optimised with the right categories & seed the Q&A part and offers with a good introductory offer and some frequently asked questions

2. Watch this: https://moz.com/blog/local-businesses-need-websites

3. Seriously consider changing the name of your company to London Removals - as this will really really help things.

4. Start collecting google reviews (not from the same office as they won't show up)

5. Add Schema markup (local business) in the datahighlighter

6. Set up all your keywords and content inside Moz or your favourite SEO tool and start watching the rankings

7. Optimise your homepage with London removals in the name of business, permalink, first paragraph, one of the H1's, meta description and image Alt.

8. Start writing content based on the main local keyword topics.  Don't focus on keywords but on one topic for each article.  Think about creating the best article you can that exhaustively covers that topic and make it 10X better than the current one on google.

9. Speak to your customers and find out what information they want to know and write about it

10. Set aside two hours a day learning from Youtube and Moz about SEO strategies and possibly speak to or follow Joy Hawkins, she's the queen of local search (sorry other queens and princesses of local) I learned local SEO in about 8 months this way and was able to rank locally for everything in Liverpool.  London is different.  Perhaps you should focus on a London Borough to make it easier.  So call the business Removals North West London or Removals South London.  There are enough people in one Borough to give you plenty of customers and make the job of SEO a little easier.  Remember that the most important signal is LOCATION!.  So you'll do much better being mega removals Westminster or Mega removals Southwark etc.  I'd say the volumes are easy enough (about 500/month for removals north London) Then once the business grows you can buy another unit in another postcode and rinse and repeat.

That should give you plenty to be going on with. Good luck!

If you can do that then I'll be able to save about $500 straight up a month in my subscriptions budget and spend MUCH less time between tools.  SEO heaven. That about sums it up.  And more time to focus on making my people happy and helping my patients smile. 

If you want to outsource, delegate or abdicate link building (don't worry we all secretly want to have nothing to do with it because it's hard) then hire a PR.  That's going to get you MILES further than any of this stuff.  That's what we did and now we've been featured in the news all over the place and on tons of really high quality sites.

Linkbuilding is now synonymous with PR.  It's not done from basements and dark rooms at 4am and you can't do it with shady tools. If you want a tool then use an outreach tool to automate your relationship building with the sites you want to feature on.  Or just hire someone to 'do PR' not to 'build links' because the people i've hired to 'build links' have been using as much black and grey as white hat techniques.  Everyone wants to cheat and if you do then you are fighting against Google.  Or here in the UK we say 'biting the hand that feeds you'.

If you can get a good relationship with one of these link-building specialist agencies and have the confidence and insight to know when they've sold you a pup - and ask them to fix it for free - then you can get somewhere.  But its expensive andeasier just to set a strategy, hire someone and execute.

I've just come back from a forum where we were discussing this exact thing.  It was suggested that older sites can have a multitude of sins and google will overlook them or ignore them until a big event (such as an https switchover) where google take a closer and more comprehensive look at the site and it's pages and backlinks.

A few people said that they were not immediately hit by panda and penguin type issues until they did some big event on the site and it came under scrutiny from google.

This was only anecdotal stuff but I see tons of sites with legacy black hat and grey hat SEO that are still ranking and seem to be doing ok. It was also suggested that links are just less important these days and so long as the page is getting good implicit user feedback signals like time on page, users clicking around and engaging with content then things hold out for longer.

Just like it takes time to get a pages authority and position up it also takes time for it to diminish.  So in the long term you need to correct these issues or you'll gradually (or sometimes quickly) get either a penalty or an algorithmic suppression of your page.

Newer pages will never get ranked with this type of profile and the standards for indexing newer pages are much higher now.  So just because it's not causing problems now doesn't mean you don't need to get it fixed or at least start adding pages that are in line with the latest stricter quality guidelines.

Hope this helps.  I know it's not really an 'answer' because it's a very tricky issue.  I can see how these ideas make sense though. If you were doing things that used to be ok and now are not ok, google is going to be less likely to hammer you like if you tried to launch a brand new site using clearly banned practices.

Yikes.

Check this out.  It's a poll on Barry Schwartz' site.  They have some more grey and black hat peeps over there (especially in the comments) and they are saying that huge numbers of dodgy backlinks aren't affecting them at all.  I really believe backlinks are becoming less and less important unless they are really powerful and relevant ones.  It's almost like Google is ignoring this whole swathe of bad sites and the algorithm just doesn't take a blind bit of notice.  But when a real person does a quality survey then this type of thing:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Sending automated queries to Google

is going to get you a penalty. (I pasted them straight over from google)

Hi Allen,

90 visits a day for 600 pages is only 0.15 visits a day for each page.  That seems to me to be quite low volume.  Have you considered that the pages may not have been indexed because google doesn't consider them to be high quality?  Even 90 visits a day for 120 pages is averaging 0.75 (less than one) visit per day.

Perhaps consider the overall quality of the site and look at the volumes of the keywords that you are targeting and see where more volume could be found?  Google will consider less than one user per day as a low quality site and that would be a huge concern of mine.

Perhaps consider aggregating pages together or combining them to send signals of comprehensiveness to google and that you're answering specific questions.

March has seen some huge google updates and this could also be causing havoc on your site as these updates are based on quality.

Have sites overtaken you in your rankings and are you on page one for your particular topics and keyword groups?

Send some more information and I'm sure we can help more.

All the best,

Ed.

All I know about this is that Google HATES spam and they have a new(ish) system - read about it here - whereby the distance between authority websites is measured in a sort of distributed way using lots of servers and loads of stuff too hard for my brain to fathom.  It's worth a read though because he puts it into simple language too.

The upshot is that your site can now be better ranked if it is 'closer' to an authority site using this system. Now I would bet you a million pounds that this works positively (so I get a link from a small but authoritative site and will get a bump in my rankings) but it also works negatively - to reduce webspam.

So - and I'm totally hypothesising here - I'd say getting yourself links from high spam sites will get you labelled as a spam site too.  And this is not a crazy jump of the imagination when you look at the work google has done getting rid of PBN's and groups of sites circle-jerking (sorry can't think of a better word here) themselves to the top of the rankings.

So I'd stay as far away from spam as you can.  Even if the other stats are good stats.   GOOGLE HATES SPAM and they are going to rid the entire web of it one day.  So you're possibly polishing the brass on the Titanic with these links.

But test it.  I would worry that I might get labelled permanently in that spammy place though.  It's not like you can disavow and just have everything return to normal the next day.  I think it's a very dangerous game.

Why don't you go after nice less spammy high authority and good sites for links?  That's just as hard or easy as getting the nasty ones on side surely?

But I'm not an expert here so if some good spam-experienced people could chime in that would be good.

Out of interest what's the site.  You can email it or DM it to me if it's private. I'll run it through Ahrefs, Rush, and a few more I have and see what they say.

I agree.  I have asked an agency to set it up for me and then I'm going to run it once it's set up with all the bells and whistles and fancy new adwords additions that i'm not familiar with.  Then once we have the targeting and bid strategy organised and optimised I will be free to re-write the ads.  I've offered to write each individual ad for the agency to save time and the budget they've given is more than fair to set it up with skill and aptitude for the correct keywords and all in the right ad groups etc.

I'm running exact match high traffic high position and then a before and after (we have the best before and afters of anyone) and cost (we have the best prices, payment terms etc and also best dentist and our qualifications etc. The emergencies idea is fantastic for me. And I can control that.  We are open later than all our competition and google in it's wisdom is putting us in position one in the maps when we are open for emergencies. Even above the national health service. So their algorithms are getting really, really smart now.  I've also marked up reviews for a 'reviews' ad set. because we have the best and most number of reviews. It's a ballsy campaign but I want to totally dominate and we have the budget.

Thanks for your advice. I love Moz.  You just can't get this level of insight anywhere else.

Hey EGOL,

thanks so much.  I really enjoy the community.  And answering the questions helps me learn more because there's never a right answer and it encourages me to be creative and think about my own site.  Also I want the T-shirt lol!!

I just came back from the SEM rush conference in London and was doing a Q&A for in-house users of their product.  It's amazing how much has changed really recently.  I'd be genuinely afraid that if I stopped engaging I'd miss something!  We have 32,000 users to our site now.  Pretty much all my learning has been from Whiteboard Fridays and Moz blogs.  I love the way this forum is never about gaming google like some others. It's all whiter than white hat.  That's the future of SEO.  There will be no black hats in a few years. It's going to be impossible to compete.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I must have read about 100 of your responses on here. You're prolific.  Are you from the UK?  It's Brighton SEO tomorrow?

I did a site migration from Http to HTTPS and saw no drop but google was big on making sure such transfers didn't create and problems so people did them.  They wanted to encourage it so gave us a little boost.  I saw no drop at all.  But have heard of HTTP / HTTPS % HTTP2 having problems with traffic dropping.  But usually this was an error that had been made somewhere.

OK so now I now that you are lettings that explains why so many pages.  Things should have improved but lately I am finding my pages are not getting indexed as fast as they were a month ago.  There really is a shake-up at google that is earth-moving at the moment.  Sensors and chatter has been 10/10 for almost a month now with rumours of new things happening on 17th April.

I'm not one of these people who is glued to webmaster world but I'd bet it's things out of your control that have affected it or delays in indexing that will get picked up in a bit of time.

Try re-requesting all your crawls.  I know what's obvious but it got mine finally indexed.

I'd say you're way to close to your products here and need to start asking your customers.  For example, the stoves in the picture - to me - are all the same stove.

I have the same problem with dental products.  Are 'All on Four Implant retained Dentures' the same 'topic' in the eyes of google as 'Dental Implants' and then are they going to internally compete with my dentures and Implants pages?  It can be a nightmare and the way around it is with testing and also taking a more global view of things and taking a step back from the technicalities.

People don't want a 'black trim 85/1 wood burner.  They want to feel warm and have a beautiful addition to their home that makes them feel aspirational or romantic or happy.  This is what you sell.  Not technical specifications. People want simplicity not complexity and they want benefits not features.  So bundle it all up into one page with some really evocative and emotionally charged sales copy about how having a stove like this is going to change their hoes and make their lives better.

From a technical perspective there's going to be a hopeless amount of internal competition that's going to be depressing your rankings like crazy.  So experiment with bringing the pages all together and having variations available on page.

I got some headphones the other day and there were about a hundred variations of colour, size, type of ear bud and it was all just available to me with dropdown menus that brought up an image of what i'd chosen.  People don't want to have to navigate around from page to page to page to find what they want.  They want to get the general picture and then decide on the specifications later.  If I listed everything we did at our dental practice do you think that would make patients want to buy?

How about a root canal with a .0012/in burr and chlorhexadine irrigation? High-speed or low-speed handpiece? Would you like a rubber-dam with that or take your chances with a file in the windpipe??  Perhaps you'd like me to irrigate with hypochlorite instead?

OK i'm being silly but this is actually kind of like what you're doing here.

Keep it simple. Merge the pages together and watch your rankings creep up for all your high traffic high purchase intent keywords. This (as you say) helps with links and also helps users stay on one page for longer and it's this implicit user feedback like time on site, scroll depth and bounce rate that google is looking at.

When customers get lost and bounce this also MASSIVELY depresses your results. i see it with my visitor recording software. and it's a very strongly correlating ranking factor.

I'm not ecommerce but i've had HUGE success figuring out which topics google considers to be topics and which are separate and the only way you can find this out is with testing it. For words and search terms it's easy.  If you type in "wood burner cost" and "wood fireplace price" comes up in bold in someone's meta description then google considers them to be the same.  So price is the same as cost etc. Sometimes that can be a good place to start.  Also do a search using site:www.yoursite.com wood burner and see how many pages come up.  If it's hundreds then you've got internal competition problems. Use more and more granular searches like this to determine if you're getting stacking or competition or even cannibalisation in the SERPS (which is getting filtered altogether)

Hope this helps!

Can we talk about Rand's book here? Just delete me mods if it's not appropriate or interesting to anyone.

But I thought it was great - no they're not paying me - it put me in the mind of my absolute fave book of all time 'Trust Me I'm Lying' by Ryan Holiday.  I mean rand is nothing like Ryan Holiday but the style of complete and utter openness and fearless criticism of what is bad in the world really gave me a lot to think about.

I can highly recommend it.  And to be honest (not transparent - those are different) to be honest don't be tempted to give up in the first few chapters thinking it's a rags to riches personal story.  Because it develops into a real goldmine of technical advice and the sort of advice that you can't get anywhere - emotional advice.  Being a founder is hard and I'd say it's well worth a read (or listen in my case)

You'll be surprised if you've only ever seen him on Whiteboard Friday.  It's like a different rand altogether.

What did you all think?  I remember some [person] trolling him once for some talk he gave at an SEO conference saying 'stick to whiteboard Friday - nobody wants to know about your life'  But you really do.  Because you need to know that your business is different from everyone else's.  I'm an optimist and think that in marketing the next decade is going to be the decade of authenticity.  And this is a great place to start.

_Moderator's Note: This question has been edited to comply with Moz's TAGFEE Code and Community Etiquette Guidelines. _

There's just too many things it could be and I'd also be scratching my head.  Maybe I'm getting paranoid listening to conspiracy theorists but sometimes things seem to be intentionally obscured so there is always ambiguity about the workings of the system.

It's enough to drive you insane but whenever in doubt just turn to thinking up a great new topic and writing a great new article that people will want to read and engage with and that might earn some decent backlinks.  I swear if I spent as much time doing that as I do trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm then I'd be lots happier and more successful

There was a person last night from a major price comparison site here in the UK with a very good reputation.  She told me that they had been engaging in successful black hat tactics until very recently. Like April 17th 2018 or around the time of 'Fred'

She said she was terrified to move because it felt like a house of cards about to collapse.  I just didn't know what to tell her. It's the same here.  What is your clients view of it?  Do they accept responsibility for the shaky foundations? Have you discussed the position they're in?  I'd get them to agree a strategy and make sure it involves the risk of losing rankings in the name of clearing the decks for future development and nail the financial risks associated with a drop in traffic.

Optimising for search will create organic traffic - this is 'owed media' - the benefits ow owned media are that it's always there so long as you keep optimising.  But a high ranking page can generate lots of revenue on autopilot for many months and years for just a couple of days research and writing time.  The downsides of this is that you have to be a real expert in your field or have done so much research that you can write like one and know how to optimise to get the high rankings that will generate the traffic and revenue.

Organic is not immediate.  It might take a month to get your domain authority up to a reasonable level through link-building and then each page might take a week or month to get onto page one and then after a bit of tweaking to position 1-3 (where the money's at.)

Paid is different - it's immediate.  You don't own it you pay for it.  It's someone else's system (ad words or Facebook) and you're buying their advertising space.  The benefits of this is it can yield instant returns and is extremely flexible so you can run flash sales and offers etc.

There is a huge amount of research to suggest that the long term benefits and ROI or ROE or ROMS (or whichever metric you go for), of organic far outweigh those of paid.  Because when you turn off paid media it's gone.  Whereas you can't turn off organic, it's evergreen and the traffic just keeps coming.

If your questions is more about which keywords to use, traffic ones or money ones then this depends on how your site operates.  But always have money in mind if you're running a business or helping someone else with theirs for a fee.  The highest bid PPC keywords are clearly the ones that are going to generate more conversions and money.  Because the huge google marketplace has decided that for you in a billion ways. So if it's a service business and there are people bidding on '[service] cost' then write an article about cost, price comparisons or what people are actually paying for inside the product (is it research (pharma) or the actual materials (jewellery) or the skill of the creator (art) - so that you rank for cost/price.  Or even just put the cost on there. This is something lots of B2B companies don't do - and it's a conversion killer.  People want to know how much something costs.  Like at least a ballpark figure.

Or if you make your money with the ads network then go you may wish to go after the high traffic keywords and get the traffic so that you get paid more per ad impression. I like to go for both traffic and money.  Why limit yourself to one or the other?  And with traffic comes authority and lots of other benefits, you may find that a bigger site with more traffic is like a snowball and starts attracting links so you can rank better for the money terms too.

But start small. Everything starts from nothing.  And there'll be niche keywords with moderate traffic and low competition and commercial intent that you can rank for to kick things off.

That's a difficult question because it's not 100% clear whether you're asking about paid vs organic or traffic keywords vs commercial intent ones.

Hope this essay helps though. Feel free to ask again if i've misunderstood.

i thought this too - about the two metrics.  But one is much more accurate than the other so even though it hurts me in my heart to have lost a few DA points - it's the more accurate metric and I'd rather see the better picture so I can allocate resources better.  For example some of my competition who are right up snapping at my heels in the serps have now got a higher DA than me and that means I'm not not looking at improving on site so much as looking at their link profiles and trying to discover where that linkjuice might be coming from.

Just think of it as two sets of data, one old (and not as accurate) and the other improved (and more accurate) so you ignore the old in favour of the new.  I'd expect lots of backlash from webmasters who are overly reliant on links and DA which are themselves becoming less relevant in comparison to user experience, 'searcher task accomplishment' and trying to order your link hierarchy to work with the intricacies of rankbrain to avoid internal conflict and make sure google understands your pages with data markup.  All these are bigger on my priorities list than links but links are always there in the background as something you need to focus on but in a real world PR type of way more than ever now.

Plus some of the other tools I use have just lost the plot entirely since the latest algorithm shifts. They have become almost obsolete. I won' name names. unless you want to hear my experiences. I don't think that's professional to do in public. but email me (on my profile)  Because I've been all over the latest changes and have been intimately involved with a few other tracking, link monitoring and competitor analysis companies and their own little updates and betas.  They seem to be struggling with a whole load of stuff at the moment - especially determining the quality of links.

haha yeah it sucks on the mobile!  I like answering questions on my way in to work on the train and they are full of typos and mistakes because it's so tiny!

You need to use the disavow tool in google search console.  I keep trying to attach a link but it's not letting me today for some reason.  Just google disavow links and read how to do it from the google webmaster forum and google manual and then go into search console, upload your file of bad / spammy links and submit.

Piece of cake. Don't panic though.  Make sure you use the tool carefully and come back if you get stuck with anything.  How do you know it's a competitor?  Have the links appeared overnight? you can't find out who's doing it usually (without a lot of wasting of resources) but google will keep the data for the future and sometimes bad links won't cause you any harm at all.

But other times they'll get you a penalty so get the disavow file in as soon as you can.

Great advice here, I'm with casey on constant updating and that's a solid article from Herb.

But for me you're asking the wrong question.  Sure updating content is great but you should really be testing it.  So test meta descriptions, H1's and other elements using a tool (there's this great keyword tool I believe it's called MOZ lol - lots of chat about that lately - they've really made some great changes.)

But in the interests of openness I also use SEM Rush and GOOGLE  that's the best keyword tool out there.  Just get googling and see what sorts of articles are overtaking you and model them and make better versions.

Having a young kid (congrats) means you're tired and creativity is really hard when you're tired and stressed - even for very creative people.  So model the articles of others and use the keyword suggestions and volumes as a guide.

But always be testing and tweaking.  Add just a paragraph and revisit and change up some words and phrases and keep it fresh. Use the date in the Meta Description.  CTR in the SERPS is really important and If I see 2018 up there i'm going to click on it.

Don't just add '2018' to everything though because google will catch you out. you actually need to add some contemporary stuff in there and it will revitalise and refresh the content.

Also remember that there have been lots of changes at google lately. So your drop in traffic might be external ranking factors bumping other sites up because google can understand them better and is better able to get good user feedback from Chrome.

Also be granular about it. Ask yourself of each article, "does this answer the question?" Is it up to date and is it correctly optimised using the keywords that are coming up in your research.

The best SEO tool in the world is the 100 billion neurons sitting on your shoulders.  Use that tool first and foremost

I've run some tests on this and the header is the best and quickest to index place to put your microdata. It seems to overrule widgets (such as review widgets) and can be placed inside GTM to reduce the speed cost of the code on your site.  Using the data-highlighter is also a great way but only covers specific schema topics.

The content is a bit thin.  There is no real substance and all google (and users) see is basically a list of places to stay and then a load of tripadvisor reviews.  There's almost more outbound links than words on the page.  You need to beef up the content if you want it to rank.  Why do you say 'it should be ranking' have similar pages like it ranked before?

There has recently been a great deal of 'quality updates' all throughout the first part of 2018 that could potentially be affecting a page like this.

Thanks, this is a great strategy. I'm thinking chopping the article up and repurposing it for different audiences is the way forward.

Those pages have been deleted for a reason so rather than redirecting to a page that's not relevant or one that's the main category page why not just get rid of the link?  this will increase the link equity of the good links coming from that page that go to places that users want to go to.

Certainly when someone leaves you need to redirect 'Job title' to the new owner of that job title.  That's what users will want. But sending people around in circles on your site is pointless and will potentially cause them frustration and to leave. If you're trying to find more info and you end up going 'up a level' and not to a deeper and more detailed level then that always makes me bounce because I figure the website can't answer my question or give me the info I need.

Think about the user.  Pagerank sculpting is dead. But it's still important to make sure there is always a path for a user to follow to get the info they need.  If there is not then delete the entire sentence and the original link.  It's only going to help strengthen the link equity flow throughout your site.

Simplify - don't complicate. That would be my advice. And remember to ask for a crawl of the updated page and it's direct links to get a quick index and see whether it helps your pages rank.

You don't necessarily need links to internal pages from external sources.  That's not the reason they are not ranking.  They are not ranking because people aren't navigating to them (no implicit user feedback signals) or they don't entice people to click from their SERP entry. So look at updating the title tags and meta descriptions and doing what you suggest, where appropriate change the anchor text to the right thing and link to the right place or just delete the link.

I have a really useful 'notable alumni' page for great people who used to work at our practice but now don't.  You'll need their permission to keep them on your site and it helps if they had a nice page with good DA and PA that links with anchor text to - for example - a product or service.

But google HATES 404's so get rid of them all as soon as you can and watch the pages that remain creep up the rankings.

Google may well be responding to implicit user feedback.  So they gather data through chrome that people who want 24 stone chairs often also want 30 stone chairs. Rankbrain is trying to guess with it's AI that these people want the same things.

Why would you not want to be ranking for both?  Is it because you don't sell the 30 stone version? There have been some quantum shifts in ranking over the last few weeks and many sites are seeing their content being picked up in lots of search terms not mentioned anywhere on the page.  There's a whiteboard Friday about it somewhere.  Mods please could you help remind me which one it is for Becky?

I've noticed since writing about endodontics that Google is now calling us an endodontist.  This is a problem for us because it's illegal to call yourself a specialist if you're not one.  And I've not mentioned anywhere that we are specialists but the content is obviously as good as what an endodontist would produce.

So it's a tricky one.  I'm not going to de-optimise. Instead were hiring an endodontist! So perhaps a pragmatic solution might be to ask your client to get some 30 stone chairs in stock or see what the demand is like and get ready to order if people start asking for them.

It's not a problem, or if it is it's a great problem to have! Perhaps you could help me with more specifics on the background and why this is a particular issue for your client?  There are ways to de-optimise but I'd usually save them for different brands.  So Company X 25 stone chairs and 25 stone chairs both contain the words 25 stone chairs, so might intefere internally with one another, stack in the serps or depress results.  So in this case I'd just use the brand names and not the descriptors.  Or choose one word for one and another word for another.  But make sure google doesn;t consider those words to be the same.  You can test this by typing in something like 'E-cig' and if 'Ecig' is highlighted in bold in the meta descriptions of the results then google considers it the same thing.

But I'd not be concerned. This is a growth opportunity!

Haha lol.  My business does 40k Net Profit a month and Starbucks is still too expensive!

But seriously, I have had loads of fake reviews, mainly from our competitors but have noticed some random ones creeping in.  Not patients at the practice but instead very generic.  It reminds me of the webform spam which started off as porn / viagra and then became more insidious so as to get past my gatekeepers or get a click or response from the newer receptionists at the practice.  They have started saying nice things like "great article, I loved reading this, can I have an appointment please for whitening".  The girls on front of house always respond to them because that's how they are trained and they are too busy usually to spot the email address that's from a bangladeshi pharmacy (very common one) or some sort of mens health company.

I try to stop them but al my actual enquiries end up in the trash.  It's a nightmare.  But spammers are adapting.  They are not ever going away. The more tech we use to screen them the smarter they get.

I have had lots of success getting google to remove reviews though.  It's not as hard as everyone says if you have the data and stats and evidence for Google.

You can get them taken down by reporting them to google using the functions on their listings.  You need to be logged in and in your Maps or GMB.  The spam and fake people will often have exact match entries like 'New York Plumber' and they will be attached to random addresses that are not taken by other businesses with just a phone number.

You just pick a 'spam type' from the list and then fill in a little form.  The more details the better and you need to keep at it and possibly mark them a few times for different things so that google knows that they are spam and doesn't overlook them.

I've had dozens taken down like this in my city.  Also you can speak directly to google if you can find the right phone number and someone will sort it for you if it's more serious (like someone impersonating you) I have had reviews taken down like this, in one on one conversations with google employees in call centres.

Google are getting better at listening to genuine concerns and I think that all the complaining you hear from people abut how it's 'impossible to get reviews taken down' or 'impossible to get map spam removed' are just lazy or not doing it correctly. Or they have an agenda.  So if it's a genuine thing then you should be ok.

Sometimes they go over night, other times it takes a week but you can keep up to date because they email you whether your suggestions and complaints have been actioned or not.

Of Course! EGOL this is another extremely solid piece of advice.  I'm wishing I worked for a charity now. EVERYONE will want to publicise their giving so make sure that rather than them writing up their good work on their blog that you go over and take photos and write up the story and have that on your blog to say thanks to the business for their generous support.  They will 100% want to link to it.

You need to create the content on your site though for maximum effect.  It will not always get a link but it's a solid strategy because content is loved by google anyway.

EGOL can you confirm the position with linking in return for links.  I read somewhere at Google that it was a problem if someone links to you and you link back to them.  Because Google thinks you're just 'swapping links' and trying to game the system.  So be careful that not every inbound link has another link from you back to it because you may fall foul of a sort of algorithmic penalty.

Someone else will have to confirm this is correct though as I'm not 100% sure.

I'm not sure if this is the best practice but I use lots of images that are the same on different pages.  I will typically give them the meta tag optimising to that pages title.  This means I'm never going to rank in the images but that's not what I want, I want to rank for the other terms and sell stuff.

Are those pages linked together with hyperlinks with exact match for the other pages so google understands what they are.  SO I have a main Veneers page and then a composite veneers page and a resin veneers page.  I had to deoptimise composite veneers to 'composite restorations' so it didn't compete with 'veneers and the resin one to 'resin bonding' and now we're doing much, much better.

It's not canonical - that's when the pages are identical but with different URL's or tracking elements in the URL and you want google to just show one of them.  Have you tries consolidating them all into one page?  That's also something I've had huge success with.  Why should users be pinged around to different but very similar pages?  Just bang them all up on the same page?  People will scroll and use on-[age navigation and it might help with googles 'comprehensiveness signal' for that consolidated page.

Just a few ideas to test.

There's a really easy way to find out.  Type e-gig into google and then if the results have ecig in bold in the meta descriptions then google considers it to be the same word.

This is HUGE for my niche which is dentistry.  I recently made an article about dental crowns and wondered should I call them dental 'caps' because it says in another of the tools I use that more people search for dental 'caps' than dental 'crowns'.  In fact they are slightly different things but lo and behold, google sees them as the same thing because there's caps in bold when I type crowns and crowns in bold when I type caps.

Rankbrain is getting smarter and smarter and Gary from google I think released a video about punctuation and compound words.  So 'six year old', 'six-year-old' and '6 year-old' and '6-year old' are good ones to test it out on.  You can see what google thinks are the same.  Likewise using TM and R after words doesn't matter.

So if you write an article for E-cig and then another for Ecig they are going to cannibalise or internally compete with one another.  I had the same problem with '6 month smiles' and 'six month smiles'.  The best solution is to use the words interchangeably and write at the level of your audience and write NATURALLY.  Google is getting really smart and you need to forget the semantics and get down to writing detailed and really readable content that people want to spend time reading.

There are some great tools like 'Answer the public' and 'LSI graph' that can also help you find other words people are using.  they scrape from google so all the results are just what rankbrain and google is thinking right now.

Hey Justin,

This is a very cool product and you're killing it for ski hire queenstown delivery but I'm sure the real money is in the broader ski hire queenstown. or ski here wanaka.  You're constantly in the map pack which is great so there's nothing seemingly wrong with local (from a very short assessment and some googling) but for ski hire and snowboard hire your coming in at 3-5 position which is not great.  you need to be 1-3.

Have you tested splitting things out? When I type ski hire queenstown in the meta comes:

"Looking forski hireor snowboard hire in Queenstown?"

This tells me that google considers ski and snowboard hire to be different things.  So maybe a seperate page covering each and not trying to cram everything into your H1.

Ski Hire Queenstown & Wanaka | Rental Delivery | Snowboard Hire

Also have you tried splitting our QT and W as locations?  You'll need a physical location or depot or address in each town but that might help with location specific signals and you can save space by using a headline with something more in it.  Like:

Dependable, hassle free ski fitting and hire delivered to you in Wanaka (might just fit on) and then the same for Queenstown. This will make the H1 and SERP entry more attractive and get you to number one with the Click Through rate.

As for Meta descriptions, they take from the first paragraph usually.  So get your terms into there in bold or google will just pick them naturally up from the first sentence (or most relevant sentence) you write. They will often be much longer so write a sort of 'featured snippet' as your first paragraph on each page.

But i'd say you need to get more granular with the pages. Without falling foul of maccabees update.  So test it and see what happens.  If you look above you NZSki and Snowrental are just Queenstown. That could be the key.

Also do some keyword density and top ten benchmarking with these pages and see if there are other problems that you can fix.

God I wish I was there now. Has the season started yet?

Thanks Miriam - I'd not heard of that one - looks awesome.  Yes outsourcing is not good but if you've got the tools to identify when the agencies have gotten you bad links you can always ask them to get you some good ones to replace the bad ones.

I've done that with a few agencies and they are not bad people - they are trying to do a good job and develop their own good relationships and I think they get let down by bloggers and make mistakes just like the rest of us.  So when they do and you've paid them you must ask them to make it right for you.

But if someone put a gun to my head and said get me a DA70 link by tomorrow I'd collar one of my dentists or therapists or nurses and make them write an article about how great their university experience was and send it to the student newspaper or uni blog.

That's a truly marvellous way of getting exposure. Incidentally Oleg emailed me and our conversation was about product suppliers also.  He works with dealerships for example and there will be lists of dealerships on the main car websites.  Every product I use from the sunglasses patients wear to stop the lights getting in their eyes to the bubblegum-flavoured mouthrinse.  I've written to them all about how much we love their products and they'll 7/10 times bang it straight up on the blog or put a link in my signoff at the end of the review.

I'm actually starting to like linkbuilding.  It's like spreading love around and making people fee nice about their products in return for links. I'd do that all day.

Thanks for the endorsement Miriam. blushes  I love it here.

This has always been a bit of a point of contention for me too.  When you pitch an article then you can usually be pretty sure that it's going to attract one link - from the target.  You can get in touch with someone and basically make a little agreement that you are going to write for them personally and that the piece is going to be specifically angled and targeted to make their brand or product look good.  So the chances of getting it published in this way is high but you usually need a good relationship or at least an existing relationship with the site owner.

Then there's 'link-worthy' content that you put on your site and market it and hope it attracts links.  This is much more speculative in my opinion because it might not be good enough to attract links and attracting links will inevitably take time as it rises to a prominent position in the SERP.

However, you forget that using the first way has the added benefit that the person you write for will want to market the content you wrote just for them to their own partners, suppliers customers and friends etc. So they will 'treat it as link-worthy content' and so long as the link is a 'naked link' so https://nakedlink.com then wherever that article gets sent you'll get a backlink from that source also.

Thew first way is the best IMO because you do all the work of writing, are guaranteed at least one good link and are guaranteed one good relationship that can be leveraged in the future.  Then the difficult job of publicising the article is effectively outsourced to whomever you wrote it for because it's then in their interests to get it published on other websites to get more backlinks for them and you.  Sometimes they will do a poor job but sometimes a flurry of links will come your way as they market the piece to other sites.

This has worked for us to great effect in the past with success stories and case studies and great pieces of content about other brands we like. Almost like ego-bait.  I prefer to also build better relationships with the publishers so I can write again for them in the future if the content does well using different topics and attracting links to different pages on my site with anchor text (but don't overdo this, you'll end up with a penalty)

Sure there is a place for creating link-worthy content on your site and certainly if you're a Moz or a big brand this is the best strategy but for a smaller brand I'd advise creating the relationship, writing something with the target in mind that's personalised and makes them look good and something they will then want to 'trade up the chain' to quote Ryan Holiday - the master media manipulator.

So for smaller blogs it's number one and then when you're confident of a stellar article that's going to rank in 1-3 position then you can go for a skyscraper piece or a piece of 'linkworthy content' but it's much MUCH harder for smaller brands to do this and have it work.  You may see no results at all.

Tons of great advice here.  My responsive design drops the sidebar to below 5% of the average scroll depth so I binned it and nothing bad happened to pages per session or time on site or bouncerate or any of the important user signals.  I do have a site-wide 'BOOK AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT' button but people use it and we're killing it for emergencies.  It's one of our best catagories and is hotly competitive.  It's in red and replaced a trustpilot widget that was taking people off site.

One of the best decisions I ever made and I was tearing my hair out about site wide links messing with SEO but it didn't happen for us.  All the google results were 'no it's SPAMMY' - but they are just a load of content creators jumping on a bandwagon, here in the Moz community, as you can see, things are more nuanced.

So if it's relevant and helpful keep it.  Do you have Hotjar.  Allows you to see what peope are clicking on.

SWL and footer links Is one of those where spammy sites use it so people say - "ooh don't ever use it" - but you must not be that binary.  If it helps the users then keep it.  In my case hardly anyone used them so I dropped them in favour of one important button.

But an additional bump in pageviews and time on site because people are navigating around your site is absolute gold.  So you must encourage that.  but remember Cialdini's jam experiment.  More than three choices is going to induce decisional paralysis especially when you have only a second and the user is almost making unconscious decisions navigating. It's like driving.  You're not thinking what you're doing - it's automatic. So make is fluid and easy and watch the user feedback signals.

How about  "Learn more",  "buy something" or 'back to navigation'

Ok this is a seemingly simple little question that opens up an extremely large can of SEO worms.

The general rules are: Exact match is great.  But only if you can use exact match 'naturally' but there is nothing unnatural about writing "Best Chocolate Doughnuts in Chicago by Frankies" as your H1.   That way you've got exact match for chocolate doughnuts and best chocolate doughnuts.

But once you're into the copy then just write naturally.  You don't need to be thinking about the keywords more about the topics and how your varieties, doughnut chefs, materials, tools and techniques are all highly rated and better than the competition.

Make it authentic and write like you'd write it as though you were explaining it to a customer or even a bunch of people coming to have a look around your doughnut factory.

For example, if you are local you can put the local identifier int he URL and i the first line of the copy and in the H1 and it will still sound natural and not like you're keyword cramming.  If you struggle to sound natural, a great way is to say, visit our main page here: "Best Chocolate Doughnuts Denver" and then you've got exact match in the anchor internally too - which google still loves - no matter what they sometimes say.

From your example what's wrong with writing both?  Perhaps sprinkle some social proof in there when someone has said "OMG Best doughnuts in Denver" so you are backing up what you say.  Also i've found that there's ore to ranking the 'best' of something than just saying you're the best.  Google is looking at reviews, what's in the reviews and their velocity, diversity and exact match key-phrases. So get your reviews in order.

I never say something on my site I cannot PROVE with either social proof, our accreditations or our degrees and independently verified information.  Google is using the same things to verify who turns up on the maps and who is, in fact, the best.

Also I happen to think 'best' is overrated because people will research 1-5 if they are interested in really finding who is the best. But that's just in my niche and from the testing I've done.

Hope this helps,

Ed.

Hi there,

I think you're being too 'keyword focussed' here. Google doesn't rank keywords anymore it ranks 'topics'.  So the first thing I might do would be to remove the local identifier in your research (not on your page). So you might get more info about bike tours.  I mean they are going to be fairly and broadly similar wherever they are in the world.   If you're talking about a specific location then google will know about it if you make sure that the location is in the URL and in the H1 and mentioned in the copy etc.

But I see your point, Answer The Public and LSI graph have pretty limited choices about bike tours and they are mostly just relating to different parts of the world.  So go low tech.  Think 'what do my people want to know about bike tours in Provence?'

Answers I can think of off the top of my head might be:

Things to take with you, what to do in an emergency, great villas and wine stops, how long is a good day's biking without fatigue for different ages, families vs couples, what are the best bikes? bike racks for my car if i'm driving? What if I want to fly and hire a bike? Where are the best places to stay.

Google loves comprehensiveness and is like a library so it likes organisation.  So I'd be tempted to divide my site into main topics like couples, families, wine enthusiasts, fitness fans, stag parties, whatever are the general groups of people you have.  and then include subtopics like the best bikes, ways to travel, places to stay and other elements of the tour to suit each 'customer avatar'

Go low tech, speak to your customers, use your own expertise on the topic.  Tools are great but some of the best positions and number one position articles I have were just really comprehensive and well ordered, nicely written and super helpful pieces addressing a topic or group of people.  So like a customer avatar.

Then at the end of each page have an FAQ and that will pick up all the long tail keywords and questions that will appear in blue in the SERP and increase your click-through-rate.  Rankbrain is smart and you don't need to think about keywords anymore so much.

Just think about organising the content and covering all the bases with FAQ'a and you'll rank just fine.  Even with a low domain and page authority.  I have 'Veneers Cost' which is one of the most valuable dental terms imaginable in the number one position nationally here in the UK and I wrote the article before I knew a thing about SEO.  I went around my dentists and asked them all what they thought and gave a no BS assessment that helps people find out how much veneers cost and makes useful comparisons rather than tries to get them in for a consultation. Watch Rand's WBF on searcher task accomplishment.  That might help you. Good luck!

Yes you are right realises own confirmation bias  I love how new this all is, it's so interesting and I feel we're on the cutting edge of something. I'll get some more data together and do my own little study.    #alwaysbetesting

Thanks for that. How precisely do i do a redirect from Blogger?  I'm used to working in Wordpress? Is it in the tools somewhere or do I need to do it somewhere else?

Just bare links and natural links go to your homepage and give it power.  Then links from your homepage to other pages on the site contain the anchor text that tells google what the page is about.  Also sometimes external places will link to particular pages inside your website (deep linking) with anchor text or not.  Better with but it's becoming less and less important as time goes by.  I don't think we'll all be talking about anchor text or maybe not even about links at all in a few years time.

Some of my best pages are ranking number one nationally (for the whole of the UK) and they are super-high competition and they don't have one single backlink.  That must tell you something...

Likewise some of my pages I've done 'linkbuilding campaigns' and spent weeks and months building links to and it's not made a blind bit of difference.

Please remember to mark the answer as a good one if you like it. Helps me get recognition for helping out. And feel free to ask more questions.  I only started learning SEO in May 2017 and my site back then had 900 users a month.  Since then I wrote and optimised about 60 pages and we now get 32,000 users a month and our business has tripled in size.  Linking was the last thing on my mind.  Writing good content came first.  And proving to google that we are who we say we are with links from universities and professional bodies for the dentists.  those are the real power links.  You must have suppliers who will link to you in their 'find a distributer' sections?

This is a very complicated question and without taking a look into the site it's quite hard to diagnose whether you've made a mistake or not.  Maybe someone else can help with that aspect.

But what I can tell you is that there have been two recent and ground-shaking updates to the google core algorithm at the end of March.  Perhaps the first thing I might do is to rule out any connection to these.  Remember not everything you are doing is affecting your traffic.  Google and many other factors are constantly at play.  It's easy to get overly concerned that you've made a mistake when rankings fluctuate but oftentimes it can be nothing to do with you but to do with an external factor.

I would go and look around Barry Schwartz' site and also get some dates for the algo updates and see whether these correlate with the rankings to rule that out first.  It seems the recent updates were not penalties but helping quality sites rank so a sudden drop of the magnitude you're reporting would seem unlikely, but I would make sure that it's got nothing to do with the March Updates, read around them and rule that out first as a cause.

Sorry I can't be more specific/helpful.  Small fluctuations are normal but I've been seeing some BIG ones in March both positive and negative.  Take the stuff on SEO Roundtable with a pinch of salt.  Like the comments.  They are often from poor quality spammy sites and are all whining about rankings drops whenever google makes an update.  But what Barry says is usually spot on and I keep my ear to the ground to try to link big drops or bumps to what's happening over at Google.

In one well known Seo tool that I might or might not use i've got:

UK

27,000 for urticaria and 47,000 for hives

US

90,500 for urticaria and 165,000 for Hives. Then the mighty Moz estimates: 70,0000-118,000 for urticaria and for 300k-1.5m for hives.

But only medics will search urticaria - and they'll search it alot and be looking for academic articles and Hives is not a really solid commercial intent keyword - hence the huge numbers.

Google doesn't consider them the same thing - if you type in urticaria, hives is not in bold in the metas and similarly the other way around.  So put Hives (urticaria) as your H1 and then have H2's as all the subtopics, causes, treatments, procedure, cremes, risks, children, and then an faq with all the questions people ask 'how to get rid of hives' i get hives when sunbathing' etc and you'll rank on page one if it's a comprehensive and authoritative piece.  Don't worry about WebMD, government sites etc.  They are not written by medics so you can outrank them with better and more detailed and more clinically helpful information.

Also think of the things peopl will type if they want to see a doctor about hives or buy hives products.  These intents will be different too.

hope it helps! I've assumed a lot here. But don't worry too much about volume estimations.  Bigger volumes are diluted with crap so you'll just get lots of traffic and no sales and smaller, more intent focussed ones are where the money's at.  And if you get in the top 3 and answer some questions really well then you'll get the snippet for sure.

I have looked at lots of different plugins and wanted a recommendation for an easy way for patients of ours to upload pictures of them out partying and having fun and looking beautiful so future users can see the final results instead of sometimes gory or difficult to understand before and after images.

I'd like to give them the opportunity to write captions (like facebook or insta posts and would offer them incentives to do so.

I don't want it to be too complicated for them or have too many steps or barriers but I do want it to look nice and slick and modern.

Also do you think this would have a positive impact on SEO?

I was also thinking of a Q&A app where dentists could get Q&A emails and respond - i've been doing AMA sessions and they've been really successful and I would like to bring it into out site and make it native.

Thanks in advance

Hey you're from Derby!

We have probably raved together at the mighty Progress back in the day.

OK so this is some complicated stuff.  But do not despair.  You need to think about who is going to be buying your complicated stuff.  Is it procurement people on instruction from engineers? Or Engineers?  People who just need a pump for something?  That's your first job.  I know it sounds bone-headed and I hate doing it but put together some of those dumb 'buyer profiles' that they use in retail - with your whole team and a whiteboard.  Model your best clients. Ask them why they use you.

Don't be afraid to use complex words for complex people and if it's lay people reading then you're gonna have to dumb it down.  There are lots of big images of (quite frankly terrifying-looking) pieces of equipment on there and that might be great or not depending on who's reading and possibly buying.  Have you thought of vectors to simplify or possibly videos to just show what they do?  Close-ups of shiny things are great and can be shot on a phone.

Although it's B2B you still need to focus on the desired end result and get a little emotional.  B2B people are obsessed with features but in reality if I'm buying a pump I still want something - could be the best one, most reliable (so I don't have to keep calling out engineers or being embarrassed by my colleagues) or whatever.  Do these people want the cheapest or the most reliable?  What does your customer want?  Service?  you need to find out.  But the website looks ok if not a little complex.  But it's a complex thing you do.  I still think you can better order things though.  Think about structuring it in an elegant way and google will reward you for that.

But this site seems (with the greatest respect) a little all over the place. Look at the JCB website (believe they're down the road from you) it's more simple and modern looking and the technology and quality of what they're doing is better reflected in their site.

I used to build rockets and loved really techy sites where I could browse all the parts and o-rings and nozzles and telemetry units and recovery systems and engine grains but I look at those sites now and cringe.  And they don't rank anymore either.   You need to communicate a desired end result to the consumer whether you're B2B or B2C.

Look how the JCB site is similar to a B2C luxury car site - I believe that's the way things are going.  Also update the imagery.  Some of the pumps are exactly the same pictures. That's just lazy.  Take beautiful close up images of their parts and make videos of them doing what they do. I'll bet some of the stuff you have is really, really cool.  So show it off.

That would excite me.  And pumps can be exciting - anything can. I'm a freakin' dentist - so I feel your pain - no pun intended.

Good luck - this is pretty non-specific observations but ask away and let's all get it fixed.