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I've just done some more research here.  So Hekkpipe is your brand? And you're worried that people might not know that means it's a portable (and epic by the way) sort of 'picnic / skatepark / on the go hookah'.  But also you presumably don't want people thinking it's an ecig!

OK so now I understand a bit better I would certainly have Hookah in the name of the brand.  Not for google for people.  If you'd said right at the get-go My site 'portablehookah.com' or 'picnichookah.com' wants to do x, y and z then I'd instantly have known what it was all about.

Also - and very interestingly - I'm a dentist and have never had a dedicated page for 'Smile Makeovers' because it's broad and competes with all the elements of a smile makeover like implants and dental stuff.  But we've always ranked for 'smile makeover' because our URL is 'Smileworks'  Also "The Brace Place" was really hard to beat to the number one spot for 'Braces' but we did do it eventually.  So i'd say you're perhaps trying to solve the wrong problem here.

Unless you are going to do multinational advertising so that the whole world knows that Hekkpipe means 'Portable Hookah' then i'd put it somewhere in there so people know what they are looking for and looking at.  It's a great idea and a beautiful website but I literally wasn't sure what it was from any of your URL examples. SO why not spell it out for the masses.  People are not that smart and especially in my niche we have to spell out lots of stuff that is not always the most elegant and 'cool' but it gets the job done and people understand and when they understand they buy.

Like I'd want one of these now - if I hadn't given up my ecig in favour of gum. Think about expressing your brand in terms of what you are for and also what you are against. Sometimes it's useful to say what you are not so people can better understand what you are.  Does that make sense?  So you are for smoking and activities and healthy outdoorsy stuff and parties and being cool.  What you are not is a whole load of things that you need to spell out to the potential buyers  - who maybe hookah users or ecig users or just people who like cool stuff or they may be outdoorsy types or super-cool social types.

Yes have both.  You need to have a page for EVERYTHING you do if you are a services business like a plumbers.  I want to see all your employees smiling and looking like they aren't going to rip me off, I want their qualifications and how you are a great plumber and have been in business many years and I'd like to see every type of project that you do or a portfolio so I can see if you're the sort of plumber with one little van who comes and unblocks my drain or whether you can plumb in my £20,000 under-floor heating system.

I also need prices for everything and how you charge for things. Not just a 'oh we'll see when we get there' I want itemised and listed prices for jobs and then price tags on your portfolio jobs so I can compare them to mine.

I am actually looking for a plumber at the moment and their websites are dreadful.  No qualifications, no experience, no pictures of the team, no idea how big or how long the business has been operating and no trust factors.

The social proof (reviews) shouldn't necessarily be confined to one page.  Spread them out throughout your other content. Where you make a claim (we have the cheapest boiler systems) have a review where a customer has said, "and they're great value too" so I trust you're not just making it up.

Because people don't trust tradesmen - thee are huge trust issues - because in the past (and still now to an extent) plumbers will try to charge what they think you can afford or add charges on for remeasures and extra things 'we've found  in the system'.  You need to say that you can assess a system and thet sometimes the price will be more if there are unforeseen things.  But come on let's fact it how many unforeseen things can there be.  I give prices for everything and I'm a dentist - the human body is more unpredictable than a heating system.  So you need to bust this myth wide open with open and honest prices.  Don't just say 'we're open and honest' prove it with reviews that say these things about you.  And with prices attached to your jobs that you've done or broad, ballpark prices on your website for the type of work that you do.

Team and recruitment pages are also trust factors because they show that you are a growing business.  So have each team member and maybe a review where they've been mentioned by name as being especially friendly or efficient.

Then you'll be ahead of 99% of the other plumbers on the planet. Just like i'm ahead of 99% of the other dentists by using the same strategy of openness in a field where people are expecting pain and a big bill at the end of it.  Just like you.

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.

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.

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.

Th number one result here in the UK for Hookah is Hookah-Shisha.com.  They've been clever by adding in both names.  I'm a local brand so we are 'Smileworks Liverpool' because I want to pick up local Liverpool search. But If I changed my name to SmileworksDentistLiverpool I'm more likely to get a penalty than a bump in search.

There have been  updates going on at google back in 2015 and then recently making the title of the business containing the name of what you're selling less important and presumably in the future this is going to increase to fight spam.

It's a local thing though.  So if you set up a local business and call it Braces Liverpool or HookahLiverpool then you can get a quick win in the maps but it'll soon be filtered out.

So be natural and make the name of your brand descriptive but not stuffed with keywords. I would imagine that Hookah-shisha is a really great site with strong implicit user feedback and time on site and low bounce rate that answers users questions about how to buy, use and the issues surrounding Shisha and Hookah.

I'll also bet it was created before this algorithm tweak.  To me HookahHekpipe.com does sound slightly 'unnatural' so I'd have avoided it but am sure it's not going to make only a small amount of difference when compared with the quality of your content, UX, implicit user feedback and your link profile.  I'm seeing a trend towards google not 'punishing' so much rather they just 'ignore' and don't give you any extra love for adding the odd slightly unnatural sounding keyword in there. HekpipeHookah sounds more natural. Like a company here in Liverpool called 'The Liverpool Brace Place' or 'City Dental' which have the keyword in there but it's 'natural' sounding.

Everything you do now needs to be natural and done for the users and not the search engines. There are still basic must haves but even these are becoming less and less important as time goes on.

This is a tricky one.  Things I might consider are:

1. changing your link structure and the hierarchy of links and link equity flow throughout the page is no problem. So long as you use 301 redirects in the correct way and get things indexed in search console (there's a stricter limit on how many you can do in a day now but it's still a good 10-20 in my experience) then there will be no waiting around for the changes to take affect and rankings will not tank because of 301's like they used to.  The whole structure could be changed and reindexed inside a week.

2. Pages with the same copy near one another may still be competing unfortunately (the problem you're having) but it could also just be that the new pages are newer and haven't had the traffic and user data fed back to google yet so it's not ranking them highly.  Do a bulk DA check to find out.

3. I would certainly consider seriously looking at what your successful competitors are doing - if they are ranking then they have it the right way.  But don't blindly follow the competition without researching their pages and crawling them with tools like Screaming Frog to see the link structure visually.

4. "Self Storage Vancouver" as David said, should be your main page, at the top.  Then the local pages should all link to this page and they will make sure you're ranking for that term.  Then have the sub pages with their towns in the H1's, title and URL as you describe and mark t all up in Data Highlighter and make sure the GMB categories and locations are absolutely spot on with your NAP.  Like 100% identical. Use Moz Local for this.

5. The bounce rate on your main Self-Storage Vancouver page will be 0% because everyone will choose a city so this will really help with the UX signals - although google will know it's a sort of portal page.

Remember that google ranks 'entities' but it can take time for an entity to appear in local search, on the maps and on the SERP.  You'll be used to having things appear instantly with your main page with it's high DA, loads of traffic etc but when you open a new one you are still starting something new in google's eyes so you cannot expect the same results immediately.

Hope this helps.

Hi it’s just the phrase ‘key’ and it has a massive search volume but I imagine not much of it is buyer intent apart for people searching your brand who will be wanting to buy anyway. So it’s an example of how a tool can mislead because it’s saying you’re now number two for key and not number one so youve lost x% of that big volume. Because t I doubt there’s any real difference in analytics like you say. It’s also just flux, so you may well be back at number one by now. I see big flux for broad terms like that and the tools go crazy but analytics and search console don’t show any real differences. You‘ve some great positions that must be generating some nice conversios and roi. There are a lot of options and categories but that’s fine because you sell lots of different stuff. If It was me I’d look at the categories and just make double sure they are all organised in the best way thats getting the best UX. do you use hot jar? its been transformational for us and you can see where people are getting stuck or lost in the site with actual recordings. It’s not super expensive. i have no affiliation with them.

Nicholas is correct. Brackets, (r) symbols (TM) and full stops, Pipes (like these) | and commas don't affect SEO. I have extensively tested my titles in the SERPS for CTR and found that using Pipes as delimiters is higher converting than full stops or commas. But it all depends on what looks nice. For example, we have a great number one positions with the following titles: Remarkable Braces Liverpool | From £46.50pcm | Free Whitening It's the stars that draw attention to the free whitening with your braces Veneers Cost in 2018 | Veneers Price Comparison by Cosmetic Dentists This used to be 2017 and I recently updated it to 2018, Google loves dates because users want up to date information. Don't just update the date though without making actual additions and changes to the page though. This is possibly going to negatively affect things. Smileworks Liverpool | Affordable Private Dentist Liverpool Simple pipe looks clean and emphasises our affordability. 6 Month Smiles Liverpool | Unbiased Reviews & Price Comparison Comparisons of price is a great title to use and the & symbol is fine here so it doesn't go over the word limit for a title tag Fastbraces Liverpool | Orthodontist Q&A, safety, prices and reviews Q&A is fine here too. If you google a term you can see whether google considers it to mean the same thing by it beingf shown in bold in the meta descriptions in other results. So for example 6 month smiles is the same in the eyes of google as six-month-smiles and compound hyphens, brackets and all that good stuff will only serve to emphasise and increase CTR which is huge. Get testing. It takes a couple of days for a title tag to change but you can get meaningful data from search console for your click through rates (CTR) Be creative! There is a John Mueller Q&A on the topic and that's where I learned that google doesn't care or it takes these things into account if you use them naturally and in a way that is nice to look at in the SERP or that stands out. Hope this helps Good luck testing.

Yep that's smart advice.  but also be aware that sometimes the volumes, now that there is so much overlap in the semantic keywords can sometimes throw you.  So 880 doesn't sound massive but we have an 880 'Veneers Cost' at position one and it's getting 738 clicks,  6524 impressions and 11.31% CTR according to my search console.  So it's 1000% worth going after.

Use search console to verify your numbers because sometimes tools that you use (like the amazing ones that Kristina mentioned will say one term gets 880 and a similar one gets say 900 but they are basically the same term in the eyes of google. SO "Veneers Cost UK" is also showing as getting us a load of traffic but it's the same searchers and the tools sometimes don't take that into account.

I also did some research after reading what Kristina said and found lots of different customer types so you only want to be going after the business types.  Also my friends on 10x (e-commerce platform) say that a scrolling banner on the homepage is a conversion killer and it's better to have a static image.

You have great social proof but also think about diversity of social proof so get some more google reviews and that will enhance your SEO immensely - in my experience.

You're doing amazingly well though, you're already number one for lockers.  You lost a big keyword and quite a bit if traffic two days ago but that happened to us too and it recovered after a couple of days.  Google are shaking things up a huge amount.

I'll bet you get better ROI from your 'metal lockers' position at 880 position 1 tan you're 'key' position with 22,000 searches. SO focus on the buyer intent keywords and forget the broad terms - We get 30,000 users a month and 90% of it is 0 ROI and the other 10% provides all the revenue.   Are we allowed to recommend other tools here that compete with Moz?  I've found SEM rush to be a reallyt great tool for sorting out this exact issue because it gives the PPC x traffic cost so you can see where the revenue is coming from.  I still couldn't live without Moz though. But they are good to use together.

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!

I had this same problem with "Veneers"  I run a dental practice.  So to give you an idea of the challenge I faced:  you've got the initial problem of establishing that we're not talking about wooden veneers floors or panels.  This is fixed by google so you don't need to worry about it.  If someone types in 'Veneer' they will still see some dodgy 'non-dentist' results - but that might be what they are looking for so google hedges the SERP with some alternatives.  Rand did a great whiteboard Friday I think on the randomness of some SERP's and how things are sometimes very disorderly.

So three months ago google couldn't tell the difference between Composite Veneers (made from resin), Porcelain Veneers (made from EMAX or Disilicate) or Composite Bonding (fixing chips and cracks) and Just plain Veneers where people might not know what they want.

How I fixed it:  I just wrote informative, detailed and comprehensive pieces about all the different types of veneers and referenced each different type as specific anchor text in each new article.  So in my composite veneers article at the top it says: 'this page is about composite veneers, these are the resin restorations sculpted onto your teeth.  If you're looking for "porcelain veneers" (hyperlink to porcelain veneers page) then follow the link.

Three months ago google and Moz and SEM Rush were going crazy saying all these pages were competing with one-another and advising I deoptimise certain words etc.  I stuck with what felt authentic and helpful and recently each page has risen to number 1-3 on the serps.  So I think google needs time to crawl and index and then users need time to use the pages you create and click or not click the links to the different types of products.

So learn everything there is to know about all the different types of lockers. Speak to the technical people because it's the technical words that will distinguish between the types of lockers in the eyes of google and rankbrain and it will see what users are doing and so long as you are accurate, comprehensive and correct - and use the internal anchor text telling google "this page is about X and if you want Y, go here: <insert link="" with="" exact="" match="" anchor="" text="">. </insert>

Someone from google in one of their mammoth Q&A's said internal exact match anchor text won't get you penalties like it does from links to your site from outside. I put n ALL my dental articles things like "this page is an academic article about integration of implants into unhealthy bones or damaged tissue if you are a patient looking for Dental Implants then follow the link here to our main article "dental Implants"

I think this strategy will work for your lockers. Also it can't be a competitive space so become an expert on all things lockers.  And write for your audience. If i'm a locker buyer I've done my research and want technical and non technical words blended in there and also I want to read about the precise types of locker not lockers in general.

Recently there's also been a google update and I'm now ranking for the main (less buyer intent but more traffic) terms like just 'braces' and Dental Implants' because of this internal linking strategy and also some linkbuilding to authorities on dentistry. In your case you should get links from all the companies that supply lockers to your client and look at forums for technical words and research. there will be locker geeks out there - I promise you

Yes of course.  Why not?  Why should you listen to LSI graph or answer the public if they are just not picking up your niche.  If you just google cycling holidays in france (or wherever) there are many many results.  I can see cycling for softies and 'the chain gang' which sounds more sporty.

So this is just as I thought it might be in my previous answer.  The actual words you use are not the point.  If you have a good level of English and write intelligently and at the level of your audience then google will understand what you are trying to say.

My strategy would be to model your clients site structure on some of the top performers in searches for the terms you are interested in.

But getting bogged down in the semantics of keywords is a 5 year-old strategy and is going to get you into trouble with the recent update that penalises sites that try to optimise for keyword variations like having two pages for "Cycling in France" and "French Cycling Tours"  These mean the same thing and rankbrain understands they mean the same thing so just choose the one that sounds most natural and relevant and run with it.

Google doesn't rank keywords anymore it ranks topics.  So put together a diagram of your topics and what you want to write about (a good place to start is by googling these sites and seeing what topics are present) and then start writing articles that are relevant to your audience.

If you google "cycling vacations in Provence" all the information you need is on that first page.  Right there infront of you.  I'm not sure why you're trusting LSI graph and these tools when the only tool you need is google itself.

But use you r own intelligence, creativity and intuition to inform what you should be writing about.  That's a strategy that never fails.  And as google gets smarter and smarter it's only going to reward great content and punish people for trying to game the system.

At the end of the day you are not fighting to understand the algorithm.  It's designed and changed and updated in a way that intentionally obscures its intricacies.  All you can do is be authentic, helpful, accurate and comprehensive.  Then mark it all up with schema and when it's done you can then think about maybe benchmarking what you've got against the number one position and you might realise you're inadvertently using words too much or haven't mentioned important phrases.

But just get the thing researched and written first and see how it does.  Research should be the longest part of the process.  And that involves reading through each site and each page on those sites for the top five results.  That will give you a feel for what is important.  Screw LSI graph.  Use your own brain to solve the problem - becoming overly reliant on SEO tools can lead into a downward spiral of confusion.

But I URGE you to watch some more whiteboard fridays.  All the answers are there.

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!

I have increased our speed dramatically by getting an upgrade to our server from our hosting company.  I noticed a big increase in traffic and ranking for the pages that were slower than 10s in total but you have to be aware that there are lots of different metrics surrounding speed and what you are seeing inside google analytics can sometimes be confusing.

For example, there are metrics for the time it takes for the entire page to load but I have a plugin called 'lazy-load' that loads all the above the fold content immediately and is smart about loading bigger items further down the page.  There are lots of tools if you google 'waterfall speed test' or something similar which will show you precisely what's slowing the page up.

But under 5 seconds is fine and we have many number one national and local rankings loading in 5, 6 and sometimes 8 seconds depending on the volume of traffic.

It's more of a 'penalty for being slow' than a 'prize for being fast' although a really quick loading website is impressive from a user perspective.

The next month I migrated our site to HTTPS and saw an immediate bump in rankings across the board, so this is one where google is giving out algorithmic love - if you like.

Also be aware of mobile loading times vs desktop and make sure you divide it up into countries and localities. These types of data dimensions in google analytics will give you a much better picture.

I've found that if someone really likes what they see in the SERP, so a strong headline and meta description, nice data markup (schema) and additions like sitelinks or hyperlinks to their precise search then they will wait longer for a page to load.  And the only way to really test this is with hotjar or a recording tool so you can see what users are actually doing on the site.

I would also look at bouncerate or 'adjusted bounce rate' if you google adjusted bounce rate you can set a timer after 10 or 20 seconds and  discount people who are reading your article, getting what they want and then bouncing.  Because these are not seen by google as bounces but are in analytics. It's east to set up and there's a guy called 'measureschool' where I learned how to do it, it's a step by step thing.

So I would consider focussing your energies elsewhere for a while to try to move the dial in the right direction. Because sub 1 second is crazy fast. Even for AMP.

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.

It's not always about CTR.  My 1-3 results still get 650% better conversions than anything I do with Paid.  Google are certainly taking clicks from top positions and I'm seeing my number one positions getting less clicks.  interestingly this is not having any effect whatsoever on the bottom line.

What I do see is when I overtake my competitors they start advertising like mad in the Top Ads for those keywords.  But this also doesn't seem to have much of an effect on revenue.

I am trialing something new on the mobile.  If you think about it when you type in a query on the mobile you're always going to see the number one ad result first. It's different from desktop where you can kind of completely ignore the ads and look straight at the map for local or the first organic position.  But for Mobile 100% of searches see that number one position and there's nothing else on the screen.

So I'm putting together a 'branding' exercise where I focus on getting that number one position for all my keywords and seeing how this affects conversion rates.

I wouldn't get too obsessed with click through rates.  Especially with google messing with the layout of the serps so much.  Focus on the bottom line and ROAS.  And I can tell you for nothing that getting in those 1-3 positions is pure gold no matter what the naysayers say about reducing click through rates.

Organic is also 100% the best way you can spend your time and effort and budget.  There's been some big changes recently with (I believe) rolling out previously collected rankbrain data.  I don't think it's real time learning.  I think google collect data, test it and roll it out.  And they recently did that so sites with real quality are now picking up a great deal more search.  So the playing field is levelled against the little guys.

Ads will always have their place for offers and immediate stuff - although since you can get a quality page indexed in 3 minutes these days and change a title and meta in a couple of days, I think ad words is still only a moderately good way of spending your budget.  But i'll report on how my mobile thing progresses.  I have great hopes for it.

Yeah they really suck though. They are mean to patients and do a bad job and overcharge them.  So it's a good thing really.  I sound evil but my team do really beautiful work for fair fees and make hundreds of people a week smile and feel better about themselves.  So every patient I acquire I see as being saved from potential dental disaster at the hands of some incompetent or greedy practitioner.  It's a cool culture.

I feel sorry for our competition because I don't ever want to see businesses fail.  But some of them don't deserve to be in business.  Not in 2018.

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.

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.

EGOL this is precisely what I was thinking.  Thanks for the reply.  And thanks too Brett for your detailed one. I was wondering whether the outrageous or more brand focussed messaging might affect the quality score of the ad and make it more difficult to retain the number one position on the mobile.  I want it to be the fitst thing ALL searchers see when they type the phrase in.  So to be more 'seen' than 'clicked' is that going to make it super costly to keep it up there or does google not care because it's pay per click not pay per impression I worry it's not going to stay for long were I need it.

My local dental practice has some pretty awesome number 1-3 rankings locally and nationally for all the keywords and topics we're interested in (thanks Moz) I was searching on my mobile locally for a keyword and notice that each time I search on my smartphone the first thing I see is a competitors ad for that keyword or phrase.  Then you scroll through four ads and the map pack (which we're in) and you find us at the number one position.

I want to completely dominate the serp and was reading this: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/37161.pdf but if I' honest I don't really understand it.

Should I run ads on the mobile to get that number one position on the ads so that everyone who searches locally for our keywords sees us on their smartphone before they even start to scroll and then see us again in the map and again in the 1-3 position?

Is this a good idea or a waste of money?  PPC had never delivered decent ROI for us and will typically break even so we are just busy fools chasing leads for not much gain.  But I was thinking a more 'branding' related number one position ad might increase the conversion rate, CTR or help in some way.  Would it cost a fortune to keep it at the top of the mobile results for maybe 10-20 keywords just on the mobile?

I know this is what google want me to be doing and i also want to choke my competition and completely dominate the SERPS because we provide the best service by miles and often the ads are shoddy and poorly executed.  What's the consensus amongst you wonderful PPC / SEO experts.  Obviously there's lots of SEO's saying it's a great idea because they just want to sell SEO services.  And google is in this camp.  So I don't know who to trust for the right answer.

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!

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

Yes thanks for this.  It doesn't seem really honest and like the right thing to do.  And I was kind of expecting people to be like, 'no don't worry, just do it nobody cares' - but it's clearly from what you say, not the right strategy under these circumstances.  What happens if you make a piece of content for outreach and send it to two or more publishers and two of them like it and want to publish it?  That's another tricky one i've found myself in.  I thought just be honest and say both are interested and let them fight over the content. All I want is a link at the end of the day.

I'm writing about dental practice success but I'm doing it to improve my SEO position not to get clients or start an agency.  So it's a funny one really.  I just want more DA from links so I can rank locally and help my dentists get more patents.

So I've written this beautiful guest post for a site who've quite frankly done a bad job of promoting it and I'm a little disappointed.

So I'm thinking:

a) I could send it around to some other publishers and see if they want it.  What would be the duplicate content problems here if any?

b) Why not just publish it on my own site and promote it to other blogs and the world in the normal way.

c) Is this just wrong and if I say I'm going to write for someone then I write for them and if they make a mess of it that's my problem and I should be more selective about who I give my talents away to in the future.

Thanks in advance. I am fairly new to outreach and all the internet searching on this topic is returning stuff about 'allowing other people to post guest blogs on your site' which is not helpful.  Rank Brain eh?  Supposed to be smart. But it's really not. 

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.

So by siloing content you mean creating categories and subcategories like in a library.  So Reference, fiction, magazines etc. And then having subsections.  The old way to 'rank' for something was to pick up keywords for the smaller sections and subsections.

So to use the example of dentistry. I might have  adult dentistry and paediatric dentistry pages then in adults i'll have implants, braces and veneers.  Then in veneers I might have an article about veneers price, veneers procedure and veneers risks.  All of these would link to each other and link up in the architecture.  And hey-presto, i'd eventually rank for one of the 'top categories' like adult dentistry.

The problem with this is that it's going to create internal competition and conflict.  Google doesn't want users having to hop around highly granular subtopics for answers.  They'd rather have the answer to a query all in the same place. So instead I'll now have one single page with everything people need to know about veneers; price, risks, procedure etc. All in one place.

Now there are further difficulties because google will sometimes consider two related things as different 'topics' or answering different questions. So I do have page for everything about veneers and also a page about veneers cost. In the case of veneers everyone wants to know the cost.  It's all cost cost cost - so this is it's own topic and it's own page.  But for something like root canals, nobody cares how much they cost, they just want to get out of pain.  So the root canal cost section is on the main root canal page because it's included in the topic of 'root canals'.

It's now more about searcher intent https://moz.com/blog/how-google-gives-us-insight-into-searcher-intent-through-the-results-whiteboard-friday, possibly 'searcher task accomplishment' https://moz.com/blog/harnessing-link-equity and also how link equity flows: https://moz.com/blog/harnessing-link-equity

Also read this: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/pcm.pdf it's tough going but just ignore what you don't understand and press on with reading it all and you'll learn a great amount about how google functions.

So to answer the question, you still need a solid site structure but i'd say 'siloing' is possibly going to dilute the potential power of each page.  You're going to end up with 30 pages all about sub-sub topics that should be rethought out and consolidated using google as your research tool.  Always use google as your research tool.  To do anything else is like training for a sprint race by going swimming every day.

'Siloing' for me also created a ton of duplicate content, duplicate headlines and I even think I got stung by Maccabees for having some pages about all the different aspects of implant dentistry.  They are now all consolidated into a 'super page' and it's ranking #1 locally and really well nationally too.  Page one.

Imagine five pages, H1's are 'braces cost', 'braces procedure', 'braces on finance' and 'braces risks'.  Google is going to struggle - in my view - to rank me for any of those because they all have an H1 containing the word braces. What would be better would be to have  a'braces' page and then the H2's were all those sub sub topics and then an FAQ with all the google suggest words as H2 and then all the 'searchers also asked' words in the FAQ.

Hope this helps - this is my interpretation from my small local business here in the UK. So other users here may have more relevant information.  For example IA, cannibalisation, internal conflict etc is much bigger in shopping and information businesses than it is in services businesses.

And of course this classic: https://moz.com/blog/optimizing-for-rankbrain-whiteboard-friday  thanks to @miriam ellis for that one.

Thanks Miriam.  I was totally barking up the wrong tree there. Thanks for helping me 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.

I'm a local dentist and have a very successful 'veneers price' blog page. People really want to know the cost of veneers and it gets hundreds of visits a day locally and nationally.  I also have a main Veneers services page talking about how you get veneers and what they are etc. This gets lots of local visitors but less nationally.

I have recently tried to replicate it's success with 'dental implants price', 'tooth whitening price' and others but they've just bombed.  I replicated the style and the blogs are similar in structure, same links etc - but obviously totally unique content and topics. The price articles get no search and it's seemed to hurt the main services pages too.  They are all linked to one another in a systematic and helpful-to-the-user hierarchy and structure.

Maccabees doesn't seem to have made any difference to the veneers traffic but should I consolidate the other price articles into their respective main pages or leave it and see what happens.  They have been at less than position 20 for months now. Whereas if you type in Veneers Cost UK, you'll probably see us in the featured snippet and position one or two.

How do I know whether google regards the price of something to be a different topic from that thing and worthy of it's own page? Do they just want everything all on one massive page? That seems a bit clumsy to me.

Thanks!

"The only benefit is trust , increase CTR etc and obviously reviews markup."

This is a huge benefit though.  It's abut users at the end of the day and having those stars showing in the serps and having the reviews scrolling on your site (using a widget) has helped me enormously with CTR.  It's one of those where you need to think less about the technical SEO stuff and more about how having the reviews there will increase the CTR and conversion rates.  It also helps time on site - all MASSIVE ranking signals.

If I said to you that a piece of technical wizzardry could increase CTR, TOS and conversions then you'd learn how to do it and implement it like immediately.  Well that's what reviews do.  So i'd not worry about marking them up or just use a wordpress widget and get them on there. I'm not massively technical but we do have 500 5* reviews with a widget on every page of the site and are in the top 3 for most non-branded searches because of our CTR. Also google says they want to eventually live in a world without markup when the algo gets smarter so it's all going to be a moot point.

Sorry If i've missed the technical nuances of this but we're doing super well just having the nice comments up there on the site (which is more than lots of your competitors have)

I'm a local dentist and have the same problem.  So we have 188 x 5 star reviews.  They are appearing next to every blog post I write and every services page but not the homepage.  Having those yellow stars in the serps and on the map is HUGE and tyou can get them just not for the homepage.

If you're on wordpress theres a plugin called Google reviews for business that works really well for us. So all your team pages, about pages, blogs and menus can have the stars - just not your homepage. So you could create individual pages for each dish or meal if you like and have stars next to them. So as a dentist I have a braces services page, an Implants one, a cosmetic one and a whitening one, all with reviews in the map, on the page as a slider and in the blogs.

So don't be defeated, you can do it really easily with the plugin!

SEM rush tracks the serp features in their Sensor tool.  If you're on Pro account (99pm) then you can see a month's worth of data but if you upgrade to Guru then you can get the historical data. I was thinking of upgrading to the Guru account for this reason but I'm just one company not an agency so it's not justifiable to spend 199pm just to see historical data without all the other features I wouldn't use.

Check out the screenshot from my pro account. Not sure if that's the sort of data you're after but they certainly let me scroll back through the years although it's greyed out because I'm not on the Guru account level.

So I'd find someone who has SEM rush Guru and ask them to export it all for you.  It's also a great tool and I'd recommend the pro account.  I use it alongside Moz as they both have features that you'll need although there's lots of overlap too.

Maybe If you ask super nice they'll give you a Pro account free trial? That could work too.

K49NDkY

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 Gaston, I'll test that out.  I'm also thinking that you're right about the nature of the FS being question answering. It's almost as though local traffic is still visiting the site but the national traffic is just looking at the snippet and leaving.  So it's worth looking at the location demo too I think.

Do you find that the FS can so detrimentally affect the CTR that you drop out of 1-3 altogether?  I've seen that happen a couple of times but can't say for certain it's because of the FS.

Check out search console data.  It all goes 100% haywire when I got the snippets.  CTR right down and impressions through the roof.  Clicks are stable (ish). That research you recommended looks great.  Thanks so much.

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OMG sitebulb is epic.  There actually is an app for everything in the entire universe. Great call David, thanks.

Yep, screaming frog SEO spider is great to get the data into excel.  However, it's not great for visualising it.  I'd go low-tech and use Word or a pen and pad!

It's all about topics so write all your main topics out in bubbles with a little cloud of subtopics around them and draw lines from the ones that are relevant to each other.  Like when you're planning an essay at at school. It really is that simple.

Keep it simple!

Hope this helps.

Ed.

I'm a cosmetic dental practice so we're local and want people to visit our website, look around and make a booking.

I've followed very closely the featured snippet debate on WBF and in the blogs here and everywhere else on the web.  I've got many 1-3 positions and have been optimising for featured snippets with great success.

I have noticed though that once I get a featured snippet the CTR of the page that the snippet is taken from drops significantly.  This can often put me from position one into two or three.  The same thing happens sometimes on the local listings.  You get in the pack and people start visiting your homepage rather than the particular services page in the SERP.

At a conference I was at, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iXlVcbpvd0 (11:14) there is a suggestion that Vodafone de-optimise because a position one or two is better for their sales than a featured snippet.

After all my interests are not the same as google.  They want to answer questions and I want to sell cosmetic dentistry.  So is answering a question without bringing a user to my site a good idea?  I've certainly seen the amount of enquiries drop once the category has a number of featured snippets.

Are they as good as everyone says they are?  I think possibly not from my data and this Vodafone talk is the first time i've heard anyone agree.

I've scoured the web for answers and it's all just "GET FEATURED SNIPPETS",  "HERES HOW TO GET THEM" etc.  But my business is not about getting more traffic it's about selling.  Could someone please point me to research on conversion rate and featured snippets. or ROI and featured snippets?

Thanks.

My understanding of cannibalisation has just clicked, thanks.  But what about CTR? Will having two results not hurt the CTR of each and prevent me getting the number one spot?

I'm testing having the 'complete guide' downloads on the product pages and also combining some of the duplicate and triplicate results in serps but the results have not been great.  Even seen some negative flux.  But it's early days yet, less than a month.

Thanks for answering, I need to go away and read more about filtering.

Hi everyone,

I have a main page for my blepharoplasty surgical product that I want to rank.  It's a pretty in-depth summary for patients to read all about the treatment and look at before and after pictures and there's calls to action in there.  It works great and is getting lots of conversions.  But I also have a 'complete guide' PDF which is for patients who are really interested in discovering all the technicalities of their eye-lift procedure including medical research, clinical stuff and risks.

Now my main page is at position 4 and the complete guide is right below it in 5. So I tried to consolidate by adding the complete guide as a download on the main page.

I've looked into rel canonical but don't think it's appropriate here as they are not technically 'duplicates' because they serve different purposes.

Then I thought of adding a meta noindex but was not sure whether this was the right thing to do either. My report doesn't get any clicks from the serps, people visit it from the main page.

I saw in Wordpress that there's options for the link, one says 'link to media file', 'custom URL' and 'attachment'.  I've got the custom URL selected at the moment.  There's also a box for 'link rel' which i figure is where I'd put the noindex.  If that's the right thing to do, what should go in that box?

Thanks.