When I tell people what I do for a living, I usually say something to the effect of, “I help businesses appear higher in Google search results for words and phrases related to the products and services they offer”.

It’s an over-simplification… but also the simplest answer.

9 times of 10, they’ll nod their head to show me they understand, let it stew for a few seconds, and then ask, “… so how do you do that?”.

Interestingly, most of the small to mid-sized companies I talk to about my SEO Consulting services ask the same question.

Here’s my best attempt at explaining my typical SEO process, step-by-step, in plain English, as well as the value each step provides.

Quick preface

I was recently talking with a small, but fast-growing brand about working with them on SEO.

After a couple of phone calls, they still had some questions about the work I’d be doing and how/why it would be valuable to their business.

So, I decided to write them an email that I hoped would help explain both. The rest of this post is, verbatim, what I sent.

Note: the brand makes plant-based protein bars (they’re awesome), but for the purposes of this post I’ll refer to them as “Protein Brand”.

Without further adieu…

Step 1: Identify the highest ROI search terms for your business

Imagine a person who has never heard of Protein Brand, but is trying to find a plant-based protein bar. What words and phrases are they going to type into Google to find one? Maybe “plant-based protein bar”? “dairy-free protein bar”? “best vegan protein bars”?

While we could just guess using our own knowledge and intuition, there are tools and research methods at our disposable that actually tell us all the different variations people use, and how frequently they use them. In other words, which variations are used the most (and thus, will bring the most visitors to our site once we rank on page 1 for them)?

Step 2: “Optimize” different pages of your website for these terms

Google ranks pages, not websites. What this means is that every page of your website has the ability to appear in Google for various search terms related to the content on the page.

The goal here is to “map” the search terms we identified in Step 1 to the pages on your website that best match the topic and intent (of the person searching for them). Once mapped, each page can be “optimized”… which simply means making sure each page is relevant to its intended terms and ultimately keeps the promise of why someone would have clicked onto your page.

Step 3: Fix any technical issues that may be holding you back

There are a million and one (exactly) technical issues on a website that can prevent Google from finding (or “crawling”) important content or pages on your website. Many of these issues impact your visitor experience as well.

Some examples include: broken links, missing or empty pages, slow loading pages, un-secure pages, etc. Here’s just a snapshot of your current technical issues (see here and here). You don’t need to know what each of these means (although I’d be more than happy to tell you) – just know that they may not only be hindering your ability to rank in Google but also hindering your customer experience.

Step 4: Create new content for continued traffic growth

There are only so many search terms you can rank for (and traffic you can receive) with your existing website content. New content, based on more keyword research, is required if you want to continue growing.

Your blog is the best place to consistently serve new, useful content that can rank for meaningful keywords and drive more traffic to your site. While your main pages will rank for highly-targeted commercial terms like “plant-based protein bars”, the blog is the place to target more informational terms like “plant protein vs. whey protein”, “best dairy-free snacks”, “healthy post-workout meals”, etc.

Step 5: Get other relevant websites to talk about you

By “talk about” I mean link to. Think about it like this: every relevant, high-quality website that links to your website is a “vote”, and Google’s search engine rankings are a popularity contest. Simply put, the more votes you have, the better your web pages will rank for your keywords.

There are a lot of ways we can get other websites to link to yours, but most will involve either doing something noteworthy offline or creating something valuable (like content) online. In either case, the goal is getting the sites you want a link from to recognize it and link to your site as the source. This is more or less “digital public relations” with an extra focus on earning links.

Step 6: Track progress, analyze results and make improvements

Is what we’re doing working? Such a seemingly simple question, yet many businesses engaged in SEO (or any marketing initiatives for that matter) don’t know the answer to it. Of course, this is never the case with my clients. (wink, wink)

At the most basic level, you can expect to receive the following information from me each and every month: total website traffic and organic website traffic (i.e. traffic from search engines like Google), conversion metrics like online sales, new business leads and newsletter sign-ups, and of course, search engine rankings for our top-priority keywords.

Bottom line

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of the things we’ll be doing from an SEO perspective – and of course, I’ll be reporting on our progress each step of the way.

I’d like to end by summarizing the overall value of SEO, as I see it, for Protein Brand:

• Currently, more than 96% of your traffic is “branded” – meaning, people that are already familiar with your brand and are finding you online by searching “protein brand”, “protein brand bars”, “protein brand cookies”, etc. This is great, but…
• There are hundreds of thousands of people who have never heard of you but would LOVE your products if they found them (I was one of them!). I’m more than confident we could begin reaching these people online – slowly at first, but snowballing over-time – with a dedicated SEO effort.
• The value won’t just come in the form of sales through your website; we’ll be leveraging your website to create awareness of your brand. Sure, some of these people will buy products through your site, but others will go to their nearest CVS or The Vitamin Shoppe to buy them in-person, or land on your site but ultimately purchase through Amazon or another online retailer.
• At the end of the day, this is an extremely low-cost way of reaching prospective customers, increasing your online and offline sales, and growing your brand compared to your other sales and marketing efforts.

Conclusion

This is far from the best or most comprehensive explanation of the SEO process that exists online – however, my hope is that it’s the most straight-forward explanation you can find on how the SEO process works and the value it can provide.

Whether you’re an SEO Consultant or Agency trying to explain the SEO process to a prospective client – or, you are that prospective client and are trying to understand what an SEO professional is pitching you on, I sincerely hope you find this useful.

If you have any questions about this process or additional insights to share, please let me know in the comments.

The post The SEO Process Explained in Plain English (6-Steps) appeared first on Web Focused.

Three years ago I was talking with a boutique digital marketing firm that was interested in SEO consulting. I really liked the people and believed in their business so it seemed like a good fit. There was only one problem:

Their website was built on Squarespace… (gasp!)

I had been a WordPress guy for a long time leading up to this point, and I was admittedly skeptical about pretty much anything non-Wordpress – especially these “DIY” content management systems that had been popping up.

To make a long story short, I ended up taking on the client, dove into the world of Squarespace SEO and ended up increasing their organic traffic by 282% over the course of a year.

I’ve since worked with several other businesses whose websites were built on Squarespace, and feel comfortable not only working with it but even recommending it to certain businesses (more on that later).

About the optimizations

In an effort to keep this post both organized and thorough, I’m going to cover 15 on-page best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) – both what they are and how to implement them on a Squarespace website.

To give credit where it’s due, these SEO tips were inspired by a blog post written by Sam McRoberts from VUDU Marketing. I don’t know Sam personally, but he’s conducted very public SEO audits for people like Neil Patel and Pat Flynn – two of the most respected internet marketing entrepreneurs out there.

If you have any questions or insights, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment at the end.

Let’s dive in!

Quick Jump Menu

1. Customize static URLs

What Is It?

Static URLs refer to web pages that do not change (both the URL itself and the content on the page), as opposed to dynamic URLs which pull content from a database to display on pages, on-demand.

Example Static URL:

http://www.domain.com/category/page-name/

Example Dynamic URL:

http://www.domain.com/sid=349092187362&query=URL

Dynamic URLs have their place (such as filtering and sorting on an ecommerce website), but all of our core website pages should use static URLs. The “customize” aspect of this point means we want to be deliberate about the words and phrases we use in our URLs – basically, everything after the .com in the examples above.

How to Implement It

To create and name new pages, go to Pages → Main Navigation (+) → Page.

Whatever you name your page here will appear in three important areas of your site – each of which is fully customizable via Squarespace:

1. Navigation Title: what the page will be called in your navigation (such as the main navigation in the header of your entire site).
2. Page Title: this actually refers to the Title Tag (the text that appears between the <title></title> element of your HTML markup), which is one of the most important on-page factors for SEO.
3. URL Slug: this is the URL of the web page itself. In most cases, this should match the Navigation Title, but it doesn’t always have to.

In order to create a page hierarchy like this:

• domain.com/photography/
• domain.com/photography/wedding/
• domain.com/photography/family/
• domain.com/photography/portrait/

Where /wedding, /family and /portrait appear as sub-pages of /photography…

Click the (+) sign again, but this time select the “Folder” option. The folder represents the top-level category which would be /photography in the example above. Then expand the folder and click “Add Page” to add sub-category pages like /wedding, /family and /portrait.

If you want your URL structure to follow this hierarchy (which I usually prefer), just add the top-level category in the URL slug field as pictured above.

[back to menu]

2. Redirect old/outdated pages

What Is It?

If you ever need to change a URL on your site (which you inevitably will), it’s important to make sure the old/original URL redirects or “forwards” to the new/updated one.

Why?

So that if people happen upon the old URL, they don’t land on a non-existent web page (typically a “404 Not Found” error) – and instead, get automatically taken to an updated version of the page they were trying to visit.

Additionally, proper URL redirection is important for search engines for a couple of reasons:

1. It tells them the page has moved and to use the updated page for indexing and ranking;
2. By extension, it tells them to attribute all external ranking signals (e.g. backlinks) from the old URL to the new one.

The main type of redirection we want to use is a 301 redirect – also known as a “permanent” redirect – which tells search engines that the page has been permanently moved to a new location.

How to Implement It

To set up custom redirects, go to Settings → Advanced → URL Mappings and redirect one page to another using the following format:

/old-url -> /new-url 301

Note the four different elements in the above string:

1. /old-url the previous URL slug of the page you’re moving
2. -> a simple arrow made with a hyphen and a greater than sign
3. /new-url the new URL slug you want the page to reside on
4. 301 the type of redirect (99% of the time it should be a 301)

In order for redirects to work there is one additional step you may need to take:

• If the new URL does not already exist (i.e. it’s the first time you’re using it), you need to update the URL slug in the page settings.
• If the new URL does already exist (i.e. you’re trying to merge two pages), you need to either delete or disable the old URL.

In general, Squarespace makes it easy to implement custom 301 redirects without needing to install additional software or access server files.

[back to menu]

3. Optimize title tags and meta tags

What Is It?

Title tags (not to be confused with the site title) are the blue “headlines” that get displayed for our web pages in search engine results and are still one of the most important on-page ranking factors used by search engines to determine what a page is about – and in turn, which key phrases it should rank us for in search results.

Meta descriptions are the descriptive text that gets displayed below our title tags in search results. Meta descriptions are no longer a direct ranking factor; however, they still play an important role in click-thru-rate (i.e. the % of clicks on your web page vs. the others around it).

Here’s what we want from Squarespace:

1. Full control over the text that gets used in our title tags and meta descriptions;
2. The ability to edit this text on every page of our website (ideally, no two pages have the same title tag or meta description).

How to Implement It

Here’s where you’ll find these SEO settings for three different types of site pages:

1. For your homepage: go to Settings → SEO. The Search Engine Description field is your meta description and the Homepage Title Format is your title tag.
2. For your pages: go to Pages → Gear icon (next to a page you want to edit). The Page Title field is your title tag and the Description field is your meta description.
3. For your blog posts: go to Pages → Blog → Edit (on a blog post you want to edit). The Enter a post title… field is your title tag and the Excerpt field (under the Options tab) is your meta description.

Seems straightforward (and it is), but there are some caveats…

Caveat 1:

Depending on the template you’re using, title tags and meta descriptions get used in other (visible) areas of your web pages. For example, in the popular Bedford template meta descriptions (called page descriptions) get displayed over page banners.

Why is this a problem?

Well, in the example above the text ‘What We Do’ looks great and makes sense for the page; however, it makes for a poor meta description in search results. What you’re left with is the need to make a compromise between trying to write banner text for your web page and a meta description.

Caveat 2:

Blog post headlines get used as title tags – i.e. they must match each other verbatim. Similar to the above point, you’re left trying to write something that serves two separate purposes.

That said, more times than not our headlines work well as our title tags when it comes to blog posts. For instance, even with the ability to differentiate the two I probably end up leaving them the same 9 times out of 10.

[back to menu]

4. Specify image filenames and alt text

What Is It?

Image filenames, logically, refer to the name given to an image file. ALT tags refer to short, descriptive text used to describe an image to search engines. They’re also used by assistive screen readers and displayed when images are disabled by a web browser.

While not considered a “major” ranking factor, image filenames and image ALT tags are still considered “content” on a web page, and as such, contribute to both the overall value and topical relevance of the page. They also play a role in Google Image search results.

How to Implement It

There are different types of images you can add to your Squarespace site, such as Image Blocks, Gallery Blocks, Product Images, and more. For the purposes of this post, I’m just going to cover one of the most common ones, Image Blocks.

Image Blocks are used to add images to pages and blog posts – typically within the main body container of a web page and related to the content around it. When you add an image block, there are two tabs that appear in the editor:

1. Content: while you could just name your image file what you want prior to uploading it, a really nice feature of Squarespace is the ability to edit the filename after uploading it via the “Filename (Optional)” field.
2. Design: there are six types of image blocks you can use. For an inline image, add your ALT tag under the image as a caption and choose from four different ways to display it (including the option “Do Not Display Caption”). For other types of image blocks, ALT tags can be edited in the same way by using the inline caption (set to “Caption Below”) and then clicking back on the image block you want before saving.

If you neglect to specify an ALT tag, Squarespace will – by default – use the image filename as the text. This isn’t a bad thing, just all the more reason to pay attention to what you name your files.

[back to menu]

5. Use rel=canonical and meta robots tags

What Is It?

The canonical tag is used to tell search engines that there are multiple versions of a page, and indicate which one they should use for indexing and ranking purposes. This is to avoid issues related to duplicate content (i.e. the same or very similar content appearing across multiple URLs). More times than not, it’s created unknowingly – especially on ecommerce websites.

It looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://domain.com/example-page"/>

The meta robots tag is primarily used to tell search engines which pages you want to appear in search results, as well as whether or not they should follow the links on the page.

It looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

Some content management systems (cough, cough… WIX) make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to add or edit these tags on individual pages, which can be pretty limiting.

How to Implement It

Canonical Tags

Out of the box, Squarespace implements proper canonical tags on all of our site pages. This is particularly useful for preventing common duplicate content issues related to things like www vs. non-www, http vs. https, and trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash URLs.

The downside is that, because these are part of the core HTML, there isn’t a way to edit them via the dashboard. For the average website, there aren’t a ton of scenarios in which you’d need the ability to do this, but it’s a limitation none-the-less.

Meta Robots

Meta robots tags, on the other hand, can be easily implemented by going to Pages → gear icon (of the page you want to edit) → Advanced.

Say for example you want to prevent (or remove) your Privacy Policy page from appearing in Google’s (or Bing’s) index. Simply navigate to that page and add the following line of code in the Advanced tab:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

Another common example would be to prevent (or remove) ‘thank you’ pages that require an opt-in to get to – for instance, a free downloadable report. If you don’t add a noindex meta tag to the download page, people will be able to access it directly from search results without having to enter their email address first.

And one more use-case specific to Squarespace:

Pagination

While technically not a canonical tag or a meta robots tag, pagination is often talked about alongside these elements. Pagination refers to content that spans over multiple pages – for example, /page/2/, /page/3/, /page/4/, etc. of a blog or an ecommerce category.

Google recommends three different options for dealing with paginated content. The first option is “Do nothing” which is basically what Squarespace does. They add a rel=”canonical” tag to all paginated pages pointing back to the first page in the series; however, this is not a “View All” page and there isn’t a way to use rel=”next” and rel=”prev”.

[back to menu]

6. Edit important HTML elements

What Is It?

HTML is the most widely used markup language for developing a website. One of the biggest benefits of using a CMS like Squarespace is that you can create great looking and functioning websites without the need to edit HTML code directly.

That said, having a high-level understanding of some of the more important HTML elements on a web page – as well as the ability to edit them – is important from an SEO perspective.

In addition to the elements we discussed in points 3, 4 and 5, some of the other things we’ll want to edit include:

• Heading tags (specifically, <h1> – <h3>)
• Font styling (bold/italic, bullets, numbers, etc.)
• Link anchor text (the text that gets used to link to other pages)
• Nofollow tags (tells search engines not to follow a link)

How to Implement It

Like most modern content management systems, Squarespace uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which allows users to make most of the necessary HTML edits without having to know HTML programming.

Let’s take a look at each of the items I mentioned above:

• Heading tags: from a standard text block, highlight the text you want to make a heading and choose either “Heading 1”, “Heading 2”, or “Heading 3”. In the HTML markup of the page, this text will be wrapped in either an <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, or <h3></h3>, respectively.
• Font styling: from a standard text block, highlight the text you want to emphasize and click either “B” for bold or “I” for italic. This is very similar to most word processing programs, like Microsoft Word.
• Link anchor text: from a standard text block, highlight the text you want to hyperlink, click the chain link icon and set the destination URL. You can enter the full URL you want to link to – or, select a page on your site from the “Content” tab.
• Nofollow tags: add a Code Block where the paragraph with your nofollow tag will go. Enter the paragraph text between the <p></p> tags and wrap the following code around your chosen anchor text: <a href="http://domain.com/" rel="nofollow"></a> (replacing “domain.com” with the URL you want to link to). Click “Apply”.

[back to menu]

7. Review/refresh XML sitemap

What Is It?

XML sitemaps are a “behind-the-scenes” website file meant to help search engines find, understand and prioritize the pages of your website for crawling and indexing purposes.

The more dynamic your website is, the bigger the pain it becomes to keep this file up-to-date, which is why Squarespace creates and maintains this file for us. For example, if you add or delete a page from your site, it should automatically be added or removed from your XML sitemap.

How to Implement It

The good news is that there isn’t anything you need to do here. Squarespace comes with a well-formatted XML sitemap as soon as you become a paying customer (note: sitemaps aren’t available to trial sites).

You can view your sitemap anytime by adding /sitemap.xml to the end of your website URL, like this:

http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

The downside is that editing your sitemap isn’t possible with Squarespace. For professional SEOs, this can be frustrating as there are certainly instances in which we want the ability to make manual updates.

For example, in point 5 above we discussed using the meta robots noindex tag to prevent certain pages from appearing in Google’s index. It is generally considered best practice to remove these pages from your XML sitemap, which isn’t possible with Squarespace.

That said…

While it’s frustrating we can’t update it ourselves, I think Squarespace’s built-in sitemap is still significantly better than the average website’s.

[back to menu]

8. Set up a blog (and start blogging)

What Is It?

A blog is a “must” for pretty much any business these days, as it’s the easiest way to consistently create and promote new quality content on your website. Without one, many websites would remain static which wouldn’t give people (or search engines) much reason to return back to them.

There are two big features Squarespace offers here:

1. Easy set-up on your root domain (e.g. domain.com/blog); and
2. Basic features like categories, tags, recent posts, commenting, etc.

How to Implement It

Blog Page

The first thing you need is a blog page. This is the main landing page of your blog (e.g. domain.com/blog) that typically lists all of your blog posts in chronological order.

Most Squarespace templates come with a demo blog page already added under Pages → Blog. You can either start editing that, or you can add a blog page yourself by clicking Main Navigation (+) → Blog.

Similar to standard site pages, you can edit the Navigation Title, Page Title, Description, URL Slug, and more by clicking the gear icon.

Blog Post

With just a couple clicks of the mouse, you’re ready to create your first blog post. This is an individual entry on your blog (e.g. domain.com/blog/welcome-to-my-blog), usually covering a specific topic.

To get started, simply click on your blog page, then click the (+) to Add Post. Squarespace has really good documentation on all the various features of the blog; however, there is one small point I want to make before you start publishing. By default, Squarespace puts the published date in your URLs like this:

http://www.domain.com/blog/2017/10/8/welcome-to-my-blog

Unless you’re creating a news site and/or plan to regularly publish time-sensitive content, I recommend removing the date from your blog post URLs to keep them more “evergreen” and reduce their overall length.

Post URL’s can be customized under the Options tab of the post editor – and, you can update the default setting under Settings → Blogging → Post URL format (remove %y/%m/%d/ and keep %t).

[back to menu]

9. Improve site speed

What Is It?

With page speed becoming an increasingly important ranking factor, not to mention conversion factor, it is quite literally one of the most important aspects of your website and its ability to grow your business online.

In general, Squarespace templates employ modern HTML and CSS best practices, minimize the use of unnecessary javascript and other code bloat, and load relatively quickly on both desktop and mobile devices;

However, because you are required to use Squarespace servers and hosting, and because there are many aspects of the core site code that can’t be touched, you are limited in what you can do to improve your page speed further.

How to Implement It

The biggest thing you have control over is image file size, so that’s what we’ll focus on here. There is a LOT of different advice out there on this topic – both from Squarespace and across the web – but I’m going to distill it down for you.

Prior to uploading images to your site, you want to first resize them (in terms of dimension) and then compress them (in terms of quality).

Using Photoshop:

1. To resize: open your file and go to Image → Image Size and set the width to 1500 pixels and resolution to 72 pixels/inch.
2. To compress: go to File → Export → Save for Web and select JPEG as your file format and High as your quality.

Using free, online tools:

1. To resize: visit picresize and go to Browse (to upload your file) → Continue and set the custom size width to 1500 pixels (for banner images) and 750 pixels (for inline image blocks).
2. To compress: set the JPG Quality to Better, then click I’m Done, Resize My Picture and Save to Disk on the next page.

I just snapped a picture from my phone and opened it on my computer. The original file was 4356px X 2904px and 6.60MB, which is HUGE! With just a minute of work using the free online tool above, I got it down to 1500px X 1000px and 196KB.

With either method, the difference in image quality should be indiscernible to your average website visitor.

[back to menu]

10. Review schema markup

What Is It?

Schema markup refers to code that can be added to your web pages to help search engines better understand the meaning behind various elements of your website and enhance the way your web pages appear in search results. Common examples include star ratings and reviews, event schedules, prices, and thumbnail images.

While schema markup is not a direct ranking factor, it can increase your CTR from search results and potentially even reduce your bounce rate – both of which can impact your rankings.

How to Implement It

Out of the box, Squarespace automatically implements the following types of schema markup:

1. schema.org/WebPage
2. schema.org/WebSite
3. schema.org/Organization
4. schema.org/LocalBusiness
5. schema.org/Product (if applicable)
6. schema.org/Event (if applicable)

Some of the properties for the first four schema types get populated from the Settings admin, and the Product and Event schema get added via those page settings in Squarespace (Pages → Main Navigation (+) → Products and Events).

In each case the options are limited in terms of the properties you can fill out, and as far as I can tell you cannot remove or overwrite the default markup.

Other methods for implementing schema markup on your website (such as Google Tag Manager and Data Highlighter) are fairly advanced topics and outside the scope of this post. I’ll be honest in saying that for most Squarespace users, time and energy will be better spent on other things.

[back to menu]

11. Test on mobile devices

What Is It?

Since mid-2015, more searches are conducted on mobile than desktop, with the gap becoming wider and wider ever since. Additionally, Google will be switching to a mobile-first index soon, which means that the mobile version of your site’s content will be used for ranking purposes.

There are three different ways you can make a site mobile-friendly:

1. Responsive web design
2. Dynamic serving
3. Separate URLs

Google’s recommended approach is the first one, responsive web design, which means the same HTML code is used to display your web pages, regardless of screen size. In other words, the elements of your website adapt and adjust to fit the device it’s being viewed on.

For anyone creating a new website, using responsive design is a no-brainer.

How to Implement It

With Squarespace as your CMS, there shouldn’t be much to “implement”. All Squarespace templates are responsive out of the box, which means your website should look great on any device type or screen size.

That said, the more you customize your template, the more likely you are to create issues with your mobile experience. Not to worry though; there are two simple tools you can use to review how your website gets displayed on mobile:

1. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test: enter a page URL and click “Run Test”. In less than a minute, Google will review your page and let you know if it’s mobile-friendly and provide diagnostic information if there are any issues.
2. Squarespace’s Device View: hover over the site preview pane and choose from phone, desktop and tablet view to see how your site looks on each device type.

Whether you’re creating the site yourself or working with an agency, it’s important to use the tools above throughout the development process and/or any time you make a significant change to your template.

[back to menu]

12. Integrate social media

What Is It?

The impact of social media on search engine rankings has been a hotly debated topic for as long as I’ve been in the SEO game.

While social media signals (links, mentions, Likes, etc.) may not be a direct ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, they still play an important indirect role in your SEO efforts. Said more eloquently in a post from Search Engine Journal:

Even if social media isn’t a direct Google ranking factor, it is one of the best ways to promote content and be found online. Which is, ultimately, what SEO is all about.

There are a couple of ways in which Squarespace can support our social media marketing efforts:

1. By linking directly to our social media profiles;
2. By making it easy for people to share our content on their social media profiles.

How to Implement It

Adding social icons

Start by connecting your social accounts to your Squarespace site via Settings → Connected Accounts → Connect Account.

Select the first profile you’d like to connect (for example, Facebook), login to your account and follow the prompt to give Squarespace access. You’ll be directed back to a Settings box in Squarespace where you can enter your Profile URL.

Note: by default, it auto-populates your personal profile URL, so if you’d prefer to link to your business profile, change that now.

Do this for all of the social networks you’re active on and would like to promote.

Most Squarespace templates will automatically add social icons with links to your profiles in the footer of your site; however, for templates that don’t add them automatically – or if you want to add them to other areas of your site – you can use the Social Links Block.

Adding social sharing buttons

Start by selecting the social networks in which you’d like people to share on via Settings → Marketing → Share Buttons.

Social sharing buttons are automatically displayed on collections pages, such as blogs, galleries, products, etc., depending on the template.

Some templates display share buttons behind a Share link (which to be honest, I’m not crazy about), and others display the buttons directly on the page and offer advanced styling options.

Lastly, Squarespace offers options to push content from your site to your social networks (for example, when you publish a new blog post), and pull content from your social networks into your site. Instructions are detailed in the first ‘Related documentation’ link below.

[back to menu]

13. Create a custom 404 page

What Is It?

A 404 error is an HTML status code that means the page you were attempting to visit could not be found by the website’s server. They are generally created when web crawlers follow a link to a page that no longer exists.

Some of the most common causes include:

• Deleting a page from your website without redirecting the old URL to a new one;
• Changing the URL of an existing page without redirecting the old URL to a new one;
• Another website linking to a non-existent page on your website (a typo, for example);
• A user mistyping your page URL in their web browser’s address bar.

Any website that has been online for more than a couple years will undoubtedly create 404 errors at some point – and one way or another, some of your site visitors will land on them.

Because of this, it’s important to serve a custom 404 page in order to help them quickly find what they were looking for instead of leaving your site.

How to Implement It

Creating a custom 404 page in Squarespace is simple. Start by creating a page as you would any other under Pages → Not Linked (+) → Page.

Note: you want the page to appear under the “Not Linked” section so it doesn’t get added to your navigation.

From there you can customize the page however you want, keeping in mind that it should be both personable and useful. Consider adding the following:

• An image relevant to the page not being found (you can have fun with this!);
• A message letting people know the page doesn’t exist (again, feel free to be clever here);
• Suggest pages for them to visit (e.g. popular blog posts, a list of products or services, your contact page, etc.);
• A search bar so people can quickly search what they’re looking for.

Once you’re happy with your page, save it and go to Settings → Advanced → 404 Error / Page Not Found. Simply select your page from the drop-down and you’re all set!

To double-check it, enter a non-existent URL into your web browser, like domain.com/asdfasdf and you should see your new custom 404 page.

[back to menu]

14. Update internal links

What Is It?

Any time you change a URL on your site, all of the links to that page from other areas of your site break. Fortunately, custom URL redirects (discussed in criteria 2 above) solve this problem.

That said, it’s still ideal to update internal links to the new/moved page for two reasons:

1. Redirects can slow down your site – especially at scale, over time;
2. A small amount of link equity or “authority” from the linking page gets lost in the redirect.

For smaller websites, it’s fairly easy to update internal links to a new URL manually. For larger sites (e.g. with hundreds of blog posts), however, finding and updating dozens or hundreds of internal links can be a real pain.

How to Implement It

As far as I know, Squarespace does not offer any form of automatic link management. Fortunately, most people and businesses that use Squarespace are not creating massive websites, so manually updating internal links on occasion shouldn’t be a huge hassle.

If you do happen to have more pages on your site, you can use Google Search Console’s Internal Links Report to help identify all the pages on your site that link to the one you’re moving.

You’ll still need to go into each page and update the links manually, but at least the first step (finding them) is relatively easy:

• From your Google Search Console property, go to Search Traffic → Internal Links.
• Enter the URL of the page you’re moving (i.e. everything after .com/) and click Find for a list of pages on your site that link to it.
• If you have a hard time finding the link on the page, simply right click, View Page Source and use Control+F to search for the URL.

[back to menu]

15. Allow user-generated content

What Is It?

User-generated content refers to content – most commonly in the form of text – that is created by users, submitted through your website, and displayed on your live web pages.

There are a lot of benefits to hosting user-generated content on your website, especially in the form of blog comments and product reviews. From an SEO perspective, user-generated content can:

1. Serve as a valuable quality signal to search engines;
2. Increase the amount of original, relevant content on your web pages.

The process of allowing user-generated content requires programming; of course, the main reason we use a CMS like Squarespace is to avoid the need to be programmers!

How to Implement It

Blog Comments

To enable comments on your blog, go to Settings → Blogging → Comment Settings.

I recommend checking everything except Allow Anonymous Comments. Leaving this unchecked will require people to log in via Squarespace, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook before leaving a comment which will greatly reduce the number of spam submissions you receive.

Two settings you might consider testing:

1. Require Approval: If you’re just starting to allow comments, I recommend manually reviewing and approving comments as they come in. Over time, if you find that you’re able to approve the large majority of comments, you may consider letting comments get published without approval.
2. Auto-Disable Comments Default Value: If you’d like to disable comments on posts after a set period of time (say, 1 – 3 months), you can set that here. For instance, if you publish a lot of timely blog posts, it’s unlikely that people will be contributing meaningful comments months or years after the fact.

To manage blog comments, go to Home → Comments (note: you’ll only see this option after checking Enable Comments Globally from the previous step).

Click the Unmoderated tab to see comments requiring moderation. The checkmark will approve a comment and the trashcan will delete it. Once you approve a comment it will move to the Approved tab where you can choose to leave a reply.

If you’d like to be notified (or not) of new comments, hover over your avatar in the account dashboard, select Edit Profile and set your “Comment Subscription” either ON or OFF.

Product Reviews

Product reviews are extremely common on ecommerce websites, and the right kind of reviews can have a big impact on conversions. This is in addition to the more direct SEO benefits mentioned above.

Unfortunately, the process for adding product reviews to your Squarespace site isn’t as straightforward as the blog commenting features above. In fact, Squarespace doesn’t offer product review functionality by default – rather, they require integrating with one of the following four third party solutions:

1. The first three options – Disqus, Facebook Plugin and Comment Box – are commenting plugins and don’t provide the functionality to rate a product.
2. The fourth option – Rating Widget – is the opposite; it lets users select a star rating, but doesn’t offer the functionality to leave a text-based review.

Of the four solutions provided, the only one I’d play with would be the RatingWidget. It’s easy to implement and adds some social proof to product pages;

However, in order to get rich snippets (stars and reviews) in search results, you either need to upgrade to the Business plan ($7.99/mo) or manually insert a small JSON-LD code snippet on each of your product pages.

[back to menu]

Final thoughts on Squarespace SEO

If I had to answer the question, “Is Squarespace good for SEO?” in one word, it would be YES.

While there are some minor limitations here and there, the ease with which you can implement and customize the large majority of on-page SEO best practices makes it a great platform for a lot of business types.

A few scenarios in which Squarespace might not be the best fit:

1. Large brands requiring complete creative control over their design;
2. Ecommerce stores with hundreds of products and/or mid-six-figures + in revenue;
3. Websites requiring more sophisticated user functionality.

For any SEO consultants or agencies hesitant to take on a Squarespace client, fear not! I’ve worked with multiple businesses on Squarespace and have had a relatively smooth process optimizing their websites and getting great results for them.

Regardless of which side of the business you’re on, I hope this post helps your optimization efforts!

The post Squarespace SEO: 15-Point Checklist and Tips appeared first on Web Focused.

When a visitor lands on your website, there are two main things they want right away:

1. to know they’re in the right place; and
2. to quickly find what they came looking for.

Turns out, search engines want this for our visitors as well, and they’ve become increasingly good at determining how well our content serves our audiences. Additionally, the organization of our web pages has a very direct impact on how search engines find, index and rank our content.

If you’re in the early stages of planning a new website, this is an ideal time to take the steps necessary to create an organized, intuitive, and efficient website structure; one that will enhance your SEO efforts, not hinder them.

Regardless of where you’re at in the process, you should have a really good idea of how to organize a website to serve both users and search engines by the end of this 6-step post.

1. Make a list of everything you offer

Sounds simple, but don’t just rush through it, because it’s important!

Using a Word doc, Google Sheets, or good ol’ fashion pen and paper, write down everything you offer to an end consumer or business. In addition to listing your products and services, include answers to the following:

• Who are your target audiences?
• Are there specific industries you target?
• Are there specific geographies you serve?
• How do people use your products/services?
• What problems do you solve for them?

As you’ll see in later steps, there may be opportunities to target specific aspects of your business outside of your core product or service offerings. In fact, some of your best results may even come from them.

Example 1:

A friend of mine developed a rubber board stand that people can use to display their surfboards in their home. While his original intent for the product was to display surfboards, it works equally well for displaying skateboards, snowboards, wakeboards and a few other ‘boards’.

So for the question, how do people use your products and services, he’d want to say:

• to display their surfboards
• to display their skateboards
• to display their snowboards
• to display their wakeboards

This is going to open up a lot of extra opportunities for him in the coming steps.

Example 2:

I did a short consulting project for a company that offers a highly reputable cloud backup service (for backing up files in the cloud). Even though their backup platform is just one main product/service, further conversations with the client revealed there were:

1. three core audiences that use it (individuals/personal, small-to-mid sized businesses, and enterprises);
2. multiple reasons people use it (i.e problems it solved);
3. separate searchers for Mac and Windows (both of which they service).

Similar to the board stand example, these insights led to big opportunities in the later steps which we would not have had without going through this process.

2. Make a list of terms you want to rank for

Start by jotting down some “seed” keywords. These are the broad, top-level terms that represent your core business offerings and are usually 2 – 3 word phrases.

For example, if I was a dermatologist in Chicago I might start with things like:

• “chicago dermatologist”
• “laser hair removal”
• “acne treatment”
• “cosmetic dermatology”
• “chemical peels”

Next, use one or more keyword research tools to generate additional ideas based off actual terms being typed into Google (SEMrush is my keyword research tool of choice).

The process I typically use is as follows:

• enter a seed keyword into a keyword research tool;
• set a couple basic filters (ex: min. search volume);
• export the list to excel;
• scan and remove terms I know I don’t want.

I’ll do this for a handful of seed keywords, combining each exported list into one master document. The columns I keep are: Keyword, Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty (optional, but if your tool has this, go ahead and keep it).

Next, I’ll start grouping the keywords into topic categories. For example, “laser hair removal” and related terms would be one group, and “acne treatment” and related terms would be another.

Once I have most of the big categories figured out, I’ll run a few more seed keywords from each topic category into SEMrush to make sure I’m not missing anything.

Here’s an abbreviated version of what the end result will look like (“abbreviated” meaning, there are typically more keyword ideas per topic):

3. Fill content gaps using competitive research

Regardless of how much time and energy you put into step 2, there will always be golden keyword opportunities you’ll miss during your first round of research. One of the best ways to uncover these opportunities is by seeing what keywords are driving traffic to competitor websites.

To find these competitors, simply type a few of your top priority search terms into Google and pull out a few of the pages that seem similar to yours.

Then, enter their root domain (e.g. domain.com) into SEMrush and click “Start Now”. Scroll down to “Top Organic Keywords” and click the “View full report” button. With the free version, you’ll be able to see the top 10 keywords driving traffic to that domain.

The default view is sorted by Traffic % – meaning, terms driving the most traffic to that domain to the least. If you’re using the free version, you can sort by the other columns to see some additional terms.

After you’ve had some fun with that, click on the “Pages” link from the left-side navigation. This will show you the top 10 traffic receiving pages on that domain (i.e. the specific web pages on the site that receive the most traffic from organic search results).

From there you can click on each individual page to see the top search terms driving traffic to each.

Ask yourself:

• Are there any keywords/topics driving traffic to a competitor’s site that I missed during my initial keyword research?
• Do those keywords/topics make sense for my business? i.e. do they represent people searching for something I offer?

Answering “yes” to both of these questions means you should probably plan on adding a page to target those terms.

4. Map search terms and topics to site pages

Each of the topics you create above will require a separate page on your website.

Why?

Think about it this way…

When someone searches for “acne treatment chicago”, what will be a better experience for them; landing on a page that’s dedicated to acne treatments with before/after pictures, patient testimonials, etc., or landing on a “What We Do” page with broad explanations of a dozen different services?

The former will be the best experience for the prospective patient, which also happens to be what Google wants and has gotten very good at rewarding in search results.

For example:

A common question that comes up during this step:

What if I have two closely related, but technically different keywords; should I target them on one page or two separate pages?

This can be tricky, but luckily we can turn to Google for help. Simply search each keyword in Google and compare the first page of results.

Are a lot of the same web pages ranking in both results?

• If so: the intent for each term is similar enough that you can target them both on one page.
• If not: the intent for each term is different enough that you should target them on two separate pages (i.e. one page for each term).

Here’s a quick example from the dermatology niche:

• “acne scar removal chicago”
• “acne scar treatment chicago”

These words seem similar, but I’m wondering if they should be targeted on one page or two.

A quick comparison of the search engine results page (SERP) for these two search terms reveals that there is a large overlap in pages ranking in both the organic listings and the local listings. As such, I should be able to target both terms on one page.

(More on keyword targeting for closely related topics from my friends at Orbit Media Studios.)

5. Create a logical page hierarchy

This is where you determine where and how these pages will fit together on your website. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for both web crawlers and users to browser your website and understand what the various sections and pages are about.

How do we accomplish this?

Think of your website as a pyramid.

• Your homepage is the top of the pyramid, your main category pages are the second level, and relevant subcategory pages are the third level. If you need more than 4 levels, rethink the levels above!
• Your main category pages should appear in your main navigation (i.e. always visible in the header of your website) and should represent the main topic areas of your business.
• Subcategories, if/when necessary, should fit logically under main categories (i.e. as “subsets” of the topics).
• Try to keep your main categories to 7 or less and the number of subcategory pages somewhat even across main categories.

Here’s a good way to visualize this structure:

Image concept from Moz.

Match your url structure to your page hierarchy.

• Like your page hierarchy, your URL structure should be simple and intuitive.
• URLs should be: short and descriptive, use hyphens (not underscores) between words, and void of unnecessary/excessive parameters.
• Each level of the pyramid should ideally reside in its own directory, following the level/directory above it.

Here’s a good example from the Dermatology niche:

In this example, the ‘Rosacea’ subcategory resides on the following url:

https://www.chicagodermatology.com/general-dermatology/rosacea/

This makes it easy for me to understand that the above page is all about Rosacea, which is one of their General Dermatology services.

6. Develop an internal linking strategy

Internal links refer to links from one page of your website to another. They are used to help guide web crawlers and site visitors to additional, relevant information across your domain.

Additionally, internal links are awesome because they:

• help pages get found by web crawlers and indexed in search results;
• establish topical relevance between pages (such as main categories and subcategories);
• pass “authority” or “link juice” from one page to another;
• guide visitors to high value pages (ex: from a blog post to a service page);
• improve metrics like ‘time on site’, ‘pages per visit’ and ‘bounce rate’.

Okay, so we agree that internal links are a great (and easy) way to improve a website, but where should we add them? I thought you’d never ask…

Here are seven different areas of your site that are prime for internal linking:

1. link from homepage to main category pages (should be handled in the navigation)
2. link from main category pages to subcategory pages (in the navigation and/or on the page)
3. link from high authority pages to ‘almost ranking’ pages (see step 2 from my fastest seo results post)
4. link from high traffic pages to high converting pages
5. link from blog posts to product/service pages
6. link from product/service pages to landing pages (e.g. contact, shopping cart, etc.)
7. link from new blog posts to old blog posts and vice versa

When linking from one page to another, be deliberate about the words and phrases you use as the hyperlink (known as anchor text). In most cases, the anchor text should be descriptive and relevant to the page you’re linking to, as opposed to general phrases like “click here” or “read more”.

For example:

Here are my best SEO tips for a new website.

vs.

For my best SEO tips for a new website, click here.

Pro Tip:

Use Google to find internal linking opportunities. Search site:yourdomain.com keyword where keyword would be a key phrase that represents the linking page. Google will return a list of pages on your domain in order of most to least relevant to that term. Additionally, you can put “keyword” in quotes to return pages that mention that keyword, verbatim.

What types of challenges do you face?

I did my best to outline a straightforward process for organizing a website that any business could follow. That said, I know there are extra challenges and considerations for certain types of websites and/or business scenarios.

If you have a specific question or challenge you’re facing with how to organize a website, I’ll be more than happy to help in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading!

The post How to Organize a Website for Rankings, Traffic & Conversions appeared first on Web Focused.

You don’t often see the words “fast” and “SEO” in the same sentence, and for good reason; SEO is typically viewed as an investment where your time, money and effort get put towards something that will pay off over the long-term (i.e. months or years vs. days or weeks).

That said, there are some “quick wins” to be had in the SEO game. That is, low resource activities that can produce meaningful and measurable results in a relatively short time-frame.

What follows are five of my favorites… each of which I review and consider for all of my SEO clients. My hope is that at least one of them will be something you haven’t tried before, and can implement quickly for some fast SEO results.

Note: this should go without saying, but each of these tactics is based on above-board, “white-hat” SEO practices that are fully compliant with Google Webmaster Guidelines. They are meant to not only improve your rankings and traffic but also your website and user-experience. Spammers and other shysters need not read on!

Still with me? Great! Here we go…

1. Optimize title tags

One of the first things I look at when evaluating a client (or potential client) website is their title tag structure.

For the SEO noobies reading, the Title Tag refers to the blue “headline” that gets displayed for your website in search results. It appears between the <title></title> element in the HTML markup of every page on your site, and is one of the most important ranking factors used in search engine algorithms.

The reason I mention it in an article about ‘fastest SEO results’ is that very minor tweaks to your title tags can impact your rankings and search traffic within days of implementation.

Beginner

At the most basic level, you want to make sure that all of the important pages on your website have unique and descriptive title tags associated with them. In other words, you don’t want the same title tag repeated across multiple pages of your website – and, you do want them to accurately describe the content of the page.

Most content management systems have a setting where you can set the default title tag structure of your website.

A good starting point is simply:

[Page Heading] | [Business Name]

For example, using this format on my SEO Consulting page my title tag would be:

SEO Consulting | Web Focused

And this blog post would be:

Fastest SEO Results: 5 Ways to Increase Search Traffic FAST | Web Focused

Examples of what you don’t want:

• The word “HOME” in your homepage title tag
• Your business name appearing at the beginning of the title tag
• Your entire homepage title tag being used across other pages of your site
• Extremely long title tags (ideally all title tags are less than 70 characters)

I regularly come across websites making these mistakes, where simply updating their title tag structure to the default Page Heading | Business Name would make a big difference. If you’re one of them, you have a massive opportunity for improvement!

Intermediate

Once you have a good basic format in place, you can further improve your title tags by:

Using the best keyword(s) for each important site page.

(read: What Makes a Good Keyword)

The long and short of it is this: you want to make sure your keywords 1. Match the intent of the people searching them, 2. Are searched for consistently (i.e. “search volume”), and 3. Are not overly competitive to rank for.

Adding keywords that are tightly related to the main one.

This might include a variation of your main keyword, a singular or plural version, a synonym, a city or state, or a modifier.

For example, if your “root” keyword was Accounting, your default title tag would be:

Accounting | [Business Name]

That’s better than nothing and certainly better than something unrelated to the page; however, we can help this page rank for more search terms by adding one or more of the following:

• Variation: Accountants
• Singular/Plural: Accountant
• Synonym: CPA
• City/State: Chicago, IL
• Modifiers: Top, Firm

So, a new and improved title tag for this page might be:

Accounting Firm – Top Chicago Accountants | [Business Name]

You don’t want to go over the top with adding keywords in your title tags. Just keep in mind that you want to keep them under 70 characters, and you want people to actually click on them.

Speaking of which…

Optimizing for clicks – a.k.a. optimizing for human beings.

Ranking for your top search terms is great, but only if it actually brings people to your website.

Your Title Tags get used as the “headline” for each page on your site – and those headlines get displayed in search results surrounded by other headlines. In order to make your title tags stand out and get clicked, you want to make them appealing to the people that are searching for your keywords (i.e. your prospective customers).

How do you do that?

Well, including keywords and keeping them to a reasonable length is a great start – but to take things to the next level, try one or more of the following:

• Make it compelling
  Listing 3 near-identical keywords in a row may help you rank, but it won’t make people click. Write for users, not just search engines!
• Convey a benefit
  In just a few words, why should someone choose your offer over the competition? Common examples include free shipping, years of experience, and low price points.
• Add a call-to-action
  This doesn’t just work for pay-per-click advertising. Try adding a CTA such as ‘Shop Now’, ‘Start Today’ or ‘Speak With an Expert’.
• Use numbers or special characters
  Of course, only if and when it makes sense. Examples include ‘Starting at $299’, ‘As Low As 4.5%’, and ‘Top 10 Rated’.

The goal is to write title tags that include one or more keywords you want to rank for and get people to click your title tag over the ones around it. It can be challenging, but also kind of fun (at least for an SEO nerd, like me

Advanced

Once you have solid title tags in place and want to take things to the next level, you need to test your title tags similar to how you’d test a pay-per-click campaign. It’s a slower, less efficient process than say, an AdWords campaign, but still something worth going through – especially for particularly competitive keywords and/or important site pages.

There is already a fantastic post on the topic of title tag CTR optimization which I highly recommend reading (I’ve referred back to it multiple times since it was originally published), but here’s a high-level overview of the process:

• Step 1: Export a list of your top-ranking landing pages from Google Search Console (Search Traffic → Search Analytics → Pages).
• Step 2: Pick a page you’d like to test the title tag for. This should be a page with an Average Position between 1 – 15 or so.
• Step 3: Update the title tag on that page and wait for it to get updated in search results (or ask Google to recrawl your URL for faster re-indexing).
• Step 4: Give it two weeks to collect data (and ideally 2000+ impressions).
• Step 5: Record and compare the Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position for a comparable date range (i.e. June 1 – 14 vs. July 1 – 14).
• Step 6: Determine whether your new title tag increased or decreased the CTR (and therefore, traffic) to the page.

The most straight-forward result would be that your Position stayed roughly the same, but your CTR went either up or down. If the Position changed as well, it will be harder to determine the effectiveness of the test, and further testing might be necessary.

Of course, if both the Position and the CTR went up, it would still make sense to leave the new title tag in place, even though you can’t say for certain that one caused the other.

Positive test results can start sending additional traffic to your site within days (basically, as soon as it gets updated in search results). Pretty cool!

2. Find “almost” ranking terms

The idea here is to identify specific search queries in which you are almost ranking at the top – specifically, terms in which you have a web page ranking between positions 5 – 20 in organic search results (i.e. the middle of page 1 through the bottom of page 2, typically).

Once identified, these terms can often be “pushed” onto page 1 (i.e. results 1 – 10), or moved from the bottom of page 1 to the top with little effort.

Two important (and interesting!) notes:

1. As you might expect, a very low percentage of users click past the first page of search results. The numbers vary depending on who conducted the study and when, but they all find that somewhere between 80 – 95% of clicks go to the results on page 1.
2. Once you’re on the first page of results, the percentage of clicks on your web page vs. the others around it increases exponentially with each position you move up. For instance, it is estimated that the first organic search result gets around 30% of the clicks (and I’ve seen this as high as 50%), whereas the second result gets around 15% and the third result gets around 7%.

Takeaway: if you want to increase search traffic FAST, improving an already ranking page by just a spot or two can yield much faster and more significant results than trying to go from page 15 to page 1 – or, creating a brand new page for a term you want to target.

So how do we do this?

First, we need to find high search volume keywords in which we have web pages ranking between positions 5 – 20 in search results. Second, we need to improve the relevance of those web pages for those keywords.

Let’s get started…

Finding Keywords

There are two different tools I use to find almost ranking keywords – one is paid, and one is free. I like to use both as each one will often come up with terms the other one didn’t. That said, even using just one should uncover some great opportunities for our purposes.

SEMrush (Paid):

Login into SEMrush and input your root domain (e.g. YourWebsite.com). This will search for ranking keywords across your entire domain, including sub-domains. Scroll down a little and click the ‘View full report’ button under the ‘Top Organic Keywords’ section.

What follows is a list of keywords driving traffic to your website via Google’s top 100 organic search results. By default, it’s sorted by the ‘Traffic %’ column – meaning, keywords driving the most amount of traffic to the least.

Sort by the ‘Position’ column – lowest to highest – and create the following Advanced filters:

• Include / Pos. / Greater than: 4
• Include / Pos. / Less than: 21

Now you have a list of all traffic-driving keywords in which you have a page ranking between positions 5 – 20!

Before we move on, there are two other Advanced filters you might consider using at this point:

1. URL: if you want to filter by keywords specific to your blog or other section of your website, set a filter to: Include / URL / Containing: blog. Where the word “blog” would represent whatever word(s) you’re using as the sub-directory or sub-domain for a particular section of your website.
2. Volume: if you want to filter by keywords with a minimum monthly search volume, set a filter to: Include / Volume / Greater than: XX. Where “XX” would be the minimum number of monthly searches a keyword generates. I usually set this to 99 so I’m only considering keywords with 100+ monthly searches.

Next, export this list and open up the file. Delete all of the columns except for the few we need, including: Keyword, Position, Search Volume, and Url. I like to do a custom sort by Url so that I can see ranking keywords grouped by page.

Finally, review each keyword and highlight the ones that are relevant to your business and the audience you’re trying to reach.

You may find that you rank for a lot of random, odds and ends keywords that aren’t very relevant to what you do – and therefore, will not be terms you want to rank higher for. This is completely normal, especially for larger websites with lots of content.

Google Search Console (Free):

A similar process can be done (for free!) using Google Search Console.

First, make sure your website is set-up in Search Console, including a separate property for each version of your domain (with and without ‘www’ + https, if applicable):

• http://YourWebsite.com
• http://www.YourWebsite.com
• https://YourWebsite.com
• https://www.YourWebsite.com

Then set the preferred domain to www or non-www.

To see the keywords driving traffic to your site, simply click on your preferred web property, then go to Search Traffic → Search Analytics (or, if you synced your Search Console property with your Google Analytics account, you can access this via Acquisition → Search Console → Queries).

Near the top of the page, check the boxes next to Clicks, Impressions, and Position. Then click on Dates and set the range to ‘Last 90 days’ (this is farthest back you can go in Search Console), then click back to Queries.

Lastly, scroll to the bottom of the page and click to show as many rows as you can (lower right), then click Download to export this list to a CSV file (lower left).

Search Console doesn’t have a way to filter your keywords by search volume or position, so you’ll have to do that in your CSV file; however, if you use Google Analytics you can apply an advanced filter similar to what we did with SEMrush:

Note: Impressions are similar to search volume; however, an impression is only triggered when your website is displayed in search results. This means that your page 2 (positions 11 – 20) rankings will likely show low impression numbers, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a high search volume keyword. Make sense?

Increasing Relevance

Whether you use SEMrush or Google Search Console, you should now have a handful of keywords that meet the following criteria:

1. There’s a page on your website ranking between positions 5 – 20 in Google’s organic search results for it;
2. It gets searched at least 100 times per month on Google (if you set this filter with SEMrush);
3. It’s relevant to your business – meaning, the people who search for it are likely to be interested in your content, and presumably, your products or services.

This is great information to have (especially with only 10 – 15 minutes of work!), but now we need to increase the relevance of our ranking pages to the terms we want to rank higher for. Don’t worry, this is quick too!

The simplest thing you can do – which is often enough to bump up your rankings by a few positions or more – is to make sure that your keyword appears, verbatim, in a couple of key areas of the page, including:

• Title tag and meta description
• Headings and sub-headings
• Body content (i.e. not counting the header, navigational links, sidebar, or footer)
• Image alt text

Start by using Control+F (windows) or Command+F (mac) to see if or where your keyword already appears on the page. Then, read the content carefully and look for a few places in which you can work your keyword in naturally.

When going through this process, it’s very common to find that the keyword(s) you’re ranking well for don’t even appear on the page. This is actually a good thing, as adding them in the areas mentioned above may be enough to boost your rankings and see a nice lift in traffic.

Important: be careful not to de-optimize your page for other already ranking keywords. In order to check which other keywords you might be ranking for, go to SEMrush and enter the full URL of the web page – e.g. http://www.YourWebsite.com/content-page/. Sort by Position – high to low – and make sure you don’t remove any of the already ranking keywords from this list while incorporating the new terms.

—

One other very simple tactic I almost always use when going through this process is adding 2 – 3 internal links from other pages on the same site to the page I’m trying to rank. An easy way to find internal linking opportunities is to go to Google and enter the following search string:

site:YourWebsite.com "target keyword"

This will return a list of pages on your domain in which your “target keyword” appears within the content. Visit a few of these pages and hyperlink the keyword on the page, to the page in which you’re trying to rank for that keyword.

You can also run the same search string without quotes around your target keyword, like:

site:YourWebsite.com target keyword

This will return a list of pages on your domain in order of relevance to that term, according to Google. Visit the top 3 – 5 pages and see if there’s a keyword similar to the one you’re trying to rank for to hyperlink to your page.

Pro Tip: use Open Site Explorer to find the most authoritative pages on your website to link from. Simply search your root domain, then click the ‘Top Pages’ report. You can see the top 5 pages with the free version, and all of your pages with a paid plan.

This whole process shouldn’t take more than a few minutes per page, and ranking results can usually be seen within a week or two (sometimes even less!).

3. Consolidate root domains

Did you know that the following URLs are considered separates websites by search engines?

• http://CompanyABC.com
• http://www.CompanyABC.com
• https://CompanyABC.com
• https://www.CompanyABC.com
• http://CompanyABC.com/index.html

Even though the root domain (CompanyABC.com) is the same and the web pages themselves appear identical to the end-user, the other attributes of the URL such as www vs. non-www, http vs. https, etc. technically make them different websites.

Why does this matter?

A few reasons:

It dilutes your backlinks.

That is, the value that gets passed to your website from other websites who link to you.

For example, if Website A links to the www version of your site and Website B links to the non-www version of your site, the value of having two sites linking to you gets divided across those two different domains.

It creates duplicate content.

To search engines, it looks like some or all of the pages of your website have duplicate versions of them.

While Google claims that they don’t penalize a website for duplicate content, it can hinder that content’s ability to rank as well as it could in search engines – and, with multiple versions of your root domain, this could potentially impact every page on your site.

It creates 404 errors.

If different versions of your domain don’t redirect to one primary version, people may receive a “Page not found” error message when trying to visit them.

This, of course, leads to a poor user experience, which may, in turn, be viewed as a poor usability signal in the eyes of search engines. At scale, this can negatively impact your rankings.

How to Test

If you’re using a modern content management system like WordPress, this shouldn’t be an issue for you; however, the “test” is fast and simple. Just enter each variation of your domain in your browser’s address bar and see if they redirect to a “primary” version. You can also perform a search for site:YourDomain.com to see which version Google considers to be your primary.

Alternatively, you can use this free HTTP Status Code Checker to check all the versions of your domain at once.

How to Fix

The implementation of this is fairly technical, but it should be fast and easy for most web developers.

If you just tell them what you want (e.g. “Please make the www version of my domain 301 redirect to the non-www version of my domain”) they should know what to do. If in doubt, feel free to send them the following resource for htaccess Snippets.

Once complete, be sure to set your preferred domain (www or non-www) in Google Search Console.

—

If you find that multiple versions of your domain are not redirecting to a primary one, and your website has been online for several years, this could be a massive “win” for you. You could expect traffic increases within a couple of weeks, and depending on the size of your site, they may continue for months to come.

4. Republish blog content

Writing a really great blog post takes time. Often, a LOT of time. And the sad truth of it is unless that blog post ends up ranking for some good keywords, only a small fraction of your audience ever ends up reading it.

Republishing and repromoting your blog content is an easy way to get a bigger return on the time investment you made to write it. Not only will more people see it the second time around (especially if your audience has grown since you originally published it), but it can boost your search engine traffic due to the following:

1. When you republish a blog post, it appears higher in the website architecture. For example, instead of appearing on page 7 (and requiring 7+ clicks to get to it), it will appear on your main blog page – typically just 1 click from your homepage. This gives it an instant authority boost!
2. Re-promoting a blog post on your social channels creates extra social signals around your content, which at the very least has an indirect impact on rankings. It’s also not uncommon for re-published content to earn even more social engagement than the original content.
3. The extra visibility on your website, as well as the additional social promotion,  increases opportunities to earn backlinks.
4. Most blog posts display a published date in search results, which can either help or hurt its click-thru-rate. For instance, if you were searching for “laptop reviews”, would you click on a post from 2012? Probably not! Updating your published date improves CTR from search results, which has a growing correlation with rankings.

How to Re-Publish Blog Content

Decide which blog post(s) to republish.

I recommend starting with one that performed well when it was originally published and/or is already ranking well in search engines. I also recommend considering posts that are at least 6 – 12 months old.

Consider the following metrics in Google Analytics:

• Pageviews, Avg. Time on Page and Bounce Rate (Behavior → Site Content → All Pages).
• Impressions and Clicks from search results (Acquisition → Search Console → Landing Pages).

These are all simple indicators of ‘top-performing content’, right at your disposal.

Update and improve your content.

This is an optional step, but it’s worth it! Simply review the post and consider:

• Updating any outdated information;
• Adding recent examples;
• Providing extra ideas and insights;
• Including extra images; and
• Citing recent resources.

This will make the post worth re-reading for the people who read the original and will also help improve your rankings for this page.

I’ll also typically include a note at the top of the post explaining that this is an updated version of a previous post.

Republish and promote your post.

The specific instructions for republishing a blog post will vary depending on your content management system, but it’s typically very easy. For example, in WordPress simply navigate to the post, click the ‘Edit’ link next to the ‘Published on’ date, select the date you’d like it to be re-published, then click ‘Update’.

Your post will be re-published on that date, which basically just means it will appear at the top of your main blog page as a new post, and the date that’s displayed on it will update to the new date.

Important: make sure the URL of your post doesn’t change. If you have the date in your permalink structure, it likely will. If that’s the case, make sure you 301 redirect the original post URL to the new one.

Finally, give your post some promotional love! This might include emailing your list, sharing it on your social channels, and potentially even reaching out to super relevant websites and bloggers to help you promote it.

Expect to spend maybe 1 – 2 hrs per blog post, and you could potentially see your blog post jump in rankings and traffic within a few days after republishing.

5. Reclaim earned links

There are, quite literally, an infinite amount of ways to build links to your website – but because this is an article about fastest SEO results, I’m including a form of link-building that is:

1. High value – i.e. links that can actually move the needle in terms of rankings and traffic.
2. Relatively easy to acquire – i.e. they don’t require a large investment of time to get them.

It’s most commonly referred to as “link reclamation” and it involves finding and re-claiming broken links (i.e. links to missing / 404 pages on your website), as well as mentions of your brand without a link to your website.

Broken Links

If you work at or for a company that has been in business for more than a couple of years, it is very likely that there are websites linking to non-existent pages on your website. And, if you’ve gone through at least one major website update, I’d even bet on it!

What causes them?

The two most common causes are:

1. A page with one or more external links pointing to it was removed or taken down and not redirected.
2. A typo in the external link itself – meaning, the website linking to you is using an invalid URL.

How to find them

The best free method is with Google Search Console.

Simply click on your web property and go to Crawl → Crawl Errors and click the ‘Not found’ tab. This will give you a list of 404 pages on your site, which means there’s a web page either on your domain or on another domain that’s linking to it. By default, these are sorted by ‘Priority’.

What you need to do is view each one and click the ‘Linked from’ tab to see which web page(s) are linking to it.

How to reclaim them

First, you want to determine if it’s a web page that was taken down by accident – in which case, you’d want to consider putting the page back up. Again, this is especially common after a significant website update.

If it’s a URL that either never existed, or existed but you don’t want to put it back, you have a couple of options:

1. For internal links (i.e. links from other pages on your site), it’s best to update the URL on the page that’s actually linking to it.
2. For external links (i.e. links from other websites), you’ll want to reach out to the site owner and kindly ask them to update the link for you. If that doesn’t work, you can 301 redirect the non-existing URL to the most relevant existing URL on your site.

Note: for external links, it’s only worth going through this process for preserving high-value links. That is, links from relevant, good quality domains and web pages.

Brand Mentions

More specifically, “un-linked” brand mentions, are another commonality of the web and represent some of the easiest and highest quality links you can get.

What causes them?

Un-linked brand mentions are “caused” by people simply neglecting to link your business name (or sometimes a specific person’s name) to your website.

Sometimes it’s unintentional, and sometimes sites have a general rule that they don’t link out to other websites (this is most common amongst news sites).

How to find them

I can often pick up some quick wins for a client by simply searching variations of their business name, like this:

"Company XYZ" –site:companyxyz.com

(the latter part removes mentions of their business name on their own website)

Don’t forget to use common variations of the business name, and try searching a few of the business owners and/or other public-facing figures.

Comb through the first 10 or so pages of search results, opening pages that look relevant in a separate tab. Then visit each page, find the mention of the business or person, and see if it includes a link back to the website.

Common examples include:

• Press mentions
• “Expert” quotes
• Business Directories
• Sponsorship pages
• Donations pages
• Partners pages

How to reclaim them

Simply reach out to a direct contact or look for contact information on the web page or site, and request a link back to your website.

Here’s an example of an email I’ve used on behalf of a client (names have been changed):

Hi John –

I work with Dan Smith from Smith & Associates.

I recently came across two articles Dan wrote for The Public Relations Strategist section of the PRSA website and was wondering if we might be able to link our business name (“Smith & Associates”) in Dan’s bio at the bottom of the articles to our website.

Here are the two articles I’m referring to:

1. [insert specific web page in question]

2. [insert specific web page in question]

And here is our website:

http://www.smithassociates.com/

Please let me know if this is something you could assist us with, or if there is someone else I should reach out to.

Thanks in advance,

– Zack

It’s really important that you keep track of your outreach, especially because you’ll want to follow up at least once or twice if you don’t hear back. It’s very common not to hear back on the first try, so leave yourself a reminder to follow up in a week or so.

I keep this outreach organized in a simple spreadsheet – but if you have a CRM, that’s even better.

For my follow-up, I’ll reply to my original email with something as simple as:

Hey John –

Just following up on this request…

Please let me know if it would be possible to add these links to our site.

Thanks!

– Zack

This is a slightly slower process than the others in this post, as the follow-ups could go on for a few weeks – then you’ll need to wait for Google to re-crawl the pages.

That said, for smaller businesses with fewer existing backlinks, picking up 5 – 10 links like this can seriously improve your rankings and traffic in 1 – 2 months’ time.

Bottom line

These are five of the best methods I know for getting fast SEO results. While they may not be as fast or as dramatic as a big press mention, a large email broadcast, or going viral on social media, the results from these methods are typically long-lasting.

I’d love to hear your experiences with the methods above – and, if you have any other methods for increasing organic search traffic fast, let me know in the comments section below.

Happy Ranking!

The post Fastest SEO Results: 5 Ways to Increase Search Traffic FAST! appeared first on Web Focused.

What keywords are my competitors using? It’s a natural question to ask, and one I usually research the answer to before my clients even ask.

After auditing some of the bigger technical aspects of a new client’s website, keyword research is often the next thing I dive into – and competitor research is a crucial element of that process.

I was debating whether or not to write this post, as I assumed there would be a ton of articles on the topic already. To my surprise, there were only a few and none of them covered what I feel is the most effective method for answering this question.

Imagine being able to see the exact keywords your competitors are targeting with their websites, as well as where they rank for those keywords and how much traffic they’re receiving from them.

Is that something you might be interested in??

(high five if you got the Entourage reference)

Well good news… not only is this possible, it’s actually pretty simple! And I’m going to lay out the process for you step-by-step – right here, right now.

But before I jump into it, let’s quickly start with the “why”…

Why research competitor keywords?

Although it’s common to want to know what the other guys (or girls) are doing, the information is only really helpful if you know how to use it.

Aside from simply being “interesting”, here’s how understanding what keywords your competitors are using can actually be used to improve your marketing efforts:

• To understand brand positioning.
  Learn how your competitors are positioning themselves online, including what they’re trying to be known and found for. Use this information to better understand your marketplace and where/how you fit in.
• To see where they’re having success.
  How much search volume does a particular topic really have? How difficult will it be to rank for it? Answer these questions and more by seeing which keywords and topics are working for your competitors.
• To fill in content gaps.
  Are you missing opportunities to put yourself in front of prospective customers due to a lack of content on your website? Competitor research is one of the best ways to find and fill those gaps.
• To uncover ideas for your blog.
  There are an infinite amount of topics you can write about on your blog, but not every topic will lead to targeted, consistent search traffic. Use competitor research to find the “proven winners”.
• To find new competitors.
  Your “real world competitors” aren’t always the same as your “search competitors”. Use this process to find and learn from new competitors before they find and learn from you!

Now that you have a high level understanding of why researching competitors’ keywords is important, let’s get into how to actually do it.

How to see competitors’ keywords

Thanks to the amazing Domain Analytics from SEMrush, this process is actually quite simple.

Step 1: Go to SEMrush.com

Step 2: Enter a competitor’s root domain (e.g. YourCompetitor.com) and click the ‘Start now’ button.

Step 3: Take a quick look at the traffic graph:

The blue line represents estimated monthly organic search traffic and the orange line represents estimated monthly paid search traffic.

I like to toggle between ‘All Time’ and ‘2Y’ (2 Year) before diving into the specific keywords, just to get a sense of 1. How much traffic they receive from search engines, and 2. How that traffic has trended over time.

Step 4: Click the ‘View full report’ button under ‘Top Organic Keywords’.

Here are the columns you’ll want to pay attention to:

1. Keyword: the specific search queries being entered by users into Google.
2. Pos: the position the domain ranks within Google’s search results during the time-frame you set (the default is “Live” – i.e. right now).
3. Volume: how many times each keyword gets searched in Google (average monthly).
4. URL: the specific web page on the domain that is ranking for each keyword.
5. Traffic %: the share of organic search traffic each keyword generates for the site (e.g. 15.25 would mean 15.25% of all organic search traffic to that domain).

Step 5: Sort by the ‘Traffic %’ column (click the downward arrow to sort by highest to lowest).

You are now looking at the top 10 keywords driving traffic to your competitor’s website. Pretty cool, huh?!

Of course, if you want access to ALL of the keywords driving traffic to your competitor’s websites, you’ll need to sign-up for a 7-day free trial.

Note: I use SEMrush for some of the most important aspects of my business, including competitive keyword research. Their Domain Analytics alone is well worth the monthly expense. I’ll just leave it at that!

For the next few steps I’m going to be using the Pro plan, but reviewing just the top 10 keywords from each your competitors will be valuable.

Step 6: Click the ‘Export’ button to download an Excel or CSV file with all of this data.

Step 7: Open up the file and remove the unnecessary columns, leaving just: Keyword, Pos., Volume, URL, Traffic %.

Step 8: Sort by the URL column alphabetically to group keywords together by page that’s ranking for them.

Step 9: Review the keywords, 1 row at a time, and highlight terms you think make sense for your business – i.e. terms you would want to rank for.

Note: just because a keyword has high search volume and/or is making up a significant share of your competitor’s traffic doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a keyword you want to rank for. Most businesses – especially ones that have been blogging for a while – have a LOT of random, irrelevant search terms that they rank for. This is unavoidable, but still not something we want to go out of our way to replicate.

Read: What Makes a Good Keyword for extra guidance on evaluating keywords.

Step 10: Review the web pages from the URL column for all of the keywords you’re interested in.

Ask yourself the following:

• Do I have a page on my site that’s targeting these keywords? If so, where do I rank for them? If not, should I create one?
• If I need to create a new page, what type of content should it be – a product/service page, a blog post, or other?
• Either way, what can I do to make my page better (e.g. more informative, engaging, etc.) than theirs?

Narrowing the list

If a competitor is ranking for thousands of search terms you may want to narrow down the list before reviewing each one.

Click on ‘Advanced filters’ and consider some of the following:

Remove variations of their brand name:

Remove other irrelevant terms:

Set a minimum search volume:

Show only page 1 rankings:

Show only page 2 – 5 rankings:

Show only blog posts:

See terms for a specific web page:

I use each one of these regularly – especially the second to last one as I routinely use this process to help uncover topic and keyword opportunities for my clients’ blogs.

Find keywords your competitors are “trying” to target

The above process is awesome because it allows you to see the actual keywords driving traffic to your competitor’s websites; however, it’s also useful to see which keywords your competitor’s are trying to rank for, even if they’re not there yet.

For instance, maybe it’s a new business with a new website, or an established business that just started doing SEO. Or, maybe they’re just trying to target keywords that are way too competitive for them.

Whatever the case, there’s all sorts of intel to be gathered by seeing which keywords you’re competitors are targeting with their SEO efforts.

Here’s how…

Step 1: Visit a competitor’s website

Step 2: Open up a few of their main site pages (e.g. homepage, products/services, etc.)

Step 3: Review their Title Tag for each page using one of the following methods:

a. Hover your cursor over the browser tab; OR

b. Right click > View page source – look for the text that appears between <title></title>; OR

c. Download and install Mozbar (free) – click on the ‘Page Analysis’ icon to see the Page Title.

The Title Tag is the best (and simplest) place to see what keywords your competitors are targeting, as it’s one of – if not, the most – important on-site factor search engines consider when determining what a page is about. Basically, if they’re trying to rank for a particular keyword, this is the place it’ll be!

Over to you

The original question this post sought to answer was, “What keywords are my competitors using?” I hope you learned not only that, but also how to use that information to build your business.

I’d love to hear how you’ve used this method (or others) to research competitor keywords – and more importantly, what you did with that information and the effect that it had.

Happy researching!

The post What Keywords Are My Competitors Using? (Answer in 10 Easy Steps) appeared first on Web Focused.

Keyword research is one of the most important tasks of any SEO campaign… it also happens to be one of my favorite tasks so I’m excited to share my criteria for what makes a good keyword with you here.

Whether you’re looking to drive traffic to your product or service pages, gain more exposure for your blog, or create and distribute a piece of content that positions you as a thought leader in your industry, keyword research can quite literally make or break the “success” of your efforts.

I regularly come across businesses who have been producing content for YEARS with very little traffic growth to show for it.

Like a lot of things in SEO, selecting keywords for your content is easy to over-complicate – but also easy to screw up! With countless (lengthy) articles, dozens of online tools, and enough crazy excel formulas to make your head spin, it’s no wonder why so many marketers give up before even getting started.

Fortunately for you, my loyal reader, I’m going to simplify the process right now.

What makes a good keyword?

1. Search Intent: it matches the intent of your content with the intent of the searcher, 2. Search Volume: it gets searched with enough frequency to drive meaningful traffic to your site, and 3. Competition: it’s a term in which you can realistically expect to rank.

Let take a look at each of these in detail:

1. Search intent

This is perhaps the most obvious, but also the easiest to overlook.

Simply put, we want to make sure the intent of the searcher (and the search query they’re typing into search engines) matches the intent of the web page or piece of content we want them to find in search results.

How do we do this?

The simplest way is to type each keyword you’re considering into Google and look through the results on the first page. Ask yourself:

• Are the results mostly commercial or informational in nature?
  If you’re researching keywords for a product or service page, and the results on page 1 are mostly informational in nature (e.g. blog posts, news sites, etc.) there is likely a mismatch of intent.
• Are there businesses similar to yours?
  Sometimes keywords may be relevant to more than one niche or industry, or simply have a different / more common meaning that you thought (embarrassing example of this to follow).
• Is your “keyword” actually the name of a business?
  You’d be surprised how often this happens. If it is, you’ll likely see the first 3 – 5 results taken up by their website and other online profiles, like LinkedIn, BBB.org, etc.
• Do the results contain multimedia such as PDFs or videos?
  If so, it likely means that search query is best addressed with that form of content, and as such, you should consider putting your content into the same format.

In sum: If several of the results on page 1 are similar to what you’re working on, you’re likely in the right place!

An example of search intent gone wrong:

A couple years ago I was researching keywords for a public relations firm. One of their core service offerings is media training, where they coach C-level executives on how to develop and deliver messages effectively to the media.

One of the keywords I found for them – which met the other two criteria in this post – was “media awareness training”. That intuitively made sense to me – meaning, it sounded exactly like what they offered so I went with it.

After a couple months we were ranking on the top of page 1 for that term and I was pumped; however, no leads were coming in! So I fired up Google.com and searched the term to make sure their website was there. It was, but I noticed that the other search results were for a completely different type of training.

It turns out that “media awareness training” is actually a type of training specific to military personnel – i.e. completely different from “media training” in the public relations industry.

Luckily, we were able to swap out this keyword for a similar keyword, but with the correct intent. Within a few weeks they were off page 1 for the previous term and on page 1 for a much better term which led to multiple new business opportunities for them.

BUT, I think this illustrates the reason why it’s so important to check the search intent of your keywords!

2. Search volume

Believe it or not, what people are searching for and how they are searching for it often varies dramatically from how we think…

So in order to get our products, services and information in front of people, we need to first understand the what and the how of their search habits so we can create the most relevant and valuable page for them to land on.

This is where search volume comes into play. It refers to the frequency with which people are searching for a specific word or phrase, typically presented as a round number by month or “average monthly” over the course of a year.

The numbers aren’t exact, but they can still be used as a rough approximation of how frequently a term is searched, as well as which terms are more commonly searched than others.

What’s a “good” search volume?

Well, there isn’t a magic number… and how much search volume to target depends entirely on your business, industry, geography, and type of content you’re doing research for. It can range from as little as 30 searches per month to tens of thousands of searches per month.

I’m going to give you a general starting point in a minute, but first think about this:

How much traffic would a page and/or piece of content need to generate each month to have a meaningful impact on your business?

Here are two examples of businesses that could benefit from as little as 30 extra visits per month:

• A small dentist office in a suburb of Chicago.
  This business would presumably only serve people within a small geographical area – and, they don’t need thousands (or even hundreds) of new patients each month. As such, targeting keywords in the 30 – 100 searches/mo range would likely have a meaningful impact on their business.
• A B2B company offering high transaction services.
  This type of business would likely benefit more from longer, more targeted (i.e. search intent) keywords with lower search volume vs. broader terms with higher search volume. For this business, even 2 – 3 new leads each month could be significant.

Now let’s look at two examples of businesses that would likely want to target keywords with higher search volume:

• A mid-size ecommerce business selling pet supplies.
  This business may have 10,000+ visits per month to their website already and rely on a much higher customer acquisition rate. As such, ranking for a keyword with 30 – 100 searches/mo wouldn’t make a dent, so they’d want to target keywords in the 100 – 1,000 range or more if it’s for their homepage or other key product/service page.
• A nationally recognized consumer clothing brand.
  This business may be receiving 100,000+ visits per month to their website, and similar to the pet supply business, rely on a higher customer acquisition rate. Their target market is also much larger than the other three examples and as such, they might be looking at keywords with 1000+ searches/mo.

If you’ve been in business for at least a few years, the following (super general) guide can serve as a starting point in understanding how much search volume you might be looking to target based on the page you’re doing research for:

When it comes to search volume it’s easy to get excited by big numbers, but it’s important to keep the other keyword criteria in mind. For instance:

• If the search intent of a keyword is off, you’ll either never rank for it – or if you do, it will result in un-targeted, irrelevant traffic to your site.
• If the first page of results is too competitive, you won’t break onto the first page either.

Speaking of which…

3. Competition

This refers to how competitive the first page of search results is for a given term, and is probably the trickiest criteria to determine.

In the SEO world, your “competition” refers to any web page ranking on the first page of search results for a keyword you want to rank for. While there is often overlap with your real world competitors – meaning, you will likely come across some of them in search results when researching words and phrases you want to rank for – this process will undoubtedly uncover new competitors for you.

How do we determine keyword competition?

This is as much an art as it is a science, but here are 3 concrete criteria we can use:

Domain Authority

This refers to the “strength” of a website in the eyes of search engines based on link metrics (i.e. the quality and quantity of other websites linking to them).

Here’s how to quickly estimate the strength of your competitor’s websites:

• Add the MozBar (free!) to your web browser.
• Turn it on and type your keyword into Google.
• Review the Domain Authority (DA) of the results on page 1.

Ideally the DA of your website is higher than at least a few of the results on page 1 (you can check your DA here). If you’re below that range, the keyword may be too competitive for you; however, it’s still worth evaluating the next 2 criteria before ditching it.

Title Tags

This refers to the blue “headline” that appears for each web page in search results.

Here’s how to quickly tell how relevant the current page 1 results are for your search query:

• Search for a keyword you’d like to analyze.
• Scan the Title Tags for the top results.

If your keyword appears verbatim near the beginning of many of them, it means these pages are likely very relevant and well-optimized for that term and will be more difficult to outrank.

Page Quality

This refers to the overall “usefulness” of a web page in answering a user’s search query.

Here’s how to quickly determine how well the current results are answering the query:

• Search for a keyword you’d like to analyze.
• Click on a few of the top ranking pages.
• Consider the following: Is the content well-written? Does it fully cover the keyword topic and/or satisfy a user’s search query? Are there multiple forms of content on the page (e.g. images, videos, charts/graphs)? Does the keyword appear verbatim multiple times on the page?

Answering “yes” to three or more of these questions means there are already well-written/optimized pages for that keyword topic and they will be more difficult to outrank.

In determining how competitive a keyword is, you should consider all three of these variables together, which is where the “art” part comes in. This is something you’ll get a better and better “sense” for after going through the process many times.

Tools to expedite the process

The last thing I want to (quickly) discuss here is the use of tools to expedite the keyword research process, particularly for larger projects.

Search Volume Tools

Google Keyword Planner was the free, go-to keyword research tool for advertisers and marketers for as long as I’ve been in the business (10+ years)… but around August of 2016 they decided to restrict their data from free users, making it available only to high-spending AdWords customers.

This was a massive blow to the people that have relied on it for keyword ideas and search volume data for years (like me), but life goes on!

Unfortunately, most of the “free” tools still available are very poor – at least until you upgrade to a paid account. As such, if SEO is an important part of your business, I highly recommend testing a paid tool to conduct your research with. The data they provide and time they save is well worth the $50 – $100 per month they cost.

Most of the “name-brand” paid keyword research tools you come across will work just fine for generating ideas and providing search volume estimates.

That said, the one I personally use is SEMrush. I’m going to write a more detailed post on how to use SEMrush for keyword research soon, but for now I’ll just say that I find it to be the simplest to work with – and, a paid membership gives me access to their entire suite of tools (which are awesome).

Competition Tools

While I think that going through the more manual process explained in this post is the best / most accurate method for determining keyword competition, it may not be feasible to do this for hundreds or thousands of keywords (for instance, if you’re doing research for an entire site).

There are a handful of really great keyword research tools out there that provide a competition or “difficulty” score where you simply type in a keyword (or upload a list) and they’ll quickly spit out a number for each.

So for larger projects I’ll combine and organize my list of keyword ideas in excel, then add a column for “Keyword Difficulty” where I’ll input adifficulty score from a paid tool.

I still do a lot of manual checking as I start narrowing down my top keyword choices, but this is a good way to get a high level idea of the competitiveness of the terms I’m considering.

The two main tools I personally use for this are:

• SEMrush: provides a simple ‘Difficulty Score’ displayed as a percent (1 – 100) based on the strength of the domains currently ranking in the top 20 positions for the keyword.
• Moz: their new keyword research tool, Keyword Explorer, provides a very similar ‘Difficulty Score’ as SEMrush; however, I find their score to be slightly better / more accurate in predicting the competitiveness of each term.

It’s worth the effort!

This post went on a little longer than I anticipated, but I hope my criteria for determining what makes a good keyword was helpful.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the difference between sites that create pages and content based on good keyword research and sites that don’t can be massive. Further, all future SEO efforts will have a faster and more significant impact on your site and business with well-researched keywords in place.

If you have any questions or feel I missed something important, please feel free to let me know in the comments section below.

I appreciate you reading and hope to see you again soon!

The post What Makes a Good Keyword: 3 Criteria for High ROI Search Terms appeared first on Web Focused.

The very fact that you’re reading this article means that you’re thinking about SEO at an early stage of your web development process, recent website launch, or perhaps even the launch of a brand new business.

Whichever the case, that’s great!

Launching a new website represents lots of opportunity from an SEO perspective, as it allows you to lay a great foundation for rankings, targeted web traffic, and an overall great user experience from the get-go.

While there are a lot of different types of businesses and websites out there – each with their own set of opportunities and challenges – I believe the tips below will be both applicable (and highly effective) for the large majority of them.

Without further ado, here are my Top 5 SEO tips for a new website.

Tip #1: Map out important site pages

The pages you create for your website and their navigational relationship to one another is an important consideration for any website and has significant implications on both user experience, as well as search engine rankings.

Of course, the more thought and research you put into your website structure from the start, the less back peddling you’ll need to do later on and the faster you’ll start making progress in search results.

Product/Service Pages

One of the most important tasks here is to think through your products and services. A common mistake I see with new websites (and even established ones) is to have just one product/service page that lists everything the business offers.

Why is this bad?

Well, it will significantly hinder your ability to rank and drive traffic for each individual product/service you offer, it doesn’t give site visitors the most relevant/targeted experience, and it will likely have a negative impact on conversions.

Let’s use a Catering company as an example, and let’s say that company offers catering services for 4 main event types:

1. Wedding
2. Corporate
3. Fundraiser
4. Social

I bet there are a ton of catering websites that have just one Services or “Events” page that lists each of these 4 event types, with a short paragraph about each one.

That’s a good start, but the next step would be to have a “Learn More” button or hyperlink after each one that links to a targeted landing page with more details about each event type.

So their navigation might look like this:

Now they are much more likely to rank for each individual event type they cater – and, once a searcher lands on that specific page they are immediately presented with the information they need about the business’s offerings around that event type.

Additional Page Structure Tips

• Pages should reside in directories, not sub-domains – e.g. yourdomain.com/page not page.yourdomain.com (there are only a few exceptions to this).
• Page URLs should be concise and keyword-rich – e.g. yourdomain.com/event-venue (whereas something like /facilities would be broad and not the language people would use to find the page).
• Page URLs should use hyphens (-) between words, not underscores.
• Pages should be organized into categories and sub-categories, where appropriate. This is especially important for product and service pages. Here’s an example of what a logical structure might look like: yourdomain.com/services/wedding-catering
• Page URLs should be no more than 3 directories deep – e.g. 1. /services 2. /wedding-catering 3. /outdoor
• Blog URLs should look like this: yourdomain.com/blog/post-title (the only websites that should consider using the date in their URLs are news sites)

If you’re using a content management system that makes it difficult (or impossible) to set up your page structure with the above best practices, I highly suggest switching to a different platform (like WordPress). Trust me, it will only get harder to make this switch as time goes on!

Read: How to Organize a Website for additional tips on page structure and organization.

Tip #2: Create compelling, informative content

I’m not going to turn this into a copywriting class, but I’d like to highlight a couple key points as it relates to the content on these pages.

Put Yourself in the Searcher’s Shoes

Imagine that you’re the person (i.e. the prospective customer) sitting down in front of a computer, going to Google.com, and typing in a search query – for example, “wedding catering chicago”. You click on the first result and get taken to a page on a company’s website talking about their wedding catering services.

What information would you expect to see on that page?

If there was 1 paragraph of generic text followed by a “Request a Quote” button, would you be likely to contact that company? (answer = probably not!)

I don’t know the first thing about catering, but putting myself in the consumer’s shoes I might expect to see:

1. A headline that immediately tells me I’m in the right place
2. An overview of your wedding catering services, showing a general understanding of my needs and concerns
3. How you’re different from other wedding caterers (or in marketing speak, your unique selling proposition)
4. Food/Drink menus and options
5. Answers to frequently asked questions
6. Testimonials from past customers
7. A photo gallery of past events
8. A call-to-action (i.e. tell me what to do next!)

You don’t necessarily need every one of these, but I’d argue that most of them would be pretty important in this example from both an SEO/ranking perspective, as well as a sales/conversion perspective. A “double-whammy”, if you will.

A Note About Word Count

I generally don’t like recommending specific word counts, as 1. It varies dramatically based on your business and the type of page, and 2. I’d rather you focus on creating the absolute best page possible – whether you can do that in 100 words or 1,000.

That said, more times than not I see businesses with too little content on their key website pages. Generally speaking, the more expensive and/or complicated the product or service, the more content you’ll likely want to include on these pages.

Having trouble coming up with ideas of what to write about? Try these:

1. Review your competitor’s websites – both your “real world” competitors, as well as your search competitors – i.e. the websites currently ranking on page 1 for the terms you want to rank for. Your goal is to create a better, more informative and more compelling page than theirs.
2. Come up with a list of the top 5 questions your prospective customers have about your business or industry in general (speak with your sales team, review past customer inquiries, etc.). Then make sure those questions are answered within your content.

Tip #3: Optimize for visitors and search results

Don’t worry, we’re going to keep this simple. “Optimize” simply means that we’re going to integrate the keywords you want to rank for in a few key areas of your web pages.

Title Tags

Title Tags are the blue “headlines” that appear for your website in search results, and are one of the most important factors search engines consider when determining where and when to rank your website pages. They are defined by the <title></title> HTML tag.

The goal here is to make sure that every page on your website has a unique and descriptive Title Tag associated with it. Fortunately, most modern content management systems make it very easy to update your Title Tags on each individual page.

If you’re using WordPress, for instance, I highly recommend installing the Yoast SEO plugin. It makes editing Title Tags (and many of the other on-site elements) extremely easy to do. Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

Here’s a good general format you can use for your Title Tags:

[Primary Keyword] – [Secondary Keyword] | [Business Name]

e.g.

Wedding Catering Services – Chicago Wedding Caterers | XYZ Company

Pro Tip: Try keeping your Title Tags under 70 characters (including spaces) in order to reduce the chances of them getting cut off and/or re-written in search results.

Meta Descriptions

Meta Descriptions appear as the descriptive text below your “headline” in search results. While no longer considered a direct ranking factor, they are used to give searchers a glimpse of what your page is about and encourage clicks to your site (which can impact your rankings). They are defined by the <meta name="description" content="" /> HTML tag.

You can think about this the same way you’d think about writing ad copy for any sort of pay-per-click advertising platform.

They should be short (up to 200 characters), compelling, and include 1 – 2 of the primary keywords you want each page to rank for.

Page Headings

Page headings refer to HTML header tags (defined by <h1></h1> – <h6></h6>) that help break up the content of the page into sections and let search engines know more about what each section is about. note: in WordPress these are defined as “Heading 1”, “Heading 2”, etc. in the Visual Editor.

Every page on your site should have one <h1> tag and most pages should have a few <h2> and <h3> tags. Simply include a few of your primary keywords in these tags and you’re all set.

Page Content

This refers to… wait for it… the content on your page! Specifically, the main body or paragraph text.

It’s likely that you’ve already included keywords in your writing without thinking about it; however, it’s still a good idea to go back and check.

I find that incorporating your search terms, verbatim, a couple times on the page still carries some weight when it comes to ranking for those terms.

Image Alt Text

Alt text refers to short, descriptive text used in the code behind important images and pictures throughout your site. It’s useful for visitors who have images blocked in their web browsers, for the blind or visually impaired, and of course, for search engines!

I also find that it can be used as an easy way to get an extra keyword or two on a page – particularly in instances in which it’s difficult to use it in a sentence.

For example, the term “catering company Chicago” would be difficult to use in a sentence (whereas “catering company in Chicago” would be easier), so I might try to work that into the alt text of an image on that page.

Page URLs

This refers to the web address of each unique, static page on your site, and is used as another clue by both search engines and site visitors as to what each page is about.

Here are 3 best practices when it comes to structuring your Page URLs:

1. Make them short and keyword rich.
2. Use dashes (not underscores) to separate words.
3. If you decide to change a URL, be sure to redirect the old one to the new one using a 301 redirect.

Pro Tip: if you don’t have Google Analytics or similar web analytics service installed on your site, now would be a great time to do that!

Tip #4: Add supporting content via your blog

Wait, you don’t have a blog on your site? I’m sure you just forgot. In any case, go do that right now!

The truth of the matter is that the large, large majority of businesses could benefit from having a blog on their site (note that I said on their site, not off on a different website).

Benefits Of Blogging (the CliffsNotes version)

When real time and effort is invested on a consistent basis, blogging could end up being one of the highest ROI marketing channels you have.

Here’s how:

• It keeps your website “fresh” in the eyes of both search engines and visitors
• It shows off your expertise and/or thought leadership in your industry
• It creates more opportunities to get links from other websites and social shares
• It helps you rank / drive traffic to your site for “informational” search queries
• It helps you build an email list that you can market to in the future
• It can be done for FREE using various members of your company or team

I could go on, but hopefully that’s enough to sell you on the idea.

What should you write about? I thought you’d never ask…

Things You Should Write About

The short answer is: any valuable information you can share to get people in – and move people along – your sales funnel.

For example:

• Ideas and inspiration (e.g. Wedding Reception Food Ideas)
• Tips and tricks (e.g. 10 Ways to Save Money on Booze at Your Wedding)
• Detailed ‘how to’ guides (e.g. How to Find the Right Wedding Caterer)
• Answers to common questions (e.g. How Much Does Wedding Catering Cost?)
• Stories or case studies (e.g. About Our First Paleo-Friendly Wedding)

Pro Tip: Use list-style posts often on your blog. You see them all the time online and for good reason: they work great for getting clicked on, read, and shared.

Because we’re primarily talking about a new website here (presumably with little to no existing web traffic), we want to make sure you’re writing content around topics people are actively searching for online. Luckily, there are a handful of free tools that can quickly and easily give us this information.

Here are 3 of my favorites:

1. Google Keyword Planner

https://adwords.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/

Primarily created for AdWords customers, this free tool allows you to enter in a “seed” keyword – for example, “wedding catering” – and spits out up to 800 related keywords, each of which could be a topic for a separate blog post.

Unfortunately, Google started showing very broad ranges for ‘Avg. Monthly Searches’ last year; however, it’s safe to assume that every keyword it suggests receives at least some recurring search volume in Google.com, and you can still use the ranges as a loose guide.

Note: the additional columns (‘Competition’, ‘Suggested Bid’, etc.) are only relevant to AdWords campaigns so you don’t need to pay attention to them for the purposes of your blog content.

2. AnswerThePublic

http://answerthepublic.com/

Another free online tool that pulls search terms from Google auto suggest, and organizes them by question-based queries, keyword + common prepositions, and then alphabetically.

I find the question-based queries particularly useful for getting started with blog content. Just pick a question a prospective customer is entering into Google, write a really great answer to it, and publish it on your blog. Apply some of my optimization methods from Tip #2 and hopefully your blog post will rank on page over time!

Note: make sure you select your country (or the country you’d like to see ideas for) on the first page.

3. SEMrush

https://www.semrush.com/

The ultimate SEO’s competitive research tool – and one of my favorite SEO tools overall – SEMrush offers a lot of great features, but they’re probably best known for their Organic Research tool.

Simply enter in the root level domain of a competitor (e.g. XYZCompany.com) and it will give you a bunch of valuable metrics about their business, including a list of the top keywords driving traffic to their website.

This can be great for general inspiration, but you can also create your own (and better) blog post around that topic/keyword and try to outrank them for it.

Note: the free version only allows you to see their top 10 keywords. I highly recommend upgrading to the Pro version – even just for a month – to get access to all of their keywords.

Pro Tip: generally speaking, it’s best to choose topics/key phrases with at least 3 words in them, as 1 – 2 words are usually too broad (i.e. less targeted) and difficult to rank for.

Tip #5: Get your first handful of backlinks

Ahh, backlinks… the holy grail of SEO. Backlinks refer to text or image-based hyperlinks that appear on other websites that link back (i.e. ‘click-thru’) to your website.

You can think of them as “votes” and the websites that link to you as “voters”. Like any election, the more votes you get, the better your chances of winning – and in this metaphorical election, winning refers to ranking on page 1 for the search terms your website is optimized for.

Unlike real elections, however, not all votes are created equal. The relevance and authority of the websites linking to you directly correlate with how valuable they are in helping your website rank.

As a new website, it’s extremely important to get a nice handful of quality backlinks to your site to get some momentum going with your rankings, traffic, and ultimately conversions.

Here are 3 super easy (but highly impactful) methods you can use to get that first handful of backlinks to your new site:

1. Business Affiliations

This refers to any organizations, associations, and/or other business entities you’re affiliated with. It may also include non-profits, charities, events, or networking groups that you and/or your business are a part of.

How to get links:

• Step 1: Compile a comprehensive list of your business affiliations.
• Step 2: Review their respective websites to see if there’s an opportunity for a link (look for a ‘Members’ page or ‘Member Directory’, a ‘Resources’ page, or a ‘Partners’ page).
• Step 3: If you find an opportunity, reach out to a contact of yours or look for contact information on the page or elsewhere on the site.
• Step 4: Kindly request a link to your site, if appropriate.

2. Unlinked Brand Mentions

This refers to non-hyperlinked mentions of your business name and/or key members of your team around the web.

How to get links:

• Step 1: Find existing mentions of your business, as well as key members of your organization, with a simple Google search like this: “Company XYZ” -site:CompanyXYZ.com (the latter part excludes results from your own website).
• Step 2: Set-up Google Alerts to track future mentions. Don’t forget to include variations of your business, such as with and without ‘Inc’ or ‘LLC’, as well as any common abbreviations.
• Step 3: If you find a mention of your brand and it’s not hyperlinked to your website, reach out to the appropriate contact to request that they add a hyperlink.

3. Blog Roundups

This refers to a weekly or monthly list of blog posts, typically around a common theme or topic that get promoted and linked to from the blog or website hosting the roundup (see, aren’t you glad you started a blog??).

How to get links:

• Step 1: Find relevant websites that host roundups by searching one of your broad topic keywords + “roundup” (e.g. wedding inspiration “roundup”).
• Step 2: Review the websites closely for submission guidelines and follow their instructions. If you can’t find their guidelines, send an email to the most appropriate person you can find and send them your blog post, kindly asking to be included in their roundup.
• Step 3: Of course, if you don’t have a relevant blog post for a particular roundup, this should serve as extra motivation to write one!

Bonus tip (because I like you!)

Create or Claim your business profile on the top directory sites.

In addition to the obvious reason (so people can find your business when searching these sites), it also helps to “legitimize” your new website or business to both search engines and users, and can help get you ranking faster.

Here are 3 really great directory lists you can work from:

1. By Category
2. By U.S. City
3. By Country

Pro Tip: Be sure to keep your Business Name, Address and Phone Number (“NAP”) consistent across all these sites. Decide up front if you want to use “St.” or “Street”, “Suite” or “Ste.”, etc., and keep a record somewhere so you can reference it whenever you need to submit your business information online.

Make the investment

If you implement these SEO tips for a new website you’ll likely be ahead of 90% of your competition.

Since your website (and possibly even business) is new, it may take a few months to start seeing noticeable traffic increases – but, unlike paid advertising, your time spent on these items is an investment which can pay you back for years to come.

If you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions please let me know in the comments section below.

I hope this was helpful, and I look forward to hearing from you!

The post Launching a New Website? Here Are My Top 5 SEO Tips appeared first on Web Focused.