But how do you find the right technique?

Some practical ways to rank well in search engines are discussed below.

Link building can be difficult to keep up with, and the rules and techniques are changing every month. On March 2016, Google Senior Search Quality Strategist Andrey Lipattsev confirmed that content and links are the first and second most important ranking factors. The full quote is:

“Yes; I can tell you what they are. It’s content, and links pointing to your site.” (Search Engine Watch)

Everyone loves to see their sites being ranked on the first page of Google. Once your website is active and running smoothly for a few months, you may be in shock when you analyze its performance. You will usually find you’re not getting any valid clicks and visitors, and notice that you’re still not ranking for the search terms you’re targeting.

“When it comes to search engine rankings, backlinks always play a vital role.”

Link building is one of the keys of success to websites being ranked at the top of search engines. There is a lot of useless information regarding link building which might be a waste of time and money and could get your site banned and blacklisted from search engines.

If you’re tired of using the old traditional link building tactics and you’re looking for free link building strategies, the processes and approach below will be of great help. I have been using these link building strategies to achieve and maintain top 10 rankings for thousands of keywords!

Start Dominating the Search Engines Today with These!

1. Internal Links

These are links that go from one page to another within the website. Internal linking is often ignored and is actually a great way to help people dig deeper within your site. For internal links, always look for a good keyword phrase on any of your any pages and link it to an inner page or home page with more information so the user stays longer and explores the website further.

Benefits of internal linking:

• It improves page authority and helps to pass link juice equally to other pages.
• Helps to decrease the overall bounce rate of the website.
• Smart internal linking improves overall crawl ability and indexation of the website.
• Improves older blog posts by sending some traffic and exposure. The Blog Starter has all the information needed on how to start a blog and manage it.
• Helps with keyword rankings if your page has relevant content and strategic internal links.
• You can go to your site right now and find good keyword phrases where you can link relevant page content with some other content.

2. “2022” Jacking

Users always prefer to click on the latest and updated posts, so by adding the current year or some call to action to the headline, you can maximize the potential to get initial backlinks. That can help get your site on first page spots.

Suppose we have 2 posts:

“Link Building Strategies“

and

“Link Building Strategies for 2022″

It is obvious  the user will click on the link building strategies for 2022. You can also add the following phrases to your headline (don’t forget to add the current year to increase curiosity).

• Top
• Discover
• Free
• Get
• Try
• Greatest
• Fastest
• Newest
• Oldest
• Strangest
• Cheapest
• Most
• Expensive
• Easiest
• Unbelievable
• Best

3. Local Business Citations

If you have a local business, then local link building is an ideal back-linking opportunity for you. You can get great links and you can draw additional traffic from the many people who routinely use local searches to find businesses near them.

Local Business Citations are key factors if you want to improve your positions in local search results. Local citations have the three terms named “NAP” i.e. Name, Address and Phone number.

While creating your local business citation, make sure to add the same address you feature on the website. These citation links are important for local rankings and help search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) to verify your business location.

Links from Yelp, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, Bing Local etc. create authority for your website, build trust and can help improve your rankings in local search results.

How to find citations sources

There are multiple ways you can easily use to find citation sites. Here are some of them:

• You can start with Whitespark’s List of Top Citation Sources and you can also head over to this comprehensive list of niche citation sites for 41 business categories including Automotive, Accounting, Marketing, Real estate, Health & Medical, and more.
• You can also find city-specific and keyword-specific citation sources by using the following:
  • (city) business listings
  • (city) business directory
  • (city) directory
• For keyword-specific citations:
  • (keyword) business listings
  • (keyword) business directory
  • (keyword) directory

Do take advantage of these sites and feel free to search for more sites as well.

4. Building Links from Trusted Sites

The internet has a ton of spam sites and Google has committed itself to weeding them out and only showing trusted sites within their search results pages.

Building links from trusted sites is one of the most important steps to establishing your site’s authority and elevating it to the top spot of search results. When a website has backlinks from a trusted site, it tells search engines that they are an authority on that subject.

For instance, there are many websites and blogs that mention Wikipedia within their content. A mention from these websites to Wikipedia increases its backlink count and site authority. Search engines consider Wikipedia a highly relevant source and it shows up high within search engine results.

On the other hand, search engines also take into consideration links from spammy sites. These do not benefit websites and mark them as untrustworthy, leading to adverse effects on your search rankings.

Search engine algorithms do not provide recognition to a website that has links on sites that have nothing to do with their products or business. A car parts website doesn’t want a link on a cooking website. The two have no relation and will not get any benefit from the link.

Building too many links too quickly will be considered spam by search engines. If a business has too many poor links pointing to it, then the performance of that website will go down in results rather than moving up. Therefore, always pay attention to how you build your links.

5. Scoop.it

Scoop.it is a content curation website where users can select a favorite topic to curate, publish and share to any social networks they prefer.

There are many other content curation sites available but, Scoop.it is undoubtedly the best site available right now. Some other sites include:

• BuzzFeed
• Lifehacker

To start using  Scoop.it, you first need to create an account and then choose a desired topic.

Next, search inside the Scoop.it pages for content which is related to your topic. There, you have 3 categories: Scoops, Topics and Users.

You can choose any topic with a large number of views and which has been updated recently. If they have a good number of views you can easily share your content – this opens up indirect link building opportunities for you.

Once you choose your topic, add the URL and hit the suggest button; this will notify the creator of the Scoop.it topic that someone has suggested content for their topic. If the creator likes your post, they will add it to the page and you get a backlink.

Don’t forget to add valid tags when sharing via scoop.it!

You can also check the Users tab and share your content by following them on Twitter and other social channels. This can get you dozens of authority backlinks.

6. List.ly

According to co-founder Nick Kellet, Listly is “true social curation with lists as a metaphor”. Listly is a free service where you can easily create lists and share them with industry peers.

How to start with Listly

People love lists and like to see content in list view. With this platform you can easily create a list of tips, a list of popular 100 songs, or a list of anything that the audience would be interested in.

To start, just go to list.ly and sign up for a free account; you can also sign up using your Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn accounts. Now you are ready to create your first list by clicking the “Make a List” button at the top.

With Listly you allow others to like, react with Emoji, share to social media, and comment on your list. You can also make your lists private, embed them into your WordPress blogs, Tumblr or on websites.

List rank is very important on Listly, and a rank of 20 is required for your list to be indexed by search engines or be recommended by Listly to the community.

Here is an example of a list with poor list rank:

A few tips to score a high list rank for your lists:

• Create lists that others will find useful. Avoid creating lists only to get backlinks.
• Write a proper headline and description for your list.
• Always add a headline image to your list.
• Invite friends (via social share buttons and via email) to contribute to your lists.
• Improve your profile on Listly by connecting multiple social accounts.

7. Infographics

Creating infographics is another great way to promote links. It is a cool and creative way to increase your reach.

Before starting to think about making one of your own, consider the following points to create successful infographics.

1. Build your infographic for your audience and keep it simple and relevant.
2. Limit the size – try to limit your infographic to 1500–2000 pixels to help it load quickly.
3. Add facts, figures and give credit to other sources in your infographic.
4. Create a story that maintains curiosity to the end.
5. Always focus on the flow, as it plays an important role in the success of any infographic.
6. Stick to maximum three colors and use no more than two fonts.
7. Impress your audience with graphs and charts.
8. Create a killer headline for your infographic and limit the number of characters to maximum 70.
9. Make sure to add a 200-300 word unique description and include a few variations of your targeted keywords.

Once the infographic is done, it’s time to submit it to infographic sites to build links. You should be able to find the latest infographic sites by using the following commands in Google:

• allintext: submit infographic
• submit infographic
• inurl: submit infographic
• intitle: submit infographic

You can use the following sites for easy-to-make infographic templates, to hire professionals to create them for you, or to submit your own:

• Visual.ly
• Piktochart
• Venngage
• Video Infographic
• ELearning Infographics
• Graphs.net
• Daily Infographic
• Easel.ly
• Reddit
• Infographic Database
• Canva Infographic Creator
• visme.co

8. Link Building with Social Sharing Sites

Social bookmarking sites where users can easily add, edit, and share content across the web help you get high quality backlinks that drive traffic to your website.

In order to learn how to build links with social bookmarking sites that help you get quality linkage to the next level, I have put together some of the bookmarking sites that you can consider:

Reddit

Reddit is a social news bookmarking, web content rating and discussion website that can be used to drive huge traffic to your website within a few weeks.

It is one of most popular websites in the social bookmarking category and it is divided into different subreddits where registered users can post links, add infographics, post text, and users can vote up or down for their favorite submissions.

To get the most out of the platform, first you need to create a free account and subscribe to the subreddits in your niche.

Once you’re done with the above steps, you can easily post the links. Before posting anything to Reddit, be sure to check the quality of the link that you are submitting and do read all the rules on the right-hand sidebar of each subreddit.

Some of the popular subreddits:

• /r/news/ (14,438,507 readers)
• /r/Entrepreneur/ (278,560 readers)
• /r/SEO/ (39,817 readers)
• /r/videos/ (16,212,000 viewers)
• /r/business (249,957 readers)
• /r/startups/ (160,038 readers)

The basic idea for Reddit success and a few tips:

• Make your titles eye-catching and be descriptive by choosing subreddits that are relevant to your website or audience.
• Create your very own “front page” by subscribing to various subreddits.
• Read up on the Reddit Content Policy or Reddiquette.
• You must be an active user and contributor.
• Build up your Reddit Karma quickly by adding the new links or comments to your own submissions and to others posts.
• Build your brand by adding links or comments to /r/AMA/. Find relevant posts to comment on like “I Am the Blogger at _. AMA.”
• Follow some people by clicking on “preferences” and then click on friends.

• You can also create a slideshow of all pictures in a subreddit by adding “p” in the URL
  • e.g. /r/food/
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/food/
  • To create a slideshow add “p” like –  https://www.redditp.com/r/food/
• To use Reddit efficiently, find the best time to add links, post text or infographics.

Sharing on Medium.com

Medium is an online publishing platform where users can read, write, and share long-form content. Getting started with Medium is easy.

You can create an account in less than a minute by using the different sign-up options available: Twitter, Facebook, Google and Sign-up with email. Personally, I like to sign up using Twitter.

By signing up using Twitter, your existing connections from Twitter who are on Medium will automatically follow you.

Here are a few tips to using Medium:

1. You must go for short headlines instead of long headlines to convey the best message. Here are some examples that work well on Medium:
   • Use negative words like stop, never, and don’t ever.
   • Create emotional headlines.
   • Use numbers, since people like seeing numbered lists. Use digits rather than words: 9 Strategic Tips for Beating Out Your Big Competitors.
2. You can easily repost your blog content to Medium and this will help you get additional visits with little effort.
3. When you repost or write new content, you have the option to tag your content. So always choose proper tags because on Medium tags are like topics.
4. Track your visits by adding UTM parameters on the URLs that link back to your blog content.
5. Mention people within the post; this will send them a notification message and your content will get more attention.
6. It is recommended to upload only high quality photos that should be at least 900 pixels wide. Add only horizontal images.
7. Interact with Medium content by recommending, sharing & bookmarking. It’s a great way to engage with your followers on this platform.

To check more tips and tricks follow this link.

How are the above tips working out for you? Let me know and if you find these worthy, please share them with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ or email them to someone who might find them useful!

Sharing on GrowthHackers

GrowthHackers is basically a group where you can share and learn more about online ethical marketing techniques. This allows you drive effective growth of your organization. The main objective of GrowthHackers is that marketers can easily share their stories and drive customer acquisition growth across all levels.

Benefits of GrowthHackers:

• Use your data to improve customer engagement.
• Have valuable discussions with industry experts.
• Easily find lots of useful, actionable content.

Designer News

Designer News is basically a group of people in design and technology. It allows open participation for those who are interested in the related topics.

Interesting features:

• Easy to make thoughtful comments and join discussions.
• You can support a story or update it by commenting.
• Replies are respectful and professional.

Slashdot

Slashdot is the equivalent of a Socially Curated Website. The site publishes news items for its members which are related to technology and allows peers to share their point of view about the topic.

This helps marketers by increasing the traffic to content that can spark such engagement and conversations.

Slashdot features:

• Allows professional insights and analysis.
• Covers a huge range of IT topics.

Flipboard

Are you looking for a website to publish your valuable content? Flipboard is a platform where you can create and publish your own magazine and subscribe to other users’ or brands’ magazines.

You can start engaging with the content that you want to see on your board and if you like any of the magazines, then you can republish their content on one of your magazines.

Key features:

• Aggregate and curate content from several sources.
• Create a social network and expand your business relationships.
• Easily read Twitter or Facebook posts of people or brands with whom you interact more.

HubPages

HubPages is an open platform for those who are passionate about their work – like writers, artists, designers, and other conversation starters who want to share visual and infotainment content. It makes it easier for passionate people to get a valuable audience that appreciates their creativity.

Pro advantages of HubPages:

• You can publish your content anytime and can retain a copy of it.
• It allows you to make money from your published content.

eLearning Tags

The first eLearning social bookmarking site where you can find, share, vote and discuss notable eLearning content. Submit your favorite eLearning links such as articles, video, infographics etc.

Here you can also easily share your links with your colleagues or friends via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest etc.

Key features:

• Completely spam free.
• Share, vote and discuss interesting content related to eLearning.

9. Link Building with Question-based Sites

Question-based sites are certainly a good way to drive traffic to your site, build brand awareness and increase authority if done right.

Millions of people want to ask questions and find relevant answers with correct information and the latest facts and statistics. Websites such as Quora, Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers are good places to find answers to your questions.

A few other popular Q&A sites:

• Stack Overflow
• Answerbag
• Ask Me Help Desk
• Blurtit
• Ask Deb
• Moz Community
• Answers

There may be other sites available, so do let me know if any other works best for you.

10. Blog Commenting to Gain Back Links

This is an easy and wonderful way to acquire backlinks from industry blog sites if you have the time and expertise to participate. Always include your URL while commenting.

Commenting on a quality blogs can be time consuming, yet for those who are focused on long-term results there are many benefits besides gaining links:

• You can easily increase traffic to your site.
• Blog commenting gives you the opportunity to build relationships with blog owners and other people in your niche.
• Build credibility and branding – by participating with blog comments regularly you increase the odds of being noticed by blog owners and to have your online business appreciated.

In short, posting comments is a good strategy as it benefits not only you but also the blog owner. It is recommended that you should do it frequently and do it properly.

Here’s how to do it the right way:

Step 1: Find quality blogs

You can use the following advanced Google operators to find relevant sites:

• “Add new comment” + “your keyword here”
• “Leave a comment” + “your keyword here”
• “Leave a reply” + “your keyword here”
• “Post a comment” + “your keyword here”
• “your keyword here” “Leave a comment”
• “your keyword here” “Comment here”
• “your keyword here” “Add comment”
• “Powered by WordPress” + “your keyword here”
• “your keyword here” “You may use these HTML tags and attributes”
• “your keyword here” “Post a comment”
• “Notify me of follow-up comments ”
• “your keyword here” “Notify me of new posts”
• “Comments on this entry:”
• “Sign in to comment on this entry.”
• “Login or register to post comments”
• “You must be registered and logged in to leave comments”
• “This blog uses premium CommentLuv”

You can also build your list by spying on your competitors. First find out your top 5 competitors and by using a link explorer tool (you can use Ahrefs), you can easily get the details of all your competitors’ backlinks.

Step 2: Create a list of all the blogs in a spreadsheet

Identify which sites have trustworthy information and are thus a good choice for your blog commenting. You can check which these are via Open Site Explorer.

Step 3: Adding your comments and how to get approved

While commenting on any blog, you will find 4 basics fields – Name, Email address, URL and Comments.

• In the name field, always add your name only and do not stuff it with your keywords.
• In Email, you can use your real email or any fake email ID.
• In the URL field, you can add your website link or leave it empty. But leaving the URL field empty can arouse suspicion that you might be spamming.
• Before commenting, read the blog thoroughly and pick some interesting points from the post you can expand on. You can add the URL in the comment box (avoid making URL comments irrelevant by just adding the URL).

I also recommend this post for some great pointers on link building through commenting.

Profitable tips for blog commenting:

• Take the time to read the whole blog post and leave a genuine response. Don’t post junk comments.
• Make your comments short and sweet. Long comments can irritate the author and other readers or commentators.
• Check the grammar and spelling of your comments and avoid rude language.
• Focus on the topic; your comments should always relate to the blog content. Don’t deviate from the subject.
• Always add your real photo and details in your profile. This can help you build strong and long-term relationships with other bloggers.

11. Link Roundups

Link roundups are monthly, weekly or daily summaries of the industry’s best content. These roundups are a good way to build links and get a decent amount of referral traffic.

Here’s how to do it in right way and get featured in Link Roundups:

1. Write a share-worthy post

For link roundups the content should be exceptional, so that it entices users to engage and read through. While writing any piece of content, make sure to create a catchy headline.

2. Find bloggers who publish link roundups

You can easily find bloggers who publish link roundups by using Twitter search. Head over to Twitter search, and type something like ‘keyword + link roundup’ using your target keywords.

3. Google Advanced Search Operator

From Google, you can easily find tons of link roundup articles by using the following search formulas:

• link roundup + your keyword
• inurl: roundup + your keyword
• intitle: roundup + your keyword
• your keyword “top updates”
• your keyword “link roundups”
• your keyword weekly link round up
• your keyword weekly roundup
• your keyword best posts of the week
• your keyword friday round up

Grab more roundup search operators from this spreadsheet shared by Webris. The next step is pitching to link roundup bloggers.

Find the email addresses of bloggers by using the above search operators and send them an email like the one I show below and to which I received a reply on the same day.

Overall this is a great and effective technique, though a little time consuming. Give it a try and do share your experience here.

Bonus Strategies

1. Get Natural Links using Guest Blogging/ Contributing to High Authority Sites

The term guest blogging: when a writer/blogger writes and publishes content for other blogs or websites.

Guest blogging is also a great way to build relationships with other bloggers and experts within your field and establish yourself as a writer.

From Google, you can easily find guest blogging sites by using the following search formulas:

• [your keywords] “become a contributor”
• [your keywords] “contribute to this site”
• [your keywords] “submit a guest post”
• [your keywords] “submit a blog post”
• [your keywords] “submit an article”
• [your keywords] “send a guest post”
• [your keywords] “write for us”
• [your keywords] “become an author”
• [your keywords] “guest bloggers wanted”
• [your keywords] “contribute to our site”
• [your keywords] “become a contributor”
• [your keywords] “submit a guest post”
• [your keywords] inurl:contributors
• [your keywords] inurl:guest-post
• [your keywords] inurl:guest*post
• [your keywords] inurl:guest-posts
• [your keywords] inurl:guest*posts
• [your keywords] inurl:guest-blogger

Key features:

• Guest blogging helps you build authority/ awareness (for yourself + your website)
• It increases your reach with the industry people
• It has a knock-on effect on other aspects of SEO
• You can easily generate a ton of quality referral traffic
• You can easily get quality, powerful backlinks

Dos and Don’ts of guest blogging:

Dos:

• Always check the guidelines first before writing for any website
• Always write for the audience, not for the search engine
• Only write unique and in-depth content

Don’ts:

• Do not spin your content
• Don’t stuff your post with links
• Avoid posting on low-quality sites. Always check Domain Authority first

A few methods to avoid when building links for SEO

There are many good ways of building links to improve search engine optimization and there are also bad ways of building links that might hurt your website ranking and get you a penalization that’s difficult to recover from.

Here are some methods to avoid when you build links for SEO:

• Buying and selling  links.
• Using an automated link building system.
• Excessive link exchange.
• Building a network of sites with the purpose of interlinking them.
• Irrelevant links posted that are not related to the topic.
• Using low quality links.
• Using web-rings and link farms.
• Low quality directory submissions.
• Article submission spam.
• Web 2.0 spamming-free blog on websites like Weebly, Tumblr, Blogger and add low quality content with links.
• Anchor text over-optimization
• PBN & link networks

2. Videos

Google always looks for a lot of indicators when it is ranking your page. The indicators include keywords, relevance, page quality, and multimedia.

Hence, videos are a great way to increase your user’s Time on your page. This, because nowadays people are more likely to choose a video than text.

And it has also been surveyed, 66% of SEOs found link building with videos to be effective. Additionally, many SEO experts have noticed that webinars and self-hosting videos on their website have driven significant engagement. So in case you also want to create such backlinks follow these steps:

1. Because most of the YouTube links are nofollow there are certain ways to avoid nofollow and spam. So, if you want legitimate backlinks, the first step is to create your own YouTube channel. Your own YouTube channel will be a valuable source to create great backlinks. Additionally, it can be a great way to connect with your audience and brand your business.
2. Next step is to place your URL in the description or in the custom links. The description is an easy way to add a dofollow link and in the custom link section you can add as many links as you want, but make sure to keep the main URL in the first box.

Or, you can add your dofollow link in the Associated Website.

After creating your YouTube channel go to http://youtube.com/verify and switch to http://youtube.com/features to access your Channel settings. Now scroll down to advanced menu, then to the Associated Website and add your website link there.

3. High Value Testimonials

Testimonials are a great way of creating high value links for your website. It helps building authority for your website, finding strong relationships, and leading to strong homepage links. 

The simple way to do this is by creating testimonials for a good website from where you have taken services or bought products from. 

Next, get featured on their website with an active link to your website. This is not a difficult task to accomplish, and both parties will be happy with the result. 

Testimonial link building technique can be done for any good product based website. For this you have to follow these steps:

1. Create a target list with the websites that have good DR and enable dofollow links. 
2. Find the contact person for those websites.
3. Send an email saying you want to pitch a testimonial for their product. 
4. Create the testimonial, be it text or a video. 
5. Get a powerful backlink for your website.

4. Broken Link Building

Broken link building is a process that stops your user from visiting a page or a website that does not exist anymore. Instead, finding a relevant website with dead links. 

So, how do you do it in an easy way? 

• Look for the best opportunity – Make use of the search operator for the relevant website. This step can drain your mind, but there is an alternative to it – Automating this step. Tools like Scrapebox can scrape thousands of links with top VPNs with a single click. Then you simply input your list and export the resulting URL.

Checking for dead links on a website can be done through browser plugins. 

Now you will have a relevant URL that contains broken links. 

• Next is outreach – Contact the website owner, tell them they have a broken link and suggest them to replace it with your link. 

Using some of these methods might falsely boost your website rankings, but there is a great chance that your site will be penalized by Google in the future and it can take several months or more to recover. Google is always looking for quality web links and adding low quality website links is not the way to go.

5. Create Content Others Find Helpful

Are you aware of Editorial links? They’re the most valuable links as they’re given by websites that aren’t looking for anything in return.

However, earning them is not easy. You only get editorial links when you provide value and create content so compelling that people would want to link to it. This image better explains the nature of editorial links:

Creating valuable content is one of the best ways to get editorial links. All you need is to create content in which other people see the value. They themselves will be willing to link to it.

Bloggers like Neil Patel and Brian Dean are some of the most prominent examples of this approach. Their content is so valuable that almost everyone in the industry links to their blogs because they find them insightful.

In case you don’t know how to get started,  here are a few tips that can help:

• Start with things you specialize in. Write case studies, whitepapers, and most importantly start blogging. According to a report from HubSpot, Businesses that blog have 55% more visitors and 97% more inbound linking opportunities.  
• Create content that makes people’s lives better, solves their problems, and offers  valuable insights.
• Make sure the stats you share in the blog are correct and you are linking to sources that provide value.
• Create tutorials and how-to guides.

6. Content repurposing & syndication for link building

Content repurposing and syndication is one of the growth marketing strategies that can be used to achieve many goals. This technique allows you to take an existing piece of content from your website, blog or any other online channel such as YouTube video and republish them  on other websites. Using this strategy you have the potential to get thousands of links, drive tons of traffic/leads and increase your search engine rankings and social signals.

Here are 10 great content syndication sites:

• Quora
• Medium
• SlideShare
• LinkedIn
• Mix
• Reddit
• Pinterest
• Using RSS feed

You can try some paid platforms such as Outbrain, Taboola and many more.

7. Sponsor Real World Events

Hosting an event allows you to mix your link building strategy with a way to drive traffic and build relationships. The key here is to make sure that the event is something that people will want to come to or join online.

How To Find Events To Sponsor

You can try these below sites: 

• MeetUp
• Events.org

You can use these Google searches for each of the hosting sites:

site:[website URL] inurl:events +“sponsors”
site:[website URL] inurl:events +“link to your”
site:[website URL] inurl:registration +“sponsors”
site:[website URL] +“sponsors”
site:[website URL] + “donation”
site:[website URL] + “become a sponsor”site:[website URL] -inurl:support -inurl:blog +“link to your website”

Conclusion

A proper link building strategy with a link earning approach will always give you better results in terms of SERP position and traffic.

Put all these techniques to action and you’ll get the results you want for your website or blog.

The above listed techniques are based on my personal experience. Please do share with us if there are any other techniques that you’ve used and recommend.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Meta tags are part of the HTML tags that describe your page content to search engines and website visitors. The Meta tags appear only in the page’s code and anyone can check them via source code (Ctrl+U).

In short, Meta tags are key things for all search engines that appear in the HTML code of a website page and tells the search engine what the page is about, and they are the first impression and point of contact for all search engines.

Meta tags added in the <head> section of an HTML web page and they are the “Legally” Hide Words on Your Pages for Search Engines.

Every platform has different solutions for adding Meta tags, just like WordPress has free plugins to choose from. I personally recommend the All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO plugins. Both are popular and you can choose any according to your need.

Do Meta Tags matter for SEO in 2022?

Yes, they do, but not all Meta tags can help you in 2022.

In my experience, if you want to rank high in Google in 2022 then you also need to focus on high-quality content and user satisfaction. The main goal of this post is to explain which Meta tags are good to go with and which are simply dead and have no use.

(See below: There are a few tags, we can call them the bad Meta tags and we should simply ignore them.)

Meta Tags can affect the way that users see your site in the search results and whether or not they actually click through to your site.

John Mueller, 2017

How to check Meta tags on a site

If you want to check the Meta tags for any page, just right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Source”. You can also use tools like SEMrush (specifically the SEMrush Audit Tool), and Screaming Frog to check the Meta tags on any site.

The Most Important Meta Tags For SEO in 2022

I personally focus on the 8 major Meta tags which can improve the optimization of your startup business or running website.

I am sharing my opinions about them all below:

1. Title tag
2. Meta description
3. Canonical Tag
4. Alternative text (Alt) Tag
5. Robots meta tag
6. Social Media Meta Tags (Open Graph and Twitter Cards)
7. Responsive Design Meta Tag

Title tag

The Title tag is the very first HTML element that specifies your web page for search engines and to visitors. The Title element supports all browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc.

Always add your Title tag in the <head> section of your site.

<head>
<title>This is Title Sample</title>
</head>

Optimal length for the Title tag: Google typically shows 55-64 characters (keep it under 60).

Title tag optimization is important for search engines and visitors. It shows up in the SERP and in Browser Tabs.

Browser Tab Title Tag shown below for Templatemonster post:

SERP Title Tag shown below for Moti Hamou – Online Marketing Expert:

Title tags are the second most important on-page factor for SEO, after content. – Source: MOZ

You cannot add more than one <title> element in your web page.  – Source: w3schools

Key Points to write a good Title tag:

• Add “modifiers” to your title tag (How to |The current year | Review |Best | Tips | Top |Find | Buy | Easy)
• Embed long tail keywords in title tags
• Add numbers to your title (9 Important HTML tags for your website to improve your SEO)
• Start your title tag with your main targeted keyword
• Don’t stuff your keywords
• Every page should have a unique title tag

Meta description

A Meta Description is an HTML element that summarizes your web page. Search engines typically show the Meta description in search results below your Title tag.

Code sample

<head>
<meta name="description" content="This is a meta description sample. We can add up to 160 characters.">
</head>

Google does not use the Meta description as a ranking signal; still, it has a massive effect on your page CTR because it shows up in search results.

In December 2017, Google increased the length of snippets in search results. Now Google confirms it shortened search results snippets after expanding them last December.

What will be the optimum length for Meta Description?

“There is no fixed length for snippets. Length varies based on what our systems deem to be most useful.” He added, “Google will not state a new maximum length for the snippets because the snippets are generated dynamically.”

Source, Danny Sullivan

The new average length of the description snippet field on desktop is at around 160 characters, down from around 300+ characters.

Mobile characters for the search results snippets are now down to an average of 130 characters.

Google-generated Description in search results

Key Points to write a good Meta Description tag:

• Don’t put emphasis on the number of characters, as Google might pull Meta description text from your content based on a user’s query.
• Do not add duplicate Meta Descriptions
• Add clear Call-to-action (CTA) in your descriptions like Apply today, Check-out, Contact us today etc. See these CTA keywords for marketing campaigns
• Add your targeted keywords in descriptions
• Strategically provide solutions to a problem
• Write for your users and encourage them to click with specific and relevant content
• Add any discounts or offers you’ve going on
• Show empathy while writing your Meta Descriptions

  Canonical Tag

The Canonical tag is an HTML link tag with “rel=canonical” attribute that is used if you have a single page URL that has the same content with other multiple page URLs.

By implementing the Canonical tag in the code, we are telling search engines that this URL is the main page and avoid indexing other duplicate page URLs.

A canonical tag Syntax:

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

Where should we choose a canonical URL?

Multiple URLs:

• http://www.example.com
• https://www.example.com
• http://example.com
• http://example.com/index.php

Google sees all the above URLs as duplicate versions of the Homepage. And to fix this problem, the canonical tag (rel=canonical) was invented.

Session ID URLs:

These are the automatic system-generated URLs and commonly generated due to the tracking URLs, breadcrumb links and permalinks in CMS

Mobile URL:

When using a special URL (m. example.com) for the mobile version of your website.

SEMrush itself has 2 versions – one is a mobile version and the other is a desktop version. For the mobile and desktop version, SEMrush is using the following canonical tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.semrush.com/" />

Alternative text (Alt) Tag

The Alt tag is important for any images, as search engines cannot read them, so you need to add proper Alt text to the images so the search engine can consider them.

Syntax for Alt Text:

<img src=”http://example.com/xyz.jpg” alt=”xyz” />

Key points to consider while creating alt-tags for images:

• All images should have informative filenames
• Alt text needs to be short clear and to the point
• Always use the original, right type of image, as this is an essential step towards success
• Create an image sitemap
• Use 50-55 characters (up to 16 words) in the alt text
• Use an optimal file size without degrading its quality for faster page loading speed

“Adding an alt tag is very easy to do and you should pretty much do it on all of your images. It helps your accessibility and it can help us understand what’s going on in your image.”

Source

Robots Meta tag

The Robots Meta tag is an HTML tag that provides instructions to web crawlers on whether to index or noindex a web page.

The Robots Meta tag has four main values for search engine crawlers:

• FOLLOW –The search engine crawler will follow all the links in that web page
• INDEX –The search engine crawler will index the whole web page
• NOFOLLOW – The search engine crawler will NOT follow the page and any links in that web page
• NOINDEX – The search engine crawler will NOT index that web page

The Robots Meta tag syntax:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”> - Means not to index or not to follow this web page.
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”> - Means index and follow this web page.

Note: The robots Meta tag should be placed in the <head> section of your web page.

Social Media Meta Tags (Open Graph and Twitter Cards)

Open Graph Tags:

Open Graph Meta tags are designed to promote integration between Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and the website URLs that you shared on these platforms.

Here is a sample of how Open Graph tags look like in standard HTML:

<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:title" content="TITLE OF YOUR POST OR PAGE" />
<meta property="og:description" content="DESCRIPTION OF PAGE CONTENT" />
<meta property="og:image" content="LINK TO THE IMAGE FILE" />
<meta property="og:url" content="PERMALINK" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="SITE NAME" />

Twitter Cards:

Twitter cards work in a similar way to Open Graph, except you add these special Meta tags only for Twitter. Twitter will use these tags to enhance the display of your page when shared on their platform.

Here is a sample of how a Twitter card looks like in standard HTML:

<meta name="twitter:title" content="TITLE OF POST OR PAGE">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="DESCRIPTION OF PAGE CONTENT">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="LINK TO IMAGE">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@USERNAME">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@USERNAME">

How both Social Media Meta Tags look like:

Head over to this post if you want to know everything about these tags.

Header tags

A Header tag is used for headings creations, i.e. by using these we can apply font changes.

The heading elements are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 with H1 being the highest (or most important) level and H6 the least.

Here is an example of how we can use header tags taken from SEMrush:

<h1> 9 Tips for Boosting the Speed of your Shopify Website </h1>
<p>Paragraph of content</p>
<p>another paragraph of content</p>
<h2>Performance Analysis</h2>
<p>Paragraph of content</p>
<h3>Analyzes the Mobile and Desktop Performance with PageSpeed Insights</h3>

Important Point to consider: Use as Many H1 Tags as You Want

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Responsive Design Meta Tag

The final important Meta tag is the Responsive Design Meta tag, which we call “Viewport Meta Element”. By using the viewport meta tag we can control layout for web pages on mobile browsers.

This viewport element is included in the head section of your web page.

Syntax:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">

If you want to learn more about this responsive design Meta tags, head over to this nicely written post.

Note: Do not use this responsive Meta tag if your website pages are not responsive, as it will make the user experience worse.

Meta Tags to ignore

Finally, there are a few tags – we can call them bad Meta tags and we should simply ignore them:

• Keywords tag– Google does not use the keywords Meta tag in web ranking. – Source
• Revisit after – This HTML tag is a command to robots to return to a page after a specific period. This tag is not followed by any major search engine and has no value in SEO. It is better to avoid this tag and leave it to the search engines to decide how to crawl your website. Syntax: <meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 days” />
• Expiration/date – This tag defines the expiration date of your page. Personally I would not recommend this, just remove this if you are using it. Syntax: <meta http-equiv=”Expires” content=”Fri, 28 January 2022 23:59:59 GMT”>
• Site verification– Just ignore this. You can verify your site using Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tool.
• Copyright– Every site puts their copyright in the footer, so you don’t need a separate tag. A big NO for this tag.
• Distribution – The “distribution” value is supposedly used to control who can access the document, typically set to “global”. It’s inherently implied that if the page is open (not password-protected, like on an intranet) that it’s meant for the world. Go with it, and leave the tag off the page. – Source
• Generator – Useless tag.
• Cache control –This tag allows web publishers to define how often a page is cached. Generally, these are not required; we can simply use the HTTP header instead of this HTML tag.
• The ODP Robots Meta Tag – Google no longer follows this Meta tag. –Source
• Geo Meta Tag – Google does not use Geo Meta tags to rank pages. – Source

So these are the few HTML tags which we should consider or simply ignore. Now you can easily use the relevant HTML Meta tags intelligently.

Don’t forget to comment below and share your views on HTML Tags. Thanks for reading!

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

While this update may not necessarily translate into ranking shifts for every website, its impact is significant. It permanently changes the way we evaluate user experience for our SEO strategies.

In this article, I’ll walk you through Advanced Web Ranking’s latest features that aim to help you integrate page experience monitoring into your search tracking workflow and make the most out of this new algorithm change.

Do Core Web Vitals Impact Rankings?

There has been a lot of debate and speculation among professionals regarding how impactful this Google algorithm update will be on search rankings, and even Google themselves deemed the update to be a minor one, so you can only expect your SEO clients to get confused about this as well: 

“Do we need to care about this page experience thing?” 

“Are we going to see any ranking changes from this Google update?”. 

In fact, a recent study we conducted at Advanced Web Ranking showed that most websites are not yet aligned with Google’s page experience requirements:

From more than 65k URLs we analyzed, only 3% of pages got a “Good” performance score on Mobile, and merely 27% of URLs were top-rated for their performance on Desktop devices. 

With so many websites disregarding page performance and accessibility, the update may bring great opportunity for improved rankings to those few websites that meet Google’s requirements.

The impact of the Page Experience update has been slowly growing over the last few weeks since the rollout began: 

While we cannot yet predict how impactful the update will be when fully rolled out at the end of August 2021, it will be very interesting to watch how SERPs change during the following months and how many websites start taking action to improve their user experience scores.

Page performance monitoring in AWR

To help you monitor this new ranking factor and its impact on SERPs, Advanced Web Ranking has created a new Page Experience report that you can access directly from the app side menu. 

The AWR Page Experience report provides a web performance overview for your main website’s Index page, helping you quickly assess your site’s performance status and progress right from the app.

Performance Overview

When you first access the report, you’ll see the initial audit report that we automatically ran for your website, with the main performance metrics:

• The General Performance Score – summarizes the users’ experience on your page and is calculated as a weighted average of the other performance metrics.  
• The Core Web Vitals and Metrics – from which the General Performance Score is calculated, quantify performance on distinct facets of a user’s experience on your webpage. 

Easy to read

Before diving into any of the potential issues reflected by the Page Experience audit report, you’ll be able to quickly understand how your page performs just by eye-scanning the report data.

Every metric is color-coded so that you can rapidly read through the data and pull the essential information right away:

Across devices

By default, the report will show your page’s performance on desktop devices, but you can easily change the device from the top drop-down menu.

Each new performance audit you perform with AWR will automatically collect data across both desktop and mobile devices.

Track progress over time

Once you have a minimum of two performance audits ran for your project, the Comparison view will be enabled for the Page Experience report.

The Comparison view shows a progress chart with how your General Performance score has evolved and lets you compare performance metrics at different moments in time.

Keep in mind that additional performance experience updates do not impact your resource consumption. You can run as many audits as you need without any influence on your subscription cost.

In-depth analysis with just one click

When performance scores signal that you need to work on your pages’ experience, you can quickly move forward to Wattspeed with just one click and get into the nitty-gritty of site performance to fix whatever is holding you back from a perfect page experience score.

Once you click the General Performance chart, you will be redirected to Wattspeed where a free in-depth audit will automatically start for your page.

Wattspeed is a free site performance monitoring app by AWR that provides in-depth details on quickly resolving the issues found during the performance audit and improving your scores. 

To track your performance progress in Wattspeed further, you also have the option to create a free Wattspeed account.

Correlating page performance improvements with search visibility changes

In addition to tracking your page performance progress, the AWR Page Experience report also helps you measure how that performance influenced your organic search visibility.

For that, you can display on the same report chart, both your General Performance Score’s evolution and that of your website’s Visibility Percent, and see if there’s any correlation between them.

Hopefully, any improvement in your page performance will translate into higher search visibility.

Integrating page experience into client SEO reports

Page performance status is something that you may want to start reporting on in the future and keep your clients or stakeholders informed on its progress.

For scheduled reports, a Performance KPI widget is now available that you can already include in your reports, where relevant.

Coming up next

The AWR Page Experience report is barely at an initial stage, with lots more improvements to come. 

Next in line, we’re working to provide page experience info on competitor websites that would help you make more accurate SERP analyses and detect search opportunities faster.

Moreover, deeper and more meaningful integrations between page performance and search rankings are also currently in development. 

Stay tuned for the next updates, and please reach out if you have any feedback on this. We’d love to know your thoughts.

Debates started to grow intense on whether rankings, as we knew them, are still reliable for making SEO strategy decisions in the context of the current, very diverse, and extremely dynamic SERPs.

As a rank tracker at the core, Advanced Web Ranking took the first step to adapt to the new SERP reality by introducing a new position tracking model that enables you to consider all the SERP features when determining a listing’s ranking in search.

The great thing with the new position tracking model is that it lets you measure your actual position in SERP, regardless of whether you are listed as typical “blue links” or carousels, featured snippets, knowledge panels, or any other features.

However, this still leaves us with a few unanswered questions:

• How much space do the SERP features listed before you occupy on the searchers’ device screens? And how far down the search results page will these features push your listing?

• What happens when ads are also listed at the top of the search results page? How many ads will Google display for each query, and how much space will these take up from the searchers’ device screens?

We built the new Pixel Position and Visibility Distribution metrics precisely to answer these remaining questions, bringing us closer to a fuller and more accurate understanding of our websites’ visibility in search results.

Pixel Position

Just as its name suggests, Pixel Position measures your ranking in pixels, meaning the number of pixels from the top of the search results page to the search result URL.

For SERPs with a great variety of result types, Pixel Position proves extremely helpful in determining just how extensive each search result is and how far down the page your listing is being pushed by everything that’s listed before you.

Let’s take a look at an example. 

I have the search results page for the “how big is the universe” query here and the Pixel Positions for this SERP, as calculated by AWR.

In Advanced Web Ranking, you can find the Pixel Position metric for each SERP listing in the Top Sites report, where you need to select the keyword and the search engine for which you wish to make the analysis, as well as a date from the calendar. 

While on a blue-links-only search results page the no.1 listing has a Pixel Position of about 172px, for my “how big is the universe” example, I see that the first listing is already 609px down the search results page.

That’s more than three times lower than a first result would usually be on a “typical” search results page.

With a Carousel inserted at the top of the page and the first position being a Featured Snippet, it makes sense to be lower on the page than usual. But let me click the “View SERP” button to see exactly how the SERP looks like.

For SERPs such as this one here, Pixel Position helps us highlight what impact search features have over the other listings’ visibility and measure that visibility. 

Above and below the fold search results

Once we’re able to determine the height of each search result on the page in pixels, we should also determine what’s above the fold and what’s beneath it.

However, the fold is a subjective measure, depending on the device used when performing the search query.

A user searching from a 1366x768px laptop will see fewer results on their screen than another user who performs the same search from a 1920x1080px desktop device.

More than the device screen size, the screen resolution will also impact how much from a search results page a user will see on the screen without having to scroll.

Hence it would be nearly impossible to make a 100% precise prediction of what each user sees above the fold on a search results page. 

In Advanced Web Ranking, we take the most popular screen sizes as a reference for both desktop and mobile SERPs and mark the fold line accordingly.

We then use color-coding to set apart the above the fold search listings from those that fall under the fold line. 

Visibility Distribution

Since Pixel Position has an extensive range of values, from somewhere around 100px and up to 15000px, it is not a comfortable metric for analysis of large keyword sets. It would get really cumbersome if you needed to remember the Pixel Position across a few dozen terms.

That’s why we came up with Visibility Distribution. 

Visibility Distribution helps you aggregate the information you would otherwise get from the Pixel Position metric.

Visibility Distribution is calculated as a percentage and shows how close your listing is from the top of the SERP. The higher your listing is on the search results page, the closer Visibility Distribution will get to 100%.

Visibility Distribution vs. the other Visibility metrics

Having yet another visibility metric for your reporting may seem a bit confusing at first, so let me lay out the differences between these SEO metrics and see how they can work together to provide you with more information on your search performance.

Let’s take another example to see both metrics in action.

I’ll head over to the Visibility menu, where I can see both metrics side by side, calculated for my keyword selection, and I see that my Visibility Percent is 92.78%, while my Visibility Distribution is merely 35.76%. 

This tells me that while my rankings are in general very high (92.78%), my listings are not placed that high up the search results page as I would expect them to be (only 35.76% Visibility Distribution).

Moving forward to the Keyword Ranking report, which contains all the data columns that I need at this point – Ranking Position, Features on SERP, and Visibility Distribution – I can scan through the keywords and see how my low Visibility Distribution corresponds to either a lower position in results or to some voluminous SERP features included before my listings in SERPs.

Explore Pixel Position and Visibility Distribution with your keyword data

If you’re an Advanced Web Ranking user, you already have Pixel Position and Visibility Distribution data available into your account, so head over to your AWR projects to start analysing your pixel rankings. 

And if you haven’t tried AWR yet, this is a great opportunity to take a free 30 day trial with us and check out the new ranking metrics. 

Give these a go!

Featured Snippet listings get less than half the clicks a no.1 listing would typically get in organic-only SERPs.

Source: Advanced Web Ranking CTR Study research data

Research data help you shed some light on the influence search features have on people’s click behavior and what results to expect from organic search, given the Google results page’s current anatomy.

Studies, however, can only paint half the picture. 

To figure out if search features are (or could be) beneficial for your organic visibility, you also need to compare with the CTR you are getting in SERPs with features, not just from aggregated data. 

In this brief article, I’ll show you how you can measure your own CTR for SERP features with Advanced Web Ranking and how to get a detailed look at the overall impact search features have on your performance in SERPs. 

We’ll talk about how to:

• Measure your CTR curve for SERPs with features
• Determine what features drive the most clicks
• Research GSC keywords that trigger search features

Let’s get started.

Measure your organic CTR in SERPs with search features

The only reliable source we have for measuring how many people click our listings in search is Google’s Search Console, so that’s where we’ll start from.

The only culprit GSC data has is that it won’t tell you which of the keywords trigger search features, nor which features are triggered so you can estimate as to how SERPs features correlate with your CTRs and Impression count.

But that’s a problem we can quickly solve with a rank tracker, in this case, Advanced Web Ranking, that has SERP features tracking capabilities.

We’ll pair GSC and ranking together data and see how CTRs change when different features are included in the SERP.

In Advanced Web Ranking, you’ll find all this information in the CTR Trends menu, the SERP Features report, that takes all your GSC monthly data and breaks it down for you by search features.

Let’s say you want to measure how Featured snippets have interfered with your listings in organic search:

• Did you get a better CTR when your website was listed in a featured snippet? 
• Or did it steal any clicks from you when you weren’t listed as one?

The first thing you’ll do is go back to the research data and look at how the CTR curve typically looks for SERPs with Featured Snippets compared with organic-only SERPs.

This shows that in general, when Featured Snippets are present, the CTR for the first search results listing, which is the Snippet itself, drops considerably, while positions 2 to 5 get a slight increase in CTR as compared to what they get in organic-only listings.

With this in mind, you can now look at your own CTR curve and see how it compares with the global values in the CTR Trend report.

In this example, my CTR curve for SERPs with Featured Snippets, the blue line, is slightly above the average, gray one, for the top 1 to 4 rankings.

So it seems that when I’m listed as a Featured Snippet, at the top of the SERP, I get a slightly better CTR than what Featured Snippets usually get, according to the research data. Nonetheless, that’s nowhere near the CTR I would be getting for a top position in SERPs with no Featured Snippets.

On the other hand, when I’m listed right below the Featured Snippet, on positions 2 to 4, although I get more or less the same CTR as the average curve line, that’s already a better CTR than those recorded for organic-only SERPs. 

For my particular case, a more in-depth analysis would be required to determine whether getting listed as a Featured Snippet is truly beneficial for my website and is worth pursuing. 

Which search features drive the most clicks

To achieve visibility from search features, you’ll want to identify the most frequently triggered features by the queries in your niche that also get reasonable amounts of clicks simultaneously.  

The CTR Trends report introduces a SERP Feature Popularity score that helps you determine which features are triggered most often by the keywords you appear in search results for.

This score has two values: one is per project, based on the keywords retrieved from your GSC account, and one is global, based on the entire data set we have available for processing in our research tools. 

Having both values available lets you understand how you stand as opposed to other industries.

For instance, I may be lured by the idea of getting organic exposure from the Images search feature, knowing that one-quarter of queries are triggering first-page images results. 

Still, by looking at my project’s popularity score, I quickly realize that I have no chance of doing that with my current set of keywords. 

To find the most popular features for my keyword set, I simply run through the list and look at their Project Popularity score. 

I’m getting that People Also Ask (PAA) is the most frequently triggered feature by my keywords, with a Popularity of 63.82%.

This means that 63.82% of the keywords that I have Impressions for are triggering PAA blocks, way above the Global average frequency of 39.31%.

The chart also shows that I’m missing quite a bit of CTR opportunity with my top-ranked keywords, getting almost half the CTR first positions usually in SERPs with PAA blocks.

Search Console keywords that trigger featured snippets

Suppose you’re looking to improve organic visibility with search features. In that case, you also need to find new keyword ideas that are guaranteed to have the targeted feature in SERP, and Search Console is always a great starting point for researching keywords. 

Further down in the CTR Trends report, you’ll find listed, for each selected SERP Feature, the keywords from your Search Console account that trigger the respective feature in search results, along with the specific GSC metrics: Clicks, Impressions, Average Position, and CTR.

Being pulled from GSC, these keywords are also guaranteed to be deemed as relevant by Google for your website, nevertheless not every one of these keywords is worth investing time and effort into.

Thus you would probably want to give this list a closer look and make a proper selection. 

There are a few filters available you can use to narrow the list of keywords to those you’re listed most often for and from which you already get lots of clicks.

At this point, you may also find useful the SERP Feature Average Position calculated for your keyword set, which tells you, on average, the position where each feature was found ranking. 

By comparing this to your website’s average ranking for each keyword, you’re able to correctly evaluate your chances of winning the feature and the amount of work needed to achieve that.

Take it for a spin

The organic CTR curve will continue to shape itself as the SERPs evolve, and the users’ click behavior changes. It’s a metric that you’ll need to reassess regularly. 

At the same time, search features continue to grab the users’ attention in SERPs so they become great opportunities for achieving extra organic visibility.

This report brings the two together and gives you the means to take a more in-depth and actionable look at your organic CTR curve.

It would be great to know what you think of it.

In 2020, the basic page with ten blue organic search results and one or two ads is rarely seen.

Modern SERPs often include at least one search feature. They no longer involve just links, but also carousels of images and videos, news, tweets, related questions, query refinement links, and much more.

The variety of SERP features returned is closely related to search intent. Any given search can trigger a different assortment of search elements that the layout of today’s SERP changes radically from query to query.

The presence and the position of the SERP features often negatively impact the visibility of the organic results, especially for those already ranking on page one.

Each new element inserted on the page may take the place of an organic result. Plus, SERP features like the Local Pack or the Top Stories box are, most of the time, displayed before the number one organic position, dominating the top part of the results page.

Also, because these elements are vertically longer than a traditional organic result, they occupy more real estate in the SERP. Thus they get more visibility and also push the organic listings lower on the page, lowering their Click Through Rate.

Why was a new position tracking model required?

SERPs are going to continue to evolve, and the variety of elements in their layouts will influence even more the results which get more visibility. This is why it is crucial to understand the entire landscape of a SERP and present the organic rankings with the context of their visual position in relation to the other search results on the page.

After analyzing thousands of SERP layouts, we concluded that a new position tracking model is necessary, one that is more aligned to what users see in SERP and that follows Google’s Search Console Position methodology. 

So we switched from an absolute ranking model, in which the positions of all features from a SERP were reported, to a web ranking model, which incorporates the visual positions of results.

With the previous tracking model, all URLs linking outside the SERP were counted as individual position placeholders. For a single search result element with multiple URLs pointing outside Google Search (e.g., a carousel of Videos or an organic listing with Sitelinks), all the links were counted when computing the position value of the other search results on the page.

Since all the external links were counted when computing the numerical ranking positions, the absolute ranking system had two potential downsides:

• The position values of “blue links” could have been distorted if the SERP layout included vertical search result elements with multiple URLs pointing outside Google.
• The first page of search results could have more than 10 numerical positions reported. This sometimes could cause reporting inconsistencies when comparing the page-one ranking data from Advanced Web Ranking with search stats from Google Search Console. 

Even if more features are being added constantly in SERPs, Google still considers a search results page as consisting of only 10 results, regardless of how many additional links a search result element has.

The new position model will still count the URLs pointing externally; however, all the links within a single result element will be reported with the same position value, resolving this way the two disadvantages mentioned.

Also, the presence of the search result elements that have no links (e.g., Direct Answer) or have only query refinement links (e.g., Carousel) is now marked in the Top Sites report. Since these search elements do not list an external link, no position placeholder is assigned to them, and their presence does not affect the position value of the other results listed on the SERP.

With the new model rollout, three new SERP features were introduced (Direct Answer, Recipes, and Knowledge Panel for Mobile searches), which are now available for tracking in Advanced Web Ranking.

How are Sponsored, Organic, and SERP features results reported with the new tracking model? 

As with Google’s Position methodology, the sponsored results are treated differently in Advanced Web Ranking. Both the Text ads and Shopping results can be monitored only with our dedicated “Sponsored” search engine for Google. Their presence in Universal SERPs is not marked in the Top Sites report, nor are they assigned position placeholders when calculating the numerical positions of the other search results from SERP.

As for the other Google search engines available in Advanced Web Ranking, including the version meant to track Organic-only search results, the position values will continue to be computed as before; nothing has changed.

The new web ranking system was implemented only for the Universal version of both Google Desktop and Google Mobile search engines. Since the links from the same search result element are no longer counted when computing the Universal position values, the new system will have a positive impact over a website’s visibility as the ranking positions of the search results will improve.

How can I switch to the new ranking model?

The new position model is the default on all Advanced Web Ranking accounts created after April 15th. 

For the accounts created before this date, to allow reporting continuity, the ranking position values will continue to be computed using the previous system, but the owners of these accounts can switch to the new ranking system from their Account settings.

Which SERP URLs are counted with the new ranking model and which are not?

The position values are calculated right to left then top to bottom, regardless of the location and presence of the different search results on the page. 

The new method of calculation is similar to Google’s position model, with two exceptions:

• Since the position value is calculated from right to left, the Knowledge Panel, when listed in SERP, is reported as the first Universal position as opposed to Google Search Console which reports this type of result in the 11th or even 13th position, depending on the number of “blue links” the page has.
• The People Also Ask (PAA) results are being counted as position placeholders and reported with the same position value in contrast to Google Search Console methodology which does not assign any impressions and clicks to them.

Below is the list of SERP features available for monitoring in Advanced Web Ranking with the Universal version of the Google search engine and details on how they are treated with the new ranking model.

Featured Snippets

In January 2020, Google’s Danny Sullivan announced that webpages featured in snippets will no longer repeat anywhere else in the search results. Following this change, the Featured Snippet, which was previously known as Position Zero, is now the first organic result, and it counts as one of the 10 blue links listed on page one.

Since a Featured Snippet always appears above all the other search results on the page, its position value was not impacted by the new tracking model. When present in a SERP, the Featured Snippet will be reported as position one.

There are only two particular situations in which other search results may interact with the Featured Snippet:

• If the same SERP displays both a Featured Snippet and a Knowledge Panel result, then, according to the right to left, top to bottom rule, the Knowledge Panel result will be reported with position 1, while the Featured Snippet with position 2.

• If sponsored results are also triggered by the search query, Google will display the Featured Snippet under the ads, but before the rest of the search results. The presence of sponsored results does not affect the position value of the Featured Snippets as the ads are not being assigned position placeholders.

Sitelinks

The Sitelinks are those additional hyperlinks that sometimes appear below a search result’s URL and meta description, and link directly to pages within the site being displayed.

With the previous model, each Sitelink listed within a search result element was assigned with a position placeholder and was counted when computing the Universal ranking position of the other results on the page.

With the new model, all the Sitelinks within a search result element are reported with the same position. Only the URL with the highest position within that search result element will have a position placeholder and will be counted.

Top Stories

The Top Stories feature typically appears in the top half of page one of search results as a pack of three or more rich cards tiled horizontally in Desktop SERPs or vertically on Mobile.

Previously, each link immediately visible within the Top Stories carousel was reported with an individual position value. Now, all the visible URLs within this type of search result element are reported with the same position value, starting from left to right on Desktop and top to bottom on Mobile.

Images

The Images search result element appears either as a horizontal carousel or as a pack of images closely related to the search query, and can be located on any position within a SERP.

As with Top Stories, the old model reported each link in the carousel or pack. With the new model, all the image URLs are reported as ranking with the same position, beginning from the left side of the carousel. Only the URLs of the images that are immediately visible in the carousel are reported.

Knowledge Panel

The Knowledge Panel is an information box that features a combination of images and text deemed relevant for the particular entity the user is searching for (e.g., a place, a movie, a book, an organization, etc.). The information appearing in a Knowledge Panel comes from Google’s knowledge base called Knowledge Graph and also from other sources across the web.

This SERP feature is very easy to spot, having a high visual impact due to its dimension and position in SERP.  

In the Desktop search results, such a panel usually pops on the right side of the screen, while in the Mobile search appears among the top results listed.

Previously, all the links featured in the Knowledge Panel that were pointing outside Google SERP were assigned a position placeholder and individually reported. With the new model, all links which are not query refinement URLs will continue to be reported but with the same position value.

Videos 

When deemed relevant to the query, the Videos search result element can show up anywhere throughout a Mobile or a Desktop SERP.

On Desktop devices, the carousel consists of three video cards horizontally tilled. Clicking on the small scroll button to the right of the carousel will reveal up to ten video cards. Only the URLs of the cards which are immediately visible in Google Search are reported in Advanced Web Ranking.

On Mobile devices, this SERP feature appears as a pack of four video cards tiled vertically. More videos can be accessed by clicking on the View All link. Since this will open the Google Videos vertical, only the four video URLs visible in Google Search are reported by Advanced Web Ranking.

Before, the video cards were individually reported. This has changed with the roll out of the new model, and now all the video URLs reported will have the same position value calculated from left to right for Desktop and top to bottom for Mobile.

Tweets 

The Twitter carousel features the most-recent tweets in relation to the search query and can appear on any location within the SERP.

Initially, the carousel consists of three Twitter cards horizontally tilled. Clicking on the small scroll button to the right of the carousel will reveal more cards. Only the URLs of the cards which are immediately visible in Google Search are reported in Advanced Web Ranking.

Previously, the Twitter cards featured in the carousel were individually reported. Now they have the same position value reported from the left to the right of the carousel. 

People Also Ask

The People Also Ask result is presented as a pack of expandable boxes featuring questions closely related to the initial search query.

Initially, the PAA pack consists of a set of 2 – 4 questions. With each click performed within the pack, additional questions are added, but only the questions initially displayed in the SERP are reported.

Before, each question had a position placeholder that was individually reported. Now, all the questions featured in the PAA pack are being reported as having the same position value.

Local Pack

The Local Pack consists of a map with three local citations listed below, which, most of the time, shows up at the top of the search results page.

Clicking on any of the featured citations will result in a visit to Google Maps, where the full profile of the selected business is available.

After introducing the new model, nothing has changed in the way the local results are being reported. Same as before, each local citation featured in the 3-results pack is assigned a position placeholder and it is individually reported.

Carousel

The Carousel search result element appears as a horizontally scrollable container featuring image thumbnails links to refine Google queries without leaving the SERP.

Since the Carousel has no external URLs as it contains only search query refinement links, no position placeholder is assigned to it. Thus, it’s not counted when calculating the position value of the other elements on the page. 

What changed is that now the presence of the Carousel in SERP is visually marked in the Top Sites report.

Direct Answer 

This type of SERP feature became available for monitoring in Advanced Web Ranking with the release of the new tracking model.

The Direct Answer feature shows up in the form of a light-gray bordered box containing a brief answer to the query typed in Google’s search box.

Most Direct Answers feature publicly available information and do not credit the source of the answer. Since they do not include a link to a landing page, no position placeholder is assigned, and their presence is only visually marked in the Top Sites report.

Recipes 

As with the Direct Answer, the Recipes feature was introduced to Advanced Web Ranking after the new reporting model was released. 

Recipes usually appear in Google Search listed within a carousel. As they are part of the same search result element, all the Recipes cards are reported with the same position value.

AMP

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is a Google-backed project for optimizing webpages in order to achieve higher performance and more efficiency on mobile devices.

AMP results are accompanied by a small “Lightning Bolt” icon. They can appear in mobile SERPs as part of rich snippets (e.g., Recipes or Top Stories carousels) or as a markup for a standalone organic result.

As opposed to the previous model, with the new reporting system, all items listed in an AMP carousel will all have the same position value.

On the other hand, if the AMP schema markup is applied to standalone organic results, they are independently reported, having different position values. In this case, they are reported as organic results and the AMP markup will be displayed near these listings in the Top Sites report.

App

These results show an installation button for an app deemed relevant to the search query.

Clicking on the button featured redirects you to the store where the installation of the app is possible.

Advanced Web Ranking emulates an iOS user agent when collecting the SERPs for mobile searches, so all the URLs reported for App results are from the App Store.

Same as before, each App link is individually reported as only a single download button is featured within the same search result element. 

How will these SERP features affect the CTR of your website?

If you’ve read this far, congrats! You’re one of those people who want to get the most out of your website’s rank tracking. Since we are on the same page, why not talk about how the above SERP features affect how many clicks your site gets?

Your website may rank on the 1st organic position, but that doesn’t always mean that you will get the average CTR for the first position. Why? Because Google might display some ads and a few SERP features right before your result, which would push your website below the fold.

For example, an average height for a desktop browser is considered to be 600 pixels. Having 4 ads, a news carousel, and 4 people also ask results right before your organic result, will push you well beyond 1,000 pixels. People will have to scroll to see your site which usually means their attention will be focused on what’s already displayed on the screen above the fold.

For future enhancements to this system, we’re thinking about measuring the total height of the SERP and tracking where your website is displayed as a percentage of this total page height.

Let’s suppose that in the above example, the entire SERP would have a 2,000-pixel height. This way, your page, displayed at pixel 1,000 would register at half the length of the page, which would be shown as 50%. That’s almost like being in the 5th position or even less.

Combine this with the knowledge that your organic result ranks as number 1 and you will easily figure out that you need to do something in this case. Maybe see what SERP features are displayed above you and try to change your page to rank in those results instead?

That’s everything for now

I hope you have enjoyed this overview of Advanced Web Ranking’s new position tracking model rolled out for the Universal search results.

For more detailed information about all the different features that you can encounter in Google search results, we have recently written a detailed SERP features guide.

To see the impact the new ranking model has on your projects’ visibility, log into your account, or start a free 30-day trial if you’re new to Advanced Web Ranking.

If you have any questions or need help with switching to the new position model, just reach back in the comments section below. Would love to hear from you.

What a time to be alive!

We are in the throes of a global pandemic and everything is effectively up in the air. Governments are scrambling to make sense of it while attempting to stave off a contraction of the global economy. People are losing their jobs and struggling across various points of the isolation spectrum. Meanwhile, consumer behavior is mutating and there’s no telling if we will ever return to what we think of as “normal.”

Simultaneously, marketers are trying to convince companies to keep spending marketing dollars and power through. Or, they are trying to figure out how to somehow hold on until a recovery, but there is no telling where that recovery is on the horizon.

As a consumer, marketer and small business owner, I’ve sat back synthesizing a lot of information and wanting to make sense of where I believe we are heading. That’s not to say that I’m above sharing a study from a management consultancy to convince you should continue to invest in marketing, but I prefer to paint the bigger picture.

What I can say, definitively, is that Search is continuing to show its strength as one of the most powerful market research panels in the world. Google’s Search box has the unmatched ability to encourage people of all walks of life to codify the latest iteration of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in Orwellian DoubleSpeak.

I reached out to the Advanced Web Ranking team to see what types of aggregated data we could review across their customer base so we could get a sense of how Search demand is shifting. Philip and his team were kind enough to spin it up for me.

Voila! We quickly get the ability to passively take the temperature of the community and verify where their interests and needs are shifting during this crisis. As you can see in the above data anonymously derived from Google Search Console impressions in Advanced Web Ranking’s dataset, key areas such as Construction, Hotels, Insurance, Entertaining, Real Estate, Shopping, and Travel are all seeing declines. This comes as no surprise, however, because these are all things that cannot effectively coexist with Social Distancing mandates. For example, how much do you need insurance if you can’t leave the house?

On the positive side, the dataset is showing dramatic increases in demand for Financial Aid, Computer Certification, and Television & Video. Many people are finding themselves jobless and looking for something they can do online and remotely between binging on the latest season of Ozark.

As marketers, we are all engaged in an on-going and interactive study of consumer psychology. I want to explore the new context we’ve found ourselves in and determine how we can use that context to support both consumers and producers.

Environmental Factors

Naturally, there are a series of environmental factors at play here. It’s not just that people are getting sick and reacting to a virus; global interdependence is also meaningfully impacted by people’s inability to work during the pandemic. With the coronavirus starting in China, and all of the planet’s supply chain routing through the Celestial Empire, we are also witnessing a supply chain reaction.

While the effects are, of course, international, my personal context is the United States — New York City to be exact. Like much of the world, we are heavily dependent on Chinese imports. From Wine & Liquor on the low end to Computers and communication equipment on the high, according to the US Census Bureau, the US of A imported over $446 billion in goods from China in 2019. Many of these goods are not final products, rather the materials and machinery required to create goods that are made available around the world.

With COVID-19 quickly reaching a literal fever pitch, China went on lockdown at the end of January 2020. So, before COVID-19 became China’s major export, the world was already poised to experience delays in the availability of goods and services of all kinds.

This is a global issue because China is also the world’s largest exporter, so the impacts on goods and services would have a global impact even if the outbreak was limited to China. With the majority of the world in quarantine, it is difficult to fulfill many physical goods, especially at the speed that we’d grown accustomed to.

According to a Digital Commerce 360 study, most retailers are expecting shortages and delays. Consumer behavior is changing in reaction to scarcity, both in stores and of stores.

As an NYC resident, I wanted to purchase a printer to work on this article (don’t ask) and Amazon said it would take five days to arrive. I’m used to receiving things the next day. My other options were stores that I couldn’t be sure were open. As a consumer, I am confused and unsure if I can trust retailers at this time.

Shifts in Supply and Demand

Supply and Demand is, of course, the core market driver outside of consumer confidence. However, it’s generally a more subtle force that rears its head over time. In the case of COVID-19, we’re instead seeing drastic and dramatic swings in real-time.

Consider the airline industry. According to the IATA, passenger demand was projected to grow by 4.1% in 2020.

Instead, with multi-national companies curtailing business travel for their employees since early March, and the shelter in place mandates coming on line late March, demand made a crash landing. First flight prices were sent into a tailspin, shortly thereafter supply took a nosedive in accommodation as airlines could no longer justify keeping so many empty planes in the air. IATA’s monthly statistics data illustrates just how far that demand has fallen.

Unfortunately, the airlines continued to be grounded by bad news and have struggled to identify a new supply and demand equilibrium. As a result, many large airlines have had to furlough or otherwise layoff thousands of employees. Typically, this type of dramatic change in demand takes multiple quarters to identify. Companies have changed management solutions to react slowly in measured ways to recover. In the face of a pandemic, it’s proven to be impossible.

In other instances, N95 Masks, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper demand has skyrocketed. As China’s supply chains have slowly come back online, D2C companies have sprouted up with Shopify stores in their wake. You can find them in ads on your Facebook timeline with slightly different creative and random company names as seen below.

Thes companies tend to be small, agile and utterly expendable. They find a supplier that can dropship and they throw up a site, some compelling ad creative and capitalize on Facebook’s low CPAs. This is an example of high demand meeting low supply.

What we’re experiencing is unprecedented in the Information Age. There are a lot of comparisons to the 2008 financial crisis, but this isn’t that. Nearly all businesses are closed. Supply chains are disrupted. People are effectively on a suggested house arrest and there is no definitive end suggested prior to a vaccine that may appear in 2021.

Based on Morgan Stanley’s model, it’s unrealistic to expect the economy will achieve a new equilibrium until 1-3 years from now.

Producer/Company Behavior

If you do Marketing of any kind right now, you are feeling the direct effects of companies pulling budgets. In times of uncertainty, any type of company needs to enforce financial discipline and be more conservative in its spending. CFOs are dialing into Zoom calls everyday to do their fiduciary duty of trimming the fat and tightening the purse strings.

How is that playing out so far?

Well, according to a survey run by IAB, 98% of agency respondents have indicated that ad spending has been cut for Q2 2020 as a result of COVID-19. Q3 and Q4 are still on the chopping block but have been less impacted thus far. This suggests that many companies are in a “wait and see” pattern.

Companies are seeing less value in branding channels like Display and Paid Social. However, interestingly enough, agencies are indicating that Paid Search campaigns are net zero. This makes sense that brands may want to pull back spend here and focus on more direct acquisition opportunities.

What’s most interesting is that the LinearTV campaigns are taking a hit as well which suggests that COVID-19 may be inducing a shift from traditional media to digital and Search is benefiting most because brands have a direct ability to be reactive to intent.

That said, everpresent yet anonymous analysts are projecting that Search spending (both Paid and Organic) will be down between 8.7 and 14.8% after several years of growth.

Let’s dig in a bit further to determine why Search has unique opportunities and spending less on it may be a mistake.

Economic Downturns Favor the Bold

I warned you that I might go full Marty Kaan at some point.

Markets are inherently irrational, and an economic downturn is always an opportunity. A market collapse due to a global shut down is rational, but these are the moments when fortunes are made and it is the companies that continue to strategically invest that make out stronger on the other side. Those companies that become overly conservative during market uncertainty are the ones that lose brand awareness, market share and ultimately fall behind competitors that fill in the share of voice that other companies vacated.

A Bain & Co. study indicated that those that remained in a measured growth mode through the 2008 recession, saw a 14% profit advantage after the economy recovered over those that turned more conservative.

That study, found in Bain’s Beyond the Downturn: Recession Strategies to Take the Lead article presented it in an especially compelling way:

“Companies that ranked among the eventual winners, by contrast, moved deliberately to capture opportunities before the recession. While they focused intensively on cost transformation, they also looked beyond cost. Think of a recession as a sharp curve on an auto racetrack—the best place to pass competitors, but requiring more skill than straightaways. The best drivers apply the brakes just ahead of the curve (they take out excess costs), turn hard toward the apex of the curve (identify the short list of projects that will form the next business model), and accelerate hard out of the curve (spend and hire before markets have rebounded).”

Brands are pulling over on the autobahn to be passed at high speed by those that stay pushing in web traffic. In other words, you should put Search on that shortlist.

From a digital marketing perspective, the opportunity is clear. CPMs for Facebook and Instagram are down and while I cannot find aggregated data on CPCs for Google Ads, discussions with Paid Media specialists indicate the same is true of the channel previously known as Adwords.

It makes sense, after all, these advertising platforms function as auctions. If there is less competition in the auction, winning is cheaper. If winning is cheaper, you have more opportunity to be seen and more opportunities to convert users into buyers.

Every marketing dollar will go further than it did last month. If you’re considering cutting your budgets, perhaps Search isn’t the right place.

Consumer Behavior

The more important part of this discussion is – what are people doing?

Personally, I wince whenever I hear the term “new normal.” In most cases, it’s presented as though it’s a temporary state. Hidden within those three syllables is the expectation that, two months from now, we will tune into the news and everyone will walk out of their home simultaneously, celebrate, and resume everything they were doing prior to the quarantine.

In reality, this pandemic is unprecedented within the lifetimes of most people that are experiencing it. As a result, consumers are forming new habits as you read this.

Suffice to say, if market segmentation is a core component of your strategy (it should be) what you believe to be true of those segments is no longer accurate.

Consumers Are Distracted

Perhaps the most important aspect beyond consumers being scared to spend money is that they aren’t paying attention.

In the US, people are glued to the news media and preoccupied with fear and uncertainty. They are not paying attention to the things that they normally would. At our core, they are living with the cognitive overhead of being concerned with their health and their ability to maintain their lifestyles more so than in the entire history of the public Internet.

This is reflected in Search in the United States; people are waking up every day and looking up what’s happening with the coronavirus. The spikes in interest in this Google Trends chart happen between 7 and 9 am on a daily basis.

Conversely, Worldwide, people are checking on it before they go to bed

The ultimate question you have to ask as a brand is – how can we help people through this pandemic or how can we help them escape?

Consumer Behavior is Different…and It May Be Permanent

Right now people are two things the regular pace of the world usually does not allow them to be en masse: bored and afraid.COVID-19 is an existential crisis the only thing to do is sit and wait.

With fear of leaving the home, there has been a shift in online shopping for essentials like groceries and cleaning products as well as an increase in the need for reading materials and entertainment.

Before the US government began treating COVID-19 like the pandemic that it truly is, entertainment companies delayed the debut of films like the latest James Bond. Now, with Trolls: World Tour we have the first example of a media company leaning into streaming first in lieu of a theatrical release. Consumers reacted. Reader — your author reacted. Anything that keeps my three-year-old daughter happy while she can’t go outside works for me.

With the record-breaking release, the US was just effectively trainer to pay $20 for a film you can only watch for 48 hours. Hollywood knows this works and you can rest assured that they will attempt to build a new consumer habit out of it to combat the losses they are experiencing.

And you know what? Going to the grocery store is a chore. How many will go back to it once the world re-opens?

All in all, spending is down, so the net effect is not positive. Consumers are shifting their dollars to e-commerce. So, it’s counterintuitive that brands would want to pull their spending from there because that’s where a large part of the opportunity to pull a brand through the downturn lies.

The composite dynamic at play is that demand is up in specific areas, supply is down, but the competitive landscape is receding and the channels that brands are choosing to be active in are shrinking. This is perhaps the best time to double down on Search because it is the most efficient channel and you get a short feedback loop that includes results against consumer intent.

Changes in Search Demand

I took the long way to get here, but as with any data, context is important. Let’s examine Travel, Fashion, Food and Drink and Personal Finance to see what has changed and how marketers can leverage Search to both help people and drive growth during the pandemic.

Travel

Travel acts as the bigger picture industry, but the data that Advanced Web Ranking provides also allows me to dig into Air Travel more specifically.

Air Travel

• Industry Change – Travel, in general, has seen a gradual decline as the news of the Coronavirus headed east from Wuhan to Seattle and then onto NYC and Europe. There have been increases in search demand for Air Travel largely due to people’s need to escape back home and to find more information on how to cancel their flights.
• Emerging Search Terms – diamond princess locator, spain, [airline name] cancellations, [airline name] customer service, domestic flights USA
• Shrinking Search Terms – train times, booking, destinations, [airline name], [destination name]
• Content People Need – There is a demand for transparent and aggregated content about how travel has been impacted by COVID-19. People are looking for guides on how to navigate their cancellation, flight tracking visualizations, videos and interactive experiences that clarify how flight safety has changed. People would also benefit from information on when their destinations will likely open back up, what deals airlines are offering for those time frames and how to approach emergency travel should you absolutely need to go somewhere. Travel aggregators and bloggers are better suited to prepare this content as they show comparisons between airlines and offer objective opinions.
• How Brands Can Help People – Brands can help people by putting them first by proactively notifying people of how to cancel flights and accommodations and not burying that content deep in their sites.
• SERP Opportunities – COVID-19 Announcements Schema, FAQs Schema, and Q&A Schema markup.

Fashion

• Industry Change – Fashion had a spike at the top of March and saw a small decline since the announcement of the pandemic. This is likely due to people losing their jobs and feeling the need to protect their cash. With their Searches, people are actively expressing a need for comfortable clothing and interest in-home workouts.
• Emerging Search Terms – home workouts, comfortable clothing brands
• Shrinking Search Terms – [name brands], sweatshirts, high-end fashion
• Content People Need – There is a demand for content on how to look good without leaving the home for your standard beauty routines, the best outfits for working from home, comfortable clothes from affordable brands and how to look good on Zoom calls. There is also a need for clarity as to what stores remain open during these times. Delivery is taking longer and people would prefer to be able to quickly pick up the things they need.
• How Brands Can Help People – Fashion brands can help people by offering deals and being clear about their logistics disruptions. Brands can also offer curbside pickup and local same-day deliveries.
• SERP Opportunities – COVID-19 Announcements Schema, FAQs Schema, Q&A Schema, LocalBusiness, and Product Offers Schema Markup

Personal Finance

• Industry Change – People are developing a fear of stability of the financial systems and a renewed focus on gold, silver prices, and blue-chip stocks is replacing interest in banks and lesser-known stock prices.
• Emerging Search Terms – gold prices, silver prices, life insurance, [blue chip stock names], life insurance, mortgage
• Shrinking Search Terms – [bank names], lesser-known stock share prices
• Content People Need – The uncertainty of the market creates a lot of fear and people begin to irrationally believe the value of money will drop dramatically so they begin to look for things to put their money into to retain wealth. Guides on how to invest, safeguard wealth and generally how to make it through a downturn are ideal for this space.
• How Brands Can Help People – Brands can help people by positioning themselves as trusted advisors and making a lot of free content available on how to understand how the market is reacting. Additionally, they put together interactive experiences and data-driven research to highlight how the investments have trended before, during and after previous downturns. Finally, there is a lot of misinformation around investments, where possible brands can look for opportunities to be a guiding light on that and the recent government updates such as changes in taxation with bite-sized video content.
• SERP Opportunities – FAQs Schema, Q&A Schema, Fact Check Schema, and Video Schema markup

Shopping

• Industry Change – Shopping demand is down across the board. Aside from entertainment, shopping has shifted away from discretionary items and focused on essential items, food, and safety.
• Emerging Search Terms – thermometer, soap, grocery shopping, comfortable clothing brands
• Shrinking Search Terms – high-end fashion, local stores, furniture, violent toys
• Content People Need – People need clarity on what items will make their quarantines more comfortable both physically and mentally. What are the items they must have to say safe and what are the items that will help them escape? This content will differ by geographic and psychographic makeup of each persona, so there are endless guides, listicles and video content that can be created to help people enjoy themselves until this is over. Beyond that, Shopping has the same issue as Fashion in that there is a lack of clarity about which brick and mortar stores are actually open and the likelihood that an order will be delivered.
• How Brands Can Help People – Fashion brands can help people by offering deals and being clear about their logistics disruptions. Brands can also offer curbside pickup and local same-day deliveries. Additionally, Shopping brands can lean heavily on the editorial content by sending more products to their work-from-home staff to visually demonstrate how it makes their quarantines better via video and written content. Finally, brands can consider data visualization to show what products are trending where and their availability to help re-distribute demand and help people discover products they may need for their area.
• SERP Opportunities – FAQs Schema, Q&A Schema, Video Schema, COVID-19 Announcements Schema, LocalBusiness, and Product Offers Schema Markup

Food and Drink

• Industry Change – One thing that will never change is people’s need to eat. According to Advanced Web Ranking data, the Food and Drink industry demand from Search is down 19% and people have refocused their demand toward food delivery.
• Emerging Search Terms – food delivery
• Shrinking Search Terms – food stores near me
• Content People Need – This situation is a bit more mutual than the others because restaurants are currently on the ropes due to the loss of foot traffic and on-site dining capabilities. This is an opportunity where companies and people should look to support restaurants so they survive the pandemic. With food and drink, the primary user concern is remaining healthy and discovering new places that are actually open to eat. Brands should look to create content to develop meal plans and introduce people to new restaurants that are still open. Restaurants should look to provide up to date information and menus on their websites to indicate that they are indeed open.
• How Brands Can Help People – A lot of food delivery is consolidated on services and sites such as GrubHub. These companies should consider lowering their fees in support of the mom and pops. The restaurants themselves should consider expanding their delivery distances, offering coupons and updating their menus to offer more healthy options.
• SERP Opportunities – COVID-19 Announcements Schema and LocalBusiness Schema markup

A New Tool from Advanced Web Ranking

As I mentioned earlier, the Advanced Web Ranking team was nice enough to prepare the data to support the insights in this post. In the process of doing so, they realized it is a good opportunity to expand their free public toolset. I personally get a lot of value out of their CTR Study tool in that we use it to compare click-through rate performance and build projections. Now they have added a live search demand tool for you to use in your day to day.

Using this tool you can get a quick snapshot of how global search demand has changed in a time period. Use it to get a sense of which verticals are performing and which are not.

You can also dig into the subcategories to see what the performance looks like. In the example below, we’re reviewing the Travel vertical which is broken down into Air Travel, Hotels, and various destinations.

As the data is aggregated across many sites, the tool is a great resource in helping to decipher search demand trends for a given space versus algorithmic trends.

How to Approach Search Marketing During COVID-19

Now, more than ever, we must remove abstractions like user, consumer, client, and customer and be acutely aware of the person on the other side of the web browser. Here are a few principles you should consider following with your Search Marketing efforts.

1. Be Empathetic – Look to help your audience before thinking of selling them something. We are all going through something unprecedented and we want to feel as though the brand we’re dealing with cares and understands. Tone-deaf brands will become long term running jokes.
2. Reassess your market segments – Any market segmentation work your brand is working from is far less applicable now. Review those market segments and layer the implications of their behavioral changes now that they are not leaving their homes regularly and they are less likely to spend money. Harvard Business Review shared a framework for this that you can consider adopting.
3. Watch the trends with cities and countries that are ahead of yours – China and San Francisco are ahead of NYC on the recovery curve. You may be able to learn from your customers in those areas before recovery in other areas and extrapolate from their behavior to get ahead of supporting people through content and keyword opportunities.
4. Measure Relentlessly – As always, you want to measure what keywords and content are meeting people’s needs and be continually proactive with keyword research to identify how else you can help people.

At iPullRank, we’re continuing this conversation deeply and we’re hosting a Marketing in the Age of COVID-19 webinar on April 22nd. We’ll be talking in great detail about these issues and how you can continue to help the world make it through with your marketing efforts. Sign up here and keep healthy!

We focused on getting visibility metrics to Google Data Studio reports in the first release, offering a clear overview of how your websites and keyword groups perform in terms of search visibility, click share, estimated visits, and more. 

This time, we come back with a Data Studio connector version that brings more granular data for tracking keyword positions, identifying best performing terms and URLs, and getting insights on search demand shifts.

Big “Thank you!” to all our customers who were part of the User Test, and to our integrations lead and his team =).

Here’s what you will learn: 

• AWR Data Source Setup 
• Keywords and Landing Pages Widget Models 
• Rank Performance Audit Report

Now, let’s take a quick look at how you can set up the Data Source to get the keyword positions.

AWR Data Source Setup

When creating a data source for AWR ranking data, you can choose between two Keyword Ranking report types: 

1. Keyword Ranking Date Comparison

I recommend this report for scorecard and table report widgets, where you can compare the keyword positions and search volumes recorded for a particular date, to a date in the past.

2. Keyword Ranking Evolution In Time

Use this report for table and chart widgets, where you can list keyword positions side by side across multiple dates.

You can find the Metrics and Dimensions available for each report fully described in our help documentation. 

One of the main aspects that we had in mind when building the new reports was the loading time. 

As you know, AWR does not have limitations regarding the number of keywords that you can track in a project, or the number of projects that you can have with one account. 

However, working with filters on large data sets in Data Studio, without a Google BigQuery integration, sometimes results in slow performance. 

With the new report types, we introduced project settings and keyword performance filters at the Data Source setup level. 

This way, the amount of data processed on Google Data Studio side becomes smaller, thus reducing the loading time for your report pages. 

Now, let’s look at some report widget models where you can use the AWR rank data.  

Keywords And Landing Pages Widget Models

Presenting the results of your work comprehensively is challenging, especially since it’s easy to get lost in detail with so many data visualization options available nowadays.  

I think that the best way to start building your report is to review the goals with your audience. Widgets, dimensions, and metrics might differ based on who is receiving the report, so this negotiation is crucial for the report’s success. 

Here are some suggestions on how you can present the data from AWR in Google Data Studio reports. 

KPI Scorecards 

With ranking data, KPIs need to reflect the keyword position changes, as well as the search demand changes. 

Usually, you can arrange them in performance groups (e.g., Ranking changes, Traffic changes) and ordered by importance. 

Here are two examples with calculated fields and ready-to-use metrics: 

Ranked Keywords is a calculated field which counts the ranked keywords found on the latest update date available on the Data Studio report. 

Total Search Demand is a Search volume metric, adding up the average monthly searches for all ranked keywords in the report. 

Tables

Google Data Studio offers powerful built-in features like heatmaps, bar charts, and more, taking simple report tables to a whole new level. 

Here is an example with the Keyword Rankings in time report type, set as a data source: 

That is a pivot table widget with heatmap, using “Keyword” and “URL” as row dimensions and “Date” as column dimension (Expand-collapse options is enabled). “Position” is set as a metric. 

Charts 

Charts are the best way to tell the story, helping you to demonstrate proportions or changes in time. 

Google Data Studio offers a lot of exciting options for making the information visually attractive, from a simple line or bar charts, to advanced options like scatter plots and treemaps. 

For this SERP Feature Distribution example, I am using horizontal bar charts showing the proportion of result types in Google Universal search.

Sometimes, a website may rank with different types of results for the same keyword (e.g., your page can be listed as a Featured Snippet and also as an Organic entry in top 10 results). In this case, AWR will count each type of result individually. 

The models available in this section are extracted from the “Rank Performance Audit Report” sample that you can find below. You will have the possibility to duplicate the report and use it with your AWR ranking and visibility data.

Rank Performance Audit Report

View Report Sample

This report was built together with Cristina Constantinescu, our new VP of Marketing at Advanced Installer, as a starting point for her new SEO project. 

We ran a keyword research session for the Advanced Installer domain and set up the project in AWR with almost 200 keywords. 

The rankings were monitored daily across Google Desktop and Mobile with blended search results. 

Then we set up 3 data sources with AWR Data and related filters:

• Visibility Evolution In Time
• Keyword Ranking Date Comparison
• Keyword Ranking Evolution In Time

Visibility Evolution In Time Setup

Keyword Ranking Date Comparison Setup

Keyword Ranking Evolution In Time Setup

Filters

Here is a short description of what we measured on each report section: 

Organic Visibility

The first page shows the organic visibility summary with trends over the last seven days of ranking updates.  

We used two data sources for this page:

• Visibility Evolution In Time, which helps to build the chart and the visibility and traffic KPIs.
• Keyword Rankings Date Comparison for the keyword position table and the search demand KPI.

For all widgets that we built with the “Visibility” data source, we used a filter for All keywords group. 

This way, we made sure that the values for each keyword were counted only one time, even if the keywords in question were assigned to multiple groups. 

Regarding the date range, the report had a static time interval because we needed the stats for a limited time. 

However, if you plan to use some of the widgets here on an ongoing basis, you can use the “Last x days” date range for the chart and a correlated comparison frame for the scorecards. 

Keyword Group Performance 

Upon setting up the keyword set for this project, we also defined three main keyword groups that we needed to evaluate: branded terms, commercial, and informational. 

It helps determining the initial search visibility and traffic performance according to the search intent. 

This page uses the same data sources as the first one. However, the filters applied are specific for each keyword group. 

We set up the keyword group performance chart as a scatter chart in Data Studio, using the “Visibility In Time” data source.

The “Date,” “Keyword group,” and “Search engine” are set up as dimensions, and “Visibility %,” “Click share,” and “Estimated Visits” as metrics. 

In this example, the more bubbles we have to the top right corner, the better. It means our keyword groups have a high click share and visibility %.  

The rank distribution section, on the other hand, is built as a bar chart, and all metrics are renamed, or set as calculated fields. 

For example, the visibility metric called “First position” is renamed to 1, Top 30 metric is renamed to reflect the 21-30 position range, while the 2-5 range is calculated as Top 5 – First place.

Desktop & Mobile SERPs

Next, we wanted to see what types of content gets listed in the SERPs from the Advanced Installer domain, because the team does not target only organic positions, but also video and images. 

For this page, we used only the “Keyword Ranking” (date comparison) data source, and we were able to see a precise distribution of different types of content for both desktop and mobile searches.

To build the bar charts, we took advantage of the possibility to convert dimensions to metrics which is offered by Google Data Studio. We set the result type as dimension and Keyword as metric in this case.

That way, on each bar, we can see the number of keywords which is associated with a particular type of result.

Keyword and Landing Page Performance

In the last two sections of our report, we took a closer look at granular data, comparing side by side positions across multiple dates. 

The purpose was to identify the best ranking keywords and URLs, but also to check their volatility. 

Back to you

That’s about it! 

With the new AWR connector for Google Data Studio, you can quickly get the keyword positions and visibility stats automatically in your reports. 

Hopefully, the widget and report samples above will give you ideas on how to present AWR data to your customers or your team.

I would be more than interested to hear what types of widgets you prefer for presenting ranking data in Google Data Studio. 

Feel free to share your thoughts below.  

From thousands of SERPs tracked, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of a visibility drop, which pages of your website lost their rankings and for which keywords.

In this article, I’ll share with you an AWR workflow, based on keyword ranking distributions and keyword segmentation, that helps you find out precisely where you lost ground in SERPs and where you need to focus your efforts to gain back your visibility.

If you’re new to AWR, be sure to sign up for a free trial account
to follow things through with us.

Let’s get started.

Acknowledging the Visibility Drop

It all starts with that horrific moment when you log into your rank tracker and see that once beautiful, ascending visibility chart line, now going…. down.

That sucks, big time. But hey, we can fix this, that’s what we do

Visibility is a great metric for weighting a website’s overall performance in SERPs, but it would only take us this far.

At most, we can compare visibility for keyword groups, to see if there’s one particular group of keywords that has lost rankings, but that still leaves us half way through to knowing what pages we need to focus on and what keywords.

So, we prefer moving over to the Ranking > Distribution report, and take a different approach.

Distribution of rankings

The Rankings distribution report splits keywords into segments, depending on their ranking, for our website and competitors.

This is great because it lets us understand the dynamic in SERPs:

• How my keywords are moving from one segment to another
• How my losses become my competitors’ gains, and vice versa

As a general rule, seeing red labels across this SEO report is not necessarily a bad thing.

But having your number of ranked Keywords decrease by 45 terms, like our website – allrecipes.com – in this example has, is really BAD.

By looking at the distribution, it’s likely that the majority of loses come from the 2-5 and 21-50 segments. Let’s find out what changed.

Pages that got impacted

The same Ranking Distribution report also lets you drill keywords down per URL, and find out which are the pages that lost the most rankings:

In our case, we have a category page that dropped out of top 100 search results for a lot of keywords – allrecipes.com/recipes/79/desserts/ – and a few other pages with less significant ranking losses.

We’ll focus first on this category page – /recipes/79/desserts/ – and move forward to determine the keywords for which the page lost rankings for.

Keywords we’ve lost rankings for

We’ll use ranking filters with the Ranking > Keywords report, to determine which keywords have got their ranking changed from each ranking distribution interval.

We’ll leave the number of ranked keywords for last, so let’s start with “First Place”.

I’m applying filters and find that we have:

• 1 keyword no longer ranking 1st for; it has moved into the 11-20 ranking segment

• 2 keywords have fallen from above to below the fold of 1st page of results;

• And from all the 19 keywords that have existed the 21-50 ranking interval, there isn’t a single one that is still ranking.

When a URL filter is applied, the app only shows keywords that are still ranking. That’s because the app cannot connect a dropped keyword to a URL, so it will not show you the keywords that are currently dropped for your URL.

Therefore, we’ll use a quick workaround to determine the keywords that dropped out of top 100, and their URLs.

First off, we pull out the list of dropped keywords:

Select all dropped keywords and assign them to a new keyword group – [Lost Keywords]:

Switch the date selection to the initial date and display [Lost keyword] group:

There you have it

At this point we have a clear diagnosis of the URLs and keywords that lost ground in SERPs.

You can use this workflow for any visibility changes, favorable or not, and easily figure out if the ranking changes were the consequences of something you made and if you need to take any actions or make improvements.

Hope you’ll give it a go, and please be sure to share your ideas and feedback. I’d love to hear how it’s working for you.

One of the problems is SEO can be time consuming, not to mention difficult. But what if there was a way to boost Google rankings quickly?

It’s quite simple actually:

Find keywords that you’re already ranking for, but not in the top positions (yet).

If you can find these search queries, you can find the ranking pages and re-optimise and improve them for better results.

In this post, you will learn quick and easy to implement tactics to boost your Google rankings, including:

• Improve your CTR
• Find and optimise your internal links
• Quickly improve your top pages
• Find and fix underperforming pages
• Generate new content ideas

Sounds good? Let’s go.

Boost Google rankings with GSC & AWR

If you don’t have Search Console setup for your site, pause reading this and go set it up. It’s an essential SEO tool.

If you didn’t know, Google Search Console (or GSC and formerly Webmaster Tools), is a free tool to help manage your website’s search functionality and appearance. It is basically a collection of reports and tools that help you fix errors and optimize your pages.

Likewise, using a rank tracker (like AWR ?) helps you verify and keep an eye on your keyword positions in Google. Without it, knowing which keywords are driving traffic (and revenue) will be needlessly tricky.

Together, GSC and AWR make a great team for improving your search engine rankings.

AWR’s keyword rank tracking interface is pretty easy to understand. But what about Search Consoles metrics? I’m glad you asked:

GSC Data 101 – what are impressions, position & clicks?

Google Search Console metrics can be slightly confusing. And, in Google’s own words: ‘are subject to change’. For further reading and more detail into Search Console Metrics, check out the official support page.

Here’s a quick rundown of what the different metrics mean:

Impressions

This is a recording of a link URL appearing in the SERPs for a user. The URL records an impression when the user opens the page containing this result (even if the result is not scrolled into view).

Position

This refers to the position of the result, and in very rough terms, this is the closest to a keyword rank. Position in GSC is the position of the topmost link to your site in the SERPs. It is also very important to note that this value is reached via averaging the position across all queries.

Clicks

For most results, any click that takes a user away from the search results page is counted as a click. Conversely, clicking a link that keeps a user inside the results page is not counted as a click. Oh, and clicking a result, going to the website, then returning to the results and clicking the same link again = still only counts one click.

CTR

And finally, a nice simple one here: CTR is click through rate. CTR is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions (clicks ÷ impressions = CTR).

Now the metrics explanations are out of the way, let’s look at the tactics:

5 Ways to boost Google rankings right now

There are no secrets to a successful SEO campaign. Well actually there might be two words:

Ongoing optimisation.

Be honest with yourself: how many times have you researched, written and published a piece of content and then that’s it? You move onto the next one and the next one and the next one and repeat forever.

Good content (and bad content actually) needs to be revisited otherwise you are missing out on a huge opportunity for more traffic. Everyone knows SEO is an ongoing process. And so is content optimisation.

Let’s get started with ways to boost your search engine rankings.

#1 Improving CTR

First things first, we want to improve the organic clickthrough rates of your pages.

Why?

Research shows websites ranking on the first page get most clicks. CTR steadily decreases the further down Google’s page results they rank.

Google have been characteristically secretive about how they use CTR data to rank sites. But the takeaway here is that improving CTR offers you a chance to get more traffic without creating more content. It’s every SEO’s dream.

To find your click-through-rates, just head to the performance report in Search Console, or alternatively you can access it via your AWR dashboard:

If you are using AWR, you can quickly check the CTR on the queries and pages that you already rank for. Just select ‘keywords only in GSC’ in the drop down:

Hit the Impressions heading to filter high to low and have a scan through your pages. What you want to look for here is high impressions but a low CTR:

If your site is getting visibility in Google, but no one is clicking through to your page, this tells us one thing:

You need to improve your title and/or meta description.

To improve your title, try using a CTA to make people want to click through, use numbers to stand out, make sure it’s the right length (60 characters) and consider asking a question to engage people.

To improve your meta description, try to keep it to 150 characters or less, give people a reason to click through to read more and maybe add a CTA and your keyword if you can.

It is also worth looking at other ranking pages in the SERPs to see if there are similarities between the top ranking pages that you should also consider including. For example, check out a selection of a few of the top ranking sites for the keyword ‘best wordpress hosting’:

We can see that adding in the year to show the lists are up to date is something we should consider including in our hypothetical page title update. Also, 10 seems to be the magic number of hosting providers.

Analyse the SERPs by looking at the other pages ranking around you, and ask yourself:

• Does my content match the search intent?
• Could my page title be better? Does it make someone want to read more, e.g. convey quality content?
• Are the other pages of content just better than mine?

#2 Find and optimise your internal links

AWR and Google Search Console make a great team for internal link building.

By adding internal links from top pages to pages you want to increase rankings for, sometimes you can see immediate results. Although, this being SEO, heavy emphasis on the sometimes!

Go to the keywords ranking report in AWR and look for pages ranking in positions #4 to #10 position.

Go to the Keywords Ranking report in AWR and filter the positions using the drop down:

These are pages that are already ranking pretty highly, but could benefit from a slight nudge up the rankings.

Now you just need to find high authority pages on your site to link from. You can do this by looking at the pages with the highest impressions and clicks. Generally speaking, these will be the highest authority pages according to Google

Alternatively, you can use the advanced search operators in Google to find pages on your site that mention the keyword you are looking to improve.

Here’s the search operator you want to use:

site:YOURSITEHERE.com KEYWORD

For example, using this operator site:advancedwebranking.com CTR would search the AWR domain for mentions of the keyword CTR, or at least the pages that Google thinks are most closely related to that keyword.

All that’s left to do there is to find where the keyword is mentioned in the content and add in the internal link.

#3 Quickly improve your top pages

SEO wins are good. Quick wins are better.

When it comes to SEO campaigns, things take time to benefit from. So anything that can be done to get some positive (and safe) movements in the short term should be explored.

One such way to quickly see results is by improving your top performing pages. The logic being: if a page is performing well, it could perform even better with a few tweaks.

Let’s identify some of your top tanking pages.

Head over to the landing pages report in AWR and from the drop down, select all the GSC metrics:

Look to see what terms each page ranks highly for (2 – 10) and also look for pages that rank for multiple keywords.

Take these search terms and try to work them in naturally into the copy on the page, but only if it makes sense to do so. This is a useful way to optimise old blog posts and maybe grab some more organic traffic.

Another quick method for improving your top pages is to sort your data by Impressions and look for phrases ranking in positions 3 – 7.

To do this, go to the Search Console report in AWR and hit export. Just make sure you have Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Position selected to show all information.

Now export and open up your .csv in Excel.

Filter impressions column to show results high to low. Then filter the position column to show values between 3 and 7.

Now work through these pages and work the keywords into either your title tags or H1 of that page.

#4 Find underperforming pages (& fix them)

It’s not just your best performing pages that can benefit from an update; underperforming pages can too. Search Console is useful for identifying those pages that nobody visits or engages with.

To do this, make sure Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Position are all selected and then order the Impressions column to show the least first:

This is a useful SEO technique of identifying pages that you can consider deleting and adding 301 redirects to a more relevant (or up-to-date) content.

Studies have shown that deleting low traffic pages (aka content pruning) and 301 redirecting them to better pages, leads to Google valuing the more relevant pages higher. Overall this can potentially increase traffic to your site.

Another method to improve underperforming pages is to look for pages that are ranking well, but are getting poor engagement metrics.

Export your keywords, and filter the positions to show positions 3 – 10:

Now you’ll have a list of pages that are ranking well, towards the bottom of page one, but are not getting good engagement metrics. You can go examine these keywords and re-optimise them.

#5 Discover new content ideas

It’s not just existing content that GSC can help you with, but new content too.

Google Search Console can be a gold mine of new keyword ideas for content, (not to mention ad copy suggestions if you are running any AdWords campaigns).

To find them, filter your data in the dashboard to show ‘keywords only in GSC’. Then you can comb through your data and tick any new keywords your site is ranking for.

You can then easily add these new keywords right into your rank tracking to keep a closer eye on them.

The trick here is to look for keywords that are getting good metrics, but could be better addressed with it’s own stand alone content. Sometimes it is better to create new content than try to shoehorn them into existing content.

Also, pay attention to search queries with the most impressions. Also look at CTR and position too. If you sort by position, you’ll be able to see the search terms you rank highest for.

All that is left to do once you have found new content ideas is to actually write them up.

Using this landing page and keyword combo will increase your chances of ranking highly and actually getting people to click through to your site. Nice.

Tracking your improvements

Whether you are tweaking page titles or rewriting your content you really need to be tracking your keywords and pages you are working on. After all, how will you:

• See rankings as a result of your SEO efforts.
• Quickly see which pages & keywords are bringing in the most traffic.
• Understand any changes in traffic (and sales).
• Find and improve underperforming pages.
• Keep track of competitors’ rankings.
• Spot any new algorithm changes early.

Getting the most out of Search Console and AWR

All of the tactics above will help you make better decisions about your site.

Just don’t forget it’s called search engine optimization for a reason. Because optimization doesn’t stop. It’s not a one time job, there’s always something to improve.

So repeat these tactics every few months, just remember:

• Check and improve your CTR
• Find and optimise your internal links
• Find and improve your top pages
• Find and fix underperforming pages
• Keep finding new content ideas

More GSC resources for improving your site

This article only scratches the surface of what you can do with Search Console. There are more use cases like improving UX, finding low hanging fruit keywords and building custom SEO dashboards.

Check out some of these useful resources if you want to learn more:

• Google Search Console: The Definitive Guide
• UX SEO: 300% Increase in impressions with a UX redesign
• Find low hanging fruit keywords with Search Console Data
• How to create an actionable Search Console Report in Data Studio