Advanced SEO might feel complicated, but it really all boils down to how much value Google thinks you provide to your users. Be creative, come up with unique approaches to problems, implement industry best practices, and use the right techniques to improve your SERP ranking this year.

Search engine optimization is an inescapable part of doing business online, unless of course, you plan on paying Google for every click for the rest of your life.

I’m going to assume that the readers of this have a baseline knowledge about SEO. Most people know the SEO drill – keywords, backlinking, business listings…lather, rinse, repeat.

If you’re wanting the basics before you dig into advanced SEO, then we cover keywords and keyword research, SEO tools for various SEO tasks,  and some technical SEO in our Basics of SEO guide.

However, there’s another, deeper, more complex layer to advanced search engine optimization, and that’s what this advanced SEO guide is all about.

Utilize and apply these advanced SEO techniques to create a more effective SEO strategy for your client.

Search engine optimization practices are dynamic and ever-changing, and even as I write this, a broad core update is rolling out and affecting the SERPs. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that some guides can contain outdated information (although I’d say that large chunks of SEO remain relevant regardless of the year).

Let’s dig right in!

Search User Intent

Search engine algorithms have gone through a lot of changes over the last decade, but the goal has pretty much remained the same: provide their users with the best possible answers to their queries.

Over time, search engines have adapted and evolved to how people search. Search engines were successful in doing this because they understood that most searches can fall under four categories:

• Informational: The searcher wants to know more about a topic. These can be phrased as a question, such as “what is search engine optimization” or “best free SEO tools.”
• Navigational: The searcher wants to navigate to a particular site, such as The New York Times website, Yelp, etc.
• Transactional: The searcher is interested in transacting, ordering, purchasing, or buying. Transactional queries can be direct/explicit such as “buy women’s heels”, include local modifiers like “Jacksonville flower shop”.
• Commercial: The searcher is looking to buy something but is just shopping around. These are the types of search queries that have comparisons – S10 vs. Pixel 3 or Cheap International Phone Carriers, etc.

Knowing the four types of search intent will help you optimize for those searches and target the customers you want. I’ve spoken a little bit more on this in my own article on keyword research, so if you’d like to know how these types of search queries can be applied to your keyword research, give it a quick 5 min read.

People always say “know searcher intent”, but too often, the value proposition of this practice is vague. The reason you want to know searcher intent for your queries is that it will feed into your entire marketing funnel. The calls to action can be customized and the internal linking structure can be optimized along with Page Rank and Chei Rank (Kevin Indig’s post on optimizing website architecture based on your website’s goals).

If you know the intent of the searcher, you can not only rank better, but you’ll convert better, and you’ll lead searchers down the correct path within your site.

Here are two examples of how you can distribute Page Rank and Chei Rank.

The 2nd example:

The 2nd example distributes page rank more equally (thus it doesn’t rely on a centralized model). To understand more, just read Kevin’s wonderful post.

Section 2: Google Ranking Factors and Google’s Algorithm

To really master SEO, you need to understand what the search engines look for, why, and how you can leverage that knowledge into something beneficial for your business. Once you know how the system works and what its rules are, you’ll not only be able to play the game…but win at it, too.

My personal philosophy on SEO is that I should learn the practical maximum for tweaking signals to send the strongest signal without going too far and getting penalized. This is the real struggle for SEOs. Once you identify a ranking factor, you then need to identify just how far you can tweak that factor before it ruins user experience or before Google starts to penalize you.

Other SEOs may warn against this methodology, but ultimately, an SEO is paid to optimize for an algorithm, and that’s all I’m suggesting.

I know of one person that stands out amongst everyone else in the SEO industry as THE expert on dissecting Google’s algorithm. I’m sure many of you already know his name, but go follow Bill Slawski’s Blog if you’re looking for someone to search through hundreds of thousands of pages to distill relevant Google patent information on search engine ranking methodologies.

Outside of Slawsky, I really appreciate Ahref’s curated list of SEO blogs.

As a general rule of thumb, beginner level SEO can be learned from a variety of sources as it’s not too hard to nail down the basics. We’ve mentioned our SEO basics, but you can also check out people like Neil Patel and Brian Dean if you’re looking for a well-designed beginner level SEO walkthrough  (though, these guys seem more like content marketing talking heads rather than sources of deeper SEO insights).

I also suggest identifying experts via social media and following them on twitter and following their blog (if they have one). To identify an expert, I’d stalk the walls of famous SEOs (like Rand Fishkin for example).

You can also start from my tiny list. You can also find SEO Agencies like mine, and reverse engineer what they do right.



Social media is the free option for getting good SEO technique insights, but you can also pay for someone to spill the beans on their SEO techniques or just buy an SEO course from reputable sources. Matt Diggity has a great course that I highly recommend. Other amazing courses exist as well, but I’m not here to promote person after person for their paid courses, so I’ll push onward.

Search engine optimization algorithms are based on mathematical algorithms. If you understand the ranking factors and apply advanced SEO techniques, you can use them to your own advantage. Google is smart, but ultimately, Google is just using math. Great content is…great, but Google can’t tell the difference between great and poor, so it uses math to get as close as possible.

The Flaws of the  Algorithm

As smart as search engine algorithms are nowadays, it’s important to know that they still have the limitations that you need to work through.

They don’t “see” web pages the same way we do, and it’s this difference between human and machine that is the reason that SEO even exists in the first place—we do search engine optimization because it helps make our content readable to search engine bots.

One of the biggest weaknesses of current search engine algorithms is that they can’t understand non-text elements. Google can’t actually read pictures, illustrations, or videos unless they have alt text, meta information, or surrounding contextual information.

Another weakness is that the algorithm can be manipulated. Ideally, the highest quality content and the most relevant results would rank the highest, but that isn’t always the case.

Take the recent Google 30-day ‘Rank or Go Home’ SEO challenge held in the Facebook group, SEO Signals. Entrants competed to get the best ranking for the term “rhinoplasty Plano”. The first result was a minimalist site with relatively poor-quality content. The second result was a website entirely in Latin, except for a few strategically-placed keywords.

The Facebook Group ‘SEO Signals’ has a range of members ranging from SEO beginners to advanced SEO experts.

Of course, Google and other search engines are getting much better every day. There’s also the issue of impressing not just the algorithm, but the real people who make up your target market. The techniques we’ll be discussing in this guide are useful, long-term strategies for both search engines and human beings.

Real SEO Ranking Factors

Not one, not even the best SEO experts, can tell you with 100% certainty what the formula is for the perfect SEO strategy. First of all, Google alone is said to have OVER 200 different ranking factors.

Benchmarking tools such as Cora or SurferSEO correlate ranking positions against a few hundred different SEO ranking factors to determine the exact ranking factors for any given keyword. Utilize these tools as part of your advanced SEO strategy to skyrocket your rankings.

Even if someone could list all of the factors, there’s no way to tell exactly how much any particular factor contributes to your SERP ranking. Plus, the list of factors (and how important they are) changes all the time!

The above image shows the 500+ ranking factors that Surfer SEO measures. The tool then allows you to visualize what everyone in the SERP is doing.

Despite all the rank factor changes, there are some factors that are proven to be important aspects of any SEO campaign. The exact impact may be speculation, but that doesn’t change the fact that these factors actually matter and are worth the effort. Here’s a great episode from some SEOs I trust and they cover this topic in massive detail.

RankBrain

RankBrain is a relatively recent addition to the Google algorithm, but it’s already considered the third-most important ranking factor.

RankBrain is a sophisticated machine learning algorithm that learns from REAL user searches and behaviors. It influences rankings based on how much a user interacts with your site. Let’s illustrate with an example.

Say that you are searching for dog grooming tips. You notice that the fifth result looks interesting, so you click on it and spend several minutes reading through the article. Google will take note of the fact that result #5 is valuable, and will potentially boost its rankings.

This is a super simplistic view, but humor me as I’ll dig into the more advanced view a little further down.

The opposite is also true. If a lot of people ignore the first result—or even if they click it, but exit the tab right away because the information isn’t relevant or interesting—Google will most likely demote that result to a lower ranking. This is known as a ‘bounce rate’ and is a commonly debated SEO ranking factor.  

What you should learn from RankBrain is that providing high-quality content that users actually want to read will encourage them to spend more time on your site. This, in turn, will help improve your SERP rankings.

I’ll share with you my favorite graphic on Rank Brain. Hopefully, it helps.

Credit: David Harry

The shortest way to summarize the meat of RankBrain – RankBrain works by embedding words into vectors. Google doesn’t always understand words, but it can understand vectors (Bill Slawsky’s blog has additional content on patent information on word vectors). RankBrain needs to also recognize vector similarities and differences.

If you’re a big ole nerd, you should be thinking that RankBrain sounds familiar to something else in SEO past – Word2vec.

If you haven’t noticed the constant bouncing of website queries and rankings, then you’ve been asleep, but one of the reasons, (besides Rank Transition) is that Google is basically guessing through trial and error.

The problem with RankBrain is that its usage is so vague. SEOs don’t really know how to apply it to SEO techniques. We know that it is used for ambiguous searches and for never-before-seen searches.

If you have any real world examples of RankBrain changing the way SEO functions, drop a comment.

For now, suffice it to say, my suggestion is to continue optimizing for simple queries (“What is a Backlink?” for example), rather than trying to guess Google’s understanding of complex vector relationships.

Section 3: Indexation and Crawl Guide

These words get thrown out a lot in advanced SEO guides, but do you really know what they mean?

When search engines “crawl” your pages, they “read” the content to gain information about it. It helps search engines understand what exactly your website is all about.

Through crawling, a search engine can pick up the most important keywords. If it comes across a link, the bots will follow it to crawl that page as well.

Search engine bots ‘crawl’ your website and use a few hundred SEO ranking factors to rank your site against thousands of other sites.

Indexing, on the other hand, makes your website, pages, and content available to the viewing public. Unless your content is indexed, people will not be able to find it via the search engine results page, even if they type in all the right keywords.

People can still access your website by typing in the URL directly or clicking on a link on another page, but not showing up in the SERPs will significantly decrease your site’s traffic potential.

Many guides focus on the “How to Rank with SEO Marketing ” , but crawling and indexing is just as crucial, and ultimately, it will affect the “how you perform on the SERP. Stay tuned, we’ll teach you how to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content, which will, in turn, boost its rankings.

Google has its own description on how it crawls websites, so feel free to read the webmaster description. I suggest reading the “long answer”

“Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as <title> tags and alt attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files.

Somewhere between crawling and indexing, Google determines if a page is a duplicate or canonical of another page. If the page is considered a duplicate, it will be crawled much less frequently.

Note that Google doesn’t crawl pages with a noindex directive (header or tag). However, it must be able to see the directive; if the page his blocked by a robots.txt file, a login page, or other device, it is possible that the page might be indexed even if Google didn’t visit it!”

Improve your indexing

There are many techniques to improve Google’s ability to understand the content of your page:

• Prevent Google from crawling or finding pages that you want to hide using noindex. Do not “noindex” a page that is blocked by robots.txt; if you do so, the noindex won’t be seen and the page might still be indexed.
• Use structured data.

For those getting more advanced, you’ll need to understand the science of “crawl budgets”.  Gary Illyes writes a wonderful description on this crawl budget blog post.

Essentially, he covers the factors that affect your crawl budget – Things like:

• Faceted navigation and session identifiers
• On-site duplicate content
• Soft error pages
• Hacked pages
• Infinite spaces and proxies
• Low quality and spam content

How to Get URLs Indexed

As we’ve mentioned, search engine bots crawl and index your content. However, this can take a while for some content, especially on low traffic sites. You can speed up the process by submitting your sitemap to the search engine for indexing.

A sitemap is a document that outlines or explains your site structure to both users and the search engine, to make it easier to navigate through it. Adding your sitemap to Google, the world’s biggest search engine, is easy enough.

1. Upload your sitemap to a location on your website.
2. Go to your Google Search Console dashboard.
3. On the left sidebar, click on Sitemaps.
4. Under “Add a new sitemap”, enter the address/URL of your sitemap.

You can also check on the Google Search Console which pages have been indexed, which pages were excluded from indexing, and if there are pages with indexing errors that need to be addressed.

There are 3 main formats for sitemaps, although some search engines may accept other formats as well (Google Webmaster accepts 9 different formats). The most common formats are:

• XML: XML is the recommended format for most sitemaps. It is widely accepted across different search engines, and it is easy to generate using an XML sitemap tool. It is one of the easiest formats for search engines to crawl.
• RSS: RSS feeds may be created automatically through a blog site. It’s a subtype of the XML sitemap.
• Txt: The simplest and easiest sitemap format to create is the Txt sitemap. However, you sacrifice functionality for convenience. You can’t add metadata to a Txt sitemap.

Publishing Posts: Indexation and Traffic Perks

How often you publish posts is also quite important. More content = more value = more potential clicks. Not only does it often equate to more clicks, but it also plays a part in getting crawled more often (read, provided that the content isn’t poorly written or formatted (orphaned content and no internal linking would be an example of poor formatting). I recommend reading Shout Me Loud’s tips for increasing crawl for additional info on specifically increasing the crawl rate of your site.

A HubSpot study showed that sites who published at least four times a week had 450% more leads than those who published 4 or less posts a month. But publishing every day may not be realistic, especially if you’re a small to medium business owner with limited time and budget for SEO.

While you should aim to publish as much as possible, stick to a publishing schedule you know you can commit to, even if it’s just once a week. Try to publish at the same time and day of the week so that your readers know when to check back for new content.

Once you hit publish, though, that isn’t always the end of it. You can (and should) update old posts so that they stay relevant and useful to your customers.

For example, in a few years, this guide to advanced SEO will likely be outdated. To keep it fresh and accurate, we’ll need to update it to fit new SEO standards. Instead of writing the article from scratch, we can save time and effort by updating the numbers, removing inaccurate information, and adding new info.

Every once in a while, look at your lineup of posts and check to see if any could use a rewrite. We recommend that you revamp articles that:

• Have low traffic or CTR, even with a lot of high-volume keywords
• Evergreen articles with outdated information
• Comprehensive educational posts that aren’t getting proper backlinks

Section 4: Speed and Security

In 2018, page load times officially became a ranking factor. It’s about time, too; studies have shown that more than half of mobile users abandon a site if the loading time exceeds 3 seconds.

As internet visitors become used to a constant influx of information, their attention span and patience decreases. Optimize your site for mobiles and speed to keep both search engines and your visitors happy.

Because Google’s goal is to give users the best experience possible, it makes sense that faster sites will be rewarded with higher rankings. Just like content, though, speed isn’t the end-all, be-all. You also have to consider if your site is at its most optimized, a.k.a. if it’s the fastest it can be, or if there are things slowing it down.

Have you ever quit loading a website halfway through because it took too long? In a world where information is so readily available, sometimes a few seconds can spell the difference between you and your competitor snagging that sale.

Studies have shown that bounce rate significantly increases after a mere 3-second wait. Improving your website speed will keep more visitors on your site for longer, improving not just your SERP ranking but also your conversion rate.

You can use a free tool like GTMetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights to find out what your page loading time is, and what your opportunities are to lower that number.

Since speed is so important to auditing your website, Raven includes detailed insights into our audit tool. You can also use the Website Auditor to identify page issues.

https://auditor.raventools.com/#/s/11ul5vav7 to see what a detailed report looks like in the Raven Website Audit Tool.

Some of the most common solutions to a slow website are:

• Compressing visual content like images and video. Large files take longer to load, slowing down your site. Compression minimizes the file size without sacrificing image quality.
• Using a faster web host. Your web host can set limits on your bandwidth. Private servers from premium hosts are more expensive than regular hosts, but they are often much faster.
• Hosting your files on an external network instead of embedding files. This allows you to display images and video without bogging down your web speed.
• Using accelerated mobile pages that reduce mobile page loading time to a fraction of a second.
• Switching to a cleaner, less bloated template with minimal code.

On top of speed, there’s also the issue of security. While Google hasn’t explicitly said that website security is a major factor, it does provide a better experience for your site visitors.

When a website has an SSL certificate, customers feel more at ease. Users will think twice about clicking on an unsecured site because their private information may be at risk.

SSL Encryption

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption offers a higher level of security and safety for users. When a site has SSL encryption, the data that passes through it cannot be tracked or stolen by malicious third parties. It also protects information from being corrupted as it is being transferred.

You can spot an SSL-encrypted website by looking at the URL bar. If there is a padlock next to the URL, and the URL starts with HTTPS instead of HTTP, then it has SSL encryption.

While we can’t say that SSL encryption is a major ranking factor, we know for certain the SSL is a ranking factor. As of the Oct. 2017, half the web is secured. I haven’t found solid statistics on updates to this number, but its safe to say with Google’s strong arm policy, everyone will move to SSL if they care about web traffic.

It’s quite easy to get SSL certification. You just have to get an SSL certificate from a certificate authority (there are both paid and free certificates). Once your site’s been verified, you can install your SSL certificate.

Section 5: Mobile SEO, Featured Snippets, Structured Data, and Voice Search

(hint: all of these things are intertwined)

The new age of search will be dominated by mobile. The advent of mobile first indexing is just the beginning. Featured snippets and voice searches are tailor-made for mobile. The UI of the SERP in mobile makes it seem like featured snippets ARE the SERP.

Voice Searches literally only read out the information from those little boxes, so all of a sudden, you should really (like REALLY) be focusing on mobile optimizations.

Rank Zero

You already know that making it to the first page is important, and getting that top spot is even better. But in recent updates to the Google algorithm, there’s another rank to aim for—the featured snippet.

Utilize advanced SEO techniques to gain ‘Rank Zero’ for target SEO keywords.

Featured snippets are small bits of information lifted directly from a search result that answer the user’s query. They can be in paragraph, list, or table form. I dig into this in detail in my Rich Snippet Visual SERP Guide.

These snippets take up the very top part of the search engine results page, appearing before the #1 result. This is why it’s called rank “zero”.  On a mobile device, the features snippet has MASSIVE importance as it occupies a

So far, only about 12.9% of searches even have a featured snippet, but it definitely “steals” a lot of clicks and views from the #1 spot.

Getting to the #1 organic search result is tough enough, but earning the coveted “rank zero” is even harder. Featured snippets are hard to achieve but give great exposure to those who manage it.

To increase your chances of landing a featured snippet, there are a few ways you can optimize your content.

First off, featured snippets always come from the top results. You don’t have to rank number one or even number three, but you do need to be on the first page to get a shot at it.

Second, create short and digestible “snippets” of information for relevant ranking keywords. Most rank zero content answers a question in a short and succinct way, like “what is SEO”

Rank zero snippets are usually in the 40-60 word range. Format your content so that it can be divided into these chunks. Most featured snippets are in paragraph form, but bulleted lists and tables can also be featured.

Voice Search Optimization

Alexa. Cortana. Siri. What do they have in common?

More SEO opportunities.

This section summarizes our previous post on optimizing for Voice Search, so if you’re wanting more detail, I suggest you check it out when you’re done here.

Voice command technology has made huge leaps in recent years,resulting in 47 million Americans (and millions more people around the world) having some sort of smart speaker/device in their homes.

Through these devices, they can automate parts of their daily routine, do “screenless” online shopping, and search for information without ever having to look at their phones or computers.

Currently, voice searches make up 20% of all Android Google searches. That number is only going to grow, so there’s no better time than now to optimize your content for voice searching.

Here are some of the most common characteristics of a voice search result:

• Voice searches are mostly taken from the top 3 results of the page.
• Voice searches are often in the form of a question, such as “what’s the difference between camembert and brie” or “what time does Taco Bell close?”
• Search results that contain both the question and the answer in the content are more preferred for voice search.

To write voice search-optimized content, include the actual question somewhere on the page, followed by a short answer. An FAQ section to your posts will make this easier for you, the reader, and the smart software.

Mobile SEO

We can’t stress enough how important it is to have a mobile-friendly website in 2021.

The big push for mobile-first indexing started in March 2018. Google announced it would be prioritizing sites that have a mobile version or a responsive site that worked well on mobile devices.

If you think about the fact that more than half of all Google searches are done on mobile, that shift makes much more sense. Google will, of course, rank mobile-friendly sites higher since they can provide more value to users on the go.

When optimizing your site for mobile, you first have to analyze your current site. Google has a free tool that tests how mobile-ready your content is and what you’ll need to improve.

Some sites may have a mobile version of the site, but SEO experts agree that a responsive site is better. Responsive sites use themes that adapt to the device it’s being viewed on. So a responsive site will look just as good on mobile as it does on a PC—no extra coding necessary.

Mobile optimization also involves creating mobile-friendly content that is viewable and easy to read on a small screen. This means fast loading times, large text, and proper formatting.

Lastly, we need to cover structured data so you’ll know how to properly format your data to get snippets and to appear in voice searches with a greater frequency.

Schema Markup

Schema markup refers to code that helps search engines understand not just the text itself but the meaning of the information, and what kind of information it is. Instead of Google seeing “3PM, 13 March 2020, Carnegie Hall” as text, it will see it as a time, date, and location respectively.

Marking up your information helps Google give users information that more accurately aligns with their search intent. There are hundreds of markup categories, like price, TV show, name, and so much more.

It is extra work, especially if you have existing content that you need to mark up, but is it worth the effort? All signs point to yes.

Posts with schema markup average a whopping 4 positions higher in the results page compared to plain text/non-schema results.

In a battle for first page and rank #1, those 4 places could be a major gamechanger. Also, including schema markup increases your chances of landing a featured snippet in rank zero, further boosting your rank.

Raven has a 10 best Schema Markups post that may benefit some of you.

Section 6: Content Strategy and Keyword Strategy

It’s been said many times and many ways, but content truly is king. Generally, the better and more useful your content is, the more Google is likely to rank you higher. However, it’s not just about good content, it’s also about optimized content—the right keywords in the right way.

Keep in mind, content isn’t just important for SEO, its paramount if you hope to convert. People like Kyle Roof prove that Google can’t read content, but they can understand keywords.

So when I say “content in king”, I’m saying that content is king for conversions and its important if you hope to build a web that looks natural, while containing x amount of keyword 1, and x amount of ___ term.

Word Count

One of the more contested aspects of web content creation is the length. Is it better to have short, concise articles or long ones? There are staunch advocates on either side, but the answer is not as straightforward as you might think.

Looking at content that does rank, most top search results tend to be on the longer side. This, of course, varies per industry, topic, format, etc., but the general average word count of over a million #1 results is 1890 words.

Now, that doesn’t mean that 1890 should be your target for every post. There isn’t a magic number that will automatically boost your rankings.

Longer isn’t always better. A 500-word blog isn’t inherently less valuable than a 2000-word article. It really depends on the quality. There are well-written short blogs that are leagues better (and rank higher) than their much-longer counterparts.

The reason longer content tends to rank higher is because longer content tends to be more in-depth. The writer has more room to insert relevant keywords, thoroughly discuss important concepts, and provide more value to the reader.

No matter how long your content is, make sure to demonstrate your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Quality first over quantity.

Content Formatting

Use headers (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.) for your on-page content. Not only will this help bots understand your content better, but it breaks up walls of texts into smaller blocks for your readers. Stick to short sentences and paragraphs that users can quickly scan through.

Formatting can help draw attention to and emphasize certain phrases. Use it sparingly on your article’s most important points.

Like I’ve mentioned before, the tool I personally use for checking how to format, is Surfer SEO. I like to review what other people are doing with good on page practices for my particular target keyword, and then I try to apply what they’ve done to my own content.

SEO is a lot of reverse engineering the SERP in 2019.

Keyword Strategies

Keywords, keywords, keywords. Many ‘advanced’ SEO guides will repeat this ad infinitum. But the real question is, what keywords do you use?

The first level of keyword research is listing down the most important search phrases that you want to rank for. This includes your business name, the name of your products/services, your location, etc. It also includes words related to your niche/topic.

Once you have an initial list of keywords, you can use an online tool to find other keywords that you may have missed. These tools make suggestions for related keywords while also giving you insight into the monthly search volume of those keywords. Gotch SEO has a great 19-minute video covering the topic, if you’re looking for a video review. This is going to help you create a forecast or prediction of your potential SEO outcomes.

My personal google sheet ends up looking like this:

Here are other tips for SEO keywords:

• Avoid broad, generic ‘short-tail’ keywords like “wine” or “SEO. It can be super difficult to rank for those words due to their competition, plus it doesn’t target specific search intent.
• Use long-tail keywords that are specific to your particular business. Instead of “burgers”, try “best Angus beef burgers Brooklyn”, for example.
• Use an LSI (latent semantic indexing) keyword tool to find keywords that are similar to or related to your main keyword phrase. Thanks to Google’s increasingly-sophisticated algorithm, you can rank for keywords even without using an exact match phrase.
• Search for competitor keywords. This will help you identify new queries you could be targeting, improve your SEO strategy, and gain an advantage over your competition.

Advanced SEO Content Guide

Really good content isn’t easy to accomplish. It requires time, effort, and some expertise. Focus on creating high-quality content that your customers will actually like, and the rankings will follow.

Writing Techniques

Hook your readers. The longer they stay on your blog, the better. Google does notice how much time visitors spend on your site, so how do you encourage people to keep reading?

Write high-quality, interesting articles that provide solutions to your customers’ biggest challenges. Write about things that actually interest your target market. If you’re a car-related business, your customer base wouldn’t be turning to you for advice on cooking a steak. Cater to their needs and address their pain points.

Get creative with your work. Captivate your audience by using transition words, phrases, or sentences that pull them into the next line.

Use the attention-grabbing “bucket brigade” technique to generate interest in the next sentence:

• Here’s something you might not know:

• The truth? It’s _____________

• Listen:

ALWAYS use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Even if you have a fun or quirky business, your content needs to be readable and professional. But don’t be scared to inject some personality into it! Be witty, be funny, or be playful—if it fits within your brand image.

Make sure the writing is smooth and flows well. Use short sentences and paragraphs to make it much easier to read. If you have a particularly long or complex post, try to divide it into shorter easy-to-understand chapters.

Content Ideas

There is no limit to the kind of content you can make. Listicles, roundups, guides, checklists, videos, and infographics all make great for great posts.

No matter what industry you’re in, you could make evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that is relevant to your customers all the time and isn’t dependent on trends or current events. TImeless resources could include comprehensive guides, FAQs, definitions of concepts, and others.

Incorporating Keywords

How you use keywords can really make a difference.

The most important thing is to use them organically throughout the content. Keywords should never break the flow of your content. It should feel natural.

All too often I hear other writers expressing frustration about integrating SEO keywords into their content naturally.

Here are 4 sure-fire techniques to implement difficult keywords:

1. Using Commas

Let’s say your keyword is ‘Australia Ultimate Frisbee’ — integrating the keyword naturally into your text without feeling ‘out of place’ can be tough… by using a comma IN the keyword, you can integrate your keyword creatively.

Keyword: Australia Ultimate Frisbee

1. As the summer kicks on in Australia, Ultimate Frisbee is becoming a popular pastime for beach goers this year.

2. Using Stop Words

Search engines have become significantly more advanced in recent years and are capable of filtering out words such as ‘for’, ‘of’, ‘in’ or ‘but’. Keywords that help structure your content grammatically without having an effect on the actual intent behind the keyword.

Keyword: Dentist Perth

Simply integrating your keyword into your content as ‘Dentist Perth’ would come across as poor English. Using the stop word ‘in’ helps make the keyword grammatically correct while still keeping the original intent behind the search.

However… there are exceptions to this. If the stop word changes the INTENT behind the search, Google will take this into consideration when crawling your content.

The search phrase [Notebook] would return results for laptops.

Whereas the search phrase [The Notebook] would return results with the dashing Ryan Gos.

3. Using FAQs

Question keywords such as ‘How to do x’ can be tough to implement throughout your content naturally… without coming off as jarring or repetitive. By utilising FAQs, you can include your keyword and keyword variations easily through the headings and body text.

4. Using Conversational Writing To Your Advantage

Writing conversationally can be an effective method for implementing long tail keywords naturally… ESPECIALLY question long-tails.

Keyword: How Hummus Is Made

1. So if you’ve been wondering how hummus is made then this is the article for you.

Integrating keywords into your content is a constant balancing act to optimize your content for both your readers AND the search engines. Both Google and your reader can tell if you’re just trying to stuff in your keywords as many times as possible. Keyword stuffing used to be a popular practice, but Google’s gotten much better at picking up on it.

Headline Writing

Engaging headlines encourage readers to click on and read your article, so it’s important to make it creative and stand out.

(Tell me right now you don’t want to read this article)

Use your main keyword in the headline, but use it sparingly. Don’t overload the headline with keywords. Keep your headline to 65 characters or less for a short yet catchy title.

Try out different styles or voices for the headline. Come up with 2-3 different options with slightly different approaches.

Learn from these headline writing hacks:

• Use numbers in your headline. “7 Things To Consider When Buying A House” is interesting and sets reader expectations. Studies have also shown that articles with odd numbers get more clicks than those with even numbers.
• Take a cue from clickbait headlines like “You’ll Never Guess This Secret To Perfect Skin!”. Mystery, intrigue, and surprise are all elements of a great headline.
• Let people know that it is timely and updated content. “Fashion Trends For Fall 2021” is a better headline than the more generic “Fall Fashion Trends”.

Section 7: Backlinks and Link Building

Backlinks serve many purposes. First, promotion on another site could mean more traffic for you (and more paying customers). Second, it signals to the search engine that your content is valued by other members of the online community. Third, it helps the algorithm crawl new pages.

Let’s focus on the second purpose. When people link to your content, it acts as a vote of confidence. It lets people (and Google) know that they trust your content and want to share it with others.

Quantity matters, but so does quality. One backlink from a popular or established site is much more valuable than possibly even dozens of backlinks from low-quality sites. It only makes logical sense that a backlink from the New York Times would matter more to the algorithm than your neighbor’s small blog.

If you’re trying to evaluate quality, Raven has two different tools to assist. One is based off of Moz and Majestic, and the other is a custom URL and domain grader, which allows you to pick from about 20 metrics for your eval.

The custom grader is under “quality” and looks like this: (I love it, especially for niche research for affiliate SEO).

Here’s a few examples of what it looks like –

Once you’ve created your metrics, you can select the importance of the metric and then use the drag and drop editor. Feel free to use Raven’s default score as well.

By the end, you’ll have a score somewhere between 1 and 100. And just like that, you’ve evaluated a domain or a URL based on what is most important.

SEO Linking Strategies

Backlinks are massively important, but because backlinking is about inbound links, i.e. links from other websites to yours, it’s not 100% under your control.

Backlinking is one of the more social aspects of SEO because it hinges on your engagement within a community of bloggers and influencers. This makes backlinking one of the more complicated SEO strategies.

However, there are many techniques you can use to build a strong network of quality backlinks.  Here are the best white hat methods to use for 2021 backlink acquisition. (I’ll dig into a white hat and black hat towards comparison towards the end).

Original Data

One of the best ways to get backlinks is, incidentally, also the most difficult. Creating absolutely unique content that can’t be found anywhere else—like doing your own research or conducting a survey—is an effective way of providing value that nobody else can.

New information is always valuable to an industry, and your findings will quickly get picked up by other people in your community. Blogs and articles will use your results in their own content, which means hundreds or even thousands of potential backlinks for just one post.

Guest Blogging

Guest posting is often considered the backbone of backlinking, and for good reason. Not everyone has the time or the funding to do original research, but most people do have the time to write a post for someone else’s blog.

The process of guest posting is actually quite simple. First, you land a guest blog spot on a site by reaching out to websites with a similar target market to yours.

Next, you create original, engaging, useful content for their blog. In your content (or your author’s bio section), you can link back to pages on your website, earning you a backlink.

There are many benefits to guest posting besides backlinking. You use another blogger’s platform to expand your own and gain access to their regular roster of readers. You also get to establish yourself as an authority in your field. Lastly, it’s a great way to network and builds relationships with other professionals within your community.

Personally, I like to use some free methods before I go into the paid route (paid by either paying someone to find opportunities or paying agencies to give me links via guest posts). I recommend reciprocal links (don’t go too heavy from one site). I also recommend facebook groups (this link goes to my personal choice) that offer people opportunities to build links together by just being nice to each other.

Features

Getting featured by another business or website can expand your reach while giving you the backlinks you want.

You can get a feature from a news site or community blog in many different ways. One way is to join a community podcast where you discuss topics related to your expertise. The podcast host will often link back to your site so that listeners can follow up and learn more.

Another way is join offline events. Participate in speaking engagements or host a conference; you’ll get a ton of backlinks from the news coverage, social media pages, and many others.

Like guest blogging, you can’t wait for opportunities to happen to you. You need to assertively seek out opportunities to get features.

The best way to do it is through PR. When you release a new product or have a major company announcement, write a press release. Send it to the relevant media outlets. Reach out to micro-influencers to try out your products/services. Be an active participant in your own promotion.

You can also pay for SEO press releases and it’ll generally cost you about $100 for 300+ press releases, which isn’t bad. If you’re still reading, I’ll add that you can also pump these links up with some T2 link building, but I won’t dig too deeply into that particular rabbit hole. That SEO Technique will be a post for another time.

Forum Posting

As accessible as blogs have become, some people prefer the interactivity and realness of a forum. Many people flock to forums to ask questions and get advice from actual people, often in real time.

There are general forums like Reddit or Quora where you can find every kind of community imaginable. There are also interest-specific forums like for bodybuilding, cooking, automotive, and more.

Forums are a great venue to meet your target customers, engage with them, and build trust with your brand. You can also answer their questions and gain insight into their biggest problems.

When posting on a forum, it’s important to not to be aggressive with the promotion. You are there to build relationships and provide solutions. Link back to your blog when it adds value.

Niche Edits

Niche editing is the process of adding a link to your site on existing content. Business love this technique because you can earn a quality backlink without having to write a guest post or do any extra legwork.

SEOs also love this SEO technique because Google (and other search engines) like aged content, a.k.a. content that has been around for a while. A backlink on a popular existing post is worth a lot more than a backlink on a new post! Done right, niche edits can get you much more valuable backlinks for significantly less effort than a guest post.

You can start getting niche edits by searching for sites with similar content to yours. If you work in the food and beverage industry, for example, this could involve going to recipe sites and food bloggers. Ask the site owners and bloggers if they could link to your content (and offer to link back to them as well!).

Many webmasters are actually quite happy to add links to other sites. They may even be more willing to do that than accept guest posts, since they don’t need to screen, edit, or upload anything new.

Mention Tracking

Mention tracking is sort of similar to niche edits, except much more specific to your business. Whenever someone mentions your business or product/service online, it contributes to your overall reputation. But you could be getting more out of that mention if they linked back to your site as well.

You can scan the internet for unlinked mentions of your brand. If you find a news feature or blog that mentions you, you can reach out to them, thank them for the mention, and request if they could add your link.

You can even automate this process for the future by setting up an alert system that notifies you whenever someone mentions you online.

Tiered Links

With quality backlinking, you try to get a good link from a reputable site. Tiered linking is sort of the opposite of that; instead, you get multiple links from small low-authority sites to signal boost a blog post on a bigger site. Basically, it looks like the image below.

Basically, you have your target post on a popular or big website (tier 1). You link to your tier 1 post from 4-5 “tier 2” posts on smaller websites. You then link to those tier 2 posts from even more niche tier 3 sites. And so on and so forth (although usually tier 2-3 is more than enough!).

The backlinking from the lower-tiered sites improve the domain authority of the higher-tiered sites. The tier 3 links improve the tier 2 sites, and the tier 2 sites improve the tier 1 site. At the end of it, you have a “supercharged” tier 1 post whose backlink to your site is worth much more.

Tiered link building is a bit tricky. While it’s not strictly an unethical practice per se, tiered linking can be done in a way that manipulates the algorithm and leaves you vulnerable to harsh penalties from the search engine.

The best way to do it is to follow webmasters guidelines and focus on creating value. The secret is in approaching niche blogs for quality tier 2 backlinks.

Don’t rely on low-value, spammy websites that were built for the purpose of tiered linking. Instead, post content that benefits everyone involved:

• You, because the backlinks can improve your SERP ranking
• Your readers, because they learned something new from your content
• The ssite masters because hosting good content boosts their credibility

Private Blog Networks (PBNs)

PBNs are similar to tiered linking in a sense. Both practices involve using tier 2 sites to build up a tier 1 post. However, PBNs take it up a notch by using high-authority domains to create super powerful tier 2 sites. Another difference is that instead of linking from third party sites, you link from sites you control.

We’ll go into detail later, but here’s an overview of the PBN process:

• Secure an expired domain with high domain authority
• Create content on that site
• Link back to your main post to award it a quality backlink
• Not get caught by Google

Yes, you read that last one right.

Using PBNs is an effective tactic in SEO. With backlinking as one of the most important factors in your SERP ranking, there are few things better than multiple quality backlinks from trusted sites.

However, this is considered an advanced black hat SEO technique, which means that there is a potential risk of getting penalized if Google finds out you’re using PBNs.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use PBNs. This just means you need to be smart about it.

It’s a lot of work (and will cost some money), but the results are clear: a faster and more effective way to get the ranking you want.

Here’s how to build PBNs (the manual way) that ACTUALLY WORK in 2021:

Step #1 – Search for expiring or expired domains with high authority.

How do you find these domains? You have a lot of options, such as getting a domain broker or participating in domain auctions. The biggest auction and broker sites include NameJet, GoDaddy, PureQualityDomains, and SnapNames. You can also scour DomCop, WhoIS Domain Lookup, and PBN HQ for a list of expired domains and metrics.

Don’t worry about getting domains that are related to your business. The most important thing right now is getting domains with good metrics. You can customize the website later to make it work for your purposes.

TIP: Don’t buy all the domains in one day, and make sure you use different emails and names for each of the sites. The goal is to make each domain seem distinct and unrelated to the rest.

Step #2 – Set up your sites.

It’s good to diversify your portfolio, so to speak. Use different web hosts to prevent Google from associating your domains with each other.

Use different themes and layouts. Not only will this help you reach wider and more varied audiences, it’s also a great way to convince the search engine that your PBNs are legitimate.

There are many different ways to set up your site. It could be a blog, a business site, or a city-based website to boost your local SEO.

TIP: The website needs to feel as real as possible, so include an “About Us” section and other pages. This may involve creating a variety of personas for each of PBNs as well as address/contact information. The personas don’t need to be experts in their fields, that makes it difficult to create content. Instead, introduce them as bloggers who just want to share their experiences and knowledge.

Step # 3 – Create content for your PBNs.

Be creative about how you can relate your acquired domains to your website.

If you run a home cleaning service, for example, you might not know how to link back to it from a domain like femalefashiontrends.com. But it’s not impossible, you just have to think outside the box. You could write about how to keep your clothes and closet space clean, then link back to your site.

Whether you choose to keep your domain’s old niche or try to re-work it into something relevant for your business, the most important thing is that you regularly create content and put in contextual links back to your site. You could do reviews, listicles, or regular articles. It’s up to you how you want to tackle it.

This step is usually the hardest. You have to regularly come up with quality content for your PBN sites. Plus, you have to use different “voices” and write on a wide range of topics.

However, you don’t need to write super long articles; 500-2000 words per post should be more than enough. And you only have to publish weekly or every two weeks.

TIP: Do not use an SEO content generator. Those may save you time, but they create low-quality content that Google will easily sniff out. The content needs to be convincing to both users and search engines.

Step #4 – Link back to your money website, or the website whose SERP ranking you want to improve.

Be careful not to overdo it on the links; otherwise, your PBN will look like an obvious link farm.

Stick to 1 or 2 links to your money site per article. And don’t just use any anchor text; you have to choose them carefully. Try to use keywords as anchor texts whenever possible, but don’t use the exact same anchor text more than once.

For example, if your money site is for a photography studio, and your keyword is “professional photography”, you could use the following variations as anchor text:

• Photographer for hire
• How to take professional photos
• Photography blog
• Best photography studio

As much as possible link to relevant pages or the homepage. However, you don’t want to link only to your site. Mix it up by linking to other authority sites.

TIP: With multiple PBNs, don’t link to every single one of your money sites from every single one of your PBNs. And not every SEO post should link back to your money site; throw some filler articles in there to make it more believable.

Running PBNs takes almost as much time and effort as running your actual site, but the backlink boost could be worth it. Just be careful to keep your PBNs separate from each other to avoid getting penalties.

Spammy Links

Not all links are good links. Your backlink is only as good as the quality of the domain that gave you that link. If it’s a bad website—full of spam, low quality, or otherwise irrelevant—there is a chance that the search engine could think that you’re part of that bad website’s network…and then get penalized for it.

To avoid this, you need to disavow spammy links or backlinks from sites that you don’t trust. You can use tools like Google Search Console or Raven Tools to find unwanted links and remove them from your site.

Section 8: Black Hat SEO Vs. White Hat SEO

Before we move on too far past backlinks and content on this big ole monstor guide on advanced SEO, we have to talk about ethical and unethical SEO practices.

In the world of advanced search engine optimization, it’s not really a question of “legality”; it’s about what’s effective.

With this in mind, most practices can be categorized into one of three groups.

First, there’s white hat SEO. White hat SEO refers to all the tactics and techniques that are search-engine approved. The strategies outlined here in this guide are all white hat SEO strategies; they follow the guidelines search engines have put in place to protect their users and provide them with high-quality content.

White hat SEO is characterized by practices that raise your profile organically. You have to earn your ranking by building better content, providing value to site visitors, and putting users first.

On the other hand, there are black hat SEO practices. These are more shady methods that search engines frown upon. Black hat techniques try to game or manipulate the system without providing value.

Below, we go into detail about the various black hat practices you need to avoid.

Link Buying

Backlink buying involves paying someone or offering goods/services in exchange for a backlink.

Link Farming

PBNs and link farming use the same tactics, except link farming doesn’t necessarily involve high-authority sites or expired domains. Link farmers build up tons of spammy, low-quality websites to build powerful tier 3, tier 2, and eventually tier 1 backlinks.

Cloaking/Redirecting

Cloaking is the act of making a page seem like it contains one thing when it really contains another. Sites lie to search engines about the contents of the page so they can rank for unrelated terms.

301 redirecting is another black hat technique similar to cloaking. The title and description on the search engine results page will show that it is about one topic, but when the user clicks on the link, they get redirected to a completely different—and unrelated—page.

Keyword Spamming

Stuffing your content full of keywords is not a great way to boost your SERP ranking. One, spammed keywords tend to sound unnatural or forced which increases the bounce rate of your page. Two, Google is actually quite good at catching (and penalizing) spammy sites. An example of this would be for me to repeat the words “Advanced SEO Techniques” over and over.

See what I did there? I just added another keyword to stuff the article while talking about keyword stuffing. Woah…meta.

Another ineffective black hat tactic is using invisible keywords. Keywords are added in the text so it is read by the search engine, but are otherwise hidden from the user by manipulating the color, size, or placement of the text.

Content Copying/Scraping

Long story short, content scraping is plagiarism. It is directly lifting parts or the whole of a text from another site. Content scraping is one of the reasons that Google has been cracking down on duplicate content.

Unlike some of the other advanced techniques (which are merely unethical), content scraping is actually illegal since you are using someone else’s intellectual property as your own.

Finally, there’s the third category: grey hat SEO. This category, as the name implies, falls somewhere in between white and black hat SEO. These are practices that are not strictly discouraged or penalized by search engines but are also not explicitly encouraged.

The issue with grey hat is that it toes the line of unethical SEO practices. It may not be penalized today, but it could very well be penalized in future updates to the algorithm.

Both black hat and grey hat SEO techniques are risky, and the consequences far outweigh the benefits. White hat SEO practices are sustainable, safe, and protect you in the long run.

Section 9: Internal Links, URLs, and Site Structure

Internal linking is one of the few aspects of link building that you actually have complete control over. While linking to your own content doesn’t have the same pull as a backlink from a reputable third-party website, it can still affect your overall ranking in other, more subtle ways.

By including links to other content hosted on your site, you are encouraging users to spend more time reading and scanning through your blog. This also helps Google crawl your website and index more of your pages.

Another benefit of internal linking is that your higher-value pages (the popular ones with lots of backlinks) can actually pull up the ranking of your lower-value pages just by linking to it. This is referred to as “link juicing”, where the domain authority of one page “trickles down” into other pages.

Another benefit of the Raven Tools Site Auditor is the ability to look at all of your anchor text.

Download to csv, and then filter and create your own visualization of internal anchor text links.

Silo and Site Structure

The site structure dictates both the search engine and the user’s navigational experience of your site. A good site structure makes it easier for your user to find the information they need. It also makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl and index your site.

Ideally, the structure—what your pages are and how they are related to each other— is planned out before the website is built to ensure that it is intuitive and easy. If you have an existing site, fixing the site structure should be a major component of your next redesign.

Siloing is one of the most effective ways of structuring a website, although it may not apply to all businesses. This involves grouping pages into categories and sub-categories. This works especially well for online shops that may host dozens or even thousands of different product pages.

You don’t have to do a silo-type structure for it to positively impact your ranking. As long as your pages are organized, easy to find, and don’t hinder the overall user experience, that’s what matters the most. I mentioned this above when I talked about centralized and decentralized structures.

URL Structure

Yes, even your web page’s URL matters for SEO.

The rule of thumb is that if a person can’t understand what the page might contain from the URL, then it’s a bad URL. If a human being can’t understand it, then a search engine won’t either.

Compare these two URLs:

sample.com/blog/2019/02/20/hskew9873-ssdmk.html

sample.com/blog/recipes/perfect-scrambled-eggs

The former URL tells you nothing about the content. The latter URL lets you know some very important information—what the page is about.  

Here are some more tips on crafting good URLs:

• URLs are case sensitive, so make sure you don’t accidentally create duplicate pages under the “same” URL.
• Use hyphens and not underscores to separate words in your URL.
• Keep your URL as short as possible. Avoid unnecessary words like “and” or “the”, or multiple repetitions of the same word.
• Come up with a logical structure for future posts. You can have the URL flow from a category to a subcategory; use your sitemap as a reference.

EMD (exact match domains) still show ranking benefits, but many disagree on this, and essentially the two sides exist because some conduct tests, and some take Google at face value.

URLs are especially important for E-commerce SEO. Breadcrumbing becomes something that can really affect you if you don’t do it properly with a larger site, so make sure you’re naming URLs correctly and structuring them so visitors can understand their page path.

Section 10: Technical SEO

For this section, I’ll expand next in upcoming articles as it deserves its own mega post, but for now, we’ll cover images, video, duplicate content, robots.txt, redirects, nofollow tags, and canonical tags.

Images & Video

Visual content can catch the eye, make your article seem much more alluring, provide a visual aid to help customers understand complex information better, and give your readers a break from long chunks of text.

People are visual creatures, so make sure to use images, infographics, videos, and other kinds of visual content.

Infographics, in particular, can be an amazing tool to boost your search engine results page ranking.

Because they break down information into a digestible format, they are incredibly shareable. Infographics can also help you tell a story in a more creative way or help your readers visualize your point through data and charts.

On the other hand, video is an increasingly popular format. Compared to infographics, videos are much harder to produce. But because of that, it’s also more difficult to replicate and you won’t have much competition. They also increase dwell time on your site and reduce bounce rate.

Videos are also highly shareable, and many people turn to videos when they search. In fact, after Google, YouTube has the highest market share of searches out of all the other search engines.

Google acquired YouTube more than a decade ago, and has since been incorporating YouTube videos into the search engine results page. Some searches also yield video snippets as the rank zero result. Some advanced SEO testers claim that videos from youtube have ranking benefits, but I’m not entirely sure where I fall on that claim, so for now, I’ll just say that adding a video for various type of web pages will increase user dwell time on your page and does wonders for local SEO.

The kind of video content you can make largely depends on the business you’re in, but the following formats are hits in every industry:

• How to’s/instruction videos
• Product videos that promote the brand
• Live broadcasts for Q&As, interviews, seminars, etc.

Upload your videos to the major video hosting platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Video. Because search engines can’t crawl the video itself, make sure to give them more context in the description. It wouldn’t hurt to add one or two of your focus keywords as well.

Image Optimization

Google’s algorithm may be sophisticated, but it still cannot crawl visual content as well as it does text content. So you have to give Google a helping hand by including alt text. This tells the search engine what is in the visual content and how it works with the other content on the page.

Image optimization also involves resizing and compressing your image/video files so that they load faster, especially on mobile devices. Small file size doesn’t mean you can skimp out on quality, however; use the highest quality images/videos and format possible, like JPEG for images and MP4 for videos.

Personally, I trust my good ole panda sidekick for this, and I’ll resize the image through the native editor on my mac.

This image was 300kb, but with Tiny PNG, 70kb. I would hope most readers would know about this, but just in case, I figured it would be good to include.

Duplicate Content

On-site duplicate content will cause your rankings to dip. Search engines tend to penalize exact-match content to prevent sites from copy-pasting entire pages to artificially boost their rankings.

That doesn’t mean that the crackdown on duplicate content is only for malicious sites. Many sites have had their content bumped off the first page or even de-indexed because of duplicate content on their own sites.

How do you solve a problem like this? You can either delete the duplicate content or consolidate them into a single page. If you must keep all of the pages, you can use the canonical tag which we will discuss in the technical strategy section.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is an important tool in any webmaster’s toolbox. It tells the search engine bots how to crawl their content, which content they can’t access, or how long they have to wait before crawling the pages.

There are many reasons you wouldn’t want Google crawling certain pages of your site. This could include duplicate content that you don’t want to be penalized for, keeping some parts of your site private, and preventing a server overload when bots crawl multiple pages simultaneously.

The general format of a robots.txt file looks like this:

User-agent: [name of the bot]

Disallow: [URLs that the bot shouldn’t crawl]

It could also include one or more of the following:

Crawl-delay: [amount of time in milliseconds that the bot should wait before crawling]

Sitemap: [location of XML sitemap]

The robots.txt file is case sensitive and needs to be located in the top-level directory. It’s important to note that even if you have a robots.txt file, bots may ignore the instructions (especially in cases of malicious bots). Robots.txt is also a public file that anyone can easily access by adding \robots.txt to your root domain, so avoid using robots.txt to hide private information.

Keep in mind that the default setting for Robots.txt is for Google to not crawl your website, so make sure you are on top of this for new sites, and even for established sites, I’ve seen people who don’t realize what’s going on. Here is an example of a site with robots.txt disallowing one kind of bot while allowing another.

Just add /robots.txt to a url to see the file.

Nofollow Tag

Remember when we talked about outbound linking? If you link to a third-party website, you are giving them “link juice”. You are signalling to Google your vote of confidence in that particular site.

What if you don’t want to give them that backlink? What if you don’t trust the site, and don’t want to risk being seen by search engines as part of that network?

You use the ‘nofollow’ tag.

The nofollow tag tells the search engine that while you may be linking to a particular site, it doesn’t mean you are vouching for it. This prevents bots from following the link and crawling the site.

A nofollow HTML tag looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>

You’ll see sites like Wikipedia use this for just about every outbound link they have on their site.

Keep in mind that nofollows still have an influence on page rank. I tend to no follow competitor links for keywords if I happen to need to link to something they’ve done. I also tend to no follow non-secure sites.

Canonical Tag

As we mentioned in the duplicate content section, the canonical tag can be used when you have duplicate pages that you can’t consolidate or delete.

This tag lets search engine bots know that a specific page is a copy of another page. It also tells the search engine to not crawl the duplicate page, and redirect domain authority to the main page.

Canonical tags are most common for pages with multiple URLs, such as:

• Homepage.com
• homepage.com/home
• homepage.com/index.php
• www.homepage.com
• And so on and so forth

When using the canonical tag, be aware that search engines may choose to ignore it if the content is too different. It is best used on duplicate content or near-duplicate content where only a small element is different (location, price, etc.).

Also, make sure you’re consistent with your canonical tag. Do not put on Page 1 that Page 2 is the main page, then put on Page 2 that Page 1 is the main page. Likewise, do not canonicalize Page 1 to Page 2, only to redirect Page 2 back to page 1.

You would put the following HTML tag in the code of the duplicate page, where the link is the URL of the main page:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://thisisthemainpage.com”/>

301 Redirects

Even though the two are often conflated, a 301 redirect functions very differently from a canonical tag.

Whereas the canonical tag allows users to view duplicates of a page under different URLs, the 301 redirect tag completely bypasses the first URL and automatically brings the user to a second URL. 301 redirects also pass on all link juice/domain authority to the new URL.

There are a few reasons to use 301 redirects. One is to avoid duplicate content, similar to the canonical tag. Another is to fix “broken links” —when you change the URL of a page, but it’s more convenient to let users still access it from the old URL.

Note that using a lot of 301 redirects can significantly slow down your web speed. Keep it to a minimum or only when necessary.

Also, only use 301 redirects on related/similar pages. A user clicking on a search result for “top 10 romantic comedies” would not want to be redirected to content about construction equipment.

Last but not least, we’ll touch upon SEO for local businesses. This won’t include any groundbreaking advanced seo technique but it will cover the basics. Local SEO is one of those niches where I find immense value in paying consultants for their courses. The lessons are incredibly actionable, and you can go out and make a killing pretty quickly.

Section 11: Local SEO

Making SEO even more complicated is that there’s a relatively clear marker between general/global SEO and local SEO.

If you’re a small business based in a particular community, or if you are a service-oriented company with a specific service area, your business probably thrives on local customers.

That means you want to build your visibility not just to the general public, but to people who are actually near you. Improving local SEO will help you reach customers in your communities and convert their curiosity into real sales.

Plus, if you neglect your local SEO, you’re missing out on the 80% of consumers who use local searches to find businesses, or the 50% of consumers who perform a local search and visit a business within the same day.

Below are the 3 most important practices to improve your local SEO.

1. Google My Business

Google My Business is pretty much a non-negotiable if you want to boost your local SERP rankings. GMB pulls a variety of information together into some of the most valuable search spots.

Not only will Google be more likely to recommend you for relevant search terms with local intent, but you can also get prime real estate in the local map pack, a list of 3 or 4 suggestions that are given to the user.

In your GMB listing, you can list a variety of important business information, such as:

• Name
• Address
• Phone number
• Email
• Operating hours

You’ll also be able to post promotions, offers, or announcements via your profile, or answer real customer questions about your business.

2. Business Listings

Besides Google My Business, there are many other directories that you need to have a presence on. There isn’t a definitive list of the essential business directories since it largely depends on your niche, but a quick search of “[your industry] business directory” should yield all the results you need to get started.

Add or claim your listing on as many relevant business directories as possible. Ensure that your information on those listings exactly match your information on your GMB profile. Fill out as much information as you can, and keep it updated regularly.

3. Reviews

Surprisingly, 84% of people trust online reviews just as much as they trust a personal recommendation. Encourage your customers to leave you reviews, and you could see interest in your business soar.

Having reviews makes you look more authentic. It lets people know what kind of experience they can expect and helps them make better decisions about your brand.

Reviews aren’t only helpful when they’re positive. In fact, how you respond to criticism can be better PR than all of the positive reviews in the world. It gives you a great opportunity to respond to negative reviews and demonstrate a willingness to listen to your customers’ needs—and turn critics into satisfied customers.

For insane insights into local SEO and a host of other advanced SEO techniques, I wrote up a mega guide to help others learn SEO from experts. I’ve linked to it in the article already, but I wanted to make sure you give it a read since it truly contains some of the best information on the web for advanced and intermediate SEO.

Conclusion

 There have been a lot of changes in SEO over the past year alone, and we’re sure that 2021 has even more in store. However, there are pillars of SEO that remain as strong and significant as ever, such as backlinking, website speed, and quality content.

Advanced SEO might feel complicated, but it really all boils down to how much value Google thinks you provide to your users. Be creative, come up with unique approaches to problems, implement industry best practices, and use the right techniques to improve your SERP ranking this year.

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The post Advanced SEO Techniques: A Mega Guide to Ranking in 2021 appeared first on The Raven Blog.

When it comes to PPC reporting, major online advertising platforms (e.g. Google Ads and Facebook Ads) do provide some native functionality, including recurring campaign reports and CSV exports. But these tools don’t allow you to combine multiple data sources — and they don’t help you craft a narrative that makes your PPC reporting powerful and interesting to clients.

To bring your PPC results to life and tell a deeper story, you need to add context, detail, and meaning to your PPC reports. For this, you’ll need the help of PPC reporting software. And this software should address two important areas of concern for your clients and stakeholders:

1. how their PPC campaigns are performing (i.e. ROI), and…
2. whether they’re outperforming competitors in their niche

In this blog post, we’ll explain how to enhance your PPC reporting with Raven Tools, and we’ll introduce our sibling software, iSpionage, which allows you to report on where you stand versus PPC competitors.

Reporting PPC Results to Clients & Internal Stakeholders

Raven Tools 

Raven has a lot to offer PPC marketers, as well as to SEOs. And for digital marketing professionals who work across both the paid and organic worlds, Raven is a proven tool for research, implementation, and reporting. Let’s look at how Raven can help you report on your PPC strategies.

WYSIWYG Reports:

Raven is a reporting powerhouse, and its WYSIWYG Reports feature allows you to pull in data from 30+ sources — including Google Ads (AdWords), Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and Bing Ads (Microsoft Advertising).

Our PPC reports are entirely customizable — you can prioritize any information that these data sources track in the back-end, meaning you’re able to create a narrative that resonates with your clients or internal stakeholders. For example, if your KPIs are based on ROAS, you can pull this in as the headline metric in your report. Or if your client is aiming to cut down on costs, you might choose to highlight CPC.

As well as generating marketing reports, you can use the Raven dashboard to track the progress of your PPC campaigns on a day-by-day basis. This can be done through our Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads integrations — as well as the direct link-ups between Raven and your Google Analytics tracking.

Google Ads Dashboard:

The Google Ads dashboard on Raven provides deep insight into how your Google Ads campaigns are performing. The initial summary highlights your main KPIs — important data such as:

• Impressions
• Average CPM
• Average CPC
• CTR
• ROAS
• Overall costs

And from there, you can dig down into device data, click types, ad schedules, keyword quality, and much more. Put simply, Raven’s Google Ads dashboard lists everything you need to know.

There are three major benefits of choosing Raven Tools for your Google Ads monitoring and reporting:

1. You can go into as much (or as little) detail as you need in order to tell your story
2. You can plug Google Ads into WYSIWYG reports or export to PDFs and shareable links
3. Your data is presented in an easy-to-consume format — for you and your clients

The Raven Google Ads dashboard doesn’t just give insight into your Search Network Ads but also shows data from the Display Network, Video Ads, and Google Shopping. Combined, this dashboard gives you a comprehensive overview of your (or your client’s) Google advertising activity and performance.

Note: Raven also offers a Bing Ads (Microsoft Advertising) plugin, meaning you can report similar details about your Bing PPC campaigns. This makes it easy to compare and contrast performance across advertising channels (in one dashboard) and to show clients which search network is generating results.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to get started with your PPC (and SEO) reporting. Integrate 30+ sources into automated white-label reports, and manage everything in one simple dashboard.

Facebook Ads Dashboard

With Raven’s Facebook Ads overview, you get all the top-level information about reach, impressions, spend, clicks, and CTR — as well as trend graphs on all the important Facebook advertising metrics.

When you scroll through the other widgets in the Facebook Ads dashboard, you can see deeper data about custom conversions — and information about specific ads, ad sets, and campaigns. All of these data points can be integrated into your custom WYSIWYG reporting or easily exported as one-off reports.

Google Analytics Dashboard:

Google Analytics is a “primary source of truth” for many marketers who are tracking website performance, and it’s often where they’ll measure paid traffic and how it generates conversions. So, Google Analytics is a vital data source for your PPC reporting. Raven integrates with your Google Analytics account, allowing you to filter traffic sources and track goals, events, engagement, and more.

Again, you can pull any data point from Google Analytics into your WYSIWYG reporting dashboard, meaning you can support your Google Ads reports with metrics about goal completions, site engagement, or anything else related to paid traffic that adds extra context or justifies your PPC strategy.

Who Should Try Raven as Their PPC Reporting Software?

Raven is geared towards marketers who want a holistic view of their digital campaigns — but it is also suited to PPC experts who need to report on results in the context of other important metrics.

Many of our users are agencies or consultants using Raven to build custom white-label reports, but our PPC and SEO reporting functionality also suits in-house teams who need to justify strategies to management.

Raven is unique because it allows you to build your own compelling story — using various PPC data sources to craft a narrative. This means that PPC reporting can be an asset to the campaign (rather than an afterthought) because PPC reports will become a tool to increase stakeholder buy-in, justify new strategies, and nurture a trustworthy long-term relationship with your clients.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to get started with your PPC (and SEO) reporting. Integrate 30+ sources into automated white-label reports, and manage everything in one simple dashboard.

Competitor PPC Reporting & Benchmarking

Competitor information makes your PPC reporting richer because it allows clients to see their campaigns in the context of their industry. This can make reports more powerful, especially if your campaigns are clearly beating competitors — but also if you can show that you’re learning from competitor strategies.

iSpionage

iSpionage is a competitor research tool for PPC and SEO, with built-in email reports, PDF exports, and shareable URLs. You can spy on ad copy, landing pages, keywords, campaign structures, and A/B tests — and understand what makes PPC campaigns profitable for competitors in your niche. You can benchmark against others and set up automatic reporting to monitor your progress versus rivals in the SERPs.

Competitor Research: One-off Report on the Competitive Landscape

With the iSpionage Competitor Research feature, you can enter any keyword or URL and get an immediate snapshot of the competitive environment in the paid SERPs.

For example, the below screenshot shows the PPC competition (on a national level, i.e. not geo-specific) for the search term “software development”. This provides an entry-point for further research, where you can dig into specific competitors to see their ads and landing pages. These findings can be sent as part of a competitor research report, or used in preparation for the launch of new PPC campaigns.

These reports can be easily downloaded as PDFs within the dashboard itself, or added in as a Competitor Alert. The alerts can be kept for your internal team, or repackaged into a client report to justify your current PPC strategy or to provide support for a new set of ideas.

SEM Campaign Watch: Monitor Competitors and Report PPC Activity

With iSpionage’s SEM Campaign Watch tool, you can monitor specific PPC competitors, track the share of impressions in your target niche, and keep an eye on how the SERPs change over time. This is also where you can get hold of the data to create reports about local PPC competitors.

You can choose to export PDFs for any report dashboard, or you can generate a shareable link. And when you set up your project, you choose whether to receive weekly or monthly automated reports. These reports alert you to new advertisers bidding on keywords and summarize the top current competitors.

Should You Try iSpionage for Reporting on the Competitive Landscape?

Like Raven, iSpionage can be used by agencies, consultants, and in-house teams. iSpionage uncovers every secret about the Google Ads strategies of competitors in your niche (or your client’s niche).

In terms of reporting on your own campaigns, iSpionage is most useful for benchmarking your progress and showing how strategies have positively impacted your impression share and average ad positions.

Summary: What You Need from a PPC Reporting Tool

To capture the imagination of clients and stakeholders, PPC reporting software must facilitate more than just click costs and conversion metrics. Instead, it should help you tell a story using insights gleaned from multiple data points.

With Raven, you can craft custom reports that set your PPC results into a context that makes sense to the end reader. And with iSpionage, you can add competitor insights into the mix, and show how your campaigns are stacking up against key rivals in the marketplace.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to get started with your PPC (and SEO) reporting. Integrate 30+ sources into automated white-label reports, and manage everything in one simple dashboard.

The post PPC Reporting Software: How to Report on PPC Results & Benchmark Against Competitors appeared first on The Raven Blog.

When you’re conducting an SEO audit, there are a lot of metrics and factors to look at — redirects, broken links, meta issues, image tags, and much more. All of these things are important to fix to keep your website healthy and capable of ranking in the search engines. However, when you’re focusing on local SEO, some factors become more important than others.

To figure out which areas are the most vital to audit for improving local search rankings, we spoke with Elliott Davidson. He is a local SEO expert and founder of boutique UK-based digital marketing agency, Contrast. As Elliott says, “you can actually have such an impact if you get the local search engine optimization strategy right, and this all starts with the audit.”
In the article below, we highlight Elliott’s 4 main areas of focus when he’s doing a local SEO audit — from covering the technical basics, to optimizing Google My Business, auditing local backlinks, and boosting organic click-through rate with USP-focused meta title copy.

According to Elliott, when it comes to local SEO, even small improvements in these four areas can have an outsized impact on your local search rankings.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools, and access our Site Auditor, backlink analysis tools, and localized rank tracking functionality.

1. Cover Your Technical SEO and Basic Fixes First

First and foremost, Elliott says you can’t skip the basics. The technical SEO issues we already mentioned are critical, so you need to fix broken links, add image alt tags, remove duplicate content, and everything else that’s involved in maintaining a healthy website. And in Elliot’s experience, there are a few basics that should be tackled when you’re thinking locally:

• Check that all phone numbers and email addresses across your website are clickable HTML, visible, and user-friendly for mobile users
• Add your hours or opening times into your website’s footer and all directory profiles
• Check your website speed and ensure that it loads in 3 seconds or less
• Test your site for mobile responsiveness
• Use structured data to boost on-page local SEO

Note: If you need a quick way to identify these and other technical issues that might need to be addressed, simply type your URL into Raven’s Site Auditor tool. You’ll get an overall technical SEO grade (out of 100), and Raven will breakdown any issues that need to be looked at, along with a priority rating of critical, warning, or needs attention.

Let’s look in more depth into a few of these factors that can impact local SEO:

Local SEO Basics: Getting Your Mobile Speed Performance Right

Page speed and website load times are as important a factor for local SEO as they are for traditional SEO campaigns, with one caveat: localized searches (e.g. “near me”) are likely to be done on mobile devices. So mobile load speed is especially important for local SEO.

That said, Elliott doesn’t recommend agonizing over the speed of your web pages after a certain point. “As long as you’re at or below a 3-second load time — there’s diminishing returns after 3-seconds,” he says.

Note: To audit your local page speed, you can use a tool as simple as Google PageSpeed Insights.

If you’re having trouble getting your website to load in 3 seconds or less, Elliott offered two quick fixes that can help cut downtime to load:

• Use an image compression tool to compress images on your website into smaller files
• Add a caching plugin (Elliott recommends WP Rocket, if your website is hosted on WordPress) to help your site load faster

Local SEO Basics: Test for Mobile Responsiveness

As Elliott told us, “if you look at the traffic breakdown for a local company, you’ll find the mobile/desktop split is often close to 50 percent.” That’s in stark contrast to other types of companies, such as corporate B2B, which might look more like 80% desktop and 20% mobile.

Plus, with Google’s announcement of mobile-first indexing, the importance of a mobile-optimized website can’t be ignored. With this in mind, according to Elliot, “your website must be responsive — plain and simple.” Luckily, with a platform like WordPress or Squarespace, the themes are automatically mobile-optimized. To test for mobile responsiveness during your local SEO audit, use the Mobile-Friendly Test available for free in Google Search Console.

Local SEO Basics: Use Structured Data to Boost On-Page Optimization

Much of local on-page SEO optimization is about making it easier for Google and other search engines (i.e. Bing) to figure out where your business is, and which searchers you’re relevant to.

One of the best ways to help Google understand your local relevance is to use structured data on your website. Simply put, structured data is written in a pre-defined structure that search engines recognize. Think of it like putting your website data into an organized Excel spreadsheet.

Specifically, Elliott recommends including your business NAP information (Name, Address, Phone Number) in a structured data format — to make it easier for search engines to interpret your location information and pull NAP data into search results pages. You can see local SEO benefit by adding that info into your website’s footer, so it’s included on every web page.

You can use the Structured Data Markup Helper tool in Google Search Console to highlight your address, phone number, and brand name. If your website runs on WordPress, you can also do this with an SEO plugin like Yoast.

2. Optimize Your Google My Business Profile to Perfection

Once you’ve looked into the basics and the technical side of local SEO, Elliott recommends turning away from your actual site — and focusing on your Google My Business (GMB) profile.

To start, ensure your listing is claimed, complete, and that all the information 100% matches your website. If there are discrepancies (e.g. listing one phone number on your website and a different one on your GMB listing) that can harm your chances of ranking for local search terms.

Specifically, your audit should verify the following details are included and up-to-date:

• Business name
• Address
• Phone number
• Hours
• Reviews from customers (really important!)

Next, Elliott recommends looking deeper at your business category. As of 2020, there are nearly 4,000 different categories to choose from. Picking the right one can have a big impact on your local SEO because it affects which local search terms Google thinks apply to you, as well as which additional features (such as menus) are included with your GMB listing.

Elliott’s tip for selecting the best category for your business is to do a competitor analysis and see which categories your key local competitors have chosen.

Lastly, Elliott told us that local businesses should always target their Google My Business profile to certain service areas. While most businesses only target the actual zip code (or postcode) where their business is located, you still want to bring in customers from other nearby areas, right? Google My Business allows this on the back-end, where you can add additional zip codes to your location as an indication of your service area.

In fact, Elliott says one local client that he’s worked with saw a huge benefit to expanding their location radius: “All we did for that client was add additional postcodes and towns for a 15km radius to Google My Business, and we saw a 30% increase in views and impressions.”

Auditing Local Reviews & Building a Process for Getting More

Not all local businesses have access to a CRM system that automatically collects reviews from customers after a service has been delivered. This often leaves them lacking in reviews, which are vitally important for building credibility — but they’re also an indicator of quality for Google.

“As part of a local SEO audit, a business should get a handle on their number of current reviews — as well as their sentiment,” Elliott says. “Then, it’s time to build a process for getting more GMB reviews and scaling that up to distribute your reviews across different online platforms.”

According to Elliott, this process for getting reviews doesn’t need to be flashy — the most important thing is that there’s a concerted effort to ask customers, even if that’s manual. The added value, especially in the UK, is that some local review sites are run by government authorities. This means that there are authoritative backlinks on offer from trusted domains.

3. Check Out Backlink Profiles for Locally Relevant Links

The next step for your local SEO audit is to look into your own backlink profile and get a sense of which locally relevant backlinks are pointing to your site.

Note: You can get a quick view of your local backlinks with Raven’s Backlink Explorer tool.

To start, Elliott recommends checking out any local citations (e.g. directories). First and foremost, ensure that each of these listings matches your website and includes the most current NAP (name, address, and phone number) — and relevant business information.

As Elliott explained, local SEO is typically dealing with a smaller number of backlinks to each page in the SERPs — so adding 1 or 2 locally relevant backlinks can make a huge difference in your local search engine results. And one of the best ways to audit whether you have enough high-quality local backlinks is to look at the backlink profile for your top competitors.

Note: You can see your competitors’ entire backlink profile (including local backlinks, citations, and anchor text) using Raven’s Competitor Research Tools. Simply type your competitor’s website into Domain Research Central and then select the Backlinks tab on the left.

“Look at your local competitors’ backlink profiles to see which links they have that you don’t,” Elliott says. “This can highlight some very easy opportunities you can go after.”

In addition to link-building on websites your competitors are already on, Elliott suggests that your own local suppliers and partners can also offer low-hanging fruit for local link-building.

“There are some great opportunities to be leveraged with pre-existing relationships,” he says. “Since you already have a good relationship with these local businesses, securing a backlink is an easier ask through things like content collaborations, case studies, and shared sponsorships.”

4. Audit Meta and Optimize It for Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The last piece of Elliott’s recommended 4-part local SEO audit is one that might fly under the radar for local SEO — click-through rate (CTR). According to Elliott, CTR is just as important for local SEO as it is for your overall SEO health. “If you’re in position 3 and your CTR increases,” he explained, “you’ll start to move up in the rankings, because this is a huge indicator for Google.”

In his view, boosting CTR on your local search results comes down to finding and emphasizing a unique selling point (USP). And to ensure that your SERP listings communicate your value proposition in a compelling way, you can simply run a meta audit on the Raven Site Auditor tool.

Review your page title tags and meta descriptions which map to key local search keywords, and verify that they’re leading with (and doubling down on) what makes your business unique — why should searchers click on your result? Why should they choose you over a more established national or international competitor? As an example, Elliott noted that for many small local businesses, this USP may come down to offering more personalized customer service.

As part of this process, he also suggested looking at your competitors’ SERPs. The key here isn’t to emulate these competitors — it’s to ensure your meta copy sets you apart from them in the search results. This might be key to outperforming local competitors and bigger rivals.

Summary: What to Focus on for a Local SEO Audit

At the end of the day, small efforts can have a big impact when you’re working to improve local SEO. And the basics matter. As with any SEO audit, it’s vital that you catch the simple errors and fix the technical issues that give Google a reason to rank competitors above you.

For Elliott, after the basics are taken care of, a local SEO audit centers around creating a perfect Google My Business profile, analyzing the backlink profile of your site and its competitors, and auditing meta titles and descriptions to optimize for click-through rate.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools, and access our Site Auditor, backlink analysis tools, and localized rank tracking functionality.

The post Local SEO Audit: 4-Part Checklist to Help You Move the Needle on Local Search appeared first on The Raven Blog.

Google launched its Mobile-first Index in 2018/19 in response to the ratio of mobile searches swinging further past desktop every year. Now, the Google algorithm assesses the mobile experience of any website ahead of the desktop experience before indexing it in the SERPs.

While of course, this proves that building a mobile-optimized site is vital, just building it isn’t enough. The increasing number of mobile searches also means that mobile rankings are more important to track than ever before. Despite this, many articles about rank tracking gloss over mobile rankings.

In this article, we will dig into the subject of mobile rank tracking, and discuss:

1. How to prioritize mobile vs desktop rank tracking
2. How to track mobile rankings on Raven
3. How to create insightful mobile rankings reports

By the end, you’ll have a step-by-step process for understanding the importance of mobile rankings, monitoring them effectively, and crafting a compelling story with your mobile SEO reports.

1. How to Prioritize Mobile vs Desktop Rank Tracking

With Raven’s SERP Rank Tracking, you can monitor mobile and/or desktop rankings in any location (zip code, town, city, or state) you wish, and the system can automatically update keyword rankings reports daily, weekly, or monthly. When you have this many options for rank tracking capabilities, you’ll need to prioritize.

To do that, SEOs need to understand the ratio of mobile vs desktop users on their site. This is relevant for deciding which rankings to track because it also guides your on-page SEO strategy.

For example, page load speed is key to moving the needle on mobile SEO — because users are more sensitive to slow loading when waiting on their mobile devices than on desktop. So, if you get a lot of mobile traffic, you’ll want to minimize large files and images and double-down on your efforts to improve loading times.

The mobile vs desktop traffic ratio changes drastically between different industries, but you shouldn’t rely on this breakdown alone. This is commonly seen along B2B vs B2C lines, but it’s not necessarily universal — and Google’s own data shows the increasing influence of mobile marketing in the B2B space. So, rather than relying on “industry standards”, it’s vital to look at your own specific traffic sources to understand where your visitors originate.

And it’s not just traffic sources that you need to check in Google Analytics — you also need to check traffic sources against conversion rates. If your mobile conversion rates are significantly lower than desktop, ask yourself whether this is inherent to the product, or whether you can take action to improve conversions.

Note: If mobile conversion rates are significantly better than desktop, you may also ask yourself how you can grow the share of mobile traffic to your website.

In the screenshot above, we can see that the desktop conversion rate is 0.20% and the mobile conversion rate is pretty much the same — 0.19%. Mobile users make up about 35% of the total traffic.

Given that 35% is a significant chunk of traffic, and the mobile conversion rate is similar to the desktop conversion rate, there’s a strong argument for including mobile SEO and mobile rank tracking in reports.

However, rank tracking strategy also depends on which pages (i.e. services) get the most mobile traffic. The mobile search volume might change between different offers, for example, if a mechanic offers fleet maintenance and emergency towing services; same business, but a very different service and customer need state.

In this case, mobile searches for “emergency towing” will likely exceed the mobile searches for “fleet maintenance” — because users will be on the side of the road with a broken-down truck. With this in mind, your rank tracking strategy would need to adapt to the nuance of the business and its customers.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to access mobile and desktop rank tracking and customized white-label SEO reporting. You can also track rankings on Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Baidu.

2. How to Track Mobile Rankings on Raven

If you’ve decided that monitoring mobile rankings is a vital part of your SEO strategy, you’ll need software that will automatically track your campaign’s progress over time.

With Raven, tracking mobile rankings is quick and easy, and you can do it using the same dashboard as your desktop rank tracking. After adding a keyword and choosing the tracking frequency, simply enter your city or zip code and toggle the “Mobile” tab before saving.

Mobile rankings are best understood in the context of their geolocations — because mobile searchers are often on the move, and because mobile rankings can change drastically from one zip code to another. So, we would always recommend setting up your mobile rank tracking to monitor specific areas.

You can add multiple cities or zip codes at the same time, or come back later to add more:

Next, your SERP Rank Tracker dashboard will be populated with keywords so you can monitor where your site ranks for those keywords when a user searches on a mobile device. In the case of the example above, “roof fitter” will be tracked in New York, New Jersey, and in a specific Manhattan postal code.

And Raven’s SERP Rank Tracker dashboard will also pick up your map results linked to Google My Business — which is important to know for local rank tracking and local SEO reporting. These keyword positions will be indicated by a map pin icon, marked as an ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’ — with ‘A’ showing that you have the first map result for that keyword in the location that you’ve chosen to track.

It’s important to note that your URL might be ranking in position 5 organically, but at the same time you can have map position ‘A’. This also works the other way around — you might be in first place in the organic SERPs but have a map position ‘C’, or no map position at all in certain zip codes. When you’re reporting SEO results to clients, it’s important that you communicate these nuances to avoid confusion.

Summary

Raven’s SERP Rank Tracker allows you to track mobile and/or desktop rankings in any location. You can monitor your keywords over time, and follow the ups and downs of your ranking positions within the online dashboard. You can export this data directly to a PDF, or plug it into Raven’s WYSIWYG Reports to automatically generate a mobile rankings report as part of your broader digital marketing reporting.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to access mobile and desktop rank tracking and customized white-label SEO reporting. You can also track rankings on Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Baidu.

3. How to Create Insightful Mobile Rankings Reports

With Raven’s WYSIWYG Reports, you can craft customized white-label SEO reports for clients or management. You can access data from 30+ sources — Raven’s own SEO tools (i.e. SERP Rank Tracker), plus other third-party platforms like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, CallRail, and many more.

How to Add Mobile Rank Tracking to WYSIWYG Reports

Adding mobile rank tracking to your SEO reporting is quick and easy with Raven. Simply go to the “WYSIWYG Reports tab”, select an existing report (or create a new one), and select “Add More Metrics”. Next, choose “SERP Tracker” from the list of data sources to add rank positions into the report dashboard.

After adding SERP Tracker, the dashboard will look something like this:

In the above screenshot, you’ll see the default dashboard view after adding your SERP Rank Tracker to a WYSIWYG report. But you can change these headline metrics to a range of different data points — depending on the customized story that you want to tell with your mobile rank tracking. See below:

Raven’s SERP Rank Tracker will work in the background, updating keyword positions according to the regularity that you choose when you enter the keywords into the tool. These will then automatically feed into your Raven reports, which can be manually exported to PDFs or sent automatically to clients or stakeholders via PDF or a shareable link. This means your mobile ranking reports are always up-to-date.

How to Build Insightful Mobile Rankings Reports

While reporting on mobile ranking results is fun, it matters less without telling the story about why mobile rankings matter. In order to build insightful and meaningful SEO reports, you need to create a compelling narrative by connecting mobile rankings to commercial results.

The first part of creating your compelling narrative is to justify the initial focus on mobile rankings (and mobile SEO) — which we covered in the first section of this article. So, by digging into your Google Analytics data, you can show whether your website attracts visitors on mobile devices, whether those visitors engage with your content, and whether they’re likely to convert at all.

But in order to measure progress and report on SEO results, you need to assign a value to specific mobile keyword rankings. To do this, you need the following information:

• Estimated organic traffic for your keyword (based on ranking position)
• On-page conversion rate
• Lead-to-sale rate
• Revenue per sale

Then, to calculate the ROI for achieving any given mobile keyword ranking, use the formula:

Traffic value = [Traffic estimate for keyword] x [Conversion rate] x [Lead-to-sale rate] x [Revenue per sale]

By calculating the potential revenue generated by boosting mobile SEO, and by attributing estimated returns on the work that you’ve done to improve mobile rankings, you can tell a story that runs deeper than mobile rankings and traffic — and go further than simply reporting on mobile user conversions.

Use Raven for Mobile Rank Tracking and Reporting

As Google serves more dynamic and personalized results to its users, marketers need to get as many of the variables down as possible to understand their SEO performance. Raven’s SERP Rank Tracker helps you do this because you can monitor keyword ranking positions for users in any location, on any device.

Our SEO reporting functionality is designed to give you maximum flexibility on what you report, and how you report. By plugging in multiple data sources, you can tell a story that goes beyond mobile rankings, traffic, and even conversions. You can assign a commercial value to your mobile rankings, and build SEO reports that link organic mobile ranking improvements to revenue growth.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to access mobile and desktop rank tracking and customized white-label SEO reporting. You can also track rankings on Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Baidu.

The post Mobile Rank Tracking: How to Monitor & Report on Mobile Rankings appeared first on The Raven Blog.

How do you track SEO progress and measure SEO results? Much of the content written on this topic focuses on tracking the right metrics. It’s easy to find a list (often lengthy) of SEO metrics and KPIs you should be tracking — but metrics really only scratch the surface of tracking SEO progress.

Keyword rankings, for example, are a common metric for search engine optimization pros. Don’t get us wrong — rankings are an important metric, but only in the right context. To understand the true value of keyword rankings (and track your SEO progress), you need to connect those rankings to what happens after they visit a landing page and become a lead.

You need to connect rankings to revenue.

To explain how best to do that, we talked with SEO consultant, Jeremy Rivera, who works with us here at Raven. Jeremy outlined the 3-step process that he uses to measure SEO success and track progress:

1. Putting rankings into the context of organic search traffic value
2. Setting up the right conversion tracking in Google Analytics
3. Taking your tracking a step beyond leads and goal completions

Below, we share Jeremy’s tips for how to follow this 3-step process and tie your SEO results more meaningfully to the ultimate end-goal: revenue.

Note: Raven Tools can help you pull together Google Analytics metrics (like conversions) and keyword ranking data into a professional SEO report. Sign up and try Raven Tools free for 7 days.

Step 1: Understanding Rankings in the Context of How Valuable the Traffic Is in Terms of Revenue 

According to Jeremy, before you can start meaningfully tracking your SEO progress, you need to reframe the way you think about (and measure) keyword research and rankings.

The typical way to evaluate specific keywords is to look at search volume, maybe keyword difficulty, and go from there. But, as Jeremy put it, “search volume is only part of the puzzle because not everybody who searches for something is going to buy your product.”

“At the beginning of the funnel,” he added, “your objective is to show up for more searches by people who are willing to purchase. And it’s that last piece that people forget.”

A better way to think about keywords and rankings is to tie them back to commercial goals, like revenue. To do that, Jeremy uses a 5-point scale during foundational keyword research to gauge the level of buying intent for each keyword. After pulling a list of topical keywords (using Raven Tools’ SERP Tracker Keyword Suggestion tool), Jeremy assigns each keyword a point value.

• 1 point: Competitor keywords
• 2 points: Related keywords that aren’t a good fit for you
• 3 points: Keywords that are in the same neighborhood as your product or service—someone doing this search might eventually need your offering, but it’s not directly related.
• 4 points: These are closely related to your product, but not quite a 5/5.
• 5 points: These are your slamdunk keywords that signal high buying intent for your client’s specific offering. They’re high-quality, bottom-of-funnel, and close to conversion.

Here’s an example of keywords that might fall into each of those buckets if you’re looking at keywords for a client’s site auditing tool.

1. “Woorank API”
2. “Google mobile friendly test”
3. “How to check keyword ranking in Google Analytics”
4. “Site audit guide”
5. “Site auditor tools”

As Jeremy explained, “Not all of these keywords are quality— some are a 1 out of 5 when it comes to intent and search objective.” And that’s important information to know when it comes to measuring rankings and tracking your SEO performance (not to mention focusing your SEO campaigns).

“If you don’t get granular on grouping your target keywords, you’re going to be running around in circles every time the algorithm changes. Do the work ahead of time and group your keywords with an understanding of how close they are to conversion, for example an online fundraiser software site would want to group their keywords by things like auction, raffle, fundraisers, software terms.” he said.

Without an understanding of how valuable the keyword phrases you’re targeting are, you can’t effectively measure progress with your client’s rankings. “A successful website doesn’t always mean that all keywords are growing equally,” Jeremy noted. “Not all search traffic is created equal. Not all rankings are created equal.”

Step 2: Conversion Tracking

Once you have an understanding of how valuable keywords and rankings have the potential to be, Jeremy recommends spending time to properly set up your Google Analytics goal conversions.

As he explained (and experienced SEOs know), “It’s about connecting the keywords you’re targeting to the potential traffic you’re going to generate. But then you have to take that next step — and this is where the huge disconnect is — to set up Google Analytics to correctly track conversions.”

But according to Jeremy, too many companies and SEOs simply don’t track the right metrics in Google Analytics. Or, they spend time setting up custom goals for the wrong metrics. “The perfect implementation means that the conversion point where your customers give you their contact information is tracked in Google Analytics,” Jeremy explained.

For many companies, that means tracking more than online conversions. It also requires that you have the right processes in place to track conversions that happen offline, most often over the phone. 

To track those conversions and tie them back to your SEO progress, Jeremy recommends using a tool like CallRail. “You put your actual phone number into the code, and CallRail dynamically replaces it with a unique number based on the source of a call. So if someone comes from organic search, they’ll see one number. If they come from paid search, they’ll see a different number.”

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to measure your SEO results and track progress. Integrate 30+ data sources with your reporting dashboard, and deliver automated white-label reports to your clients.

“CallRail tracks those calls on their side, and communicates the call and its source to Google Analytics (once you connect them). Then you can set up CallRail conversions as a custom goal in Google Analytics, and you’ll be able to identify calls (and the corresponding conversions) that come in from each source.”

Note: Since you’ll need event tracking codes to accurately track that information on your website and pull it into Google Analytics, you can use the event tracking code code tool in Raven Tools to generate the codes you need.

After you’ve deployed the event tracking code on your website, you’re ready to set up your custom goals in Google Analytics.

Step 3: Going Beyond Your Conversion Tracking

Now that you’re set up to track SEO conversions, the last step is to take things a step further and connect each of those conversions (plus the search terms and rankings that spurred them) back to commercial metrics, to the bottom line. Specifically, Jeremy recommends looking at revenue.

Once an SEO lead fills out a form and becomes a sales lead, what happens to them? How are leads handled internally? Typically, as Jeremy explained, “that gets kicked off to somebody else. If it’s a form, someone has to make that call and connect with that person. If it’s a call that’s getting tracked, then the prospect has to talk to somebody.”

Understanding how leads are handled once they convert is a key part of measuring your results from SEO. The metric Jeremy boils it down to is the lead-to-sale conversion rate: “There’s a lead-to-sale rate involved that you have to multiply by the average revenue per purchase.”

Simply, you need to know, “out of the number of leads you get, how many of those leads do you need to sell a customer?” When you know your lead-to-close rate, you can figure out:

• On average, how much is my new customer worth?
• Do they usually buy 1 product, 2 products, 3 products?
• Is that $500 per product? $1,000 per product? $10 per product?

From there, you can turn that information into an estimate of the ROI of your investment and SEO efforts. To pull that all together, Jeremy noted that you need to take several numbers into account:

• Estimated organic traffic for your keyword (based on ranking position)
• On-page conversion rate
• Lead-to-sale rate
• Revenue per sale

Once you have all that information, the ROI formula looks like this:

Traffic value = [Traffic estimate for keyword] x [Conversion rate] x [Lead-to-sale rate] x [Revenue per sale]

According to Jeremy, when you get to this level, it opens up a lot of doors for in-house SEOs and SEO agencies alike. “Once you get that last piece of how much per conversion and you dial in your lead-to-sale rate, then you can come back and do the cool stuff with your forecasting.

“Then you can say. ‘If we were on the first page of Google for this term, we could make $1,000/month. We’re not on the first page, but if we were—based on our conversion rate and our lead-to-sale rate—we could make this much money.’”

Connecting keywords, search rankings, organic website traffic, and other SEO metrics back to revenue potential takes SEO tracking to a different level. As Jeremy put it, “Revenue is a much more compelling argument to make to a client than ‘Hey, we can get you ranking on the first page.’ You can prove the value and model out a reasonable path to the first page.”

Take Your SEO Progress Tracking and Measurement Beyond the Obvious Metrics

Metrics are a starting point for building complete and compelling SEO reports — but they aren’t the only thing that matters. To meaningfully track your search engine results and progress, you have to build a connection between SEO metrics and revenue into your overall SEO strategy, from start to finish.

By using our 3-step process outlined above, you’ll be able to build revenue into your SEO process from start to finish — and be better equipped to track progress and results in a meaningful way.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to measure your SEO results and track progress. Integrate 30+ data sources with your reporting dashboard, and deliver automated white-label reports to your clients.

The post How to Track SEO Progress and Measure Results Beyond Rankings appeared first on The Raven Blog.

Digital marketers prioritize tracking their keyword rankings on Google, and rightly so — because Google has secured over 87% of the search engine market. In second place, Bing has a comparatively tiny share of the pie ⁠— just 5.5% according to Statistica. However, according to Bing, their PC market share is 11%, and this amounts to 11.7 billion monthly searches on desktop. That’s a lot of searches.

And while Google is undoubtedly the dominant global player, there are other, more specific, factors to consider when thinking about rank tracking on alternative search engines like Bing:

1. Searcher location: Bing is more likely to be used in the USA than anywhere else in the world
2. Searcher demographics: Proportionally, Bing is used by an older age group than Google
3. Searcher technographics: Bing is the default for Windows devices, PCs, and Internet Explorer

While Google will remain the focus for SEOs, tracking your rankings on Bing may be worthwhile ⁠— especially when it’s easy to do and if your target audience matches the above characteristics.

In this article, you’ll learn about how the Raven Tools Bing rank tracker works, and how you can benefit from using Bing Webmaster Tools in your SEO research and reporting.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to access Google and Bing rank tracking in one intuitive dashboard. You can also track your keyword positions on Yahoo!, Yandex, and Baidu.

How to Check Bing Keyword Rankings with Raven Tools

Due to Google’s dominance, most rank tracking software doesn’t talk about their Bing rank tracking capabilities. But we’re keen to show how the Raven Tools Bing rank tracker is designed to give SEOs the actionable and reportable information they need. Let’s look at the main benefits.

Easy to Use:

As an all-in-one SEO platform, we want to combine everything a digital marketer needs for research, monitoring and reporting. So, our Bing rank tracker is quick to set up and is part of the same dashboard as your other search engine rank trackers ⁠— so you don’t need to put in extra effort to monitor Bing.

Simply enter your keywords, select the tracking frequency and location (more on these later), and choose which search engines you want to monitor. The rank tracker will get to work automatically, and you’ll be able to track your Google and Bing rankings side-by-side in the same table:

Location-Specific:

With the Raven Tools Rank Tracker for Bing, you can track your keyword rankings in different countries. This is useful for digital agencies with clients in different regions (or with clients who target different regions), and for international businesses with target markets in several countries around the world.

This feature might come into play if you’re selling different services in different places, or if the search terminology differs between locations. For example, you might want to track keyword rankings for “lift engineer” in the UK and “elevator engineer” in the USA ⁠— depending on your SEO strategy.

Note: Our Google rank tracking allows you to get even more specific and monitor SEO rankings for certain zip codes, towns, and cities. However, Bing rank tracking is nationwide data.

Real-Time Position Tracking:

With Raven Tools, you can choose how often the Bing rank tracker checks the SERPs for updates to your keyword positions. By default, our system can check each keyword on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Many of the other SEO tools on the market limit this type of rank checking flexibility to higher-tier plans.

Cost-Efficient:

If you want extra breathing room to monitor more keywords on Bing or Google, we have a really flexible overage pricing structure. The extra on-demand keyword tracking costs just $0.003/RPC (Rank Position Check).

This means you don’t need to upgrade to a more expensive subscription, but you can simply add a few more monthly keyword checks to your current plan. Other SEO tools have a hard-and-fast limit on the number of keywords you can track, and force you to upgrade if you hit that limit. We’re more flexible.

Reporting Capabilities:

Everything on the Raven Tools platform plugs intuitively into our reporting functionality ⁠— meaning you can report to clients or stakeholders about results in traffic, conversions, backlinks, technical SEO fixes, Google Ads and Bing Ads performance, and of course, organic ranking positions.

As part of this reporting suite, you can track Bing rankings and feed them through to automatic reports. These reports can be sent via shareable URL or in a PDF via email.

You can create your own custom mix of data sources that tell the story you want to tell ⁠— comparing and contrasting metrics or using data to justify your SEO work. For example, if Bing rankings are improving after a link-building push or Bing click-throughs are improving after a meta audit, you can highlight this.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to access Google and Bing rank tracking in one intuitive dashboard. You can also track your keyword positions on Yahoo!, Yandex, and Baidu.

Bing Webmaster Tools: An Underrated Source of Information

While Raven Tools offers solid rank tracking for Bing, you can also plug your Bing Webmaster Tools into the platform to access deeper data. Unlike Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools is transparent about how your website is performing ⁠— including what your current rankings are and which keywords are driving traffic. This means that Bing Webmaster Tools is an asset to your SEO research and reporting.

First, you need to connect and verify your Bing Webmaster Tools with your website. Then you can select the Bing Webmaster Tools option in Raven’s Rank Tracking feature and connect using your Bing API key.

In the Bing dashboard, you’ll find a summary of Bing metrics, including average click position (average SERP position where your link was clicked), average impression position (average position where you got an impression), CTR (click-through rate), numbers of clicks and impressions, and goal completions.

Furthermore, connecting Bing Webmaster Tools to your Raven account also adds more rank monitoring capability. But as well as telling you where you rank for certain keywords, the dashboard gives you insightful data about clicks and impressions, click-throughs, and conversions.

This is useful for cross-checking the reports from your third-party rank tracking tool, but also gives you a deeper understanding because it reveals your actual impressions and clicks. This means you know exactly how many searches you appear for — and how effective your web content is for getting clicks.

Using Bing Webmaster Tools in SEO Reporting

As a standalone product, Bing Webmaster Tools is more thorough than Google Search Console in how much data it shows. This includes a more granular view of your SERP performance, but the platform also shows backlink data — and it even tracks your social media indicators (if you connect your accounts).

You can derive a lot of knowledge from this honest ecosystem, and when combined with our reporting and visualization features, Bing Webmaster Tools becomes a valuable data source. You can set up your SEO reports to pull any data you want from Bing Webmaster Tools, and pair it up with other key metrics.

Raven Tools is the only major SEO platform to integrate with Bing Webmaster Tools (as well as Google Search Console). Our platform data indicates that this integration is getting more regular usage on our platform — up 32.5% over the last 12 months — as Bing becomes a core component of what SEO professionals track on a daily basis.

Summary

While it might not have the market share of Google, Bing is facilitating billions of searches every single month. It is the default search engine for Firefox, as well as being the default search engine (via Internet Explorer) on Microsoft PCs and Windows smartphones and tablets. SEOs are right to focus on Google, but that doesn’t mean Bing rankings should be ignored ⁠— especially when they’re so easy to track.

Our Bing rank tracker is an intuitive part of the Raven Tools platform, and you can enrich your knowledge about how your website performs by integrating Bing Webmaster Tools at the same time. Both of these data sources can feed into your SEO reporting, so you can craft the story that you want to tell.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to access our Bing Rank Tracker and Bing Webmaster Tools integration. You can also integrate Google Search Console into your Raven Tools dashboard, and pull Google’s data automatically into your SEO reports.

The post Bing Rank Tracker: How to Check Bing Rankings & Why You Should appeared first on The Raven Blog.

When you build an online SEO report for your clients, what data do you include?

First and foremost, an online SEO report needs to be shareable and easy to access. But in terms of the information you include, there’s no clear-cut answer — no boilerplate list of KPIs that make for a universally good search engine optimization report. Why? Because every client is different.

Many blog posts will tell you which metrics to use and perhaps even give you a template. However, this isn’t an effective way to build an SEO report that works for you and your client, because:

• You may not be sharing the data your client is actually interested in
• You pull the same generic SEO metrics regardless of each client’s strategy
• You’re locked into a format that can be cumbersome to change

That’s not a great recipe for communicating your unique value to clients.

To find a better recipe, we talked with Dimitris Drakatos, the Digital Marketing Manager (SEO & ASO) at Revolut. Throughout his client-side experience, he has gained plenty of perspective on how to build an SEO report that really showcases your expertise and value. In this article, we’re sharing his best practices for building an online SEO report clients actually want to see. We’ll focus on four themes:

• Building SEO reports to match each client’s unique needs
• Evolving the report as the strategy develops
• Being proactive, transparent, and owning the results you create
• Delivering an intuitive report that’s easy for clients to share

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to build your custom online SEO reports. Integrate 30+ data sources with your reporting dashboard, and deliver automated white-label reports to your clients.

Keep Your SEO Reports Tied to Client Objectives

The #1 principle Dimitris highlights is to match SEO reports to what your client actually needs to see.

If, like many agencies, you’re reporting to an SEO or marketing manager, they’re often reporting to other senior stakeholders. They need to take your report and show senior management what you’re doing because they need to justify their SEO and digital marketing spend.

Your job, then, is to help them do their job better — to help them justify why they’re working with you.

That can start with simply asking which information they want to see, and what they need to be able to show their senior management in internal meetings. In particular, Dimitris emphasizes the example of financial metrics. Playing the role of executive or VP, he asks, “Okay, so we’ve published 60 keyword-focused articles — that’s great. But how will these articles help us grow as a business?”

According to Dimitris, your SEO report should help your point of contact draw a line between the SEO-specific (and content-specific) metrics and the executive’s financial metrics.

“Try to associate the content production or optimization work you’re doing with revenue, downloads, or whatever you’re trying to achieve,” he recommends. How does growth in organic traffic translate into conversions? How do specific keywords and the client’s rankings for those keywords affect revenue?

One simple way you can do that is by referencing the estimated costs in Google Ads and using that platform’s data to estimate the value of the keywords you’re targeting for your organic rankings.

Dimitris also emphasizes that for every metric or proposal you share in your online SEO report, you need to tie it back to the overarching strategy. Justify every action you propose, from keyword targeting to technical site changes, and explain how those efforts move the client closer to their objectives. Clients want to know that SEO is aligned with long-term strategic goals — rather than just being tactical actions.

“The overall SEO strategy can — and should — evolve over the engagement, but the last thing clients want to see is a new direction on every bi-weekly call,” he says.

Evolve Your SEO Reports Over Time

Creating dynamic and evolving SEO reports is another theme that Dimitris hammers home in our interview. As the engagement with a client progresses, your strategy will evolve, your efforts and focus will change — and your SEO reports need to keep up with these changes. Here’s a rough chronology:

1. First, Report on Your SEO Site Audit

“At first, what I want to see from an SEO agency is a presentation about my domain in general. How my domain is performing, the current status of domain authority, ranking keywords, branded vs non-branded organic traffic…” Dimitris says.

According to him, this is your opportunity to report on the state of the website before campaigns kick-off — and to set expectations that prevent problems down the road.

“The more detailed you are in your first presentation,” Dimitris explained, “the better you can prevent a situation where you’re doing a good job but the client feels like the website still isn’t performing.”

Specifically, Dimitris says you should report on the findings of your initial SEO audit report:

• Domain strength: Clients need to understand where they’re placed from a Domain Authority (DA) perspective, since improving that number will help them rank higher.
• Competitors (business and SERP): Many clients may assume their SERP competitors are the same as their direct business competitors, but SEOs know that isn’t always the case. Your first site audit is the time to clarify this for clients and reframe how you talk about competitors.
• Technical SEO metrics: These will help you identify and explain any technical issues and justify your recommended fixes. It’s your chance to sell the client on back-end fixes that will put you in a better position to rank well down the road.
• Branded and non-branded keywords: Auditing the current state of your client’s keyword rankings makes it easier to highlight and justify keyword gaps you’ll target later on, plus you can outline opportunities to improve existing rankings for a quick win at the outset.

“You need to provide clients with the details of their problems first, and then explain why it’s important for you to fix them,” Dimitris tells us.

Note: You can use Raven Tools to get a quick sense of the current state of a client’s website SEO using the Quality Analyzer scoring tool in Domain Research Central. It pulls together metrics like Domain Authority and page speed to calculate an overarching SEO score for the site.

The Site Auditor Studio tool is another feature that gives you an overall score for a website’s technical SEO. It identifies and prioritizes areas to improve this score through technical fixes.

2. Next, Report on Output and Quick Wins

After your initial report, Dimitris recommends focusing your reports on output, quick wins, and low-hanging fruit — until you start to see some more significant SEO wins further down the road.

“In the first few months, it’s more difficult to show you’re creating a ton of progress — because you might not be seeing very big shifts in rankings and organic traffic,” he says. “So instead, you should focus on the most important changes you’re making. The output is more important in the early days.”

For example, Dimitris added “if you perform an SEO audit and you see that technical issues are problematic, you should explain that these are a major priority to fix. Broken links, wrong implementation of sitemaps, pages without meta tags, long URLs…”

Next, you report on the progress of these fixes. So at this stage, anything from technical tasks to the number of content pieces published to Google Analytics goal configuration is fair game in reports — alongside immediate jumps in rankings or traffic due to meta audits and other low-hanging fruit tactics.

Note: You can use the Raven Tools Site Auditor Studio mentioned above to highlight the progress you’ve made on technical SEO and how those actions have impacted the client’s score.

“This is the time to focus on the actions you can take immediately that produce encouraging short-term results for clients,” Dimitris says. “Going after lower-difficulty keywords, for example, or updating content that already ranks in the top-10 for a keyword. That way, you can highlight positive progress while you work toward longer-term SEO goals.”

3. Then, Build the Reports That Your Client Wants to See

“As the client relationship progresses, you’ll publish more content, build more backlinks, and optimize your client’s website to perform better in the organic SERPs. You’ll start to see more and more wins — and the graphs should start to show a consistent upwards trend,” Dimitris says.

According to Dimitris, this is the time when you can start really customizing your online SEO reports for the client (as we talked about above). By this stage of the engagement, you should have a sense of what your clients (and their stakeholders) care about. For example, the report metrics might include:

• Ranking improvements for target keywords
• Conversions from landing pages and blog posts
• The value of certain organic keywords
• Organic traffic growth
• Domain strength and backlink profile

Note: With Raven Tools WYSIWYG report tool (more on this later), you can pull information automatically from 30+ data sources, and choose the specific individual metrics you want to include.

At this point, Dimitris also recommends staggering the depth of your reports. “The most detailed report should be sent bi-weekly or monthly,” he says. You can report changes and spikes in metrics at this cadence, he says, “but SEO takes time, so sending daily or weekly reports are unnecessary — and they might set you up for difficult conversations if the algorithm is volatile on certain days.”

Due to the fact that Google is testing content all the time, “there will be constant ups and downs,” Dimitris says. So while it makes sense to report frequently on some things (e.g. technical fixes, new content, organic traffic), he advises not to produce a comprehensive SEO report every week.

Be Proactive and Own the Results You Create

“Be very straightforward and super transparent, and you’ll build stronger long-term confidence in your SEO agency,” Dimitris suggests. In his view, there are a couple of aspects to this:

• Owning up to poor results
• Being open about positive results you didn’t create

When results aren’t up-to-par, your SEO report still needs to own them. You need to explain why they happened and, more importantly, how you’ll change them. This is where you should add annotations and context to the numbers, rather than letting them speak for themselves.

On top of that, Dimitris tells us that agencies need to maintain a well-rounded view of the client and their industry — so you can identify when positive results aren’t necessarily the result of your SEO work.

He gave an example: Revolut recently raised a $500 million funding round and got all the press it entails.

“The day we announced our new funding,” he said, “of course we had a huge spike in traffic because everyone was searching on Google to learn more about Revolut.”

In an SEO report, you don’t want to (inadvertently nor intentionally) claim credit for that increase in organic traffic. So, you need to stay in touch with clients and pay attention to everything that is going on around them. This is a big reason why automated reports should be supported by custom commentary.

Deliver Intuitive and Easy-to-Share Reports

When it comes to the formatting of an SEO report and the logistics of sharing it with clients, Dimitris has a few tips to offer. First, he recommends using a lot of visuals to help make the data more accessible — for anyone in the client’s business who needs to see it.

“Due to the fact that SEO managers and digital marketing specialists usually report to other stakeholders, it’s useful for them to have a shareable report on hand,” he explains. “That way, they don’t have to pull this data out themselves and create another version of the report.”

Alongside annotations, visuals — graphs, charts, tables, and screenshots — make an SEO report more easily digestible and accessible for those who don’t spend a lot of time in the minutiae of SEO metrics.

With the Raven Tools WYSIWYG Reports feature, you can connect your reporting to your client’s own platforms (e.g Google Analytics, Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google/Bing Ads, social media profiles) and combine this data with information from the Raven Tools proprietary tools — rank tracking, backlink acquisition, site auditing, and more.

From there, you can customize the entire report and white label it using your logo. It’s a quick-and-easy way to build a personalized story for clients and translate abstract numbers into meaningful results.

Finally, Dimitris recommends that you make online SEO reports easy to share. “Senior managers tend to be time-poor, so if you need to quickly show results or justify new digital marketing spend, you need to make it as easy as possible for stakeholders to access the right information,” he says. “It’s really important to make reports shareable and available to view without logging into different platforms.”

Note: With Raven Tools, you can deliver online SEO reports via shareable URLs or PDFs — so you can share it with your client easily (and your client can share it with other stakeholders).

You can also schedule reports to update with real-time data on a set schedule, meaning shareable links always include the most up-to-date information about your SEO campaign results.

Key Takeaways: Building the Perfect SEO Report

There may not be a universal formula for which metrics make for a good SEO report, but the principles Dimitris outlines here can help you build a powerful online SEO report for your clients.

• Build reports around what your point of contact (and stakeholders) need to see
• Plan your reports to evolve over time as your SEO campaigns progress
• Proactively own the results you create (and call out those you didn’t create)
• Deliver intuitive and shareable reports that can be easily understood

If you follow Dimitris’s advice and tick these four boxes, you’ll build an SEO reporting process that works for your clients and better communicates your SEO agency’s true value.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Raven Tools to build your custom online SEO reports. Integrate 30+ data sources with your reporting dashboard, and deliver automated white-label reports to your clients.

The post How to Build a Powerful Online SEO Report Clients Want to See appeared first on The Raven Blog.

In this blog post, we’ll be comparing three of the market-leading SEO tools: Ahrefs, SEMrush, and yours truly — Raven Tools. There are a lot of review sites out there, but having built an SEO platform ourselves, we have a deep understanding of what makes these tools different — and the ways in which they might suit certain marketers more than others.

We can tell you where Raven Tools shines, and where Ahrefs and SEMrush keep us on our toes. Hopefully, this helps you make a decision about which tool is most suitable for you.

In the following comparison, we’ll give you information about:

• The unique features of Raven Tools, Ahrefs, and SEMrush
• The main uses for each tool’s unique SEO features
• What kind of SEO professional is best suited to each tool

All of these SEO tools are successful for a reason; digital marketers find them to be robust and effective. So, rather than critiquing our competitors, we’ll focus on each software’s main differentiators, and see how they cater to the needs of SEO professionals in their own unique way.

Raven Tools

Overview of Raven Tools:

Let’s start with Raven Tools. Our suite helps SEOs do site audits, rank tracking, link-building, keyword research — and we tie this together with world-class reporting functionality. Raven Tools helps agencies, consultants, and in-house digital marketing teams to do the SEO work and report on results beautifully.

Our subscription plans start at just $39 per month (when paid annually). We offer a 7-day free trial — so you can check out Raven Tools with zero risk.

Main Differentiator: Raven Tools is a Reporting Powerhouse

All of the SEO functionality that we feature in this guide is woven together by one common thread: reporting. You’ll need to have effective reporting capability in your locker if:

• You’re a consultant or agency reporting results to your client(s)
• You’re an in-house team reporting results to senior management
• You’re an in-house team that needs to justify investment or resources
• You want to monitor results for yourself in an easy and consumable way

Whether you’re in-house or a service provider, you have to build a narrative and tell a story with your SEO research and reporting — beyond simply showing the raw numbers. Raven gives you the tools you need to do the actual work, and also the means to communicate the results efficiently and effectively.

What Makes Raven Tools a Reporting Powerhouse? 

Dozens of Data Sources, and Customized, Automated, and Visual SEO Reports:

• Totally customizable: Your SEO reports are customizable down to the tiniest detail. Firstly, in terms of the metrics, you report on. For example, you can choose your data source (e.g. Raven’s Site Auditor), and show a single selected metric from it if you want (e.g. desktop page speed).Secondly, they’re customizable in terms of the report’s structure and branding. They can be white-labeled with custom URLs, text commentary, images and screenshots, favicons, and logos.
• Access data from 30+ platforms: You can plug Raven Tools into the data sources you need — Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Ads, and Bing Webmaster Tools.You can even connect third-party APIs (e.g. SEMrush and Spyfu) for keyword data, and use Moz and Majestic metrics to assess the strength and quality of a site. And of course, you can feed in Raven’s own metrics from the platform into your reports — e.g. site audit fixes, backlink acquisition, and rankings performance.

• Automatic: You can build reports from scratch, or create templates that auto-generate on any timescale that you need. For example, if management needs a weekly backlinks report but a monthly traffic report, you can set up templates and they’ll generate and send automatically.By integrating various data sources, you can automatically build data-rich reports that tell a story — either to measure your own progress or to communicate ROI to other stakeholders.
• Visual: With Raven Tools, you can create SEO reports that are quickly digestible and easy on the eye. You can demystify SEO data by pairing certain custom metrics with others to show ROI (for example, keyword rankings and a number of inquiries via blog posts), and share online SEO reports via shareable URL — or in PDF format to email if preferred.

• Dynamic and flexible: You’re not limited to Raven’s metrics, nor the third-party platform integrations. You can dynamically feed in Google Sheet data and/or upload CSV data manually. For example, if a report is scheduled for every Friday, Raven can scrape a Google Sheet and automatically feed fresh spreadsheet data into the report before it sends.

Which SEO Research Tools Connect with Raven Tools Reporting?

Site Audit:

A first port-of-call for many SEOs is to check the health of your website to uncover high priority technical issues that need to be fixed. This is where the Raven Tools Site Auditor comes into play.

SEO site audits can be messy affairs, so we’ve focused on keeping ours clear, concise, and actionable.

You can tick off the tasks as you go through, and you can also easily share a link with non-technical stakeholders. Site Auditor can be used by any SEO professional, and due to our annotations and directions on the dashboard, the importance of each technical fix can be understood by everybody else.

Rank Tracking:

Businesses hire SEOs to improve rankings, so rank tracking — and effectively reporting on rankings improvements — is crucial. Naturally, as SEO research tools, both SEMrush and Ahrefs offer rank tracking, and they’re both pretty good at it. But here’s where Raven Tools differs from the others:

• You get the choice of how often to update keyword rank tracking — daily, weekly or monthly — as default, without paying extra. This means you can prioritize the most important keywords to update daily, while the others can stay on the monthly monitoring backburner.
• You can track all of the major Google alternatives in one dashboard. This includes Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex (Russia), and Baidu (China). We’re one of the only SEO tools to give you this view on your performance in the different global search engines.
• You get flexible on-demand keyword rank tracking, above-and-beyond your current Raven Tools plan. Put simply, if you need extra rank tracking functionality but don’t want to upgrade to a higher-tier plan, you can add keywords for a tiny fee ($0.003/RPC).

As with other SEO tools, Raven Tools offers localized rank tracking (you can track keywords per zip code if you want) — and you can also see desktop vs mobile rankings in one place.

Keyword Research:

In Keyword Research Central, you can research specific keywords to see their search volume and competition and monitor them on your Keyword Manager or Rank Tracker.

While this is standard practice for most SEO tools, we differ because we open up keyword data to third-party APIs through our Keyword Suggestions feature:

By default, Keyword Suggestions uses Data For SEO keyword data — but you can also plug your SEMrush or SpyFu account into Raven, and tap into multiple data sources when doing keyword research. This means you can enrich your keyword research and cross-compare metrics between data sources.

Link-Building:

Ahrefs and SEMrush both focus heavily on backlink analysis. Similarly, Raven Tools uncovers backlink data on any URL through the Backlink Explorer. However, we do things a bit differently by allowing SEOs to do link-building management on our platform, too.

1. Link Manager: With Link Manager, you can manage the links you have and the links you want. You can import current backlinks directly from Backlink Explorer and upload new links as you target them. This helps you implement and track your link-building campaigns.

1. Link Spy: With Link Spy, you can enter a keyword or phrase to reveal the domains that link to the top 10 results for that keyword or phrase. This helps you know which backlinks you acquire if you want to break into those top SEO results.

As with all of Raven’s SEO research metrics, you can feed backlink data automatically into SEO reports — meaning you can show clients or senior management the progress of your link-building campaigns in the context of other metrics. For example, to drive the link-building message home, your reports could show how keyword ranking positions are climbing in correlation with your backlink acquisition activities.

Summary: Raven Tools as an All-in-One SEO Platform

Raven isn’t just a reporting tool — though that’s the thread that runs through much of our functionality. Raven Tools is a platform to research the most crucial SEO metrics, get actionable insights about website health and campaign performance, and actually implement and manage important SEO work.

Raven Tools lets you tell a story and communicate data in a way that clients and non-technical stakeholders can clearly understand. With other SEO tools, this requires more effort and manual finesse. Raven is built to be intuitive and flexible — both for SEOs themselves, and the people they report to.

You can try Raven for free for 7 days and get access to our all-in-one SEO platform: Site Auditor, rank tracking, link-building, keyword research, and of course — automated reporting.

Ahrefs

Overview of Ahrefs

Ahrefs has built a reputation as a robust SEO software, and one which is particularly solid for backlink analysis and keyword research purposes. Ahrefs is mostly focused on tracking, monitoring, and research — so it isn’t really a reporting tool, aside from its automated rank tracking updates.

You can pull data from the software by exporting information to CSVs, but there’s no intuitive method to report all SEO results automatically to clients or other stakeholders.

Currently, the smallest Ahrefs plan (Lite) is $99 per month, or $82 per month when billed annually. You can register for a 7-day trial and pay $7.

Main Differentiator: Ahrefs is a Backlink Analysis Deep Dive

Ahrefs has always placed a high value on backlinks for SEO, and therefore the main dashboard emphasizes a lot of information about backlinks and referring domains:

In the Backlinks section of Ahrefs, you can check out the new, lost, or broken dofollow and nofollow backlinks for any domain — whether it’s yours, your competitor’s, or your client’s website.

The Ahrefs Backlinks dashboard shows the referring page, plus the anchor text and the backlink in situ with a snippet of its surrounding copy. You can assess the strength of each particular referring domain through the proprietary Ahrefs scores — Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR).

When you dig further into your website’s Referring Domains, you can see more detailed information about the sites that link to you — from the aforementioned DR score to their number of referring domains, their volume of organic traffic, and their Ahrefs Rank.

Referring IPs: Revealing Low-Quality Private Blog Networks

The Referring IPs feature on Ahrefs is a further deep dive into the health of a website’s backlink profile (note: a similar feature is also available on SEMrush). Users can see referring domains grouped by network, and pick out the IPs with the same c-class that commonly link to their site. If there’s a high volume of links from the same c-class, it might suggest that a Private Blog Network (PBN) has been used.

Private Blog Networks are targeted by Google as a black-hat SEO tactic — punishable by a penalty. So, if you’re kicking off a client campaign, you need to be able to spot these red flags in time.

What Else Does Ahrefs Offer to SEOs?

Aside from in-depth backlink analysis, what does Ahrefs offer to SEOs?

While it doesn’t have much intuitive reporting prowess, it does provide automated rank tracking — and their keyword research functionality (Keywords Explorer) is certainly a key strength:

In the above screenshot, you can see the data you get when you search a specific keyword (including their proprietary keyword difficulty score). And below, you can see the keyword ideas overview. These keywords can be added to lists and exported as CSVs:

Ahrefs Site Audit:

Like Raven (and SEMrush), the Ahrefs Site Audit tool crawls your site for performance blockers, broken links, indexability errors, meta issues, and on-page problems like missing headers and duplicate content.

Due to the vast number of datapoints and filters, the interface is far more complex than Raven Tools. This can present a challenge to non-technical folks but allows technical SEOs to get into the nitty-gritty of website structure and performance. You can even look at the JavaScript and CSS to check for errors.

The Ahrefs site audit can be bulk exported to CSV or added to a ”to-do” list — which itself can be bulk exported to a CSV file.

Summary: Ahrefs for SEO Professionals

Ahrefs has mainly built its reputation on backlink analysis and keyword research for SEO, and for good reason. These features still represent the most solid parts of the tool. The Site Audit feature is impressive in its detail, which probably makes it most suitable for technically-minded marketers.

Compared to Raven Tools, Ahrefs has limited reporting capabilities and no white-labeling option. This means SEOs need to export their data into spreadsheets and build reports manually or limit their reporting to the automated rankings updates alone.

SEMrush

Overview of SEMrush

SEMrush has a reputation as a heavy duty digital marketing tool, and due to its wide array of PPC and SEO features, they describe themselves broadly as an “Online Visibility Management Platform”.

At the moment, SEMrush plans start at $99 per month, or $83 per month when billed annually. A fair amount of the more advanced functionality is limited to users on higher-tier plans ($199 or $399 per month). These features include read-only access, white-labeled reporting, competitor intelligence ($200 extra), multi-device rank tracking, third-party integration, and many of their content marketing features.

Main Differentiator: SEMrush Covers a Lot of Bases

Each SEO tool in this comparison has its own identity, even if some features are similar to one another.

With Raven Tools, the emphasis is on reporting and management — and bringing all the key SEO metrics together in an intuitive platform. With Ahrefs, the emphasis is on digging deep into backlink data and tracking the impact of link-building on keyword rankings and website strength. But with SEMrush, it’s a bit more challenging to pick out a clear area of focus — partly because it’s such an expansive tool.

Key Features of SEMrush:

As you’d expect, SEMrush offers all the important SEO research features on the standard $99 plan:

• Domain research (Domain Analytics): A snapshot of a website’s authority, traffic, and backlinks
• Site audit: Errors, warnings, and notices to guide technical SEO fixes
• Rank tracking (Position Tracking): Visibility, rankings distribution, and rankings trends
• Backlink analysis (Backlink Audit & Backlinks Overview): Backlinks, ref. domains, and more
• Keyword research (Keyword Analytics): Similar to Ahrefs in terms of UX and data

Let’s take a look at a couple of SEMrush’s unique features.

Backlink Audit, Shining a Light on Toxic Backlinks:

SEMrush focuses heavily on helping users avoid toxic backlinks in their Backlink Audit feature — with their unique Toxic Score reflecting the danger of you suffering a Google penalty for bad backlinks.

Just like Raven Tools, SEMrush incorporates some management capability into its backlink analysis. After you’ve picked up the toxic links, you can add them to a file — and later upload that file directly to the Google Disavow Tool. If there are any links that have been marked as toxic but you know they’re ok, you can whitelist them, so SEMrush won’t see them as a danger anymore.

Monitoring Search Engine Algorithm Updates:

SEMrush keeps a keen eye on the search engine algorithms to give their users a heads-up when an update is launched that could impact their rankings. First, there’s the Notes list. This is a live miniblog in which SEMrush lists the notable activity in different regions and on different search engines:

Then, you have the SEMrush Sensor. This measures the global SERP volatility across different industries and website types — providing live updates on a daily basis. You can also check the deviations based on average monthly volatility, and see who the current “winners and losers” are in the SERPs.

This feature also allows you to input your own URL and get a “personal score” from the SEMrush Sensor, which shows how SERP volatility is affecting your website and your selected target keywords.

Summary: SEMrush for SEO Professionals

SEMrush offers a lot of functionality, and this might make it a slightly overwhelming platform if your scope is more precise. The core SEO research functionality is available on the $99 plan, including the keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and site auditing — but read-only access and reporting, plus competitive intelligence and some advanced rank tracking features are on pricier plans.

Conclusion: Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Raven Tools

The choice between these tools comes down to your personal preference. Each software has robust functionality for in-house, freelance, or agency SEOs — albeit with slightly varying emphasis and usability.

Raven is available on a 7-day free trial, and so is SEMrush. You can try Ahrefs for a week for $7. This means you can test without risk, and see which tool suits you. If you have any questions during your Raven trial, don’t hesitate to check out our Helpdesk or get in touch to speak to someone on our team.

When compared to Ahrefs and SEMrush, Raven Tools offers more flexibility in terms of pricing plans. And our simple dashboards make doing SEO work and communicating results much easier. These aspects make Raven Tools suitable for a wider range of SEO professionals while giving them everything they need to succeed with site auditing, rank tracking, link-building, keyword research — and reporting.

You can try Raven for free for 7 days and get access to our all-in-one SEO platform: Site Auditor, rank tracking, link-building, keyword research, and of course — automated reporting.

The post Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Raven Tools: SEO Software Comparison appeared first on The Raven Blog.

You then take a look at your site and see that your website has half the links, half the trust and citation flow (read more here), and half the domain authority and page authority (DA & PA). You may have even decided to run a website audit!

Now What?

The problem most beginners face is normally rooted in analysis paralysis and data confusion. You can dig into data for months, but when you finish digging, how do you turn this data into actionable steps you can take for your business? 

More links? 

Well, how many links? 

More content?

Well, how much content?

The purpose of this guide is to provide you with a step-by-step walkthrough where we will show you how to take your data research and turn it into actionable steps. If you’re a real go-getter and have already completed one or more of the steps, just navigate the table of contents to find the section you need.

Gather Data on Roofing Niche

The first step to any project is to gather as much data as possible. The more data you get, and the higher quality data collection, the easier it will be to rank your roofing website.

Keyword Research for Roofer

If you want to quickly find your keywords, we recommend using a combination of a couple of paid tools and one free tool like:

1. Seoruler.pro
2. Google Sheets
3. Raven Tools

We’ll walk you through the first step to create a google sheet that can hold all the information you’ll need. We like to format these shoots using the following column breakdown:

We recommend starting with the baseline seed keyword list (this should be 2-5 keywords). 

Note: Seed Keywords will be used to populate lists in other tools.

Next, enter “roofer” into Raven’s Keyword Suggestion tool.

You should get a list that gives you a competition score (AdWords metric), keyword volume, and keyword:

Now export the results and place it in your google sheet in a separate tab.

Using the Keyword Suggestion tool, you’ll be able to prioritize AdWords and SEO by filtering based on CPC cost. If something costs a LOT of money with Ads, then SEO may be the strategy to go with (just make sure to identify whether that keyword is super competitive based on the domains ranking for it before you start racing towards a goal that may be further down the road than you are prepared to go).

After you’ve repeated this process, you should then combine all of the keywords into one, comprehensive list.

Pro Tip: 

Seed keywords often produce replicated results. 

We recommend that in column B, Row 1, you enter “=unique()”. This formula will remove all duplicates. The easiest way to remove the formula from the formatting is to just paste into a text file (notebook) and then paste it back into the G-sheet.

The next step, is PAA (People Also Ask). We recommend that you use SEO Ruler for this.

Typically, if you just want blog articles (long-tail keywords),  we use the following set up:

The other part of the set up should look like this:

Enter your keyword and you’re off to the races! Next, export your list (which should look like the one below):

When you get your entire list populated, I recommend that you pick out the ones that make the most sense to your website. 

After you’ve made your list, feel free to look at search volume with Raven if you’re trying to evaluate the search viability of your terms. Keep in mind that keyword volume is not the only reason to create content around a keyword.

If you’ve read our post on Google BERT, then you’ll understand why volume isn’t the end-all-be-all factor when going after a keyword, but suffice it to say, Google wants to satisfy users, and if your website has content on all of the queries that Googlers have, then you’ll give yourself a fighting chance to rank.

Free Roofing Keyword List

The keyword research we’ve done up to this point has now been cleaned up and we have a list of primary keywords for roofers. This list excludes the long tails (who, what, when, where, why, how) but includes all of your main keywords.

• Roof Repair
• Roof Replacement
• New Roof

• Metal Roof
• Solar Tiles
• Asphalt Shingles
• Stone-coated Steel
• Slate
• Rubber Slate
• Clay and Concrete Tiles
• Green Roofs
• Built-up Roofing

• Roof Cleanings
• Roof Maintenance
• Roof Inspections
• Gutter Repair and Replacement
• Gutter Inspection and Cleaning
• Gutter Maintenance

Roof Modifiers (Entity Associated Terms)

• Residential Roofing
• Commercial Roofing
• Roofing Construction
• Roof Tile
• Roof Coating
• Standing Seam
• Hurricane Damage
• General Contractor
• House
• Tile
• Metal
• Steel
• Shingle
• Asphalt
• Construction
• Slate
• Plastic
• Modern
• Kerala
• Tin
• Rubber
• Felt
• Design
• Wood
• TPO
• Tar
• Zinc
• Asbestos
• Contractor
• Roll
• Concrete

Competitor Research & Sentiment Investigation

Sentiment Research is designed to double-check your own ideas on how you should target a keyword. Does Google want to see a blog? A hub-style resource guide? A landing page? A video? A template? 

Good news: simply Google your term before writing about it and you’ll be fine!

Here is an example of sentiment for “Roofing Contractor”:

You’ll either want to rank a landing page (preferably home page) or you’ll want to create a directory of sorts that gives the top __ roofing contractors. The sentiment here shows that people are either using the keyword with transaction intent or commercial intent. Basically, they are either ready to buy NOW, or they are comparing to buy later.

Competitor research is meant to provide a more precise off-page road map. How many links does it take to rank? What kind of links are people using? What links are you missing?

For keywords, you don’t absolutely need to buy a tool (although it helps), but for backlinks, it’s basically impossible to do the kind of research you need to without paying for some tool. For our example, we’ll use Link Spy:

The goal here is to mark down the URLs and the link types of these competitors that rank for your target keywords. After that, you’ll have your roadmap.

Read More:

Competitor Research

How to Analyze Backlinks

How to Do Keyword Research

Mapping Out Website Architecture and Keywords

The next step is to figure out exactly how all of this data will take shape on your website. The example below uses Gloomaps (a free tool).

The free keyword list we provided will give you the services to offer and the resources page will be filled by your content that addresses the long tail keywords we’ve marked in our keyword research.

Make sure to map your keywords to each page as well. We’ve written a post specifically tackling the keyword map, but here is a small summary: 

URL structure and Keyword Choices

The URL structure should be as short as possible while containing your short tail keyword. As you can see above, the demo URLs are right to the point (/link-building, /keyword-research, etc.)

To identify the keywords that should be present on the page, we recommend SEO Ruler or Google again. This time, however, we recommend the chrome extension, and here’s why: you canautomatically scrape the autosuggest, “people also ask”, and bold keywords tied to your search query! Boom! 

After you’ve copied that, hop on over to Google Images and do an image search for your keyword. In this example, we’ll go with “roof repair”. 

Once again, this is covered in the Google Bert blog post, but this is such an overlooked tool. Google is telling you exactly what ideas and words are related to your search. Make content that contains these ideas!

Related Content:

Keyword Mapping

BERT Update

Crawl Your Website for Technical SEO Errors

For those that are somewhat mystified by or scared of the term “Technical” when combined with “SEO”, we have an entire page that acts as a technical SEO dictionary. Check it out if you want some clarity before running a site crawl.

This isn’t a full technical SEO Audit guide, but here are some best practices for your site:

Some best practices for SEO content include:

• Content adheres to the overall page goal and purpose
• Content is concise and helpful to users
• Content is well-organized and structured according to SEO best practices
• No spelling or grammar mistakes
• No “filler” content (i.e. all content serves a purpose)
• Content includes helpful bullet points, numbered lists, and pictures as needed
• Content is optimized for mobile (short paragraphs with white space)
• Include internal links to relevant pages and external links to reputable websites
• Content is unique and isn’t duplicated or plagiarized

Common issues identified in an SEO audit include:

• Duplicate, short, long, or missing title tags
• Duplicate, short, long, or missing meta descriptions
• Missing or duplicate image alt text or title text
• Google Analytics code missing
• Presence or absence of H2, H3, etc. headings
• Missing or incorrect schema.org microdata
• Non-optimized internal links and anchor text

You can use Raven’s Site Auditor to check these issues. 

GMB, Local SEO, and Content Preparation

We cannot stress this enough – GMB is the lifeline of a local service business. You can ask anyone what result they click when they google “service + city”, and 9 times out of 10  they point right at the local map pack.

Why wouldn’t they? It isn’t an ad and it has everything you need all in one place to evaluate your query.

You’ll need content, local relevance, and an optimized GMB to get the snack pack.

Step 1: Optimize the GMB

Pro Tip: make sure that EVERYTHING in GMB needs to be filled out. More to come on this in a later post…

Info:

Business information like niche, service area, address, hours of operation, phone number, short name (for people to find you), website URL, products, services, highlight attributes, business description, opening date, and photos.

Make sure all of the information is accurate. As you get website citations, you’ll want to make sure it all matches with your GMB listing.

Posts:

You’ll also want to make sure to create at least one post a week. You can change the formatting, but these posts are powerful for rankings.  The guidelines for Google Posts are here.  Another Pro tip with posts: include images and link your posts to each other like this,  Post 1 > Post 2 > Post 3 >, etc.

Reviews:

This section is hotly debated by SEOs. Reviews are known factors for CTR  – click-through-rate, but are reviews actually ranking factors? Our personal opinion (for now) is that reviews are not GMB ranking factors. One look at a rank and rent / lead gen site and you’ll see that. If anything, the reviews having keywords in them may be a factor, but not a review in and of itself.

Website:

Google gives you the ability to make a website hosted by…Google. Use it. Promote it. Send links to it. Treat this like a real website and put some time into filling it out. This is a huge asset to have for FREE.

Photos:

One look at Google’s Vision API and you’ll realize how important real images are for rankings. We recommend filling out the following photos:

• Picture of the team
• Pictures of the exterior
• Interior
• Services 
• Products
• A picture of the team at work 

Step 2: Roofing Directories, Niche Citations, and General Citations

This step isn’t too difficult and you can always hire a freelancer if you don’t have the bandwidth yourself.  You are going to need backlinks from directories. These links are perfect trust signals, and if you’re into more grey hat techniques, you can even send links to your citations (works like a charm).

Where do you find citations and directories for your business?

Glad you asked. The easiest way to build a list is to look at competitors in your local space and reverse engineer the work they have done. Here’s how: 

1. Use backlink explorer on three roofing contractors that are killing it in your city.
   
   
   
2. Export the list and investigate the next competitor.
3. After you’ve investigated the top three competitors in your primary city, go and find the top three competitors in three cities surrounding your primary city. Lather, rinse, repeat.
4. Lastly, get the entire list and run a “=unique()” function to clean the list and paste the list into a .txt file to clean up formatting. 

Just like that, you’ll have a list of links to go after. You’ll pull up other types of links as well, but you can just do a visual check of the URL to see whether its a directory. Here is an example:

https://homeownerideas.com/business-directory/wpbdm-region/tennessee/
http://www.besthomeimprovementcontractors.com/roofing/contractors-tn.html

These links usually have “best” or “directory” along with the city or state in the URL.

The last step for setting up the foundation of your local SEO roofing campaign is to create a content calendar. 

Step 3: Create a Content Calendar

What is a content calendar? It’s a way of scheduling which pieces of content will be scheduled on certain days of the week. For local businesses, we recommend getting the content out as soon as possible and keeping a consistent drumbeat of quality content that addresses user queries surrounding your topic. 

This is one of the templates Raven Tools has used that was created by Webris.

When you’re trying to get organized, we recommend putting together a topic worksheet to filter your thoughts along with your data.

Finally, and most importantly, you’ll want to put together a sheet that can track everything from draft to cost to completion.

That should look something like this:

Conclusion 

We hope this guide has been helpful for you as a beginner to rank for your roofing business. As with anything, it’s important to take the time upfront to organize your efforts when trying to rank. At Raven,  we have amazing SEO and reporting tools that can help with keyword research, backlink data, site audits — and more! 

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to help@raventools.com to request a demo or sign up for a free 7-day trial here! 

The post SEO For Roofing Businesses: A Beginner’s Ranking Guide appeared first on The Raven Blog.

To explain Google’s reasoning behind the update, here is a snippet from Google’s October 24, 2019 press release:

“With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding–made possible by machine learning–we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.”

So, what exactly does this mean for SEO? According to Danny Sullivan, a well-known Google search engine liaison, it doesn’t mean a thing from an optimization standpoint:

“Write good content”. If only the SEO community had a $1 for every time they heard that! Unfortunately, great content just isn’t enough (at least in most SEO situations). The real question is: How do we turn “write good content” into actionable advice?

What is the Google BERT update?

In layman’s terms, the update is a change in Google’s processing of natural language or NLP and is meant to connect a question to an answer.

Google is looking for webpages and websites that can answer: Who, What, When, Where, Why, & How.

So if you’re looking to impress someone at a cocktail party with your copious amounts of Google BERT knowledge this holiday season, here’s what you can say: “Google’s latest update is a neural network and natural language processing technique specifically aimed to improve the currently existing word2vec model for understanding word relationships.”

Can You Optimize for Google BERT?

The short answer: you can’t optimize for BERT – but you can optimize your website’s content for users, which is basically the same thing.

A major focus for SEOs going forward should be Entity SEO, which is a type of optimization that focuses on establishing a relationship between two things.

As mentioned above, the content needs to be seen as relevant and your website needs to do all it can to establish a connection between the ranges of search intent and your site. The more you cover a niche or topic, the more “authority” or “relevance” you build for yourself (similar to how backlinks work).

What is Entity SEO?

To illustrate how Entity SEO works, we’ve googled “Who is the big guy in princess bride?” to show you how Google’s algorithm determines the results: 

Honestly, this is pretty dang cool. A movie character can be surfaced in the results based on BERT / RankBrain (and a host of other algorithms working in unison), which ties into the idea of Entity SEO. To help explain how we’ve included an abstract for you to read before we dive in further with our own explanation:

“Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for identifying entities that are related to an entity to which a search query is directed. One of the methods includes receiving a search query, wherein the search query has been determined to relate to a first entity of a first entity type, and wherein one or more entities of a second entity type have a relationship with the first entity; receiving search results for the search query; determining that a count of search results identifying a resource containing a reference to the first entity satisfies a first threshold value (bold is author emphasis); determining that a count of search results identifying a resource having the second entity type as a relevant entity type satisfies a second threshold value; and transmitting information identifying the one or more entities of the second entity type as part of the response to the search query.”

Moving forward, it’s important for Search Engine Optimizers to improve their understanding of Entity as it pertains to Google. Why? We’ve noticed trends in Google’s most recent core algorithm updates (RankBrain, Medic, and BERT) are favoring this concept. 

Here is an image to help you visualize:

Clear as mud? Good.

The key to understanding the relationship between Entity and SEO is in Section 404 of Figure 4 on the Google patent shown above where it states: “a sufficient number of resources identified by the search results are authoritative resources for a particular entity.”

Keyword difficulty taps into this idea slightly, although it doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head. Because although it a helpful metric, it fails to account for the strength of entity association. 

Additionally, backlinks aren’t the only thing that creates “a sufficient number of resources” as mentioned above. Which means that domain authority or the domain rating metric isn’t quite able to calculate what Google is trying to do either. 

To summarize, the goal for Google is to form a relationship between queries in various contexts with websites and webpages to form a ‘confidence score’ (similar to how Google’s Vision API works) that enables them to connect a search query back to your page. The better you are at creating Entity association the more likely you are to be trusted by Google as an authority. 

Using Google’s own SERP to Understand Entity Relationships

This is a fun exercise that was referenced in a previous post on keyword mapping and keyword research.

If you want to understand the current entity understanding that Google has, then just enter your keyword and identify the “people also ask”, “autosuggest”, “image result” boxes, and the “people also search for” sections (located at the bottom of the SERP):

“Storage company” is related to moving, public, pod, business, self-storage, yellow, portable, and locker. It’s interesting to see that a brand “yellow” is connected this strongly with an entity-relationship. When I use Raven’s keyword rank checker to see the strength of the keyword profile, we see why “yellow” pops up in the search results for this query:

“Nearest storage to me” as a phrase gets 300k searches. Guess who is at position 28? Yellow. “London Storage” at position 1? Yellow. We would wager that if “Yellow” wanted to lean into their SEO campaign, they could acquire much more organic real estate, especially since BERT and associated algorithms all rely so heavily on the science of determining entity.

How to Win Post-BERT

To dominate the SERPs in 2019 and 2020, begin to get creative when tying one entity to another (i.e. company = keyword). You don’t just do this by building authority through links. Link diversity, brand prominence (popularity), content relevance, general niche authority (arguably another way of describing relevance), and of course, the technical aspect of your site, will all play a part in ranking.

Don’t just rely on a technical SEO 100/100 score. You’ll need a lot of web pages, a lot of internal links, a lot of content covering a semantic range, and you’ll need to create a heavy web footprint that connects your brand to the keywords you’re hunting for.

Good luck! 

-The Raven Team

Further Reading – Bibliography

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805.pdf

https://www.briggsby.com/on-page-seo-for-nlp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpHS4hgUUac

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-bert-update/332161/https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-bert-misinformation/332931/

https://mlexplained.com/2019/01/07/paper-dissected-bert-pre-training-of-deep-bidirectional-transformers-for-language-understanding-explained/?fbclid=IwAR1_jtvhA6KavedbOhuYu4KpIOMUZRq5U0V-Psxy-yT_h8JJ7d549rXPk6M

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