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What is keyword rank tracking? & its Best Practices

How can you gauge the success of the content on your website? While there are a number of variables to be considered, if you have never evaluated your content using keyword metrics, then you have seriously undervalued a critical search engine optimization (SEO) factor.

SEO places a premium on keywords. Search engines will find it difficult to rank your website if your content lacks relevant keywords. Remember that the search volume and traffic potential of keywords fluctuates over time. As a result, you must stay updated on the search terms that could benefit you and those that are obsolete. This is where keyword ranking and tracking come into play.

What is keyword rank tracking? 

Keyword rank tracking allows you to see where your site ranks for specific search terms. When someone types a search term that is relevant to your industry into the search bar of a search engine, the position at which your URL appears is referred to as your keyword ranking.

Every page of the search engine displays approximately ten results. If you have a higher keyword ranking, it means your site is closer to appearing on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP). Poor page ranking means that your site appears near the bottom of the fourth or fifth page or even lower.s

Keyword rank tracking helps you identify your spot on the search engine. It also generates reports that can help you identify the cause of the drop in rankings. Keyword rank tracking is also helpful in developing various SEO strategies. However, while keeping track of your rank, make it a point to conduct a thorough review and evaluation of your peer ranking.

What is the motive of keyword Rank Tracking?

Keyword rank tracking is highly recommended if you want to be at the top in search result pages. It informs you on how various keywords you intend to use to rank your site can help you. 

Assume that you have not updated your pillar pages in a while. This has resulted in a noticeable drop in rankings. In this case, before you optimize it with new keywords, you should monitor the search volume, difficulty level, and trend of that specific keyword. 

Furthermore, your content may contain multiple keywords that are difficult to rank. Rank tracking assists in identifying the most relevant long-tail keywords to boost rankings in such cases.

Why is rank tracking effective in SEO? 

Tracking keywords’ ranking is undoubtedly crucial for SEO. In truth, improving your site’s search engine rank is impossible if it is not optimized using relevant keywords. Here are the top five reasons to include rank tracking as an SEO strategy. 

  • You can make changes to your current keyword strategy. For example, if certain keywords aren’t working for you, you can try long-tail keywords or incorporate search queries in your content.
  • You can monitor the performance of your competitors. You can use their performance as a benchmark to plan your campaign.
  • You can determine the cause of a traffic drop. If you notice a sudden drop in your search engine position, you may have unintentionally engaged in bad SEO practices such as keyword stuffing, black hat SEO, and so on.
  • You can identify underperforming Web pages, optimize them with the latest trending keywords, and add missing information to improve the page’s SERP ranking.

Does Google Provide Ranking of Keywords? 

Google provides a good amount of insight into your search performance. You can get data by visiting Google Analytics and Google Search Console (GSC). 

Google Analytics does not offer insight into keyword ranking. But you can use it to understand how your site performed overall in search. Using Analytics, you can track how much of the traffic to your site was organic. 

GSC, on the other hand, offers data related to impressions, the number of clicks on your top ranking keywords, and so on. However, it does not track information related to specific keywords. 

The major downside of both these tools is that they generate  reports that are difficult to comprehend.

Monitoring Keywords

There are several ways to track your rank, but most SEOs rely on GSC and Google Analytics. However, both these tools provide information about the queries for which your page appears on the SERP and a small amount of detail about your search position. However, if you want to know where your page ranks for a specific query, you will have to put in a lot of effort. This is not the case with rank tracking software. Such tools provide easy-to-understand reports with in-depth information about things that affect your rankings or changes that have not gone in your favour.

Rank Tracking Best Practices

1) Identify Keywords

In order to track your rank, you must first choose the right target keywords. Usually, enterprise-level websites go for around 400 to 500 keywords to get an idea of how their site is performing. But if your website is new or is only a few years old, you can reduce the number of keywords.

When preparing a list of keywords to rank on, make sure it includes: 

  • List of branded keywords with your company’s name
  • Top-performing industry keywords that are well-known for driving traffic
  • Keywords that are currently trending in your industry

Always use a tool to determine the best keywords to rank for.

2) Tag Keywords 

Once you have a list of keywords, the next step is to tag them. Keywords can be tagged using a spreadsheet. When you tag keywords, it becomes convenient to filter search in a rank tracking tool.

Let’s go over an example of this.

Let’s assume that you run a fintech company that provides various types of loans, such business loans, personal loans, and auto loans. In the keyword tagging step, you need to add  tags to a list of keywords related to “personal loan”. Then, you add another tag to keywords related to other loan products and so on. So, each keyword has a specific tag associated with it.

Always try to understand the uploading process for specific keywords before going ahead with this step. 

3) Choose a Rank Tracker 

After using a spreadsheet to tag a list of keywords, the next step is to select the best rank tracker from the ones available in the market. Ahrefs, Semrush, and UberSuggest are some of the most popular rank tracking tools. A monthly subscription for these tools starts at $500 and allows you to track between 500 and 1000 keywords. If you want to track more keywords, you may have to pay a little more.

When selecting a rank tracking tool, take into account the frequency of ranking updates, mobile compatibility, and the geographical areas they cover.

4) Upload Keywords 

Once you have picked a software, start uploading your extensive list of keywords. Many rank tracking tools allow you to import keywords in bulk to ensure that the process takes as little time as possible.

Let’s go over an example of how uploading works. Let us assume that you have picked Semrush to assist you with uploading keywords. Semrush gives you an option to tag keywords through conventions that are Tag 1, Tag 2, Tag 3, and so on.

Soon after you upload the keywords and run the tool, Semrush starts detecting Google’s search results to capture the performance data of those specific keywords. After a few hours of investigation, the tool will show you how your site ranks for specific keywords.

5) Analyze Performance Reports 

After uploading keywords, you will want reports that provide insight into your site’s performance. The rank tracker tool gives you a detailed breakdown of the specific keywords your site ranks the highest for. It also points out much traffic each keyword is currently generating or has previously generated. 

You should make a note of keywords that rank in the top 10 and 100 search results. If you notice any sudden drop in ranking, the report might help you trace the reason. The data offered here also provides insight into how your new SEO campaign has performed over time. 

Not Ranking your Keywords?

Here are some steps that you can take if your keywords aren’t helping with ranking your site.

1) Change keyword strategy

The most common cause of poor ranking is selecting highly competitive keywords. For example, if you own an e-commerce website, you are directly competing with Amazon. In such a situation, beating Amazon using the very same keywords that bring them phenomenal results is difficult. So, what is the alternative? Consider using long-tail keywords. Such keywords are easier to rank for.

If your company wants to target a specific geographical area, you should consider using a local SEO strategy. You could also concentrate on finding a niche and searching for relevant keywords within that niche. Major brands usually avoid these strategies due to lack of time.

2) Climbing the rankings 

Regardless of how effective your overall SEO and keywords ranking strategy is, you cannot find yourself on the top of SERPs overnight. Set a benchmark for yourself after doing a thorough competition analysis. Take small steps to improve your performance and move up in the rankings.

3) Keep Monitoring Keyword Rankings 

We highly recommend using the rank tracker tool because whenever you notice a drop in your performance, you can utilize these tools to identify exactly where you are lagging. Keep an eye on your peers to see if their rankings are improving or deteriorating as a result of minor or major changes. By performing these minor checks, you will always be able to move up in search engine rankings.

If keyword ranking takes a while, don’t worry; just switch to plan B, which is a robust social media strategy. Remember that generating leads is more important than ranking high on search engines.

Best Keyword Rank Tracking Tools

1) Ahrefs

Ahrefs has a solution to any type of SEO problem that you might facing. This tool’s keywords explorer option helps you determine which keywords work best for you. You can further use them to understand keyword difficulty, search volume, and traffic potential. Ahrefs keywords database has over seven billion phrases. And the best thing is that it is updated every month. 

Ahrefs uses clickstream data to refine search volume every month in order to provide the best results. Obtaining information on paid clicks, bounce rate, and keyword topic ideas are some of the other benefits of using this tool.

2) Semrush

Semrush allows you to choose from three different keyword ranking tools. Here are the details:

  • Position Tracking: This feature allows you to monitor your competitors’ keyword profiles, identify high-ranking keywords, and track domain performance on Google. You can also use it to resolve cannibalisation issues. 
  • Sensor: This feature enables you to monitor SERP and site position volatility. You can also use this tool to check for changes in the Google ranking algorithm.
  • Ranks: Use this feature to research various sites. It will provide you with data on paid traffic, organic visibility, paid keywords, and so on.

3) Search Engine (SE) Ranking

You might want to rank on different search engines to boost your revenue. But how can you do that if you don’t have any data indicating your ranking for specific keywords? SE Ranking can assist you with this. You may use this tool to monitor your keyword rank on YouTube, Bing, Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. It also tells you how your keywords are performing across various devices. You can also track results based on Google Maps, snippets, Google Ads rankings, and videos.

SE Ranking allows you to add up to five competitors for evaluation and analysis. 

4) Monster Insight 

This SEO tool allows you to integrate Google Analytics into WordPress. You can then use it to track different keywords’ rankings by navigating to the WordPress admin section. It also allows you to generate the Search Console report, which includes the top 50 most searched phrases on Google and where you rank among them.

Now that we have covered keywords, it’s time to move on to other aspects of SEO. Monster Insight provides detailed information on the click-through-rate (CTR), clicks, keyword position, and impressions of keywords. It is recommended to use this tool to optimize Web pages that appear at the bottom of the SERP in order to help them rise to the top.

5) Serpstat 

Serpstat is one of the most effective SEO tools available at present. You can use it to track your global ranking and to see how your peers are doing. If you don’t have time to generate reports, use the scheduler to automatically generate weekly, monthly, or even daily reports. They provide insights that allow you to analyse search volume for a specific keyword, difficulty level, and market share. 

You can use Serpstat to conduct clustering, backlinks review and analysis, and semantic data collection. The monthly subscription starts at $48 and provides access to over 20 SEO tools. 

6) Mangools 

Mangools offers a keyword rank tracking tool named SERPWatcher. When you subscribe to this tool, you also get access to four other tools that are ideal for SEO. In order to use this tool, simply paste your website URL pick the location in which you want to track rank, select the device (mobile or desktop), and enter the keywords. 

SERPWatcher’s report contains detailed information about your site’s performance. It takes into account things like search volume, average position, the top position, and traffic volume. The monthly subscription to this tool starts at $29.90.

7) Ubersuggest

UberSuggest is one of the most effective rank tracking tools in the market. You do not have to pay anything to use this keyword tracking tool. You can use it to determine the search volume and difficulty level for any keyword. It is also ideal for competitor research because this tool allows you to see the keywords used by your peers and how they are performing on those specific search terms. Furthermore, UberSuggest provides topic ideas based on various keywords. If you are a content strategist struggling to find the best top on various search phrases, look no further than UberSuggest.

8) Accuranker 

Are you looking for an SEO tracking tool that provides real-time updates on keyword positioning? If yes, you should definitely give Accuranker a shot. This tool provides all the necessary information related to keyword positioning on a daily basis. Accuranker allows you to track the ranking of your site and keywords and receive notifications when there is volatility in your positioning. It is also useful for developing a strategy to increase organic traffic. The only drawback is that it works best only with Google and Bing.

Conclusion 

Rank tracking is essential for creating a successful marketing campaign. It provides information about your site’s performance for specific keywords. Monitoring this aspect allows you to develop a solid SEO strategy and compete with your tough competitors. Furthermore, you increase the likelihood of receiving quality leads by incorporating relevant search terms. 


Importance of FAQ Pages for SEO

Well-done frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages are an asset to websites. They not only provide essential information but can also play a key role in search engine optimization (SEO). On the other hand, badly done FAQ pages resemble a poorly curated data dump and can affect SEO negatively.

In this guide, we will go over how FAQs on websites can become a valuable tool in an SEO strategy.

What is an FAQ page?

The FAQ page on a website is where visitors can find answers to commonly asked questions about various products and services. Sometimes, answers to questions that are unrelated to the products or services offered by a business are included in the FAQs. Good FAQ pages can be of great assistance to buyers, often serving as the starting point for some of them.

Why create an FAQ page?

FAQ pages can:

Assist customers and can streamline and shorten their buyer’s journey
Help the customer support team reduce churn time by answering questions related to the business and addressing the most common concerns and doubts of customers
Build a lot of trust signals by extensively covering important information,, such as return policies, terms and conditions, shipping process, and so on, for customers and search engines
Be a great place to build your internal links meaningfully

Are FAQ pages good for SEO?

Done right, FAQ pages can be a solid addition to your SEO strategy. That said, there are good and bad ways to leverage FAQ pages for SEO. Using a keyword tool and answering questions is a very limited approach to the same.

Optimizing the content, finding relevant keywords, addressing the right questions, and designing UX well are all the key ingredients to a good FAQ page. All these factors combined can prove to be very beneficial for the overall SEO of your website.

FAQ Page Examples

Homepage

One of the most frequently seen examples of FAQs is on the homepage of most websites. An FAQ section on the homepage, right before the footer, is a very common practice for websites. It helps websites fill the homepage with informative content about the brand while creating a space for organic internal linking that is effective.

Service/Product Page

Similar to the homepage, FAQs on service or product pages are also very common. Populating these pages with informative content about the specific product or service can help websites guide their customers and reduce customer service requests.

Standalone Blog Post with FAQs

There are many FAQ pages that are made as standalone blog posts. This is a very simple medium that does the job conveniently and effectively for brands. Using different subheadings as questions and answering them is the blog post style. This helps brands properly use keyword clusters on the page, as well as create opportunities to gain backlinks.

FAQs within a blog post

Another tactic is to incorporate FAQs within a blog post. You do not have to create a separate blog post for just the FAQs. You can add the relevant FAQs to existing blogs, and spread them out across many blog posts relevant to the questions.

Dedicated FAQ Page

If your brand has to address a lot of questions in your niche, then having a separate FAQ page dedicated to educating the customers is one of the best ways to go. Having a good UX design that accommodates the many questions and makes them easily accessible is necessary on such FAQ pages. This can help you create a good link-building strategy, as this page can be used for internal links as well as a reference on other on and off-page blogs.

How to create SEO-friendly FAQ pages?

  • Group the most common user queries

The first step towards creating an SEO-friendly FAQ page is to compile all the common queries and issues raised by your customers. While it may sound simple, this step requires a lot of data and brainstorming.

Interact with customer service representatives and frontline employees, who regularly answer the queries, for valuable insights into these questions..

  • Give complete answers to those questions

Keeping the answers short and to-the-point is essential for FAQs. Customers are looking for a quick resolution for their queries, and most would prefer not to read an entire blog post on a single question. It is important to give a complete answer to these questions, so address the main pain points of the query, and link to detailed blogs for answers to these questions on your website if the customer wants to explore more.

  • Format FAQ pages

Format and design your FAQ pages to make them convenient for the users to surf through. Simple practices like drop-down boxes for answers to each question can help your UX design a lot. No user would want to endlessly scroll down a page to find answers to their question. Such pages would significantly increase the bounce rate, and also lose out on leveraging SEO opportunities.

  • Optimize the title tag and meta descriptions

Incorporate topical keywords for each FAQ page in the title tags and meta descriptions. This SEO practice can help search engine algorithms and users understand what your page is about. Meta descriptions can help users understand what they will find on a certain page.

  • Add FAQ Schema

To gain additional real estate on SERPs, you should add an FAQ schema for your FAQ pages. Incorporating structured data can result in your website figuring among the rich snippets on SERPs, and even garner organic traffic from Google Assistant!

FAQs

1) Is an FAQ section a good idea?

Yes, having an FAQ section on your website can help address many customer queries, and can help accelerate their buyer’s journey. This can help in improving the overall user experience on your website, and may also result in increased conversions.

2) What are the benefits of an FAQ page?

There are many benefits of an FAQ page, such as:

  • Building internal links for your website
  • Assisting customers and accelerating their buyer’s journey
  • Empowering trust signals by incorporating the main parts of terms and conditions, return policies, shipping information, and more for customers
  • Reducing the excessive time, resources, and stress for the customer support team by addressing the most common queries and questions of the customers

3) What is the difference between a knowledge base & FAQ?

A knowledge base covers information on everything you would need to know about your business. However, FAQ pages usually answer the most common questions.

To Summarize

Taking the time to properly research the questions your target audience is asking and mapping a relevant response to them via FAQ pages is one of the best ways to improve your UX and enhance SEO. Now that you know all that is needed to create an effective SEO-friendly FAQ page, it is time to build one for yourself and reap its benefits.


Major Google Algorithm Updates

What is the Google Algorithm?

Google’s search algorithm is a complicated system, which they use to rank domains on their search engine based on the user’s query. Along with this algorithm, Google uses more than 200 ranking factors to rank a domain to its SERPs. SEO experts in the industries claim that each year, Google releases thousands of algorithm updates to refine their search results in order to address to user’s queries. If you are a website owner or an SEO person with a curiosity about everything search marketing, this post about Google’s biggest, most impactful & latest search algorithm updates over the years is worth your time. Sit back and read through our timeline of Google algorithm updates

Major Google Algorithm Updates:

November 2021 Broad Core Update

Launch Date: 17 November 2021

Google has announced the November broad core algorithm update on Twitter, sending the SEO world into a frenzy. Here’s the official announcement:

“Later today, we are releasing a broad core update, as we do several times per year. It is called the November 2021 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates is here.”

Read more about November 2021 Broad Core Update

November 2021 Spam Update

Launch Date: 3 November 2021

The ‘November 2021 Spam Update’ is expected to have further enhancements to effectively detect spam in Google Search. Here’s the official announcement:

“As part of our regular work to improve results, we’ve released a spam update to our systems. This November 2021 spam update should be fully rolled out within a week. We encourage sites to follow our best practices for Search

Read more about November 2021 Spam Update

Google Link Spam Algorithm Update

Launch Date: 26 July 2021

On 26 July 2021, Google starts carrying out the “link spam update,” which makes its algorithms more powerful at distinguishing and nullifying link spam.

Read more about Google Link Spam Algorithm Update

December 2020 Core Update

Launch Date: 3 Dec 2020

On 3 Dec 2020, Google officially announced the release of the December 2020 broad core algorithm update. This is the third update in 2020. The previous updates were May 2020 and January 2020 updates.

Read more about Google December 2020 core update

May 2020 Core Update

Launch Date: 4 May 2020

On 4 May 2020, Google officially announced the release of May broad core algorithm update. The May 2020 core update anticipates that it will bring out the most relevant, latest, and local content while searching for information.

Read more about Google May 2020 core update

January 2020 Core Update

Launch Date: 13 January 2020

On 13 January 2020, Google officially announced the release of a January broad core algorithm update. Google announced the January 2020 Core Update after a lot of rumours and chatters surfaced with regards to fluctuations in ranking signals. 

January Core Update confused in content. It states that more frequent and fresh content would stand a better chance of ranking higher on SERPs as compared to old content. 

Read more about Google January 2020 core update

November 2019 Update

Launch Date: 7 November 2019

On 7 November 2019, Google released the November 2019 update which majorly affected domains like Health and maintenance, Food, Travel, Lifestyle and YMYL domains. Post Google’s November update, many webmasters noticed a 40% drop in ranking for their websites. Google claimed that this update is not niche or industry-specific.

SEO experts stated that the search algorithm update that caused it was an aggressive one and comparisons were made with the Penguin Update of 2012. But as usual, Google says you don’t have to fix anything.  

Read more about Google November 2019 update

Read – Local Search Algorithm November 2019 update 

BERT Update

Launch Date: 25 October 2019

On 25 October 2019, Google released one of the most important updates in recent times. This update is called BERT Update. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.

BERT identifies sentences or phrases within web page content, which, although missing individual search keywords, are more relevant to the search query. BERT utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand search terms better. NLP understands and analyzes how we interact as humans in terms of terminology. This way, BERT gets a better grasp of content searched by the user. It is important to note that BERT analyses search queries and not web pages.

Read more about Google BERT Update 

Read – How to Optimize for BERT

Read – Bing says they are using BERT from before Google

September 2019 Update

Launch Date: 24 Septmber 2019

On 24 September 2019, Google’s Liaison Danny Sullivan tweeted that Google would be releasing a new broad core algorithm update which is called as September Broad Core Update. Google did not provide many details about this broad core update

Read more about Google September 2019 Broad Core update

June 2019 Core Update

Launch Date: 3-8 June 2019

On June 2, Google’s Liaison Danny Sullivan tweeted that Google would be releasing a new broad core algorithm update on June 3 which is called as June Core Update. June Core update focused on E.A.T SEO. EAT SEO Stands for Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness SEO. 

Google said that there wouldn’t be any specific ‘fix’ as such once the June 2019 core update runs. One would need to prepare to die (close down the website) if they tried to manipulate the user, link sentiments or the quality of the site to gain good search rankings.

Read more about June 2019 Core Update

Fred Update

Launch Date: 8 March 2017

Google’s Fred was brought out in March 2017 to target sites that featured sub-par and obviously-thin content for the only purpose of generating ad or affiliate revenue. The name was the idea of Google Webmaster and Trends Analyst, Gary Illyes, who joked that any unnamed Google algorithm update would from then on be known as ‘Fred’. The search engine is usually quiet about its algorithm changes and Fred was no different. A study of the after-effects of Fred’s launch showed that low-quality blogs were its number one target.

Google’s aim here was to highlight how serious they were about content quality and relevancy. With Fred, the message was clear – if a site’s content was mediocre in the slightest, its rankings would be hurt. Google makes two to three changes to its algorithm every single day and the name Fred was used as a way to identify any updates centered around content and thus search quality.  

Google Fred recovery steps include going through Google Webmaster Guidelines to improve your site’s chances of being crawled and indexed by the search engine. Carrying ads is not a crime as long as you are not trying to fool Google into thinking a page is about something else when it actually is just an ads page. Instead, provide good-quality, relevant and useful information on such ad pages, making ad revenue generation only a secondary goal. Having more content and fewer ads is also a great idea to navigate this update. 

Possum Update

Launch Date: 1 September 2016

September 2016 saw the release of the Possum Google algorithm update in which local businesses were given priority over others. However, if you shared an address with competitors or businesses that have similar offerings, your rankings or chances of being featured in SERPs could suffer. The closer a user is to your location, the higher the probability that they will know you operate in that area. The most interesting part about Possum is that search phrases which are very similar will generate different results and what one user sees will be different from others. 

For Google Possum recovery, you must track your search rankings from specific, relevant geo-locations. Also try and include close variations of the same search query and diversify your keyword coverage strategy by doing a deep-dive into locally relevant search terms. Make sure that the same, consistent address is specified across all business directories and places on the web.

RankBrain Update

Launch Date: 26 October 2015

RankBrain was rolled out in October 2015 and is nothing but the extension of the Hummingbird. However, it has been hailed as a prominent Google algorithm update as it is the only AI (Artificial Intelligence) add-on that the search engine actually uses to better answer user’s search queries. There are so many different ways a person can ask Google a question and much of it may never have been searched for in that specific way before. Add to this users’ inclination to use voice search and it is crucial that Google learns how to better interpret queries formulated in a conversational and sometimes, colloquial way. 

Although Google’s RankBrain was initially used to process around 15% of all the queries that the search engine encountered, it is now used for almost all of them. RankBrain especially helps Google pinpoint what a query means when there is a degree of ambiguity attached to it; it works across all geographical locations. The more never-encountered-before and unique the query, the more this update comes into play. For e.g., if you were to search for ‘MAC’ on Google, you would see a mix of search results that showed information about both the cosmetics giant as well the electronics manufacturer. 

Google RankBrain recovery involves taking a look at what your competitors are up to. A deeper understanding of all relevant keywords will help you keep your on-page content all-inclusive, relevant and diverse. Additionally, audit your content to check if it sounds natural and not as though it were authored by a machine. Also, include popular phrases that people would use in conversational language to be on the safer side.  

Read more about Google Rankbrain update

Mobile Speed Update

Launch Date: 21 April 2015

The Mobile Speed Google algorithm update or Mobilegeddon was introduced in April 2015. It aimed to place pages that were optimized for mobile devices and loaded quickly on them above those that did not meet these criteria. This was Google’s answer to the fast increasing number of mobile internet users across the globe. Google’s revenue is largely due to paid ads atop organic results and they intended for people to keep clicking on them courtesy an improved mobile user experience.

The Mobilegeddon was the only update about which Google gave out details so that people had time to understand it and take precautionary measures. Those pages/sites that were not mobile-responsive or took too long to load on mobile devices were bumped down to lower positions on SERPs or excluded altogether. 

Google Mobile Speed Update recovery is straightforward – you must pay attention to how your website performs on mobile devices. Using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool will help you test this in a few easy steps. Make sure to have the same version of content on both the desktop and mobile versions of your site. 

Pigeon Update

Launch Date: 24 July 2014

Local search is fast gaining prominence and the Pigeon update, introduced in July 2014, plays a major role in determining website ranking in this regard. It, in fact, helps local and core search algorithms work together to throw locally appropriate search results. While local businesses with a great online presence benefited immensely from it, still others were hit badly, with reports of a 50% fall in rankings in some cases. It also impacted search in Google Maps and deprioritized large, geographically spread out business ventures or chains. 

Users experienced better local search results based on nearness or distance factors. Any initial glitches that were seen at the time of launch of the Google algorithm update were corrected in subsequent versions. At first, local, spammy websites tried using exact-match keyword targeting to fool Google but this was soon tracked and tackled successfully, as was visible with the increasing quality of local search results. Now, both Google SERPs and Google Maps have a similar look and feel courtesy of the Pigeon update. 

Google Pigeon recovery techniques are simple and would serve any business well. Make sure you are registered in local business directories and are giving out the right contact information online, including your name, phone number and address. Also, check out the Google My Business site to create or clean out your business profile and control what users see when they look for you. Finally, make sure your business/office location is optimised and correct on Google Maps by marking what areas you are operational in, the categories you serve, etc. 

Hummingbird Update

Launch Date: 22 August 2013

With the iconic Hummingbird update, Google hoped to read query intent better and provide even more relevant search results. Before the launch of this update, Google would return exactly what you queried without any in-depth information or other helpful resources. This meant that there was a chance that the user would have to visit many sites before finding exactly what they were looking for. Sometimes, they would also have to make more queries to find what they were searching for. For e.g., if you look for ‘Brazil’, Google can now successfully tell if you are searching for the country, the movie or something else. 

Introduced in August 2013, the Google algorithm update relied on the user’s search history, synonyms and LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords, and natural or conversational language processing to get a better grip on user needs. It was all about understanding how users think and what they expect from Google. One of the major breakthroughs of the Hummingbird was that pages that carried highly relevant information for a particular search phrase/query could still hope to rank well for keywords that they were not an exact match for. 

Google Hummingbird recovery steps include broadening your horizons regarding keyword research and targeting not just obvious search terms but also synonyms, LSI keywords and long-tail queries that include who-what-where-how-why questions. The Google Keyword Planner is of huge help in this department. Also, explain a topic as best as you can while including all relevant information that you can think of in a structured way. 

Read more about Google Hummingbird update

Exact Match Domain (EMD) Update

Launch Date: 28 September 2012

In September 2012, the EMD or Exact Match Domain Google update was released. As the name suggests, it was built to target those sites that had an exact-match keyword in their domain name. However, this was not the only criterion for a site’s ranking to take a hit – it also had to be of low authority, engaging in questionable link-building tactics and have thin content that was not a value-add to users. 

What is interesting to note here is that high-quality, useful EMD sites, if hit by the EMD update, recovered due to the nature of the content they carried. The EMD update was launched in retaliation to grey-hat SEO techniques that saw webmasters buy domains with exact-match keywords in their domain names, throw in some poor-quality links and content and rank well on Google’s SERPs. The EMD update was run at regular intervals to distinguish between spammy EMD sites and EMD sites that were genuine and helpful. 

The first and foremost Google EMD recovery measure includes making sure that your site content is something users would actually want to read and feel satisfied after reading. If you are yet to buy a domain name, try avoiding the ones with exact-match keywords in them. Another easy solution is to add filler words prior to or following your exact-match keyword inside the domain name.

Penguin Update

Launch Date: 24 April 2012

The landmark Penguin update is believed to have had origins similar to its predecessor, the Panda, having been named after one of its principal architects. It was introduced in April 2012 by the initial name ‘webspam algorithm update’. It was aimed at reducing the instances of spammy backlinks that were of low-quality and manipulative. Many even consider it to be an extension of the Panda update as it attempted to categorise the various links that websites were garnering. 

Penguin helped the search engine prioritise websites which were linked to by high-authority, trusted sites based solely on merit. When the Google algorithm update first came out, it was estimated that around 3% of websites that featured on Google were affected. Although many versions of it have been rolled out over the years, webmasters who had resorted to spammy backlinking techniques saw either a partial or full dip in rankings and site traffic.

For Google Penguin recovery, webmasters and publishers must stop buying or getting links from sites that have been created for this purpose alone. The same applies for links from sites that are not within your domain or relevant to you. Your focus must be the quality of the links and not how many of them you get. Additionally, always be aware of what sites are linking to you and use the Google Disavow Tool to get rid of suspicious, unnatural links to your site. Keeping a mixed bag of branded, keyword-based and naked anchor text is also important.

Read more about Google Penguin Update

Panda Update

Launch Date: 23 February 2011

Panda was said to have been named after a key Google engineer, Biswanath Panda, who helped develop it. It was another Google algorithm update that rocked the world of internet search when it was introduced in February 2011. It, however, did not officially become part of the search engine’s algorithm until 2016. It was created to address the issue of content farms and the prevalence of sub-par content on various sites. This meant that the search results populated by Google were not very useful either, leading to user outcry. The Panda aimed to single out thin, duplicated, spun content and promote original and impactful content like in-depth analysis, research, etc. 

It has been reported that during the initial development phase of this algorithm, participating human raters of quality were presented with various test documents and told to grade them based on certain parameters. They were asked many questions, including if a site was authoritative, would they trust it with their bank details, etc. They then combined the machine ranking signals with inputs provided by these human volunteers to find a middle ground/wholesome ranking system and improve the quality of their search rankings. 

Google Panda recovery methods include deleting duplicate pages, avoiding targeting the same set of keywords with more than one page, making sure all your pages have optimum-quantity, genuine content which speaks about the page without stuffing keywords in it. Staying away from readymade content manufacturers and making extra sure that your content is not plagiarised are crucial to your site’s success too. 

Read more about Google Panda update

Florida Update

Launch Date: 16 November 2003

Florida was one of the earliest Google updates to dramatically change the way SEO professionals worked. It was introduced in November 2003, allowing Google to come down hard on commercial sites that used questionable and spammy methods to get ahead on Google’s SERPs. This included techniques like keyword stuffing in on-page content, the presence of more than one site under the same brand name, text that was invisible and concealed links. Commercial sites suffered the most, while keywords like ‘jewellery’, ‘hotels’, ‘clothing’, etc. seemed to have been hit the worst. But what one must always remember is that Google does not simply pick on specific industries and works towards tackling fraudulent optimisation techniques instead. 

While some sites’ search rankings dipped due to the Florida update, many others saw a surprising boost in SERP spots. This confirmed that SEO or online search for that matter is a zero-sum game where there are both winners and losers, i.e. where one website loses a top spot in Google’s SERPs, another will take its place. Although nobody knows for sure, many were of the opinion that this update was named so as it targeted Florida-based commercial establishments and their affiliate network.

Florida was the planned end to late-90s grey and black hat SEO techniques, heralding a new age of cleaner methods instead. Although it felt like a hurricane had destroyed everything in its wake, Google Florida recovery measures were far simpler than originally imagined. Most webmasters shifted focus to creating great-quality sites and amazing user experience. They also took control and stopped depending on affiliate networks to draw in most of their revenue. 

In Conclusion

So far, Google has been a 100% successful in reinventing search while both predicting and catering to user behaviour. SEO is not a one-time exercise – it requires you to think on your feet while staying well-informed of the newest Google algorithm updates and other search marketing trends. If you like this post and want us to cover even more useful digital marketing topics, leave us a comment and come back for more! 


A Complete Guide on Google Autocomplete for SEO

The Google search box serves millions of people every second across the globe and has revolutionised the way of searching things on the internet. The autocomplete search is something that is revered in the SEO community and is used in many different and unique ways by digital marketers and SEO professionals across the globe.

Exploring user intent, looking up the most searched for terms, and finding trending keywords are just a few ways Google auto suggest feature helps digital professionals. 

While you may think that Google autocomplete is only meant for basic purposes of exploring the internet, there is much more to it than meets the eye. This comprehensive guide on Google Autocomplete and how it can be leveraged to boost your SEO will show you how big a deal this feature is. Let us dive in.

What Is Google Autocomplete?

Google search autocomplete is a feature designed by Google to make it faster for users to complete their search terms as they type it out. This feature is integrated into almost all places like the quick search box on Android phones, Google homepage, the address bar of Chrome, and much more. A study published by Google highlighted that Google search suggestions save over 200 years’ worth of typing time every single day!

While the primary purpose of Google Autocomplete is to cut down the time spent by users to type their search queries with smart predictions, there are other useful ways to leverage this feature to your advantage.

Google autocomplete also helps businesses in generating content ideas, finding keywords, online reputation management, exploring competitors, and much more. The amount of data-driven tasks one can carry out with Google autocomplete is quite staggering, and it has proven to be one of the most useful tools of the 21st century.

How Google Autocomplete works

Google’s algorithm for its search engine has grown smarter over time with more processing and predictive abilities. It determines its predictions based on the search history of the users coupled with real searches happening worldwide. Then, it shows the most common and trending pages on SERPs based on the characters in the search query along with additional factors such as user location.

  • Do the suggestions differ country-wise? 

In most cases, yes. Google search suggestions “follow” the users based on their location. For instance, if you are in Brazil and you typed “best restaurants in” in the search box, it will provide autocomplete suggestions on nearby areas. The same search term when typed in India would provide completely different autocomplete suggestions.

  • Do Google Autocomplete suggestions differ language-wise?

The autocomplete suggestions also differ based on what language you type in the search box. If you have set a default language in your Google account, you will be shown autocomplete suggestions in that language.

  • Impact of Your Search History on Google Autocomplete Suggestions

If you are making any searches while being logged into your account, Google will remember those search terms when it shows its suggestions.

You can easily identify these suggestions as they have an “X” button right beside them. This is a prediction that is based on your search history, and the remove button helps Google recognise if it was just a one-time search or if it is prevalent to your future search.

  • Google Autocomplete Guidelines

Google search autocomplete suggestions come with some strict guidelines which disallow certain types to be displayed for users. Search terms containing the following material are not shown on autocomplete:

  • Violence or gore
  • Sexually explicit or vulgar terms
  • Hate speech or terms that promote violence
  • Dangerous terms that can lead to life-threatening or harmful situations for humans and animals

How to Use Google Autocomplete for Boosting SEO? 

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is the foundation on which all SEO strategies are built on. Targeting explicit keywords is a practice that has evolved over time, and related ideas and keywords have become equally important to focus on.

Google autocomplete is a good place to start your keyword research. You can use it alongside tools like Google Keyword Planner to gather new content ideas and get an overview of the right keywords to target. You can gather all the popular results from the autocomplete suggestions of your search terms. Then, you can check their monthly search volume, CPC rates, competition, and much more.

Google autocomplete can help you in keyword research by uncovering good quality, popular long-tail search terms. Since autocomplete suggestions consider popularity as one of the key factors, you can find many valuable keyword ideas and suggestions from this feature. 

Google autocomplete holds an undeniable value when it comes to looking up related search terms and generating keyword ideas. It can nudge you in the right direction to help start off your keyword research process. It can even help you in refining your existing SEO strategies by giving you an overview of the latest trends under the targeted keywords. This can help you in updating your existing strategies to generate even better results over time.

2. Define User Intent

To drive organic traffic on your website, it is important that you understand your users’ intent. The messaging, layout, designs, and even media you put on your website should be reflective of the search terms you’re targeting.

Satisfying user intent can help you boost your rankings based on search terms relevant to your page. One way you can achieve this is using Google autocomplete. You can find the most searched for queries under your targeted keywords to understand the totality of user intent. Keywords very often overlap with different types of user intents and without the context of keywords, it would be quite hard to gather what users want.

It is important to satisfy the intent of the users across all stages, and autocomplete can provide you a holistic view to determine these stages. 

3. Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Online Reputation Management is also a significant factor that autocomplete can help you propel on the digital space. Whenever users are searching for a specific brand name, it should show up on the autocomplete suggestion before even the SERP is loaded. This is an indicator that the brand is authoritative or established.

Another factor here is what autocomplete suggestion shows up after your brand name. It needs to be positive. If you are searching “X car dealership” and the autocomplete suggestion finishes it with “under investigation”, it will leave a very negative impact on the user, and they most likely would not visit the business or even their site.

It is imperative that you balance out any negative connotations associated with your brand name so they do not appear on autocomplete suggestions. Here are some ways in which brands can eradicate negative autocomplete suggestions:

  • Taking holistic control over conversations about the brand online to guide Google autocomplete in making the right connections and removing negative associations.
  • Optimizing the social media accounts of the brands and reinforcing the positive conversations to outweigh the negative ones.
  • Regular branding efforts in existing and new online profiles with positive messages and keyword association.
  • Associating positive keywords and anchor texts in the backlinks with the brand name to push positive suggestions out. For instance, a restaurant named “A” can use terms or anchor texts like “A 3-star restaurant” or “A best reviews”.

Online Reputation Management is an imperative factor for SEO and having users see only positive autocomplete suggestions can have a great impact on your site’s traffic. Make sure to associate your brand with positive words and phrases so Google autocomplete does not display the negative ones and drives users away with negative impressions.

4. Finding keywords for Local SEO

Local SEO plays a huge role for location-based businesses and brands. And autocomplete suggestions play a huge role in driving traffic to local searches.

For instance, if you are looking for a restaurant in Mumbai, autocomplete would consider search factors like area name, zip code, neighborhoods, and city name to rank the results. Google autocomplete will instantly let you know what type of local searches are happening for restaurants in Mumbai.

Once you look up the results for this search term, you will see which restaurants have their local SEO optimized properly to show up on the first page. Autocomplete will also show suggestions of landmarks or neighborhoods which are linked to the search query to give you keyword ideas.

It might seem easy to guess the most common local keywords by associating the city name with your service. But Google autocomplete is a great resource to find some more which can help you rank even higher for local search queries.

5. Creating a User-Friendly Website

An estimated 2.14 billion people will shop online in 2021. Ecommerce has become the biggest attraction for customers, and it will only grow in the coming years. And with an abundant amount of competition online, it is important for businesses to use every avenue to get ahead.

Google autocomplete can help you find the most trending and popular search terms to target in your SEO strategy. But you also have to ensure that your website is user-friendly and offers good value to the visitors. For instance, if your eCommerce site sells travel accessories, it is crucial to make it as accessible and easy to navigate as possible.

Google autocomplete can help you in refining your website in the following ways:

  • Discover the most popular categories to ensure the landing pages for those categories are up to date and responsive.
  • Find the most popular brands for the products you are selling. If you are an online purchase website for men’s shoes, then Google autocomplete can help you find the most popular brand in the category to display at the top of your search result to attract more visitors.

6. Content Ideas

While Google autocomplete gives great suggestions for finding long-tail keywords and terms, it is also a great source for discovering FAQs and related search queries from users. This can prove to be an essential tool for discovering new content ideas for your website.

Since autocomplete suggestions are popular, creating content on those suggestions can bring in high organic traffic to your website. You can use autocomplete suggestions to flood your website’s FAQs page with good quality content for the most searched queries on the search engine.

Time to Put Google Autocomplete to Work!

Google autocomplete can prove to be a great asset for SEO professionals, digital marketers, and all businesses looking to refine their website’s SEO and rankings. Now that you know all that you can do with this tool, it is time to put in some work to leverage it to your full advantage. Get in touch with an established SEO company like Infidigit to uncover the advantages of this amazing feature and reap great


On Page SEO: Top 20 On-Page SEO Techniques to Drive Traffic

SEO strategies are focused on ranking higher in search engines. One of these techniques is on-page SEO optimization. SEO experts know how important it is to prioritise on-page SEO and keep it updated with the recent search engine algorithms. Focusing only on including keywords and off-page SEO does not fetch good results if you don’t pay attention to on-page SEO.

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO includes all technical activities carried out on your website to optimize its performance. This can include optimizing the metadata on your pages, improving meta titles and descriptions, adding internal links, and much more.

There are many on-page SEO techniques that come into play to make this possible. All these techniques help websites in gaining better visibility to search engine algorithms and ensure your website works at an ideal functionality. Some of these techniques include:

  • Image optimization for faster page loading speeds
  • Internal link building for better display of website structure to Google’s algorithms
  • Technical SEO

Why On-page SEO is Important

On-page SEO helps search engines understand your website and identify if it’s relevant to users’ searches and queries. Search engines have become more sophisticated over the years which has increased the need to focus on content relevancy in SERPs.

Google’s algorithm focuses on understanding what users are searching for and delivering the most relevant results to the user searches. Adapting according to these ensures that search engines rank you higher on SERPs. You can do this by ensuring that your website and its content are optimised according to the latest algorithm updates and focus on users needs.

How to create SEO content

Before we get into the SEO technicalities and optimising keywords, remember that content is still the king. As mentioned before, Google and other search engines pay a lot of attention to the content and thus your focus should be on creating amazing content that people would want to read. To create SEO content, you need to focus on these four things along with your keywords. 

1. Relevant content

Relevancy is unarguably the most crucial part of SEO content. Aligning your content with your audience’s search queries increases your chances of getting noticed. Google understands search intent and thus the type of content you put, the format you choose matters a lot in SEO. 

2. Unique Content

Serving what the user is looking for is crucial for search engines. If your content is not bringing something new to the table, you will fail to attract an audience and search engines. 

3. In-depth content

When someone searches on the web, they look for complete and useful information. If your content fails to deliver in-depth information on the topic, they most likely wander to some other site for the information. Good content covers all the aspects of the topic and that is what the search engines also look for.

4. Clarity

Clarity in the content is another important trait of good content creation. A clearly designed and written piece attracts the readers because they can quickly skim through it. When creating content for your website use bullets, subheadings, images, easy to understand language, and short sentences.

How to optimize your content 

Creating content that readers and search engines are looking for is the hardest part of SEO. After that, all that’s left to do is to optimize the technical details on your website like the URLs and meta tags, etc. Here are a few points on which you should keep a checklist for:

  • Including keywords in the title. This is the most conventional and important SEO technique. Keep your title simple, natural, use conjunctions, and ensure it makes sense. If your keyword does not fit in the title, use a close variant of the keyword.
  • Use descriptive and short URLs because this helps the readers to understand what the page is about. You can optimize your URL by adding target keywords in the URL slug and informing your visitors about your page. 
  • Always optimize your title tag and create short titles. You can use your post title too for your title tag. 
  • compelling meta description is important for enticing readers and gaining more clicks even though they don’t contribute to ranking much. You should use this space to expand your title tag, show your intent and include keywords
  • Optimizing images is the next important step. Always name your images appropriately and use descriptive alt texts. Compress your images so that they load faster. 
  • Link relevant external and internal links to help the visitors with everything they might be interested in or are looking for. Don’t overdo it and link anything just anywhere. Only link resources that make sense to your page or product or service.

Advanced on-page optimization techniques 

Advanced on-page SEO optimization helps you to push things higher. Here are a few advanced on-page SEO techniques that you can use. 

Check out this video to find out the Top 13 On-page SEO Techniques

 

 

1. Featured snippets

Featured snippets are a type of search engine result that appears at the top of the search results. The snippet answers the queries and the question with a short excerpt from the top-ranking articles. 

Snippets can help you get to the top of the search results. Look for snippets of the same keyword and optimise your content for keywords and style that you see is followed by top-ranking pages. Also, check how your competitors are addressing the queries and how they have answered the query. 

2. Get rich snippets with schema markups 

Additional information below the title and URLs are called rich snippets like ratings and other useful information. Google pulls this information or the data from the schema markup page. It is basically a code, a semantic vocabulary that is placed on the website from which the search engines pull informative results for users.

3. Improve the relevance of the topic

We have stressed a lot the importance of relevance in links and content. It is important to note that Google measures a page based on the information it provides to its users. So, your content should be comprehensive, relevant and provide extra information that the user might need. 

You can also check why are you not ranking on search engines by comparing relevant keywords and analysis using the: 

‘Also talk about’ report: This shows phrases and keywords that are frequently mentioned in the top 100 pages relevant to your niche. 

Running a TF-IDF analysis: Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency or TF-IDF is a statistical measure of the relative importance of a word or phrase in a document. You can use this to compare how your top-ranking competitors use the keywords and what they are doing differently.

Top On-Page SEO Factors That Affect Webpage Ranking

When it comes to offering a seamless and memorable experience to users on your site, certain on-page SEO factors are key. The following list will help you be at the top of your on-page SEO game:

 

Top 10 On-page SEO Techniques

 
 

 

  • Site Speed

We live in an age of instant gratification and the same applies to websites. Recent articles indicate that even a second’s delay in loading a webpage can lead to a fall in conversions by 7%. You can check your website’s perf


What is Technical SEO – 15 Major Technical SEO Checklist

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a topic that often comes up when talking about websites. Search engines have their own intrinsically designed algorithms that they use to determine the quality of a website and how to rank it. 

While there are many elements to SEO, technical SEO is where the groundwork is laid for your website for these algorithms. Technical SEO, in simple terms, is optimizing technical elements of a website and server optimizations, which helps the search engines to crawl your website and index it more efficiently. So, what does technical SEO entail? Let’s find out.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is used to better a website’s infrastructure so that search engine bots can crawl and index the pages on your website more effectively.

Technical SEO is a process that involves auditing and optimizing technical elements of a website so that it has better chances of ranking higher on SERPs. Improving the efficiency of your website’s performance for search engines across the board requires high technical SEO skills.

The main elements of having a solid technical SEO for a website include improving page load time, making it easier to crawl for search engines, and providing search engine algorithms with enough information about your website to accurately index it. Technical SEO comes under on-page SEO. Hence, it primarily focuses on improving various elements on your website that can improve its image in the eyes of search engines.

Why is Technical SEO Important? 

You can create a very high-quality website with the best content, and it will still not rank if your technical SEO is not up to the mark. Why? Search engine algorithms should be able to find your pages in order to crawl them, and understand the content in order to index them for the right search queries. 

Simply put, technical SEO conveys to search engines what your pages are about. This includes providing information about content, internal and external links, metadata, image descriptions, and much more. This is just scratching the surface. There are many more elements such as mobile optimization, duplicate content, page loading speeds, and a multitude of other factors that go into technical SEO.

This does not mean that you have to perfect your website’s technical SEO to rank. But having it optimized makes the job of search engines easier, and gets you higher ranking on SERPs.

Why should you optimise your site technically? 

It is important to keep your site technically optimized for search engines and visitors alike.

Search engines strive to provide the users with the best results for their search queries. This is why Google’s bots crawl through all your web pages and evaluate them on various factors. Technical factors in this process include page loading speed, understanding of the content, structured data, and much more. This helps search engines get a proper picture of what your webpage is about.

Similarly, technical SEO also plays a huge role in user experience. A fast website with reliable navigation and easy to use will keep the attention of the visitors. Having a rigid technical foundation for your website can significantly improve your website’s user experience.

 

 

Top 15 Advance Technical SEO Checklist

It is not uncommon to feel overpowered by the sheer number of things you must do to optimize your site. Simply peruse the following technical SEO audit checklist to enhance user experience on your site and get it to rank better in Google’s organic search results. Here is the list of top 15 technical SEO checklist you need to implement to make your website SEO friendly:

You could also contact us for Technical SEO Audit Services

  • HTTPS Version – A secure site is everything

Until 2014, online shopping or e-commerce websites were the only ones to employ SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) software for a safe and secure environment that facilitated transactions. However, in 2014, Google announced that all websites would have to adopt the technology if they wanted a higher organic search ranking on its SERPs and thus it began one of the most important Google ranking factors. In 2018, it began displaying the ‘not secure’ tag for the websites which did not follow its mandate and still had the ‘http://’ tag in their URLs. To prevent this from happening, all you have to do as a website owner is to ensure that your website has an SSL certificate installed. This will create a secure and encrypted connection between your web server and a browser, thereby displaying the ‘https://’ tag instead.  Here is a video from Google Chrome Developer on why HTTPS is important for your website

 

 

  • Mobile-Friendly Website

In 2018, Google announced that it was going mobile-first for indexing sites. This means that the search engine looks at web-pages from a mobile device (be it a smartphone or tablet) perspective and assesses how responsive it is. You can always see how you measure up in this category by analyzing your Google Search Console data. Remember that your mobile site should have the same content as its desktop counterpart. Doing away with intrusive pop-ups is also another important optimization measure.

Mobile Friendly Web Page
  • Implement Structured Data Markup

Structured data mark-up helps search engines understand and read your web-page better, for e.g. whether your content is a recipe, book, a how-to tutorial, etc. Simply use the Structured Data Markup Helper by Google to set it up and then test it using its Structured Data Testing Tool. But before you do any of that, remember to visit schema.org and understand which schema is appropriate for your site content and assign them to various URLs. Doing this will help you get visually enhanced rich results on Google’s SERPs, something that will catch the attention of more users.  Here is what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say on Implementation of Structured Data Markup

 

 

  • Site Speed Matters

Although Google has always considered desktop site speed an important ranking factor, in 2018, it announced that the speed at which your mobile site loads is also top ranking priority. Additionally, having a slow site can lead to customers quickly losing interest in knowing more about you or shopping on your site, leading to a high bounce rate. Although you can simply use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see how you fare in this category, you can also use a few tactics to help speed things up. These include choosing a landing page redirect that best works for you (temporary redirect through a 302 status code, a permanent redirect through a 301 status code, JavaScript redirects, etc.), having a caching arrangement in place, employing a fast hosting and DNS (domain name system) provider, using tools like GZIP to compress pages, having responsive images which user vector formats, etc.  

  • Optimize Your Crawl Budget

 

crawl budget is the number of times Google bot visits your site during a specific period to crawl and index it. As a website owner, you must ensure that no crawl cycle/unit of your crawl budget ever goes to waste. Websites employ a standard called robots.txt to talk to search engine crawlers. You must go through your site’s robots.txt file and see that it does not unnecessarily block out any critical resources (like those of JavaScript for e.g.). If it does, then your site will be incompletely crawled. Making sure that there are no orphan pages, i.e. those pages that are not connected to any others on your site is also mandatory. Keeping pages about three clicks away from the homepage, i.e. having a shallow click depth, keeping your links contextual and interlinking to pages with related content, and using keywords in the anchor text of internal links are other signs Google watches out for while ranking your site. Here is a video from Google’s Matt Cutts to understand more about Crawling the website

 

 

  • Optimum XML sitemap

An XML sitemap consists of useful information about your site, including the latest changes made to a page’s content, how important it is in comparison to other pages inside your site, etc. As the name suggests, an XML sitemap gives a web crawler a blueprint of your site and tells it how to navigate it. While you can use a sitemap generator to create one for your site, is also important that you submit your XML sitemap in the Google Search Console so that it can crawl and index it properly. Make sure to remove blocked URLs, redirects that are not necessary and pages with no SEO value like author bios, privacy policies, etc., take care of broken pages, and not use any long redirects. You can use a W3C validator to check for errors in coding.

 
  • AMP Implementation

 

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a special, bare-bones version of HTML used to boost the speed and functionality of a mobile website. AMP works by deactivating scripts, forms, comments and the likes. If used correctly, AMP can inflate your CTR (click-through rate) and the number of back-links to your site. Google even displays AMP pages in important search result carousels, leading to increased user attention. However, remember that AMP is not a substitute for a mobile-friendly site.

 

AMP Pages
  • Avoid 404 Pages

If a page does not exist anymore or if a URL was modified by you, a 404 status code is your best bet. If you are using WordPress or a similar content publishing platform, ensure that your 404 page is search engine optimised by having a structure similar to your site, giving users options of other similar pages they can visit instead, and making it easy to navigate back to where they came from, etc. This way, you will make it easier for a web crawler to index and crawl your site while moving through it minus the confusion. 

404 Error Pages
 
  • Canonicalization

 

Duplicate site content is a big no-no when it comes to maintaining good site hygiene. A canonical URL signals to Google which version of a web-page it must crawl and index. Simply using a rel=”canonical” command in your page code will help you achieve this. It is recommended that you specify a preferred canonical URL for all the pages of your site. You can also prevent your CMS (content management system like WordPress) from publishing many versions of the same content to ensure there is no duplication in the first place. Here is the what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say about Canonical

 

Canonical URL

 

Read more about Duplicate content

 Noindex Tag and Category Pages 

Adding a ‘noindex’ tag to a page will instruct search engines to stop indexing and tracking the content and links on it. This is often used by developers to direct Google crawlers to their more important and prioritized pages. Thus, while working on enhancing different technical SEO factors, this tag can be put on archive or category pages. 

  • Name your preferred domain

 

A site can be accessed by typing in either https://www.abc.com or https://abc.com (sans the www). While users may do this on a whim, without giving it much thought, it might confuse search engines and lead to indexing and page rank issues. Hence, you must indicate to Google the version you prefer. Note that there is no advantage of choosing one over the other but once you make a decision about your preferred domain name, you must stick to it, else there will be problems during site migration using a 301 redirect. To set a preferred domain name with Google, register with Google Webmaster Tools, validate all versions of your site, and then set the preferred one under ‘Site Settings.

  • Breadcrumb Menus

Breadcrumbs are an essential architectural part of the technical SEO checklist. Also known as a “breadcrumb trail”, it is a type of navigation that discloses the location of the user. It is a form of website navigation that vastly improves the orientational awareness of a visitor. Breadcrumbs clearly show the website hierarchy and point out where one user currently is.

It also lessens the number of steps a user has to take when required to go back to the homepage, a separate section, or a higher-level page. Breadcrumbs are generally used by those websites that have various sections and demand a logical structure. As a result, it serves as a great recommendation for e-commerce websites. 

  • JavaScript 

A part of the technical SEO basics aims to make JavaScript-heavy websites search-friendly. It is undertaken by an SEO agency to make the respective websites noticeable and higher rank in search engines. Google tools like the Mobile-Friendly Test, URL Inspection Tool inside Google Search Consoleand the Rich Results Test are essential for troubleshooting JavaScript SEO issues. JavaScript web apps process occurs in three main phases: crawling, rendering, indexing.

  • Pagination

It is a process in which content is divided across a series of pages. Pagination, a crucial aspect of technical SEO, is used to segregate a list of products or articles into a consumable format. News publishers, ecommerce, blogs, forums, are the type of websites where pagination is used.

Duplicate content issues could be encountered while using pagination. To avoid such instances and integrate the links as well as page rank to the main page, one can make use of rel=“next” and rel=“prev” links. It is done to inform search engines that the succeeding pages are a continuation of the main page. After finding the respective links in the code, Google will recognise the main page and will use it for indexing purposes.

  • Avoid duplicate or thin content

Thin content is one of the dominating factors in understanding what technical SEO is. It can be discovered by the ranking signals that are uncovered from the data sent by Google. To avoid instances of thin content, websites are recommended to have higher quality content written by the experts instead of using mass-produced content. 

Duplicate content may be removed from the downloaded HTML before it is sent for rendering. App shell models, lesser content and code may be shown in the HTML response. The same visible code on multiple websites leads to duplicate pages which may not immediately go to rendering. Eventually, with time the concern should settle itself. Although with newer websites, it could get problematic. At this juncture, self-referencing canonical link elements help prevent duplicate content issues and indicate the original page or page one that we would like to rank in the search engines.

Extra Technical SEO Tips

  • Check Your Site for Dead Links 

Do You Need Well crafted SEO Package for Your Website?

  • EXCLUSIVE SEO SERVICES: If you see carefully you will find packages are narrowed down according to the geographical location, as Local, Global SEO, and E-commerce SEO, depending on your target audience. Find your package that synergizes with your corporate needs.
  • LOCAL NICHE: Choose an SEO package to localize your services and reach the visitors near you.
  • E-COMMERCE SEO PACKAGE: Opt this package if you want to target multiple and highly competitive keywords.
  • ANALYZE AND ASSESS: You can analyze the details as specified in each list, measure, and value each plan that can help you make better decisions. It will become easy for you to compare with competitors and comprehend the expected outcome. Accordingly, you can choose either a monthly or yearly package scheme.
  • ACHIEVABLE RESULTS: Our SEO plans are guaranteed and result achievable. So whatever plan you choose you will see the results coming up. Our services will go beyond first-page ranking to give your website traffic, leads, and clicks.
  • GOOGLE COMPLIANT: Our strategies are Panda and Penguin compliant, strictly adhering to the Google rules. We follow a standardized approach and the latest guidelines to ensure there is no adverse impact on the website UI. Our process involves identifying your business problem areas and work closely with you to fix them.
  • SUSTAINABLE EFFORTS: SEO is a sustainable effort as it takes at least six months to one year to start getting results. So it requires continuing efforts and patience.

Why and How to Link Build – Its Relevancy and Value in SEO?

No business can run successfully without quality connections and creating networks with like-minded enthusiasts.

Networking helps push up your business. It is the same thing in the digital marketing setup, as in it we forge link building. It means creating links between the websites, whether it is with a third party or internally. You create links to boost visibility and attract visitors to your website, whether your strategies are online or offline.

Link building is a popular way to gain visibility and increase popularity. If your website is popular, it gains authority, and people will admire your content and share it. When you have created a link to your business page with the other page, then you expect to receive traffic from both websites. It is a smart way to rank your website and which only can smart SEO man offers.

What is a Link Building?

It is a way to gain hyperlinks from other websites into your own. It is a quick way to navigate the website and read the content.

Google and other search engines utilize the process of hyperlinks to make the web crawl on the internet.

Though for a user, link building is a simple thing, however, if you ask any SEO expert and you will know how much hard goes into creating links. And if you have gained the mastery of link building, it can give you an edge over others. It is a smart thing to do, especially if you are running your blog, working on content.

How to Create a Link?

This small guide will help you in knowing the titbits of link creating.

Start with creating a link tag: It is also known as an anchor tag. It opens the link tag and informs search engines about the link to another but similar content.

Establish a link referral location: There is a hyperlink referral known as “href” known as hyperlink referral.

And whatever text you add in the quotation is the URL to which the link intends for redirecting. You might also see something that begins with a # sign. These are local links that redirect you to another part of the webpage.

Anchor Text: It is a text that the users see on the page and on which they require to click if they need to open the link. Format your word in a way that it gets instantly visible, and you can click it.

Closing of the link tags: Search engines come to know that now it is an end of the link tag, and there is nothing else.

How Link building is beneficial in SEO?

As explained about link building is a decisive plan that increases the visibility, ranking, and popularity of the website.

As soon as your business gained popularity, people will start admiring your content and increase its popularity. As soon you link your business page to another page, you will start getting traffic from both.

So let us get the gist of the benefits of link building

  • Create your brand image
  • Build a relationship
  • Give the referral traffic and leads
What are Link building and link earning?

Before you start building the links, you must be aware of the link earning methodologies. And, for this, you need something of value.

You create links to specialize the resources like blog, tool, research study, graphic, or a post. Sometimes you have all these aspects on your website already present, but on other occasions, you need to create these resources to build links.

It means that now you are ready to earn the links. It is not easy to get the links of the web pages that are of the least value or no value at all. But when you have something of value and worthy of sharing, link building gets much easy. So quality content is a must for the link building strategy.

SEO requires the combined efforts of both the optimizers and owners, and that includes link building. It is essential to write more and more authentic and original content and which is also valuable and meaningful.

When life is not so easy, and stakes are high, it is the link building that counts and helps you. So do not wait for anything, so set the ball rolling for the worthy link building.

Who we are?

We are one of the leading SEO companies in Australia (AdelaideSydneyMelbourneBrisbaneCanberraPerth) to serve the corporate and non-corporate in their digital building initiative. We have a team of SEO experts who have many years of expertise in SEO and can analyze the Google algorithm and change the rules to develop strategies that are beneficial to you and your business.

Search Engine needs consistent efforts to get the results, and our experts do it with tenacity. We will give you weekly reports that make you aware of what is going on. We will analyze our functioning and will change the strategy if we found something not right.

Contact us if you are a start-up or already in the business for a long, we will have your website get an edge over others.


Reasons why website is not getting ranked and what are its key Metrics?

You have developed your website for any purpose; it is either for promotion or generating business and it is running fine. But one fine day, you see the website traffic started plummeting. And you are not aware why it has happened and why the traffic dropped suddenly?

People visit websites to gain visitors, but these visits can mean differently for different people. It means to earn and for some to gain publicity, but ultimately you need a ranking of your website and taps and eyes on it. But when the website fails to get traffic or is reduced, why it happens, we must understand the reasons?

And finding it is not only a work of SEO professional but also yours. We at SEO Service Agency offer our bespoke SEO services to the website while giving strategic inputs and analyzing website traffic.

Finding the traffic is one thing but finding the right traffic is another thing. We have to find the right traffic and that too at the right time.

The catch is Strategy + Right Content with the Right Keywords.

Let us come to find out the reasons why traffic to the website falls.

Reason:

Find out whether the keywords you are using are still relevant?

If your website is running for many years, you must find out whether the keywords you are using still have importance and can gain visitors or not?

With time things get old, and the strategy applicable at one time or occasion might not be useful for anyone the second time. It is also possible that people find different variations of the same question but cannot find an answer or its solution.

As Google has also improved a lot that includes language comprehension ability, they can type in any natural language to get at the result. It is easy to get ranking if you keep things simple and write in easy language.

Recently Google has also changed its concept, as instead of depending on only a few keywords, websites are getting ranked on complete sentences that are more natural. Analyze the keywords and keyword phrases, and if you find you are using the old keywords change your strategy.

Solution:

Find Key Metrics to measure the efficacy of the SEO Campaign.

Make a solid keyword plan that you would like your website to appear on Google. Focus is on keywords that have transactional intent for our clients. That means look at keywords that can drive the business KPIs ahead, whether it is regarding sales, leads, or inquiries.

During the SEO campaign, you can see an increase in the number of targeted keywords. If you have a new website, do not use highly competitive keywords.

Reason:

There is a duplicity in the content on your website.

Google does not allow any duplicate content to appear on the website, and if published, all your SEO efforts will get wasted. And you would never want to get it to go in wane. If there is duplicate content, the page will get a mediocre ranking.

Solution:

Write unique quality content related to your business services or products.

Reason:

Missing Links

Yet another reason for your search ranking and traffic to get reduced is that you have lost links. Find your website for lost links in the last 90 days using tools like Cognitive SEOMajestic, or Ahrefs.

What are the questions that you should ask about the lost link?

  • Is there a drop in the website linking?
  • Are the links lost located on the same pages of your website which Google dropped in the ranking?
  • Is there any reduction in inbound links that have reduced their ranks?

Solution:

In case your links are lost or broken, you will have to find the reason from where the links are coming and whether broken? You can then replace, remove or retain them. Check each link individually and get to the next steps.

Reason:

Broken Redirects

If you have migrated the website to a new server or made any changes on the website, you will see the drop in ranking till you have an adequate 301 redirect plan. These broken redirects can create errors like 404s if you are pointing the same in the wrong place. It is very menacing for the SEO professional as there are no ways to find the issues and whether the links are working or not.

An audit tool can only find on-site URLs, and it would not try to crawl your old URLs. At this point, you cannot find any old URLs in the Google index, so there would not any broken links showing in the search results.

If you are not testing the redirects, you will have no idea whether these are in place.

Solution:

Whenever it is possible, avoid changing the URL structure. The easy way to prevent redirect is to avoid forming the redirects.

Generate proper URLs from the very beginning so that you do not have to optimize URLs.

Avoid changing URLs unless required.

Reason:

Penalty by Google

If you witness any reduction in your website rankings, it means that your website is on the Google radar.

Google imposes either manual actions or automatic. If your website is getting ranked on other search engines, this means Google has penalized your website.

Whether the penalty imposed is manual or automatic, fix the issue and get it removed. Check the notifications in Google Search Console.

Solution:

Check the warnings in the message menu in the Manual Actions section. Here you can see a list of instances where a Google employee has found that pages in your website are not in compliance with the guidelines.

The other most obvious reason is algorithm changes. Google is seeking different ways to improve different strategies and results by making algorithm changes, which causes an impact on the rankings.

So SEO professionals should adopt impactful marketing and traffic strategy and keep uprising themselves with the latest Google updates. And there are many other issues stiff competition, internal navigation, competitor’s improvements, etc.

Let’s make a difference in our work by getting the high quality and best strategies with the SEO Services. And we will make it possible for you.

Who We Are

We are SEO and digital marketing professional acumen who knows and understand the minutest things about your website. Since we started our operations in 2013, we have achieved different targets, giving your websites an edge over the competitors. We adopt strategies that are good for your business, ensure good ranking and increase your credibility.

It is seen companies prefer to hire companies as they are more trustworthy.

So if you hire an agency, you can establish yourself and lay a strong foundation to realize your marketing goals.

If you also want to see your website gets ranked and retain the position in Google, talk to our experts. We will suggest what is best for you. We offer you services that ensure a higher degree of expertise, knowledge, strategies, and time.

To contact us, call us at +61420800213 or email us at vishal@seoserviceagency.com.au.

We invite you to visit our website, SEO Services Agency.


What is the Impact of Blockchain on SEO and Digital Marketing?

Many of you must have heard of Blockchain, a concept that has disrupted the latest technologies to incorporate that is more inclusive and inductive. It changed the corporate landscape to form secure and trustworthy transactions of finance, and a comprehensive range of data and documents. The technology is not very old but is now successfully making it sway in financial, education, health, travel, transportation, logistics, and other fields.

Whenever we develop a website or mobile application in any technology, we need it to be search engine optimized (SEO), for gaining ranking in Google Search Engine.

We at SEO Services Agency will take a step further in the technology stream to adopt the strategies that mean business and success for you.

Now the question here is what blockchain means for the Search Engine Optimizer?
Is there any connection between the blockchain and SEO?

At the onset, you will say No!

This is a ridiculous question as Blockchain is a technical thing, a program while SEO is a part of digital marketing. But Blockchain does impact SEO, as both are indirectly related, a strong indirect relation that should not get broken.

First, we will try to explain how the Blockchain will impact the Search Engine Marketer

In the digital marketing process, Google, Facebook, and other social media channels connect websites with advertisers.

Google offers scope to the advertisers to run their advertisements on websites via the Google Display Network. This gigantic search engine acts as a mediator between the advertisers and website owners generating trust between the two. And with the entry of blockchain, the trust deepens advocating guaranteed authenticity.

Advertisers are ensured that the website owner charges only for genuine clicks.

Blockchain also reduces the chances of online fraud and offers transparency for the stakeholders and whosoever are involved in a transaction without displaying personal details.

Now many companies like the Interactive Advertising Bureau, DMA, and Microsoft are operating on the blockchain.

  • Blockchain removes the need for a middleman
  • It confirms the authenticity of each user
  • Validate the agreement between websites and advertisers
  • Ensure that the advertiser is only getting charged for actual click-through
  • Decrease all the chances of financial fraud that can occur on advertisers
  • Verify that advertisements are getting genuine views and not bots
Impact on Search Engine Optimization

As companies continue to adopt blockchain, they will integrate it into their websites.

Website developers and SEOs will try to get many benefits through each transaction that will happen through blockchain.

Though SEOs might have to face technical issues like compatibility this they can sort with the help of developers by creating a different content management system and offering website platforms. The work has already gained momentum on Schema Markup for blockchain certificates and user ID profiles.

There Are Transparency and Accountability

When there is transparency, there is naturally trust.

With blockchain technology transparency is ensured as the advertisers and website owners are now aware that the transaction will be secure and they will get genuine visitors. This results in the gain of visitors and naturally more traffic to the website.

Several cases have come to light when customers are cheated with counterfeit products as part of internet sales. But with blockchain, this scenario can change.

As it is not possible to modify its ledger system, customers can easily check and verify the originality of a product and its features.

Search engines access blockchain records to find whether the merchants are legitimate? They then use this data to index such companies. This is important as e-commerce is increasing.

Ease of Business through advertisements and search marketing

Blockchain technology is impacting search marketing by disrupting the way payments are facilitated. The businesses will help blockchain-powered ad buyers to make use of smart contracts, and make the transactions more seamless and safe. Financial transactions are conducted in a safe environment, and this is all thanks to the power of blockchain.

Till today we cannot deny the blockchain is at the revolutionary stage yet there is very little study to derive the direct correlation between blockchain and digital marketing initiatives. There is no doubt that blockchain will give a lot of impetus to marketing efforts, but there is also a concern of threat in data portability and user control.

Studies in industries are required to make the assessment of the direct impact and perform much required descriptive and qualitative research of varied blockchain-based advertising systems.

While currently, businesses might not easily understand the blockchain technology concept and consumers. Yet a time is not far when businesses will start adopting this technology and creates an incredible impact on the whole game of SEO.

Who We Are

We at SEO services are a step ahead in the industry serving the clients with our digital marketing and SEO strategies and fulfilling their dreams. We adopt the strategies that now make your business grow but also built your credibility and respect in the industry.

In one of the blogs, Neil Patel refers to the heap of SEO companies as ants who are after one cube of sugar. But what does that mean to you, a search for a good company that would make a good partner in your business venture? You can reach Google’s top pages, generate quality traffic and drive sales.

It is also a fact that only getting on top does not get you results. You need traffic, leads, and sales, and returns on your SEO investment, and this is all you can get from one.

We adopt a balanced holistic strategy that means a process that ensures regular traffic, and revenue and of course on top of the Google Search Engine.

If you want to know more about us or want to seek any queries you can contact us at +61420800213 or email us at vishal@seoserviceagency.com.au.

We invite you to visit our website, SEO Services Agency.



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