Category: SEO News and Information

We have long known that search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! have moved beyond the single keyword. Semantic search has been part of the dialogue for quite a while now. But what does that mean for good SEO page content? Well, it means good content got more complicated, yet still logical.

Google has said, for years, that we should write for the users, not the search engines. At the beginning (15+ years ago), that was difficult. When search engines rewarded keyword stuffing and single-term focused page content, they put good SEO in direct opposition to quality writing. With semantic search, that changed.

Write Naturally

When we speak about a topic, we rarely use the same word too repetitively. For most topics there are multiple ways to refer to the subjects, and we tend to pepper our speech with these variations. When writing for almost anything other than SEO, our natural tendency is to also vary the way we reference ideas, items, or people. This same approach is critical for creating content on the web site; it reads better and is better for organic search.

If you are not sure where to start, think back to how we learned to write papers in grammar school. We started with an outline, and worked our way to an essay or report by working through the elements of the outline. For the search engines, a page on your website is structured in exactly the same way.

Logical Content Structure

Every page starts with an overarching topic. This topic can then be divided into subtopics that help explain or elaborate on the overall content theme.

In school, we created outlines. In HTML structure, we use Title and H tags.

1. Title:   Only 1. Main theme, content area
2. <h1>:  Only 1. Different words, same theme as Title
   1. <h2>: sub header
   2. <h2>: sub header
      1. <h3>: sub header
      2. <h3>: sub header
   3. <h2>: sub header
      1. <h3>:sub header
      2. <h3>: sub header
         1. <h4>: sub header

The html Title and H tags are not something you see as a reader, but you do see the content. These tags “wrap” the content so the search engines can see the structure of your page.

For each H tag header or subheader, we write content directly related to the topic. A small paragraph can be sufficient, but there should be enough content to make your point.

What if a single subheader has a lot of content unto itself? This is not uncommon, and usually indicates that you have another theme to explore. In these cases, you write a small bit of content for this page, and link to a new page that elaborates on the sub-topic as it’s main theme.

As an example, if your content is about employee productivity, many of the subtopics are worthy of their own pages. Worker productivity increases with training or improved morale. Certainly these are proper subtopics to productivity as well as worthy of their own pages.

So, how much subtopic material should be on this page? This is where your qualitative assessment must come into play. As a reader, if you begin to wonder if the topic is about productivity or about employee morale, then you’ve diluted the primary topic too much with subtopic content. There is no magic formula, so use your judgement or ask others to review the article.

Creating Quality Content

You have your outline, and you’ve created decent blocks of content, but you’re not done yet. The search engines are grading your content on several levels, and one of them is quality of writing.

No one is looking for Pulitzer level writing, but you have to have the basics covered. Google is able to assess spelling and grammar in page content. While we can’t say how much weight is given, and how “wrong” it can be before it’s a problem, Google has indicated that the quality of the writing is part of the overall page assessment.

Let’s face it, what the search engines are asking from us is that we create relevant content that users can easily consume. Their algorithms are simply now aligning to the goals that they’ve been articulating for the past 15+ years.

Every day, you check your page rankings on Google, and every day, you come up a little short of that first page.

You’ve been optimizing keywords, so what gives?

Well, guess what? You’re not the only one who knows the importance of keyword optimization. Your competition does too.

And while keyword optimization can certainly help improve your site’s ranking, it’s only one small piece of the puzzle.

Search engine algorithms also take into account other factors such as bounce rate, inbound links, outbound links, broken links, user experience, and pages viewed, just to name a few.

In order to see a big boost in your ranking, you need to be employing other search engine strategies.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the top 8 tips for boosting your search ranking.

Tip #1: Create High Quality, Relevant Content

When it comes to boosting your rankings, getting visitors to your site is only half the battle.

You also need to get those visitors to stay on your site and browse. This is known as “dwell time.” The longer the dwell time, the higher the ranking.

So how do you increase dwell time?

While the right keywords may draw a visitor to your site, content is what makes them stay.

Nobody cares about keywords unless those keywords are surrounded by actionable, useful content.

Most of this content will take place in the form of blog posts. Typically, you’ll want your posts to be at least 1,000 words.

Why so long?

Longer posts give you the opportunity to include more keywords, more inbound and outbound links, and provide more valuable content. And of course, longer posts take more time to read, which can increase your site’s dwell time.

Plus, every time someone bookmarks your content to Chrome, it improves your ranking on Google.

Tip #2: Focus on Link Building

Google’s let the cat out of the bag: content and links are the two most important factors when it comes to boosting your site’s ranking.

Your link building strategy should focus on three areas:

• Inbound links- links created on other sites that link back to you
• Outbound links- links you create to other websites
• Broken links- links that don’t work (get rid of them)

However, you need to make sure you choose your links wisely. A link from a highly-trafficked, authoritative site goes a lot further than a bunch of links from small, unknown sites.

In order to get these authoritative links, you can pitch to online magazines or news sources or partner with popular blogs. Usually, these partnerships have an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” mentality. They’ll link to your site only if you’ll link to theirs.

Tip #3: Increase Page Load Speed

In the world of the internet, waiting a few extra seconds for a page to load is like waiting an eternity.

If your site’s taking too long to load, users are going to peace out and move on to someone else’s site.

Not only does this reduce your dwell time, it also increases your bounce rate.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your site, view the landing page, and then leave without viewing anything else. Average bounce rates are somewhere around 50 percent. But no matter where you fall, you should always be looking to lower that number.

And increasing your page load speed is one of the best ways to do this.

Here are a few ways you can increase your page load speed:

• Optimize image sizes
• Reduce the number of plug-ins
• Minimize redirects
• Enable compression
• Enable browser caching

Tip #4: Optimize Long-tail Keywords

Okay, you probably already know the important role keywords play in search engine strategies.

But, many people are going about their keyword strategy all wrong.

If you’re a new site, you’re going to have a tough time competing for top keywords. That’s why it’s best to go for long-tail keywords- ones that are three words or more.

Long-tail keywords have less competition, and therefore, are easier to rank for. Check out Google’s keyword planner to find the best ones for your industry.

Tip #5: Use Different Multimedia

Visual content is an excellent way to improve user experience and enrich your written content.

Videos, slideshows, infographics, and audio files are all great ways to deliver information to users in a unique and engaging format.

In fact, adding videos to landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80 percent.

Plus, multimedia also signals to search engines that your site contains quality content. Which, as well all know, is key to boosting your rankings.

Tip #6: Optimize for Mobile

Google will penalize your site if it’s not mobile optimized.

More and more people are conducting searches on their mobile devices these days. And if you’re site isn’t optimized, it will negatively affect user experience.

Google is all about providing the best user experience, so make sure your site’s optimized so you don’t receive a penalty.

Tip #7 Update on the Regular

Boosting your search rankings is a marathon, not a sprint.

You can’t expect the quality-content you created last year to help you in your rankings this year.

Google prefers updated, new content over stale, old content. It lets them know that your site is relevant, fresh, and still in the game.

Plus, popular keywords change over time. You want to make sure you’re always creating content that uses the hottest keywords.

Tip #8: User-friendly Formatting

Formatting that is user-friendly can help improve your rankings.

If your site contains huge walls of text, you’re making a huge mistake.

You need to break that stuff up so it’s easy for your readers to scan and digest.

Here are a few other ways to make sure your formatting is user-friendly:

• Use fonts that are easy-to-read
• Use bold types and colors only sparingly to call out useful info
• Use bulleted numbers and lists
• Break up sections with headings and sub-headings
• Use short paragraphs- 2-3 sentences is ideal

Search Engine Strategies Wrap Up

We hope these search engine strategies helped paint a clear picture for what you need to get done in the coming weeks.

But, implementing these search engine strategies on your own can be a tough feat. If you’re looking for some help, contact us today.

I’ve been in the digital market space for 20 years and this question, “how much should I pay for Search Engine Optimization?” is perhaps the hardest to answer. The elements that go into SEO are highly dependent on variables that agencies or SEO service providers need to identify before they can provide a valid estimate. SEO variables can be overt or hidden and defining them is key to establishing a fair price.

Some of the common variables in SEO

• Level of Competition
• State of current website technical issues
• Current content
• State of Google’s assessment of site issues (ie, manual actions)
• Dynamic nature of subject area
• Internal support level at client
• Goals and objectives

There are cases of “unknown” variables. These are things that pop up during our scoping process that do not fall into the “normal” bucket and can have a big impact on the work effort for SEO.

Ranking for some industries or products can be exceptionally difficult while others have very low barriers to good rankings. Even with all other aspects being equal, the difference in the subject matter can have a significant impact on the effort necessary to get and improve page rankings on the search engines. Until the SEO provider examines the competitive landscape, it is impossible to know what you are up against; are you competing against the little league or pro players? Is it a tough industry? If so, do you have a lot of niche opportunities? Developing a price is heavily dependent on your competitors’ strength in organic search.

Is the industry dynamic? If the content is developed at a high velocity, then keeping pace in SEO requires more resources. New products, research, news stories, and other related topics can push their way to the top of the SERPS (and your site out). In industries where fresh content is the norm, staying competitive requires new, quality content is added to the website on a regular basis.

We have seen some great websites come to us that required very little cleanup. But, we have also seen some that require extensive work. In some cases, the base condition of the site was so poor that we didn’t even quote the project, we directed the prospective owner to scope out a complete site rebuild (we don’t handle sites builds of that size, so it was not a self-serving suggestion.) The point is, the condition of the website has a big impact on the cost of SEO, particularly for “setup” fees.

You should always write content with the intention of helping your target audience. Some sites have great content that needs some adjustment for SEO or needs better sharing activity. On the other hand, we may need to re-write entire pages or even sections of sites to improve their quality as well as their SEO visibility. Depending on the budgets, objectives, and timeframes, the content may be cleaned up all at once, or it may be spread out over months. Either way, the cost for the content clean up has to be covered.

Sometimes clients have great support for their websites and we only need to pass on the direction. Other times, the clients need us to implement all our recommendations, manage the site, and deal with any technical issues. The more the client relies on us to do this, the more resources we need to commit. It makes no sense to pay an SEO provider for recommendations that are not implemented.

We usually start the conversation with goals and objectives, as do most ad agencies. This gets us aligned with the client, and it also gives us an idea (along with all else) what resources are needed. Do we want to double the leads in 1 year or in 1 month? Huge difference. It may be the difference between reasonable, difficult, and impossible. If you are shopping for SEO services and you are quoted a firm price prior to a discussion of your goals, be sure to understand what the deliverables are.

So, clearly, I can not tell you exactly what you should pay for SEO services. But here are some things to expect

Setup fee

As I alluded to above, there may be a lot of activities that take place at the beginning of the engagement. For websites that are already well tuned, with analytics properly setup, GSC connected and with little technical cleanup, the setup fee can be nominal, or non-existent. There is setup for keyword tracking and reporting depending on reporting requirements. The extent of effort will depend on the size of the program.

What is tricky about the setup fee is that the on-going program cannot kick in until the setup is complete and this typically takes 4 – 6 weeks. Since most ongoing activity waits for this, the agency should not be adding setup resources on top of the monthly ongoing to determine the first-month fee. So, be sure that the fee for month one is truly the setup activity and not double dipping.

Ongoing SEO Activity

In today’s SEO, content for your site and for guest posting/sharing are some of the most resource intensive. Link building outreach is the second big consumption of resources. The more competitive your niche, the more content and content distribution will be required. This is not a 2 or 3 month activity. It is absolutely ongoing.

I bring this up because I am often asked if we can reduce the cost after month 4,5, or 6, because the ‘heavy lifting’ is done in the first few months. I’ve heard this referred to as “maintenance mode.” In SEO, there is no such thing as “maintenance mode.” You are either fighting to maintain position, fighting to gain position, or you will lose position.

SEO price range

Setup – $0 – $5,000.

Ongoing – $1,500 – $7,500.

I’ve seen SEO for less. I’ve worked on programs for less. These are the exception. The client has 100% technical support, has content creation is taken care of in-house, is not in a competitive marketplace…. Every one of the “hard” things is not hard.

That, or…

They are paying so little that there will be no traction.

For more competitive categories, or programs with a lot of rich, quality content development, the upside cost can be much higher. But, these are unusual and are part of larger efforts for big companies.

Long term SEO

Many people look at the monthly commitment. This is convenient for cash flow purposes. But, SEO is a long game. Commit to 12 months, things do not happen quickly in SEO. There may be the fluke “big hit”, but that is unusual. I know this is cliche but think in terms of investments, not expenses.

Pricing estimates for SEO will vary a lot. When an agency or SEO provider is quoting the service, be skeptical if they did not first ask you a lot of questions. If they don’t, they will be surprised in a short time and so will you.

Yes good content should generate links back to your website and improve SEO perfomance. The challenge is in helping people differentiate between content marketing strategy and SEO link building tactics, and their respective control.

Content marketing starts with a broader marketing objective, using distributed content to help achieve goals, and in some cases linking back to the website is not even part of the implementation. Our focus is on the marketing, with branding, customer development and relationship nurturing as integral components of the campaigns. Content, well controlled and distributed, is king, this is a strategy.

For SEO link building, there is very little, if any direct control of the general content. Yes, you can have some influence with provided content, but the final call is the publisher’s (the more control to exert, the closer you push link building toward content marketing.) This can lead to some odd pairing of relevant content for SEO that does not necessarily play into the brand’s narrative. And this is where folks can get uncomfortable.

Here are some elements of SEO link building that marketers should become comfortable with:

First, the final call is the publishers. You can negotiate to a certain point, but publishers have their own brand and narrative to follow. If they give into the whims of every link partner, the site will lose continuity and eventually lose audience.

Second, a variety of content and sites is a good thing. While all must be relevant to your respective pages, the internet is a tapestry of interests and points of view. Tying into this helps strengthen your pages inbound linking. Remember that this in someone else’s voice connecting to your brand, it is not your brand.

Third, some sites look cheap, but this should not preclude them from consideration. As long as the site is not being dinged by Google and the content is relevant, don’t sweat the aesthetics.

Keeping a focus on link building’s purpose, to show Google that other sites “like” you, understand that this is a popularity contest. While having some high profile, great looking sites should be part of your program, the vast majority of votes will come from sites that are average or below. They still count.

The Problem AMP and FIA Fix

Behind the scenes a browser sorts through a whole bunch of code that tells it how to present the content. This code is an agreed upon standard. Unfortunately, it is not really designed for easy mobile access to information such as news stories or blog articles.

Standard html and the associated scripts, styles and other bits of code take a lot to process. We don’t notice it too much on desktops and laptops because our computers have become extremely powerful and can easily handle all that code and present the web pages to the users.

The complexity allows web developers to create very elaborate websites with a great deal of functionality. But when we are simply looking for information, all this elaborate foundation just gets in the way. This is particularly true on mobile devices that are not powerful enough nor do they have the screen real estate needed to process and present the pages well. Responsive design only addresses part of the problem, arranging elements or hiding them for mobile presentation- but they are still there taking bandwidth and time. Often mobile users will simply back out of the page rather than wait for it to load.

The AMP and FIA solution(s)

The answer to this issue is to streamline the content and the code that is used to present the content, and eliminate the unnecessary functionality.

AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages – is the Open Source project (backed by Google) designed to help companies make their website content more accessible for mobile devices.

Facebook’s approach to this is Facebook Instant Articles which does the same thing, but for now is focused on the Facebook ecosystem.

The focus is on the unique article content. By using the amp method, you process and display just the information unique to that article and do so in a simplified way. Below is the regular page next to the amp version of one of our posts..

Using this method lets the content be streamlined for faster processing and makes it easier for the information to be cached on the different servers. This has two great benefits. When the content is indexed it is stored on the servers (in this case Google, but any server can do this because it is an open source effort) so the server does not have to always come back to the site every time a person wants to see the information. The trip to get the information is shorter. Secondly, the format is something that mobile devices can process very quickly, eliminating a great deal of the wait time.

AMP and SEO

Duplicate Content?
If executed properly, this is not an issue. On the amp page, standard canonical ref will tell the engines the original page sources (standard practice).

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://fanaticallydigital.com/blog/2016/02/google-compare-shutting-down/” />

While the original page provides a reference to the amp page so the indexing site can pick up the mobile friendly (amp) version.

<link rel=”amphtml” href=”https://fanaticallydigital.com/blog/2016/02/google-compare-shutting-down/amp/” />

As Google pushes further down the mobile friendly path, more weight will be placed on content that delivers quickly and easily to mobile devices. For those companies that rely on their blog and news content to attract more people, this will have a significant impact. AMP was initiated in October of 2015 and you can see in GWT / Search Console what pages on the site are being ‘flagged’ for not being AMP friendly. While we have not yet seen a degradation in the results directly tied to this, it is just a matter of time.

At the moment the SEO landscape does not have a lot of competition with AMP pages. That will change and when it does, the search engines will have a choice between your content and content that is “AMPlified”. Guess who wins.