Want more relevant organic traffic? Put in place an SEO content strategy to help you achieve that!
Here is how:
What Is SEO Content Strategy?
SEO content strategy is the core part of a powerful content strategy and practically decides what topics to write about, how to write them, and how to optimize them in order to rank in search engine results pages and attract organic traffic.
It includes all the tactics applied from identifying the content pillar topics and target keywords to creating content briefs and procedures of on-page optimization.
The main purpose of the SEO content strategy is to create content that will help the business reach its goals. And to offer guidelines for doing this in an efficient manner.
Having a documented SEO content marketing strategy in place has several consistent benefits:
Keeps content creation organized and inflow
Prioritizes tasks and allocates resources better
Supports attracting more qualified leads into your sales funnel and ultimately improves the chances of converting more leads to paying customers
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How to Create an Effective Google SEO Content Strategy?
Since Google gathers more than 90% of the search requests, it is pertinent to say that businesses looking to rank organically have to optimize for Google search.
Creating an effective SEO content strategy may be a daunting task but it will ease the operations and execution of content down the line. Thus, it is preferable to craft it from the very beginning, then have to correct and clean up after that.
SEO content strategy is an extension of the content strategy and will be built on its canvas.
Here are the detailed steps of the SEO content strategy:
Consider Each Buyer Persona and Their Buyer Journey
Even if we are discussing the content strategy from an SEO point of view, one cannot discard the fact that first and foremost you create content for your buyer persona. You need to answer its pain points, questions, and interests concerning your offer.
Your buyer personas and their associated buyer journeys were already created and established by your content strategy. As such, now you just have to transfer them to the SEO content strategy and keep them in mind when completing the subsequent steps.
Primarily you should have a clear understanding of what’s your business offer, what its goals are, why would a potential client choose your company instead of the competition, and who’s your target audience.
SEO Content Audit
Unless you are a brand new company or haven’t yet dug into content marketing, you have already published content. And you need to audit it from an SEO perspective and have a clear picture of its quality and performance in the general framework of your content strategy.
A content audit was most probably executed within your content strategy. So, now you have to take the list with the articles and pages of the site and review them taking into consideration the on-page SEO best practices.
You should verify at least the following:
Topic and its importance for the topical authority
Main keyword, LSIs, and PAA questions
Search intent for the main keyword
Content format and length
Content structure
Permalink
Keyword insertion
Images, graphics, and visuals
List all the improvements and updates that are needed and establish their priority in the function of the performance of the page and its importance for the topical authority.
The Output of the Competitor Analysis
Keeping a close eye on the competition can offer your business an edge. It’s a task that should be executed at least quarterly. Hence, the reality is quite different. Research sustains that 40% of B2C content marketers only check out their competitors yearly, if ever.
An SEO content strategy is incomplete without researching in detail what is your direct competition doing. Identify your direct competitors and check their content strategy, see what keywords they rank for, what are their most performant posts, etc.
Getting inspired by your competitors will offer some valuable insights into what is working in your niche in terms of content.
To research your competition you need an SEO and keyword research tool like Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, or similar. Check for each competitor KPIs like:
Domain authority (DR)
Number of organic keywords
Number of organic keywords in the top 3
Monthly organic traffic
Linking domains
Organic traffic value
Source: Semrush
Competitors analysis can provide you with valuable content ideas, topics that you are missing, backlinks that you are missing, among others.
Metrics Setup
SEO and Marketing managers will be interested in calculating the ROI of SEO activities. And which specific activities bring the most revenue. To be able to determine that, you need to establish and monitor the key performance indicators that are relevant to your business in the next period.
The most used KPIs are:
Organic traffic
Dwelling time
Number of organic keywords
Content pieces published
Backlinks acquired
Number of featured snippets
Subscribers
Leads
Conversions
You should be tracking your metrics at least quarterly if not monthly.
Topical Authority Should Be the Foundation of Your SEO Content Strategy
In SEO, topical authority refers to how many topics and to what extent a site covers relative to a certain topic.
For example, if you have dozens of articles published on the subject of “content strategy” and its subtopics, Google will consider you an authority on that topic. And the more semantically related keywords you cover, the more authority your site gains.
To identify all the subtopics that will help you build authority on a given topic, you have to use Google and/or a keyword research tool. And filter all the related keywords and all the semantically related ones pertinent to your topic and business.
Creating SEO content strategy based on topical authority is a laborious process, but it’s a useful methodology if you want to pop up in SERPs.
Based on Your Product/Services Identify the Key Content Pillars
Knowing what are your services/products, who’s your buyer persona, and what are your content marketing goals you can start searching for keywords and content topics.
Conduct a keyword research and identify keywords that have:
Business potential
Ranking perspective
Organic traffic potential
Start by searching in Google for the term you are most interested in ranking. Use a broad term. After that check the search suggestions, PAA (People Also Ask), and related searches for the first 10-15 pages. Filter just the topics that are relevant to your business.
For example, if you offer content strategy services, you will search for “content strategy”. Additionally, you can do this in a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or SurferSEO. This will be the basis of your SEO content strategy.
Once you have this list with keywords you have to group them into topics clusters. In a tool like SurferSEO, the topics will look like this:
You don’t necessarily need a tool to do this, you can do it manually, but it will save you time.
When you have these clusters defined, prioritize them in the order of their importance for your clients, for your business, and from an SEO KPIs point of view. You also have to consider the difficulty for each keyword, the search volume, and CPC.
Your top priority is the money-generating pages, those need to be first created, fully optimized, and hopefully rank.
Then choose the topics for which you want to be an authority in your niche. And second, those for which you can rank the easiest, meaning the so-called “low-hanging fruits”. Those who need the least resources and have the greatest chance of bringing traffic and leads.
Bear in mind that your expertise and your main purpose should be the core of your content creation strategy.
Next, for each cluster brainstorm a corresponding topic. Each topic should cover and solve a buyer persona’s problem, should have a unique angle if possible, or a different approach from your competition.
Having a strong SEO content marketing strategy based on topical authority in place has a compounding effect. The more content you produce to build authority, you will rank for more keywords and your domain authority will increase and will be able to rank for keywords with higher difficulty.
Pay Attention to Search Intent
When using keywords to produce optimized content, you should also take into consideration the search intent behind that search. Meaning what the user is looking for.
Google’s supreme purpose is to offer its users what they want, in the fastest possible manner. It knows what users expect to find when making a certain query.
For example, when people are looking for “how to make pizza” Google knows they are looking for a recipe. Or when looking at “how to create a GIF”, users expect to find a how-to guide.
By figuring out the search intent you are in a better position to create more relevant content.
Thus, Google will guide you regarding the search intent behind each keyword from your list. Search each keyword on Google and identify
The type of content you need to create – blog post, product page, video, etc.
Content format – how-to, list, recipe, reviews, etc.
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Write Search-Focused and Qualitative Content
The SEO content strategy has the purpose to equip your business with the best chances of attracting relevant organic traffic that will buy your services/products.
As a consequence, you have to produce high-quality content – meaning content that your audience finds useful, solves her problems, and drives her to consider your services.
And also search-focused content – in other words, content that is created for the correct search intent and is optimized via current on-page SEO best practices.
To create optimized and high-quality content you need first to draft content briefs and implement correct on-page SEO procedures.
Draft Content Briefs for Your Writers
If you want to create content smoothly, without many revisions and supplementary rewriting activities, creating detailed briefs is a must.
An SEO content brief includes the necessary instructions for the writer to write a correctly optimized article, with the right structure and keywords. Clear instructions and guidelines to follow. Thus offering the article the best possible chances to rank in SERPs.
In a content brief, the following information should be included:
Title
Summary, search intent, and angle
Target keywords
Target buyer persona and stage of the buyer journey
Tone and voice
Structure of the article (H2 headings)
Resources
NLP words
Lengths of the article in words
Deadline
You can create the briefs manually (still the best way in my view) or use a brief generation tool. There are countless tools out there ready to generate your briefs, but all of them need manual reviewing and corrections.
You can view below a sample content brief generated via SurferSeo.
Define On-Page SEO Best Practices to Be Implemented in Each Piece of Content
On-Page SEO is the foundation of SEO, it’s compulsory if one wants his articles to rank and it’s an SEO task under your control.
On-Page SEO is a must-have, as most businesses already implement it. Implementing current on-page best practices right from the writing phase will spare future efforts of rewriting and optimization.
When Creating Content Consider the E-E-A-T Principles
Google clearly stated that a core part of its metrics revolves around E-E-A-T (Experience – Expertise – Authoritativeness -Trustworthiness). In other words, they are emphasizing the quality of the content delivered to the user.
The content produced should prove that the business has first-hand experience and expertise on the topic to be granted higher chances of ranking.
Each site will be evaluated for a certain topic based on the E-E-A-T template. It is also done for each query and for each result.
Consequently, you have to produce content for your target audience while positioning your business as an authority in your niche. And build trust.
Pay Close Attention to Your Internal Links Architecture
Internal linking structure is important for your users and search engines alike. First, your users should be able to find their way and navigate with ease your site to get the information they need. And second, search engines should be able to crawl your site and find all the published content.
Plus, search engines should be able to identify which are the most important pages for your business, the ones that you want to rank for, and the supporting pages for the latter. In addition, a pertinent anchor text will indicate to Google what keywords you are looking to rank for.
Your site’s internal linking structure is like a map with main roads and secondary streets. All connecting with each other in some way. This internal links architecture is important as the link juice is redirected from performant pages to those needing supplementary support.
Internal links play an important role in SERP ranking.
Perform SEO Content Audits Regularly
To continuously improve your site rankings you have to keep an eye on your most important keywords. Track them with a keyword research tool to help you identify ranking improvement opportunities.
It’s not enough to write and publish qualitative content. You have to perform audits, update it and review it periodically.
There are several reasons to do that. It might happen that your content doesn’t rank or it loses rankings. Or search intent changes. Or content gets outdated.
Search engine algorithm updates are frequent and SERPs are dynamic, they change continuously.
When executing an SEO content audit you have to check on the following:
What is the situation of your traffic? Is It growing, stalling, or decreasing?
Which are the most performing pages? Which drive the most traffic? How about conversions?
Which pages do you need to rank and they actually don’t rank for the right keyword?
What can you do to improve the rankings?
Based on this information you can adjust your future plans. Prioritize performing pages, update those that are less performant following the model of those that bring the most results, etc.
Keep an Eye on Google Algorithm Updates
There is no news that Google updates its algorithm several times a year (core updates). Even if minor updates might not impact your rankings, core updates may at times have a significant impact.
Consequently, you have to keep updated about what future algorithm updates require to maintain the performance of your content and site.
Conclusion
A date-based and successful SEO content strategy is an absolute must if you want to attract organic traffic in a more complicated and crowded environment. Plus, the challenges brought by the newly developed AI technology. Following the above-mentioned steps and keeping yourself updated will help solve future challenges.
The top 5 SEO strategies may be considered the following: High-Quality Content Creation Topical Authority On-Page SEO Off-Page SEO Technical SEO
What is an SEO content plan?
An SEO content plan is a document that clearly defines what content will be created, what keywords will be targeted, guidelines for content creation, and on-page optimization. All these have the purpose of reaching the business goals.
Is SEO a content marketing strategy?
SEO is a core part of a content marketing strategy. SEO doesn’t exist on its own without a content strategy.
What is the key to SEO?
The key to successful SEO is clearly defining your business goals and defining and implementing an SEO content strategy to show you how to reach those goals.
How to integrate SEO into your content?
To integrate SEO into your content, you should put in place an SEO content strategy to define the keywords to rank for, the topics to write about, and the guidelines for on-page SEO optimization.
Is SEO part of content strategy?
Yes, SEO is a core part of the content strategy.
What is the core of content strategy?
The core part of a content strategy is creating content that is considered useful by the buyer persona and is optimized to rank in search engines. Its mission is the help reach the business’s goals.
What are the 3 C’s of SEO?
The 3 C’s of SEO may be considered content, credibility, and conversion.
Can meta description be the same as content?
The meta description is not the same as the content. It is a brief summary of a page and is an HTML element.
Ranking the highest possible in search engine results is a fierce battle. An interminable ever-changing list of on-page SEO steps and off-page SEO factors impact these results.
The main purpose of on-page SEO techniques is to naturally optimize a piece of content for search engines, in such a manner that it is easily found and listed in front of targeted visitors.
Here is a list of on-page SEO techniques that everyone should use to boost rankings:
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Most experts consider that the title of the post is the most important on-page SEO factor. Their argument is that if the title is not attractive and engaging enough to click through, or not optimized, the content will never appear in front of the user.
Others, like MOZ, consider the title tag as the second most important on-page SEO factor after content.
For best performances, your titles should follow the subsequent rules:
– Optimal length under 60 characters for proper display on the search results
– Use your keyword in the title once, out of the question to stuff a title just with keywords
– Keyword should be among the first words of the title, the first if possible.
Whenever possible include modifiers in the title. Words such as 2023, “guide”, “best” help improve rankings for long tail keywords.
In my view, the title of your post is paramount in the hierarchy of on-page SEO steps. The headline will make or break the success of your post.
2. On page SEO Step 2: Assign H1 Tag to the Title of the Article
The H1 tag is very important for SEO, so verify if your CMS properly added it to your title.
H1 tag should be used only once on a page and include the target keyword.
3. High Quality 1000+ Words Content
There is a huge debate about what that high-quality content means. As a consequence there is a myriad of indirect methods that in a certain way can measure the quality of the content: the number of visitors, repeat visitors, time on site, shares, comments, etc.
Useless to say that unique content is the norm. Avoid publishing duplicate content, for example for a guest post, because you have real chances of getting penalized by search engines.
High-quality content is easy to digest and attractive as designed. Organize the content in short paragraphs, emphasize keywords with a bold format, and use bullets to break blocks of text.
Nowadays the trend is to write long-form content as it was established that it ranks higher and is perceived as providing more value. Writing 2000+ words or even 3000+ words posts becomes the standard.
4. On-Page SEO Step 4: Enrich your content with visuals
Besides high-quality content, formatting that content is of out-most importance. Insert charts, videos, and entertaining images to retain attention, increase time spent on that piece of content and shrink the bounce rate.
Visuals improve the quality of content, making it more informative and attractive, thus boosting user interaction. Search engines highly appreciate that.
5. On-Page SEO Steps: Absolutely Include Images Optimization
Image name and image Alt Text should include target keywords. At least one of the images should include the keyword you run for. Again, this is a detail that helps search engines determine the subject of your post and it’s an on-page SEO technique that you should not ignore.
6. Insert Target Keyword within the First 100 Words
The first 100 words of your article should include the target keyword to help search engines identify the subject of your content.
Most probably this comes naturally, but just in case don’t skip it.
Concerning the keyword density in your post, there is no magic formula, but don’t overuse them, it’s subject to downgrading in search results. Use one keyword in the beginning and within the post where it makes sense, including semantic variations.
Here is what Matt Cutts from Google says relative to keywords density:
7. On-Page SEO Steps: Exploit the Power of Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords
Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords are related words or synonyms used by search engines to score the relevance of a page. Use a couple of them within your post.
8. Assign H2 Tags to Subheadings
Subheadings should also have tags, H2, H3, H4. The target keyword is to be inserted in at least one subheading.
Like in the example below:
9. Updated Content
Search engines are more interested in fresh content. As such updating content, especially for time-sensitive content is decisive.
Google, for example, displays the date of the last update.
The dimensions of the modifications made to a certain post are important too, removing irrelevant parts, and adding more content surpass just changing a few words. Update your post frequently and boost your rankings.
10. Insert External Links in Your Content
This seems to be a common mistake in not using outbound links. But it is a simple, easy SEO strategy to increase traffic. Its major advantage is that improves the quality of your content and helps search engines establish the topic of the respective page. External Links do not miss any on-page SEO checklist 2023.
It’s important to pay attention to the sites you link to and aim for those with high authority. Renowned sites like Forbes.com or Entrepreneur.com, or major actors in your niche, like HubSpot.com for Inbound Marketing, are more than reliable and trustful, as they provide quality content that your readers will highly appreciate.
And even more, your site will gain credibility.
11. Insert Internal Links in Your Content
If external links are very important, inbound links are also important. Interlinking is a strategy to keep the reader more time on your site while passing from one page to another. Inbound links prove that you are also offering supplementary information besides your page content.
Drop 2-4 links among your posts. And use as anchor text the corresponding keywords. Place them just since and when they are necessary and pertinent.
12. Insert Social Sharing Buttons
Social sharing is not actually a ranking factor but has an indirect role. Social media buttons help expand the audience that arrives on your site.
13. On-Page SEO steps: URLs Should Be SEO Friendly
It is well known that the first 3-5 words that appear in a URL bear higher importance.
Consequently, the permalinks should be short, relevant, and include the target keyword.
Loading speed is an SEO ranking factor and a compulsory on-page SEO technique. User experience is highly impacted by the site’s loading speed. Statistics say that users would not come back to a site that loads in more than 4 seconds.
Keyword research can be considered the very first step towards achieving great SEO that will drive your website’s organic traffic. They are the building blocks of SEO without which an SEO campaign would flop. Identifying the right keywords is all a matter of finding the ones that match your customer’s needs and this is why you need an SEO keyword tool.
In 2022, keyword research requires the help of third-party tools, some fall under the free tier while others only offer a free trial after which you can opt to purchase or not. The SEO keyword tool you use for your research will have a direct impact on the kind of data you’ll collect. Some of the best SEO keyword research tools will provide you with excellent actionable data on given search queries and will help you get potentially relevant keyword ideas you’d ordinarily not have thought about.
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With that said, how will you know the best SEO keyword search tools? You need a good knowledge of not only how each tool works, but also how to transform that information into results. This article has put together the best SEO keyword research tools from both the free and paid tiers.
But first, a quick look at why keyword search is important.
How Does Keyword Research Help You?
i. It Guides Your Direction
Researching for keywords gives you a deeper sense of focus and direction because it helps you unearth other keywords and ideas that you may not have had before; this helps you focus on only the best topics within your niche.
ii. Brings New Ideas
You may have an idea in your mind, so when you do keyword research you tend to get more information about it and this can help you expound more on your idea. It keeps the ideas flowing and brings in more ideas.
iii. Effective Use of Time
Keyword searching may be a time-consuming activity, however, it tends to also save you from more waste of time by driving you exactly where you need to be. During the keyword research, you can mark potential articles or products that you can work on in future and thereby giving you a next plan of action that in turn will save you lots of time.
iv. Gets You the Right Audience and Offers You Customer Insights
Of course, this is one of the most important reasons why you‘re doing a keyword search. It keeps you focused on the right audience. This will enable you to master a lot of customer insights. It’s particularly possible if you do some forum search or Google research.
Getting better insights helps you target better and therefore offer better to your clients.
v. You Get Insights on the Best Possibilities to Rank in Search Engines
Google is the most advanced search engine, so when doing your research with that in mind, you gain from all the exposure you get, and this includes getting competitive keywords that will fine-tune your strategy. It will also enable you to pick keywords with the lowest competition but with the highest likelihood of getting listed in the top spots in the Google search.
vi. It Covers Your Competition Analysis
Keyword research helps you determine whether a certain selected topic is worth pursuing or not, it helps you be more specific even within a niche. To get a good competition analysis, you have to find out how authoritative competitors’ websites are; based on the keywords you’re deliberating on.
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How SEO Keyword Research Works
This is about identifying keywords that can help rank your website. For instance, if you want to write about pet food, your content should include the word pet food throughout the article. But the likelihood is that many other pet websites are already competing for that same phrase. And this is why it’s important to use long-form phrases.
For example, “organic pet food and product” is a long-form keyword that may not be used by every competitor but has a higher chance of ranking your blog. Long-form keywords are generally more than 4 words and have a lower search volume. For this reason, they have a higher buyer intention and are also easier to rank for.
So, with this clear picture of where you want to take your content, here are the best SEO keyword search tools:
Pricing: Pro Plan- $119, Guru Plan- $229, Business Plan- $449, has a 7-day free trial.
This SEO keyword ranking tool is great at optimization; it allows you to do competitive analysis and tells you for which keyword your competition ranks.
Top Features
Complete organic research – it helps you stay ahead of the competition by giving you the keywords that drive traffic to your competitors’ sites.
Monitor’s ranking changes – it keeps up with the ever-changing internet preferences. It monitors and tells you if your website ranking changes, as well as that of your competition, on a regular basis. On top of this, SEMRush SEO keyword tool helps you identify new competitors to ensure you don’t lose your rankings.
Relevant backlinks– it easily creates a list of spam backlinks and also offers an opportunity of getting relevant links back to your site using the backlink audit tool.
Analyses various websites – This SEO keyword research tool analyses several other competitors at once. This helps you concentrate on the most important or profitable keywords. You can also get the ones missing out from your competitors.
Traffic Analyses – it tracks your competitors’ traffic sources and builds a good content strategy to reach your audience. At the same time, it gives you in-depth data on the sites you plan to invest in.
SEO guidance – SEMRush has an on-page SEO checker that offers insightful suggestions that can help rank better and fix any errors on the same page.
Pricing – Starts at $99 per month for the Standard version and goes up to $599 per month for the premium version, has a 30 days Free Trial
This is one of the best SEO keyword tools out there, it offers out-of-the-box solutions with robust features that compete with other top tools. It prides on two very unique data points:
The Organic CTR score – this shows the number of clicks you’re likely to attract on the first Google result page.
The priority score – this is a perfect blend of all the factors a typical tool uses to gather keyword options. It puts together data on CTR, keyword difficulty as well as search volume.
Top Features
Keyword clustering – closely related words can be grouped or clustered together rather than have them sit individually. This enables you to track your ranking more accurately, get to know more about your search visibility and keep you ahead of your competition.
Bulk uploads keywords – you can upload bulk keywords rather than adding them manually to your campaign. You can use a CSV to quickly upload the keywords along with their labels and locations.
SERP feature filter – you can ease the process of prioritizing keywords by using the SERP feature filter. All you need to do is refresh your keywords list in the keyword explorer and then you’ll be able to view and filter your data.
Understand your clients/ customers – get to find out how customers search for your products or services. Discover the keywords they use as well as the questions they are asking, you can leverage this data to give relevant and useful content that can help you rank highly.
Rank tracking – it accurately tracks and ranks your keywords as well as those of your competitors. You can see their location, the search score and so on.
Cost: Lite – $99, Standard – $179, Advanced – $399, Agency – $999, no trial
Ahrefs is another competitive SEO keyword tool. It has the highest-ranking index and allows you to find out about your competitors’ SEO strategies, the keywords they’re using, their backlinks and so forth. Another great thing about Ahrefs is that it has very committed support through phone, email as well as chat.
Top Features
Site Explorer – an overview of any site you want is only a click away. It offers you the Ahrefs rank, the URL rating and the domain rating. It also gives an analysis of how the number of backlinks and repairing domains are improving. This ensures you follow link velocity guidelines. It also shows the organic traffic you’ve acquired over time from the keywords.
Backlink profile – Ahrefs is top when it comes to backlink index. When you enter the URL or domain name in the search box, it gives you all the backlinks directing to the URL or domain. In its lite plan, you’re allowed to view up to 100 URLs and 25 domains per day.
Find new or lost backlinks – This feature allows you to identify backlinks that have been built simply by selecting the date. This is the feature that also allows you to spy on your competitor’s SEO strategy. It will show you if you’ve lost any backlinks or if a blog owner removed a backlink from a guest post.
Organic search – this feature gives you the organic keywords that drive traffic to a URL or a certain domain. You can use this to also discover good blog topics that would draw organic traffic. This feature tracks how your blog ranks in SERPs when targeting a major keyword. Another thing this option can do is show you keywords that you may not be ranking but your competitors are using.
Top pages – this feature returns the best-performing pages depending on the backlinks. Just go to “Top pages” and get the pages with the most traffic on a site. It allows you to see the top pages of a domain in social sharing.
Paid search – This is a bonus for PPC marketers because it boosts the ROI from advertisements when running PPC campaigns. It also allows you to spy on ad copies running with the keywords, and get the location and the campaigns devoid of using VPNs. It shows you the pages that are converting well for your competitors; it’s a great feature when used in advertising.
Keywords Explorer – this feature lets you do the long tail keywords search. All you need to do is simply enter the topic idea or keyword seed and voila. It will calculate the keyword difficulty level and offer you metrics like return rate, related keywords, search suggestions and so on.
This SEO keyword tool that’s also an analysis platform has some unique features. For instance, it provides users with keywords that have low SEO difficulty yet have high search rates. It’s very accurate at finding the lowest-cost keyword that offers the highest SERP ranking.
Besides being an SEO keyword tool, KWFinder also tracks the ranking of your pages over time and analyses backlinks that are boosting your search ranks and those that are not.
Top Features
Keywords identification – It helps find high-traffic, low-cost keywords to maximize your search ranking. It offers an accurate figure as compared to other applications that give an approximation.
Competitor analysis – it offers unique SEO metrics (45) to show which authority websites are thriving, the strengths and weak points and how their keyword selection compares to yours. Among the 45 metrics, this SEO keyword tool has, are included the following: the number of external backlinks, visits per month, domain authority, number of shares and so forth.
Ranking progress – this SEO keyword research tool will show you how much organic traffic potential your site has. You can use this information to tweak your plans in order to improve your site’s performance.
User friendly interface – beginners will find this tool easy to use thanks to the wide range of features it offers. Navigating between services such as the source of your traffic, paid and organic searches, and keyword and domain searches is quite smooth because they’re all integrated on the dashboard.
Great support – their support team can be reached any time around the clock, either via email or live chat. KWFinder also offers a robust knowledge base and official FAQ for those who are not tech-savvy.
This SEO keyword tool is a browser extension add-on that can be installed on either Firefox or Chrome. One of its greatest features is that it offers users access to info like monthly search volume, competition data, as well as cost per click.
Top Features
It shows YouTube insights and tags
It shows related keywords both on Bing and Google (people also search for)
It analyzes URLs to build the list of keywords from the content page and the density of those words.
It’s supported on Google, YouTube, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing and Amazon among others.
Pricing – Has a 7-day free trial, Individual Plan – $12, Business Plan- $20, Enterprise- $40
This SEO keyword tool specializes in generating or suggesting new keyword ideas, initially, it was built around getting ideas from Google Suggest words, but now it does a lot more than that.
Top Features
SEO keyword – It presents to users the terms that are driving traffic to their websites and how competitors using the same keywords measure up to yours.
SEO checker – this feature shows you any activity that breaks SEO best practices. Users have the option of organizing the results in order of the difficulty to fix that mistake and the impact this error has on current traffic to your website.
Domain review – it offers real quick metrics on your URLs.
Organic keywords – it gives users the number of keywords for which the domain ranks organically.
Backlink score – it gives users the number of websites that drive traffic to your website through links.
Top traffic and SEO pages – it shows the top-performing pages that are driving traffic to your site. You can see the country and the social platforms that are the source of the traffic, and the estimated number of page visits. It also shows backlinks and where they come from. It also gives an in-depth analysis showing the volume, cost per click, visits, buyer intent and the probability that your site to rank for a certain keyword.
Organic monthly traffic – at the same time, this SEO keyword tool shows how much traffic your site gets based on organic keyword searches.
Domain score – it calculates your domain score using several parameters to show whether your website has any authority on Google.
Backlink data – It shows the kind of content people are linking to within your niche. It shows who is doing the linking plus the metrics on the back-linking sites.
Website speed – Ubersuggest shows how fast your site loads on either the desktop or mobile device. It goes further to show all the errors required to get fixed in order for your site to load faster and thus boost your CTR and Google rank.
Content ideas – get to find out what content and particular keywords are performing well. Along with this, you’ll also get to see your domain authority and estimated clicks for certain content.
Pricing: Starts from Starter Plan – $59.99, Pro Plan – $89.99 and Agency Plan – $299.99
This is a desktop premium SEO keyword research tool that runs on Adobe Air. What’s the best keyword research tool for SEO for beginners? This tool is the one. It has a very simple and straightforward user interface that’s very easy to get familiarized with.
Top Features
Multiple projects – You can run various campaigns at once, this helps you stay organized.
It enables you to generate keywords from your seed keyword.
Allows you to export keywords from Excel spreadsheets.
It helps you find available keyword-rich domain names.
Competitor analysis – it offers an in-depth analysis on your competitors’ organic traffic to give you ideas of what they’re up to.
Rank tracker – LongTailPro comes with a rank tracker to keep you in the loop of how your keywords are driving up more traffic.
It allows you to favorite the best-performing keywords.
Pricing – Lite $69 per month, Standard $149 per month, Advanced $299 per month, Enterprise $499
This is another SEO keyword tool with solid features that competes fairly with other tools in the market. It has an excellent audit tool and other great features that have made it the most upvoted tool on Product Hunt.
Top Features
Keyword research – This is its primary feature that can be used for both PPC search campaigns and SEO. You can leverage this to edge your competition through organic and paid keywords.
SEO keyword research – it can be used to identify high-value keywords for SEO campaigns. This SEO keyword tool can also be used to show new content ideas and ways to improve the already existing content.
PPC keywords research – this feature provides you with data such as estimated cost per click, search volume and keyword difficulty which you can use to pick the best-paid keywords.
Backlink analysis – this option provides a complete backlink profile with suggestions for the potentially good content material. On the dashboard, you get to see the number of backlinks and the percentage of those that are do-follow as well as no-follow. They also provide charts to show the new versus lost backlinks over a specified period. It also offers a top-page report that shows the most backlinks of any selected website.
Keyword rank tracking – this feature helps you measure the success of your SEO campaign. It helps you keep track of the position of your most useful organic search keywords along with your website’s visibility in relation to your competition.
Competitive analysis – it gives you an analysis of competitors to help you know more about your competition, who they are and what keywords you’re competing for.
Top organic competitors – this feature presents you with the top competing sites that share the organic keywords with you. On the dashboard, you get to see the keywords that are common, those that are missing as well as a score on how relevant they are.
Cost: Ranktracker – Starter $24, Double Data $59, Quad Data $109, Hex Data $209.
This tool gives you SEO search engine keyword position through an analysis of the competition, research of the keywords and tracking of your search engine ranking all at once. It is excellent at harnessing various data sources to keep you ahead in your SEO.
Top Features
SEO metrics – Ranktracker reveals your search result ranking, your SEO search engine keyword position and the traffic you’re receiving from searches. You can use a filter to see your ranking in different locations or devices.
Local and international ranking updates – it allows you to track the position of your site on the search engines. This can be composed of a selection of keywords either on desktop or mobile.
Keyword finder – this SEO keyword tool can offer you insights on search volume and keywords difficulty, it can also show you your keywords’ relevancy in selected areas.
SERP checker – with Ranktracker, you can get search engine results from up to 50 countries.
Actionable SEO guide – it helps you optimize your website for SEO with Actionable Data and step-by-step guidance that will help you optimize keyword research for maximum traffic.
Web audit – this feature scans through your data points and quickly identifies any hidden SEO errors and guides you on how to resolve them. It also produces useful XML audit data that can be used to compare previous records for recurring errors.
Reports – Fully customizable reports that offer lots of details including your competitors’ ranking, your visibility and much more. This information can be shared via email straight to clients or colleagues.
Cost – Individual $5 per month, Pro $49 per month, Expert $99 per month
This unique SEO keyword research tool extracts questions from Google and Bing and generates categorized keywords from them. When searching for a particular keyword, the results will be several keywords in the form of questions. These questions are further organized into what, where, when, who, why or how forms.
Top Features
Search insights from customers – out of over 3 billion daily Google searches, about 20% are new questions that have never been seen before; these are like fresh cues from your customers’ mind. This tool listens to autocomplete content from search engines and picks out useful questions around your keyword. This goldmine can present you with just the right ideas for exactly what your customers need.
Unlimited daily searches – for the paid version, you won’t have to worry about a daily limit in searches.
New suggestions alerts – compare data and monitor keyword search behavior over time. You can set up a Search Listing Alert which will give you weekly emails with questions being asked about your topic or keywords.
Export results to CSV– you can transfer, filter and pivot your data to Excel spreadsheets if you want.
Hide some unwanted suggestions or branches – if you get too much data, you can prune off the unwanted data and keep only what’s relevant to you.
Unlimited team members – with this SEO keyword tool online the teams have no limit with respect to the number of members. Members can work side by side or run their own research.
Pricing: Personal Plan – $39 per month, Pro – $59 per month and Agency – $99 per month
This SEO keyword ranking tool brings simplicity to work by presenting you with all the data you need to see in one place. It offers quality and relevance with a complete data evaluation including your competitors’ analysis. It requires no installation or downloading, it’s an online tool that can run on the cloud and it is compatible with any internet browser. The only prerequisite is for you to have an account.
Top Features
Keyword research – this feature is extremely fast since it runs on the cloud. This allows you to analyze and process 200 keywords or more per minute. Other tools might only do 2 keywords at the same time at best.
You’re also able to analyze imported keyword lists. It operates in most languages across the globe.
Keyword ideas – once you enter a keyword for search, it comes back with several other suggestions picked from Google search suggest, YouTube search suggest, Google AdWords and Google relates searches. It keeps getting better, you can do a semantic keyword search on your competitors and use the results to gain a new seed word to consider.
Keyword analysis – this feature gives you a detailed analysis drawn from the current best-ranking pages. The analysis includes backlink number, page rank and on-page optimization. Besides collecting all this data, it is user-friendly and very easy to understand.
Competition analysis – this feature enables you to draw data from each first result page of your keyword research. It’s achieved by getting data from Moz’s database because of its accuracy. This feature also allows you to compare URLs with your best competitors and identify eventual errors.
It also provides keyword ideas based on the competition analysis and based on it to create new semantics to boost your page ranks.
Organize keywords – it enables you to select quality keywords among the not-so-relevant ones. Very useful when trying to get a specific word. Besides this, it’s possible to use files to categorize keywords. You can export your data if you need to process it elsewhere (e.g. to a PDF).
Pricing: Basic- $39 per month, Pro-$79 per month and Team $299 per month.
This SEO keyword ranking tool takes competitive intelligence to another level. One of its popular features is how it can be used to discover the most useful keywords in your competitors’ organic as well as paid search efforts. This is the reason why this tool is specifically called Spy-Fu, it specializes in spy games.
Top Features
SEO Research – it offers in-depth data on organic search ranking for any given website. This allows you to access the same data and use it to enhance yours.
SEO Overview – the dashboard provides data on the number of organic keywords, inbound links by type, monthly organic traffic, keyword gainer and loser and the value of your organic traffic.
SEO Keywords – this feature allows you to view the best-performing organic keywords for any website and propels you into an advantageous position against your competitors. For every keyword searched, SpyFu shows the keyword difficulty, rank, clicks per month and searches per month.
So, it sorts all these details according to the newly ranked, most valuable, first-page keywords, keyword gains in rank and so forth. To make things better, it can group related keywords to offer better insights into the topics that rank at the top as well as their hierarchy. It’s just brilliant.
SEO Backlinks – this spy tool can provide you with data about any backlink profile for any website. You can see the individual backlinks and for each one of them you get to see the domain authority. It also categorizes the backlinked sites by type in order for you to compare who gets more backlinks between you and your competitors.
PPC Research – it reveals data on the paid search activity for any site you may consider.
PPC Keywords – the feature allows you to see any paid keywords for any site along with data such as cost per click, monthly searches, Ad timeline and total ads and much more. They are grouped into categories to ease up your work.
Keyword rank tracking – this tool tracks your website position on Google. This tool serves as a spy for our competitors as well.
Competitive analysis – The beauty of SpyFu, is that most of the features discussed above can be used to spy on your competition. The SEO research, keywords and rank tracking as well as PPC research can all offer you reliable data to enable a better understanding of the current marketing tactics. You get to discover who your top competitors are and the keywords they’re using, and you are not.
Organic Competitors – Presents a report of your most prominent competitors, the data includes SEO tools keyword density, the keywords that overlap and so forth. It reveals organic keywords that are also in your website.
Free Tools
What Are the Best SEO Keyword Research Tools Free to Use?
This is the most popular free tool if you know how to use the Google keyword tool for SEO. The main reason it’s so popular is because it directly integrates with Google Ads. All you need to do in order to use this tool is to have an Ads account which is absolutely free.
Top Features
It offers in-depth data thanks to its link to Google. You, however, cannot use it to gain research data from any other search engine.
Filtering to refine audience and budget – Keyword Planner offers you the option to either search for new keywords or to get multiple keyword lists where you can combine 2 lists for new keyword combinations. It provides the possibility to search volume and trends and the option to get click and cost performance forecasts. You can use any of these filters as they suit your needs.
Get quality over quantity – it gives you relevant keywords along with phrases and new terms. Your SEO keyword search can offer new long-form words, generate new relevant words based on your landing page or can help you identify keywords within your industry that you may not have picked up but customers are using.
Prepare for what others are paying – Competition over keywords may make some of them rank very low, medium or very high. For your SEO search engine keyword position to be higher, you may be required to use the high competition keywords which may cost more per average bid.
Therefore, the keyword planner helps you identify effective keywords that may fit within your budget by revealing data on how much other advertisers are paying for these keywords. This will enable you to boost your chances of being seen by relevant customers.
Analyze you plan and budget – as you find new keywords ideas as mentioned in the above feature, you can add them to your keyword plan where they can be stored temporarily as you create a daily budget based on the detailed forecast of the potential of the selected keywords.
This SEO keyword tool searches engines for key phrases as well as keywords. It searches on the top 15 search engines such as Google, Bing, Answers.com, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia and a couple of others.
Top Features
People also search – this puts together the queries from all 15 search engines in a single place. These are questions asked by people along with your keyword. It’s therefore important to include them in your content in order to increase the chances of being discovered.
Aggregated research tool – it presents keywords from search engines and is a tool that offers SEO keyword density, competitors’ data and CPC.
Easy GUI – its graphic user interface is pretty simple. When searching for the keyword, it presents all the results from all these different sources simultaneously.
This SEO keyword research tool is best known for long-form keywords that often mean a buying intent. The SEO keyword tool online finder is very effective at reducing your keyword tasks to a bare minimum because the developers ensured it takes all the needed time to build an app that in turn consumes less of the users’ time.
It’s very advanced and takes care of managing your keyword search, competition as well as market research.
Top Features
Alphabet Soup – this feature specifically targets long-form keywords by offering a clue on what customers are searching for on Google. This offers a chance to rank your content for keywords you never even thought about.
Search analysis – this spy function tells you the competitors ranking for the keywords you’re interested in and what they’re ranking with. You can leverage on this information to do better.
Site Rank– if you’re looking for SEO tools to find out where you rank for a keyword then this is the. On top of this, it shows you how your competitors are faring.
Keyword data – this is the most commonly used feature on Jaaxy. Besides giving data about keywords, it also offers data such as estimated traffic, monthly searches, domain availability, keyword quality indicator, SEO tools keyword density and so forth.
Save lists – you can create lists of your keywords and also import these lists to other applications.
Conclusion
SEO will continue to be an essential component of digital marketing. It’s a reliable mainstay and is most likely to remain so, for the foreseeable future. The benefits of being mindful of SEO are pretty evident as they create strong and robust foundations for websites and this is very important in customer satisfaction. With this said, all the above SEO keyword tools are essential in strengthening your SEO and building a functional online presence.
What makes some highly reputed websites always rank top in search engines? Have you ever wondered how Wikipedia, for instance, is always ranking high? The simple number one reason is that they have a high domain authority compared to other sites. High-domain authority websites such as Forbes or Wikipedia have mastered the art of how to increase domain authority.
But high domain authority doesn’t only happen to big websites, smaller businesses too can learn how to increase their domain authority over time.
What Is Domain Authority?
Domain authority or DA is a metric that indicates the reputation of a website ranking from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest. When your website has a high DA, then it means that you rank high on Google and your traffic base is rock solid. DA is developed by SEO tools and you can track any website’s domain authority by installing their extensions or through their site explorer feature.
For example, MarketingDigiBook has a DA of 47 according to Ahrefs.
DA shows you a quick picture of your site’s SEO health. For a website that’s just launched, there is no domain authority, but for big and older websites, the DA ranges anywhere between 1 and 100. The DA score is generated by an algorithm that assesses the strength of a site in regard to how it ranks. For example, a DA of 60 and above is likely to rank more competitively than a DA of say 40.
With that said, it’s important to note that DA ranking is just part of Google page rank and not the only aspect considered. It’s a key digital marketing KPI necessary for your website’s growth.
How to Assess Your Domain Authority
There are tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, and others, you can use to find your DA. If this is not something you need to do too often, use the free trials to find out. All you need to do is list down the websites that appear above and below you on the SERP page for a phrase or term you rank for. These should be the websites you compete with. Then use the above tools to check the sites’ DA.
Alternatively, you can just use Moz to check your DA among other KPIs when you use their SEO analysis tool which is all free.
How Is Domain Authority Calculated?
The scores of a DA are made up of several ranking factors that are all balled up to make a number between 0 and 100. Moz describes these ranking factors as being inclusive of the following:
Amount of authoritative backlinks
Amount of referring links
Root domain
Quality and credibility of links
Structure and user experience of your site
It’s clear that links play quite a big role in your website’s DA. A wealth of content coupled with high authority link diversification makes for some of the ways how to increase domain authority in 2022.
It’s also important to know that DA scores are logarithmic. This means that a single factor alone will not necessarily increase domain authority. For instance, you can increase your organic traffic which will put your DA at 40 to 41, and improving on SEO alone might bring it to 45.
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Does the Formula for Calculating Domain Authority Change?
The formula does not change frequently. A single formula can stay unchanged for up to 5 years. SEO apps apply minor tweaks whenever necessary. For example, Moz says they considered “Robustness against changes in Google’s algorithm and in the underlying Mozscape link index” in their design principle when they created the Moz algorithm.
What’s A Good DA Score?
By now you understand that your DA score is a relative metric that shows you how you compare to your competitors. And this can be determined by several factors such as the fact that some of your competitors’ websites have been around for years while others have superior authority such as Forbes.
It’s also possible to find that in some niches, a DA of 30 might not be good enough while in others it might be quite high.
Therefore with all these in view, it would be objective to state that there is no standard “good” score that can be set as a benchmark. The competitiveness of your DA is going to be determined by the niche your brand is in.
With that said, you tend to get a high DA score when your site gets a high number of referrals.
For instance, if you have about 20 domains that refer back to your site, you can get a DA score of anything from 0-20, if you get over 4,000 referring domains, you can have a DA score of anything between 40-60 and if you get over 300,000 referring domains, your DA score will fall anywhere between 80-100.
This simply means that the more referring domains your site get, the higher your DA score. But any score higher than your competitors for the target element is a good DA score.
What Does This Mean for Bloggers?
When your blog gets high refers, it means it’s considered credible, and this translates into a high DA score. Think about Wikipedia. Therefore the higher your blog’s DA score, the more the search engines recognize it, and the more users and partners value it. This means greater opportunities for you.
Such opportunities include more guest posts from other bloggers that want to contribute to your content as they get a backlink. It can also include invitations to contribute to other high domain authority websites which in return will earn you a backlink. All these and others are ways how to increase the domain authority of your site.
Domain Authority vs. Page Authority
As you have seen that domain authority is concerned with your entire website. Page authority uses a similar metric but measures the ranking strength of each individual web page. Page authority is the real test of the specific pages because it has a direct impact on your search engine ranking as well as your DA.
The metric used to rank page authority is similar to the one that ranks domain authority. It’s a scale of 0 to 100. And the factors that they use to determine page authority include the following:
How many external links are on each page?
The quality of the sites linking to a specific page.
The number of social signals on each page, i.e. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. links
How many root domains are linked on each page?
The number of sub-domains that are linking to each page.
How many of the root domain links are using partial anchor text?
It’s also important to note that Google doesn’t rank your website. It only ranks your web pages.
Why Do Low Authority Pages Outrank Higher Authority Pages?
Because there are many other factors with varying elements that can make a low authority page outshine the high authority page. These low authority pages can have exceptional performance in other areas such as:
Having links to the page that contains the key phrases in them.
The content on the page is relevant to the key phrase and it answers more questions on the topic compared to other competing sites.
It has a sign of great user engagement and shows that visitors stay longer among other factors.
So, if you’re looking to learn how to increase your page authority, then these are the factors to look into.
How to Increase Your Domain Authority Score?
Up to this point, you may be wondering “how to increase my domain authority”. Wonder no more, having a high DA is about ranking better than your competitors. This means having quality over quantity as far as links are concerned. It’s all about the relevance to your content that carries the day.
Here are steps on how to increase domain authority in 2022:
Source: YouTube
Create Link-Worthy Content
As much as content is king, it’ll only pay off if it can attract shares and backlinks. It’s therefore worth considering this when creating your content strategy. Because the more linkable your content is, the more you will attract quality backlinks as well as social shares which we have seen to be quite important.
Think of it this way. You have created amazing content and readers have found it very helpful therefore they will share it easily with other people. Such an approach will equally increase the chances of getting backlinks from high-authority sites. This will end up boosting your root domain and overall DA.
Examples of link-worthy content include:
How to tutorials. Solve your readers’ problems or pain points by giving them step-by-step tutorials that are straightforward and easy to follow.
Lists. People love quick stuff; list posts are easily sharable and straight to the point.
Feature Experts. Having an expert from your industry is a great way to get high-authority links in your content.
Long-form content. Lengthy high-quality content that offers value to readers is recognized by both Google and SEO tools. Therefore, avoid thin content and make yourself an authority with in-depth solution-focused content.
Rid Negative SEO
Inbound links are valuable for your site’s domain authority ranking. However bad links can create more harm than good. For instance, if your site gets links from harmful websites, it could truly sabotage your DA and could even cause you to get a penalty from Google.
Another source of negative SEO could come from being hosted by a cheap server that allows malicious attacks or has outdated plugins.
It’s vital that you help increase your domain authority by conducting due diligence on the health of your website by auditing your site regularly and tracking your Google Search Console data. Fix any vulnerability that you come across. Takedown all harmful backlinks and get rid of outdated plugins. Also, get hosted by a trusted server.
Optimize Your Site User Experience and Structure
One of the factors mentioned above for calculating DA was website structure and user experience. A good structure enables easier crawling by search engines to index your site on search results. You can use a sitemap to ease navigation on your website.
Another factor is to improve your internal link structure. This will help your DA in two ways, first, it will ensure a smooth user experience. Direct your links to informative pages within your website to keep your visitors on your site. This is great for reducing the bounce rate.
Internal links also allow search engines to crawl and index your pages. A good structure increases domain authority over time bypassing the value of one page to other web pages (link juice). Plus, it indicates the trustworthiness of that page and thus increases its domain authority.
Another very important factor is user experience. If you have not optimized your website for mobile use, what are you waiting for? Did you know that Google now prioritizes how well a website functions on mobile?
This is one of the best things you can do when planning how to increase domain authority. A good site must function fully and smoothly on mobile and that includes fast loading.
The final factor is to ensure the safety of your website. Use SSL certificates. It’s compulsory.
Use Older Domains
The domain age affects your domain authority score. Younger domains tend to have low scores.
Get High-Quality Backlinks from Reputable Authority Sites
Are you tired of hearing about backlinks? Well, in domain authority they’re a really important factor. Statistics have shown that more backlinks translate to more organic traffic on a page. Therefore quality backlinks are important.
One way you can get quality backlinks is to use HARO. You could also look at your competitors’ backlink sources and see how you can get a link from the same sites. And an even easier way to get quality backlinks is through guest posting.
For guest posting, you have to publish on a website that has a higher DA than yours in order to increase your domain authority. This site also has to be offering relevant content that’s within your niche, it has to be relevant and of high quality, without these two, it could lower your DA.
Link the Unlinked Mentions
Besides getting high-quality backlinks, you can also build links by tracking where your brand has been mentioned but without the link being included. What you need to do is to contact these people that mentioned you and ask them to add the link, especially if they are an authority publication. Often times they will be happy to.
Wondering how you can get all your mentions?
It’s pretty simple, use Google Alert, set up your blog or brand name (it’s an easy process), and then you will get alerts whenever you have been mentioned. You can then head to that page to see whether you have been linked, if not, contact them and get linked. And this will especially happen if your website is an authority in the niche.
This means several things. First of all, you need to keep updating your old content to keep it relevant to your readers. Google notices fresh content and this is a great way on how to increase domain authority. So, if you have content that’s several years old, go and update it with SEO optimization in mind.
Another way of staying consistent with your content strategy is by consistently posting new relevant long-form content. Ensure that this content is superior to that of your competitors. It includes correctly formatting it, citing it thoroughly, and ensuring it is error-free.
When you post such content a minimum of once a month you can rest assured that you will notice an increase in your domain authority. The important thing in your content strategy is to offer value to your readers. Without value, you won’t earn any links, ergo, no increase or improvement in your DA.
Become an Authority in Your Niche
Everyone likes to associate with experts or brands considered to have authority in their niches. If you build your blog to become an authority in your niche, you will organically get linked by other bloggers or high-domain authority websites in your industry.
Conclusion
How well your domain authority ranks will largely depend on how you build it. Does domain authority matter? The simple answer is yes. It’s a great indicator of your website’s health in terms of strength, reliability, and trustworthiness.
You can increase your domain authority over time by bolstering your high-quality and authority link strategies as listed above. Couple that with stellar content and you’ll be on your way to success. Domain authority will help raise your website’s rank in search engine results. In simple, a good DA will set you up for success.
If you are an entrepreneur or solopreneur and have your own site, it’s a matter of time till you hear that in order to rank in search engines you need SEO backlinks, if possible high-quality backlinks.
All good, but how do you get backlinks? And what are backlinks in SEO, more precisely?
These are links from external websites that point to your site, consider it a “recommendation”, a vote of trust, or a vote of confidence. Simply put they are hyperlinks back from other sites. The more you have the better.
SEO backlinks can also be referred to as inbound links or incoming links.
Why Are SEO Backlinks Important?
Recent studies have shown that SEOs consider backlinks as a significant ranking factor. So, backlinks can be looked at as pathways that represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. They’re essentially signals to search engines that other sites can vouch for your content and this means if you get many quality backlinks on your website then the search engines automatically conclude that your content is credible and therefore worthy of showing them on search engine results pages (SERP).
The most important thing to consider before starting the link-building process is that you must first have a strong and properly optimized website. This will ensure that your backlinks are very effective and drive the desired effect. However, if your website is not well-optimized, you lose out on valuable opportunities and waste your time and money.
How do you optimize your website?
Here is a quick checklist to go through.
1. Ensure that you have no UI or technical issues such as site loading speeds, mobile friendliness, or page duplication. Fix all external links by conducting a website audit. (This is crucial)
2. Create high-quality linkable content by generating content that will inform, educate or add value to your audience (and eventually to yourself). Remember, content is the reason the search began in the first place. It should be:
3. Create an intelligent site architecture. This simply means – avoiding acquiring backlinks to non-linkable pages and instead using a content-centric approach through a reverse silo to acquire content-rich pages with the goal of distributing link authority from your rich content to your sales-driven pages.
With the above 3 elements checked, you now have a foundation to set your SEO backlinks-building strategy. The strategy, as you may know, means your overall plan. What do you hope to achieve after the entire process? For the purpose of this article, your strategy here should be (as indicated above) credible content that’s worthy of linking. It’s really that simple. This is how to get quality backlinks for free. You must provide quality. The highest possible.
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So, how are you going to proceed with this? Beyond your strategy, you should be and act tactically.
Without further ado, here are the smartest and most effective link-building tactics that will bring you SEO backlinks to strengthen your domain authority.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 1 – Grow Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand is the ultimate scorecard that measures your presence and worth either as a business or as a person. It showcases to the world what you stand for, your skills, and the solutions you’re bringing to the table.
So, much work goes into building a strong brand, but the benefits can be seen when people naturally link to your content, thus building links. This means your content earns you organic traffic.
So for this to work, you need consistent and frequent quality content to share with your audience. Blogging works very well here, improves your search engine rankings, and gains more organic traffic through frequent quality blogging.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 2 – Establish Your Content Pillars
Effective content requires a powerful sense of purpose. You should have identified your goal and target. And it’s on this foundation that you build a theme that will direct your articles, videos, or blogs. You can start with a few great in-depth articles or blogs that are going to act as the bedrock on which many other smaller articles can be linked back.
The key thing to remember here is that the pillar content shouldn’t be too specific; this will allow you to build the smaller articles on it while addressing the needs and values of your target consumer.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 3 – Syndication and Repurposing of Older Content
It’s possible to have an already existing compilation of great content but not sharable on some sites or platforms because of its format. So, instead of losing out on the opportunity to share this information, and be linked to other sites, you can repurpose it to other formats.
You can repurpose your content from text to videos or info-graphics then share it on other fitting platforms and increase your audience.
Syndicating your content to third-party sites is another way to build your links. Other sites can pick up your content alongside a link back or even publish the whole thing or an excerpt but with a link to your site.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 4 – Earn Editorial Links
One of the things that absolutely boosts your SEO is editorial links. And these are earned by writing quality, valuable and relevant content. Studies found that editorial links are the most sought-after links because they don’t cost you anything.
You see, you run a tiresome risk of getting penalized by Google if all your links are manually built, so instead of struggling to retain them, why not just fetch deeper in your creative juice jug and come up with relevant content that compels others to link you?
This means offering solutions that your target is actively seeking.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 5 – Guest Posts
Marketers are incorporating more blogs and more content each day; because it generates an average of 97% more inbound links meaning more traffic. And this is partly why guest blogging is an effective strategic approach to getting backlinks.
It is a win-win scenario that allows you to both earn high-quality backlinks free and also reach a new audience and gain new traffic. It’s just brilliant.
But the tactic that makes this a win situation is relevance and target. You need to know the sites where your content will be relevant to the respective audience. So, the next question is how do you find these sites?
There are a few ways you can do this. First, you can identify prospect sites and then pitch your content to them. You can achieve this with the help of Google Search Operators or “spy” on your competitors and check where they guest post. The important thing is to find a site that accepts guest posts, is connected with your niche, and has high authority and lots of traffic in order for you to maximize the chances of getting your content shared.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 6 – Use Social Media & Network with Peers in Your Niche
Link building is all about forming and cultivating relationships that boost links back to your site. One such place to start is through social media channels including YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. These platforms are where you first showcase your brand or business personality and start creating relationships.
Social media can improve your building links efforts through outreach, content ideation, or even content promotion. What you need to do is identify the specific group of people you want to connect with e.g. influencers who are able to offer you a valuable link back to your site.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 7 – Use Infographics
A picture is worth a thousand words.
In 2018, visual content registered the highest number of shares among social media platforms and blogs as well. This means greater opportunities to connect with the audience and to earn SEO backlinks because it’s clear and quick information.
It’s also important to note that infographics continue to drive more and more traffic even if the content is not very new, unlike standard text-based content. The key thing for your infographic to become a sharable asset is its uniqueness, appeal, and ease of understanding. You could, for example, use gifs instead of static images.
There are a couple of reasons why links can get broken:
They can either have been removed from the linking page or
The linked page was deleted and therefore no longer exists.
For this strategy to work though, you need to find out the reasons for either of the above situations before you jump into using them.
So, here the first step would be to identify a related site that you would like a backlink from then to check them out in a tool like Ahrefs to identify pages that have broken links. Broken link reclamation is a great way to build valuable links because it eases the crawling and indexing of websites by search engines and also improves user experience and confidence as a site, by getting rid of the 404 error message.
Once you have identified the broken links, you can offer the site owners a chance of replacing the broken link with a valid link with similar relevant content from your site.
It’s another win-win situation because the site owner will have fewer broken links while you get high-quality backlinks.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 9 – Stay On Top- Check Your Competitors
It’s important to know the tools that your competitors are using and replicate this to achieve their level of authority. This means doing an analysis of their link profile and gaining similar backlinks.
It’s however, important to note that there are 2 types of competitors:
a) Domain Level Competitor
This one competes with you in the SERPs entirely. This means they’re competing with you for many search terms across many pages.
b) Page Level Competitors
These compete with you on the page level for specific keywords or topics.
Your first step would be to do a Google search for important keywords. You could start by writing down URLs for the top ten websites that appear in relation to your search. Then ask yourself important questions like why they linked to your competitor and not you, you can quickly figure this out by looking at the anchor text, surrounding text, and even the page title.
Once you figure out why and where your competitors are getting mentioned, then copy their strategy.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 10 – Create a Link Rate Target
The markets are continually building new links with valuable content and so do your competitors. You, therefore, need to understand the number of links required to earn the first page rankings at one point and which is the earning rate of new links in order to stay on the first page. You can get this information by looking at the Ahrefs affiliate SERP overview.
The key thing here is to pay attention to the relevance and quality of the referring domains. It’s better to have little yet relevant and high-quality content that creates an impact than hundreds of pages of worthless information.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 11 – In Ego They Trust
Using ego as bait simply means creating content that’s intended to appeal to your target and getting a link in return. Your target here must have some authority in your industry else it won’t be of any help. The important thing here is to give them attention and get some back with a link.
This strategy can benefit you by increasing your traffic and also improving your site or post’s authority. Here are a few ways you can get free backlinks:
a) Expert Roundups
This is a quick and easy way to build free backlinks and improve site traffic. You can approach this by asking the experts and influencers in your niche for an opinion on a certain relevant topic, and then consolidate their opinions into a high-quality blog post and then let them know about it and possibly request them to share it.
b) Mentions
This is another sure way of getting the backlinks free. You can mention a top-notch influencer or expert by quoting something they’ve said, you could even add an image of them to boost and catch their attention. Then inform them because this way they will share your content with their followers and this is a win for you.
c) Interviews
Most big names in any industry love interviews, get a contact, approach them with your well-thought-out set of questions and once they respond, publish them and watch them share the interview on their platforms.
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SEO Backlinks Tactic 12 – Unlinked Mentions
Quite often, people will mention you and not link to you. But with this kind of mention, you’re halfway through to a link, which means you’re not a stranger to this business. So, it would be easy to convince this person to link to your site.
But how will you find such relevant mentions in the humongous World Wide Web? There are a few tools you can use including Ahrefs Content Explorer or Google Alerts. They search for mentions of your brand or any word or phrase related to a particular topic.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 13 – Create Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that remains fresh and relevant to its target audience and keeps giving value, remains informative, and retains its original quality years on. It’s simply timeless.
Such content includes lists, how-to tutorials, tips, best practices, etc. You can find a smart way to incorporate these kinds of things in your content by following these tips:
Make sure the keywords are evergreen as well.
Make your content visually attractive and the text easy to understand
Make sure it’s current and relevant with actionable tips
It gives satisfying solutions for the reader
SEO Backlinks Tactic 14 – Good Old PR
Online PR, just like traditional PR is an effective way of spreading the good word about your brand, only that this time it’s through online platforms such as blogs or social media. It’s essential because it helps you build relationships with people, and eventually influence them to give you their trust and this strengthens your authority and delivers organic backlinks.
And because all businesses are different, there is no one size fits all strategy for online PR, but here are a few basic principles that can guide you:
Understand what you want to gain from the online PR strategy
Identify who your target is and understand the market
What are you promoting primarily? Your Brand? Product? Your Authority or Reach?
Who are the influencers in your field and what kind of content do they respond to?
With these critical points noted, you can do some research and identify the opportunities you’re missing.
So, since Google revealed that quality backlinks are among the top 3 search ranking factors, you have more than enough strategies to get you high up in the SERP in the near future.
Get working and let me know which one worked the best for you.
YouTube presents such an enormous opportunity for businesses to dive into video marketing. And why won’t it? Statistics show that 54% of users prefer to see more video content and 87% of marketers use video as a marketing tool because it’s effective as far as ROI is concerned. It’s for such reasons that video marketing is on the rise and YouTube SEO ranking is a very important thing if you want to create an impact. If you are just starting YouTube SEO for beginners comes in handy.
And while the main social media platforms in an attempt to keep up with this new trend have incorporated video features in their platforms, none of them can beat YouTube because it’s the second largest search engine with over 2 billion users each month and over one billion hours spent on videos each day.
What this means is that every other person or business is doing something on this platform. So, for you to stand out, video SEO is the next monster you may have to fight with and conquer.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be such an uphill task because it’s not too different from any content optimization you have been doing in the past.
YouTube search engine optimization may sound like some complex thing and may intimidate you quite a bit. But it’s not that complicated. All it requires is to catch up with the learning curve of all the new strategies and tactics that seem to be coming up every other day. To help this learning endeavor and make catching up easy, here are a few core fundamentals that you can start with.
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The main goal of optimizing your site is to help it rank higher in search engine results to improve your relevance and hence authority. Relevance can be appreciated as a measure of how suitable your content is in solving a certain problem and can be achieved through the use of a selected keyword combination. Authority is the measure of how much trust you’re worth.
b. Keyword Research
Specific keywords by themselves may not do most for you because Google search is driven by both semantic and contextual considerations. The important thing that will help you stand out is to be able to identify the lead or head keyword; this includes equally the short and high-volume keywords as well as the longer and more conversational but low-volume keywords.
c. Measurement plus Analysis
As with any work you do, unless you know how to measure and interpret your results, you may not get so far. One of the best tools you can use to measure and interpret is Google Analytics. It will help you (even if you’re a newbie) to experiment with various metrics to see the ones that perform best.
With these three core fundamentals of SEO, you’re in a better place at understanding why you need YouTube SEO tips for beginners and how to best approach it.
How YouTube’s Algorithm Works
Let’s speak some history.
In 2012 YouTube ranked videos according to view count. Between that time and 2016, it was all about the length of the views your videos got. In 2017 it was more about the quality of your video, just last year, in 2018, it was more about monetization.
But in 2019 they announced that they will not be recommending content that seemed to reach borderline to protect its viewers from being harmed or misinformed. With that said, they’re into assisting their viewers to locate the videos they want to watch while maximizing the length of time spent engaged on the platform.
So, the YouTube algorithm will rank your videos based on how appropriately your video’s title, keywords, or description (metadata) fits the user’s quest and how well it engages your users, i.e. comments or likes. In short, it’s all about the session time and engagement.
How then, can you ace the reach as well as the engagement time for your videos with more ease?
There are three main areas of YouTube video SEO that you should put your focus on in order to maximize your visibility. So, this article will look deeper into these three elements:
Keyword Search
Optimization of Content
Engagement
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research simply means looking for words and phrases that users use to search for different video content on YouTube. So, when you optimize your video content through the use of the right keywords, you have a better shot of getting a significant number of views as well as engagement.
So, how can you find the right keywords to boost your video SEO?
How to Search for Keywords for Your YouTube Content and YouTube SEO Tools
a. YouTube Autocomplete
Assuming you are a frequent YouTube user, you have perhaps noticed that when you search for an item on YouTube, you get suggestions that kind of complete your quest. This is called autocomplete. It’s a feature that suggests the most popular keywords that most other people use to find videos when they do a YouTube search.
What this means is that autocomplete gives you the most popular keywords that you can use to optimize your content. But it also goes beyond keywords; it often goes all the way to give you the key phrases that are most popular. This is one of the easiest ways to search for keywords.
b. Top Competitor Videos
It’s always a good idea to see what’s working for fellow YouTubers. How do you do this? Identify the channels in the same niche as you; find their most viewed videos and then check the video titles and descriptions.
c. Video Result Keywords from Google
It’s possible for your videos to not only rank on YouTube Top results, but also on Google. You need to be able to identify specific keywords that can make this happen since Google won’t show video results for just any keywords. These specific keywords that Google can pick are what are called Video Result Keywords.
So, before finalizing the keywords you’ll use for your YouTube SEO checklist, search for them on Google to see which one gets picked up, and then use it more.
d. Your YouTube Analytics
This is another keyword search goldmine since you get to see the very keywords that viewers use to find your content. You can get this by going to YouTube Studio, clicking on “analytics” then “reach viewers”. You may be surprised to find keywords other than the ones you’ve been using. And this will enrich your keywords list and eventually rank you even higher on YouTube search results.
So, besides using your keywords on titles or descriptions and tags, you can maximize your video SEO by mentioning these keywords throughout your speech. This is possible because YouTube transcribes (but you have to correct this) your videos and each time you mention a keyword you help it understand your content’s background relevance in relation to your keywords.
2. YouTube SEO for Beginners – Optimization of Your Content
The next important step to optimize is your content. There are several ways to improve the optimization, and here are the main ones.
i. Optimize the Title of Your Video
Ensure your video’s title includes the keywords you are targeting and at the same time the exact words that users choose when searching for your content.
ii. Optimize the Meta Description
The definite way to make your content visible encapsulates the use of optimized descriptions. The use of keywords in your description helps you get the searchers’ attention as well as YouTube’s rankings. A meta description will determine whether the searcher will want to click on your video result or not. A meta description is any additional text that appears in your search results that lets the reader know what the link is all about.
Your meta descriptions must:
Include the main keywords
Must be catchy with the use of verbs like “Check out”, “Discover” etc.
Must be relevant, as compelling as possible, matching the content on your video
Must be between 135 to 155 characters and no longer
Have unique meta descriptions
And because these descriptions are an introduction to what you’re about to talk about, they will woo the user to click for more information.
Do not forget to optimize the title of the video file, and the tags, make a thumbnail, and include closed captions.
iii. Transcripts
A transcript is simply a textual illustration of your spoken content in the video files. And because search engines are not able to watch your video, they instead will index the text, this is how transcripts enable them to take in your content and index it as required.
How does this help SEO? Well, content marketers get a lot of derivative data with the help of transcripts and this helps build an authoritative presence in the search results. Transcripts are also great for UX, remember as earlier indicated, YouTube is now more concerned about the user’s satisfaction, so transcripts are a reliable way to optimize the user experience and improve your page rank.
iv. Location
Targeting is everything. If you wish to tap only into your local area, then it’s ideal to include your location in your video. It will boost your video SEO within your target area and maximize visibility.
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3. YouTube SEO for Beginners – Boost Engagement
Video marketing SEO thrives on engagement. Gaining many views is no longer enough for your video SEO. Your viewers need to engage with your content because this is how search engines understand how useful your content is to your viewers and this is how YouTube SEO ranking occurs.
The metrics to put your finger on are:
Likes, shares, and comments – Tracking the number of likes, shares, and comments on your videos is a great guide as to whether your content is relevant or popular or not. The shares and comments especially can boost your engagement and views of your other videos. At this point, it’s important to say that it’s actually ok to encourage your viewers to comment and share your content. Just make it more natural and less salesy.
Click Through Rate – CTR is the clicks your video gets based on impressions. You can improve your CTR with a great title and a great thumbnail (read on for more on this).
Subscribers – If the number of your subscribers keeps going higher then it means you’re gaining popularity. This is a good sign of high engagement.
Audience Retention – this is the amount of time people spend watching your videos. The longer people keep watching your video (ideally to the end) the higher your video will be ranked by YouTube. Why? YouTube wants people to spend more time on their platform for the ads, and if you can help them achieve that, then they return the favor by ranking your content higher.
Here are a few ways to make high-retention videos:
Start with a summary of your content
Jump into the main content of your video without being too wordy
Use open loops – hint at what’s coming
Video length – longer videos tend to perform better, if you can, make it at least 20 minutes or more.
Thumbs up and thumbs down
As far as viewer engagement is concerned, always remember that you’re addressing people. Treat the whole conversation (including the ones in the comments) like you would a real-life conversation. This means making your points simple and very clear, emphasizing the key steps, and providing humor while at it, everyone needs a bit of that at some point. And is a sure way to keep your channel engaged and YouTube happy.
Source: Youtube
Bonus Tips on YouTube SEO Basics
Use Eye-catching Thumbnails
This is the first thing that a viewer will see when searching through YouTube. It’s the first impression that will tell the viewer what your video is all about. So, you need to arrest their attention and make them want to watch, or they’ll scroll on.
So, how do you create an impressionable thumbnail?
Use the right size- YouTube has guidelines for the dimensions. So, don’t make it too small.
Contrast – Pick a perfect contrast for your photo and your title.
A great thumbnail is not only good for your video SEO, but for branding purposes as well.
Embed Your Videos
Besides getting video SEO on the platform itself, it’s possible to achieve this by embedding your video on social media sites and the web in general. This is made easy by the fact that YouTube is very strong in hosting video content on these other platforms on the web.
The sharing and embedding buttons are already present in the default options so your work has pretty much been done. The advantage of embedding videos in other places is that it grows your engagement in great ways; in any case, someone who may not know about your channel on YouTube may be able to see your content on a blog or on social media. There is no end to the benefits of embedding videos because people generally love video content more.
Promote and Link Your Channel
Within the first week of posting your video, you’ll see it featured on YouTube’s new content. So, how do you promote it for maximum visibility?
The first thing is to know the best time to post the video. You can identify the peak periods by checking your real-time reports.
You can also promote your video by linking it to your email or embedding it as indicated earlier, in your newsletter, blog, or wherever your existing audience may be spending their time.
Stellar Content
While this is a YouTube SEO tutorial, no matter how brilliant video SEO will not guarantee success without quality content because the quality of your content is what carries the day. The degree of optimization is important of course, but people will not try to find you again unless you give them a reason to.
Keep it relevant, useful, and engaging. Build it around authenticity and it will sell itself. As far as SEO is concerned, be specific as much as possible with your keywords and the intent of the topic.
Be consistent and frequent with your content to keep the viewers engaged and for you to stay relevant in their lives.
In Summary
YouTube SEO is more than just keywords, it is a combination of various YouTube SEO tools put together for effective results. It’s about ranking your video search results to improve your relevance and your authority by understanding how the algorithm values session time as well as engagement and knowing how to leverage these two requirements through optimization.
Other factors of great importance include the delivery of quality and relevant content on a regular basis to build a relationship with your viewers and consequently build lasting engagement. Video SEO has improved due to the availability of measurable metrics that help keep track of the work in progress. And YouTube SEO basics are rather digestible. Plus, there are tools and features on YouTube to help. So, don’t stop trying until you master this art while keeping yourself updated with the ever-changing ranking algorithm of YouTube.
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