– In this actionable article, I’m going to lay out the five most important SEO strategies that you need to focus on in 2022. And I’m going to explain these SEO tips step by step so you can apply them for huge traffic gains on your website. My name is Matt Diggity, and I’m the founder of Diggity Marketing, LeadSpring, The Search Initiative, Authority Builders, and The Affiliate Lab. These are all SEO-based businesses that live or die based on how good my SEO is, which is why I’m constantly testing the Google algorithm. I’m about to share some of the recent things I’ve learned with you right now.
And one thing I’d like you to know before we get started is that this is indeed an SEO tips video specifically made for 2022. I didn’t film this last year and then simply changed the title like a D-bag.
And you can’t edit a YouTube video once it’s been uploaded. So, every time you hear me say 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, remember, this video is current AF. Next, this is not a basic video telling you SEO advice you already know.
Stuff like if you create quality content, then Google will love you. You know what I’m talking about. This is an advanced video, specifically tailored for what’s changed and what’s working in 2022. And I’m going to deliver everything super actionably so you can get started implementing these changes today. There will be five SEO strategies served up to you on a silver platter.
But make sure to stick around until the end because there will be a bonus tip that is absolutely critical as well, especially considering how much SEO is going to change in the future. Let’s get started. The first SEO strategy that you need to focus on in 2022 is creating topical authority for your website. Your website achieves topical authority status on the topic when you completely cover that topic in your content as compared to your competition.
And another important factor is if you cover that topic for a longer period of time, when you hit topical authority status, Google will rank you faster and higher than everyone else in the niche.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you want to become a topical authority on protein powder. It’s not enough to simply create a single article on the best protein powder or what is protein powder? Protein powder is a vast subject. If you can cover all those topics, like is it bad to drink protein powder daily?
How much protein powder should you eat in a day? Does protein make you fat? Once you start covering them to a high degree, you approach topical authority status and Google rewards the (beep) out of you. For reference, here’s the entire list of 200 items we generated for the protein powder topical map.
People have been noticing the topical authority effect more and more these days.
This dude, Talha, in one of my Facebook groups noticed this one-month-old website that posted 721 articles and hit 30K visitors per month. Then there’s the godfather of topical authority, Koray Tugberk, posting up crazy traffic boners like this all the time. I did a killer interview with Koray, so make sure to watch it after you watch this video. What’s more, topical authority is such a powerful ranking factor, it can overcome other website weaknesses. I often see crappy sites publishing garbage articles, but it’s working just because they publish a ton of them.
So, here’s my advice to you. Make 2022 your year to break your own publishing records. But stick to one topic at a time and hit it with everything you got. Bear in mind, it starts with generating a complete topical map on your niche. Here’s what I do.
Go to answerthepublic.com. Type in your topic and get a head start with 100 or so topics. Type your keywords into Google itself and get tons of topics from the People also ask feature. You can use a tool like SEO Minion to download hundreds of them in a single shot.
Go to the bottom of the search result and pull tons more topics by clicking around and exploring the related searches. And leverage the Google Search bar’s auto-complete function to get even more topics. And here’s where the gold is. Look at your competitors to see what kind of topical coverage got them to the top of Google.
I said this a million times before, the answer to SEO is always written on page one.
How do you do that? You dig through their site map and do a search for your keyword. Then when you’re done, remove duplicates and put your long list of results through a keyword clustering tool like Keyword Cupid which is going to organize which topics need to be written in the same articles, as opposed to separate articles. Topical authority doesn’t stop there though. You need to make sure all the things are written well.
For that, I 100% recommend using Surfer’s Content Editor Tool, which is going to look at who is ranking on number one for a given keyword. And it’s going to tell you exactly which words, entities, and phrases you need to have in your content, and at what frequencies too. By the way, if you’re committed to leveling up in SEO, make sure to subscribe and turn on the notification bell.
I’m doubling down on this channel with tons of videos like these, so make sure you get notified. My next SEO 2022 advanced tip is to get your hands dirty with AI-generated content.
In 2021, Jarvis and other AI content-generation tools hit the market. They allow you to literally click buttons, and content magically comes up on the screen. Is this the best content you’ve ever read in your life? Not even close. But we’re talking about machine learning here.
It’s going to get better. – He is refining his methods. He is evolving. (static buzzing) – And there’s sites out there that are publishing 100% AI content, and they’re kicking ass. Why?
Because they’re posting 500 times a day and covering topical maps like it’s no one’s business. So, my advice here is to at least start playing around with AI-generated content. The tools are going to get better over time, and you want to make sure you can take advantage of that wave.
Start setting a goal of creating at least two to three AI content pieces per month. Half of entrepreneurship is being in the right place at the right time.
This applies here. By the way, in my 2022 SEO prediction video, I mentioned that it’s going to be hard for Google to deal with the rise of AI content. In turn, they’re going to have to turn up the volume on other ranking factors outside content, and I’m going to touch upon that later. Next, you need to focus on engagement. No, you don’t need to propose to your girlfriend.
– Huh? (static buzzing) – Bad dad joke. Sorry. You need to pay attention to how your users are behaving on your site. Google is learning a lot of lessons from the success of YouTube, and YouTube is all about engagement.
Don’t worry, I’ll define what engagement is right now. Instead of relying on ranking signals that can be manipulated or don’t truly represent if a piece of content is good or not, why wouldn’t the algorithm just look at people’s behavior on the article? Did the reader actually read the article and get what he or she came for? Engagement starts with CTR, otherwise known as Click-Through Rate.
This is the percentage of time that people click on your article when they see the listing in a search result.
It influences if your article actually gets read in the first place. If I didn’t have a good enough title and thumbnail for this video, it wouldn’t have this many views. Improve your website click-through rate by optimizing your title and meta description. Put your keywords towards the front of the title and add clickbait, like here with the current year, towards the back. For your description, add keywords in there to get them bolded.
With any luck, you’ll get jump links like I have too. A table of contents help with that. Next, we have time on page, which is a decent indication that an article is good, but it’s not the whole story. just because someone’s spent 10 minutes on an article doesn’t mean they liked it. Maybe an article that someone was on for one minute got them their answer quicker, hence a happier searcher.
Nonetheless, more time on page is better than less. So, here’s what you can do.
Have a strong introduction, paragraphs that hook the reader by being interesting, entertaining, and informative. Have no walls of text on the page. Break up things with images and eye-friendly paragraphs, one to two sentences per paragraph, and have a great design.
I’ll touch upon this in the next section. Next, we have goal completion. Before we talked about how someone spending a minute on a page is a good thing in some cases. That’s when their goals are met. If someone finds my Best Web Hosting for SEO article and they click on this WPX link in 20 seconds, that’s a freaking happy searcher.
They got what they came for. My advice here is to focus on your call-to-action CTA buttons and get them clicked. I got a great video on this in my channel. Have great content that actually sells your CTAs by being informative but not too salesy. Next step on your list is to really pay attention to user experience or UX.
In June 2021, Google rolled out the page experience update, which was an update completely dedicated to user experience. That’s an odd thing for sure. But you can bet your buns it won’t be the last time they add new user experience-related ranking factors to the algorithm. Here’s what you need to look at when it comes to user experience: core web vitals. These ranking factors are the new kids on the block that they patched in with the page experience update.
It includes Largest Contentful Paint or LCP.
This is your loading performance. You want to get it faster than 2.5 seconds. Get a great host, pre-size your images, and defer or remove slow-loading scripts.
First Input Delay or FID. When someone interacts or clicks on your page, you want it to be faster than 100 milliseconds. Again, this comes down to hosting and your server response time and optimizing slow code on the page. And lastly, Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS. CLS is all about visual stability.
When the page loads, you don’t want boxes and colors jumping all over the place. You want this number to be less than 0.1. This comes back to scripts again. For more details, check out my Core Web Vitals video on my channel.
For UX optimization, you also want your site to be mobile-friendly. This means that when people look at your site on mobile, it looks normal. Everything fits on the page. The fonts aren’t too big or too small. Stuff like that.
Use Google’s free mobile-friendly checker tool to see how your site performs in Google’s eyes. Also, make sure that your site meets all of Google’s safe browsing standards. That includes keeping clean of malware and hacked content.
Google provides another free tool with their Security Issues report. I’m sure you have this already, but make sure you’re all set up on HTTPS.
And lastly, in the UX category, make sure you don’t have any intrusive interstitials. Intrusive what? This is when you have a bunch of pop-ups and display ads freaking dominating the page on mobile. Don’t do that. In fact, I’d turn off all pop-ups on mobile.
It’s just not worth it. Now, I could never make an SEO video discussing important ranking factors without mentioning backlinks. Do not sleep on backlinks in 2022. And Google has made this blatantly clear. Let me show you what I mean.
Do you know what this is? Yes, it’s a psychic. But it’s also cash money. Psychic readings is one of the most lucrative affiliate niches there is, and it’s very competitive. Look what happens when you Google free psychic readings.
Look who comes up here: “The Daily World,” “Herald Net,” “Peninsula Daily News.” Do these look like authorities on the topic of psychic readings? You can bet your lucky stars, no. It doesn’t take a tarot reading to figure out that what these new sites have going on is a ton of backlinks. When I turn on the Ahrefs toolbar, you see what I mean: DR 68, DR 78, DR 72.
Backlinks are beating relevance in this SERP, and many, many more. So, build links and build lots of them. And be diverse with your link building. This table illustrates where I’m putting my backlink efforts in 2022. 30% of the links I build are in the category of White Hat Link insertions.
I’m manually outreaching to websites that I want to link from, and asking to get a link placed into articles, preferably with some links going to them. 5% of my links are coming from directory citations, even for my affiliate sites. And for that I’m using my own business, Authority Builders. 15% of my links are coming from editorial-level sites. We’re talking about DR 70 and above.
For this I’m using HARO, link exchanges with high authority competitors, and digital PR campaigns. And lastly, the main bulk of my link building, 50% is coming through guest posting through Authority Builders as well. Here’s my bonus advice for ranking in 2022. Make 2022 your year to level up your networking and masterminding. SEO is forever changing, and it’s changing faster than ever.
What I plan to do is to stay in touch with as many smart people as possible. No single person could possibly figure out the algorithm by themself.
But together, people can combine and share ideas and accomplish way more than you could by yourself. Join Facebook groups like The Affiliate SEO Mastermind. And subscribe to this channel to stay on top of all the SEO developments before your competition.
– An SEO tip that just works, especially if you’re a beginner. People say SEO‘s hard and complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Even if you are a beginner, you can get tons of traffic to your website through simple strategies. And today I want to start you off with one. First off, have you ever heard of the site Quora?
It’s a simple question and answer site and it’s super popular.
So popular, it’s one of the top hundred websites in the world, according to Similarweb. So how do you get that traffic that Quora gets? Well, it’s simple. They just answer questions that people are curious on.
These questions are long tail keywords. In other words, they contain many keywords. Best of all, they aren’t competitive. It’s easy to rank for questions because no one is targeting them. So how do you find these question based keywords in your industry?
Well, have you heard of a tool called AnswerThePublic? It’s a tool that shows you all the popular questions that people are asking.
Head over to AnswerThePublic, type in the keyword related to your space and hit Search. You’ll then get a list of all the questions that are popular within your space. Now, if you want to see their search volume, you can type in any of those questions into Ubersugggest and it’ll tell you how many people search for them on a monthly basis.
But before you go and write content on all those keywords, there are a few things that you need to know. First, make each question a unique page, assuming you have enough content to write about. And when I mean enough content, I’m talking about hundreds of words, ideally 300 plus, if you can do even more than that, like 400, 500 a 1,0000, even better. But don’t just add fluff. Second, you need to have an amazing answer.
For example, I wouldn’t create a page answering the question of what’s two plus two, because everyone knows it’s four. And if not, they can just Google it. And it’s one word or one letter or one number more. So which is just four, right? There’s not much content to create on that.
But if I had a sports website, I may answer the question of what is it like to be Olympian? And my answer would be very detailed. From what it’s like to train, how long it takes to be Olympian. What kind of diets do you have to be on? What is it like to win or even lose?
And how do you earn money as Olympian? Right? I don’t see Olympians getting shoe contracts like Michael Jordan. I would even break down how hard it is to be one. And the amount of people that try and like the percentage that you’ll actually have to be Olympian.
So that way it gives people a perspective on how hard it is.
Third, you want to continually update your answers as things change. For example, it was probably less competitive to be Olympian when the Olympics first started versus how hard it is today. So as time goes on, keep your answer updated. This is super important.
Just think of Wikipedia. It is the ninth most popular site in the world. Why? Because they keep their content updated. For reference, most topics there are more pieces of content than searchers.
For example, there are 165 searches a month for their term dog food in the United States, yet there are 2.6 billion results. You think all those searchers are going to go through 2.6 billion results? No, Google doesn’t even show them all because they know people don’t really go past the first page.
Maybe the second page, rarely the third page, which means search engines have their pickings when it comes to determine what sites to rank. So make it easy for a search engine.
Keep your content up to date because they’d rather show updated pieces of content versus ones that are years and outdated. Fourth, promote your content. You don’t have to spend add money to do this.
It’s as simple as sharing it on the social web or linking that newly created answer from some other webpage on your website that’s related to it. Fifth, you have to do this with a lot of questions. Now I know this is not what you want to hear but this is how you’re going to do well. There isn’t a specific number of questions that you need to create content around and you can’t really do it with five or even 10 questions because that won’t get you much traffic in the long run. But if you do this with a thousand questions or even a hundred, you’ll notice nice traffic gains, and the more, the better, assuming you can create amazing answers to those questions.
If you want my team to just do this for you or create other similar content for you if you don’t have the time and resources, just check out my ad agency, NP Digital where we implement the strategy all the time. Now, if you have questions or you’re stuck on implementing the strategy, leave a comment. I’m here to help. If you enjoy the video, like it, share it, tell other people about it. Thank you very much.
In this video, I’m gon na reveal a list of the top voted browser, extensions that search engine professionals use to improve their productivity. I sourced this list from a poll I conducted in my Facebook group “ The Affiliate SEO Mastermind” with over 23,000 members. So what we’re gon na be lookin’ at today is the best of the best extensions as voted on by the community. If we haven’t met before I Matt Diggity, I run multiple SEO businesses, including Diggity Marketing, LeadSpring, The Search Initiative, Authority Builders and the Affiliate Lab
In other words, I do a lot of freakin’ SEO, So anything I can do to improve my productivity makes a really big difference. seo browser extensions are a really big part of that. The good ones can save you a ton of time and give you access to data that you typically be diggin’ around for hours to find And that data might be the difference between you makin’, a good versus a bad SEO decision.
But on the other side of the coin, extensions slow down your browser, which is why you only wan na install the very best ones.
So in this video, I’m gon na break down the top seo extensions, as voted on by thousands of SEO. Professionals And, more importantly, I’m gon na show you how to use’em in the coolest ways possible. But first you know what would be really cool If you smashed a like button.
Since I started this YouTube thing, I’ve become a virtual crackhead for, like button smashes,
So if you could help me out with my addiction, while also supporting my channel that’d, be awesome Comin’ in number five for our top seo extensions is the Detailed SEO Plugin from Glen Allsopp. The Detailed SEO extension is supported for both Chrome and Firefox and allows you to get super quick insights into most of the key SEO metrics for any webpage on the innerwebs. Let me show you how it works.
Let’S say you stumble upon an article that you wan na bring up more information on With a click of a button. Up comes The Detailed Interface Right away in the first overview tab. You get the basic information for the article, such as the meta title, meta description and, if there’s any canonical action goin’ on with the page And down here, you get the word count which is critical if you’re doing content research, so you can ultimately write your own Article on a topic Down here at the bottom there’s a quick link to the site map for the site.
One thing I’d like to do: if I’m trying to figure out how someone was able to rank for something like “ Best hosting for SEO”, is to look at their site map I’ll, do a find for the word host and see how many articles they had to Write on hosting to achieve enough topical authority to rank for best hosting for SEO. In this case, I have 23 hosting articles. The second tab is critical as well, where you can pick up the overall heading structure. This is huge in the SEO writing process. As you wan na make sure you’re covering all the main talking points that your competition does,
I’D left a link to a video in the description on how to write content that ranks number one on Google, So make sure to watch it after you finish this video. The links tab gives you a nice snapshot of both the internal and external links. Comin’ and goin’ into this article, Then we have a summary of the images here. You can check if you’re missing any alt tags, a big no-no which you wan na get fixed
Export these bad boys out to the CSV and start workin’ on them one by one, And then we have a schema tab showing what type of structured markup exists on the article Schema’s handy to put on your site. If you’re trying to get an extra edge on Google, which I’m gon na assume you are I’ll, create a video on schema soon So make sure to subscribe.
You can also right click on the article itself to pull up a quick links menu that will let you do stuff like instantaneously, pull up the Ahrefs’ Site, Explorer view for that page.
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Now, back to the video, The fourth most popular SEO, browser extension is Keyword. Surfer Keyword, Surfer is an amazing plugin for Google Chrome. That gives you a ton of data. You can install it by openin’ up Keyword, Surfer in the Chrome, store and installin’ it for free. There’S over 300,000 users and a 4
5, star rating, So you know you’re in good hands. Let me show you it in action. Surfer enhances your Google search. Result experience by showin’ you right in the search bar. What is the search volume and the cost per click for any keyword, you’re searching for Then. Next to the results themselves, you get estimated traffic for the article as well as the word count for each of the articles rankin’ in the top positions.
This saves you time from havin’ to open up the articles themselves, But then, on the right hand, side of your browser. You get this handy overlay that gives you a set of relevant keywords, their similarity to your original search plus their search volume. So you can add them to your keyword, research plan,
Highlight the ones that you like and save’em to your clipboard to export out as a CSV file, But here’s where the magic comes in Click. This open article outline button here at the top
With a click of a button, it’ll use Surfer’s AI outline generator software to create for you on the fly, an article outline, so you can start writin’ this article right away.
No need to manually look at all the headings of each competitor article, one by one. The AI gets that done for you From here you can select, which headings you wan na include in your article Copy, the selected ones, a clipboard and paste this directly into a Google doc. So you can get writing
Genius Comin’ in at number three on our list is Ahrefs toolbar, A great extension that saves you a ton of time. Ahrefs toolbar is available on both Chrome and Firefox. The toolbar has two different modes:
It can enhance your view on Google search results just like Surfer does. It can also be brought up on individual pages. To give you more insightful data like Detail, plugin, The downside is that most of these features require an Ahrefs account, whereas the other two plugins are free.
When you perform a search up here at the top, you get local search volume. For that keyword, the number of clicks you can expect at number one cost per click, keyword, difficulty, global search volume and return rate Clicking on the overview button. You bring up keyword explorer for a deeper dive into the keyword with the full suite of Ahrefs stats.
Of course, a paid account is required. If you scroll down the search results themselves, you get a whole slew of data. On the left side, you have domain level. Statistics such as domain rating Ahrefs rank the number of backlinks. The domain has referrin’ domains, search traffic and the number of ranking keywords On the right. You have page level statistics such as the URL rating and page level links referring domains, traffic and keywords.
Opening up a page, the Ahrefs toolbar will give you an overlay with virtually the same page and domain level statistics you saw before
But what I like to do is click on the Ahrefs extension icon up here to pull up a deep dive into the content stats Under the content. Tab you get useful stuff. Like the word count, the date the article was published, the date it was last modified and the whole heading hierarchy, Pretty slick. The links. Tab is pretty awesome as well. You can click the Nofollow filter to perhaps filter out, which are the affiliate links, they’re, promoting
And then you can even highlight them on the page, export them to CSV too. Next up we have SEO Minion A really handy plugin. That really is a Swiss army knife for SEO tasks It’s available on both Chrome and Firefox, and it’s free
Loading up SEO Minion, while you’re lookin’ at an article, gives you all your favorite analysis features.
In the analyze on page SEO, tab your meta data information, canonical information and heading structure, which can actually be downloaded right here, as well as the images without alt tags. Super handy Highlight all links as multiple configuration modes, so you can just look at internal due follows if that’s what your little heart desires Lists are downloadable here as well. The check, broken links feature will also help you debug, 404s or redirects. That shouldn’t be on your page
Where I think SEO minion really shines, though, is on the search result. Page
First things: first, I’d like to set up Google to always show a hundred results whenever I do a search Who likes to click like a freaking caveman to page two To do this. You click the gear icon up here at the top. See all settings then slide. This bar over to 100, Now that you’ve done that you can use SEO Minion to just straight up download all the 100 results, all their URLs and titles and meta descriptions.
But my absolute favorite feature is to download the people also ask questions in a search result. Seo Minion is gon na keep clickin’ and expandin’ these questions all the way up to eight levels and download all the related questions that you need to answer in your content. These are absolutely priceless in your articles, FAQ sections. In fact, this is exactly what I do in every single article. I write as it can be seen this FAQ section here on my SEO crash course. Article which ranks number one on Google Comin’ in at first place is a paid extension and that’s Keywords Everywhere.
Keywords Everywhere is available on Chrome and Firefox and as a credit model, where you’re basically paying for individual usages of the tool.
This extension does a lot of the same stuff that previous extensions do Now buckle up, because this extension does a lot of cool stuff On the SERP overlay. We get a ton of cool features over here on the right, A bunch of difficulty metrics. So you can get some insight into just how challenging a keyword is.
Trend data, which indicates if your keyword is gaining in search popularity, as well as a breakdown of other related keywords that are trending
Metaverse strip club come on now High volume related keywords, as well as keywords, other people search for and long tail variations. And then, when you hover over a search listing, you get this breakdown of traffic metrics for the domain, as well as the link metrics from Moz And then, when you’re in Google search console, you get search, volume, CPC, competition rating and a trend line.
All stuff that GSC skims you out on You even get search volume, CPC and competition data overlaid on Google Trends, They’re truly livin’ up to the name with keywords everywhere, Even freakin’ answer: the public gets keyboard overlay data. Where does it end?
How about Amazon Lookin’ for search volume on products on Amazon, Don’t mind if I do
If you’re in the YouTube SEO game, then you even get search and competition data. Here too, This extension is outta control.
If you like, this video make sure to subscribe for more videos, just like this one..
3.5 billion searches are performed on Google every single day Seriously, no matter what you do, people are looking for your products and services on Google cell phone repair, shop, 1,700, monthly searches, iphone charger, 34,000 monthly searches, best smartphone, 41,000 monthly searches,
And these search volumes are only for US based searches But heres the thing, Even though there are billions of searches every single day. Our recent study shows that 91 % of content gets no traffic from Google. So how do you join the other 9 % of web pages and start getting free, consistent and passive traffic from Google? If youre a beginner to SEO, then youre going to want to watch this whole tutorial because Im going to show you how to start attracting customers from the worlds largest search engine.
Stay tuned
[, Music, ] Whats up everyone – Sam, Oh here, with Ahrefs the SEO tool that helps you grow your search, traffic research, your competitors and dominate your niche. This tutorial is called SEO for beginners, because even if you havent got the slightest clue what SEO is youll have very clear and easy action items that you can implement into your website. Right away So well be covering the most important things that you should know to ensure that your website is optimized for search Lets get started. So what is SEO?
Seo stands for search engine, optimization Its the process of optimizing your website and webpages to get free, organic traffic from search engines like Google, Think of Google like a filing system. In a library The library has billions of books with hundreds of trillions of pages, So lets say that you want to find something on global warming.
Then Google would search through these books and extract pages that contain your keywords or closely related words.
But as Im sure you know, search results aren’t returned in any random order. Google tries to return the most relevant results first by using sophisticated algorithms And they’re so good at this that most of us never have to click through to page 2 of the search results. Nobody knows exactly how these algorithms work or the exact factors it looks at to rank a webpage, but we do know a lot of the so-called “ Google ranking factors ,”. So we are able to make some optimizations
So your job is going to be two-fold Number. 1. We need to make sure that it’s easy for search engines to understand what your page is about and create that content that matches what we call the searchers intent ,” right And number 2. We need to show Google and other search engines that its worthy of ranking So throughout this tutorial lets, say that Im a new and budding photographer and I live in Toronto. Canada,
Im starting my new wedding photography, business called Sam PhOHtography Yup Im, pretty awesome.
.., but I dont have any friends so referrals are out of the question. Alright great Step 1 is to find relevant keywords that people are searching for and see how these search queries fit into your business.
The easiest way to start finding relevant keywords is to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer, So I would think that a bride or groom looking for some magical wedding photos would search for wedding photographer in Toronto, Makes sense right So Ill. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords, Explorer tool, which is one of our SEO tools that provides rich data on Google searches and Ill enter in that search. Query here Ill also change the country to Canada, since people in other countries, they probably arent. Looking for a Toronto based photographer as often
Now Ill run the search, And you can see that there are only around 60 or so monthly searches for this keyword. Phrase which is far from exciting, But looking below youll, see that the parent topic for our query is different. The parent topic determines, if you can rank for your target keyword, so the one that we originally entered here, while targeting a more general topic on your page. Instead, In this case, the parent topic is showing that more people search for toronto wedding, photographer over wedding photographer in toronto.
Now, if we scroll to the bottom of the page, you can see the top 10 Google rankings for your target keyword and a bunch of keyword, metrics
Ill just touch on two of them. For this video traffic and keywords. Take a look at these two ranking pages. You can see that they generate well over a thousand search visitors every single month and next to that youll see that each page individually ranks for hundreds of keywords. If we click on the number of keyword rankings here, you can see all of the different keywords and the ranking positions in Google search.
This is a good thing to do, because you already know that Google is ranking this single page for all of the keywords. So why wouldnt you be able to rank for these keywords and maybe even more Try and remember this part, because we will be exploring things like keyword, usage, multiple times throughout this tutorial.
Alright, now that we have a list of keywords its time to optimize your pages In the world of search engine optimization, this is called on-page SEO. Since we know the keywords that people are searching for in Google, it gives us clues on the language we should use to. Let both Google and potential customers know what your page is about.
For example, knowing that toronto wedding photographer is a more popular search, query than wedding photographer in Toronto, that will help us make smarter copywriting decisions. So for your homepage content you might want to say Hi Im Sam, a Toronto wedding, photographer Blah blah blah blah blah. Instead of Howdy Im Sam and I do wedding photos for couples in Toronto, But I do need to make two things very clear. First, you dont have to use your exact match keyword since Google has gotten pretty smart at understanding what your page is about.
And second, its very important to note that you shouldnt try to trick Google by using keywords where they dont belong.
Your first priority should be to optimize for people, because the last time I checked, robots arent going to pay you for your services, Heres an example of what you shouldnt do: “ Im a Toronto wedding photographer that does Toronto wedding photography for your Toronto wedding. This is known as keyword stuffing and long story short. It does more harm than good
So key takeaway Dont do it
So for on-page SEO, I want to pass on 4 very basic, but important tips that you can use on every page you optimize First, is to optimize your title tags and meta descriptions. When you look at the Googles search, results. Youll see this part in blue and the text below The top part is called your title tag and the other part is the meta description. The purpose of these is to entice someone to click through to your page.
And if people are actually clicking through to your page, then thats telling Google that your page is likely relevant to the reason why they had searched for the query in the first place right, And you can see that Google actually even bolds these keywords and similar keywords Within the search results, making them stand out With that in mind, I might create a title like Award-Winning Toronto, Wedding, Photographer and then my brand name, But of course, if youre going to do something like this, it should be true.
Then, for the meta description, you can explain in a couple brief sentences. What the page is about.
But, rather than putting a generic description that everyone else is doing and calling yourself the best you can put something like Sam, Oh was rated the Stars Best Toronto Wedding Photographer. He combines creativity with science to capture lifes happiest day in a million pixels Awww …
How sweet is that Now? This would make me, as a consumer want to find out who this awesome photographer is The last part of on-page optimization is the most important and thats the actual content on the page For a typical wedding photography home page. I might have some images a short about us or about me section, possibly the services that I provide and some testimonials from happy brides and grooms Without over complicating things. Youll likely want to use your primary keyword. Phrase in the main headline often referred to as an H1 tag.
And looking at one of the top ranking pages, youll see that they did this right here, An example of what you probably shouldnt be doing is something like this hello there. The H1 or heading tag here says hello there, which doesnt help anyone understand what the page is about And remember. Your job is to help Google best identify your page as being relevant to the users search query Ill, go back to the organic keywords report in Ahrefs to see one of my competitors keyword rankings and see if there are any other ideas that might help. Google better understand what my page is about.
You can see some other relevant keywords in here like bridal photos and GTA, which stands for the Greater Toronto Area. So as youre writing the copy for your page, you might want to keep these in mind and sprinkle them in where it makes sense and reads naturally to visitors. Alright, so lets take this Sam PhOHtography example. One step further Lets say that my business was growing. I got a lot more experience under my belt and I found out that I have some mad skills in areas like landscape portrait, travel product, photography,
So I decided heck Im going to offer those services too.
Rather than trying to rank my homepage for keywords that arent exactly related, I could easily create new services pages. So Id do the same thing by first going to Ahrefs Keywords: Explorer Then Id type in something like toronto, product photographer, ,” and Ill quickly. Look at the search volume and see it has 100 or so monthly searches in Canada Then Ill. Take a look at the parent topic that has around 200 searches And heres a quick but super interesting side. Note
With wedding photographers people seem to be searching for Toronto wedding photographer the most While people looking for product photographers in Toronto are searching for product photography Toronto. So this step is vital to ensure youre targeting keywords that will provide you with the most exposure for your pages.
So for our services page, we would do the same thing as we did before with the title tag, meta description and the content on the page. The last thing you should do is to include your primary keyword phrase in the URL of the page,
So for a product photography, services page, your final URL might look like this. If youre a WordPress user, you can just click here and edit it using hyphens to separate spaces. So in this case I would change it to product-photography-toronto. A really quick hack you can do is to look at the top 10 rankings and see how theyve optimized those pages to rank there. So if we look at the Google search results for Toronto product photography, you can see that some of the pages are keyword stuffing in the title tags and that the meta descriptions are all kind of cheesy or they’re truncated.
Clicking through to this result, you can see that its just a classifieds site, similar to Craigslist so its clearly not optimized,
Clicking through to this one, you can see that they included their keyword, phrase in the heading and title tags, but then theres pretty much no content on the rest of the page And then clicking through to this one. Here. This one seems to be over optimized for their keyword target
And if I do a find for the word photo, you can see over 110 instances of it on this page, which again will do more harm than good in the long run. What youre seeing here is an opportunity to overtake these search results. Basically, Google has no choice but to choose the best options from a bad pool of pages.
Alright, so by this point, weve optimized, our main pages for our different services and we’ve covered the basics of on-page SEO. And if youve done this for all of your key pages, then I can assure you that you are miles ahead of a lot of your competitors. The next part, and arguably most important piece of ranking high on Google, is off-page SEO. Off-Page SEO often refers to link building And link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your web pages?
Basically, links act as votes or other people vouching for your website saying hey. These people are really good at what they do, and I trust them enough that I would send my visitors to their website. It works in a similar way that you would refer your friend to buy a product from whatever store because youve tried it used it and loved it In general, the more quality backlinks you can get from relevant pages. The higher youll rank in Google Now Im putting the emphasis here on the word quality, because there are a lot of different types of links you can get from like forums, directories and editorial links to name a few. But if you think about it a place like a forum where virtually anyone can place a link will likely hold less value than a link from someone else’s blog
But to be clear, other types of links will still hold some kind of value, but probably not as much as links like editorials would So. If youre focusing on quality, then youll probably want to prioritize editorial links And the main way to get links from other peoples. Blogs is through something that SEOs often refer to as outreach And outreach is exactly the way it sounds. Youre contacting people and asking them for a link.
But you cant just email, someone and be like yo. I need a link Hook it up. It doesn’t work that way. There are a three things that you need in order to make your outreach campaigns more successful.
1, You need people who are actually interested in the stuff that you do 2. You need a good reason to contact them. 3.
You need a pitch that somehow benefits them. Lets go through a few examples. Shall we First we need to identify people who are interested in what you are doing. The most commonsensical one in the context of link building are websites that have already linked to your competitors. You can find these pages by going to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and entering in a domain or URL
So Ill enter in mangostudios.com, who also does wedding photography in Toronto.
Ill also narrow our search down to pages that are linking just to their home page From here. I can click on the backlinks option in the left, column And here Ill use this filter to narrow down the backlinks to only links within content. Since I mentioned that, I want to get some editorial links.
On the left side, you can see the websites that linked to the target, URL or domain and on the right side you can see which page they linked to and the context of the backlink Next lets. Click through to this one, on “ Jaw-Dropping, Gorgeous Wedding Flower Ideas. .”, You can see that there are a bunch of pictures of flowers,
And hey, I actually have a great one thats way better than all of these
So lets check that off on our checklist for successful outreach. We now have a prospect, So I can contact the author, Nicole and let her know about one of my pictures that was published in some kind of wedding magazine because its that awesome. So this now fulfills checkbox # 2. We have a good reason to contact her because we have something relevant to her piece.
And, of course, Id be giving her rights to publish my photo, which also checks off # 3. As a side note, it doesnt mean that shell publish my photo or give me a link.
As a general rule of thumb, the better the excuse you can come up with to contact the author, the better your chance will be to get the link. Another good reason to contact someone is to offer a guest post. Blog owners are always on the hunt for new content and, since your site is new, youll be getting in front of someone elses audience in exchange for some of your time and content where you could easily use some watermarked photos that youve taken
With guest posts, your reason to contact them is pretty reasonable and youll be providing value, which is free content (. That should be good ) that benefits them and/or their website. The next outreach prospect you can find are businesses in a lateral, non-competing niche. So, as a wedding photographer, you might want to contact other local flower shops, reception, halls and wedding planners. If you look at the jaw dropping flowers article, you can see that there are two people mentioned in the article Theres Mango Studios, which is the site that were analyzing as well as an event and design planning company.
You can contact these people to form meaningful relationships, Just think about it. For a second, Your businesses go hand-in-hand and you can pass on referrals to each other. You can link back to each other as a preferred vendor or link to others content in guest posts where it’s relevant And this isnt limited to just local businesses. This applies to everyone.
So find some solid partners who are on that same journey as you in a lateral niche and help each other out Now with link building. There are numerous tactics and strategies. So if you want to expand your knowledge in this sphere, then I highly recommend watching our series on link building where youll get a full scope of how to do this effectively.
Alright, We are on to the last SEO tip that I see a lot of beginners avoiding Now. If you have something to sell setting up your homepage and product/services pages is probably the first thing that youll do or did, and for good reason.
These are the pages that will directly generate leads and revenue for your business But heres. The final tip start blogging Now: Im not telling you to write about how you changed your storefront sign from red to green By blogging Im referring to providing practical content that can and will help your prospective customers solve problems In Dr
Jonah Bergers book Contagious “ Why Things Catch On ,”? He shares his research on why content gains popularity and even goes viral Content that provides practical value, was one of the key factors to success. People dont just share funny cat videos or emotional stories. They share things that help others And the same goes for gaining links.
People are more likely to link to your content if its helpful actionable and solves a problem. Look at what we do for the Ahrefs blog
We have numerous SEO tools, but we tackle different big topics like keyword, research and link building, And even if you dont use our tools, you can gain a ton of value through these monstrous posts. But youll see that we include shortcuts or hacks where our tool can make doing SEO a whole lot easier.
To further prove my point, if you look at the top pages report inside Site, Explorer youll see that the pages that generate the most search traffic for us mostly come from our blog articles.
Blogging lets you reach large audiences. For example, we saw that Toronto wedding photographer had around 900 monthly searches in Canada. Lets look up something like wedding venues: Toronto in Keywords Explorer. You can see that it has around 1,400 monthly searches in Canada.
If youve been in the wedding photography business long enough, then youve probably done shoots at numerous venues, So you could create a post with helpful and practical value. For example, I might create an article of some of the best venues that I had taken photos at and display pieces from my portfolio within the blog post.
I would also detail pros and cons of each place: pricing, information, location, details, items on their catering menu or anything else. That would be genuinely helpful to a person visiting this page And, if you think about it, people usually book the venue before the photographer
So theres a solid chance that after people see some of your stunning watermarked photos, they might look through your portfolio and contact you for a quote that can generate more customers for you And, if you think about it, they may have never discovered you through a different Means because they didnt type in a keyword phrase like Toronto wedding, photographer, ,” or their friends didn’t refer you to them. When youre thinking of these ideas put yourself in the searchers shoes, What would they be looking for and what would help them solve the query Now, when youre picking topics try and stick with ones that provide value to your business?
So, as a photographer, I would want to almost always showcase my work, because I would be judged by my portfolio.
As a software company, we showcase how our tools can help in peoples SEO process, because people will buy our tools if they see how it benefits them. As a coffee roastery, you might show them how to make the perfect cup of coffee or an article on how to roast beans. I cannot emphasize enough how much a blog can help you boost your SEO, efforts Its a great way to get ahead of your competitors, who have been in the game for longer than you, but they’ve been targeting. Only these obvious keywords:
From here you can just rinse and repeat the keyword, research process, the on-page, optimization tips and continually build links to your content and articles and start climbing. The Google search rankings
We have a ton of really helpful videos where we expand on these topics, so Ill leave. Links to those in the description Make sure to subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I would be happy to jump in and help out. Sam PhOHtography signing out..
In today’s video, I’m gon na show you exactly how to rank on the first page of Google step by step. In fact, I used this exact formula to rank on the first page of Google for competitive keywords like link building tools, backlinks and SEO checklists, I’m Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic. And if you wan na rank number one in Google, you’ll love the actionable steps in this video. Keep watching.
I have a confession to make I used to hate SEO, That’s mostly because my first website wouldn’t rank no matter what I did. It was super frustrating. I hate you SEO.
And to make matters worse, I was following all the advice that I read from so-called SEO: experts
“ Create great content. .” “, Add keywords to your page. .” “ Make sure that your site loads, fast .” Yeah that stuff can help a little
But it’s not gon na rocket your site to the top of Google’s first page And when I realized that I decided to run lots of SEO experiments, I tested title tags, backlinks anchor test internal links and more And over the years I started to put the pieces Together, Flash forward to today and I rank number one in Google for tons of competitive keywords like nofollow links,
And “ Success Magazine” recently called me “ The world’s foremost expert on search engine, optimization .”, Okay enough bragging. Now it’s time for me to reveal to the process that you can use to rank on the first page of Google step by step. So, let’s kick things off with step number one find three keywords, So your first step is to find three keywords:
They are keywords that you’ll create content around in the next step And here’s exactly how to find great low competition keywords.
First, head over to AnswerThePublic This free tool finds questions that people ask on forums, blogs and on social media, and it turns those questions into awesome keywords. The best part
The keywords that you get from AnswerThePublic are usually long tail keywords In case you haven’t heard of them before long tail. Keywords are just keywords that are long and very specific. For example, a keyword like keto diet is a short tail keyword, But keto diet. Breakfast recipes is a long tail keyword, Even though not a lot of people tend to search for long tail keywords, they’re also not super competitive
Which makes them perfect keywords to go after if you’re, just starting out Another great way to find keywords, is believe or not Reddit Just head over to a subreddit where your target audience hangs out and take a look at the topics that people are talking about. You can even pop these topics into AnswerThePublic to find long tail versions of these topics. Finally, head over to explodingtopics
Com, This is another free tool that bubbles up trending topics in industries like tech, health fashion, marketing and more
And because these topics are relatively new, the keywords that people use to find information on them aren’t usually that competitive. So once you have at least three keywords ready to go, it’s time for step number two create epic content, So I recently teamed up with BuzzSumo to analyze. 912 million articles
And one of our more surprising findings was that most content on the web doesn’t get shared or linked to. In fact, we found that 94 % of all articles online have zero links, Zero And there’s a simple reason for that. Most of the content that people publish isn’t that great
And if it’s not great, it’s gon na get lost among the millions of blog posts, tweets YouTube videos and Twitch streams that come out every day. So for your content to stand out, it can’t just be good or even great, For your content to be something that someone else would wan na actually link to. It needs to be epic Now, there’s no formula for creating epic content, or else everyone would do it. But there are a few things you can do to increase the odds that people will share and, more importantly, link to your content.
First, you wan na publish content. That’S long and in-depth. The BuzzSumo study that I mentioned earlier uncovered a little interesting nugget And that nugget was that longer content gets more links than short content. Specifically long form content gets an average of 77 % more backlinks than short content. Does this mean that publishing longer content will automatically bring in thousands of links?
Of course not, But publishing in-depth content that does cover an entire topic. In-Depth can increase the odds that people link to you. For example, this post from my blog is 4,700 words long And because this post has everything there is to know about link building in one place over 1,000 different sites have linked to it.
Next, you wan na add a hook to your content.
A hook is something that would make a blogger or journalist wan na link to your content. Your hook can be a stat a case study example, a unique strategy, a rare interview, a tool or widget or even a visualization. Basically, anything that makes someone else say wow. I need to link to this can work. For example, a few years ago I published this case study of how I increased my blog’s conversion rate. The hook in this case was a specific case study that people could reference
I also wrote about a unique strategy in that case, study call the content upgrade, which was another hook, And because my page wasn’t just high quality content but included several hooks. Lots of people have linked to that post. Now that your epic content is ready to go. It’S time for step, number three keyword-optimize your content On page SEO has changed a lot over the last few years. Back in the day, keyword optimization was all about stuffing your page with keywords:
But that doesn’t really work anymore. Instead, the goal of on page SEO today is to give Google context about what your page is all about.
Yes, you still wan na use keywords on your page, But you also need to help Google understand your pages’ overall topic. Here’S how to do it!
Your first step is to include your target keyword in a few important places on your page. That way, Google can understand that your page is about that specific term. Specifically, you wan na add your keyword to these areas of your page Next, it’s time to give Google more context about your page And the best way to do that.
Lsi keywords: LSI keywords are words and phrases that are closely related to your target keyword Put another way. They are terms that tend to show up next to your keyword around the web. For example, if your target keyword was fresh, prince LSI keywords would be terms like this
And when Google sees these LSI keywords on your page, it makes them say we’re confident that this page is actually about that topic.
You can find these LSI keywords by searching for your keyword and then scrolling to the bottom of the search results. The bold suggested keywords here usually make great LSI keywords. Then sprinkle in a few of these LSI keywords on your page and you’re good to go With that. Let’S dive right into step, number four: optimize: your content for users;
Back in the day, Google would rank pages based almost 100 % on who had the most backlinks
Yes, backlinks are still important And I’ll show you exactly how to build backlinks in the next step, But to rank in Google today, backlinks aren’t enough. Your content also needs to be optimized for users. That’S because Google pays very close attention to how people interact with your site in the search results.
And if they notice that people are clicking on your site and then quickly, heading back to Google they’ll down rank you Boring next, But if they see users sticking on your page, that’s a sign that you’re giving Google searchers what they want. This is awesome And you’ll usually get a rankings boost.
With that, here’s exactly how to optimize your content for users, so they stay on your page First structure, your content, so people start getting actionable info ASAP. In other words, you don’t wan na start your post off with a long explanation about why the topic is important. That’S only gon na make people bounce Instead use a short intro then get right into the steps, tips recipes, workout plans or whatever you’re gon na cover in your post, For example, in this post from my blog, I don’t get into a long backstory about why SEO Is important?
Instead, I have a brief five line. Intro then it’s time for the first strategy. Next make sure that your content’s design is on point
Studies show that people largely judge your site based on design first and content. Second, So if your site looks like this, you can expect a really high bounce rate. Now that doesn’t mean that your site needs to win any design awards.
Or look fancy In fact, in my experience, a simple design tends to work best. For example, if you look at this post, there’s nothing remotely fancy about it, But it does have a clean design that makes it easy to read and skim, Which leads us to our last step. Step number five build backlinks,
Are backlinks still important for SEO Yeah? In fact, Perficient Digital has been tracking the importance of backlinks over the last three years And they found that links are basically just as important today as they were, since they first started tracking them. And if you follow the steps so far by creating epic content, optimizing it for users and adding hooks, you already have a strong foundation for building backlinks
It’S just a matter of getting your content out there to actually build those links.
And the best way to do that Broken link building. In fact, I used broken link building to get this link from a super, authoritative website. Here’S how it works.
First find a broken link on a page that you wan na get a link from. I personally use the helpful Check My Links extension for Google Chrome, which is free. It automatically crawls all of the links on a page and IDs broken links. Next, you wan na find a post on your site that will make a good replacement for the dead link.
For example, I recently found a broken link on this page and after looking through my site, I found this post. That would be a pretty good replacement.
Now it’s not a one to one match to what the person linked to, but it’s close enough Finally reach out to the person that runs that site and ask them to swap out the dead link for a link to your content. Now for this process, you can definitely work with an email script as you send these out, But I definitely don’t recommend sending out the same generic email to 100 different people. In fact, an outreach study that I recently did with Pitchbox found that personalized emails got 32 % more replies than emails that used the same exact pitch for everybody.
For example, you can see that this broken link building email that I recently sent out is super personalized.
Now, before we close out this SEO tutorial, I wan na show you a quick bonus step use, unique images. Can using stock photos on your site? Hurt your Google rankings, As it turns out they might. The folks at Reboot Online recently ran an interesting experiment.
They created 10 brand new websites, all optimized around a keyword that they made up For the experiments on five of the sites. They used five stock photos that were already used on a bunch of other websites And for the other five they actually took their own images. That way, they were 100 % unique. So what did they find? They discovered that the five websites that had unique images, which are the green lines in this chart – you see here outrank the sites that didn’t use, unique images which are the red lines from the chart.
So, what’s the bottom line, Whenever you can try to use unique images in your content,
These can be pictures that you take with your phone Or illustrations that you make in Photoshop Or screenshots that you take yourself.
As this study showed, unique images seem to have a direct impact on rankings. Did you learn something new from today’s video, If so make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel right now, Just click on the subscribe button below this video. Also, if you want exclusive SEO techniques that I only share with subscribers head over to backlinko
Com and hop on the newsletter It’s free Now I wan na turn it over to you.
Which technique from today’s video are you gon na try? First, Are you gon na try broken link building
Or are you gon na try adding unique images to your page? Let me know by leaving a comment below right now Now from Okay, we don’t need a prop The hook here.
[ Man ], Did I hurt you ( laughs ), But you also need to ( clears throat ). I think it’s yeah. That was like an action movie. Line..
