Understanding the Migration Landscape

Navigating a site migration requires a nuanced understanding of its various forms and the unique challenges each presents. A site migration, broadly defined, can encompass anything from changing a site’s domain to fundamentally altering its platform or structure. Each type carries potential risks and impacts on SEO performance that need to be managed carefully.

Types of Site Migrations

1. Domain Migration: Changing a website’s domain name is often driven by business decisions such as rebranding or company mergers. The challenge lies in maintaining the site’s authority and trust, as the equity built up in the old domain needs to be effectively transferred to the new one without losing ranking power.
2. Platform Migration: This involves moving a website to a different CMS or e-commerce platform. It poses substantial risks as it can affect the underlying code and URL structure of a site. Such migrations require meticulous mapping to ensure that all redirects are properly established and that the new platform supports all SEO functionalities as before.
3. Site Structure Changes: Revising the architecture of a website can improve user experience and SEO but also poses risks if not done correctly. Changes must be logical, enhance the navigability of the site, and ensure that no existing content is orphaned in the process.

For Gympass, a website with more than 500,000 pages spread across more than a dozen subdomains – some of which are user-generated content (UGC) – this involved a brand and domain migration along with multiple CMS migrations.

Impact on SEO Performance

Site migrations often result in short-term losses in traffic and fluctuations in rankings. The primary reason for this is that search engines need time to process the new configuration and re-evaluate the site’s relevance and authority. Key to mitigating these effects is ensuring that all changes are correctly mapped to the new site, from URL structures to meta tags.

Migration Risk Factors

The concept of “migration risk” involves several critical components:

• Broken Links: If the new site structure leads to broken links, it not only degrades user experience but also impacts the flow of link equity throughout the site.
• Content Gaps: Failing to replicate content accurately on the new site can result in lost keywords and ranking opportunities. Ensuring content is matched or improved in the migration is vital.
• Indexation Issues: New content structures and URLs may confuse search engines, leading to delays in indexing or the indexing of outdated pages.

Google’s Algorithms and Migration

Google’s algorithms prioritize websites that provide a great user experience and accurate, valuable content. Migrations that enhance site speed, mobile responsiveness, and security (e.g., HTTPS) are generally rewarded. However, migrations must be managed to ensure Google can effectively crawl and index the new site. Informing Google through tools like Search Console about the changes can help expedite this process and minimize negative impacts.

Understanding these elements and preparing for them can vastly reduce the risks associated with site migrations, thereby maintaining SEO performance and even setting the stage for improved rankings post-migration.

The Gympass Journey: A Strategic Brand Migration

Our recent partnership with Gympass, a well-known player in the fitness and wellness industry, showcases the need for strategic SEO during a website migration. Gympass faced a common challenge: how to maintain and enhance their online presence during a domain migration. As they prepared to move their website to a new domain, they sought our expertise to ensure a smooth transition without sacrificing organic traffic.

Why Organic Traffic Matters

Organic traffic was one of the main sources of traffic for Gympass and reaching their target audience – fitness enthusiasts, gym-goers, and wellness seekers – hinged on maintaining visibility in search engine results. Whether users were searching for workout tips, gym memberships, or wellness programs, Gympass needed to be front and center.

Pre-Migration Planning

Successful site migration starts long before the actual shift in domains or platforms—it begins with meticulous pre-migration planning. For our collaboration with Gympass, a clear understanding of their current website’s performance was paramount, as was preparing for the potential SEO impacts of the migration. This section details the critical steps we took in the initial stages, setting the stage for a smooth transition.

Analyzing Current Website Performance and Traffic

The first step in any site migration plan involves a thorough analysis of the existing website’s performance. For Gympass, this meant diving deep into their analytics to understand traffic sources, user behavior, and key performance indicators such as page load times, bounce rates, and conversion rates. Utilizing tools like ScreamingFrog, Google Search Console, and SEMrush, we were able to gather a comprehensive picture of the site’s health and areas where improvements were needed.

This initial analysis serves multiple purposes:

• Identifying High-Value Pages: Ensuring that pages with the highest traffic and engagement are prioritized during the migration to preserve their SEO value.
• Benchmarking: Establishing performance benchmarks helps in measuring the impact of the migration and setting realistic recovery goals.

Predictive Modeling of Traffic Dips and Recovery Post-Migration

Understanding that site migrations often result in temporary traffic dips, we employed predictive modeling to forecast these changes for Gympass. This involved analyzing historical data from previous migrations, industry benchmarks, and the specific changes being implemented. Our model took into account various scenarios, from best-case to worst-case, enabling us to develop a robust contingency plan.

The predictive model helped in:

• Setting Expectations: Clear communication with Gympass about potential traffic impacts and recovery timelines.
• Resource Allocation: Planning the necessary resources for immediate post-migration actions to mitigate any negative effects.

Preparing a Comprehensive SEO Audit Checklist

A comprehensive SEO audit was crucial to ensure that no stone was left unturned. This audit included checks for:

• Technical SEO: Ensuring that the website’s architecture was conducive to search engine crawling and indexing. This covered aspects like URL structure, the use of canonical tags, redirects, and the implementation of XML sitemaps.
• On-Page SEO: Analyzing content relevance, keyword optimization, and meta tags to ensure that all pages were optimized for maximum visibility.
• Off-Page SEO: Reviewing the site’s backlink profile to safeguard against losing valuable backlinks during the transition.

The SEO audit checklist served as a roadmap, guiding every step of the migration process to ensure that SEO best practices were adhered to, thereby minimizing risks and setting the stage for a successful transition. With these preparations in place, Gympass was not just ready for a domain change but was positioned for success in its aftermath, leveraging enhanced site performance and improved SEO strategies.

The Audit Spreadsheet: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

We’re sharing the very spreadsheet we used to run the technical SEO audit – a comprehensive spreadsheet that allowed us to build a map of all website URLs, identify issues, and develop mitigation strategies. 

Spreadsheet

Running the Numbers: Modeling Scenarios

Our analysis focused on Gympass’s three key international markets: Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. We dissected the percentage of organic traffic attributed to branded versus non-branded search terms and found that the overwhelming majority of organic traffic originated from branded search queries. Since the brand name would be changing, we factored this into our organic traffic predictions.

Armed with this insight, we rolled up our sleeves and dove into the data. By modeling potential scenarios based on the expected dip in traffic during the migration, we could anticipate the impact on Gympass’s online presence and how to best prepare. 

Behind the Scenes: Audits, Redirects, and Best Practices

Our tactical approach involved:

• Auditing Subdomains and Main Domain: We audited all 13 subdomains and the main domain. Our goal? Identify pages with high organic traffic and uncover any technical SEO issues.
• Redirect Maps: We meticulously crafted redirect maps for every subdomain and the main domain. Ensuring smooth transitions from source URLs to final destinations was paramount.
• Loop-Free Redirects: No tangled webs here! We identified redirect loops and chains and built the redirect maps from the source URL to the final URL, ensuring users seamlessly reached their desired content.
• CMS-Specific Best Practices: Each subdomain had its unique content management system (CMS) – HubSpot, WordPress, Storyblok, Unbounce, etc.,. We tailored migration guidelines to suit each platform.
• Robots.txt and XML Sitemap: A new Robots.txt file and an updated XML sitemap were essential for search engine crawlers.
• Technical Redirects: We followed best practices – server-side redirects, testing with 302, and then making them permanent 301 redirects.
• Collaboration with Developers: Our close partnership with Gympass’s development team ensured flawless execution.

Key Takeaways and Best Practices

From our extensive work with Gympass, valuable insights emerged that not only refined our approach to SEO but also provided us with a blueprint for future migration projects. Understanding the nuances of each step, from planning through execution and beyond, is crucial for maintaining the SEO value and ensuring the digital growth of any business.

Key Learnings from the Gympass Case Study

The Gympass migration underscored several critical elements:

• Thorough Preparation: Meticulous planning and testing helped anticipate potential issues, and minimizing disruptions in user experience and search rankings.
• Communication: Keeping all stakeholders informed at every phase ensured that any unforeseen challenges were swiftly addressed without significant delays.
• Flexibility: Adaptability in response to real-time data and feedback was essential for optimizing the migration process and outcomes.

Essential Considerations for Site Migration

Regardless of the industry or business goals, certain considerations remain paramount during any site migration:

• Risk Management: Identifying and managing risks proactively can significantly mitigate potential negative impacts on SEO.
• User Experience: Ensuring that the site remains user-friendly post-migration is vital for retaining and growing traffic.
• SEO Continuity: Maintaining SEO performance requires careful handling of all site elements that impact search visibility.

Actionable Best Practices

For companies planning a site migration, adhering to the following best practices is essential:

1. Conduct a Comprehensive Technical SEO Audit Before Migration: Assess your current SEO landscape to identify strengths and weaknesses. This audit should guide the migration strategy to avoid losing any SEO equity.
2. Develop a Detailed Content Migration Plan: Ensure all valuable content is accurately migrated to the new site. This plan should prevent any loss of content that could affect your site’s information hierarchy and keyword rankings.
3. Implement Server-Side 301 Redirects for All Old URLs: This is crucial for transferring the existing SEO value to the new URLs and for providing a seamless user experience by redirecting visitors to the appropriate content on the new site.
4. Update Your Sitemap and Resubmit It to Search Engines: Quickly updating and resubmitting the sitemap helps search engines discover and index the new structure more efficiently.
5. Monitor Performance Closely Post-Migration: Use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to monitor the site’s performance. Quick identification and resolution of issues like traffic drops or page errors can prevent long-term negative impacts.

The Ongoing Importance of SEO After a Site Migration

Post-migration, continuous SEO efforts are necessary to solidify and enhance the site’s position in search rankings. Regular content optimization, proactive link building, and ongoing technical checks ensure the site remains competitive and relevant. This ongoing commitment to SEO not only helps in recovering from any short-term losses during migration but also in capitalizing on new opportunities for growth and visibility.

By integrating these insights and best practices into your migration strategy, your business can navigate the complexities of site migration while preserving and enhancing its online presence.

Ready to Elevate Your SEO Strategy?

At Tuff, we understand that the landscape of digital marketing is continuously changing. With increasing advertising costs, it’s more crucial than ever to invest in sustainable SEO practices that not only preserve but enhance your digital footprint. Whether you’re contemplating a site migration or looking to tweak your SEO strategy to align with the latest Google updates, our team is equipped with the expertise and experience to guide you through.

We’re eager to help you uncover the full potential of your website and ensure that your SEO strategy is robust, responsive, and results-oriented. If you’re considering any technical changes or simply want to learn more about how recent Google updates might impact your site, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post Minimizing Risk in a Site Migration: A Data-Driven Approach to Sustainable Growth appeared first on Tuff.

When conducting technical SEO audits, one of the most common errors that I see on sites is duplicate content. It is also one of the most important issues to fix because it can hurt your chances of growing your site organically. 

Luckily, with a basic understanding of what duplicate content is, what it means for your site’s SEO, and how to identify and fix it, dealing with it will seem less daunting. 

Table of contents: 

• What is duplicate content in SEO? 
• Why is having duplicate content bad for SEO?
• How to spot duplicate content
• Examples 
• How to fix duplicate content

What is duplicate content in SEO? 

Duplicate content is when you have similar or the same content on different pages of your site. 

The definition of duplicate content might seem self-explanatory. However, in practice, the reason your site is flagged for duplicate content and the solution to fix it varies greatly. Therefore, it can be complex for someone that is not familiar with duplicate content or SEO. 

Why is having duplicate content bad for SEO? 

“Why does it matter if we have duplicate content?” I’ve heard variations of this question from several clients. Duplicate content negatively affects your SEO in four main ways.

• Site health
• Organic performance and rankings
• Crawling and indexing
• User experience

No matter what is causing the duplicate content issue on your site, the issue itself greatly impacts your health and performance because it confuses search engines. 

When you have similar or duplicate pages, Google doesn’t know which URL or version of a page to index. As a result, you could end up not ranking for anything or not appearing in the search results at all. Not to mention, you could be wasting your crawl budget on duplicate pages. 

Lastly, if you have multiple URLs that have similar or identical content it can also negatively impact your user experience. 

Is there a duplicate content penalty? 

You may hear the term “duplicate content penalty” thrown around. Google does not have an official duplicate content penalty. However, many sites experience ranking and health issues because of duplicate content. 

Site health scores also tend to increase—sometimes by as much as ten points or more—after fixing duplicate content SEO issues. I’ve seen sites that were struggling to rank for keywords or had wild fluctuations begin to steady and rank on the first page of search results. 

Duplicate content happens for a variety of reasons, and it’s not usually as simple as “there’s the same content on different pages”. Most of the time, it requires technical SEO fixes. 

The first step to fixing duplicate content is to identify where it is on your site and why it’s happening. 

How to spot duplicate content 

To identify duplicate content, you can use an SEO auditing tool like Semrush or Ahrefs. These are user-friendly tools that will crawl your entire website and generate a report on the technical SEO issues that it finds. 

Typically, if you have duplicate content SEO issues, a crawl report will look similar to the one below. 

Even though it’s called duplicate content, title tags and meta descriptions also fall under that umbrella. For example, if I were fixing the site from the above audit, I wouldn’t consider duplicate content issues resolved until all instances—including title tags and meta descriptions—are gone. 

Auditing tools can help you identify SEO errors, but they have limitations. They may tell you where duplicate content appears but you have to understand how to fix it, which requires technical SEO knowledge. 

In addition, if you are using Shopify, I’ve actually seen Semrush miss duplicate content issues in its audits. So, I advise either consulting a technical SEO agency or running a second crawl with another crawling tool like Screaming Frog, and comparing the results. 

4 common duplicate content examples 

Technical SEO issues vary from site to site. The duplicate content issues may be unique to your site, but they tend to fall into one of these categories. 

1. Ecommerce product pages 

A common example of duplicate content happens with ecommerce product pages, specifically when you have the same product but different sizes or colors. 

Let’s look at an example. If you go to the Allbirds site and click on the popular tree runner shoe, there are lots of color options and different sizes. 

If you choose the “Sol” edition and a size 9, the URL updates to the below. 

• https://www.allbirds.com/products/mens-tree-runners-sol?size=9

Technically, it could be flagged as duplicate, but it isn’t because they’ve set up a canonical tag. If you look at the image below, you’ll see this line of code below. 

•  <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.allbirds.com/products/mens-tree-runners”>

It’s a canonical tag, and it signals to Google that the “Sol” URL is a variation and identifies the original URL “mens-tree-runners” as the one to index. 

Canonical tags are one way to fix duplicate product pages, but it’s not the only solution.

2. Inconsistent URL structures 

If a site has recently gone through a migration or redesign, it is not uncommon to see inconsistent URL structures, specifically in the domain. However, they shouldn’t be there. The best practice is to keep your URL structures consistent across your site. 

For example, the Tuff website’s homepage (https://tuffgrowth.com/) uses https and a non-www in the URL. Every other page of the site follows the same structure. 

• Resources – https://tuffgrowth.com/growth-marketing-resources/
• Blog – https://tuffgrowth.com/blog/

You get the idea. If your site has varying URL structures it will also result in duplicate content issues. Variations that you might come across include: 

• Http or https (you should always have https for security and SEO)
• Www or non-www
• Trailing and non-trailing slashes (slashes at the end of a URL)

Even though it may seem like a slight variation of the URL, Google will view them as two separate pages with the same content. Typically, you’d set up 301 redirects (more on those below) to the URLs with the format that you are using and stay consistent.

3. Duplicate content and global SEO

If your company operates in different countries and you have different sites for each, you’ve likely considered what that means for global SEO. 

Luckily, if one site is in the United States and written American English, and another is in Spain and written in Spanish, the pages aren’t usually flagged for duplicate content. Because it is written in two different languages, Google considers them unique. 

However, this gets trickier as you move between countries that have similar languages with small adjustments. For example, a site with American English and British English. Without diving too deeply into the nuances of global SEO and hreflang tags, you could get around this by creating unique content for each market. 

4. Tracking parameters 

When you use tracking parameters, whether they are URL parameters, session IDs, or tracking IDs, it can create duplicate content issues. These URLs may look like this: 

• https://example.com/folder/?utm_source 

But, they may also have variations like the examples below. 

• /?tab_id=
• /?_ga=
• /?session_id=

Primarily, you’ll want to look for the URLs that have a slash (/) followed by a (?). There are ways to get around URL tracking parameters. To fix duplicate content, however, you could use a no-index tag or directive in your robots.txt file. 

It will be a line of code that follows a similar format to this: 

• Disallow: */?

This acts as a suggestion to Google, where you are asking it not to crawl the URLs that follow this URL format. For example, if you go to IKEA’s robots.txt file, they have several disallow directives. Some of these are for filters and others are for tracking parameters. 

This is not a comprehensive list of duplicate content examples. Ultimately, you’ll want to conduct a technical SEO audit of your site or hire a technical SEO agency. If you do an SEO audit of your own, it will identify where the errors appear, but it won’t tell you how to fix them or implement the fixes for you. 

A technical SEO agency can fix most duplicate content issues, depending on the CMS that you use. If you are on a traditional CMS like WordPress, a technical SEO specialist can fix duplicate content issues in a few clicks.

On the other hand, if you are using a custom, headless CMS like Contentful and Sanity, it takes longer. This is because everything is custom-coded, and as a result, it requires development. You may work with your in-house development team to make fixes with SEO guidance or hire a developer that has an SEO background. 

How to fix duplicate content 

The solution to fixing duplicate content will depend on why the issue is happening, but generally, there are three technical adjustments that can fix it. 

1. 301 redirects 

You use 301 redirects to signal to Google that the old URL is no longer in use and specify a new URL that it should point to. Keep in mind that this is a permanent redirect, and you’ll use 301s for more than just fixing duplicate content. If you use a 301 redirect, the old URL should be one that you don’t plan on using again, likely a 404 or broken link. 

How to set up a 301 redirect depends on the CMS. For example, if you use WordPress and Yoast Premium, it’s simple. You go to Yoast SEO > Redirects. Then add the URL slugs—the part that appears after the .com slash—in the old and new URL sections. Otherwise, you might directly edit the .htaccess file, which configures your site. Again, this varies by CMS.

2. Canonical tags (rel=”canonical”)

As a reminder, the canonical tag is used to identify one URL as the original. By using it, you can avoid duplicates that have the same or similar content on different URLs. 

• <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/” >

First, you need to identify which URL to mark as the canonical one. Then, you add a canonical tag to the head of your HTML code for each of the duplicates.

3. No indexing

Similar to canonical tags, you can ask search engines not to index pages by adding a noindex tag. It looks like this: 

• <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

As the name suggests, it tells search engines that they shouldn’t index—crawl and show the page in search results. For example, if you are running paid ads with landing pages that look similar, you might no-index them to avoid duplicate content and other technical SEO issues. 

This list is not comprehensive, but each site is unique. To fix duplicate content issues, you first need to identify and diagnose the problem. Then, look at your site structure and CMS to determine the best course of action. It can get pretty technical depending on the error, so if you’re unsure it’s best to consult a technical SEO specialist or agency.

The post Duplicate Content and SEO Guide appeared first on Tuff.

In most true SEO stories involving newer websites, results don’t come quickly. Sure, there was that one time we increased organic traffic by 117% in just 90 days, but this wasn’t one of those times. 

As a newer website with few blog posts and an average domain authority, we stumbled in the dark a bit before we found our footing. But once those results began trickling in, it started to downpour. Here’s the story of how we increased AKKO’s non-branded organic traffic by 659% in just 6 months, after months of lackluster SEO performance. 

Overview 

First, let me explain what AKKO does and what industry they’re in. AKKO specializes in gadget protection a.k.a insurance. They cover your phone, laptop, electronics, and other vital personal items against costly damage and theft – all for just $15 a month.

“Great people and team to work with who produce top notch quality and results!” – Eric Schneider, Co-Founder at AKKO  (see all Google Reviews here)

When we first started working with AKKO, their past SEO efforts were heavily focused on cell phone insurance keywords. Those were just about the only non-branded keywords driving organic traffic to their website. And while their branded keywords were driving a few hundreds clicks per month from search engines, it wasn’t a match for the industry behemoths that they were up against – Verizon, AT&T, and Apple to name a few. 

Technical SEO

Fortunately, AKKO’s website didn’t have a ton of technical SEO issues when we began working with them. 

With just a few small fixes, we were able to get their overall site health to over 90% in SEMrush. Once that was done, we found additional ways to improve the technical SEO by adding structured data where possible, improving internal linking, and improving the CRO on AKKO’s core pages.

Now we could move on to the next step in our SEO strategy, keyword research, and planning. 

Keyword Research

Just like all great SEO content strategies, it begins with keyword research. We do this by conducting competitive analysis on industry leaders, direct competitors, and search competitors. We see which strategies are working for them, what their top pages and keywords are, what they’re doing well and what they’re not doing well. We then conduct a topic and keyword gap analysis to find our biggest areas of opportunity. 

Once equipped with all of this data, we map it back to our partner’s website and determine what makes the most sense for them and what we have the best chances of ranking for. 

We look at a lot of different metrics when determining what are the most appropriate keywords to target. The most common ones are monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and searcher intent. Then we ask ourselves, will this keyword drive conversions if we rank in position 1?

Along with those metrics, we analyze the existing website content, search competitors, and domain authority to see if it’s the right fit for us. No one metric in itself is enough to determine the quality of a keyword, so it’s important to look at several different metrics when choosing your focus keywords. 

More than 90% of AKKO’s organic traffic was coming from branded searches. Of the less than 10% of non-branded traffic, the majority of it was coming from cell phone insurance keywords. I took a closer look and noticed that almost 100% of this non-branded traffic was going to two places: the homepage and one particular blog post.

In the initial research phase, I identified this as an opportunity and began working on ways to leverage AKKO’s brand recognition for cell phone coverage while expanding to other products that they cover.

Building our SEO Content Strategy

Our initial SEO content strategy began with strengthening AKKO’s existing rankings by building comprehensive coverage around their cell phone protection service. They had some non-branded keyword rankings on pages two and three of SERPs that I identified as low-hanging fruit. 

I worked with our dev, UX, and CRO teams to build a few targeted high-quality landing pages that would give us a better chance of ranking for these high keyword difficulty terms. We also build comparison landing pages that compare AKKO against all of their top competitors – Apple, AT&T, Verizon, and more. 

Unfortunately, in such a competitive industry, these keywords were extremely difficult to rank in the top 3 for and they weren’t driving as much organic traffic as I had hoped. 

After our initial organic efforts didn’t get the results that I had hoped for, I spent some time going through all of the pages on the website and making some changes to the on-page SEO. AKKO only had a few pages on their website when we began, so we didn’t build a full keyword mapping spreadsheet as we typically do for larger partners.

Our main goal was to improve the internal linking throughout the website, especially to the new pages we had just created. 

We did this by including all of our comparison pages in the footer of the website so that they were readily accessible and properly linked.

Content Creation

Once we had pillar pages built for our focus keywords, we used blog posts to create topical relevance around secondary and tertiary keywords and create a cluster strategy of knowledgeable informative content. 

I quickly expanded from cell phone insurance keywords to laptop insurance, camera insurance, tablet insurance, and many others. 

After a few months of tracking our SEO performance, I knew that we needed to pivot. Overall organic traffic had increased but it was mainly due to our other marketing efforts from our social and PPC campaigns. 

Search queries related to gadget insurance were proving extremely difficult to rank for, even though this wasn’t apparent in the keyword data, and we were up against industry behemoths every which way we looked. If it wasn’t Apple or AT&T we were competing against it was AllState or Progressive with their homeowners insurance. 

Content Strategy Pivot

It had been almost 5 months since we began our SEO strategy at this point and I was getting antsy for some good results. I was checking Google Search Console and other performance reports but the SEO impact was minimal no matter how I looked at it. Branded terms still seemed to be dominating our organic search traffic. 

Then I tried something new. 

When conducting new keyword research, I noticed that there were thousands of monthly searches for Xbox warranty but hardly any searches around Xbox insurance. Not only that, but the keyword difficulty was much lower than the keywords I had been targeting previously. 

I did some Google searches to understand searcher intent and noticed that other than Xbox’s own manufacturer warranty pages, which were written in very high-level legal jargon that very few understand, there wasn’t much competition. 

So I tested out a few warranty keywords. We wrote content about the Xbox and Playstation warranty along with the controller warranties and the advantages of having AKKO coverage. 

The results were amazing. 

In just a few weeks we had the Featured Snippet and the #1 rank in Google for Xbox warranty and a few keyword variants. A few more weeks later and we were ranking #1 for more than twenty Xbox warranty keywords.

For the first time, we were driving non-branded organic traffic from keywords with high search volume.

I wasn’t sure if this was just a fluke though or if this was enough to build our content strategy around. We also saw some good results for PlayStation (PS5) warranty keywords, but it wasn’t until a few months later that they started driving significant traffic. 

I also knew that I couldn’t rely on just these keywords alone to drive quality organic conversions so I build out a list of other high-volume, low-keyword-difficulty warranty keywords and took stock of just how large the playing field was. 

To my surprise, there are a lot of people searching for these warranty keywords and there wasn’t much content out there other than the manufacturer’s legal pages. 

After seeing those initial results and building out the keyword list of other devices with high search volume that AKKO covers, I decided to pivot from insurance keywords to warranty keywords. 

This was a game changer. 

New Content

In the next few months, we wrote content on all of the top gadgets and devices and saw results similar to what we saw with our Xbox warranty keywords. 

We were ranking much quicker than I ever expected, we were driving more traffic than ever before, and non-branded keywords are now accounting for about 70% of all organic traffic, up from less than 10%.

Below are just a few of the more than 4,000 non-branded keywords that we’re ranking for today along with the monthly search volume and the position that we’re ranking in. Maybe you’ll be as surprised as I was at the amount of monthly search volume these keywords receive. 

This has helped us create comprehensive coverage on our website and ultimately improve our rankings for the very difficult insurance keywords. Here are a few of our current page one rankings for some insurance keywords. 

How we measure branded vs non-branded organic traffic

Tracking branded and non-branded organic keywords

Tracking branded and non-branded organic keywords and traffic is something that I was doing from the beginning and this was the first time that non-branded traffic started to gain traction on branded organic traffic and direct traffic. 

We use a few different SEO tools to periodically pull a performance report and accurately pinpoint how our SEO campaign is performing. The tools we use the most for this are Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and SEMrush. 

SEMrush gives us daily updates on keyword movement and estimated monthly organic traffic but it’s not as accurate as Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Using Google Search Console and Google Analytics, we’re able to filter strictly for clicks from branded traffic and non-branded traffic.

In the screenshot below from Google Search Console, you can see the number of monthly clicks and impressions received from non-branded keywords in December 2021 compared to the number of monthly clicks and impressions from non-branded keywords in June 2022. 

In 6 months, we were able to increase non-branded traffic by 659% with 648 organic conversions (sign-ups) and a CVR of 2.72% in June 2022.

We were able to do this for a few reasons. 

One of the biggest reasons is that we have a partner that understands the value of SEO and fully trusts us to do what we do best. They could have given up after the first few months of lackluster performance and shifted their budget to paid campaigns but they didn’t. 

I also have to thank the rest of my growth marketing team for providing exceptional results across multiple different channels and buying me some time to put together a fully optimized search strategy that not only drives traffic but also new customers.

Another huge reason is that our partner has a truly amazing product offering that beats the competition no matter where you look. I was able to write content on just about any popular gadget or device because AKKO covers it. Not only that but no matter how good the manufacturer warranty is, it doesn’t beat AKKO’s pricing when you consider that you can insure up to 20 devices. We were able to add this CTA to all of our blog posts and increase organic sign-ups exponentially. 

Conclusion and Next Steps

Our next steps are to continue to double down on warranty keywords while improving CVR and expanding to B2B search terms.

We’ve had such great success with warranty keywords and there is still so much more to write about that there is no reason to stop. At the same time, we want to make sure we’re constantly optimizing and increasing our CVR and expanding into new territory. 

AKKO’s business is increasing and I know it will be a new challenge to try and dominate search results for B2B keywords and I welcome that challenge. 

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post Small Pivot, BIG Results: How We Generated a 659% Increase in Non-Branded Organic Site Traffic for AKKO appeared first on Tuff.

When adding a blog to your website it’s often much easier to integrate your content management system (CMS) on a subdomain, but often this isn’t the best-case scenario. 

Popular platforms such as WordPress and Shopify typically don’t allow you to install a brand new CMS into a subfolder but it is allowed on a subdomain.

For instance, you’ll run into problems if you have an eCommerce store running on Shopify – example.com – and you try to install a WordPress CMS on a subfolder of that domain – example.com/blog. 

It’s easy to accept the alternative and put your SEO blog on a subdomain but this will ultimately lead to technical SEO or organic traffic problems further down the line. As a growth marketing agency we’ve seen this a ton of times and this is usually the #1 reason why webmasters opt for a subdomain rather than a subdirectory; so we’re very familiar with the issues you may run into.

Before deciding whether a subdomain or subdirectory is the best option for you it’s important to understand what the purpose of the blog is for and what subdomains and subdirectories are specially used for.

Subdomain Structure

Subdomains can be beneficial for many reasons but they can also be harmful if used incorrectly. Let’s talk about how and when to use a subdomain. 

Simply put, a subdomain is an add-on to your primary domain. The main takeaway here is that a subdomain doesn’t automatically receive the same domain authority as your primary domain, the way a subdirectory does. 

It’s important to understand that in most cases, a subdomain is treated as an entirely separate domain. That may mean that you need to pay extra to incorporate tools and software from your primary domain to your subdomain. You’ll also have to verify each subdomain separately and set up tracking for each separate subdomain. 

Subdomains are great when you need to separate sections of your website that have enough content to warrant their own website and don’t need the domain authority from your primary domain. Here are a few examples:

Good subdomain uses:

• An application behind a login that isn’t being indexed in search engines.
• Support website with troubleshooting and knowledgebase articles or forums.
• A merch store on a non-eCommerce website. 
• Any content that is completely different and/or secondary to your primary website.

This is not an exhaustive list and there are always exceptions, for instance, if your website is a single-page web application then it makes sense to have your blog on a subdomain so as not to interfere with the functionality of the application. 

Bad subdomain uses:

• Translated language versions of your primary website. 
• Your primary blog that is driving organic traffic. 
• Core products or features of your primary website.

Subdirectory Structure

A subdirectory is a sub-section of your primary website and is recognized by crawlers as such. This means that you retain all the domain authority that your primary domain has and continue to build on your website’s comprehensive coverage.

Subdirectories are the preferred option if your content strategy revolves around the same topic as your primary domain and is being used to drive high-quality organic traffic. 

How do subdirectories and subdomains affect SEO?

Google is able to crawl both subdomains and subdirectories so you won’t be penalized for either approach as long as you’ve set each up correctly on the backend. With that being said, there is more technical SEO work needed to effectively index and rank pages on your subdomain. Also, crawlers have come a long way at recognizing subdomains and attributing that traffic and rankings to your domain, but they still have a long way to go.

Subdomains should be verified and submitted to Google Search Console with an XML sitemap. 

Using a subdirectory strategy concentrates your keywords onto a single domain while the subdomain strategy spreads your keywords across multiple distinct domains. This essentially establishes the subdomain as its own website and is treated as such by crawlers. For SEO purposes, this is putting us at a disadvantage compared to a subdirectory, which is treated as a new section added to your primary domain. 

Should you put a blog on a subdomain or subdirectory?

When talking about an SEO blog, the answer is almost always going to be a subdirectory. Building your blog on a subdirectory allows you to build on top of the existing domain authority that your root domain has built up over time. 

For example, if the domain authority (DA) of your root domain is 85 that means that your blog is also starting at a DA of 85. If you were to add a subdomain to a root domain of 85 there is no specific information from Google to figure out exactly what the DA of that subdomain is. For that reason, it’s best to start a new blog on your root domain so that you don’t have to re-build all the authority that you’ve built up over the years. 

Conclusion

If you’re just launching your blog and looking to optimize it for SEO, consider using a subdirectory over a subdomain. Driving more organic traffic to your root domain and increasing your domain authority is something that I’m sure you’re already working on and using a subdirectory strategy will help improve your effectiveness.

If your organic traffic is suffering and some of your top-performing pages are on subdomains you might want to think about migrating them to the root domain. 

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post Subdomain vs Subdirectory for Your Blog: Which is Better for SEO? appeared first on Tuff.

If you’re not familiar with some of the more advanced aspects of SEO, you may not have heard of site health before. However, if you’re trying to get more traffic from Google and other search engines, improving your site health can play a role in getting your site to outrank your competitors.

What is Site Health?

Site health is a metric that SEO tools, like SEMRush and ahrefs, provide to measure your site’s structure, speed, security and technical SEO.

SEO tools provide this metric to give you an idea of how your site compares to other websites from a technical SEO standpoint. If your site is full of broken links, slow-loading pages, and other technical issues, your site will be given a lower site health score than a similar website without those issues.

Site health itself is not a metric that Google looks at to determine whether or not your site ranks, but having an error-filled site could certainly impact your ability to rank for your target keywords. If you want to increase your site’s organic traffic and improve your keyword rankings, improving your technical SEO is a good place to start. Site health is a valuable metric because it allows you to easily monitor the progress you have made over time with your technical SEO changes.

Which Factors Play a Role in Your Site’s Health?

• Site Architecture and Crawlability: It’s important to make it easy for search engines to crawl and understand the content on your site.

• On-Page/Content Structure: Along with making sure that search engines can understand the structure of your site, it’s also important to make sure that the content on individual pages is easy to understand. This means making sure each page only has a H1 header, meta description, and title tag.

• Core Web Vitals: One of the best ways to improve your site health is to look at Google’s Core Web Vitals. Your site should load quickly and when loading it’s best if the content does not shift around due to slower loading elements on your page.

• HTTPS Security: If your site isn’t using HTTPS (as opposed to HTTP), now is the time to set that up. People visiting your site could be getting a warning message if you don’t have HTTPS setup with a current SSL certificate.

SEMRush and Ahrefs Both Use Three Categories of Site Health Issues

The two leading SEO tools, SEMRush and Ahrefs both assign issues to one of three categories based on the severity of the issue:

• Errors: Errors are issues of the highest severity detected on your website during the last audit.
• Warnings: Warnings are issues of medium severity detected on your website during the last audit.
• Notices: Notices are not considered severe issues, but we recommend that you fix them.

If you’re working on improving the technical SEO on a website, these dashboards are easy ways to see if the changes you’re making are accomplishing their goal.

SEMRush Site Health Dashboard

Ahrefs Site Health Score Report

What is a Good Site Health Score?

At Tuff, we aim to maintain a site health score of 90% or greater for our website and for our partners. This ensures that we don’t have technical issues preventing us from ranking on Google when we start publishing new content on the site.

According to SEMRush, the top 10% of websites have an average site health of 92%. If you want to be sure your site is healthy from a technical SEO perspective, 90% a good goal to shoot for.

Why You Should Monitor Your Site Health Score

If you are consistently publishing content and adding new pages on your site, it’s important to monitor your site health to keep an eye out for any technical issues with the new posts and pages that you’re publishing.

Site health can be useful for identifying issues that you wouldn’t notice when visiting your site, but that could have an impact on your search rankings. New content on your site could be uploaded without proper meta tags or without an SEO-friendly title tag, and this makes it more difficult for Google to understand what your page is about.

What is Site Health’s Impact on Your Site’s SEO?

Improving your site health can actually provide a sizable lift in traffic and search engine visibility for your site. The search console data below is for one of our partner’s websites that increased its site health from 72% to 95%. 

This site saw a 13% increase in organic clicks and a 27% increase in organic impressions following the site health improvements we made. We’ve seen similar results from other sites that we’ve worked with after improving site health.

Fixing technical SEO errors and improving your site health can actually make a noticeable difference in your search rankings and typically these fixes can be made with just a few hours of backend work on your website.

Poor Site Health Could Be Preventing Your Site from Ranking

If you’re frustrated that your SEO efforts aren’t providing the traffic you were hoping for, we strongly recommend improving your site health as that could be something holding your site back from ranking and getting traffic.

Fixing technical SEO issues can require some knowledge of web content management systems (CMS) and some basic HTML skills. If you work with a web developer these fixes should be simple for them to make. If not, a technical SEO agency can help you make these changes to give your site the best possible chance of ranking for your target keywords.

The post How Does Site Health Impact SEO? appeared first on Tuff.

Cleary Bikes is not just any kids bike brand. The company—based out of Oakland, CA—makes among the highest-quality kids bikes out there. Their philosophy: instead of giving your kid training wheels and a rickety frame as they’re taking their first pedal strokes on their own, give them a sized-down experience of what it’s really like to be on trail, in the air, or at the park. That way, they’ll be building real, transferable skills from the get-go. It’s a perspective that resonates. That’s among the reasons that, when we first met the folks at Cleary, we learned their organic revenue was already booming! 

The health of their organic traffic was one of the reasons we were eager to partner with them. We knew that continuing to put in the work to improve Google search results while layering on other acquisition channles would help us build a holistic, long-term, and scalable path to growth. 

When we look at partnering with a brand at Tuff, really any brand, but especially eCommerce, we examine their current traction to help us understand how we plan to craft our Growth Marketing Strategy to help them reach their goals.

For Cleary, our minds were blown (literally), when we saw that organic revenue was the largest sector of their overall revenue d2c eCommerce makeup. 

Here’s how their traffic looked prior to April when we started our partnership: 

Of their organic traffic, a large percentage of it converted due to Cleary’s success in showcasing the benefits of their bikes, the high quality of their messaging, and the overall praise from their customer base. 

From a growth perspective, we could see that a great formula for growing Cleary’s revenue would be to increase the volume of quality organic traffic to the site. 

This step by step guide lays out how we were able to develop an SEO Growth Content Strategy to increase Cleary’s organic traffic by getting them to rank on page one on Google for keywords specific to their business. 

Step 1: Lay The Technical SEO Content Foundation

No matter what you’re selling – SaaS, physical products, or a service – having the correct Technical SEO foundation for your performance content to work from is the most important thing you can do. 

With Cleary, they happened to be in the middle of a website overhaul so making some of our big changes was a no-brainer for their website and easy to implement. 

Step one was identifying tactics and updates we could implement to help us earn a website health score over 90%. A high health score helps our performance content rank faster and more efficiently. To get to the bottom of what was keeping us from better site heath, we first needed to run a SEO site audit. 

The results of this audit showed us what to change and included information about page errors, broken links, and more. The site audit also shows us how to fix those errors. 

In addition to the website audit solutions, we also provided Cleary with information about how best to migrate their website. 

Our biggest fear with their website migration and with any website migration is that we’ll lose our organic traction and need to rebuild from square one. This is not a great scenario to confront, so the only way to keep that from happening was to make sure the website migration process was accompanied by a strong SEO perspective.

Here are some of the suggestions we made: 

• Setting up redirects on the server side for product pages, collections, etc. 
• Switching to WP Engine servers. 
• Using a third party migration tool like Cart2Cart

The final suggestions we made addressed Cleary’s product page descriptions and collection page descriptions. We noticed that most of Cleary’s rankings were coming from their home page. To help diversify the high-ranking pages as well as lead high-intent users further into the funnel, we worked with their team to develop SEO-focused copy for the mentioned page descriptions. 

Step 2: Develop A Strategic Content Strategy

As the decade-old saying goes “Content is King!” 

Yes that’s true, but not if the content itself is total garbage 💩. 

To develop an informed content strategy, it’s imperative to do some research. A great place to start is to first run a keyword gap audit against your brand’s competitors. Here’s the one we did for Cleary to show us where we were weak against their competitor Guardian Bikes. 

As you can see in the above “Missing” category, Cleary didn’t have any ranking keywords (KWs) related to bike sizing. Therefore, we determined that our first piece of content needed to be related to sizing. 

Step 3: Produce Content, Publish, Repeat 

This first piece of content wasn’t just a normal article, instead, we created a main hub page, which we called Kids Bike Sizing Guide. This is designed to be a sort of center around which all of our following sizing content could sit. This clustered approach—essentially similar to a whike wheel hub and its spokes—helps communicate to search engine algorithms that Cleary truly is an expert in this topic and therefore should appear at the top of search results.

Leveraging this one hub page, we were able to help Cleary rank for multiple KWs related to kids bike sizing, which tied back into the data we saw in our Competitor Keyword Gap Analysis. Examples of our focus KWs for this hub page were: kids bike sizing guide, bike size guide, bike wheel size chart, bike size chart.

Once we had our hub page developed we began developing auxiliary content pages that were related to our hub page and would help us boost its ranking through internal linking. 

Examples of these auxiliary content pages included a “Bike For X-Year Old Series” that featured more than four content pieces related to kids bike sizes that we could use to support our hub page. 

From there, we were in a great position to begin supporting our other hub pages like our product and collection pages using high volume KWs related to Cleary’s industry, missing and weak topics (from Keyword Gap Analysis), and full-funnel strategy content. 

Step 4: Improve Google Search Results  

Within 60 days, we started to see encouraging results with our Growth Content Strategy for Cleary. 

Step 5: Keep Repeating The Formula

Just because you land on page one for specific terms doesn’t mean you’ll stay on it forever. Similarly, if you haven’t gotten onto page one for a specific KW, that doesn’t mean you won’t. 

Growth content is a long-term solution, not a quick fix, but you’ll see key indicators of growth like higher search rankings and new traffic within 30-60 days of publishing in most cases. Typically, within four to five months you should see significant traction toward your goals.

Excited about growing your organic traffic but not quite sure where to start? We’ve got your back. Let’s talk about how to level up your site traffic and land you on page one. 

The post “Bikes:” How We Helped Cleary Rank on Page 1 And Snag a Slice of the 135k Monthly Search Volume appeared first on Tuff.

Author’s Note: We’ve given this blog post a refresh on November 2, 2023, complete with fresh information, new links, relevant data, and more.

If you want to increase your site’s search traffic while building an inbound pipeline of potential customers, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a channel you need to explore. Prioritizing SEO increases the chances of customers finding your website on the search engine results page (SERP) when searching for keywords related to your products or services. According to databox, 70% of marketers find SEO more effective at driving sales. And if that wasn’t enough, compared to other tactics like Pay Per Click (PPC), SEO is cheaper.

At Tuff, with technical SEO agency experience, we analyze various facets of our clients’ websites—from homepage to blog, and from site speed tags to 404 redirects—to discover what SEO tactics will positively impact their growth. 

What is on-page SEO?

On-page or on-site SEO is the process of optimizing specific elements of your website’s pages, such as content, title and meta tags, and HTML subheadings, for both humans and search bots alike to improve your site’s visibility. On-page SEO encompasses all the improvements you make directly to a web page to improve its visibility on the search engine results pages. Some examples of these include:

• Writing helpful, quality content
• Including descriptive title tags and meta descriptions
• Adding both internal and external links with relevant anchor text

These optimizations help search engines like Google and Bing (if you’re into that, we don’t judge), interpret page content to understand what it’s about. When the search engines understand the purpose of your page, they can turn around and help visitors searching for the goods or services you sell to find you.

Remember: search intent is crucial here. When you create content that matches the true intent behind a user’s search—whether informational, navigational, or transactional—you better position your webpage to rank highly on the SERP. Another way to think of on-page SEO is as a collection of signals search engines use to decide whether to serve your content in response to a given query. The more finely tuned your on-page elements are—and the more useful your page is to readers overall—the more likely you are to rank highly.

So, how can you leverage those signals to create good on-page SEO? Here are some things to consider.

Use keywords thoughtfully

In the good ol’ days of SEO, you could have articles filled with search terms for your industry. So if you were a dog food company, most of your web pages would be jam-packed with search terms like “best dog food,” “top-rated dog food,” “number one dog food,” etc. This was great for search engines, but terrible for people that had to read sentences like “Have you asked yourself, ‘Is there dog food near me?” Now, spamming a target keyword in your content is much more harmful than helpful.
On-page SEO is about using relevant, targeted keywords to help your site rank higher. But it’s not just going into Semrush and picking the top-ranking keywords. There’s a technique to it. First, you want to perform a SEO competitive analysis, in which you determine the top keywords for your industry and how your competitors rank for these as well. Plus, you want to look for relevant keywords with low competition. This will help your site build out its expertise and authority, which should have Google start ranking your content higher in the SERPs if your content is deemed valuable to the end-user. So tl;dr:

• Identify your competitors and compare your keywords
• Determine how the customers you want search for your goods or services; i.e., their search intent
• Research successful pieces of content in your space and determine how they utilized keyword phrases
• Use online SEO tools like Semrush and Google Search Console to look for keyword opportunities and evaluate the performance of your top search queries and keywords

Optimize your page title tags and HTML heading tags

Every piece of content you produce should have a compelling title tag that informs what the article should be about and contain the primary keyword you want to rank for. Neither Google or users have a lot of time, so if you can tell them what they can expect from the web page in the most concise way possible, you’ll be rewarded. Research shows that page title tags are also confirmed ranking factors, so ignore them at your own peril.
HTML heading tags are also a great way to add your primary and secondary keywords. So if you were writing a piece on say, different types of SEO, your structure would look like this:

• H1: The Difference Between On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO
• H2: What is On-Page SEO?
• H3: Title tags

And so on.

In the below example from another Tuff blog, we used the SEO Pro Chrome Extension to illustrate the layout of heading tags on the page.

Search engines can crawl the page title and headings to help them determine what the content is about, and for a user, it is an excellent way for them to skim the content and get to the answer they want. All that engagement will go a long way toward boosting your visitor site time and click-through rate, which will, in turn, increase your organic growth.

Remember: when it comes to on-page SEO, what’s good for the user is good for the search engine. So use title and heading tags to satisfy the needs of both.

Write helpful, useful content

One thing people get wrong when doing on-page SEO? They create content for the explicit purpose of ranking highly. In other words, they prioritize writing for Google over human readers.

As we point out above, in SEO, this sort of approach was once par for the course. But in 2023, Google is actively deprioritizing content like this. Case in point? Google’s September 2023 Helpful Content Update specifically targeted “content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.”
The solution? Writing helpful, useful content that answers your readers questions comprehensively. Fortunately, Google has released plenty of documentation to clue you in on what exactly this sort of content looks like—the quality rater guidelines.

These guidelines are used by Google search quality evaluators to gut-check the ability of its search algorithm to rank content that’s helpful to human readers.
So if you’re looking to create helpful content, start by reviewing Google’s own documentation. You can reference an acronym, E.E.A.T, to assess how effectively your content is ticking off Google’s boxes:

• Experience — Does the content speak from a place of personal experience, or is it more concerned with the experiences of other people? For Google, harvesting a unique, original perspective is one of the hallmarks of quality content. 
• Expertise — Does the author of the content draw on their own expertise in a certain field to inform their opinions? This is especially important in YMYL—i.e., Your Money or Your Life—fields, such as personal finance, medicine, and health-related topics. But the principle applies for all written content. In other words, whether you’re writing about accounting, growth marketing, or credit card reward programs, it’s best to find an author with significant expertise in those areas for your blog post. 
• Authority — This one is related to expertise. It follows that if you have significant expertise in a subject, you can write about it from a place of authority. You can also think about authority as comprehensiveness. If you want your work to be seen as authoritative, it should dispassionately address a topic from all angles, without omitting facts to mislead an audience. 
• Trustworthiness — Similar to the above ideas, this final point highlights the face that the content you produce should be trustworthy. Content that promotes misinformation, willfully deceives, or cuts corners just isn’t going to cut it. 

Also important for 2023—AI-generated content is now fair game. Google’s documentation specifies that quality content should be rewarded, even if it’s produced by ChatGPT or a similar tool. The key point here is that it must be quality. So, if you’re going to rely on AI to do the actual writing, you better have a solid human editor to make sure your content’s up to snuff.

Include an SEO-friendly URL

This one often gets overlooked. But the title should be a simplified summary of what your page is about. It may be tempting to just go with an auto-generated URL, like the ones Shopify and WordPress suggest based on your content, but take a minute to think about it. If you can remove any filler words and ensure that your title contains your primary and target keywords, you’ll have a greater opportunity to rank higher in the SERPs. So in short, make sure you:

• Exclude words that don’t add significance to the URL 
• Add relevant target keywords
• Make it easily readable
• Use hyphens and underscores
• Needs to contain your single domain and subdomain
• Match URLs with your content’s page titles as closely as possible

In the end, your URL will look something like this:
https://tuffgrowth.com/seo-competitive-analysis/

Write optimized Meta Tags

Meta elements are also crucial for on-page optimization. So, don’t just go with the auto-generated meta tags from a CMS platform. As Google likes to tell us, you know your content best. So you take a moment to craft meta titles and meta descriptions that stand out from your competitors and use those valuable keywords.

Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of your title and 155 characters of your meta description. This includes spaces, so you don’t have a lot of room to work with. Let’s drag out our dog food example again. For a page on our made-up Pawsome Dog Food company, we want to tell both the search engines and the reader what it’s about while also encouraging them to click. So it should look something like this:

Optimize Images

Are images important for on-page SEO? They sure seem to be. According to an article in HubSpot, articles with images get 94% more total views than articles without images. But just like the keywords, the images have to be relevant to the content, and you have to do some on-page optimization to make the images work a little harder for you. This means titling the images using your keywords if possible and adding Alt-text that uses your keywords so the search engines can better categorize the content.

That was a lot, and there are tons of tweaks and on-page SEO strategies you can implement to make your growth strategy successful.  But now we need to discuss off-page and technical SEO, and how they can also be an important part of your company’s organic growth.

Add internal links

Finally, add relevant internal links between the pages on your website to follow best practices for on-page SEO and help serve additional content to interested readers.

Search engines crawl links on your website to find new pages. So by including internal links between multiple pages on your website, you help Google navigate it more easily. Internal links also leave those same crawlers important clues as to your site structure by signaling which pages on your website are most important. When your core product or service landing pages have an army of internal links pointing back at them, search engines can infer the relative importance of that page compared to others.

But let’s not forget the user in all of this! As we mentioned above, Google and other search engines have developed to the point that what’s good for the search engine is often good for the user, and vice versa. By sprinkling relevant internal links throughout your content, you can help visitors to your site more easily access other pages and sections of your site of interest to them.
The above is enough to give you a solid foundation in on-page SEO tactics and best practices. But what about optimizations you can make to your content off of the page? For that, we have off-page SEO.

What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO includes any sort of tactic off of the page itself to bolster its search engine rankings.

Typically, we think of off-page signals as those referring back to your site, such as social media mentions, backlinks from external domains, or anything that happens off your site that influences your site’s authority. Off-page

SEO work generally falls under the Social Media Manager, or Link Building Manager, or Off-Page SEO Manager role at your company.

Let’s review some of the most common off-page factors and tactics for improving off-page SEO for your website.

Acquire backlinks

The most common off-page SEO tactic is link building. In the earlier days of search, SEO strategies determined if a page outside of your website linked back to your site, creating a backlink, that it was a signal of the popularity of your content. The more backlinks you had, the higher you would rank. In addition, you got bonus points if the other sites linking back to you were also popular. So, there was a mad dash of websites linking to each other as much as possible.

But like that judgemental principle in your middle school, Google judges your site by the company you keep. So if you have too many backlinks that are considered “toxic,” meaning they have a low domain authority or are from just terribly spammy sites, a backlink from these types of sites could actually hurt your on-page SEO. This means you have to be careful who you request a backlink from.

A big part of off-page SEO is curating your backlinks. Often, you can’t control who links back to your site. In this instance, you have to disavow these toxic backlinks. Plus, you could have sites linking to web pages that no longer exist on your site. This would require a link reclamation campaign.

There are several different ways to acquire backlinks from reputable sites. We’ll explore a bit more below how creating attention-grabbing content is one of the best ways to do so. But you can also do manual backlink acquisitions by emailing or reaching out to site owners or blog editors directly. By opening a line of communication with these stakeholders, you can suggest placing a link back to your content in a way that elevates the quality of the other site’s content.

Create content people want to reference

An enterprising content marketing manager should know how to tap into their company’s resources to create content that generates citations naturally around the web.

For starters, the leadership in your company probably would consider themselves experts in their fields. Tapping into your own company’s subject-matter expertise to produce thought leadership content is a great way to acquire backlinks the good ol’ fashioned way. Youtube video that expresses a strong POV on an important issue, like the impact of AI on SEO.

Another way to do this is by sourcing meaningful data to produce clickable content. People love statistics, especially when they uncover trends in their own industry.
Sourcing data doesn’t have to be complicated, and it can come from a variety of sources. For starters, SaaS companies or other digital platforms might have access to user or platform data that tells an interesting story about user actions, behaviors, or similar. But even companies without user data can source data by running surveys and publishing the results.

Do guest posting or PR campaigns

Finally, another common off-page SEO tactic involves creating content on other websites that, in turn, link back to your own pages in a strategic way.

Remember the manual outreach approach for link building? Guest posts works similarly. If you know of a blog or website that shares a common audience to your own, you can reach out to the site owner and ask to contribute a blog of your own.

Different types of sites might be receptive to this approach than others. But you can increase your odds of a successful pitch by suggesting mutually beneficial content topics, hitting your deadline for submission, and incorporating the other website’s style guidelines and tone of voice into your contributed blog.

Another tactic involves running a PR campaign in established news outlets, PR newswires, or industry trade publications. There are different ways to accrue brand mentions and backlinks in so-called “earned media.”

Normally, you can tap into your network or partner with an external vendor with the connections to make this sort of exposure possible. While brand mentions don’t always necessarily include backlinks, they can still boost your website’s traffic via direct entrances or organic branded-searches.

Off-page SEO vs. on-page SEO

Comparing on-page vs. off-page SEO? In summary, on-page SEO refers to any optimizations you make to the content or structure of the pages on your website.
Off-page SEO addresses the ranking factors outside of the context of your website to bolster organic search visibility, including backlinks and brand mentions.

But that leaves one final area for us—technical SEO.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a catch-all term for optimization improvements that are not on-or off-page. An SEO skilled in this will perform technical optimizations to your site to ensure you have a solid foundation for all your on-page and off-page SEO tactics. Their behind-the-scenes work can do wonders on your site’s performance and your organic growth. This is because Google not only rewards good content— it also values a good user experience. If your site is too slow, too hard to crawl, or you have too many dead links, all the great content in the world won’t get you to rank high in the SERPs.

So, is technical SEO important in the grand scheme of things?

At Tuff, we look into a client’s site health before we make any changes. We know that if the site’s foundation is bad, then all our work for the client won’t help them grow an inch. So technical SEO is just as important as any other SEO tactics, if not more important. So what should you address from the technical SEO standpoint? This isn’t the definitive list, but it’s some of the heavy-hitting a technical SEO will perform on a site.

Site Architecture

We mentioned how vital a good foundation was. An experienced SEO can use technical SEO tools to inspect your technical SEO health and ensure everything is working and linking as it is supposed to be.
Your site’s architecture makes it easy for search engines and users to find you. Crawlers need to be able to thoroughly and easily navigate your entire site. A website with an ideal architecture helps crawlers locate anything they’re looking for across all of your pages.

Another reason technical SEO can be so effective is that it flushes out any internal linking issues you may have, such as broken links. Internal linking to high-priority pages gives them greater authority (Remember that whole E.E.A.T. thing?) These high-priority pages are recognized by Google and receive a higher ranking, which is key for sites like your homepage.
It’s not just for search engines. A good site architecture also helps people find what they need more quickly and keeps them from bouncing too soon. Keeping customers happy lowers your bounce-back rate, which helps your organic rankings.

Sitemaps

Your site map or XML sitemap is really just what it sounds like. It’s a roadmap for search engines to explore your site. Just like any good map, an XML sitemap will highlight the most critical areas of your sites, like landmarks, so the search engine robots know what to check out first.

This is key for extensive sites where the crawlers may not know where to begin; you want to make sure that the search engines prioritize your most important pages, such as landing pages before your crawl budget is used up.

You can update your sitemap by submitting it to Google Search Console.

Mobile-first Optimization

With Google prioritizing mobile search over desktop, your site must be friendly for mobile devices. Technical SEO ensures your site not only looks great but functions as it should when someone accesses it from their phone or tablet.

If that doesn’t seem too important, consider that in 2023 mobile search accounted for 49.78% of all searches—nearly half. So yeah, a website’s overall mobile friendliness is a pretty big deal.

So, what should you consider when assessing the performance of your website on mobile? For starters, Google’s Core Web Vitals. One free tool you can use to assess this is Google’s Page Speed Insights, which examines core web vitals and other elements, such as page rendering and unused Javascript files, when determining the technical health of your own website for both mobile and web.

Duplicate Content
Some things are so important you feel the need to say them multiple times, but too much and Google will ding your rankings. A technical site audit will look into what pages constitute duplicate content—i.e., content with the same message or even the exact same content, and devise a plan on what to keep and what to throw out.

A technical SEO will also look into thin content or what pages are not providing much value from a search standpoint. Remember, Google will penalize you if you throw up a page that offers no value. Google doesn’t like it when you waste its or a user’s time. For large enterprise sites, chances are there are a lot of duplicate or thin pages, and a technical SEO can ferret these issues out to ensure your site is healthy.

Page Speed and site speed

Do you hate sitting in traffic? So does Google, and if your site loads too slow, more than two seconds, then Google is going to have something to say about it. But it’s not just search engines that have a problem with slow page speeds.

Most people will leave a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. But, unfortunately, all this clicking-and-bouncing negatively affects your site rankings. There could be too many redirects, line breaks in your code, Javascript issues, image optimization issues, and more. So having a technical SEO that can determine why your page is loading too slowly can save your organic rankings..

Schema Markup

Schema markup or structured data is a type of code that communicates to Google how to follow your website and what the data on your site means. Rember, Google isn’t patient—it has a lot to do, so good communication with search engines is key to getting you to rank higher.

Schema markup provides details about your products, services, events, articles, reviews, and much more. This level of clarity makes it easier to comprehend your content’s context, making it more likely to appear in relevant Google search results.

Additionally, schema markup doesn’t just benefit search engines. It also enhances the user experience when viewing search results. Rich snippets, enabled by schema markup, provide users with quick, concise, and relevant information directly in the search results. This not only makes your website stand out but also increases the likelihood of attracting organic website traffic, as users are more likely to click on search results that provide instant, valuable information.

Orphan pages

Technical SEOs also uncover problems with the linking on your website. One of the most common problems involves orphan pages, or pages without any internal links back to other pages on your same site.

When search engine crawlers encounter such pages, they may not be able to access them easily from other parts of your site. This lack of interconnectedness can severely impact the indexation and ranking potential of these pages. If a page isn’t linked internally, search engines might not even know it exists, let alone consider it for ranking in search results. A technical SEO can concoct a plan to build links to any orphan pages or broken internal links on your site.

Finally, technical SEO also looks at how your site performs internationally, hreflang tags, and a host of their back-end issues such as canonicals, robots.txt or the robots meta tag (which can block search engines), and redirect chains, and assesses how any Google update may affect your site’s overall technical optimization.

What kind of SEO is best for your site?

The easy and lazy answer— all of them, and this is true. A holistic SEO strategy isn’t about on-page vs. off-page SEO. It should rely on all the strategies that affect your organic growth channels. But sometimes it’s not realistic to focus on all three. You may not have the expertise or the people to make a serious SEO- impact to grow your site’s organic channels.

This is where a growth marketing agency like Tuff comes in. We’ll do a deep dive on your site and determine which SEO tactics will have the biggest impact on your business. We’ll determine if on-page, off-page, or technical SEO is going to improve your conversions and website rankings and then come up with a plan and help you execute. Each business model is different, so there is not a one-size fits all approach. If there was, SEO would be easy. However, with a partner like Tuff on your team, on-page, off-page, and technical SEO are a whole lot easier.

If you want to know more about how on-page, off-page, and technical SEO  can be a part of your growth marketing strategies, hit us up. We’d be happy to walk you through our game plan on how we can attract the right traffic to help make your business successful.

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post The Difference Between On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO [Updated] appeared first on Tuff.

Author’s Note: We’ve given this blog post a refresh on November 2, 2023, complete with fresh information, new links, relevant data, and more.

In the last article, we talked to about technical SEO and what it entails. 

In this article, we’ll talk about how to conduct a technical SEO audit. What to look for? What tools to use? And what to focus on? 

In this post, we’ll cover the following:

• Selecting Your SEO Tools
• What to Focus on First
• Page Speed
• Mobile Accessibility & Core Web Vitals
• Deepening Your Technical SEO Understanding
• Key Takeaways

Selecting Your SEO Tools

Unless your website has less than 50 pages or so, you’re going to need an SEO auditing tool to crawl the website. The most popular SEO auditing software tools are SEMrush, ahrefs, and ScreamingFrog. 

Personally, SEMrush is my favorite because they grade your overall site health and provide a comprehensive user-interface for reporting, keyword tracking, and a lot of other features. 

Ahrefs is great for backlink auditing, building backlinks, and anything that has to do with the back links. But it is not ideal for auditing websites.

ScreamingFrog is a great tool and I will sometimes run it in parallel alongside SEMRush. It’s also significantly cheaper than both SEMrush and ahrefs, probably because there is no user interface in the cloud. It’s great to crawl the website and export that data to Google Sheets or Excel but there isn’t a user interface that allows you to run reports and present to clients.

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are also tools that you will want to have set up and connected so that you can accurately track your organic traffic.

For the purpose of this article, I will be using SEMrush and a few other tools for specific things such as site speed.

What to Focus on First

Another reason why I like SEMrush is that it prioritizes the most important errors, warnings, and notices.

• Errors are issues of the highest severity and should be fixed first. 
• Warnings aren’t as important but you should attempt to fix as many as possible. 
• Notices are not so important and most likely will not be fixed on larger sites. 

These errors may look alarming but it’s important to understand that you’re not going to be fixing every single one. The audit takes into account SEO best practices and this would be the ideal if you are 100% focused on SEO and we’re willing to potentially compromise other aspects of the website to fix all SEO notices. So let’s drill down into the errors and see what to fix first.

The above screenshot shows the eight most critical errors that we must fix. You can click on each one and drill down to see exactly which pages the errors occur on. They also do a great job of explaining what the error is and how to fix it.

Since we have to fix them all we have to decide which one to start with. The easy thing to do is look at which one has the most errors and start there – hreflang conflicts. Another reason why this is a good error to start with is that it can be fixed programmatically. With a few lines of code, we can fix all 1400+ hreflang errors in the span of a few hours.

This is just a personal preference, but it’s always great to come back to your client and say “hey look, we fixed 1400 errors in our first week of implementing SEO fixes”. It’s a quick win and it goes a long way rather than starting with the 900 duplicate meta descriptions, which may take weeks to completely finish and deliver to the client.

After fixing all of the errors to the best of our ability we would then go on and do the same with the warnings and then the notices. My personal goal is to get the site health to 90%. That tends to be very challenging with large websites.

Page Speed

With page speed being so important, there are a dozen different tools we could use to check our page speed. We’re going to rely on the ones that are provided by Google today, specifically Google pagespeed insights.

Focusing on the opportunities, we can see that images are significantly slowing down this particular website. So we would click on the errors and find solutions to the problems and present them to the client.

Mobile Accessibility & Core Web Vitals

The rest of the technical SEO aspects that we’re going to look at today can all be viewed from Google Search Console.

Fortunately, this particular website doesn’t have any errors but if it did we would click on open report, find the specific hour, and go in and fix it.

This usually requires working closely with the developer as you can see most of the errors revolve around coding. This is also the same for the core web vitals, which mainly focuses on the speed of the website on desktop and mobile.

Deepening Your Technical SEO Understanding

As we delve deeper into the technical aspects of SEO, it’s essential to have a firm grasp on several core components that significantly impact your site’s performance and search engine ranking. The following sections will provide insights and actionable steps to analyze and optimize your site’s indexation, canonicalization, XML sitemaps, robots.txt file, structured data, site architecture, server performance, and security protocols. Each of these elements plays a pivotal role in ensuring your website is well-optimized, secure, and user-friendly, contributing to an enhanced online presence and better SEO results.

Indexation Analysis

Ensuring the right pages are indexed is foundational in a technical SEO audit. Utilize Google Search Console to check the Index Coverage report, identifying any pages that are excluded or have warnings. For a finer granularity, use the site:operator on Google Search along with your domain to see exactly what’s indexed. It’s advisable to also check for unwanted pages in the index and apply the “noindex” tag accordingly.

Canonicalization

Proper implementation of canonical tags is vital to prevent duplicate content issues which could dilute your site’s SEO value. Check for correct canonical tag implementation using tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. They provide data on pages with missing or incorrect canonical tags. Establish a protocol for canonicalization, ensuring that every new page has a correct canonical tag pointing to its preferred version.

XML Sitemaps

An accurate and comprehensive XML sitemap guides search engines to the important pages on your site. Use tools like SEMrush or Screaming Frog to audit your sitemap for errors or omissions. Ensure that your sitemap is updated regularly, especially after adding or removing pages. Submit your sitemap via Google Search Console and monitor the Sitemaps report to ensure that your pages are being discovered and indexed properly.

Robots.txt

Analyzing the robots.txt file is crucial as it directs search engine bots on which pages to crawl and index. A well-configured robots.txt file ensures that search engines can access essential content while avoiding less important or sensitive areas of your site. Utilize tools like Google’s Robots Testing Tool to analyze the directives in your robots.txt file, ensuring they align with your indexing goals. By reviewing and testing your robots.txt file regularly, you can maintain optimal crawl efficiency and ensure that search engines are accessing the right content.

Structured Data

Verifying the implementation of schema markup is essential to enhance your site’s appearance in SERPs. Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool can be invaluable for checking your markup for errors or omissions.

But with the recent changes to Google’s algorithms, first you want to evaluate just how helpful structured data will be for your website and industry. For instance, event structured data is no longer showing in SERPs but eCommerce product and review schemas can still significantly enhance your product listings in SERPs.

Site Architecture

A well-organized site architecture is like having a well-laid out map for both your visitors and search engines.

• URL Structure: Descriptive URLs: Ensure URLs succinctly describe the content on the page.
• URL Length: Keep URLs short yet descriptive; it’s recommended to stay under 60 characters.

Internal Linking

• Link Relevancy: Ensure that links are relevant to the context of the page.
• Anchor Text: Use descriptive anchor text to improve user experience and SEO.

Site Navigation

• Breadcrumbs: Implement breadcrumbs to help users navigate your site.
• Navigation Menu: Maintain a clean, easy-to-understand navigation menu.

By optimizing these aspects, you create a favorable environment for search engines to crawl and index your content efficiently, and for users to navigate your site effortlessly.

Server Performance

Evaluating server performance is like ensuring the engine of your website is running smoothly. Here’s a breakdown to assist you in diving deeper:

Response Codes

• Error Codes: Look out for 4xx and 5xx error codes that indicate client and server errors respectively.

Redirects

• Redirect Chains: Identify and fix redirect chains which could slow down page loading times.

Performance Testing

• Load Time: Tools like GTmetrix or Pingdom provide insights into server performance and potential bottlenecks.

Optimization

• Caching: Implement server caching to improve load speed.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN): Utilize a CDN to distribute the load, saving bandwidth and speeding up access for your users.

Regular Audits

• Monitoring Tools: Employ monitoring tools to get real-time insights and historical data on your server performance.

Hosting Environment

• Server Type: Ensure your hosting environment is adequately configured and optimized for performance. By taking these steps, you’ll be on a good path to optimizing your server performance, enhancing site speed, and providing a better user experience.

Security Audit (HTTPS Issues)

Conducting a security audit to identify HTTPS issues is fundamental to ensure the protection of your site’s data and build trust with your visitors. Utilizing tools like SSL Labs’ SSL Server Test can provide a comprehensive review of your site’s SSL/TLS configuration and highlight areas for improvement.

Key Takeaways

Conducting a technical SEO audit is an imperative step to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your website from an SEO standpoint. Through the use of various tools like SEMrush for a comprehensive SEO audit, URL inspection tools for evaluating URL structure, and Google’s robots.txt Testing Tool for analyzing directives, you can garner a plethora of insights. 

This audit helps in optimizing internal and external links, ensuring a well-laid architecture, and enhancing server performance for a swift user experience. The ultimate goal is to improve your site’s visibility in search results, making it easily accessible to both users and search engine crawlers. This meticulous process, although time-consuming, is a cornerstone for achieving better SEO results and a more robust online presence. If you are not experienced with this then I recommend hiring a technical SEO agency to take care of it for you.

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post The 30-Minute Technical SEO Audit Anyone Can Do [Updated] appeared first on Tuff.

Behind only quality content, content is always king, high quality link building is arguably the most important SEO ranking factor. So it’s no surprise that companies and SEOs put a lot of effort into building backlinks. I stress the term high quality, because the majority of link building that goes on is not high quality in my opinion. So what exactly does link building entail?

Link building can be both technical SEO and content SEO. It usually involves public relations, partnerships, and communication. In simple terms, link building is the process of getting another website to link to your website. This can be done naturally or it can be done strategically. 

Why is link building important?

Link building is important because one of the most important ranking factors that Google uses to determine how and where to rank your page in Google search results. Acquiring backlinks from authoritative domains can be very beneficial for your company. 

For SEO purposes, search engines crawl two different types of backlinks. A dofollow link and a nofollow link. A dofollow link simply tells the search engine crawler to follow that link, whereas a nofollow link does the opposite. So if you’re receiving a backlink from another website, a dofollow link is preferred, since a nofollow may not be crawled at all, though Google has recently announced that using nofollow is now seen as a hint, not a directive.

Beyond just getting a link from a high-quality website, there are a lot of additional factors that Google is looking at to determine how high quality that link is. The links that appear in the body of content with related anchor text are some of the highest quality backlinks you can get. For instance, if a news outlet covers a story on your company and links to your web page with text that is related to your core business, that is seen as a high quality backlink.

Link building research

When crafting a link building strategy, research is one of the most important factors. You’ll want to know exactly what type of link building you’re going to be doing, what websites and blogs you’re going to be focusing on, how you’re going to reach out, and what you’re going to offer.

Link building is certainly not easy. If you’re asking someone to insert a link to your website you better have a good reason why they should do so.

Let’s look at some different types of Link building strategies.

Link Building Strategies

This is not an exhaustive list but rather some of the most common link building strategies.

Mentions – using a tool such as Mention to find all mentions of your brand name and then reaching out to that webmaster and asking if they will link to your website because it will be beneficial to their readers.this has a higher success rate since they are already talking about your brand name and are familiar with your company.

Lost backlinks – this technique involves using a tool such as SEMrush or ahrefs to find backlinks that you have lost, for whatever reason, reaching out to the particular website or blog owner and asking if they can add back the backlink. This has varying degrees of success because maybe they removed the link on their own or maybe the link was broken, which takes us to our next method.

Partnership building – This is the most common form of link building. General outreach to bloggers and webmasters in your industry. Just like any other outreach, its success depends on how targeted the outreach is, how enticing your offer is, how relevant your content is to their audience, and so on. NinjaOutreach and BuzzStream can be great tools for mass outreach, though I’ve always chosen to do it manually.

Since I’ve had pretty good success with this method in the past, I’m going to share with you some things that have worked well for me in the next section. 

Broken links – this method is very tedious and has a lower success rate than the previous methods. For this method, you use a tool such as ScreamingFrog to crawl a website with related content and find broken links. Once you find a broken link that is linking out to a piece of content that is similar to a piece of content on your website, you reach out to the blog owner and ask him/her if they want to replace the broken link with your new link.

HARO – HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out and provides writers with daily opportunities to be featured in high quality articles. Each day you receive an email with stories that reporters are working on and if you are an expert on any of the topics, you respond and have a chance to be featured in the article. This doesn’t always guarantee a backlink, but they usually make it clear whether or not they will link to you.

Guest posting – guest posting is one of the most common forms of backlinking and involves writing a guest post to be featured on another website. Within that guest post you will ideally link a few times to specific pages on your website. This is okay as long as you’re not paying to post the guest. Google has recently said selling paid links on blogs is against its webmaster guidelines.

Partnership Building Outreach Template

Here is an email template that has worked well for me in the past. One important thing to note is that you usually need to offer a link swap, or a way to drive traffic back to their website as well. Nobody wants to do anything for you for free. Before I include the template, lets talk about the steps that lead up to it.

1. Build a spreadsheet of 5 target pages that you want to build link to and save it in Sheet 1
2. On Sheet 2 (if doing manual outreach) build a list of target blogs and keep track of the URL, website name, DA, contact’s name, and contact’s email.
3. Once you have that information, you can create a mail merge directly in Google Sheets.

Email template

Hi,

My name is Derek, and I’m reaching out on behalf of [Your Company].

I wanted to see if you’d be interested in exploring ways we can collaborate on content sharing between your blog and [Your Company]. I’ve been reading [WEBSITE/BLOG] for some time and have noticed a lot of content overlap. I think we could benefit from driving our audiences back to relevant content where applicable.

Let me know if you’re interested in discussing further.

Thanks,

Conclusion

These are just a few link building strategies but the best strategy is always to create high-quality content and share it with an interested audience so that they will naturally build backlinks for you. 

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post How to do SEO Link Building in 2020 [Free Email Template] appeared first on Tuff.