Six tools to quickly check website SEO
1
Any digital marketer knows that SEO becomes more important than ever before. With the advent of new trends (for example, voice search, mobile-first indexing, AI revolution), you need to take control of your website SEO performance from the very beginning and fix any possible issues to stay afloat today.
But the big problem is that many digital marketers know a lot about SEO, but they don’t have a clear picture of their website SEO. According to this report, 61% of marketers continue checking and improving their SEO performance and organic presence as their top marketing priority. So, if you want to fit into this 61%, it is high time to take SEO seriously and start tracking your progress.
As a savvy marketer, you want to complete more SEO tasks in less time. Whether it’s tracking your rankings or checking how well your web pages are optimized for certain search queries, SEO tools can be a real lifesaver for any marketer.
Fortunately, there are many useful tools available online that help to see your own website the way that Google looks at it and identify the areas that need some improvement.
I hope that these six tools will make your job so much easier to stay ahead of your competition.
1. Check the site load time
Many website owners often underestimate the importance of this parameter or even aren’t aware of it. According to Google researches, the probability of a visitor leaving a website enhances by 90% after 5 seconds after page load. After 6 seconds, bounce likelihood increases by 106%
For small businesses, if your website is slow, then your SEO is going to be poor. This means that you can meet different problems, including Google Rankings drops, high bounce rates, and low sales results.
For big companies like eBay or Walmart, quality content and interesting offers are not quite enough. Time means billions of dollars per second. For example, Amazon pointed out that it could lose $1.6 billion in sales each year due to a page load slowdown of just once second.
Slow site speed impacts your website rankings and requires to make improvements for SEO. In November 2019, Finteza analyzed the waiting time of 850 million users who scrolled 12 billion total pages. Here are some interesting research findings:
To identify your website loading speed, you can use Finteza to find out real results. It shows how long it takes for your users to access all web page features, how quickly they can download your content, what type of resources slow down your webpages the most, and how your website loads on various devices and in various counties.
The tool provides real analytical data and reliable diagnostics. It allows you to detect any possible issues and fix them at any time.
2. Track keyword rankings for certain keyword phrases
It’s essential to know how each of your web pages is performing based on keyword phrases to help you increase more traffic. Finding the right keywords, making sure to thoroughly respond to the search query and satisfy the user intent is the best way to long-term SEO success.
Once you know your keyword rankings, you can determine whether you’re on the right track. One of the quickest ways to check the page ranking for a specific keyword is to look in SE Ranking. The software offers different toolkits, one of which is a keyword rank tracker.
The tool allows seeing for what keywords your website page is ranking, keywords’ monthly search volume, KEI, traffic forecast, and visibility rating. You can also compare your page performance to competition, find more profitable keywords, monitor quality backlinks, and get the most out of similar on-page website SEO opportunities.
Together with global rankings, SE Ranking monitors Google SERP features, Map results, and Google Ads positions for different locations and devices.
In the age of the mobile-first index, mobile-friendliness is a must, not a want. It’s no surprise that mobile users take up the majority share of online users. According to this research, 72.6% of users will access the internet using their mobile devices by 2025, equivalent to almost 3.7 billion people.
It’s important to optimize your website for mobile users as Google still considers mobile-friendliness as one of the most significant ranking factors. Designing for mobile users, make sure to avoid long-scrolls, take into account different devices and screen sizes, and different considerations for surfing on mobile. You can check out Google’s new resource for improving mobile experiences. To check if your site is mobile-friendly, Varvy has the answer. It’s a great tool for website owners to test your site within seconds and see their websites’ performance. The tool is free of charge so you need to enter URL to start using it.
Through this process, it will come with recommendations and guidelines on how users can improve the mobile-friendliness of your website and increase mobile rankings. Besides, Varvy offers a bunch of other useful features, including page speed optimization, page security, paid links finder, search engine optimization, and many more.
How do you think? What makes a successful website? The quality content, visual and functional appeal of your website, backlink profiles, keyword research, good navigation, and many other things. But the one thing they all have in common: their technical structure. It affects your keyword rankings and user engagement.
As Marc Robles pointed out on the Law Rank blog, technical SEO helps build your solid foundation and forms a hierarchy. If you don’t want to crumble your house, you need to fulfill each level of the hierarchy of technical SEO needs (URL’s crawlability, index ability, accessibility for bots and users, rank ability and click ability).
To better understand how your technical SEO performs, you can use Hub Spot's Website Grader. It’s a free tool that helps website owners detect search engine optimization opportunities. The tool builds personalized reports based on website performance, on-page SEO, mobile, and security.
You just need to enter your URL and email to get a score (1-100) and a detailed report. The tool also comes up with actionable recommendations and guidelines on how to increase your website grade. To better direct your SEO efforts, HubSpot offers a bunch of paid SEO tools.
Creating awesome content is not enough to generate traffic from search engines and rank high for your target keywords. It’s important to understand user content and use it to improve your SEO. As Ahrefs pointed out in the study, 91% of online content gets zero traffic from Google.
To do this, you need to create the right content that resonates with your target audience, optimize it for relevance, and publish it where you want to see it. We’ve already viewed some of the advantages it can offer using the knowledge graph, answer boxes, local packs, and other different search results for broad matched keywords.
If you don’t optimize your content for user intent, it can get devalued. Ensure to better understand the intent of target keywords, perform the SERP analysis of these keywords, figure out what type of content is ranking well, research semantically related keywords, answer all questions users may have, and optimize content for these terms.
According to this HubSpot study, content with a word count between 2250 and 2500 words generates the most organic traffic. So, creating long-form content can be valuable for SEO and can help you become a thought leader in your niche.
To receive valuable data about questions people may ask online, I recommend a nifty free tool called ‘Answer the Public’. It provides popular keyword variations based on search queries and visualizes an awesome graphic with questions and phrases people often use when searching for that keyword. To get unlimited searches, you can learn more about the Pro plan.
Internal linking is crucial from different SEO perspectives. Internal links open the doors that allow you to move from one room to another room. But once a website grows older, it becomes difficult to keep a solid interlinking structure and maintain consistency through your website.
As John Mueller pointed out, the way your web pages are interlinked helps Google understand how your pages are related and its roles. Choose the optimal type of structure that greatly meets your business needs.
To make sure that your links on a web page work, you can consider Check My Links. It’s a cool Chrome Extension to crawl through the web page and detect which ones are valid and which ones are broken. The tool highlights good links in green and bad links in red to make it easy to spot and take immediate measures to fix them.
I haven’t mentioned every element of SEO, but this should be key areas to check your website’s SEO. Along with the right tools, you can look at it from a more holistic point of view, survive and outsmart changing algorithms. Here I’ve collected six tools that offer a lot of useful features and can reach remarkable results when used properly. Whichever tool you choose, make sure to maximize all the value you can get from it.
Irina Weber is Brand Manager at SE Ranking. She can be found on Twitter . Related reading
Info graphics are highly effective for backlinks as they're visually appealing, easy to digest, and highly shareable. Tips for great info graphics.
Leveraging real-time insights can take you all the way through to the January sales and more.
Both lead generation and CRO forms an integral part of a comprehensive SEO strategy. Make the most with SEO tools to generate quality leads in 2020.
Video Ad Sequencing helps you dodge YouTube's "Skip Ad". Tips to take your target audience on a video journey, drive deeper awareness, engagement, and more.
02
Have you engaged in paid link building or other “sketchy” link building tactics?
Are the anchor texts of your links over-optimized?
Content quality.
Links (or authority).
Ensure a strong technical foundation for crawling and indexing.
Research and create amazing content.
Build or obtain links back to your site and your awesome content.
Continually reevaluate/iterate on-site opportunities and improvements.
Revisit more advanced technical SEO opportunities and improvements.
Why Technical SEO & On-Site SEO Are Rarely Enough
' ); h3_html = ''+cat_head_params.sponsor.headline+''; cta = ''+cat_head_params.cta_text.text+'→' atext = '
'+cat_head_params.sponsor_text+'
'; scdetails = scheader.getElementsByClassName( 'scdetails' ); sappendHtml( scdetails[0], h3_html ); sappendHtml( scdetails[0], atext ); sappendHtml( scdetails[0], cta ); // logo sappendHtml( scheader, '' ); sc_logo = scheader.getElementsByClassName( 'sc-logo' ); logo_html = ''; sappendHtml( sc_logo[0], logo_html ); sappendHtml( scheader, '
ADVERTISEMENT
' ); if("undefined"!=typeof __gaTracker){ __gaTracker('create', 'UA-1465708-12', 'auto', 'tkTracker'); __gaTracker('tkTracker.set', 'dimension1', window.location.href ); __gaTracker('tkTracker.set', 'dimension2', 'content-marketing' ); __gaTracker('tkTracker.set', 'contentGroup1', 'content-marketing' ); __gaTracker('tkTracker.send', { 'hitType': 'pageview', 'page': cat_head_params.logo_url, 'title': cat_head_params.sponsor.headline, 'sessionControl': 'start' }); slinks = scheader.getElementsByTagName( "a" ); sadd_event( slinks, 'click', spons_track ); } } // endif cat_head_params.sponsor_logo });
Let me start by saying that there is objective and significant value to have from well-done technical and on-site SEO.
Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site and site structure for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your site quickly and efficiently.
Having poor technical SEO while the rest of your site is optimized is like driving a shiny new Lamborghini without an engine.
On-site or on-page SEO refers to optimizing your content both for search engine rankings as well as for users (you want them to see you in the SERPs and be attracted to what you may have to offer).
With that said, you should view them both as a foundation to be expanded on. Without the basics, you’ll be stuck on an endless treadmill of mediocrity.
They Do Matter, But…
My frustrations stem from the idea that they are all you need or that “advanced” technical SEO course for three easy payments of $999 is going to make a significant difference for you.
This may be the case in some specific scenarios, but for the large majority of sites, they simply will not propel you ahead of the competition or fix your more important underlying issues (like poor content quality or a weak link profile).
What They Can & Can’t Do
Viewed as a foundation, there are a number of highly important components of technical and on-site SEO.
Here are the main pieces that can make a tangible difference:
It’s these “basics” that have the most impact – investing significantly in improving beyond this will often not make enough of a difference to warrant it as a primary focus.
Schema, for instance, is a great tool to have in your arsenal and employ strategically, but going overboard and tagging every single page with every schema element possible will simply not make a difference in your search rankings. Don’t let “industry experts” convince you otherwise.
Schema is not even a direct ranking factor that we know of (right now).
There are some great capabilities with structured markup, but you aren’t going to make your site rank out of thin air with it.
Improving your site speed from a score of 20 to 90 will not only make the user experience significantly better and reduce bounce rates, but it can act as a ranking factor as well.
I’ve had clients see almost immediate traffic boosts after bolstering site speed and have heard many similar experiences from others in the industry.
But remember this quote from Matt Cutts back in the day:
“Quality should still be the first and foremost concern [for site owners]. This change affects outliers; we estimate that fewer than 1% of queries will be impacted. If you’re the best resource, you’ll probably still come up.”
Perhaps this percentage has increased in the past 9 years, but the emphasis is clear:
Content quality and relevance win.
Clearly site speed should be optimized, but stressing over obtaining a marginally better score probably won’t be worth the time unless you’re already a company of significant size.
It won’t bring a bad piece of content to the first page or make up for having the lowest authority out of your competitors.
Should Technical SEO Be a Focus For You?
Don’t get me wrong – if you’re already a strong organic performer with a slow site, tag issues, wonky redirects, and poor site architecture/taxonomy, then you’d absolutely benefit from a technical or on-site overhaul.
If you have a wealth of fantastic content and a strong link profile (authority) yet are not seeing the results you think you should be – then you may also be in a ripe position to fix up these foundation elements and begin taking advantage of your existing pillars of content and authority.*
Note: If you’re in this situation, you could also be facing a penalty. Check Google Search Console to determine if you have a manual action.
Also, be mindful of a potential algorithmic penalty. Assess the health of your link profile.
Then check your site for keyword stuffing or other over-optimization of keywords and consider consulting with an SEO expert if this is a longstanding and unsolved problem you’re facing.
Why Technical SEO & On-Site SEO Are Not Enough
Two of the top Google ranking factors today by far (that aren’t going anywhere soon) are:
Advanced schema implementation, snippet optimization, JS rendering, lightning-fast page speed, and picture ‘perfect’ site architecture are all best practice and should be used when possible, but they aren’t going to overcome a lack of quality content (along with, ideally, reasonable quantity as well) and link authority.
Ask yourself: Where will your time and effort be best spent right now?
If you’re confident in your content and you’re generating a better link profile than all of your competitors, then go all in on the above.
Until then, a balance leaning towards content and link building may be more beneficial.
Check out the top ranking pages for just about any query, and you’ll notice some pretty consistent trends – high authority and/or direct links to the ranking page among the biggest.
For a quick example, check out Google’s page speed scores for the Top 3 results for the query “cancer symptoms”:
That’s right – even Web MD has an abysmally poor speed score of 9/100 on mobile.
Only 2 of these 3 have schema implemented, and one of them has questionable schema type choices that probably aren’t helping Google understand the page.
These sites rank primarily because of their topical relevance, content quality, and authority. They have an average 87 DR according to Ahrefs. Even with page speed as a ranking factor, it doesn’t outweigh their dominant authority.
This is only one search term out of potentially trillions, but I encourage you to try it and see what kind of speed scores and schema the top sites have in comparison to their domain ratings.
Then What Is the Most Important?
If I haven’t stressed this enough already, technical SEO should be looked at as your foundation.
Without the basics, you won’t even be able to index your content in search engines, and users will never be able to find the content and resources that you’ve worked hard to create.
On-site SEO should be considered an assistant to the bulk of your content and the technical foundation you’ve created.
Focus on writing naturally over chucking your keywords all over the page.
Use best practices (keywords and variations in the title, H1, body content, etc) – but don’t force them.
What currently matters most in the world of SEO are these two things.
1. High-Quality Content & Strategy
Writing with the consistent aim to create the best piece of content on a topic ever seen on the web will do wonders for your rankings.
Using experts goes a long way; not only will crediting a health-related piece of content to an actual M.D. be a testament to legitimacy in the users’ eyes, but Google claims to understand and credit authorship from verified and credible sources more than a general content writer without experience in the field they’re writing about.
Naturally interweaving related keywords and subtopics is another solid strategy.
Remember, we want to create the best piece of content ever seen on this topic.
This is going to require covering a multitude of subtopics and not just targeting one keyword per post.
Think bigger and think holistically.
2. Site Authority
The number of unique linking domains (ULDs) to your website along with the relative quality of these links is the pinnacle of your site’s ranking potential.
Even with high-quality content, you aren’t going to outrank the big players out there without mid-to-high authority (compared to your competitors).
You may be able to target and attract long-tail keywords at lower levels of authority, and depending on your niche, you may be able to hit it big with content alone if the competition is low.
As time goes on and more people become sophisticated in SEO and content strategy, they’ll eat up the existing opportunities that may be out there, and it’ll be harder to continue without strong authority.
How do you improve your authority?
A large array of options are at your disposal, but link building through PR, content marketing, outreach, guest posting, and more are some of your most notable choices.
Want Strong, Long-Term Organic Growth? You’re Going to Need Good Content & Links
Perhaps in 5 to 10 years links will truly matter less and Google will have placed a significant emphasis on schema and other technical matters, making them powerful, game-changing ranking factors.
Until then, I’d recommend that you do things in this order:
And let me know how it goes!
More Resources:
Image Credits
All screenshots taken by author, November 2019
03
Top eight SEO trends for 2020
As new businesses spring up each day, the competition for the reader’s attention heightens. Staying on top of the latest SEO trends will enable you to meet specific requirements that search engines use to rank websites.
Google makes hundreds of changes to its search algorithms every year. While most changes are minor, they could affect your search ranking. These are some of the SEO trends I expect to see in 2020.
1. Voice search: People search how they speak
“Google, can you find the nearest taco place near me?”
There were 33 million voice search queries in 2017 alone. Data from March 2019 shows that 20% of mobile queries are voice searches.
As voice search becomes increasingly popular, more people will type search queries the same way they speak.
Notice that most of these search queries are long-tail and very specific? Users want an accurate answer to the exact question they asked.
Users who search long-tail keywords are in the consideration stage and are more likely to convert than someone in the awareness stage.
Bullet lists Increase your chances of ranking for voice queries, and most voice queries are local. Hence, optimize your website for local SEO.
2. Featured snippets will continue to dominate search results
A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a search query. Google displays it at the top of the SERP result, above paid and organic ads.
They’ve been around for a few years and have led to significant changes in Google’s search engine result page. Almost half of all searches result in no clicks because users get the answers they need directly from SERPs. In fact, an Ahref study of 2 million featured snippets revealed that featured snippet gets more traffic than the first organic search result.
Aim for question-based search queries and keywords. Use questions from the “people also ask” section as it offers insight on related questions for a more in-depth answer.
3. More marketers will leverage influences for SEO
17% of businesses spent over half of their entire marketing budget on influences. The statistics highlight the importance of influence marketing for companies, especially those in fashion, beauty, eCommerce, travel, and lifestyle.
Online users are overwhelmed with ads. They are looking for authentic information they can trust. Most times, the source of that information are reviews from influences. They are more likely to trust information from an influence than an ad.
So, what’s the relationship between influence marketing and SEO? Working with an influence helps you generate traffic, increase your online visibility and amplify your content reach.
Many companies do not see the return on their investment in influence marketing because they don’t plan or execute their sponsored content properly. Your marketing fails if it doesn’t align with the needs of your audience.
To get the most bang for your buck, partner with influence's in your niche who already engage with your target audience. The backlinks you gain from influence sites also show authority to Google and enhances your SEO efforts.
4. BERT is here to stay
BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) enables anyone to train their own question answering system. This is the first major change Google has made to its search algorithm since Rank Brain in 2014.
BERT will impact one in ten queries. SEO marketers who apply BERT models increase their chances of ranking on the first page for featured snippets in Google SERP.
BERT will have the most impact on conversational queries where prepositions like “to” and “for” matter to the meaning of the search query.
Just to clarify, you can’t optimize for BERT. Google uses BERT to improve its understanding of natural language.
But you can optimize for the intent behind search queries because intent matching is crucial to creating successful content.
Before writing copy, analyze the top ten content ranking on the first page of SERP for that specific keyword. Is the result informational, transnational or navigational? Create content that matches the user’s intent based on your analysis.
5. People will want digital experiences
44% of companies have moved to a digital-first approach to improve customer experience. Whereas, 56% of CEOs said the improvements led to revenue growth.
Page load speed is an important ranking factor. Great content means nothing if your web page doesn’t load quickly or you have a complex user interface.
Successful businesses understand that building a long-term relationship with customers hinges on customer experience, and customer experience invariably affects search ranking because only users who have a good user experience will spend time on your website.
Focus your user experience on helping customers find the information they need. Make it easy for visitors to proceed to the next step.
To provide the best user experience, you’ll need to wear the visitor’s shoes to identify roadblocks that cause poor experiences. Do not use complex words they do not understand. Lack of clarity in your messaging also increases the bounce rate and negatively impacts your site’s SEO.
6. Video will be the new king of content
Google loves video. It’s a crucial part of your SEO strategy and digital marketing efforts. According to a Forester Research, video is 50 times more likely to show up on the first page of SERP than a web page with plain text. Also, 62% of Google universal searches include video.
Create helpful YouTube videos that support existing content on your website. It’s not a guarantee for first page results but you’ll enjoy higher traffic when Google indexes your video.
Embed videos on your website to get more traffic. Remember to optimize your video to your blog’s width. Add copy on the page to help Google understand what your video content is about.
7. Content length will determine search rankings
Only high-quality content can help you beat the competition to page 1 ranking. But you will also have to consider quantity alongside quality.
There’s a lot of arguments around the ideal length of a blog post. Research shows that the average length of the top 10 results is at least 2,000 words. That’s because web pages with long-form, high-quality content enjoy more visibility.
However, your content must comprehensively answer the question the user asked as well as questions related to the main search query.
Lengthy articles increase dwell time, which tells Google that users enjoy your content. You build authority and Google increases your ranking for the search query.
8. Mobile search will continue to take over
87% of internet users are on mobile phones and 40% of transactions occur on mobile. Google moved to mobile-first indexing on the 1st of July 2019 to improve the mobile search experience.
You can’t get far on search engine results if you haven’t optimized for mobile. Think beyond responsive designs to rich snippets.
If you’ve optimized for voice search, you’ve also optimized for mobile. Besides incorporating long-tail keywords for on-page SEO, modify the content structure and representation for technical SEO.
Conclusion
Just when you think you fully understand SEO, algorithm updates happen. Today’s SEO is a holistic process that requires both offline and online marketing strategies to succeed. Invest in SEO as a long-term strategy for lead generation and stay on top of the latest SEO trends to avoid getting left behind.
Would you like to add to this list of SEO trends in 2020? Drop them in the comments.
Related reading
Four million pieces are published every day. Stand out with these conventional and unconventional ways for a steady stream of traffic to your website.
Greeting your customers, optimizing your products page, implementing schema, and seven more great ways that you can beef up your e commerce PPC strategies.
As professionalization is predictive, machine learning has started playing a central role. Three ways to utilize machine learning for improved professionalization.
Info graphics are highly effective for backlinks as they're visually appealing, easy to digest, and highly shareable. Tips for great info graphics.
No comments:
Post a Comment