AMA: SEO

[lludwig]

My question now is;
How would you launch a website today? What would you use? What platform, what type of site would you build? Let's say its a news site. I want to build a site that works well for AdSense and other ads and has the best shot at SEO. I will create articles on the site that will be posted to social media. The social media will refer people back to the website. Web and social will work off of each other for referrals and SEO.

Thanks!
Chris
NYC

Even with its limitations, I'm still a fan of WordPress. The reasons are:

• Amount of people familiar with WordPress (writers and tech)
• Flexibility
• Amount of plugins available
• Ability to extend with your own custom themes and plugins
• How well it can work with SEO

Though WordPress can be a pig of a program. You can cache and scale a site that can handle thousands of page views with WordPress.

 

[lludwig]

Thanks, are you a fan of self hosted Wordpress, or using hosting services like Wordpress.com/wix/godaddy etc. My theory is that hosted WordPress does worse for SEO and advertising.

Well with my background I prefer to manage it myself but I get most can't/shouldn't.

For most using a hosting provider like WP Engine (who I like) is more than fine. For SEO (unless slow) really doesn't matter. Unless you picked some no-name hosting provider which hosts a bunch of sites on the same ip that are spam/PBN.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[lludwig]

If a small but established site has a disorganised URL structure, would you recommend re-organising it or is that likely to negatively impact existing page rankings?

Basically we started our site years back with very little knowledge and managed to rank top on our most important transactional keywords for our location. We also have some highish traffic blog posts, although that traffic doesn't really convert much.

We'd like to rank for new high traffic keywords and also expand our business and rank our site for new locations. The problem is that our home page is optimised only for our current location and our blog has no organisational structure. I'm concerned Google is rewarding our site for being specifically focused around one location for our products and it will be hard to rank for new locations without becoming less relevant for our current one.

You are saying one physical location?

So we have:

• Our home page (optimised for our location and our products).
• Product pages linked from the home page (we no-indexed them because the home page and product pages were competing and the home page ranked higher. Not sure if there was a better thing to do here).

That's very unusual to see this happen. Usually, a home page lacks the content needed to rank for a keyword like this, but don't know specifics with your page content and the competing pages. Obviously, the home page lacks a CTA so people buy the product which stinks IMHO.

• And random blog posts with topical urls (e.g mysite/post-title)

And we now need to add new locations and want to tidy up the blog and start loading on more awesome content.

I'm concerned if I leave our current home page alone (optimised for current location) and just add extra pages for any new locations we expand to, it will make it hard to rank for those new locations. I'm also concerned if we make a more generic homepage which lists all new locations and changes our current home page to a location page, we'll lose top ranking for our current location.

Yes all of this could happen, but not sure how easy it is to rank for that location and keyword combo. Most cases it isn't that high competing that you couldn't do what you describe and make a new subpage rank for the keyword and location.

With the blog I'm wondering whether to tidy up url structures or leave it alone? E.g Change successful page urls to all match a mysite.com/blog/post-title or mysite.com/category/post-title format.

This is an easy answer. things like /tag/ /blog/ /category/ in the URL (not the tag or category names itself ie. /category/ not /web-hosting/ ) serve no value. So they should be removed.

Would that damage the ranking of already successful pages? Are the potential gains from an organised site architecture worth the risks that come with changing things?

Any thoughts or ideas would be hugely appreciated. I'm super keen to get on with improving things but really don't want to feck up what we've already done.

For something like this bite the bullet and make the change. Of course, make sure you do 301 redirects so sites pointing to these pages are redirected. Plus make sure all internal links point to the new pages. you should avoid redirections since you control your own pages.

 

[lludwig]

Thanks for that info and I'll definitely look into that ratio for the blogs I'm adding to my site.

However, I don't think I was clear in my question. I want people to link to my product listing for "blue widgets" on a Shopify store. I'm not trying to get backlinks to a blog.

From what you've said above, I should make sure that my site is easy to use and each of my product listings has the information users want to keep them on the site.

I'll continue to look for areas of improvement and collect user feedback, but I think my product listings are now as good/better than my more established competitors, but they are well established in the "widget" market with a number of backlinks whilst I'm relatively new.

I'm now trying to find a niche within the market that I think I can get ahead, so I'm trying to target "blue widgets". This is where I think I stand a chance of getting better listings as my competitors haven't focused on these yet and have average product listings and very few backlinks.

Would asking other bloggers to review my blue widgets (by sending samples) and then linking back to the product page on my store help its ranking?

Hi Though product pages are high in transaction and yet low in information. it is hard (not impossible) to get a product page for very long-tailed information. Meaning product-specific info when people are searching. Things like:

• product ID
• product attributes
• product description

Though in general Google likes organic search to be more information than transactional. I've mentioned this before in this thread. Most product pages from a store like Shopify are not much in information but high in transaction. The likelihood of ranking for popular keywords (like 'brandname' review) is almost zero. This is why you need a blog as well. The blog is for articles to help educate and add value to readers and is where most of your SEO ranking will come from. If you only have a storefront you are IMHO limiting your self to only highly transactional keywords and that is an arms race. For some of those keywords you might be better off paying for traffic.

As far as your mentioned backlink strategy isn't a bad idea and could be a method to get backlinks.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[EdKirby]

If anything in recent years it is much more about user experience

How is this measured by the search engines? How does this affect SEO?

Or do you mean by creating a good UX you would be rewarded with backlinks etc.

 

[VTK]

If you were to hire a Freelancer to do an SEO analysis and improvement of your site, what specific skills would you be looking for? What questions would you ask them as part of the hiring process? What would you make sure to include in a project brief for them?

 

[Menery]

Im doing some local seo but Need to get into ecommerce/niche site seo as well.

Im pretty fast with picking things up from scratch. I just dont know any reliable Source on this and I dont Trust Most Blogs as they only want me to get them their bluehost of sem rush comission.

Do you have and advice on Where to find ecommerce seo advise ?

 

[Envision]

What would be a strategy that a physical products brand doing 7 figures/year could implement for SEO?

We get hardly any organic traffic and going into 2020 I want to build our blog and content marketing side of the business.

Is it about hiring writers, trying to get links, and volume? Any tips for getting links?

 

[GoodluckChuck]

What do you do now that you don't have your blog? Are you still actively practicing SEO?

And, what automations, if any, do you use for SEO on-page and off?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[lludwig]

What do you do now that you don't have your blog? Are you still actively practicing SEO?

I'm now building out my own personal brand, LarryLudwig.com

Doing some consulting as well and working on building some courses.

Also looking to acquire an existing site and/or creating a new one.

And, what automations, if any, do you use for SEO on-page and off?

None with SEO. Not sure what exactly you can automate. I mean services like ahrefs.com send you data on a regular basis.

 

[lludwig]

What would your seo strategy look like for a super boring niche product with Little competition?

Opinión on content marketing for niche sites?

I'm of the opinion little competition means a mark that's not good to get into. The reason no unique ideas exist. If it's not popular, then it's for a reason, it doesn't make much money. Obviously there are some exceptions to this. I believe execution better is a better way to create a site. Add value where others are not.

 

[GoodluckChuck]

I'm not building out my own personal brand, LarryLudwig.com

Doing some consulting as well and working on building some courses.

Also looking to acquire an existing site and/or creating a new one.



None with SEO. Not sure what exactly you can automate. I mean services like ahrefs.com send you data on a regular basis.

I've seen people, a lot from SEO signals, talk about automating everything from competitor research (parts of it) to on-page optimizations across large sites.

I don't automate much on the SEO side but I would If I did more volume.

Cheers

 

[lludwig]

I've seen people, a lot from SEO signals, talk about automating everything from competitor research (parts of it) to on-page optimizations across large sites.

I don't automate much on the SEO side but I would If I did more volume.

Cheers

At least for me, SEO is more of a manual task with the researching of keywords. At least previously, I automated and created SOPs for other things on my site. Like creating content and making everything on the site metadata which can be updated in one place.

 

[lludwig]

Thanks for the AMA.

Do you have any suggestions or tips for brainstorming seed keywords for a new site in a particular niche that I can plug into a keyword research tool to start gathering a list of long-tail keywords to target?

look at competitors for what they rank and also not rank for.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Xavier X]

@lludwig
Other than sheer time and valuable content, what do you recommend to outrank a brick and mortar business (in a different country) with the same name as your site? One with Google business info displayed on the right panel.

My website in question does not have a physical location, per se. When I created the site months ago, I had search engine indexing blocked, and forgot to remove the block once I launched (oops!). I found I wasn't anywhere in the results last month, and tracked down the issue to that block. I removed it and submitted a sitemap on Google Console.

Now the site is on the second page, for the exact name. Which is still no good.
I know with time, and more content it'll rise, but is there anything else I can do to have my site prioritized for that term? It's an abstract term, so low competition.

I have another 7 year old site which gets over a million pageviews/month. About 50% comes from Google, but the keywords I dominated weren't competitive at the time. I believed they would get popular, so it was a gamble that paid off. While I have some success with that, it wasn't as strategic as what I'm trying to do now.

Thanks!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Xavier X]

A bigger issue, I would make sure you don't run into copyright issues in your country with that brand. So that other business doesn't do any business in your country? Do they have backlinks in your country? I would look at that if they do then you will have more of a time getting Google to get your brand to rank #1 for your country. I would also get in Google My Business and other local business listings to give markers to let Google know you are a business in your home country.

I would pay for your brand to get ranked #1 for that keyword (Google Ads). I had to do this when i started my personal brand and still do for "Larry Ludwig".

You should always buy your brand name in Google Ads. I assume most of our traffic doesn't come from searching for your domain anyways, but you do want to make sure they visit your site if they are typing it in.

Thanks for the response.
There's approximately zero chance of a copyright issue. I'm American, and their business, from what I can see is a small single location guest house, in a small African town. It's not the kind of business to bother with such things, even if they had a legitimate right to it. In this case, they do not - by any means.

They don't have a website, from all indications, just listings on different sites like TripAdvisor. For instance, a TripAdvisor listing of their place is the first result on the search page.

I'll set up a Google My Business account, and other relevant accounts.
Do you think running Google ads up to the point it ranks #1 and then stopping will suffice?

A lot of people search for my 7 year old site by name on Google, and I know with time, people will search for this one by name too. That's why I'm trying to position this aspect from the get go.

 

[lludwig]

I'll set up a Google My Business account, and other relevant accounts.
Do you think running Google ads up to the point it ranks #1 and then stopping will suffice?

Yes it will at least help. Keep in mind people sometimes purposely don't click on ads. Make sure it only shows up in USA then if you are US-based. It's a cheap solution while you also work on the organic SEO.

A lot of people search for my 7 year old site by name on Google, and I know with time, people will search for this one by name too. That's why I'm trying to position this aspect from the get go.

The sad part for me is my personal name isn't all that unique so I have to now with Google Ads (with their dumb change in how keywords work) to do a lot of negative keywords. ugh.

 

[lludwig]

My site has been stuck on page two for months now. I did get it on the bottom of page one for a few fleeting moments but it went back to page 2 shortly.

I feel like my content is superior that anything else in the market. At this point, is it all about getting more quality backlinks?

Since I know specifics I can't say 100%. What I can say is if you done everything and it's still not improving, then it is a backlink issue more than likely.

I also looked at content as generic and isn't a moat around my business and focused on functionality. Can you add tools on the page to improve engagement? Like a comparison tool I did for Investor Junkie.

Thinking about pushing YouTube more next year as the quality on it seems pretty low quality overall.

Yes YT is where it's at for SEO. Less competition, but also lower volume.

So is doing podcasts as a backlink strategy.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[lludwig]

Thank you a lot. Will try my best. I have one more:
For my local SAB I have 4 location Pages that I Need to Rank. (Im in Germany)
Of Course I would like to get citations for every Single Location Page and Build up the individual link equity of each locationpage. I will Rank the Homepage for branded searches only.
However, many online directories only allow me one URL to link out to for my company Name.

What would you do in that Situation?
1. change company name in the citaion (inconsistent nap)
2. link all citations to the homepage
3. link all citations to the Main Location page

Hmm. There's many ways to play this.

If you can test, I would try all three out and see which works best over time.

I would have to say #3 if I could only pick one.

Make it a gateway page to the specific locations.

Though why not #4. link to the specific location?

That is assuming the directories are only for a specific geographic area.

The best way to think about this is really a sales funnel issue than really SEO. In fact many directories don't allow for 'follow' (your industry might be different).

If from the directory they are ready to contact you, make it easy as possible to make it the next step.

The other option is could you direct to generic URL and geo IP the user to then redirect to the location nearest them based upon their location?

 

[lludwig]

Ok maybe I didnt explain myself very clearly.
There a two tips of directories ( a good amount do allow follow links)

1. „location directories“ , ofc course These will link out to the corresponding City landing Page
2. „General directories that cover all off germany

The 2cd one only allow one link most of the time for a given business name so in Not Sure if I should send These to the homepage or the Most valuable city landing Page.
My Homepage has inbound links to all Location Pages and all Location pages are Linked to from a top level menu.

I dont care about the directories being a Sales funel, Most people ignore them and I use them purely to get some backlinks.

my strategie to get a higher DA is

• Directorie backlinks
• Great Blog content with Inbound links to the Homepage

Maybe there are better ways to approach this?

If you are going for pure higher DA then in most cases linking to the home page makes the most sense.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Datingafter35]

I'm averaging 100 unique visitors per month with an article per month (around 3k words).

How do I 10x my traffic?

I don't understand but had implemented internal linking and external linking. Stop guest blogging. Never comment or get buy or build links. Have a shared hosting plan.

I sucked at writing but most of my work are model after Neil Patel and other bloggers in different niche.

I don't have anything to sell because my niche is pretty scammy. Forex trading, specifically forex price action. My keywords are mostly in the 70 per day.

 

[lludwig]

I'm averaging 100 unique visitors per month with an article per month (around 3k words).

How do I 10x my traffic?

I don't understand but had implemented internal linking and external linking. Stop guest blogging. Never comment or get buy or build links. Have a shared hosting plan.

I sucked at writing but most of my work are model after Neil Patel and other bloggers in different niche.

I don't have anything to sell because my niche is pretty scammy. Forex trading, specifically forex price action. My keywords are mostly in the 70 per day.

Forex is a spammy niche with blackhat SEO techniques. In order to compete in this space you may have no choice but to do black hat techniques. OR hope Google eventually figures out the competing sites are playing this game.

If you aren't selling anything, then what is your end game?

I would determine what keywords your article currently rank for and figure out how to improve those rankings. If it's highly competitive keywords you have no choice but to get backlinks.

 

[lludwig]

The idea was to get the page showing up for searches such as:
"livestock haulers" - 720/mo
"livestock transportation" - 1300/mo
"cattle transportation" - 480/mo
"cattle hauling" - 1000/mo
"goat transport" - 320/mo
(data from keywords everywhere)

The goal would be for the page to capture a lot of different keywords and bring them to the landing page. Even with 10 keywords bringing in 100/mo, that's 1000 visits/month just for one category on my site.

This might not be the best way to go upon this, what would be a better strategy for a site like this? (online marketplace)

Why not just focus on these keywords then?? Anything below 100/mo unless is very transactional keyword is usually a waste of time. You have much bigger fish to fry. I didn't search all of the ones you mention but 'livestock haulers" shows in Ahrefs (not sure where you are getting your data from) is a KD of 1 and 100/mo search volume. That's easy to get ranking for.

ahrefs is showing 'livestock network' as the parent topic for this. Not sure if it's the same, but gets 2.3k/mo and is only a 2 in KD.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[lludwig]

Isn't that what I'm am doing already? I have these keywords in the titles and throughout the page in various different forms (livestock transporter, livestock hauler, etc.). Sorry if I'm misunderstanding.

As mentioned in the previous post the data is coming from Keywords Everywhere. Can't afford ahrefs.

Livestock Network is a popular website for posting livestock hauling loads, so that's what the people using that keyword are searching for.

Why not just focus on these keywords then?? Anything below 100/mo unless is very transactional keyword is usually a waste of time. You have much bigger fish to fry. I didn't search all of the ones you mention but 'livestock haulers" shows in Ahrefs (not sure where you are getting your data from) is a KD of 1 and 100/mo search volume. That's easy to get ranking for.

ahrefs is showing 'livestock network' as the parent topic for this. Not sure if it's the same, but gets 2.3k/mo and is only a 2 in KD.

Sorry I didn't see that mention of using keywords everwhere.

'Livestock Transportation Services' is the H1 and the URL slug this is the primary item you are a hint to Google you want to rank for. You should change the content to be 'livestock network' and make the URL to be as such.

 

[lludwig]

What would this achieve though?

People searching "Livestock Network" are solely searching for a popular website called livestocknetwork.com, as I mentioned before. Let's say I am able to rank #1 for "Livestock Network", why would click my link? They don't want my website, they want LivestockNetwork.com.

I would test it by paid ads. Make it an alternative to their service.

You would know better than me as is that considered a term in your industry or a branded term. It sounds generic to me.

Either way, the existing keyword shouldn't be used since there's no volume.

 

[lludwig]

I see what you mean. It's actually not a term at all. It is solely referring to a company/website and has no other meaning outside of that.

So let's say I have two keywords:

1. livestock transportation services - 110/mo
2. livestock transportation - 1300/mo

If my page is titled "Livestock Transportation Services" because that is a better description of what my page is about, but I'm intending to rank for "livestock transportation", does this mean I won't rank for "livestock transportation" unless I title my page to the exact keyword? I was under the impression that using the keyword in the title (especially as the majority of the title) would be sufficient to rank for the keyword.

Google is much smarter than having rank directly for the same keywords listed in the <h1> tag. There are cases in which an article ranks for a keyword yet it's not mentioned. Google knows this keyword is related to the keyword used in your content as a synonym.

It's two issues you are dealing with:

• User Intent - Is one of these two keywords yield more intent (since that is the ultimate objective - visitors taking action)
• How Google Interprets the keywords.

With BERT update now especially, intent matters more than ever. So out of these two keywords, I don't know for a fact but I don't think 'livestock transportation services' and 'livestock transportation' are much different in intent.

If the intent is the same, the question is if one gets 1300 when compared to 110 (assuming KD is the same) you are best to get the 1300/mo volume.

To answer your other question you more than likely will also rank for 'livestock transportation services' as well with just 'livestock transportation'. Typically longer tailed keywords are not only lower volume but also less KD.

I would look very closely on the search results to see how different they are and what ranks for them. Search leaves clues and you should be using search to determine what Google thinks is important for ranking.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[DavidTT]

Is my website growing at a normal rate or a bit slower that it should? Here are a few snapshots of my search console. This is in the past 16 month;

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[lludwig]

Is my website growing at a normal rate or a bit slower that it should? Here are a few snapshots of my search console. This is in the past 16 month;

This is the wrong question to be asking.

In the end what matters is relevancy, not just pure eyeballs. It does you no good if you get 100,000/mo in traffic and that audience is the right audience for your product.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Darius]

I Already had it submitted and ranking on the first page. Now I cant even find it when I type in „site:mydomain.de myarticle name“.
Like idk it looks like google deindexed.
Btw Google rolled out a core algo update today so maybe it has to do with that?

It's common for new content to fluctuate wildly. Like @lludwig said, just wait.

 

[lludwig]

It's common for new content to fluctuate wildly. Like @lludwig said, just wait.

AKA The “Google Dance”.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.