When I look at manufacturing companies online, I see a lot of opportunities.

Most manufacturing businesses don’t have a strong digital marketing strategy and still rely heavily on sales.

SEO (search engine optimization) is a channel that is not well understood by most manufacturers and has a lot of potential.

In the last 4 years, I have helped a manufacturing company build its SEO from a 6 figure to a multi-million dollar channel.

In this article, I’ll share the key manufacturing SEO strategies that can help you do the same.

1. Knowing your audience

Knowing your target audience will be beneficial to all the following steps. This is not a one-off thing that you do and then you know. It’s an ongoing process.

In manufacturing, there are usually several people involved in big purchases and long sales cycles. To succeed, you have to get familiar with who you’re talking to and the sales process.

Here are five things you can do to know your potential customers: 

• Create personas: The goal is to create a realistic representation of your audience that you can get back to as a reference.
• Talk to sales regularly: Join sales meetings and talk to the sales team member.
• Read messages from leads: Log regularly into your CRM and read the messages from leads. Notice the language they use, and visit their LinkedIn profile to learn more. 
• Listen to sales calls: If you can, record the sales calls and listen to them.
• Meet clients in person: Although not absolutely necessary, you can learn a lot by meeting clients or potential clients in person. 

2. Choosing the right keywords

Keyword research is a crucial step to success. It is a step many companies overlook and end up missing out on great opportunities.

An important concept to understand when choosing keywords is search intent: the user’s goal behind the query.

Understanding search intent helps you select and prioritize keywords as well as plan your content.

There are two primary ways I use to find keywords with the help of tools like Ahrefs or Semrush.

The first is by looking at all the keywords competitors rank for. The second is by starting with a seed term in the keyword tool.

In manufacturing, keywords will usually fall into one of two categories.

1. Commercial keywords: Users looking for a specific product, service, or solution for a specific application. You can rank for these keywords with product and application pages.
   
2. Educational keywords: Users looking for educational content related to their manufacturing processes. You can rank for these keywords with blog articles and sometimes a glossary.

Once you gathered your keywords, you’ll want to prioritize them in order of importance based on their relevance, your expertise, and their difficulty.

3. Writing content that ranks and converts

For most companies, I recommend starting with one article per week. Once you get the quality to a high level, you can go up to 2 or 3 per week if you want to accelerate things.

With that said, it’s best to produce one great article per week than 2-3 average articles.

Hiring a writer in-house produces better results, but you can also hire a freelance writer.

Because manufacturing content tends to be highly technical, you need a writer with great research skills and attention to detail. Take your time to choose someone, it can take some time to get it right and find the right person.

The higher you put the bar in terms of quality and unique expertise, the easier it will be to rank and convert more qualified leads.

Here are the four steps to follow for each article:

1. Create a brief: A brief is a plan for the article including an article outline. It should result from an analysis of the search intent and the ranking competitors.
2. Interview an expert: Ask internally who has the most expertise for your article subject. A 20-minute interview with this person should provide unique expertise to add to your outline. This person can be an application specialist, or an engineer on the R&D team. 
3. Technical review: Once the article has been written, your expert should review it to make sure it’s accurate.
4. Add internal links: As you publish more content, you should add contextual links within your articles. Internal links that are beneficial for users will also be beneficial for SEO.

For more details on writing SEO-friendly content, you can read this article.

4. Building your business and author E-E-A-T

In their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, Google introduces the notion of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust).

Despite not being directly used in their algorithm, this is still an important concept that applies not only to your author(s), but to your company as an entity as well.

Without going into much detail about how it is used, here are a few actionable things you can do to improve your E-E-A-T.

Business E-E-A-T

1. Get authoritative listings: Get your company listed on reputable manufacturing sites (like Thomasnet and IQS Directory) to establish credibility.

2. Get customer reviews: Encourage clients to share their experiences on platforms like Google Maps.
   
3. Get media coverage: Create newsworthy content and distribute press releases to catch the attention of journalists. Build relationships with journalists in your specific industry.
   
4. Create a Wikipedia page: If your business qualifies, having a Wikipedia page or being listed as a source helps demonstrate authority and trustworthiness.

Author E-E-A-T

1. Add author bios to your blog articles: Include a professional headshot, a bio of their background and accomplishments, and a link to their LinkedIn profile (and other social media profiles, if any).
   
2. Publish on authoritative industry websites: Contributing articles with your author as a byline and bio on authoritative websites will be beneficial to your E-E-A-T.

5. Building great links

Backlinks are still an important part of SEO. For manufacturers, my approach is to go with quality over quantity and focus on the following four types of links.

Linkable assets

Linkable assets are high-quality pieces of content that attract links naturally. This is the best way to continually attract links naturally.

Here are the five types of linkable assets that tend to work well for manufacturers:

• Technical definitions
• How-to guides
• Technical papers
• Industry statistics
• Infographics

Article contributions

More commonly called guest posts, I prefer to call them article contributions. It sounds less spammy and tends to convert better when reaching out to editors.

There are tons of online magazines in the industrial and manufacturing sectors, and most of them accept quality article contributions.

Before sending the article, add a link to a helpful and relevant page on your site. Also provide them with your author’s name, headshot, bio, and LinkedIn link to help boost your E-E-A-T. 

Specialized directories and associations

In most manufacturing industries, you’ll find quality directories and associations that you can sign up for.

Many of them have a yearly fee. Some of them might be too high for your budget, but keep in mind that you can negotiate the price in most cases.

Avoid the broad low-quality directories that don’t bring value to users. An example of a good directory is IQS Directory.

Press releases

Sending press releases is a great way to gain some citations and backlinks. I recommend using a service like PRWeb for distribution. Their “Advanced” plan allows you to pick an industry-curated journalist list for distribution.

You should also make a list of sites in your industry that publish news releases. These are usually the best since you’ll get a “follow” backlink.

Whether it’s a new technology, a new product, or a new location, make it newsworthy!

6. Refreshing your content

As you become better at publishing quality content and you innovate with new products and technology, there will be opportunities to refresh your content.

Manufacturing subjects tend to evolve at a slow pace. So a good rule of thumb is to update your content after 6 to 12 months.

A more advanced way is to look at the freshness distance and set the frequency based on the subject and your competitors.

Refreshing content can range from adding a new section to completely rewriting the article. The goal is to increase rankings, but better content will also result in better conversions.

7. On-page and technical SEO

The most important parts of your on-page are your title tag and your header tags. Make sure they are relevant, unique, and aligned with the user’s search intent.

In my opinion, a meta description is not really important. I had several clients succeed without writing a single one. Adding custom images with proper alt text is beneficial.

You should also spot opportunities for featured snippets and optimize for them.

Learning and implementing the best practices of site architecture is one of the most important technical things you can do.

An audit software like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog can help you with the most common technical issues and basic on-page optimization.

Keep in mind that no amount of on-page optimization and technical SEO will fix poor content quality, but it will propel high-quality content.

8. Expanding with multi-language

If you sell internationally, there are most-likely opportunities to expand with other languages. 

Depending on your resources, it might be best to start by building your SEO on your main site before adding other languages.

Adding multiple versions of your website in different languages and for different countries can quickly become a headache.

Add one at a time. And get at least one person from the country you’re targeting to review your keywords and translate your content.

9. Tracking your SEO KPIs

With their long and often complex sales cycles, manufacturers need to track the entire funnel to gain valuable insights and drive real results.

Marketers should not stop at tracking Marketing Qualified Leads. It’s important to work closely with sales to identify opportunities and bottlenecks. You should also have shared goals.

Here are the KPI(s) you should be tracking:

• Keywords in top 3-10-50
• Domain Rating (DR)
• Referring Domains
• Organic traffic
• Marketing Qualified Leads
• Sales Qualified Leads
• Deals
• Sales

Lead generation and CRM software like Hubspot allow you to keep track of your leads.

Google Analytics for your traffic and Ahrefs for SEO-focused metrics.

10. Conversion rate optimization

Google wants users to have their needs met. For manufacturers, this often means a conversion. It’s a win-win situation.

To improve conversions, you need to make it easy for users to contact you with clear call-to-actions, contact forms, and phone numbers.

Ebooks are also great for manufacturing websites to capture users farther in the sales funnel.

Here are three things you can learn to help you improve your conversions:

1. Copywriting: Learn from the best copywriting books (like Breakthrough Advertising) and apply the principles to your content.

2. User experience: Learning the fundamentals of web design is crucial for conversion. I recommend the book Don’t Make Me Think as a timeless classic.

3. A/B testing: A/B testing is the best way to test assumptions and continuously improve conversion. I recommend the book Making Websites Win as a starting point.

Conclusion

Most manufacturers don’t realize the potential of SEO yet. Even with the rise of AI, SEO will remain a profitable channel for authoritative websites.

If you would like to discuss SEO for your company, feel free to reach out or book a call with me.

The post SEO for Manufacturers & Industrial Companies: How to Succeed appeared first on SEOCharles.

Link building is an essential part of SEO, but it can be a time-consuming and challenging process.

One of the keys to successful link building is effective prospecting and outreach tracking. Without a system in place to track your outreach efforts, it becomes difficult to know which prospects you’ve contacted, which ones have responded, and which ones you need to follow up with.

That’s where my link building tracking spreadsheet comes in. It’s a great alternative to costly software If your niche is not too competitive or you want to focus on quality over quantity.

This is the spreadsheet I use and give to my clients. Available to you for free…

Here are the goal of each column:

Status: This is a dropdown to select the status of the link building process.

Link type: What kind of backlink opportunity it is. You can add or remove options in the Data tab.

Owner: The name of the person in charge of outreaching. This is helpful when there are multiple person outreaching.

Duplicate: This automatically checks if the domain name is in the list in column F. It’s helpful when prospecting from different competitors or sources.

Existing referring domain: This automatically checks if you already have a backlink on that domain. For this to work, you need to export your site “Referring domains” in Ahrefs or other tools, copy the list of domains (without https:// or www), and paste it in column A of the “Existing referring domains” tab.

Page: This is where you paste the URLs of the site with a backlink opportunity. When going through competitors’ backlinks, I paste the page where the competitor has his backlink. Once my backlink is acquired, I replace it with our site’s backlink.

DR: For the Ahrefs domain rating. You can also use the domain authority from Moz.

Domain traffic: Domain traffic according to Ahrefs estimates.

TF: The trust flow metric from Majestic.

CF: The citation flow metric from Majestic.

Price: The price for the backlink if any

Contact email or sign-up URL: Email of the contact person. I use forward slash when there is more than one email to try.

Contact Name: Name of the person to contact. I use forward slash when there is more than one contact to try.

1st/2nd/3rd/4th contact date: The date of each email sent.

Note: Any important or related information. If it’s a guest post, I usually paste the title there.

Source: Where the backlink opportunity was found.

Root domain: This is added automatically to compare and find duplicate domain entries.

If you like it, I’d appreciate it if you could share it.

For more SEO tips and resources, connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter.

Happy link building!

The post Link Building Prospecting and Outreach Tracking Spreadsheet appeared first on SEOCharles.

Or you need the list of internal links to a page so you can optimize your anchor texts.

Either way, we’ve got you covered. In this article, you’ll find 3 tools that allow you to easily find internal links to a page.

1. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is one of the best SEO tools out there. And it’s free to use for up to 500 URLs. If your website has more than 500 pages, the tool is well worth the price if you actively do SEO.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Crawl your entire website.

Enter your homepage full URL and click “Start”.

Step 2: Search for your URL and/or select it in the Address column.

Search the URL for which you need the internal links in the Search box.

Step 3: Go to the Inlinks tab at the bottom.

The Inlinks is the second tab in the bottom section of the app.

Your internal links are all listed there. Here are the important columns and what they mean:

• From: The page on which the link is
• To: The internal link page you selected
• Anchor text: The text used to link to the page
• Alt text: If the link is from an image, the alternative text of the image
• Link Path: The link position in the HTML
• Link Position: The link position in the page, which is useful to quickly detect links in menus vs. content

Step 4: Export the internal links (optional)

If you’re dealing with a large number of internal links. It is best to export and open with Excel or Google Sheets where you can sort and filter the data.

2. Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Those who have been doing SEO for a long time will have heard of Xenu. It’s an old-school tool that still works today. It’s not nearly as good as Screaming Frog, but it has the advantage of being completely free.

It’s a Windows software, but you can make it work on a Mac with a tool like Crossover.

Step 1: Crawl your entire website.

Click on “File” and “Check URL…”, enter your homepage URL, and uncheck “Check external links”.

Click on “More options” and check “Treat redirection as errors”

Click “OK” twice to run the crawl.

Step 2: Select the URL and click the “URL properties” icon.

Click on “View and select “Show broken links only”.

Then, select the URL from the list for which you need the internal links and click on the “URL Properties” icon.

3. Search Console

Search Console has an internal links report under “Links” and “Internal Links” on the right side. Unfortunately, the data is incomplete so it’s not the best option to identify internal links.

In addition, it doesn’t report image links and links in the header section (e.g. canonical links).

Common internal links optimizations for SEO

Internal links maintenance and optimization should be performed for any site that takes SEO seriously.

Optimized internal links provide a better user experience and can results in significantly more search traffic over time.

Here are 3 types of internal links optimization:

1. Internal links that return a 404: These are the most important to fix. You should update to the correct URL or remove the links if the page no longer exists.
2. Internal links that 301 redirects: While less urgent than 404s, internal links that go through 301 redirects slow down crawling and can negatively affect your SEO when they accumulate.
3. Topical and anchor text optimization: As you publish more content, opportunities arise to interlink your content in beneficial ways for SEO and users. 

These tasks should be done every month, if not every week for active websites.

The post How to Find the Internal Links to a Page (3 Methods) appeared first on SEOCharles.

One way to greatly increase your chances of ranking and getting traffic is the process of SEO editing. 

In this article, we tell you what it is about and give you our 9 best tips for editing content for SEO.

What is SEO content editing?

SEO content editing is the process of reviewing an article to improve its quality for users and search engines. It is similar to regular content editing in improving the flow and readability of the content, but it also involves doing it with an understanding of search intent and semantic SEO.

Another important editing skill that is beneficial to SEO is copywriting. Making every sentence lead to the other creates higher engagement and improves conversions as well.

Content editing vs. content refresh

Content editing is done before publishing and has the goal of improving the whole article to match the desired level of quality. Content refresh, on the other hand, is done months after an article is published in order to improve its rankings.

Both can have a similar process, but content refreshes can also only be adding or replacing a section or updating outdated information.

Who should edit content for SEO?

The SEO editing should be done either by someone with both SEO and writing expertise (which is rare) or by the collaboration of a writer and an SEO. It is best to get a second pair of eyes for editing or separate the writing from the editing if you do both.

9 tips for editing content for SEO

1. Know the search intent and your audience

This is a prerequisite for quality SEO editing. The search intent is the ultimate motive behind the target keyword. Taking the time to understand the search intent can give you an enormous competitive SEO advantage.

In other words, it’s the ability to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. If you can talk to some of them, even better.

With this understanding, the editing process becomes much easier since you’ll know right away what will resonate and what won’t.

2. Try to make the title tag stand out

The title tag is the most important element of the article. It’s a ranking factor and determines in big part if people click on your page.

A good title tag has the keyword in it (ideally at the beginning), it’s noticeable, and has an element of intrigue.

Brackets and parentheses can help you stand out (if others aren’t using them) but the best is to have something truly unique.

With that said, it’s best to have a simple and to-the-point title tag than using clickbait techniques.

The meta description is the extension of your title tag that can also be optimized. However, if you don’t have one Google will generate one for you based on your content. 

3. Make the article skimmable

Most people don’t read entire articles; they skim them – They’re looking for something specific or evaluating if the article is worth reading.

Make sure your header tags are easy to scan. It’s not necessary to have your keyword in each subheading. But each one should be relevant to the article title.

The first sentence of each paragraph should also be easy to scan. A good tool to help make your whole article easier to scan is the Hemminway app.

4. Let go of the fluff

Writers tend to add lots of unnecessary information when writing first drafts.

Fluff content removes credibility. Anything that doesn’t contribute to the article’s main goal should be removed. This can go from a word to an entire section.

Remove filler words like “very”, “always”, “just”, and “really” unless they are absolutely necessary.

A common issue after removing fluff content is that you end up with an article that is too short. It’s ok to have fewer words than your competitor if your article is more helpful. But it’s best to get the word count back up by adding more information where it makes sense.

Lastly, avoid using jargon or technical terms unless it fits with your audience.

5. Take advantage of featured snippets opportunities

Answers to questions are often opportunities for featured snippets.

Spot these opportunities and have summary answers in 40 to 55 words. The answer should be preceded by the question in a header or text.

These short answers should have a “Wikipedia” tone, using scientific words and synonyms.

List-post elements also have the opportunity to be featured snippets. For these, you just need to have your list in the same header tag (often H2 or H3).

6. Use a content optimization tool

If you use it right, a content optimization tool can lead to significantly more rankings and traffic. And save you time on topic and keyword research.

Many choose to use one in the editing process since writers tend to do keyword stuffing when using it while writing the article.

The danger with these tools is that people tend to prioritize their arbitrary score over integrating only the keywords you can add naturally.

Here are the 3 most popular optimization tools:

1. Clearscope
2. Marketmuse
3. SurferSEO

Any of these can work. It’s best to choose one and take the time to learn how to use it.

No need to pay much attention to keyword density. But it’s best not to have high numbers of occurrences for terms over their recommended use.

7. Check for spelling and grammar

In the past, you would need a proofreader to correct spelling and grammar. But these days, tools like Grammarly makes this process much cheaper and easier.

The paid version of Grammarly is well worth it if you’re serious about your SEO.

8. Check the tone

A consistent tone helps create an emotional connection with your visitors. For the tone, it’s best to have guidelines to stay consistent and integrate it while the article is written to minimize editing work. 

For more on this topic, you can read 5 Steps to Nail Your Tone of Voice.

9. Add internal and external links

This is an important step often overlooked. There are 3 types of links you should be adding:

1. Add internal links to your other related articles
2. Find other of your articles to link from
3. Add links to authoritative sources (avoid competitors)

For one and two, you can browse your blog categories to find relevant articles to link from (or link to). Or you can also do a site:yourdomain.com “keyword” search to get a list of relevant pages.

Closing thoughts

There more you do SEO editing, the more your judgment will improve and you’ll get pretty good at knowing when an article will perform or not.

Once you’re aware of its quality, you can keep working on the articles until they are at the required level.

But don’t overdo it or delay your publishing schedule. You can always come back later for a content refresh. 

Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/ 

The post SEO Editing: How to Edit Content for SEO appeared first on SEOCharles.

Great content makes almost everything else in SEO easier. Yet, it is where most people fail and don’t get the expected traffic results.

An important thing to clarify is: What is meant exactly by “unique content”?

For SEO, unique content is more than content that is plagiarism free, it’s content that has unique information not found anywhere else, or has a unique point of view. It comes as a result of understanding search intent, in-depth research, and having access to unique expertise.

Everybody can spend a couple of hours researching and summarizing content from the top results on Google. But creating something truly outstanding takes time and effort.” Source

As you’ll see in this article, spending the time to create unique content has multiple benefits beyond SEO.

1. Unique content increases engagement

If your content is high-quality, it will be reflected in user-engagement metrics.

Despite Google being unclear as to how they use engagement signals, it is clear that their algorithm uses them in one way or the other.

The great thing about engagement metrics is that they can be measured and improved over time.

The most important is the click-through rate (as reported in Search Console). It is influenced by your title tag, meta description, and sometimes rich snippets. In other words, the article title is the most critical part of the content.

In Google Analytics 4, Engagement Time is one of the engagement metrics that help judge your content quality. Google Analytics metrics are not ranking factors, but they are good indicators of user satisfaction.

Increased engagement usually leads to more conversions as well, so it goes beyond SEO.

2. Unique content increases natural links

A natural link means a link that was placed organically, without you asking or paying for it. They are the best kind of links since they’re free and you don’t risk being penalized by Google for paying for links.

Quality content increases your credibility and naturally attracts links. The more authoritative the sites linking to you are, the more they will benefit your SEO.

Once your content ranks, it tends to attract even more backlinks as more people find it.

3. Unique content tends to rank longer

High-quality unique content is hard to do, but it’s also hard to replicate.

If you choose evergreen content subjects and put the bar high, you can sometimes rank for years without touching it.

Contrary to other channels like paid ads, your content assets compound. And one of the biggest determinants of durability is the uniqueness and quality of your content.

Eventually, you’ll need to go back and optimize your content. To avoid pressuring your writer too much, a good practice is to re-optimize your content in increments every 6 to 12 months.

4. Unique content increases branded search

When users like your content, they search for it with your brand, product, or service names.

A high search volume for brand-related terms is beneficial to SEO.

For example, because an estimated 4.4k people search for “rei duffel bag” every month, it benefits REI SEO for non-branded related terms like “duffel bag”.

And you don’t need to have thousands of brand-related searches to get the SEO benefits. Even 50 brand-related searches per month can be beneficial.

How to check if your content is unique

Keeping in mind that plagiarism-free content is not necessarily unique content, it is still a good practice to use a tool to check for duplicate content.

There are several plagiarism tools available. I personally use Grammarly with their paid plan. But there are several free options like Copyscape or Plagiarism Detector.

Is duplicate content always bad?

Duplicate content is not always a bad thing. For example, quotes from other articles with links to sources are totally fine.

For long-tail keywords, it’s sometimes okay to use the same content on several of your pages, changing only the variable that differentiates these pages.

But in general, you should aim to have a low percentage of duplicate content on your site. 

Closing thoughts

Producing truly unique content is hard, but when done right, it will get you more traffic and more conversions.

In addition, it’s much more satisfying for a writer to produce than rehash existing content.

Keep in mind that it’s a process and the more you do the better you will get. With patience and consistency, you’ll most likely find out that it’s well worth the effort.

The post Why Unique Content is so Important in SEO appeared first on SEOCharles.

In reality, most content that performs well in search is written with both the user and search engine in mind.

With this dual approach, not only can you attract organic traffic, but conversions and customers as well. 

In this article, I reveal 7 steps I have been refining for years to produce content that has attracted millions of visitors. Follow them and you’ll significantly increase your chances of similar results.

1. Choose the right keywords and search intents

In order to produce content that ranks and drives traffic, choosing the right keywords and search intents makes all the difference.

This first step is often overlooked, and it’s an opportunity for you to outsmart your competitors.

Ahrefs and Semrush are two great options of keyword tools to help you gather a list of relevant search terms. Google Autocomplete is also helpful, especially if you’re on a budget.

The most common ways of gathering keywords are starting with a seed term (e.g. HTML, or learn HTML), or identifying your competitor’s keywords.

What is search intent?

Search intent is the user’s primary objective behind the keyword searched. A keyword can have multiple search intents, and intents can evolve over time. In general, the more words a keyword has the easier it is to determine the primary intent.

Understanding search intent better than your competitors is like a superpower. It allows you to produce content that truly fulfills the needs of your visitors, which generally results in more traffic.

Here are two examples of keywords and their associated search intents.

Depending on how in-depth you want to be, an article can cover one or multiple search intents if they are closely related.

2. Analyze the first page and ranking competitors

To further help determine the best keywords and search intents to go for, the first place to look at is the first page of Google’s search results.

You can use BrightLocal to get un-personalized search results from any location.

Look for content you feel confident you can compete with. Start by scanning the headings of these articles to see what’s covered. 

In parallel, start outlining your article with improved sections and new topic ideas.

The “People also asked” feature is now shown for many queries and can provide great questions to answer in your article.

Tip 1: Put “what/how/why” in front of your keyword to trigger the “People also ask” feature

Tip 2: Expand and close a question to see more questions appear.

Next, the related keywords shown at the bottom of the page can also provide great section ideas or search terms to use within your article.

In addition to looking at the first page results and relying on your own experience, you can get your content to the next level by interviewing an expert, consulting book notes or summaries, or doing a survey. 

3. Prepare content briefs

Whether you have a writer or write the article yourself, preparing content briefs will help you set expectations and have concrete plans.

Your content briefs don’t need to be super complex; here is what I recommend they contain:

• Article (working) title
• A primary keyword
• Search intent description
• Purpose/goal of the article
• Word count range or approximate word count
• Writing style and guidelines
• Sections outline suggestions (with heading tags)

4. Write a strong title and intro

As they say in copywriting, your headline is the most important part of the article. This also applies to your title in SEO.

For the sake of this article, we’ll refer to the title as the actual article title on the page and the title tag, which we recommend to be the same for beginners. 

Your headline goal is to get people to click and read the intro. The intro’s goal is to get them to read the next section. And so on…

So it makes sense to spend more time on your title and intro.

Great article titles have two key elements: 

1. What is the article about: the keyword (ideally early in the title)
2. An element of intrigue

The element of intrigue can be many things; here are a few examples with the keywords in bold:

Make sure your title fits the 580px limit. It’s also a common practice to capitalize your titles.

The hard part is to come up with something original, creating instead of copying. You can get away with copying others’ titles, but you’ll miss a chance to stand out and maybe rank higher because of it.

5. Set your E-E-A-T foundations

E-E-A-T is an acronym from Google search quality raters guidelines that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Google raters are tasked to look for signals of these 4 criteria on the sites they evaluate. The algorithm then uses their ratings to find patterns among sites with good and bad ratings.

If your site is considered YMYL, the E-E-A-T criteria are even more important.

Websites that sell products or provide services or information that can impact users’ happiness, health, financial stability, or safety are categorized by Google as YMYL – which stands for “Your Money or Your Life.” Source

To improve your E-E-A-T, here is what I recommend you have…

On your site:

• A company about page
• A contact page with an email, a phone number, and a physical address
• A privacy policy and terms and conditions page

On your article page:

• An author bio with a photo and links to social media (especially Linkedin and Twitter)
• Cite authoritative sources in your content
• Show that you have first-hand experience with the subject
• Authorship schema

On the web:

• Get the author featured on other websites
• Get the author cited as a source
• Create a Google My Business
• Get reviews on authoritative review sites

6. Have someone review and proofread your content

This step can be done by the same person. But a second pair of eyes tends to get better results.

The first goal here is to make sure the article aligns with the content brief. Remove anything that doesn’t add to the primary goal of the article and add anything that is missing.

For grammar, I recommend using a tool like Grammarly to help you fix spelling, grammar and punctuation.

As you review the content, look for opportunities to add links to related articles you’ve already written as well as a few external links.

Finally, look for opportunities to create new articles that can be linked to as an additional resource.

7. Refresh your content

Six to twelve months after publication, articles that are not performing should be improved.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to refresh an article:

• How can I make this article better?
• What part of the article can be removed?
• What is missing from this article?
• Is there new information that would be useful to this article?
• How can the structure be improved?
• Are there images or videos that would make this article better?

If you can’t find ways to improve an article or it’s no longer relevant, it’s best to remove it.

Closing thoughts

SEO takes time. For new websites, it can take 6 months before your content starts to rank.

Most people give up before seeing results. It’s your opportunity to push through and reap the compounding benefits.

Just set a goal, follow these steps, and start publishing on a regular basis.

The post How to Produce SEO-Friendly Content for Google appeared first on SEOCharles.

This is a case study of how I helped a friend’s company reverse a downward traffic trend and double their organic traffic within 6 months.

I’m going to give you an overview of how we did it, and hopefully you can learn a thing or two you can apply on your website.

Client Background

The client website SEO was fairly successful in the past. Organic search had been their main marketing channel that grew their eCommerce SaaS company from a 0 to 7 figure.

Their main strengths were the quality of their content, their participation in the communities related to their industry, and the fact that they are just cool guys/gals.

The Challenge

With the growing competition in SERPs, their traffic started to decline. In the span of 11 months, they had lost nearly 40% of their organic traffic.

Their attempts at reversing the trend were unfortunately not working.

In a last attempt, they redesigned their website and put a lot of effort into their site speed thinking it would “do it”.

It didn’t…

This is when my friend gave me a call and said:  

“Charles, we REALLY need your help”.

From SEO strategy to execution, this is the work that took place in the following months…

1. Initial Analysis

The first priority was to understand where the traffic was declining so we can start getting clues as to why and what to do.

I reviewed every change that was made to the website in the last year alongside the traffic trend.

With this analysis, I came up with 4 observations:

1. The traffic decline was global, more than 90% of their pages were losing traffic
2. The decline was slow and steady with no sudden big drops
3. A specific set of product pages had lost 33% of their traffic following the redesign migration
4. Their current content strategy was not performing well

2. Technical Audit

In the span of two days, I did a complete technical audit in which I identified 18 issues that needed to be resolved.

I prioritized them in order of importance with the quick wins first.

Their marketing specialist and I had a meeting with the developers to review each one and assign them between us.

Here are a some of the things we addressed within 1-2 months: 

• Switched some menu links and content from client-side rendering to server-side
• Removed tags that were creating hundreds of low-quality pages
• Reorganized the blog categories so they are more SEO and user friendly
• Added contextual internal links (especially to pages with keywords on page 2)
• Cleaned up unnecessary internal 301’s
• Fixed canonical issues on a specific group of pages

In parallel, we were working on the 2nd of the third important pillar of SEO… 

3. Content Editorial: Planning and Revision

On top of the existing page traffic decline, the new articles were not attracting enough traffic to reverse the trend.

The topics and keywords selected were too narrow. They didn’t have enough search volume.

We set a goal to get a minimum of 1,000 visits per month per article and kept the existing pace of one article per week.

I then did a content gap analysis and keyword research to identify keywords that met these criteria.

Because the site already had authority, we were able to target keywords with much higher search volumes as well.

In addition, we added one article optimization per week with the same traffic goal.

In five months, we published 20 new articles and 20 optimized articles.

The process for each article was:

1. Determine a primary keyword, search intent, and article angle
   
2. Prepare a detailed brief for each article including an outline and ideas to make our article stand out
   
3. Revision of each article to make it as good as possible

As is often the case, the revisions were key to success. They allowed us to get the article’s quality up to the level we were looking for.

Here’s how the content calendar looked:

4. Link Building

We were able to get these results with minimal link building for 3 reasons:

• They already had a high-quality backlink profile
• They are attracting links naturally
• We prioritized content quality so we didn’t need as many backlinks

In addition, they were not big fans of link building. 

But I was able to convince them to do just a little in ethical and non-spammy ways.

With the help of my email templates, they acquired some pretty great links with a combination of HARO, link inserts, and guest posting.

There was also a great opportunity for a link asset that they didn’t have the resources to do, unfortunately.

5. SEO Mentoring

Throughout the project and in the last month, I mentored their digital marketer in all aspects of SEO. Here is what he had to say about his experience:

“Charles taught me how to properly choose keywords that will bring in valuable traffic, helped me learn to create efficient content briefs for content writers to ensure our content would perform on the SERP, and showed me how to edit content so it is optimized for the readers and search engines too. Charles provided me with a wealth of knowledge on technical maintenance and audits that I use on a regular basis. Our weekly sessions during my apprenticeship helped me acquire all the skills I needed in order to continue increasing our organic traffic.“

The Results

Results rarely happen by chance. As I always do at the start of a project, we had set goals on key metrics.

Goal 1: Stop the downward trend as soon as possible

We stopped the downward trends in 3 months with a slight traffic increase of 4% on month 3. It was the first month in almost a year that the traffic was up.

Goal 2: A conservative 30% increase in traffic within 3 months

Three months later, the monthly traffic is almost double what it was at its lowest month.

Goal 3: Keep the same conversion rate as we increase traffic

This one unfortunately we didn’t meet. While the traffic doubled, the conversions only increased by 50%. But hey, +110 additional signups per month isn’t nothing.

Closing Thoughts

Sustainable SEO is hard work. 

But it’s also a lot of fun when you work with passionate people who care about their customers.

The key is to optimize for both search engines and users. That’s exactly what we did and the results speak for themselves.

Here’s an excerpt from the testimonial I received with my favorite part (emphasis mine):

“[…] I highly recommend working working with Charles, he provides great results and it’s easy and fun working with him.”

If you liked this case study, feel free to share it and connect on LinkedIn for more SEO tips.

Or you can book a call to discuss a potential project.

The post SaaS SEO Case Study – From 38,000 to 75,000 Visits a Month appeared first on SEOCharles.

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