Therefore, including high-volume and relevant keywords on a web page is a no-brainer.

But how do you do that without making your content appear unnatural? What are some of the best practices for including keywords on a web page?

In this blog post, we discuss just that and share some tips on how you can include primary and secondary keywords on your web page naturally.

1. Don’t go overboard

Before we start discussing the actual techniques and tricks, it is important to note that you should never go overboard with keyword inclusion and optimisation.

Search engines have evolved and gotten significantly smarter over the last few years. They do not need a magic number of keywords or a certain density in order to rank pages for that keyword phrase.

Sometimes, even including a keyword once in the page will do the track. In fact, sometimes, you do not even have to include a keyword on the page to be able to rank for it.

Therefore, the primary focus should always be on creating comprehensive, high-quality, and engaging content. Keyword inclusion comes second.

2. Use semantically related keywords and synonyms

You can’t use a keyword or keyword phrase over and over again on a web page. That appears as over-optimisation, which not only looks unnatural but may also lead to a search engine penalty.

In that case, it is a good idea to use synonyms and semantically related keywords to replace your main keyword phrase. 

LSIGraph is a free tool that you can use to find lots of semantically related keywords. It is an excellent way to increase the search potential of your page while solving the over-optimisation problem.

3. Add keyword-rich subheadings

One of the best and easiest ways to include important keywords is to create keyword-rich subheadings.

Including keywords in the subheadings not only helps with search engine rankings but also opens up other subtopics for discussion. This helps create a more comprehensive, information-rich, and in-depth content piece, which is something that readers and search engines love.

4. Use the space in meta content

The main content of the page isn’t the only place you can and should include keywords in. In fact, the meta content offers valuable real estate for including important and high-potential keywords.

You can include primary and secondary keywords in the meta title as well as the meta description of the page.

There are a few things that you should remember about meta content:

• Both the meta title and meta description have a character count limit, which is primarily dictated by how many pixels each character takes.
• Use a free meta content inspection tool to check your meta content isn’t being truncated.
• Make sure the meta title and meta description perfectly describe the page. Misrepresentation — just because of keyword inclusion — will do more harm than good.

5. Customer testimonials

Some customer testimonials can be a goldmine for great keywords. Search engines also do not necessarily mind lots of keywords in a quote or testimonial — which opens up more opportunities for keyword inclusion.

It is recommended to avoid anonymous testimonials, though. The best practice is to add the name of your customer, her designation, the name of her business, and a link back to their website.

6. FAQs

If you are struggling with keyword inclusion for some reason, consider adding an FAQ section to your blog post or web page.

The FAQ or Frequently Asked Questions section can make it very easy to include lots of high-volume keyword phrases in a natural way. Many people ask questions in search engines — especially after the rise in voice search.

Add those questions as is, will help you target those keyword phrases more effectively.

You can also find relevant questions in the ‘People also ask’ section that Google has on its first page. 

There are always lots of questions in that section that people regularly ask. You will never run out of content and subheadings if you use them.

The post Best Practices for Including Keywords on Your Web Page appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

In that case, you should always start with a thorough analysis and audit.

Here are five key areas to check when auditing a Google Ads account.

1. The overall structure of the Google Ads account

The overall structure of the Google Ads account has a major impact on its effectiveness, performance, and profitability of the different campaigns.

Many problems can be solved just by fixing the structure of the ad account.

Therefore, it is highly recommended to start your auditing process by analyzing the structure of the Google Ads account and exploring the different possibilities on how it can be structured.

• See how many campaigns are active
• How many ad groups each campaign has
• How the different keywords are grouped in ad groups
• How are the quality scores for each campaign

After the analysis, identify areas that you can improve. Even small improvements in the account structure can make a noticeable impact on the bottom line.

2. Location targeting and performance

Google Ads offers various options for location targeting. It is easy to overlook the right settings you should have — especially if you launched your ad campaigns with the default settings that Google recommends.

As you can see in the above screenshot, Google’s recommended location setting is “People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations.”

If you have a local business catering to a local audience, this is not the location setting you want to have.

It means that even people who are outside your local area, city, or country will be able to see your ads.

That will increase your operating expenses, without contributing anything to total revenue.

It is also recommended to audit which specific locations have performed particularly good or bad for your campaigns. If the results are consistent throughout the time period, you can turn off a few locations to improve campaign performance.

3. Keyword types

Keywords are the lifeblood for any Google Ads search campaign. Google offers multiple options and keyword types to advertisers. However, you have to be very strategic in picking the right keyword types for specific keyword phrases if you want to stay efficient.

As a general rule, there should not be more than 5% broad keywords — and that also depends on how much you are willing to experiment and expand your campaigns.

Most of the keywords should be the phrase match. Exact matches are good, but they can be expensive. If you want to experiment with the broad match, start with broad modified matches and control your experiments to an extent.

While auditing, make sure that the keywords are relevant and controlled. Otherwise, that could be a big reason for the ineffectiveness of the Google Ads campaigns.

4. Search terms and negative keyword lists

Despite what keywords and keyword types you have selected, you will likely get a variety of search terms and, therefore, many irrelevant clicks.

These irrelevant search terms and clicks is one of the big reasons why many search ad campaigns fail. 

When auditing a Google Ads account, make sure to spend plenty of time in the Search Terms report. Also, analyze how the negative keywords lists are performed and how they are being used in different campaigns.

Ideally, you should have at least a 2:1 ratio for negative keywords lists. In other words, for every keyword you add, you should have at least two negative keywords.

All those negative keywords should be properly organized in negative keyword lists that are used across campaigns.

Lastly, make sure to revisit the search terms regularly. Depending on the size of your account and the number of keywords you are targeting, you should either do it weekly or biweekly.

Further reading: Google has changed how search terms 

5. Competition and cost per click (CPC)

Sometimes, it is just not your fault.

If the cost per click is rising, it may not have to do anything with how the account was running. Sometimes, the market gets more saturated and competitive.

You can look at the average cost per click, the historical cost per click, and the auction insights reports to see how competitors are changing their approach.

With this analysis, you can identify if the rising cost per conversion is because of something you did or because the market is getting more aggressive and competitive.

Conclusion

Although there is a lot more you can audit and check, the above-mentioned five tips will help you audit the bulk of any account.

The post 5 key areas to check when auditing a Google Ads account appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Congratulations! But what’s next?

What do you do first to hit the ground running? What are some of the steps that you should take right away?

Here is a list of 7 such SEO steps to take first when you start.

1. Run an SEO audit

As an SEO professional, you will soon realize that most websites would have some SEO issues. Therefore, as soon as you start working on a website, it is highly recommended to start with an SEO audit.

See how the website looks and what are some of the issues it has.

Here are some of the common issues that you may find:

• Missing meta titles or meta descriptions
• Missed internal link opportunities
• Orphan pages
• Crawlability issues
• Broken links
• Duplicate content
• Canonicalization problems

If it’s a brand new website, you will probably not run into any of these issues at this stage. But it would still be a good idea to keep an eye out on these issues for later.

We also recommend running SEO audits periodically to find problems.

Whatever issues you do find, however, make sure to fix them before moving forward. Craft a plan with subtasks, stakeholders, and deadlines to keep everything organized.

2. Set up a content management system

The website will likely have some sort of content management system in place. If there isn’t, set up one.

If you are not sure which CMS you should go with, WordPress is arguably the safest and most popular choice.

Once WordPress (or any other content management system) is set up, personalize it to how you’d prefer running your website. You may want to install some helpful SEO plugins, like the Yoast SEO plugin.

Arguably, the most important thing is to settle on a URL structure. Otherwise, if you change the URL structure later down the road, you will have to create redirects — which is something you want to keep at a minimum level.

If you are using WordPress, go to Dashboard > Settings > Permalink to change the URL structure.

3. Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console

A search engine optimiser cannot do much if the right data and information isn’t available. Therefore, make sure to install and set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console at this stage.

Here is how to install Google Analytics.

And here is how to add and verify a Google Search Console property.

Lastly, it is highly recommended to link the Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. This integration will give you more in-depth data and unlock valuable insights.

4. Run competitor analysis

This is an excellent way to get started quickly — especially if you do not know much about the industry.

Find a few direct competitors, analyze their website and content infrastructure, find their top pages, identify their best-performing keywords, and shortlist their backlink sources.

If you have a professional SEO tool, such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Moz, you can conduct a detailed competitor analysis in just a few hours.

Remember, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

If something is working for most of your competitors, you know it’ll likely work for you as well.

5. Conduct a thorough keyword research

Use the information you gathered in the last step and conduct thorough keyword research for your own website.

If competition is high, focus on long-tail keywords more than head keywords. Build your backlinks with those terms, drive relevant traffic, and get the ball rolling.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to conduct thorough keyword research for SEO.

6. Establish content infrastructure

Now that you have your keyword research, it’s time to think about the overall content infrastructure for the site.

• How many new pages you will need
• What keywords those pages will target
• How you will present them in the main menu and footer
• How will all those pages be interlinked with each other

7. Start creating high-quality content

You’re almost done now.

The next step is to start creating those pages and get that free organic traffic rolling.

It is important to remember that it’s tough to rank on Google’s first page, even for semi-competitive keywords. Not every piece of content will rank in the top 10 positions.

Here are a few guides to help you create SEO-friendly content:

• A simple (but effective) SEO checklist for 2020
• SEO content: Complete beginner’s guide

Good luck!

The post Getting Started: 7 SEO Steps to Take First appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

According to this update, Google will show less search term query data and will instead only show the terms that were searched by a lot of people.

Here is what a notification by Google said:

“We are updating the search terms report to only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users.  As a result, you may see fewer terms in your report going forward.”

Its impact on how SEMs optimize their campaigns and keep everything more cost-effective is quite significant.

When Google says the new search term report will only include “terms that were searched by a significant number of users”, it is sort of pointless. Because most of the clicks are relevant anyway. It is the outliers — a smaller number of people — who bring irrelevant clicks.

And that’s what you need to add to your negative keyword lists. By taking away this ability, advertisers will end up spending more money on irrelevant clicks.

As a result, we may see:

• Lower conversion rates
• Increase cost per conversion

Moreover, this will be most damaging for SEMs and digital advertisers who are in industries with very high cost per click (CPC). These industries include transportation, legal, tech, doctor, local services, etc.

Seer Interactive recently analyzed their account and saw that as much as 28 percent of their search terms have been removed by Google — which is quite significant and not ideal for advertisers at all.

According to their analysis:

• Prior to the update by Google, 100,000 clicks got them search term data for 98,300 clicks.
• After the update, they see search term data for 77,900 for 100,000 clicks.

Approximately $27,000 worth of search term data (for a $100,000 spend) is gone from their account.

And people are very concerned.

What’s next?

Going forward, this is something that you will have to account for making PPC reports for your company or clients. 

It would also be a good idea to explain this change to your boss or client. An explanation might help clarify the higher cost per conversion or lower conversion rate that you may see in the near future.

The post Google to show less search term query data to Google Ads advertisers appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Regardless of the importance and amazing potential of content marketing, it does have some problems — especially for people who are just starting.

The biggest problem is building traction.

When you have a relatively new website or blog, almost nobody visits it and reads what you have published. The time you spend on creating, publishing, and promoting all seem to go to waste when you don’t get enough readers.

There are many ways to solve that problem. Content Syndication is one of those ways.

What is content syndication?

Content syndication is when you publish the original version of your content on your website or blog and then republish the same content on a third-party website.

The article can be republished completely, or it can be just an excerpt with a link to the original source. That depends on the third-party publication or the agreement you have with them.

In all essence, it seems very similar to a guest post. However, the one big difference between a guest post and a syndicated content piece is that the latter would have already been published on some other website.

Three big reasons for content syndication

Now that you know what content syndication is let’s dive into the possible reasons why you would want to syndicate your content.

There are three big reasons why many content marketers choose content syndication:

• Backlinks.  Although content syndication isn’t primarily a link-building strategy, it is a valuable bonus that comes with it.  You can contextually add valuable backlinks for various articles on your website — or even the homepage, if it makes sense. Backlinks are a powerful search engine ranking factor and can help your site with search engine rankings.
• Increasing readership.  As we discussed earlier, many blogs do not have any readers — especially at the beginning. Increasing readership almost instantly by syndicating content on established websites is a proven tactic.
• Brand awareness.  If used correctly, content syndication is an excellent strategy to increase brand awareness. Syndicating one piece of content on one website may not help achieve that result, but syndicating multiple relevant pieces on multiple websites can trigger a multi-channel brand awareness campaign.

Two potential problems with content syndications

Content syndication looks almost too good to be true.

You create an article once, publish it multiple times, get backlinks, increase readership, and promote your brand.

But what’s the downside?

There are two potential problems with content syndications, and there are ways to bypass those problems:

• Content duplication issues.  With content syndication, you are basically duplicating a single piece of content and publishing it on multiple websites. This may lead to a potential content duplication issue and related penalties. Moreover, content duplication may also impact the search engine rankings of your web page.
• Search engine rankings.  Content duplication affects the search rankings because Google does not know which version of the content should be ranked higher than the other. Generally, Google prefers to rank the original source higher — whenever it can.
  
  There is always a possibility that your web page may be outranked by another website that you syndicated your content to. It may also mean that Google only ranks the other page and completely discard yours.

How to overcome these problems

Most of these problems can be solved by telling Google which one is the original source. You can do that by creating a canonicalized link.

Another method is to ask the third-party publisher to add a no-index tag on their page. This ensures that the syndicated page does not get ranked on the search engine results pages at all. That will leave the field open for your original version in the SERPs. 

However, as the other page won’t rank in the SERPs, this would limit the potential reach. Second, you probably may not get as much benefit from links that are coming from a no-index web page.

Conclusion

Our recommendation is to go with canonicalization. We also recommend adding a separate line at the top or the bottom of the article that says something like, “This article was originally published on [your website name]” with a link back to the original source.

These techniques will help you minimize the potential SEO issues of content syndication, so you can enjoy the many benefits that come along with it.

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Content Syndication appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

This constant need to publish new high-quality content often becomes a big problem for website owners.

However, the good news is that you do not always have to publish completely new content. In fact, you can also increase organic traffic and stay competitive by updating and republishing older content.

It is a common practice to update old blog posts. But we recommend being strategic about it if you want to maximize results.

While updating the content is always a big focus, it is extremely important to first identify which posts you should update. You can’t pick a post randomly and expect great results.

Therefore, in this blog post, we share four tips on how to pick the right blog posts for content updates that would maximize organic traffic.

1. The page must be targeting a high-volume keyword

Different blog posts target different keywords and keyword phrases. When you are shortlisting pages for content updates, make sure to only pick the ones that target a high-volume and potentially profitable keyword phrase.

For example, if you’re targeting a keyword phrase that only has 10-20 searches per month, it probably won’t be worth the effort to update that page.

Therefore, make sure to only pick pages that are trying to optimize for high-potential keyword phrases. 

2. The page should not be in the top 3 positions on the SERPs

The idea of updating a web page is to increase incremental organic traffic. Therefore, if a page is already ranking on #2 or #3 on the SERPs, moving it one position higher probably won’t be worth the effort.

Instead, that effort can be directed to another page that is, for instance, ranking on position #11 on Google’s second search engine result page. Any improvement will push it to Google’s first page, which will likely lead to a significant increase in overall organic traffic.

Therefore, when shortlisting web pages to update, make sure the page isn’t already ranking on the top of Google for the main keyword.

3. The page must not be brand new

Optimising a web page for search engines may often take some time. Although crawling and indexing by search engine crawlers do not take very long, it may take a few weeks for a page to reach its full potential and rank as high as it could.

Therefore, how long ago a blog post was published should be an important consideration.

In other words, you should not start updating posts that were only published a month ago and hope for major improvements in organic rankings and traffic.

Instead, try to focus your efforts on much older blog posts — for example, the ones you published last year — and update them. Remove broken links, add new content, delete outdated information, include new images, internal links, outbound links, new studies, more data points, and new keywords.

4. Page underperformance should not be a backlink issue

Last but not least, make sure the page is not underperforming because of a backlink issue.

It is easy to lose sight of the real problem. You could look at a page and its low search engine rankings and decide to update its content. 

But there is always a possibility that the page may not be underperforming because of its content. Often, the problem is the lack of backlinks pointing to that page.

You can easily identify the problem by doing a quick analysis.

Look at the pages that rank above you on the SERPs and see how many backlinks each of those pages has. Compare it with the total number of backlinks that your page has.

If all the other pages have a very high number of backlinks compared to yours, you should focus on acquiring more backlinks — instead of updating the contents of your page.

Conclusion

Updating older content is a common practice, but it is easy to start the process without paying much attention to the selection process of the pages.

Merely looking at the organic traffic that a page brings is not always a good indicator. It is recommended to dive a bit deeper and analyze each page as per the tips mentioned above.

This will help ensure that you are directing your efforts at the right pages that would bring you the most incremental organic traffic.

Related Posts:

• On-Page SEO Guide
• Content Revamp
• Updating Old Blog Posts SEO
• How to Fix Stagnated Content
• Should You Delete Old Blog Posts

The post How to Update Old Blog Posts appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

• Search Network ads that appear on the search engine results pages whenever someone searches for relevant keywords.
• Google Display Networks that display text and image ads on websites across the internet.

And although the focus is almost always on Google Search Network, the Google Display Network is also an excellent tool for creating brand awareness and increasing conversions & ROI.

Here are five simple Google Display Network tips for digital marketers to get started with Google display ads.

1. Use Google Display Network for remarketing ads

Although you can use search ads for remarketing, Google Display Network ads sometimes perform better than search ads when it comes to brand awareness, brand recognition, and bringing people back to your site.

Remarketing allows you to follow people who visited your website — or certain pages on your site — and display targeted ads.

For example, if someone put items in the shopping cart and later abandoned the cart, you can display a GDN ad to her that offers free shipping or a limited-time 10% discount.

They were clearly interested in buying the items, but something “surprised” them, and they abandoned the cart.

Remarketing can lead to a much higher conversion rate and amp your ROI significantly. And Google Display Network is often the perfect medium for running remarketing ads.

2. Use managed placements

The Managed Placements feature allows you to direct your ads to certain websites that your potential leads and customers visit most often.

Analysing data and turning them into actionable insights is a key part of digital marketing success. By being more informed and basing your decisions on data with managed placements, you can drive targeted traffic to your site.

For example, if you sell SEO software, like Ahrefs or SEMRush, showing an ad about it on SEO-related blogs would get you more targeted traffic with potentially a higher conversion rate.

3. Don’t forget image ads

It is highly recommended to use all types of ads because it is possible that some websites would only support one format.

Having said that, it is important to reiterate that you must not forget image ads.

Approximately, 67.5 percent of ads on the Google Display Network are plain text ads. This is despite the lower click-through rate these ads get. According to a study, text ads get an average click-through rate of 0.23 percent. On the other hand, image ads get an average CTR of 0.31 percent.

This makes image ads kind of a necessity. Even if you are testing different ads (which you should), we would recommend testing your CTA in an image format for GDN ads.

4. Monitor, tweak, and improve

Just like search ad campaigns, you will have to spend some time collecting important data, monitoring the account for any major and minor changes, and make your tweaking decisions accordingly.

Your Google Display Network campaigns demand and deserve the same kind of love you give to your search ad campaigns.

Set aside some time for reviewing display ads, just like you do for search ads. Instead of adding negative keywords with search, exclude placements with display network campaigns.

When analysing your data, also pay special attention to websites that get you the most traffic. Are those websites relevant? Will they bring you targeted traffic? Are people on those websites expected to spend enough time on your site to become a lead?

Apart from the number of conversions, other metrics such as time-on-site should also be considered.

By looking at everything and spending time analysing data on a regular basis, you can make data-driven decisions to improve display network ads and the ROI you get from it.

5. Set aside some budget for testing

Just like with search ads, you might have to test many different elements and variables before you find that winning formula for your campaigns.

We recommend setting aside 10-20 percent of your total budget for testing.

You can try different ad groups for topics, interests, contextual targeting, managed placements, etc. You can also try different types of ads and different variations of text and image ads for your Google Display Network campaigns.

Conclusion

It is very easy to waste thousands of dollars in Google Network Display ads.  But when done right, it can deliver an excellent ROI for the right campaigns.

Use the tips mentioned in this article to make your display ads campaigns more effective and efficient.

The post 5 simple Google Display Network (GDN) tips for digital marketers appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

However, Google’s Gary Illyes recently clarified that spam reports only represent a small portion of manual actions. Instead, these reports are generally used to improve Google’s spam detection capabilities and search results.

“Thanks to our users, we receive hundreds of spam reports every day. While many of the spam reports lead to manual actions, they represent a small fraction of the manual actions we issue. Most of the manual actions come from the work our internal teams regularly do to detect spam and improve search results.”

Google’s spam detection capabilities are very effective. On average, It filters out 25 billion spam pages every day. Google search results are 99% spam-free, but there is “always room for improvement.”

“The reality is that while our spam detection systems work well, there’s always room for improvement, and spam reporting is a crucial resource to help us with that. Spam reports in aggregate form help us analyse trends and patterns in spammy content to improve our algorithms,” said Gary Illyes.

Content quality and spam detection

Google’s immense focus on high-quality content has been pivotal in improving its spam-detection capabilities in the SERPs.

According to Gary Illyes:

“Overall, one of the best approaches to keeping spam out of Search is to rely on high quality content created by the web community and our ability to surface it through ranking.”

A clear distinction

Google has also made a clear distinction between manual actions against websites and spam reports in Google Webmasters Guidelines.

A new paragraph in the Webmaster Guidelines explicitly states:

“If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please let us know by filing a spam report. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, and will use the report for further improving our spam detection systems.”

In summary, a spam report against a website will not necessarily lead to a manual action. 

You can find more information about this in Google’s blog post.

The post Google clarifies that spam reports represent only a small portion of manual actions appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

This is an important question that almost all businesses and search engine marketers think about at least once.

If you are already ranking on the #1 spot on Google’s first page for brand keywords (i.e., the name of your business), should you pay to have an ad on the top of the SERPs? Even above your website’s organic listing?

CPCs seem to be rising continuously. If brand campaigns are not generating incremental MQLs for your business, why not save that money and invest it somewhere else or perhaps use it to fuel other campaigns?

The answer to this question, however, is not very simple.

Brand SEM campaigns: Pros and cons

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty details of what you should do, it is important to take a look at some of the pros and cons of each option.

Pros

Here are some benefits of running brand campaigns.

• You get more real estate on the search engine result page if you have an organic listing as well as an ad at the top of the page.
• You control the messaging. With organic listings, you cannot always control the sitelinks that appear on the page. With an SEM ad, you can control exactly how your website appears on the page.
• You get more overall traffic, MQLs, and sales. As we have often noticed, having ads as well as an organic listing on the same page increase traffic and MQLs.
• You can send the traffic to a different landing page, instead of the homepage.

Cons

On the other hand, here are some potential disadvantages of bidding for brand terms:

• If brand campaigns are not driving incremental MQLs and sales, you waste money.
• You run out of the marketing budget sooner, which means you’re less likely to explore other areas and initiate other marketing campaigns.

Should you bid on brand terms?

Now that you know some of the big pros and cons of bidding on brand terms, should you do it?

Unfortunately, only you can make that decision.

In our experience, it is usually beneficial to bid on brand terms. However, that may not always be the case.

Therefore, the best solution is to run a brand test and see whether paid campaigns are driving any incremental traffic, leads, and sales.

Running a brand campaign test

Here is how you can run that test and determine whether bidding on brand terms is for you or not.

• Make sure you have a separate brand campaign with only brand keywords in it.
• Get a sense of how many MQLs you generate on a daily basis via SEM and organic channels.
• Define the period of your test. A 14-20 day period is usually sufficient, but it depends on how much you’re spending and the number of leads you generate per day.
• Turn on your brand campaign on day 1, turn it off on day 2, turn it back on day 3, off on day 4, and so on.
• On each day, make sure to note down the MQLs (or sales) you generated via SEM and organic channels.

After a couple of weeks, you should get statistically significant results on whether bidding on paid terms is generating incremental MQLs/sales or not.

On the days you turn off the SEM campaigns, the number of leads should remain more or less the same. Those leads would just be attributed to organic channels. However, if that’s not the case — and if the total number of leads drops significantly on those days — it means you should bid on brand terms.

The Reinforcement Effect

While the above-mentioned test should give you credible numbers to determine if you should bid on brand terms or not, there is one more test that you can.

The Reinforcement Effect test won’t highlight the incremental MQLs or sales, but it will tell you how having an ad and an organic listing on the same page affects the overall CTR.

• Make sure your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are connected.
• Log in to your Google Ads account.
• Go to Predefined Reports > Paid and Organic.
• Download the report and export it to Excel or Google Sheet.
• Add another column to that report and mark whether a keyword is branded or non-branded.
• Calculate the CTR for branded terms if (1) only organic listings appear on the SERPs, (2) only ads show, and (3) both ads and organic listings appear via pivot table.

If you are not sure how to do it, check out this tutorial.

Usually, when both the ad and organic listing appear on the same page, the overall CTR increases significantly. But it may vary from business to business and is something that you should test.

The post Branded keywords in SEM: To bid or not to bid appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Web pages get stagnated all the time — for a variety of reasons. If you have pages that never fulfilled their organic potential, it is time to revisit them and try to revitalize those content pieces.

Here are a few ways to fix stagnated content.

1. Build internal links

One of the easiest ways to fix stagnated content is to leverage internal links and transfer some of the SEO juice from more well-established pages on your site.

Links are an important part of search engine optimisation. Just like with external backlinks, internal links can also boost your content. Furthermore, internal links can also help Google search crawlers find your content more easily.

When building internal links, follow these two tips:

• Build internal links that are relevant to the topic of your target page.
• It is recommended to build backlinks from pages that have many high-quality external backlinks.  This will help transfer more SEO juice and boost your target page quickly.

2. Revisit on-page SEO

Sometimes, pages don’t perform well organically because they follow poor on-page SEO practices. Before trying all the different tactics, it is recommended to revisit on-page SEO and double-check if everything is in order.

This process includes analyzing the following elements:

• Keyword selection
• Keyword optimisation and density on the page
• Heading tags
• Meta title
• Meta description
• Internal links
• Outbound links
• Word count
• Alt text for images

Make sure your page is well-written and well-structured with appropriate, keyword-rich heading tags. The meta title and description should be engaging, unique, descriptive, and keyword-rich.

Moreover, the word count also matters a lot. 300-word blog posts do not work as well. Instead of relying on shorter blog posts, create long-form content that discusses a topic in more depth and detail.

3. Technical SEO

There is more to SEO nowadays than just keyword optimisation. Technical SEO is an aspect that many SEOs still ignore — however, it is a major search engine ranking factor now.

Technical SEO encompasses several things: mobile-friendliness, website loading speed, image optimisation, clean website code, etc.

Make sure your page checks all those boxes.

Web page loading speed, in particular, has become a big search engine ranking factor. The median page loading speed for Google’s top 10 results is 1.65 seconds.

Check your web page loading speed with Google PageSpeed Insights and identify any areas of improvement.

4. Backlink campaigns

Many pages just never rank on Google’s first page because they do not have enough backlinks from unique, relevant domains on the web.

Link-building is one of the most important search engine ranking factors. If you want to fix your stagnated content, it is worth the effort to try and build some high-quality backlinks from relevant websites.

Here are some tips you can try:

• Google Alerts.  Set up Google Alerts for brand mentions and relevant keywords.  Google will alert you whenever someone mentions those keywords. You can then reach out to them with a personalized pitch to get them to create a link to your page.
• Broken links.  Try to find pages with broken links. A Google Chrome extension, such as Check My Links, can help you quickly identify broken links on a page. Shortlist all such relevant broken links and reach out to them for a backlink.
• Better resources.  Use tools like Ahrefs to identify pages that create backlinks to content similar to yours. If your page is objectively better than those other content pieces, you can reach out to the author of the post and present your page as a better alternative to link to.

5. Merging multiple pages

It is not uncommon to find 10 pages on a topic on the same website. Some content marketers actually prefer having multiple pages on the same topic instead of having one definitive, in-depth blog post.

The problem with that approach is that those pages end up competing against one other in the SERPs. Some pages are so similar that they even use the same keywords — which leads to a problem we call keyword cannibalization.

To overcome that problem, it is recommended to identify such pages and merge them together into one big resource. By empowering that one page, you put it into a better position to rank higher in the SERPs and compete more effectively.

Conclusion

An online business or blog creates hundreds of content pieces every year. Many of those posts get stagnated and never drive any organic traffic.

You can, however, fix those pages with the techniques mentioned in this article, and get more out of each page you publish on your site.

Related Posts:

• On-Page SEO Guide
• Content Revamp
• Update Old Blog Posts
• Updating Old Blog Posts SEO
• Should You Delete Old Blog Posts

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