According to John Mueller, not much.

Keywords in the domain name

He recently answered a question and advised search engine professionals and website owners that there are no search engine ranking benefits of having a keyword in the domain name.

The question was, “Does a .jobs domain improve ranking in Google for jobs?”

In response, John Mueller responded:

“This is a really common question that comes up for the new top-level domains.

In short, no. You don’t get a special bonus like that from having a keyword in your top-level domain. 

Anecdotally you can see that by searching naturally for anything that interests you. I’d venture a guess that the top results don’t have those keywords as a domain ending. 

Just because a website has a keyword in its domain name doesn’t mean that it’s more relevant than others for that keyword.

In short, you don’t need to put keywords in the domain name.”

Keywords in URLs

So there are no ranking benefits for having keywords in the domain name. But what about keywords in URLs? Are there any benefits there?

Surprisingly, John mentioned that there are not any ranking benefits for having keywords in URLs either, and that is by design.

The real impact of keywords in domain

This is Google’s official messaging that keywords in domain names do not have an effect on search rankings. However, there are some search engine ranking factors studies that contradict this stance.

Until that changes, we suggest sticking to whatever you feel is the best way, which will most likely be having important keywords in the domain name.

Having said that, Google’s approach is more practical. At least, that’s the right approach — to not favour websites based on keywords in the domain name.

In addition, if there are significant rankings benefits of having keywords in the domain name, it would make it very difficult for businesses to evolve and cater to different niches.

According to John: 

“From a practical point of view, it’s also worth keeping in mind that businesses evolve over time, and moving domains is hard.

So it often makes sense to pick a domain name that you can use for the long run and not necessarily one that just matches what you’re offering today.

For example, if you focus on making awesome blue widgets, and build your website on BestBlueWidgets.com, what do you do when you start offering red widgets?”

What’s John Mueller’s advice?

He recommends: “Instead of spending too much time on the domain name, or the top-level domain name, focus instead on building a site that you can continue to use for the long run.”

What do you think? Is there a disconnect between Google’s messaging and what actually happens in the search engines? Let us know what you think.

The post John Mueller clarifies the role of keywords in domain name and URLs appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Is the quality of information more important than the number of words a web page has? What does the evidence suggest?

These are some of the many questions that content marketers and SEO professionals often think about. Recent evidence suggests that Google prefers long-form content in the search engine results pages, and that’s the type of content that usually gets ranked on Google’s first page.

But does the search engine algorithm really work that way?

Google’s John Mueller recently responded to a question on Twitter and clarified some of these burning questions.

What Did John Mueller Say About Word Count?

A Twitter user analysed the competition in the SERPs, checked the average word count, and asked the following question:

“What if I’m covering more information in less words than competitors. What [does] Google think about word count?”

Responding to this Twitter, John Mueller posed the following question:

“Why would a search engine use word count as a metric?”

This is rather surprising.

As we mentioned earlier, recent evidence suggests that Google ranks pages with high word count. According to a recent study by Backlinko, the average word count in articles that rank on Google’s first page is 1,447.

Another interesting tidbit is that in Google’s SEO Starter Guide, Google mentions that content should be “factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.”

Moreover, the word “comprehensive” is mentioned 30 times in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines. 

As you can see, the “comprehensive content syndrome” isn’t completely unjustified. However, John Mueller mentioned that the comprehensiveness of a web page does not depend on the total number of words.

John also explicitly clarified that Google does not use word count as a ranking factor.

Mueller also mentioned another important point.

According to him, not all pieces of content need to be “comprehensive”.

Some questions just require a direct, quick, and simple answer. In that case, not all pages need to be comprehensive.

Summary

If we are to summarise this entire “explanation”:

• Google does not use word count as a ranking factor
• The content should be comprehensive, factually accurate, and clearly written. That’s more important than artificially increasing the word count.
• Lastly, not all questions need a 4,000-word answer. Sometimes, a simple answer will rank higher because it helps users in a better way.

The post John Mueller Talks About Content, Word Count, & Rankings appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

When we talk about content marketing, the biggest focus is almost always on content creation. While that is super important, you would know that there is no shortage of content on the web.

Hundreds of new blog posts are published every day for even the smallest of niches. 

So, how to make your piece of content stand out amongst others?

Two words: content distribution.

Publishing content isn’t enough; everybody else is doing it as well on a daily basis. You also need to make sure that content reaches your readers. The success of your content marketing campaigns depends on that.

Here are a few content distribution ideas that might help you with expanding your content marketing reach.

1. Identify what works

First things first.  

Not every piece of content can be successfully distributed across channels. Some formats work better when it comes to content virality; it is just the way it is.

Therefore, the first step for you should be to research and identify the most successful content formats in your industry and for your target audience.

Use tools like Ahrefs and BuzzSumo to identify the most popular content pieces in your niche — by backlinks, number of referring domains, and social shares.

Then create more content in that format, e.g., list-based blog posts, long-form content, infographics, etc.

2. Be active on social media

To successfully distribute content and expand its reach, you will have to be more active on different social media channels.

First, you need to build an active group of targeted and engaged followers. Being active and engaging on social media is an integral part of that.

Second, you need to put your content in front of that audience. Sharing the right type of content at the right time and on the right channel can be the difference between success and failure in content marketing and distribution.

3. Engage with influencers

If content virality and distribution are your main goals, then you will need help from industry influencers. 

Industry influencers have access to thousands and — sometimes — even millions of people. When they share and endorse a piece of content, it is more likely to be spread on the web quickly.

But influencers won’t just help when you send them a tweet or an email. First, you need to lay a foundation.

Build up a reputation with them, engage with them, help them if you can, and establish a connection before asking for help.

4. Find out where your target audience hangs out

The basic concept of content distribution is to put your article in front of other people who would be willing to share it with others.

Those “people” would be your target audience, in this case.

To put your content in front of them, you will first have to find out where they all hang out most of the time. 

Is it a Slack group? A Facebook group? Is it Reddit? Or is it an industry-specific forum?

Identify the places where you need to be before starting your content distribution efforts. It is just as important as identifying the most successful and popular content formats for distribution.

5. Email outreach

Email outreach is often the first and last resort for content marketers trying to distribute their content. While it does not work as well for a lot of content marketers, there is no reason to underestimate email outreach.

To make it effective, however, you have to be smart and tactical.

Curate your list properly, personalise your email, be creative, and don’t act spammy.

Focus on starting a conversation and engaging the email recipient. Build a connection — if it does not lead to a share right away. It will be valuable in the long term.

6. Paid content distribution channels

Not all content marketers would think of paid content distribution channels, but it can be a viable option for many.

Paid content distribution channels work especially well if:

• You are spending a lot of time and efforts in producing the best possible piece of content on a topic, and
• You know the potential ROI that can be generated with a web page

Then you can reverse-engineer the maximum advertising cost and expand your content’s reach.

Conclusion

Content distribution is an integral part of the success of any content marketing campaign. You may have the best blog post, but if no one reads it, it is useless and won’t bring you leads and customers.

All the time, money, and efforts to create that piece of content would be wasted.

The content distribution ideas mentioned in this article can be used to expand your content reach and drive a better ROI.

Good luck!

The post Content Distribution Ideas: How to Expand YOUR Content Reach appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Google’s John Mueller recently participated in a discussion on Reddit and shared some valuable insights, advice, and best practices on how to implement big changes without negatively affecting the site’s SEO and rankings.

Here are a few important points John Mueller mentioned:

Domain name changes are safer than you think

You would think that changing the domain name of a website would have a big impact on everything SEO related, but it is relatively safe.

According to Mueller, moving your entire site structure and content is relatively safe — especially when compared to a website redesign and update.

He said, “You’ll potentially see more fluctuations from the redesign / revamp than from the domain name change. Moving things 1:1 from one domain to another is – for the most part – a non-issue.”

Website redesign and major structural changes

As an SEO, you are always looking to make any improvements to the website’s improvement if you can. Making structural changes and redesigning your website is something that many SEOs undertake. However, there may be unintended consequences.

According to Mueller, you should be extra careful if you are doing any of the following things:

• Moving site to a different content management system
• Rebuilding a website
• Restructuring site content
• Changing URLs
• Redesigning the website design
• Revamping the internal linking structure

Make big changes in multiple phases

Furthermore, John Mueller advised that big, structural changes to the website should be done in multiple phases. 

The big reason is multiple phases would allow you to give proper attribution to improvements. Moreover, you will also be able to understand the reason for any potential negative impact and attribute it to a specific change.

“If you do everything at once, you’ll never know what to fix, and even if things end up “same as before”, you won’t know if one part went down, and was compensated by an improvement on the other part. Keep things controllable & trackable,” says John Mueller.

Conclusion

Rebuilding or redesigning a website is often a big undertaking — one that may have unintended consequences for the website’s SEO performance and search rankings.

Many of those potential problems can be avoided by following John’s recommendations.

The post Google’s John Mueller shares SEO advice on implementing major website changes appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

On average, the top 10 results in Google SERPs load in just 1.65 seconds. If your website takes longer to load, it will have a negative effect on its search engine rankings.

Furthermore, website visitors also do not like slow-loading websites. If a page takes too long to load, they’d just quit it, go back to the search engine results page, and click on another link.

This not only sends negative signals to search engines but also makes you lose credibility, traffic, and potential revenue.

There are several methods to improve the loading speed of your website. However, one of the big methods is by reducing HTTP requests.

In this article, we discuss several methods about reducing HTTP requests that could help speed up your website.

1. Image optimisation

An average website uses dozens and hundreds of images. If you have an e-commerce store, there will likely be even more images because of different products.

There are two ways you can optimise images on your website and improve the loading:

• First, delete all the unnecessary images that are no longer in use or serve an important purpose. By reducing the number of images that must be loaded on a page, you can reduce the number of HTTP requests.
• Second, despite your best efforts, you will still have to use several images on your website pages. Therefore, make sure to properly optimise those images and use web-friendly versions. For example, use .jpeg instead of .png whenever possible. Also, keep the size of the images as low as possible — without sacrificing the quality of the image. All these steps will help you load the page faster.

2. CSS and JavaScript minification

Review your CSS and JS files, and you will notice a lot of useless code in them. That extra code slows down your website.

Minification refers to removing unnecessary code from CSS and JavaScript files, such as white space, irrelevant comments, additional characters, etc.

3. Combining JS and CSS files

JS and CSS minification helps, but that is not the only step you should take to speed up your website.

You can also combine the different JS and CSS files you have. For example, if your website has 10 CSS and JS files, it would need to send 10 requests. 

If you can cut it down to 2 files, you can reduce up to 8 HTTP requests — which can have a noticeable impact on your website loading speed.

4. Reducing external scripts

Does your website still have any plugins or scripts that you no longer use?  For example, a Twitter feed or a Facebook conversion pixel?

These external scripts can increase the number of HTTP requests and slow down your web page.

It is recommended to periodically analyse your website and identify external scripts that you can afford to remove.

5. Using a CDN

A CDN or Content Delivery Network is a worldwide network of servers. Located in different regions in the world, a content delivery network helps reduce the total number of HTTP requests by caching static content.

The CDN delivers the cached content from the closest server to the user’s physical location whenever a user visits your website. Because cached content is delivered to the user, it does not have to make new requests every time the user visits a page.

However, not every website will be benefited from a content delivery network. For example, if most of your traffic comes locally (from your neighbourhood or city), a CDN won’t be necessary.

HTTP requests: the goal

Although all websites are different and have different types of content, HubSpot suggests that an average page should not have more than 30 HTTP requests.

We recommend identifying the total number of HTTP requests your page makes and then reduce that number with the tips mentioned in this article.

By doing so, you can improve the loading speed of your website — which may have a direct positive impact on engagement metrics (bounce rate, average on-page time), search engine rankings, conversions, sales, and revenue.

If you want to learn more about how to improve the loading speed of your website, read our free guide: The Usain Bolt Guide to Website Load Speed Optimisation.

The post How to Reduce HTTP Requests appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

While this is welcome news, the other part of the news may not sit well with some people, at least for a little while.

Now that Google is officially moving the Rich Results Test out of beta, it means that the old Structure Data Testing tool will be deprecated. And although the tool will be available for at least a short period, Google recommends getting familiar with the latest Rich Results Testing tool as soon as possible.

According to Google, the Rich Results Test has the following benefits over the Structured Data Testing tool:

• Better alignment with Google Search Console reports
• The ability to render both the desktop and mobile versions of a result
• Highlights valid Search feature enhancements
• More effective treatment of dynamically loaded structured data markup
• The ability to test either an entire URL or an isolated code snippet

Rich results — powered by structured data — can include images, carousels, and non-textual elements. It is important to remember that warnings — unlike errors — won’t affect the eligibility of a page for showing up as a rich result.

In the announcement blog post, Google reiterated this by saying:

“You can use the Rich Results Test to test a code snippet or a URL to a page. The test returns errors and warnings we detect on your page. 

Note that errors disqualify your page from showing up as a rich result. While warnings might limit the appearance, your page is still eligible for showing up as a rich result. For example, if there was a warning for a missing image property, that page could still appear as a rich result, just without an image.”

Here is an example of how errors appear on Rich Results test:

And here is a screenshot for search preview on Rich Results Test:

You can check out the full announcement blog post for more details. And if you want to learn more about the Rich Results Test, click here.

The post Google is moving the Rich Results Test tool out of beta appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation refers to optimising your site for higher rankings in the search engine results and free traffic. SEM or Search Engine Marketing refers to paying for clicks and purchasing ads to jump to the top of the SERPs.

Both these fields are different, but there are certain areas that overlap. And there are ways to utilise SEM data, information, and insights for improving the SEO strategy and execution.

In this blog post, we highlight five such ways of using search engine marketing campaigns and data for SEO and vice versa.

1. Identify new keywords with high traffic potential

When you run SEM campaigns, you have the option of targeting keywords with four different keyword match types. These match types are:

• Broad match
• Broad match modified
• Phrase match
• Exact match

Unless you are exclusively using the exact match — which isn’t recommended — you will likely find out new keywords and keyword ideas.

While some of those ideas would be outright bad (you’d add them to negative keywords), you’ll likely find many good keyword ideas. These ideas are found in the search term report — which shows the exact search query that people used to trigger your ad.

Apart from adding those keywords to your campaigns or ad groups, you can also use those new keyword ideas for SEO campaigns and optimising older content.

2. Identifying high-value keywords

During SEM keyword research, you will find some keywords with a very high average cost per click (CPC). 

This high avg. CPC generally indicates a high commercial intent of keywords. The CPC is high primarily because many competitors are bidding for these keywords. And the reason they do purchase those keywords is that it works for them.

This data provides you valuable insights and a surefire method to identify keywords that are more likely to increase revenue. 

You can create dedicated pieces of content optimising for such keywords and even some money if you manage to rank on top for such costly keywords.

3. Improving the organic CTR

Search engine marketing ads also give valuable data and insights into the click-through rate (CTR). In Google Ads, for example, you see the click-through rate for each ad you run.

With A/B testing different keywords, CTAs, and other elements in the ad, you can not only fine-tune your CTR but also learn more about your audience and what they prefer.

The idea is to learn lessons from those ads with higher CTRs and apply them to meta titles of your blog posts. By improving the meta title tag and meta description, you can easily increase organic CTR and traffic 2-3x.

4. Saving money on brand ads

It is a common practice to run paid ads for branded keywords — especially when you are not ranking at the top for the most important branded keywords.

By diving deep into Google Ads data, you can find out the ad and organic listing CTR when only the ad is shown, when only the organic listing is shown, and when both ad and organic listings are shown.

This report can be found in Google Ads > Pre-Defined Reports (Dimensions) > Paid & Organic.

This can help you come up with the most effective data-driven strategy and decide whether or not you should buy clicks for branded keywords.

5. Perfecting the CTA and improving ROI for SEO campaigns

“Try it for free”, “request a free demo”, or “learn more”.  Which one of those CTAs would work well on your web page?

You cannot know until you A/B test all these CTAs. And SEM ads are a great way to bring instant traffic to your web pages and test different ideas.

Once you use the SEM data to perfect your CTA, you have a significant positive impact on your SEO campaigns. Executing an SEO strategy can be costly, and you need a high ROI for proper reporting and sustainability.

By analysing SEM data and A/B test results, you can improve CTAs on your web pages. This will have a significant impact on the number of organic visitors you manage to convert into MQLs and paying customers.

Conclusion

SEM and SEO cover two different areas of the search engine results pages, but there is also a lot of overlap. Smart online marketers and SEOs leverage both SEM data to improve SEO, and vice versa.

Make sure to fully utilise SEM and SEO data to understand what’s going on with your search traffic (free and paid) and revise your online marketing plan accordingly.

The post 5 ways SEM data can help you with SEO, or vice versa appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

However, some markets are narrower than others, and the size of a  market can sometimes be a problem for SEO professionals.

If a niche market is too small, it can be very difficult to reach potential customers. But don’t worry, there are always ways around it.

In this blog post, we are going to share a few content marketing and SEO tips for niche marketers and businessmen.

1. Understand Your Niche Industry

Understanding the industry is often the very first step for SEO professionals. It is all the more important in niche markets.

First, you need to understand who your target audience is, how they search for you online, and how they engage with online information. You can use the following tools to get that information:

• Facebook Audience Insights
• Alexa
• Google Analytics Audience reports

Second, you need to analyse the industry and get an estimate of the general search volume and the overall potential.

How do people search in your niche? Are they usually very specific, or do they use long, drawn-out phrases?

You can use a keyword tool like Google Keyword Planner (free) or Ahrefs / SEMRush (paid) to conduct your keyword research. This basic understanding will help you strategise accordingly and form the basis of how you move ahead.

If you already have an active website, you can plug in your URL and see which keywords bring people to your website. 

2. Competitor Analysis

Conducting keyword research in a niche market can be a very difficult task. You may have to go very granular, which requires additional time and effort.

Thankfully, you are not alone in this world. Whatever niche you may be in, there must be competitors. It is time to use those competitors to your advantage.

Identify five of your biggest direct competitors. Copy their website URLs and paste them into keyword research tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Google Keyword Planner.

More specifically, you should be looking for at least the following things:

• Their most popular pages (so you can steal those topic ideas)
• The keywords that bring the most traffic to those popular pages (so you can target those keywords as well)
• The high-potential keywords that your competitors rank for and you don’t (so you can close the gap)

3. Keyword Research

While a thorough competitor analysis gives you a bunch of keyword ideas to target, your job doesn’t end there.

You still need to do your own keyword research. The good thing is that now you know where to look. Running a detailed competitor analysis can give you plenty of ideas to explore.

You will also now have a better understanding of the average search traffic potential for keywords in your niche. So you’ll be in a better position to identify the keywords that you should target — even if they apparently have a smaller search volume.

Conduct thorough keyword research and categorise your shortlisted keywords by:

• Top of the funnel content
• Middle of the funnel content
• Bottom of the funnel content
• Head keywords
• Long-tail keywords

4. Content Marketing Strategy

If you are a niche that is very thin in terms of content, topics, and ideas, it would be a good idea to revisit your content marketing strategy.

Ideally, you wouldn’t want to create a lot of thin and shallow content. Therefore, pick a topic and go really deep. 

Instead of writing a 400-word blog post, create a 3,000-word guide one each topic.

This will enable you to fully explore each topic and not run out of ideas in a few weeks. Secondly, because of the in-depth content, you’d be more likely to rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

In an industry that does not have a ton of search volume, you want to get every available visitor. That’s not possible without ranking in the first three spots on Google SERPs.

5. Link Building

And because ranking higher on Google is so important, you can’t do it without lots of high-quality and relevant backlinks to your site.

A smaller niche or industry faces a unique challenge: it may have a smaller subset of relevant websites to get links from. 

Therefore, spend more time in your research and conducting competitor analysis and identify all the possible websites that you can acquire backlinks from.

Note down the websites that have successfully linked to your competitors. Once you have great content, reach out to them and convince them to link to your site instead.

Conclusion

As we stated earlier, even if you operate in a small niche, you have every chance to rank higher in the SERPs and acquire a large share of the organic traffic.

Follow the tips mentioned in this article to make your journey towards that goal much easier.

The post 5 Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

With the rising popularity of e-commerce, Google has decided to make an unprecedented move and offer free product listings on Google Shopping. This news comes amidst the growing threats to businesses and people across the world because of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

In the announcement blog post, Google acknowledged the growing dependency of people on digital commerce and the challenges businesses are facing worldwide.

“With physical stores shuttered, digital commerce has become a lifeline for retailers. And as consumers increasingly shop online, they’re searching not just for essentials but also things like toys, apparel, and home goods. While this presents an opportunity for struggling businesses to reconnect with consumers, many cannot afford to do so at scale.”

Google further added:

“In light of these challenges, we’re advancing our plans to make it free for merchants to sell on Google. Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google.”

This is excellent news for everyone involved in the online shopping process.

For retailers, it means free exposure to hundreds and thousands of people who search for their product on Google. For online shoppers, this means easier discoverability of more products and a lot more variety that just wasn’t available before. For digital advertisers, this step means paid campaigns would be augmented with free listings.

What should users do?

According to Google, existing users of the Merchant Centre do not have to do anything to be benefited from free listings. For new retailers, Google says that “we’ll continue working to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months.”

For more information, you can check out Google’s help centre, which has more details on how to participate in free product listings.

When will the changes roll out?

These changes will start taking effect in the United States before April 30th. Google is working on expanding it globally before the end of the year.

In addition, Google also announced a new partnership with PayPal, which would allow merchants to link their PayPal accounts to Google Shopping. PayPal now joins Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce as Google’s partners. You can read more about that in Google’s announcement blog post.

The post Google to make listing products on its shopping service free appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

To make it easier for people across the globe to connect with healthcare providers, Google is introducing two new features in Google Search and Google Map results.

These features will make it easier for people to stay at home and play a key part in reducing in-person visits by allowing them to find virtual healthcare options on a local, regional, and national level. 

Here is how the two features will work:

Healthcare providers, such as doctors, mental health professionals, clinics, and hospitals, will now be able to add a virtual care offering in their Google My Business profile. When people search for, say, a hospital, they would see a new “Get Online Care” link that would take them to the healthcare provider’s virtual care website.

Google also laid out several best practices that outline how healthcare providers should update their websites to provide COVID-19 information on Google My Business and any changes in the operating hours and walk-in visit policies.

Apart from the aforementioned changes in the Google My Business profile, Google is also introducing changes in the Google Search as a pilot project. This new feature would show virtual care platforms directly in Google Search so people can easily access virtual visits. At the moment, this pilot project is only functional in the U.S.

Google explained this pilot project in the following words:

“For example, when people search for “immediate care”, we’ll be able to also present available virtual care options and related information such as the out-of-pocket price charged for a visit (for those without insurance) and an easy way for people to directly connect with the virtual care platform.”

It is important to note that Google will only play the role of a facilitator. Once connected, the healthcare provider and the patient can meet on the provider’s preferred platform.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in virtual healthcare and online appointments has increased significantly. With these features, Google is making it easier for people to stay at home, practice social distancing, and minimise in-person visits.

For more information on how Google is helping people connect with virtual healthcare options, read this official blog post.

The post Google introduces new search features to facilitate virtual healthcare appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.