The best part is that content is useful — in some way, shape, or form — in almost every aspect of your business.

In this blog post, we take a look at how online content can benefit your business and what you can do to ensure it happens.

1. Brand awareness and authority

High-quality content helps increase brand awareness and authority. 

By regularly publishing informative content that online users search for, find, and benefit from is the cornerstone of modern-day content marketing. It not only establishes you as the authority in your niche, but it also helps with more conversions and conversion rates down the road.

In addition, if you manage to get ranked in the first position on the SERPs for important keyword phrases, the credibility of your business can grow tenfold.

For example, if you have a website that offers account software solutions and appears on the number one search position for the keyword “best accounting software”, it will be incredibly beneficial for your brand authority, awareness, and credibility.

What to do: Invest in an SEO-driven content strategy that focuses on high-quality, informative content. Shortlist the most important keyword phrases and aim to rank your web pages in the number one position for those keywords.

2. Leveraging social media platforms

Without high-quality content, you wouldn’t be able to tap into social media. 

First, there are so many social media websites now (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), and social media requires a steady stream of content to keep engagement high.

If done properly, social media can be a huge source of additional traffic and leads — but it all starts with content that is optimized for social media engagement.

What to do: Leverage your existing content for social media posts. This may include quotes, statistics, content sharing, images, etc. In addition, create new content that is specifically optimized for social media. Monitor analytics to see what type of content performs the best and double down on that.

3. Prospects nurturing via email marketing campaigns

Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that their job is done when a website converts or becomes a lead.

That is not the end. In some ways, that is only the beginning of the journey.

You may still need to nurture those leads and guide them through the sales funnel with a robust email marketing campaign. In addition, existing customers also need marketing emails for retention and cross-sell or up-sell purposes.

What to do: Dedicated a portion of your content calendar to email marketing campaigns. You can also leverage your existing content to nurture leads and customers at specific stages of the funnel, e.g., customer case studies when a prospect is at the bottom of the funnel and ready to make a purchase decision.

4. Tapping into multiple mediums

As we discussed earlier, existing content can be used to power social media content marketing efforts. 

But that is not the only use case. There are many more mediums and platforms that you can use your content to generate new sources of traffic and leads.

What to do: Take inventory of your content and explore how it can be repurposed — for videos, infographics, guest posts, e-books, guides, landing pages, ads, A/B tests, etc.

5. Minimizing operational expenses and replacing paid ads

At the end of the day, it is all about ROI or return on investment. If you are strategic about it, content can benefit your business by saving a lot of money in the long run.

SEO-driven content helps you build a steady stream of free traffic coming from search engines. That does not require active participation from you — except for only a little bit of upkeep to ensure your pages are fresh, up-to-date, and properly linked.

Compare that with, say, paid search ads (SEM) — you stop receiving traffic as soon as you stop paying for ads.

SEO-driven content can help you minimize that operational expenditure of constantly bidding for keywords.

What to do: Identify a list of high-CPC keywords that are profitable for your business and that you bid on. Create a content strategy for ranking on the number one SERP spot for those keywords organically. When you do reach the #1 position on the SERPs, you will be in a position to stop buying ads for that keyword.

The post How content benefits your business (and what to do) appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

As you can tell, a large percentage of businesses might be using content marketing without any documented strategy. 

That is just one of the many reasons why so many online businesses fail — especially at content marketing. Because they do not know what they are doing. Furthermore, merely having a documented content strategy isn’t enough. That content strategy also needs to be effective.

But what makes a content strategy effective and successful?

In this blog post, we are going to take a look at seven things that help make a content strategy successful.

1. Focus on short- and long-term goals

A content strategy should be an extension of your overall marketing and business plan. It does not work in isolation — but in tandem with the overall business strategy.

That’s why it is crucial that your content strategy focuses on overall marketing and business short-term and long-term goals.

For example, if your business goal is to penetrate a different market segment, is your content strategy doing enough to further that goal? If not, it is not an effective and successful content strategy.

2. A practical content calendar

No content strategy is complete without a working content calendar. After all, the execution of your content strategy completely depends on it.

A good content calendar is ambitious but realistic and practical. It is also very comprehensive and contains every bit of important information, e.g., due date, publish date, current statuses, content promotion dates, content refresh dates, etc.

Note that the content calendar isn’t supposed to be only limited to your blog content. Instead, it should encompass everything related to content, e.g., commercial page refreshes, email marketing campaigns, public-facing white papers, guest posts, internal communication content, newsletters, gated and ungated ebooks, etc.

3. Clear and succinct content guidelines

What are the content guidelines that writers and editors are supposed to follow?

Without clear content guidelines, your content team won’t be truly productive and effective. The goal is to automate processes and minimize friction — for example, eliminate multiple feedback rounds. 

That’s not really possible without content guidelines.

4.  A website that is built for content and readers

No matter how good your content strategy is, if your website isn’t built for content and content consumption, you will have a hard time getting the desired results.

Does your website have a good product or service? Is it reader-friendly? Does it load fast enough? Does it have a good website design? Is it built for conversions?

The efficacy and success of a content strategy depend on all these factors and more.

5. Content promotion and marketing plans

Remember that a content strategy isn’t just about content creation. It is also about content promotion and marketing.

A lot of blogs and businesses do not publish dozens of blog posts every month. Instead, they rely on fewer but higher-quality blog posts — maybe even once per month. Once that post is live, their focus is primarily on promoting that content, ensuring its longevity and a stronger link profile. 

It won’t help if 90 percent of your content pieces do not find their audience. Therefore, make sure your content strategy equally accounts for an effective content marketing plan.

6. A content strategy that doesn’t stop at conversions

A content strategy that stops at the first conversion point is not an effective content strategy. Your job doesn’t end there.

A good content strategy continues to play a key role after a user has converted into an MQL. It helps them become an SQL and a paying customer. 

After they become a customer, content continues playing a key role in ensuring they are retained as a customer. Moreover, you can also use content to upsell and cross-sell — all of which help increase the ROI.

7. Analytics and performance measurement

The last part of the puzzle is, of course, performance measurement.

You won’t know if your content strategy is working or not unless you successfully measure every single detail.

Tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Salesforce can help track how your content performs — especially in the context of the overall marketing and business goals.

Conclusion

Any business can create and have a content marketing strategy, but it won’t necessarily be successful — especially if it does not cover these aforementioned areas.

Make sure that your content marketing strategy does.

Let us know if you have any questions. And good luck!

The post What Makes a Successful Content Strategy Successful? appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

While the demotion in search rankings is a big nuisance, you can recover from it if you keep your calm and take the right steps.

In this blog post, we are going to discuss how to recover from Google’s core algorithm updates and talk about the importance of relevance and content.

7 things to do to recover from a core algorithm update

Here are a few things you can and should do when you are trying to recover from a core algorithm update:

• Relax.  It may not be the ideal situation, but you can recover from it. It is common. Take a deep breath and get to work.
• Google Search Console.  Review your Google Console Search account to see if you notice anything odd. Double-check if you have a manual penalty.
• Analytics.  Analyze your Google Analytics account and identify the pages that have lost the most traffic.
• Content audit (relevance).  Once you have identified the pages, conduct a content audit from a relevance point of view. Is your content relevant to the search query? This is arguably the most important point, and we’ll talk more about it later in this article.
• Content audit (authority).  The second part of the equation is authority. The next step of your content audit would be to analyze shortlisted pages from an authority perspective. Is your content authoritative, detailed, and comprehensive?
• Backlink profile audit.  This would also be a good time to review and audit your website’s backlink profile. Build domain authority with high-quality and relevant backlinks. Remove spam, low-quality, and irrelevant backlinks.
• User experience.  A general review of the user experience on your website would also be in order at this time. This includes page experience, use of obtrusive ads, core web vitals, website loading speed, etc.

How Google sees websites improvements

If you want to recover from a demotion in search rankings, it is important to understand how Google views your efforts and website improvements.

“It’s not so much that we would consider it a situation where you have to fix something. But rather, when it comes to relevance, if you work on improving the relevance of your website, then you have a different website, you have a better website. So it’s not that we would switch back and say, ‘Oh, it’s like the issue is fixed,’ and we will change it back to the previous state.

But rather, you’re saying, well, this is a better website now, and we look at it and say, ‘Oh, it’s a better website.’ It’s not the same or comparable to before, so it would be kind of tricky to expect that it changes to the state it was before. But it’s a new website; it’s a better website.”

John confirms that this is especially true in the case of recovering from core algorithm updates.

“I think, especially with core updates, when you’re talking about recovery, it’s not so much you’re recovering, but rather Google is seeing that you have a better website and reacting to that.”

Relevance, content, and core algorithm updates

As we mentioned earlier, there are plenty of areas you can improve when recovering from a core algorithm update and improving your website. However, if you have to focus on only one, improve your website content and make it more relevant.

That’s what Google’s John Mueller suggests.

“With the core updates, we don’t focus so much on just individual issues, but rather the relevance of the website overall.

And that can include things like the usability, and the ads on a page, but it’s essentially the website overall.

And, usually, that also means some kind of the focus of the content, the way you’re presenting things, the way you’re making it clear to users what’s behind the content. Like what the sources are, all of these things. All of that kind of plays in.”

“So just going in and changing everything around the content— I think you can probably get some improvements there.

But essentially, if you really want Google to see your website as something significantly better, you probably also need to work on the content side … Think about where might there be low-quality content, where might users be confused when they go to my website — and is that confusion something we can address with technical issues? With UX changes? Or do we actually have to change some of the content that we present?”

Conclusion

Recovering from a core algorithm update can be daunting, but it is certainly doable. Use the tips we mentioned in this article to simplify the process and improve your website for Google to take notice.

The post A beginner’s guide to recovering from core algorithm updates appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

It is especially beneficial for online marketers to keep themselves updated about what’s happening on the internet, what’s new in the industry, what their competitors are up to, and identify any potential opportunities and areas of business growth.

Getting started with Google Alerts is quick and easy, and the possibilities are endless.

In this blog post, we will briefly discuss what Google Alerts is, how to use it, and share some practical examples of how digital marketers can use Google Alerts.

What is Google Alerts?

Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service. It was first launched in 2003 and has evolved significantly since then.

Users can ask Google Alerts to send notifications whenever there is a content change on the internet regarding a keyword, topic, brand name, etc.

The benefits of using Google Alerts

Google Alerts is extremely beneficial to use because it simplifies a very tedious and manual process — of manually keeping track of changes across the internet.

As you can guess, that’s almost impossible to do.

With Google Alerts, you can track anything you want to: brand name mentions, new content on the web, new content by your competitors, personal name mentions on the web, etc.

How online marketers can use Google Alerts

Online marketing encompasses many different areas: communications & PR, search engine optimisation (SEO), content production and marketing, competitor analysis, product marketing, etc.

Google Alerts offers something to everyone.

You can use it in a wide variety of ways to keep track of important changes across the web. Following are a few different practical examples demonstrating how Google Alerts can be used by the different departments or functionalities in online marketing.

Competitor Analysis

It is recommended to set up Google Alerts for competitor mentions, so you receive a notification every time your competitors get mentioned on the web.

This is useful because of the following reasons:

• You can instantly learn if your competitors are ramping up a content marketing and backlink campaign.
• You learn about their new products or services.
• You can analyze and learn from their mistakes if there is a negative online mention.

Search engine optimisation

SEO professionals have a lot of ways to use Google Alerts. They can:

• Set up alerts for important keywords to see what’s happening on the internet and in their industry.
• Set up alerts for brand mentions to make sure they are utilizing all backlink opportunities.
• Set up alerts for keywords that you rank on top. So if there is a new piece of content published, you know there is competition.
• Set up alerts for evergreen content to track their performance and impact down the road.
• Set up alerts for competitors to see if they are publishing new content that may outrank yours.

Communications & PR

There are also plenty of opportunities to use Google Alerts for online communication, brand management, and PR.

For instance, you can set up Google Alerts to find writers and influencers that work in your industry. You can also set up alerts to track whenever your brand name is mentioned. The same goes for mentions of products and features.

Content creation

Content creation can be a challenge. Sometimes, you just can’t find enough topics to write about. Other times, you fail to jump on breaking news or trending topics at the right time.

Google Alerts can help you with that.

Set up alerts for a few keywords that are relevant to your industry and business. If a news story comes out regarding that topic, you receive an alert, so you can start working on the story right away.

You will also be able to see a pattern of a trending topic if a bunch of publications suddenly jump on a topic.

Conclusion

As you can see, there is a lot of potential in Google Alerts in online marketing. Because of how versatile this tool can be, everyone in the online marketing field can use it in one way or another to stay on top of everything and identify growth opportunities before their competitors do.

Google Alerts is completely free to use. Just input what you want to track, tweak the settings as per your liking, and start receiving alerts whenever there is a content change on the web.

Learn more about Google Alerts.

The post How to Use Google Alerts in Online Marketing appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Structured data is considered important for search engine optimisation. However, according to an estimate, approximately 50 percent of brands are still not using structured data. There could be multiple reasons why they haven’t invested in structured data yet:

• Their CMS does not support structured data
• They do not have the technical resources or understanding to implement structured data on their website
• They do not understand the benefits of structured data
• They do not know about structured data at all

This begs the question: is structured data considered “essential” or is it just a nice-to-have feature?

Top 5 benefits of implementing structured data

Structured data has plenty of benefits. In this article, we will try to answer the above question by highlighting a few of the big benefits:

1. Better search engine visibility

It is believed that well-implemented structured data can help improve search engine visibility.

Structured data assists search engine crawlers in finding and correctly interpreting the contents of your page. This generally leads to an improved understanding of your content and indexation — which eventually leads to higher search engine visibility.

2. Higher click-through rate or CTR

Rich search results generally lead to a higher click-through rate or CTR. Organic CTR is an extremely important factor for SEO professionals and online businesses because of multiple reasons:

• First, a higher click-through rate or CTR leads to more organic traffic,
• Second, a higher organic CTR sends positive signals to Google that your web page is a better fit for that search query. As more search engine users click your page, it is more likely to get promoted on the SERPs to higher rankings.

According to a case study by Google, StyleCraze leveraged structured data to improve its organic click-through rate (CTR0 by 20 percent. You can read the full case study here.

3. Featured snippets

Featured snippets are the holy grail of search engine results nowadays. You can get a large share of search engine traffic by having your web page ranked in featured snippets. The best part is that featured snippets work and produce results for your business, even if your web page isn’t necessarily ranking in the first position.

And structured data provides an excellent opportunity to rank your content in featured snippets.

Here is an example of a featured snippet:

When Google fully understands the contents of your page, it makes it easier for the search engine to select a small snippet and show it in the featured snippet.

Note that featured snippets are not guaranteed after you implement structured data. But it does help significantly.

4. Credibility and impressions

Rich results appear unique and more professional in the SERPs. They usually get the most eyeballs and clicks. Moreover, the first impression they make is a nice added benefit to improve the overall credibility and authority of your online business.

5. Control over your content and information

Last but not least, structured data gives you an opportunity to control your information, how it is interpreted by search engine crawlers, and, to a large extent, how it is displayed on the search engine results pages.

This is equally important in the grand scheme of things.

Google wants to understand everything better so it can offer personalized search results with more efficacy and accuracy. You can help Google to achieve that goal with structured data.

This is the future of SEO, and we highly recommend controlling the flow of information to Google from your end. It not only makes things easier for Google, but it allows you to control how Google perceives, understands, and showcases your brand to search engine users.

Conclusion

To answer the question we posed earlier: in today’s world of search engine optimisation, structured data is not just nice to have. It should be considered essential, and every online business should go out of its way to implement structured data correctly on its website.

It helps with search engine visibility, better authority, improved search engine rankings, and higher organic traffic.

You can learn more about and implement structured data and rich results with the help of Google’s Rich Results Test tool.

The post The Importance of Structured Data appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

This update also caused a bit of a stir on the internet. Because of the changes made by Google, many websites lost traffic and saw a decline in clicks. Some page titles were also erroneously updated by Google. If you want to learn more about what happened, read the following blog post: Google’s “Titlepocalypse” causes a drop in search traffic.

Since then, however, Google has apparently refined the system, made improvements, and issued additional guidance for everyone. In this post, we are going to share what the new guidance is. 

Here are a few important points that you should know about the latest state of the page title update.

• When the update was first rolled out, it was targeted to affect nearly 20 percent of search queries. That percentage has since decreased to 13 percent. Original page title elements are now used 87 percent of the time, instead of the initial 20 percent.
• Google will update half-empty titles by adding information found on the web page.
• Google will also replace obsolete titles that have been used for years now, even though the page itself has been updated with new information.
• If the page title does not accurately define the page, Google will also attempt to fix the inaccurate title and replace the text with more relevant keywords found on the page.
• Google will also adjust micro-boilerplate titles.

Google defines micro-boilerplate titles as:

“Consider an online discussion forum about television shows. It might have areas for different shows, and then for each show, it may have areas for threads for individual seasons.

The micro-boilerplate title elements appear on the season pages. The titles omit the season numbers, so it’s not clear which page is for what season.”

Google also shared the following example to demonstrate how the page title update will help in this case:

In the end, Google added the following guidance to summarize the overall philosophy of the page title update:

“The changes we’ve made are largely designed to help compensate for issues that creators might not realize their titles are having. Making changes may help ensure your title element is again used. That’s really our preference, as well.”

The post Google shares new information regarding page title update appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

The Bing Content Submission API notifies Bing of any website changes in real time. Therefore, in theory, the API allows webmasters and content creators to notify Bing of any recent website changes (or new content) in real time and have their website indexed instantly.

The idea behind having a content submission API like this is to reduce the dependence on Bingbot.

According to Fabrice Canal, Principal Program Manager at Bing:

“With an overwhelming response and great feedbacks from website owners who had adopted the API, we are pleased to announce that Bing Content Submission API is now open for all to implement and to start sending their content changes to Bing, not only to reach more relevant users on Bing but also to reduce bingbot crawl load on their sites.”

It is recommended to see the Bing Content Submission API in combination with the Bing URL submission API. This will grant webmasters access to a unified dashboard that they can use to see insights such as latency data for their submissions and indexing stats.

How to use the Bing Content Submission API

Here is a three-step guide:

1. Verify your website with Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. Generate an API key in the Bing Webmaster Tools. Here is how to generate the API key:
   1. Log into Bing Webmaster Tools
   2. Click on Settings
   3. Go to the API Access section
   4. Click the Generate API Key button.
3. Once the API key is generated, integrate it with your website.

Note: This API key can be used by a user for all verified websites on Bing Webmaster Tools.

The Content Submission API is a big step towards instant indexation and reducing submission latency. However, it is a work in progress, so webmasters may run into issues early on. Also, further adjustments can be made based on the feedback Bing receives.

“We are excited to publicize the API to our users, and we are here listening to your feedback. We will continue to learn and improve at a larger scale and adjust crawl rates for sites implementing the API, so as to give maximum benefit in terms of not only indexation but also crawl load management and freshness of the content to searchers.”

Learn more about the Bing content submission API.

The post Bing’s Content Submission API Allows Instant Indexing appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

However, as the importance and application of search engine optimisation grew, the job of SEO professionals became more complicated and tough. Now, SEO experts do not just need to know about search engine optimisation. They also need to have a working understanding of many other aspects of digital marketing to be successful.

If you want to be an SEO expert or if you are someone who has been managing SEO on your business website, here are a few key areas that you should master in order to become a well-rounded SEO professional.

1. Audience research

Audience research is much more than just “keyword research”, and it plays an important role in search engine optimisation.

SEO depends heavily on high-quality online content, and you can’t create that content for someone you don’t know anything about. That’s why audience research is often one of the first things you need to complete — even before creating your SEO strategy.

Audience research comes in the form of detailed buyer personas. These personas (or audience profiles) contain information such as:

• Who is your target audience?
• What are their demographics?
• What are their psychographics?
• What are they interested in?
• What are their problems?
• What are the solutions they seek?
• What type of content do they prefer?
• What type of content do they engage with?
• What are their pain points?

Knowing your audience is the first step to creating high-quality content and an effective SEO strategy. It also helps plan your customer journey.

That’s why audience research has become an integral job for SEO professionals — one that you should master if you want to become an expert.

2. Competitor research and analysis

Similar to audience research, competitor research and analysis is another key milestone towards creating and executing an effective SEO strategy.

Without competitor research, you’ll be mostly shooting in the dark. With thorough competitor research, you can determine:

• What’s working in your industry, 
• How are your competitors approaching, 
• What keywords are they targeting, 
• What are their most successful pages, 
• Where are they building backlinks from.

Thoroughly analyze your competitors’ websites, read their pages, sign up for their marketing emails, etc.

3. Tracking and attribution

As with every other digital marketing medium, SEO or organic also has a cost attached to it. It all comes down to results. Without proper tracking and attribution, you can’t accurately demonstrate the success of your SEO channel.

That is why having a thorough understanding of analytics, heatmaps, tracking scripts, pixels, and other tracking and attribution mechanisms is crucial.

At the very least, spend some time in Google Analytics (funnels, goals, UTM parameters) and Google Tag Manager to get a feel of how these tools work. Eventually, you will have to master these tracking and attribution tools to become an SEO expert.

4. Link building, outreach, and building relationships

Link-building isn’t a new SEO concept by any means. However, the methods for building backlinks have changed significantly in the last few years.

The previous “build it and they will come” approach does not work as well anymore. That’s mainly because there is a lot of content and websites on the internet now. There is no shortage of competition. Therefore, passively building backlinks does not yield the results you need to be successful.

You need to actively build backlinks through manual outreach, guest posts, and building relationships with other bloggers and influencers in your industry.

This includes working on your social and communication skills and brushing up your email writing skills, in addition to being able to identify valid backlink sources and actually creating those backlinks.

5. UI/UX

UI/UX has become extremely relevant to SEO — especially in the last few years. That’s because search engines, such as Google, have been putting a lot more focus on user experience.

This includes many things, such as:

• The average time users spend on your website, 
• How many clicks it takes them to reach their destination on your site, 
• How soon they find relevant information when they land on the page,
• Whether they are greeted with content or ads after landing on your website, etc.

While SEO professionals are not expected to be expert UI/UX designers, they need to have a basic understanding of how it all works and ties together.

Good UI/UX is crucial for a good user experience, and without a good user experience, you will find it tough to rank your website on the top of the search engine results page.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t just limited to keyword research and optimisation anymore. There is a lot more that goes into creating and executing a successful SEO strategy.

And if you want to become an SEO expert, you will have to master all these areas and more.

The post 5 Marketing Areas a Good SEO Professional Should Master appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

As a result, websites are losing traffic. The loss of traffic is attributed to poorly rewritten titles on the search engine results pages.

It is important to note that search marketers who shared their data and showed the loss in traffic confirmed that the average position is still the same in the SERPs. It means that they did not lose search rankings but still saw a decline in organic click-through rate and, therefore, organic traffic.

Search marketer Lily Ray was one of the many casualties.

According to Lily, most of the loss in traffic is due to lower CTR.

Many other users reported a variety of issues that the title tag updated. Here are some examples of the problems publishers and website owners ran into:

• Google misunderstood the page and used the wrong location in the title tags for a business website that has multiple locations.
• Google incorrectly added the word “vaccination” in the title for web pages that were about the illness, not the vaccination for the illness. 
• Google incorrectly capitalized the wrong words in the SERPs, creating an awkward title tag.

All these problems lead us to wonder if the Google Title Tag update was rushed. It clearly caused a bunch of problems that affected a wide variety of websites and made them lose valuable traffic.

Moreover, it also affected search results in sensitive niches, such as health and medicine. Some instances can even cause a heated debate between the pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination groups.

More problems in Search Console reports

In addition to this, Google also reported that there was a data loss in Search Console that affected reporting on August 23 and August 24.

Google assured that this is only a data loss in Search Console reports and does not affect actual traffic or discovery.

Here is the official statement:

“An internal problem caused a data loss in Search and Discover performance during this period. Users might see a significant data drop in their performance reports during this period. This does not reflect any drop in clicks or impressions for your site, only missing data in Search Console.”

Conclusion

Considering both these events, it is possible that you see relatively poor results in August when reporting traffic for your clients or managers. In that case, you should call out these two instances that may have affected your organic traffic reports for this month.

The post Google’s “Titlepocalypse” Causes a Drop in Search Traffic appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

First, you need high-quality website content that is link-worthy. Then you need to execute a thorough outreach campaign. Even then, results can be underwhelming.

This often leads to many publishers and SEOs towards the easier method of exchanging backlinks with other websites.

The concept is simple: you make a deal with another website. You create a link to their website, and they reciprocate by linking to your website.

However, Google prohibits link exchange. It goes against their guidelines.

In this blog post, we take a look at whether or not you should exchange backlinks with other websites. Moreover, we will also look at some techniques that may fool Google into thinking a link is naturally built, but is this a method that you should put your trust in.

Let’s begin.

Link exchanges are prohibited

As we mentioned earlier, Google prohibits link exchanges. More importantly, link exchanges are prohibited regardless of the extent or circumstances.

According to Google’s John Mueller:

“A link exchange where both sides are kind of like ‘you link to me and therefore I will link back to you’, kind of thing, that is essentially against our webmaster guidelines.

That’s something where our algorithms would look at that and try to understand what is happening here and try to ignore those links. And if the webspam team were to look at it, they would also say this is not okay.

Can link exchanges lead to manual actions?

Yes, too many link exchanges can lead to manual action against your website.

John Mueller mentioned that it happens when Google identifies the majority of the links on your website as a result of exchanging backlinks with other websites.

“If this [link built via link exchange] is the majority of the links to your website like this, then they might apply manual action. That’s something I would avoid,” says John Mueller.

This is very straightforward.  However, it does lead to a few other questions, which we are going to answer next.

1. What if we build only a few links through exchanges?

If the majority of links on your website are built because of exchanges, it may lead to a Google penalty against your site. So does this mean you can exchange links at a smaller scale and stay out of Google’s sight?

Technically, it is possible, but we do not recommend it.

Google evaluates each link and identifies if it is built naturally or reciprocally. Even if Google identifies only a few links, you may still get in the bad books.

The best practice is, therefore, to stay away from exchanging links — even if the plan is to do it at a smaller scale.

2. What if the links are highly relevant?

But what if the link you got via an exchange is actually highly relevant and helpful for your users?

Can you do it then?

John says it does not matter.  According to him, “it doesn’t matter if it’s topically relevant or if it’s kind of like a useful link.

If you’re doing this systematically, then we think that’s a bad idea because, from our point of view, those are not natural links to your website.

They’re only there because you’re doing this deal with the other site.”

3. What if it is between three websites?

You may not be familiar with this, but there is another way many websites exchange links that Google may overlook.

In this type of exchange, there are three websites involved, instead of two.

So, normally, website A links to website B.  In return, website B links back to website A. This exchange is very easy to track for Google.

However, in this variation that we are discussing, there are three websites involved: A, B, and C.

Website A creates a link to website B.  In return, website B creates a link to website C.  Website C, in return, creates a link to website A, but it never links to website B.

It makes it trickier for Google to establish a connection between website A and website C. 

And while this may work for the short term, we recommend staying away from this variation as well. Google is getting smarter, and there is more data than ever to explore and establish prohibited connections among websites.

Conclusion

Although link-building is a tedious and tough job, it is worth doing naturally and properly. 

Taking shortcuts — such as exchanging links — is not worth the hassle, especially as it can eventually lead to a manual against your website.

The post Should You Do Reciprocal Linking SEO? appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.