Webinar Recording on Advanced SEO hacks for bloggers by Craig Campbell
Search engine optimization or SEO is incredibly important for bloggers and marketers. One should optimize their web pages including their blog posts. By doing so you’re making your website more visible to people who are entering the keywords that are associated with your service or product through search engines. To truly stand out in the competitive world of E-content, you need to move towards the advanced SEO hacks for bloggers.
So we recently invited Craig Campbell to our webinar. Craig’s a UK based SEO consultant and trainer. A Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 18 years.
Blog Niche Selection
Let’s start by talking about the best practices when it comes to blogging. So if you were to Google something like blogging mistakes, you’ll find a lot of content. They talk about the most common mistakes and you’ll see people mentioning a whole bunch of stuff “write like you talk”, show your personality, make your point again, you don’t want broad topics and things like that. Now when we look at our blog we can see that every single blog post is very specific to a particular search term. You don’t write about how nice the weather is or how much you enjoyed travelling and that’s what a lot of bloggers do. That is one of the most common mistakes. You don’t write just for the sheer joy of it, you are a blogger and want to be paid for your work. So select topics that would help you in doing so.
Write with as many different SEO related keywords, as one possibly can to make people come and visit your site
We see a lot of people blogging without having a particular niche. You have to do your keyword research, see what people are looking for and simply blog about it and take advantage of it. Take part in things like the best podcast. You can also host podcasts and you can sign up to get an affiliate link. You can do a whole lot of stuff like this and make a lot of money as a result of blogging but you have to be very specific on the articles that you’re writing and how do you do that? Obviously, we can go to tools like SemRush. It can help you with the keyword research. It will also show you the sales volume in the US UK and India and so on. You can find the keyword variations of various terms also.
There are a few other useful tools you can use for this. Google Keyword Planner is a free tool and uses the data the company collects on what people are searching for in the most popular search engine in the world. It supplies information related to how often people search for a keyword term and also the similar keywords people use to the ones that you provide already.
You can also find long-tail keywords people commonly use by researching upon the similar searches Google provides in the “People also ask” and “Searches related to” sections on its results page.
Using YouTube and other Social media channels
Now the next thing when it comes to blogging is how do you push people to your blog and obviously one them is content, it has a big hand in the ranking of a site. But don’t forget that you can utilize other platforms such as YouTube and your social media profiles to drive traffic and engagement to your blog as well. Using YouTube you can drive a lot of people to your blog and by adding videos within your blog. This way people have the choice of getting visual content and they’ll also be able to see an amazing blog article at the same time.
The point here is to build your audiences on other platforms to drive traffic to your blog to not just rely on what we think is a good blog post and people. It’s hard work. It takes time. You got to obviously have to put in the effort but it will definitely be worth it.
Use Twitter features. For example, you can schedule your posts, automatically follow people and you can have it automatically unfollow people, retweet, favourite stuff and things like that. A Facebook group would be another great place to start building an audience
Use Facebook pixel
To capture all of the data, analyze it, find the gaps and then work on filling those. Boost the posts with the most engagement and for very cheap rates as well. What you need to see is that Facebook page. It basically allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising and you can also make sure that your ads are shown to the correct audiences and if not you can use the data to target those people.
Focus on Long-tail keywords
One would love to rank for the general keywords that broadly describe what they do on their website. If you provide therapy consultations, then showing up when people search “mental health” would mean that people will easily find you. But if you do a search for that particular term, you’ll notice you’re in with some serious competition. So you should try for specific keywords. These more detailed, specific searches are called Long tail keywords and are a boon for the majority of the websites trying to improve their SEO, they’re the most important keywords to focus on targeting in your efforts. They’re comparatively less competitive, so you definitely have a better chance of showing up on the first page and actually grabbing some of the traffic for that term.
Do SERP Research for Every Topic
Not all search engine results pages look alike. With the recent rise in rich results, few of the searches produce a simple list of links, some include answer boxes up top, some have product ads at the top of the results page, and some have a map of local results that dominate the page.
Optimize for Rich Results When Relevant
If your SERP research reveals such keywords that bring up rich results, in that case, you should optimize your content based on the specific types of the results that win the page. Sometimes that will lead you to use schema markup which will help your content in standing out in the main list of results and in other cases it will mean optimizing your blog post to aim at the featured snippet.
Feature Influencers in Your Blog Posts.
Just like with guest posts, finding different ways to collaborate with the influencers of your niche is a very useful way to expose your blog to a wider audience and increase its reach. You could do an interview with them, feature a quote from them, quote their examples in your blog post, or even refer back to the advice they provided on their site by attaching a link.
Use Browser Push Notifications
What PushEngage can do is not just about sending a blog post out saying- hey guys, here’s how to do some affiliate marketing, but it can do a lot more. It can do cart abandonment. So when someone adds something to your e-commerce website. You can push a message to them seeing you forgot to meet your purchase. Now every time I launch a blog post, I think I’ve got the ability to push that out to another thousand people.
Summary of key SEO questions covered in the webinar
I have a discussion group for this. Would you like to join?
Sure thing. I’m always happy to look at it.
How to improve SEO locally, say I want more traffic from the US?
So in order for you to get traffic from the US, you’re gonna have to be hosted in the US domain. We all want to write well in the U.S. It’s the place where people spend money and you know it has a serious amount of traffic. So the USA Is a great place to drive traffic to your business.
How to optimize blogs?
Blog optimization, you want to force a lot of engagement on your blog. You also want to build links, obviously and content is really important. The main crux of what I was trying to say is engagement signals are really powerful and can help you rank.
You can use your Facebook pixel, build up a good social media audience, use all that kind of stuff to try and force engagement to your blog and that will help you massively over and above doing all of your basic stuff in terms of title tags.
The requisites should be there before launching a website?
What you need to make sure is that your website is mobile-friendly, I think for me though the website is mobile-friendly, make sure it’s fast loading. It’ll have to be everything special and has some good solid information. Have good content, put up more videos, more calls to action, but the most basic thing is to have it mobile-friendly. So make sure that you’re tracking everything.
Make sure you have an idea of how you’re going to monetize that blog whether it be affiliate marketing or if it is some other form of monetization.
I don’t trust much in the third party algorithms because they try and guess the domain Authority. Do you trust an algorithm?
So of course, it can be manipulated. It’s not something that you obsess over, of course, that thing can be manipulated. However, it is one of the numbers one ranking factors and DR just gives you an idea of whether the website is powerful and working well.
Say if you have a DR 20, I would be asking questions, you know you are not doing enough or something like that. So it’s more of an idea type of thing and is not something to say in stone.
I Have the Yoast plugin for on-page SEO. Do I need to check my content SEO elsewhere or is Yoast enough?
So Yoast will give you an idea of your title tag but it doesn’t give you any content optimization. For that, you’ll have to look for other tools like page optimizer pro etc.
What are free SEO tools which can analyze and tell the story of your website?
There are free SEO tools but the data behind them is non-existent. The reason why sites like SemRush charge fees is because they have that sort of data with them.
Is it okay to have a website name in all the pages and do you need to have anchor text and does it make any difference?
I don’t think you need to use your website name and your title for every page. You know, your homepage is enough. For example, why do you need to maintain your business name on the other places local SEO when you’re doing something up, but I’m thinking you you can do it and a lot of people do look at the website name, but I just feel it’s wasting space because of title for Maximum Impact can only be 60 letters.
Why would you want to waste our own business name, which you already shared through your homepage? About anchor text, it’s not necessary that all of them vary just make sure that they are not spammy.
Does external, internal link and indexing help in increasing traffic?
So just doing internal and external linking is not going to drive traffic. Internal linking does help you rank better which in turn leads to more traffic. You’ve to have good content.
How to build quality backlinks?
It really comes down to what niche you are in. Reach out to bloggers and the guys in the industry and exchange content. You can do outreach, you can do broken link building. Take advantage of any opportunities out there.
I’ve got a playlist for link building techniques on my YouTube. You can check it out.
How to find free or low-cost content writers?
I’m not sure about free one’s. Guys in South Africa are good, their cost of living is low and so South Africa is a great place to find native English speakers and freelancers.
Is there any tool to check content duplication?
Yes, you have Copyscape, there are a few more.
Does having product anchors filter help in SEO?
No, you have got to have good navigation and internal linking.
How to get link backs on the products page?
Build links on your product page. You can go after the product and category-specific keywords. Get links all over the website.
Can’t find a relevant volume keyword on SEMrush, what can I do?
Every product can have a very specific keyword and there may not be enough data for SEMrush.
Since there is no volume keyword, the product might be old or out of date and you might have begun with the wrong niche.
As per me, there is no point in selling those products, but you can try researching manually once, just for the sake of it.
What role does link building play on a website?
You’ll only rank for long-tail keywords or very specific keywords. But link building is the number ranking factor. Google has stated that many times as well.
Does push notification hurt SEO? And how do I get benefited from Push Notifications to my website, directly or indirectly?
No push notifications are not gonna hurt your SEO, they’re going to send messages to people to come to your website.
They indirectly help your SEO though. It doesn’t directly affect your ranking but what you do with it definitely helps you.
