Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
I like the Keywords Everywhere plugin that you can get for free in a Chrome browser extension. You can't upload a list unfortunately but you can check fairly accurate search volumes (i'm showing corn seed gets 15,000 searches/mo.)
In SEMrush if you create a Project for the website, you can copy and paste a list of keywords like you described, it sometimes takes a few minutes to show the search volumes, but should have them (and the websites ranking) within an hour or sooner.
I think when you are looking at content for your blog, it is ok to have fun posts, staff highlights, etc every once in a while and it adds a personable feel to your blog, however if you are wanting to do a food blog with consistent posts being put on it, it should be separate as you don't want your website visitors confused about what you do or offer.
As far as search engine optimization goes, it shouldn't effect your rankings when doing just a post every now and then that is more fun or entertaining, however the vast majority of your posts should be industry-related and helpful. Doing the mini-food blog on a platform like blogger or wordpress, seperate from your website, would be a good idea for this in my opinion.
If the search phrase isn't brand specific, I would assume this is due to relevant backlinks, dang good on-site optimization, and probably a fast loading, content heavy website for both the homepage and the service page. I have seen this before as well and if you were to do some in-depth competitor research on them, I believe you would find that it is more than likely a pretty well optimized website, and they have quality backlinks pointing to both the homepage and service page.
I would do a full analysis on their on-site factors (meta titles, outbound links, H2s, amount of content on both pages, internal linking, etc) and then use Moz Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs for both rankings pages to see what backlinks they have. Use that insight to see if you can, to a degree, duplicate what you see. Once you feel you have duplicated as much as you can, while still keeping the content original to your website, try and out-do them in both helpful, relevant on-page content and quality backlinks they don't have. Each situation is different and I am assuming some things here based on what I've seen in the past with this situation, hope it helps though and best of success!
Impossible to say for sure Tom, I would give it a go personally, especially if there is another keyword you want to target with the blog post. If Google is currently only allowing one page of your website to rank at one time for your keyword, de-optimizing one of the competing pages for that keyword should lead to more consistent ranking for the other page with all else being equal.
I don't imagine it will negatively affect SEO, and in fact, brackets and parentheses have been shown to increase CTR when in a Meta Title Tag. If you implement this I would only do it a few pages to test it, and keep track of the rankings and analytics for those pages specifically. If rankings and Analytics are the same or better, you should be good to implement it on Product Pages.
Option #1 for sure. This way you get a link and hopefully traffic from them, while they are still able to reference your content.
You can also write about Venetian Blinds in a blog, link to the /venetian-blinds page in the blog post, and then share the blog post on social media and/or with influencers in the interior decorating space (as Donald mentioned above). For blog post topic examples:
"Top 10 Venetian Blinds of 2017"
"Venetian Blinds vs. ____ Blinds"
"How Venetian Blinds Changed My Home"
"9 Things You Don't Know About Venetian Blinds"
You get the picture lol. Writing helpful, non-salesy content on your website's blog and then promoting/sharing it is what I would recommend. You can also go the infographics or video routes, which are great, but just takes more time and expertise. Hope this helps, best of success!
Personally, I would still de-optimize the blog, just keep a notes document of before/after changes that you make during de-optimization, that way if the worst case scenario happens and neither page is ranking for your keyword, you can undo the de-optimization and look for another solution.
Also, after you de-optimize the post it may be worth it to utilize Google Search Console's Fetch & Render tool to request Google to re-index and crawl all of the direct links on the product page and blog page. This can sometimes work like a "refresh" to get Google to properly index both pages quicker. I would still wait like a week or so after you de-optimize the post page to see what happens.
Great question Swendt! Linking from your blog to your product page or other blog post is a great SEO practice, as long as it is in moderation. People tend to disagree on what that is, but I've seen having 2-3 internal links, as well as 2-3 external links in a 500-1000 word blog post be a great SEO benefit.
Internal linking is an often overlooked SEO strategy that can help distribute authority to page's you want to rank on Google and be visited when someone is on your website, just make sure the links are relevant, helpful, and that you don't have so many that it hurts the user's perception of your blog quality.
This should be able to be edited in Google My Business. If you have the login information for the account this is linked to the Google Maps citation you are seeing, you should be able to login and edit the categories under the "Info" Tab.
If you do not have the login information for it, search the business name in Google Maps, go to "Suggest An Edit" and click on the category listed, it should cross it out and then you can suggest a new category for Google to review. This way does not guarantee it will change, but is worth a shot if you don't have the information to login to their GMB account. Best of success!
Adding .html to the end of your URLs is not necessary and causes URLs to look less readable in my opinion. In taking over the site, definitely make sure to do proper 301 redirects and run a broken link check on it as well.
Dan Thorton is correct above. It is likely you have been put in Reddit's hidden sandbox. A good way to test this (if you are unsure) is logout and then try to find your comment or post the day after you publish it on reddit.
Think of Reddit as an actually community, of which you are "new in town". You should try to initially be 100% helpful and have natural comments on existing posts for a few weeks (in my opinion). If people already have a post on a related topic, which on Reddit is extremely likely, post a related and helpful comment on it (without any links). Do this 10-15 times before trying to put links in comments or start a new post/thread that promotes your content or directs people to your content in any way.
I am not familiar with LDA, but most people refer to LSI in regards to online content optimization. This stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and can be synonyms and abbreviations, as well as keywords related to the keyword that you search for on Google. A good free tool for discovering LSI Keywords is LSIGraph- https://lsigraph.com/.
Here are some LSI Keywords for Piedmont Bike Tour which you mentioned above:
Hope this helps! If you write long-quality content, you often will find yourself automatically including "LSI Keywords" in your content, but a general awareness of them is good to have, and can be good for on-site optimization testing, just don't keyword or LSI Keyword stuff :). Best of success!
I would go with option 2, just update the URL, and then add a 301 redirect from old URL to new URL, so it doesn't cause any broken links. We have done this on our website and seen great results with updating it to include a target keyword.
For example, we had a URL- https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/, and then around December of this past year we decided to update it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/, in order to help rank for "ppc kansas city". We added a 301 redirect of course, to avoid any broken links or loss of page authority.
Our results from making this change (and added a little more content to the page) led us to move from position 16-19 on page 2 of Google, to now ranking in position 3-5 on page 1 of Google.
You could set up an effective campaign working with them. I would just be sure to keep an eye on the Search Terms report to make sure you aren't showing up for and/or wasting money getting clicked on from irrelevant searches. I would also ask for details on what updates and changes they make during those first 2 months.
While it can take a few hours, I would definitely recommend getting yourself Google AdWords Certified, that way you know what's going on with your campaigns no matter who you are working with.
Great answer Alick300! I would also add that the primary keyword and secondary keywords (sometimes referred to as LSI keywords) should all work together to help the search intent of the user. Writing longer, quality content that naturally uses your primary keyword a couple times and a ton of secondary keywords that still relate to your primary is a great way to get a page ranked quicker than normal.
For example if your a handyman that wants to rank for electrician + "your city", it's helpful to talk about electrical repairs, panel installations, electrical service, house wiring, etc. integrating this secondary keywords into your page not only helps your ranking for electrician + "your city", but also electrical repairs + "your city", panel installations + "your city", etc.
This question pertains to local SEO, and businesses that want to rank for a certain city, service area or metro.
In looking at Ahrefs, it appears businesses that are BBB Accredited will get multiple "nofollow" links and possibly 1 "dofollow" link (on their actual profile), however businesses that only have a free (non-accredited) profile, only got a "nofollow link" and no "dofollow links". While it is definitely not a silver bullet and this is not always the case, in examing hundreds of local SERPS throughout 4-5 years in the SEO biz, there does seem to be some sort of correlation between businesses that are BBB accredited and also have their "BBB accreditation" badge with a link on their website.
Has anyone seen similar results or correlations for local SEO where they live? Is this a coincidence/anomaly?
Hard to say without seeing the website. I would recommend having 500+ words on any page you want to rank on Google (may have to have more depending on competition). Sometimes there can be a misreading if you have written content with a widget that displays on a page vs having it directly on the specific page's content.
It is also important to remember that while the content length is important, I would argue content quality and content depth should be more of a focus. Check out this recent Moz post- https://moz.com/blog/influence-googles-ranking-factor.
As long as it reads normally and is grammatically correct, I have not seen that it matters much. I would advise just trying to get your main keyword in the first paragraph if possible, and then sprinkling LSI keywords throughout content in a natural, easily readable way.
It can sometimes make sense to have your LSIs right next to each other if you have a sentence in which you list your services, like "At XYZ company we proudly provide digital marketing services, search engine optimization, paid search marketing, and Local SEO strategy campaigns". Just make sure you are not listing all your services together several times throughout the copy as that would seem spammy to a user, and therefore could be considered keyword stuffing to a search engine.
Correct, and yes the trust factor definitely makes sense to me. I just didn't know if anyone had a case study or experience of a business that wasn't doing much SEO, decided to get BBB Accredited, embedded the BBB badge on their website, and then saw a change in rankings due to it.
I have never used the BBB to search a business either and think that it may be more of a correlation than a causation, as a business that decides to get BBB accredited is also probably investing in SEO, a blog, other high DA directory listing, content marketing or a combination of marketing efforts that could be leading to high local rankings.