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Call us Today
(888) 846-4937
Email us Today
info@destinymarketingsolutions.com
As a digital marketing agency that focuses on SEO for clients, we commonly receive questions about SEO and our approach to SEO.
For the benefit of our website visitors, we have compiled a list of common questions along with our answers.
Content plays a critical role in the potential of your SEO campaign. These are some of the ways in which content can improve your SEO:
More on content and SEO
The most common error I come across with websites are broken links, which can be 4xx, 5xx, internal, or external issues.
While it’s questionable the impact of other on-page factors in the age of Google’s AI-based algorithm, broken links highlight potential trust and usability issues with your website.
Although these are not issues that would not be found with auditing tools, these are still common opportunities for optimization that are not addressed:
Websites usually lack any strategic implementation of link building, or completely. lack internal links between site pages
Proper optimization of title tags for keywords and CTR. Using special symbols and keywords in your pages’ title tags can help not only with keyword rankings but SERP CTR as well.
Lack of site architecture optimized for SEO. I recommend using the silo structure for optimal results, where either the silo is established with the website’s directory or via internal links.
More on On-Page SEO below:
A Swiss army knife of tools, including technical diagnostics of the website (crawling errors, site speed issues, mobile usability issues, rich snippets, etc.), search query data to uncover hidden keyword gems, URL indexing capabilities, and data for feedback on URL CTRs and average position.
More videos for Google Search Console:
All of the traffic and conversion data I need in one place. Also, when doing content marketing, tells me which topics my website users are engaging with most.
My go-to tool for keyword research. In many cases, I have uncovered keyword opportunities that I could not find with Google’s tools. In my opinion, the keyword research feature is superior to AHREFs capabilities.
My go-to tool for backlink research. In my opinion, the link research feature is superior to SEMRush’s capabilities.
These videos detail a couple of ways we use AHREFs:
Great for NLP and sentiment analysis for content. If I have a page that’s a high priority for ranking improvements, I run it through Surfer SEO and modify the content based on Surfer’s competitive analysis.
This tool is great for uncovering any technical on-page optimization opportunities.
Note: This is a review of prolendera.com.
At this time, the website is not optimized.
For optimal visibility on Google or any other search engine.
These are the major areas of opportunity:
Currently, there are 46 pages indexed from this domain. Most of these pages are internal use pages (i.e. Cookie Policy or Terms of Service) or Blog filler pages with Lorem Ipsum text. “Working capital loans” is a fairly competitive keyword, so it’s a must that we build out content as some of the authority sites in the niche.
According to AHREFs, there are no referring domains pointing to this website. Even with a lack of content, we should start building foundational links via press releases and relevant directory and profile websites.
Overall, this isn’t a major issue, but the time to first byte could be slightly improved to hit the .5 second benchmark. Also, we should examine how the website is handling browser caching. See below:
The homepage title tag should incorporate “working capital loans”, or some close variant.
My team and I work with businesses everywhere in the US. Part of this SEM strategy is building an online targeted presence in targeted cities and towns. As we know, keyword-optimized content is critical for sustainable Google SERP visibility, but how can we build content in a cost-effective way to target hundreds of cities at a time?
We know from previous experiments that content only needs to be 51% unique to bypass Google filters. Even with that knowledge, building pages for 500+ locations would still be resource-intensive.
If we localized content for each location, then we would be able to bypass Google’s content duplication filter and get the potential for good SERP visibility.
We bought two domains with relatively equal domain metrics (domain rating, age, historical traffic, etc.). We used the same theme for the websites.
We decided that 20 location pages would be sufficient for results, based on previous research and experiments from the SEO community.
For the first website, we created 100% unique content for each location. For the second website, we used the same base content, but changed major components of the page (title tag, heading tags, alt tags, call to action). The unique content for the second website was ~20%. The content length for all articles was 1000 words.
We let the websites sit for 90 days. Other than submitting the URLs to Google Search Console for expedited indexing, there were no other SEO optimizations made.
From our review after 90 days, the 2nd website with 20% unique content outranked the 1st website with 100% unique content in 16 out of 20 locations.
We also found that the localized effort doesn’t work very well when cities are too close together. For example, Sugarland is a large suburb of Houston. The Sugarland page ranked, whereas the Houston page did not. The Dallas page did rank, however. Additional research and testing is needed to see what is the distance needed for pages to rank well without any issues.
Since there are several moving parts with an effective SEO campaign, such as on-page, technical, local (if it’s applicable to the business), content, CRO, and link building. Of these different moving parts, I am proficient and enjoy developing content strategy through an SEO lens. Content benefits businesses of any size, and it sets the foundation for a successful link building strategy.
Any major algorithm updates that may affect this website.
For this step, I reviewed gizmorate.com. These are some high-level recommendations:
Homepage (no SSL certificate)
(https://gizmorate.com/the-neck-hammock-melt-away-your-neck-pain-from-home/),
should be
(https://gizmorate.com/gadgets/the-neck-hammock-melt-away-your-neck-pain-from-home/
My vote is quality content for the following reasons:
These steps are assuming the old domain will no longer be used and there will be no hosting change.
The reports I review regularly are:
What are the first things you look for on a website to test if it’s search engine-friendly? I would check for any crawling issues with any URLs that should be indexed. Any optimization on a page is futile if the page cannot be indexed.
Describe how you perform keyword research.
These are a high-level summary of our keyword research strategy:
More on our keyword strategy below:
There are a few things I consider as I build out and implement a link building strategy:
Is the referral domain we are considering in some way relevant to our target website? Relevancy can get somewhat vague, as if we have a B2B brand, any business-related website can be a relevant referring domain. But, we should stay away from obviously irrelevant websites. For example, if I have a financial services product, I should not receive links from an adult, XXX website.
More on link building relevancy below:
Since my preferred link research tool is AHREFs, I use Domain Rating (DR) to assess a website’s authority. Typically, I filter out any backlink opportunity that has a lower DR than my target website. Only in specific cases would getting a link from a lower DR website have any benefit, such as in cases where you’re looking to diversify your anchor text profile. We should have a balance of backlinks across different DR buckets. A review of our top organic competitors will reveal what is realistic for our industry/niche.
More on authority in the video below:
Since link building itself is at best a grey hat activity, we must be very mindful of our anchor text profile to ensure we are not over-optimizing for any type of anchor text. I identify these categories of anchor text: branded, naked URLs, generic, partial keyword match, and exact keyword match. In my experience, the best approach is to analyze the anchor text profiles for our top 3-5 organic competitors on the SERPs and to mirror our anchor text profile to match those websites.
More on anchor text below:
We know that links are an important part of any comprehensive SEO campaign. However, we should build links tactfully. The velocity, or rate in which we acquire links, is very important to understand. For example, if our top ranking competitors average 10 new backlinks per month, but we are acquiring an average of 30 new backlinks per month for our site, can be spammy, and can open the door for ranking adjustments to the detriment of our website.
Simply, does the backlink target’s website get organic traffic? Referral traffic is another benefit of link building, and if the link is from a real website that gets traffic, the link has a better chance of passing any Google quality tests.
Lastly, the metrics I look forward to when building out a list of backlink targets include Domain Rating (AHREFs), Trust and Citation Flow (Majestic), and Monthly Traffic (AHREFs).
Authority for a website reflects its position as an authoritative source for content within its industry/niche. Typically, these websites are going to rank very well for a large number of keywords, have a large backlink profile as other influencers use these sites as references, and have tremendous weight in terms of overall visibility.
For ProLendera, authority websites within this industry would include NerdWallet and Kabbage.
I leverage my go-to mastermind and Facebook groups to learn about new tools. Some of my go-to groups include SEO Fight Club, SEO Signals, Digitaleer, The Blueprint (Ryan Stewart), and the Gotch SEO Academy. Typically, new tools are shared in these private groups before major publications such as the Search Engine Journal are aware of them.
We worked with a client in the student debt consultation space.
The client was very talented with writing, however, there was no strategy behind topic selection.
I suggested the following:
For the majority of our SEO/SEM campaigns, I serve as the head strategist, helping develop the strategy to achieve results for the client and working with my team to get those strategies implemented.
For a recent client in the behavioral health space, we were able to help them rank well and receive increased organic traffic (and patients) to their practice’s website.
Because of these results, the practice owner was able to bring on new team members and open one new practice in the MetroWest area (outside of Boston).
Yes, as I mentioned above, scholarships were a great way to get .edu links years ago. However, they are not as effective as before, and universities now understand that these are an SEO tactic. We tried employing this strategy for a client in the student debt space, and it did not work well. We were able to acquire .edu links, but not nearly the number as planned. Many of the universities added additional guidelines, where the scholarship could only be allocated for their students, would be listed in an internal portal (which is not indexed and therefore provided no SEO value), or rejected the request altogether.
Even though we did not hit the backlink goal, we were able to build relationships with university administrators, which helped my client in the long-run get in front of more of his target clients (college students with debt, or recently graduated students with debt).