How Your Brand Can Impact Non-Branded Queries

In this video, we’re going to look at how our brand impacts the SEO results of non-branded queries.

 

Video Transcript: 

Branded Vs. Non-Branded Queries

What’s the difference between branded queries and non-branded queries? In case you don’t know, a branded query is a query that includes your website’s brand name, or maybe a variation of your brand name, something that’s unique to your domain. A non-branded inquiry is pretty much everything else.

Keywords that don’t reference a brand name or any part of it, including misspellings. That’s the difference between these two, branded have to do with your brand, and non-branded has to do with everything else. More likely what your brand does. Those are those keywords that you’re writing blogs about, things that you’re trying to earn traffic on.

The Truth about Branded Queries

The truth about branded queries is that a lot of businesses ignore them. They assume that because it’s their brand name, they’re going to naturally rank for them and that it’s all going to be good.

This is dangerous in today’s Google for a number of reasons. And these are just a few, not all of them. The first one is your domain might not be ranking for your branded queries. Google might not know much about your brand. Maybe it’s not able to crawl or index your site. Maybe your brand is too closely related to another term. That term’s ranking for it.

There are a lot of reasons why your brand may not be ranking for its own name. You also could have incorrect listings. Maybe you have the wrong pages showing up. Maybe you have the wrong profiles. Maybe your Facebook’s showing up, but your website’s showing up below it. Maybe it’s out of whack on the brand results. Maybe you have bad reviews from other websites that are ranking ahead of your brand name.

This happens quite a bit when brands ignore their brand. And then it turns out that they have all these bad reviews ranking for branded queries. And then the last, maybe you have missing information. Maybe there’s incorrect information showing up in the knowledge panel or in a local pack or in a listing somewhere. And if you’re not being aware of that, you have some inconsistencies within your brand on Google, and that can impact how Google sees and views your brand and the quality of your brand.

Entities, Your Brand and Non-Branded Queries

On this channel, we’ve talked a lot about structured data. We’ve talked a lot about entities and how Google has made this shift from strings, so text, to things, which are entities. These are things or concepts that are singular, unique, they’re well defined, and distinguishable. A lot of times we think of entities as those keywords that we’re targeting.

For instance, in our business, we target terms like SEO. SEO is an entity. It’s a concept that’s singular, but in the same regard, so is our brand. SMA Marketing is an entity. It’s a thing. It’s a concept, it’s singular, it’s unique. It’s well defined and it’s distinguishable. And those keywords that we’re targeting are also connected and related to our brand. They’re related to our brand’s entity and how Google understands it because those keywords describe our brand.

Those keywords and our brand are closely related when we look at the world of linked open data and knowledge graphs, as Google is, and how those things start to work in play together. If we’d zoom in on certain brand entities, we would notice different attributes associated with them. If we did some sort of TensorFlow visualization on some of these entity audits or extractions that we do.

In the same regard, you have to think of your brand as an entity itself and those keywords, those non-branded terms, as things that define it. And if we look at the organizational markup within schema.org, you’ll notice there are a lot of ways that non-branded queries can show up in this process.

In the center here, we have ‘organization’. There are a ton of different attributes that we can add to an organization when we’re marking it up and helping Google understand our entity better. But one of those things is ‘keywords’ where you can put in specific terms that are related directly to your organization, but you can also write up what your brand ‘knows about’. These are those different concepts that your brand is maybe authoritative on. You have a ‘description’, oftentimes which includes those non-branded keywords.

You have ‘alternate names’ for your brand. This may help if your brand has one name, but goes by something else. For instance, when I first started this agency, we were Shelley Media Arts, and then we rebranded and shifted under SMA Marketing. We add both of those names into our organizational markup because it’s an alternate name that could be used for our brand itself.

You also have something called ‘brand’ that you can tag as well as the main entity of the page. On a specific page, what is this main entity? What is this specific page about? And even though it’s about maybe SEO, that’s still connected to your organization as a whole. As you can see right here in a visual way, our organization, and our brand is much connected to those non-branded queries.

E-A-T and Your Brand

How does this impact the search results? Well, Google’s talked a lot in the past about E-A-T. We’ve seen it in the quality guidelines, there are a lot of people in the SEO world that talk about E-A-T and it stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

And this is looking at the creator of the main content, the main content itself and the website. If you look at your main content and who’s the creator, oftentimes it’s the organization that’s being attributed with that content. Google’s looking at this content and saying, are you an expert? Do you have authority? Are you trustworthy?

Google will tell you that E-A-T is not a rank factor directly, but I believe it has a major impact on ranking and does a whole lot of people in the world of search. I think we can see this with the way search has moved, that sites that don’t have the expertise, that aren’t authoritative, that aren’t trustworthy begin to slide in the results.

I’ve seen brands where they’ve not taken care of their brand results, and lose out on some queries that they used to rank for because their brand got diluted. Their brand became less of an expert. The brand became less authoritative and trustworthy. And as a result, they lost lots of site traffic, not only from branded queries but also began to impact non-branded queries, as well as Google, saw them as less of a brand of trust.

If you want your brand to be known for a query, you have to be an expert. You have to prove that you’re an expert. You have to have authority, and you have to show that you can be trusted. And if your brand’s lacking in these areas, you’re going to have a hard time ranking for anything, not just branded terms, but non-branded terms as well.

How to Improve Your Brand for SEO

1. Track and Review Your Brand Queries

What can you do? How can you help improve your brand SEO? Well, the first thing you need to start doing is tracking and reviewing your brand queries, looking at the things you’re ranking for. For instance, if you have your brand reviews, do your websites show up, do your links show up, and are they positive? Are they negative? And if they’re negative, what are you going to do to help jump that?

This is an instance that we’ve faced a number of times with companies as we start working with them, we say, ‘Hey, you have some of these branded queries that aren’t good, and we need to try to work on helping improve your brand and the visibility of your brand.’

2. Track Brand Mentions

You also want to track your brand mentions. How often are people mentioning your brand? And if they are, is it in a positive light or not? And again, what action can you take?

3. Get Brand Listed on Reputable Sites

You also want to make sure that you’re listed on reputable sites. This isn’t about blindly putting links on websites, but if there are sites within your industry that make sense for you to be on and they’re reputable and they can help show that you are trustworthy, those are good.

And not just from a backlink standpoint. So if Google sees, okay, this is an organization that promotes a certain part of your industry and all of the competitors are on there and it’s known as a well-known organization and group, you should probably be on there too. And looking for those opportunities to improve your brand and its reputability by being on those sites.

4. Give Attribution When Making Claims

You also need to make sure you’re making attribution or giving attribution when you’re making claims. If you’re writing pieces of content and you’re showing your expertise, or you’re showing that you know what you’re talking about, linking and quoting other experts is helpful in that because you’re saying, ‘Hey, I believe this, and so does all these other people that Google’, you already think as being reputable.

That helps with your users because they know that you’re not pulling stuff out of midair, but it also helps Google say, okay, this guy, isn’t making his claim on his own. It’s backed by a number of people in this space as well.

5. Optimize Knowledge Panel/Local Listing

You also want to be optimizing your knowledge panel, if you have one, optimizing your local listing, make sure that the information is correct. Make sure that your information is correct on your website as well. And any of those other platforms where your business information may be showing up and making sure that it’s congruent and consistent, that’s important. And as you begin to do this, you can build the reputability of your brand. You can build the strength of your brand, the expertise, the authoritativeness, and the trustworthiness.

There’s a whole lot more that you can do in the world of brand SERPs. And I’m going to make a quick pitch here for this book that I highly recommend for you to check out. I’m not getting anything for posting this on here, but Jason’s book is good and it will help you especially if you’re new to the world of brand SERPs or brand SEO.

I like this book. I use this book all the time. I think it’s a great resource. So go ahead and check this out if you have some time, you can listen to it, read it, do whatever you need to do, but start to take ownership of your brand. That way you can get the results you want from the non-branded queries as well. Until next time, happy marketing.

guide to updating old blog posts

Why is User Experience Important in Web Design (1)

Duplicate Content: More Isn’t Better for SEO

Why is User Experience Important in Web Design (1)

Duplicate content is identified in two ways. First, it’s recognized as content that is repeated from one site to another, or multiple pages on the same site have large sections of information that say the same thing. Either way, publishing duplicate content on your website can negatively impact your Google ranking, even if it’s unintentional.

As the internet expands, search engines must prioritize how information is ranked in order to deliver the most relevant results to people searching for answers. The rapid pace that content is published, read, and indexed into categories for future queries is impressive, but it’s not perfect.

Google defines the amount of time and resources devoted to crawling a site as a crawl budget. It’s important to realize that Google doesn’t index everything on your website, even if they read it. The AI bots are tasked with identifying which pages to index. Google explains, “each page must be evaluated, consolidated, and assessed to determine whether it will be indexed after it has been crawled.”

There are a host of factors that impact whether website URLs are indexed or if they earn SERPs. Different link metrics also affect overall search visibility in search for the organic keywords you earn and search engine rankings and impressions. 

SEO best practices will positively impact your ability to rank higher in search and black hat SEO, or choosing bad tactics will negatively impact your chances of ranking high in search, if at all. And this brings us back to duplicate content.

Is There a Duplicate Content Penalty?

Google states they don’t punish websites for having duplicate content, but they also have a disclaimer saying otherwise. If your duplicate content was not the result of intentional manipulations of search results or spamming practices, then you shouldn’t be penalized for having duplicate content. If it is, you may.

Google states, “In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the site’s ranking may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”

3 Duplicate Content Issues You Want to Avoid

Duplicate Content Impacts Link Equity

“Link equity” refers to how certain links transfer authority and value from one webpage to another.

Search engines want to provide the best user experience by showing various original content rather than multiple pages containing the same content. 

The number of external links your page earns matters. According to Backlinko, the top result in Google has 3.8 times more links than positions two to ten.

Worse yet, external websites might link to a duplicate version of your preferred URL instead of your preferred URL. Duplicate content harms your link-building campaigns by reducing the opportunities for each individual link to earn external links.

Identical Content Wastes Your Crawl Budget

If numerous web pages contain duplicate content and you want one indexed, crawlers will crawl all duplicate variants, taking time away from them crawling other important pages.

Your Blog Post Won’t Index 

There are two types of duplicate content: internal and external 

Internal duplicate content occurs when one site creates duplicate content through multiple URLs on the same site. External duplicates occur when two or more different websites have the same page copied. External and internal duplicates can occur as exact- or near-duplicate pages.

As I’ve already addressed, Google doesn’t index everything on your website. However, in Search Console, the Index Report under the Coverage section, you can see which pieces of content are not indexed. 

Among the reasons pages Google excludes content they list:

  • Pages with redirects
  • Pages with no index tags
  • Duplicate pages without user-selected canonical tags
  • Pages that were indexed, not submitted in the site map

As you can see, duplication issues are one of the core reasons content isn’t indexed. It is a waste of time and money to focus on content creation that isn’t going to appear in an organic search, so it’s vital that as much of your website as possible is indexable. 

Common Causes of Duplicate Content

There are many unintentional reasons your website will have duplicate content, including:

  • Faceted/filtered navigation
  • Tracking parameters
  • Session IDs
  • HTTPS vs. HTTP, and non-www vs. www
  • Case-sensitive URLs
  • Trailing slashes vs. non-trailing-slashes
  • Print-friendly URLs
  • Mobile-friendly URLs
  • AMP URLs
  • Tag and category pages
  • Attachment image URLs
  • Paginated Comments
  • Localization
  • Search results pages
  • Staging environment

 

How Much Duplicate Content is Acceptable?

While it’s likely unintentional, website owners create duplicate content. Moz reports that some experts estimate up to 29% of the web is actually duplicate content! While some duplicate content may be acceptable, when blog articles repeat the same information multiple times, you run the risk of keyword cannibalization.

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization refers to the situation where you have various blog posts on your site that can each rank for the same search term in Google. Cannibalization happens because blocks of content are repeated within the post or because you’ve already optimized another article for the same keyword.

Optimizing posts and articles for similar keywords will compete with each other for search engine visibility. Usually, Google will display only one or two results from the same site in the search results for any given query. However, if you’re an authoritative domain, you might get three.

When you have cannibalized content, your own URLs compete in search queries for first-page positions. For example, this could be the difference between one link in the 5th or 6th position and two links in the 21st and 22nd positions. Which would you prefer?

You can avoid keyword cannibalization by using a duplicate content checker and by ensuring that each type of content you publish uses SEO best practices for quality content. 

Do You Need Help Updating or Removing Duplicate Content?

The content team at SMA Marketing has a comprehensive strategy for identifying duplicate content. We consider each URL independently, taking a holistic approach to update, optimize, and remove content. Give us a call!

What is SEO Content Hint Its Not Just for Search Engines

What is SEO Content? Hint: It’s Not Just for Search Engines

What is SEO Content Hint Its Not Just for Search Engines

For over a decade, Google has insisted ranking factors include high-quality content when building websites and publishing blog posts. Over the years, Google has taken the time to refine the definition of “high-quality,” most recently clarifying that content quality focuses on total user experience, including page layout, design, images, and content relevancy.

What is SEO Content?

SEO content is any content that’s created with the intention of improving a website’s search engine rankings. This could be anything from blog posts and articles to product descriptions and landing pages.

Good SEO content is keyword-rich (which helps search engines understand it) and informative, original, and engaging (which helps readers understand it). It should also be optimized for on-page SEO, which involves making sure the content is formatted in a way that makes it easy for search engines to index and understand. Creating strong SEO content can be challenging but it’s worth doing if you want your website to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs).

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is one of the most important elements of search engine optimization and is an essential aspect of good SEO content. On-page SEO refers to all the techniques and strategies used to optimize a website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). The main factors influencing on-page SEO are title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, keyword density, and alt text.

Title tags are probably the most important element of on-page SEO. They are one of the first parts of the page that search bots crawl and the first thing people see in search results. As such, they play a significant role in determining whether or not people will click through to your website. That’s why it’s essential to ensure that your title tags are accurate, relevant, and engaging.

Meta descriptions are another important element of on-page SEO. These short descriptions appear under your website’s title in the search results. They must be well-written and keyword-rich to persuade people to click through to your website.

Header tags are used to structure the content on your website. They help search engines understand your content and make it easier for people to scan through your pages.

Keyword density measures how often a particular keyword or phrase appears on a page. It’s important to strike a balance here – you don’t want to stuff your pages with keywords, but you also don’t want to use them too sparingly.

Alt text is the text that appears in place of an image if the image can’t be displayed. It’s important to use alt text because it helps search engines understand what your images are about and can also help people with visual impairments access your content.

Optimizing your website for on-page SEO is essential to getting good results in search engine rankings. Using the proper techniques ensures that your website is easy for both people and search engines to understand, leading to more traffic and higher conversion rates. Check out our checklist for optimizing blog posts for SEO to learn more.

Should We Write Content for People or Search Engines?

Most people would say we should write content for people, not search engines. However, it is imperative to consider your audience and the search engines when creating an SEO-focused content strategy in today’s digital age.

Here’s a look at why SEO content is important and how you can make it effective.

SEO content is important because it helps your site rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means more people will likely see your content and click through your website.

Creating high-quality, keyword-rich content is one of the best ways to improve your site’s ranking.

When creating SEO content, it’s important to remember that both people and search engines will be reading it. This means that you must ensure your content is well-written and informative.

Focus on creating a piece of content that is both interesting and useful for your readers. If you do this, the search engines will notice, and your site’s ranking will improve.

Google is Built to Understand Good Content

Good content is content that satisfies a searcher’s query, either to educate, entertain, or inform them. Google’s AI incorporates search intent as a ranking factor. Understanding search intent impacts whether or not your visitors are satisfied with your page’s content.

What makes good content? Well, there are a few key things that you should keep in mind:

  • Make sure your content is well-written and free of errors. Google will penalize websites with poor-quality content.
  • Use keyword-rich titles and descriptions to help Google understand what your content is about.
  • Structure your content in an easy-to-read format using headings and subheadings.
  • Include images, videos, and infographics to break up your text and make your content more engaging.

Creating quality content that satisfies search intent is essential for any website that wants to rank well in Google search results. By following the tips above, you can create SEO-friendly content to help your website succeed.

Page Quality Rating

Many factors can influence your page’s quality rating. Generally, the higher your page quality rating, the better your chances of ranking well in search engine results pages (SERPs). Therefore, improving your page quality rating is crucial to enhancing your website’s SEO. Luckily, there are several things you can do in addition to what has already been mentioned to improve your rating. Here are a few tips:

  • Improve the usability of your website. This includes ensuring your navigation is easy to use and creating a user-friendly design.
  • Increase the number and quality of links pointing to your page. This can be done by guest blogging on high-quality websites and including links to your site, for instance.
  • Work on building up the overall reputation of your website. This can be done by ensuring you have a solid social media presence and providing valuable content that people want to share.

Guidelines for High-Quality Written Content

Here are the basics for writing quality content:

  • Content should always have a purpose: It should have a topic of interest, an audience, and an intent stage for that specific audience.
  • Do your research thoroughly: Get the whole story before you begin tearing things apart. What’s happening now, what happened before, and what happens next. 
  • Write well and proofread: Use punctuation and grammar, and try to stay focused and on topic. Provide background when needed.
  • Google cares about where content comes from. What is the brand or person who created the content? It wants to know. Make sure it can tell. The more authoritative a brand or person’s repu­tation is, the better.
  • Make sure there is substance in your content. Your content has a purpose. Does it fulfill its purpose? And does it explain everything thoroughly? Educate your readers, and they will appreciate and depend on you.
  • Always cite your sources. Data and statistics mean nothing unless we know where they come from. Make sure to always cite the source whenever possible.

Search Engines Read Human Language, Not Search Language

Search engines are designed to read human language, not search language. When creating content, you should focus on making it readable and understandable for humans first and worry about keywords second.

This can be a difficult balance to strike, but it’s important to remember that people will be the ones reading and engaging with your content, not machines. So while keywords are still important for SEO purposes, they shouldn’t be your sole focus. Write for people first, and the rest will follow.

Learn about Semantic Search

Keyword Research

There are a lot of different ways to approach keyword research. For example, some people focus solely on finding keywords that will rank well in search engines, while others prioritize finding keywords that will be most relevant to their target audience.

The best approach is a mix of both: finding both popular and relevant keywords. This way, you can attract a large number of potential customers while also ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Here are a few keyword research tips:

  • Use long-tail keywords, which are more specific and tend to have less competition.
  • Think about the intent behind a keyword. What are people searching for when they use that keyword?
  • Target both broad and narrow keywords. Broad keywords will attract more traffic, but you may have difficulty ranking for them. More limited keywords will be easier to rank for, but they may not get as much search traffic.
  • Beware of “keyword stuffing” – cramming too many keywords into your content in an attempt to game the system. Not only will this make your content difficult to read, but it will also turn off potential customers and penalize you by Google.
  • Check search volume. Use a keyword research tool to ensure the long-tailed phrase you want to focus your content around has search volume and matches your search intent. Check out our favorite tool, SEMRush, free for 14 days here!

Keyword research is essential to SEO and should be done regularly to ensure that your content is relevant and visible to your target audience. By following the tips above, you can produce content people are looking for and improve your chances of ranking high in SERPs.

SEO Content Writing Should Target Your Ideal Buyer

Your SEO content needs to be compelling and valuable for your target audience, but it must also be optimized for search engine ranking. Remember that people are the ones who ultimately decide which content is successful. If your content is interesting, informative, or engaging, people will share it, link to it, and come back for more. But they’ll quickly move on if it’s not well-written or relevant.

That said, there’s no point in writing great content if no one ever sees it. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. Optimizing your content for certain keywords and phrases ensures that it appears higher in search results and thus gets seen by more people.

The bottom line is that you need to write great content that’s optimized for both people and search engines. Then, with a little effort, you can reach a wider audience and build a successful online presence.Easy Guide to Content Marketing

how to set up and use Google Search Console

How to Properly Set Up and Use Google Search Console [Complete Guide]

Google Search Console is essential for any website owner who wants to know how their site is performing in search. However, in order to get the most from this amazing tool, you must set it up properly. 

Looking for guidance on how to set up Google Search Console? If so, this is the guide for you. Below, we provided step-by-step instructions for setting up Search Console so you have the data you need to make informed decisions on our search strategy.

Before we dive in, let’s take a look at what Search Console does.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.

Search Console offers tools and reports for the following actions:

  • Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site.
  • Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
  • View Google Search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more.
  • Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.
  • Show you which sites link to your website.
  • Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability, and other Search features.

Source: Google Search Console

How to Set Up and Use Google Search Console

You may find it helpful to watch this video before setting up Search Console for your website. Then, go through the instructions while setting up your own site.

 

 

Time Stamps:

  • 0:00 – Introduction
  • 2:36 – Adding a URL Prefix
  • 4:50 – Verifying via HTML Tag
  • 7:11 – Adding Your Domain
  • 10:11 – Getting to Know Search Console
  • 10:58 – Connecting Google Analytics and other Accounts
  • 14:33 – Using Search Console
  • 14:48 – Overview
  • 14:55 – Performance Report
  • 17:12 – URL Inspection
  • 18:52 – Creating and Adding A Sitemap
  • 22:30 – URL Removal
  • 22:42 – Page Experience
  • 23:39 – Core Web Vitals
  • 25:22 – Mobile Usability
  • 25:29 – Enhancements
  • 27:22 – Security & Manual Actions
  • 27:53 – Legacy Tools
  • 28:35 – Links
  • 29:07 – Wrapping It Up

 

Setting up Search Console

Go to the Search Console Welcome page. 

Note that this is a very different tool than Google Analytics. If you have a Google Analytics account, you don’t necessarily have a Search Console account. 

Verify Your Domain

Before you can get the data from Search Console, you have to prove that you own or have access to the domain. There are two different ways to verify your domain. Below, we go through both of them.

Option 1: Adding a URL Prefix

The easiest way to grab your domain URL is to put your site into the search bar at the top and run it. This is most likely the correct version of the site you want to be indexed. It may or may not contain www. Just be sure to use the primary version of your site. In the URL prefix field, paste in your domain URL and hit Continue.

Google will ask you to verify that you own the domain.

There are a few ways that we can verify this. 

  1. Download the file and then upload it via FTP, or one of the file managers from your hosting company, into the root folder (the main folder where your website is hosted or housed).
  2. Add an HTML meta-tag to your site. If you’re using WordPress, there are a few SEO plugins that will do this, including SEOPress and Yoast. 
  3. If you have access to Google Analytics and you’re running Google Analytics on your website with the same domain that you’re logged into Search Console with, you can verify via Google Analytics. 
  4. Use Google Tag Manager.
  5. Use a DNS record.

The easiest option may be the HTML tag. You could do this in the header or the body of your website if you don’t have WordPress. If you do use WordPress, you would copy the verification code and paste it into either your SEOPress or your Yoast implementation.

Verifying via HTML Tag in WordPress

Log in to WordPress. Click on your SEO plugin. In our example, we use SEOPress. 

Copy the HTML tag from Search Console.

Under analytics, go to tracking, and paste the tag.

 

Another option is to use the SEO plugin’s built-in verification tool. In SEOPress, it’s in the WordPress dashboard under Advanced. 

 

Then go to Google site verification. Copy in the section of the code within the quotation marks. Then save the changes. 

Go back to Search Console and hit ‘verify’. Then, you will have the domain within Google Search Console, and you will be able to see the data.

Note: If you’re doing the URL prefix method of verifying your domain, you will want to verify both the HTTP and HTTPS versions of your website. Also, you will want to do the version with ‘www’ and the non-‘www’ version. The reason is that you want to make sure you can see all those variants and see the data all the way across Google. 

If you are verifying a new website, or this is the first time you’re logging in and setting up Search Console, it’s going to take some time. You’re not going to see the data right away. It may take about 24 hours for your data to show up.

Option 2: Adding Your Domain

The second way to verify your domain is via Domain verification. Domain verification is very similar to verification via URL prefix. The only difference is you will leave off everything in front of the HTTPS and ‘www’, and just enter your domain name. Then click Continue.

Next, you will have to add a TXT record to your DNS. Your DNS comes from your hosting company and you may need to ask the hosting company to help you with this if you don’t feel comfortable trying it yourself. 

TXT record is short for text record. You will copy the TXT record and add it to our DNS configuration. 

Google provides instructions for adding the TXT record to the DNS for several hosting providers. Use the dropdown menu to select yours. If you don’t see your provider listed, just Google how to add a TXT record to DNS with (your hosting provider), and it should show you.

Inside of your host, you’ll see something that says DNS or DNS Zone Editor. You want to launch that. Most hosting providers, their DNS section or the Zone area of their site works similarly. For Search Console, you need to add a TXT record. You can leave the domain empty and leave the default value time. 

Then, copy the verification code, and paste it into the Value. Then hit Create. Depending on your hosting provider, it will look similar to this:

Adding the TXT record allows you to see the data for all of the different subdomains and versions of your main website. 

After you’ve added that TXT record, go back to Search Console and hit Verify.

Then, you can go to Property.

Now you have a domain property. You will see up that Google has both the secure and non-secure version, the ‘www’ version, as well as a subdomain. Everything’s being pushed to the new domain property.

Now hit Start. If you click the menu icon in the top left corner, you’ll see that you’ve set up a domain property. Select your domain and you’ll see some data.

Getting to Know Search Console

Now that you have your domain set up, you can see how people are experiencing your website across the internet.

The Overview page is your home base inside Search Console. You’ll see metrics like Clicks, Coverage, Experience, and Enhancements.

 

Clicks: The number of clicks on your website URLs from a Google Search results page, not including clicks on paid Google Ads search results.

Coverage: This shows how many site pages are indexed and how many have errors.

Experience: Here you’ll see your domain’s scores on Page Experience, Core Web Vitals, and Mobile Usability. You can click to see reports for each of the metrics.

Enhancements: This is where you would see different structured data or rich-feature elements, that you are ranking for within Search.

Connecting Google Analytics and Other Accounts to Search Console

To get the most out of Search Console, make sure it’s also connected to Google Analytics. This brings data from Search Console into your Google Analytics and Data Studio setup and creates a cohesive environment for all of your Google tools.

There are a few ways to connect these accounts. We suggest starting with Google Analytics because you may be more familiar with its functionality. 

Log in to your Google Analytics account, scroll to the bottom and click on Admin. 

Under the Property menu, click Property Settings. Scroll down to Search Console.

Click the Adjust Search Console button. Then click Add. Then select the domain property you’d like to connect. It will ask you to verify that you want to associate the property with the Google Analytics account. Then click Continue. Then click Associate.

Once you’ve connected them together, you can go to Search Console and under Settings, you’ll see Associated Services, and you’ll see that you’ve connected your Google Analytics.

There are other Associations you can set up as well. An Association is a connection between a Search Console property and some other entity or property in another Google service, for example between a Search Console property and a YouTube channel.  You can learn more about Associations here. 

If you have a YouTube channel for your business, you can pull in video data within Search Console. After you set up the Association with your YouTube channel, you’ll see Videos under Enhancements in your Search Console dashboard. Click Videos and you can see how many videos are getting impressions in search over the past 90 days. 

You can dig deeper by clicking on Search Appearance. Then click New and Search Appearance and select Videos. Hit Apply. This will show you how pages with YouTube videos embedded in them are doing within the search results. 

Using Search Console

Once you’ve created all of your connections, you’re now going to be able to leverage Search Console to help you grow the visibility of your website. Let’s review the tabs in your Search Console dashboard and how you can leverage them for site optimization.

Overview

As mentioned above, Overview is the homepage.

Performance Report

Inside of performance, we can see a few things. The default is set for Web search and the last 3 months. So, when you first click on Performance, you’ll see the total clicks and total impressions of that website. You also see the average CTR (click-through rate) and the average position. The average position is an aggregate of where your site ranks, based on the highest position and the lowest position. It’s an aggregate rating, so it would say with all the terms I’m ranking on average, high and low, at 53.8.

Filtering by Search Type

You can filter this data by date or by search performance for different types of searches. Click the Search type: Web filter and you can select image search, video search, and news search. Then click Apply.

There are some interesting things that you can do. Let’s say you want to see how your images are doing in search results, you would click on image search and see how many impressions your site is getting in image search.

Filtering by Query and Page

When you click New, you can filter to see data on how your site is performing for a specific query or how a specific page is performing.

 

The Query filter will tell you how your site is performing for specific search queries. You can select to filter by queries containing or not containing a term, or do an exact query.

We can see that our site had 415 clicks and 519k impressions for search queries containing SEO. And we can see the top queries that had the most impressions and clicks in search results. 

The top query listed is the one we are getting the most clicks from. When you click the query and then click Pages, you’ll see the page or pages that are appearing in search for that term.

We can use this data to determine the queries to focus on and the pages to optimize to improve our search rankings for specific keywords. 

URL Inspection

The next thing to review is URL inspection. This shows data on a specific website page. You can use URL inspection to see the performance of a specific page, whether or not it is eligible for rich results, or if it had some kind of an issue or an error. 

The URL Inspection Tool is also used to submit new or updated pages for indexing. 

Click URL inspection in the main menu and paste a specific URL from your website and hit enter. Google is going to pull the URL from the index and tell you whether or not the page has been indexed. It will also tell you whether or not the page is covered in the site map. 

If you are submitting a new or updated page for indexing, click Request Indexing. You’ll get a pop up saying Google is testing if the live URL can be indexed. Then you will get a message saying indexing has been requested. Click GOT IT. 

Creating and Adding a Sitemap

If you click on Coverage, you can see whether or not your sitemap has been submitted. 

A sitemaps gives Google information on how to index your website. You want to control how Google indexes your site as much as possible, so a sitemap is an important part of the Search Console setup.

If you have a WordPress site, there are a number of ways to build a sitemap. A sitemap is just a data file that helps Google understand how your website is structured, and provides rules on how you want your site to be crawled. Most SEO plugins today will have a sitemap feature. Inside your SEO plugin menu, locate the sitemap function. Enable your sitemap and click View. 

Your sitemap will look something like this in WordPress.

 

To add your sitemap to Search Console, copy the URL of your sitemap page. In the Search Console dashboard, under Coverage, you’ll find Sitemaps. Click Sitemaps and enter the URL of your sitemap and click Submit.

Google will read it pretty quickly. Here’s one thing to note. Very often, the first time you submit your sitemap, you will see an error stating that it “couldn’t fetch”. Don’t freak out. This happens all the time. Simply refresh your browser, and it will change to “success”.

You will notice that it shows zero discovered URLs. That’s not because you have zero URLs. It’s because Google is now reading the sitemap, and it needs time to discover those URLs. As you keep refreshing and come back regularly, you’ll see more and more pages will be added.

Having submitted the sitemap, we know that Google can crawl it. We know that there are URLs in this site map, and we know that now we have some rules for how we want Google to crawl our website. 

Index Report – Coverage

Click on Coverage under the Index section of your Search Console dashboard. You will see the number of pages with errors and warnings, the number of valid (indexed) pages, and the number of excluded pages.

There are many reasons there are excluded pages:

  • Pages with redirects
  • Duplicate pages without user-selected canonical tags
  • Pages that were indexed, not submitted in the site map
  • Pages with no index tags

If you click on Excluded, it will show the types of pages that were excluded. Then you can click on the different types and see the URLs of the excluded pages.

As you click into these reports, you can see what pages are not being indexed and see if there are pages that aren’t being indexed but should be. It’s good to look at this report periodically to make sure that you have your pages set up correctly. The cool part is once you have a sitemap in here, Google can start reading your website the way you want them to read your website. It gives you a little bit more control.

URL Removal

Under the Index section of Search Console, you’ll also see Removals. This is where you submit a request to Google to remove URLs that you don’t want to be indexed or you don’t want on the internet anymore. 

Experience

Now we’ll go through the Experience section of your Search Console dashboard.

Page Experience

Google has rolled out the page experience update which is all about speed and usability and making sure there is a good experience for your website visitors. If you click on Page Experience, you’ll see a report like this.

As you can see, Google is saying that 89.6% of my URLs are considered good URLs. You can see that there are no mobile usability issues and the site is secure. But I’ve got 275 failing URLs when it comes to core web vitals. This is a subsection of page experience and is an area in which Google wants us to really improve.

Core Web Vitals

Click on Core Web Vitals and you’ll see that they are broken down between mobile and desktop. 

For the most part, you need to look at mobile because that’s where Google indexes first. Click Open Report. 

There are two areas to look at.

  • Cumulative Layout Shift [CLS] 
  • Largest Contentful Paint [LCP]

CLS is your page moving a little too much on mobile. Click on CLS to see the URLs affected. If you click on the example URL, it will open up a list of URLs. 

Click on PageSpeed Insights to get more information about that page.

 

This typically tends to be a little bit heady and the technical work required to improve page speed may be outside of your scope. But, it is something site owners should look at as it does impact your search ranking.

The other issue is LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint, which is all about page speed. Google wants a page to load in less than four seconds. 

You can click on the example URL and run PageSpeed insights from there as well.

Mobile Usability

Also, look at mobile usability to see how many pages you have that are mobile-friendly. 

Enhancement

Next, we’ll go through the Enhancements section of Search Console. Enhancement is all about how our pages look in search. Are those pages getting rich features in the SERPs? You can go through these and find any of those issues that might be causing your page not to rank as well.

Go through each Enhancement to see which pages have issues:

  • AMP
  • FAQ
  • Logos
  • Sitelinks search box
  • Unparsable structured data
  • Videos

You can click on Unparsable structured data to see which pages have structured data with syntax errors that could not be understood by Google such as a missing comma or extra quotation mark.

Security and Manual Actions

Google also gives you some information on security and manual actions. If there are no issues, it will say No issues detected when you click on manual actions or security actions. However, if you’re doing something you’re not supposed to do, and Google gets offended by that, they will send you a manual action and you’ll be able to see it here. 

Legacy Tools

Search Console also gives you some legacy tools, including International targeting. However, legacy tools are not available for domain properties. You could only use these tools within the URL presets, because that’s what they were designed for. 

Links

The last section is the link section. Search Console tells you a little bit about your link profile. You can go here and look at your external links, so what are the top pages that are being linked to from other places? We can see the top linking websites, what sites are linking to yours? You can also see which pages on your site are being linked to internally.

We can also see the anchor text, so what is the anchor text that’s being used when people are linking to our website? This information helps you see how people are connecting with you. 

Wrapping it Up

As you can see, Search Console is an essential tool in your SEO toolbox. It gives you valuable information about how your site is performing within the search results. Setting it up properly is key. If you haven’t set it up yet, we recommend that you go back to the beginning and go through the video and this guide, step-by-step, and set up Search Console on your own website.

Once Search Console is set up properly, you can use the data to understand what content is getting impressions in search results, what pages are getting clicks from the SERPs, what content you should optimize, and what new content you should create to fill any gaps. You can also use Search Console to see the errors you have on your site that may be impacting your search rankings. And, view your link profile and how your pages are linked to other pages both internally and externally. 

 

Check out these helpful resources:

  • Google Search Console information and training videos
  • How to Use Google Search Console the Right Way to Improve SEO
  • Improve Your Internal Links with Search Console
  • 3 Tips to Prepare for Google’s Page Experience Update
  • Why Website Page Speed Matters

how to set up and use Google Search Console

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in September 2021 and has been updated with fresh content. 

Optimize Your Blog Posts Using an SEO Checklist

Optimize Your Blog Posts Using an SEO Checklist [Free Template]

Optimize Your Blog Posts Using an SEO Checklist

At SMA Marketing, we are always looking for ways to refine our processes to produce the best quality content marketing services for our clients in the most efficient way possible.

We are currently in the process of building an in-house writing team to serve our clients’ content needs. It’s been a very rewarding endeavor, carried out by our exceptional Content Manager, Beth Walker. We’re hiring talented writers that we work with directly to produce high-quality content that connects with our clients’ target audience.

When you’re building a content team, there will be members with varying degrees of expertise in blog content optimization. It’s to be expected – not everyone has had the same training in SEO (search engine optimization) best practices.

It quickly became apparent that some training was needed to ensure everyone was following the same guidelines for on-page SEO optimization of blog content. Along with providing our writers with our Blog SEO Checklist document, we determined that a template they could use for each article would guide them through the blog SEO optimization process.

If you’re in search of an easy SEO checklist to follow when writing your blog posts, look no further. You’ll find access to your free copy of the template below.

Blog SEO Best Practices

The template covers the following blog optimization best practices:

Keyword in the Title

Make it easy for Google’s web crawlers to understand what your content is about by including the keywords in the article title. One of the first things the web crawlers look at is the title tag. If the keywords are at the beginning of the title, all the better.

Keep in mind when we say keyword or keywords, it could be a single word but is typically a string of words or a phrase commonly searched by your buyer persona.

Keyword in the First Paragraph

Again, you’re giving Google clues as to what the article is about by including the keyword in the first paragraph.

Link to Core Page in the First Paragraph

Try to link the keyword to a core page of your website in the first or second paragraph, if it makes sense contextually. You’ll want the link to be near the beginning of the article. This helps pass authority to your core pages which are the ones you are trying to boost in the search engine rankings. A core page, or pillar page, is one that provides high-quality content describing your services, solutions, or product.

At Least One External Link to an Authoritative Source

By linking your page to an external, credible, authoritative website, you are showing Google that your piece of content is related to a trustworthy piece of content. It lets Google know your content is trustworthy, as well. A few easy ways to link to an external site are:

  • Include statistics and link to the source.
  • Include terms that are relevant to your content and your industry and link to a website that defines that term.
  • Include a link to a YouTube video tutorial of the subject in your article.
  • Include an infographic from an authoritative site, using the embed code they provide.

Related article: Learn more about on-page optimization and external links, in Anatomy of an Optimized Page here.

Include Two Internal Links

You’ll be linking to a core page in the first paragraph, as described above. Also include links to other internal pages, such as other blog articles and landing pages. These links provide additional clues that the web crawlers use to determine whether or not your content answers the searchers’ questions.

Include the Keyword in a Heading

Google’s crawlers look at the H1, H2, and H3 tags of your page, those are the heading tags. The keyword will already be in the title tag, but make sure it’s also in at least one of your blog article headings. You could also include variations of the keyword in other headings. For example, note that in this article I used “SEO Checklist,” “Blog SEO Best Practices,” and “Why is Blog Post SEO Important?” in the headings. “SEO Checklist” is the keyword phrase for this article, but the other headings also relate to “blog SEO.”

Keywords in Image Alt Tag

When you add images, be sure you also add image alt text that contains relevant keywords to help Google serve up your image in search.

Keywords in the Body of the Article

You’ll want to sprinkle the article with relevant keywords and variations of it. We’re not suggesting keyword stuffing. Google will penalize you for that, and it appears unnatural to the user. What we are suggesting is that you include the keywords a couple of times in the article, where they fit contextually, and then also use LSI keywords throughout the article.

LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords are words or phrases that are related to the target keyword that are often used by searchers when they are using search engines like Google. You can learn more about LSI keywords in SMA founder Ryan Shelley’s video What are LSI Keywords and How do They Impact Content Marketing and SEO.

 

Why is SEO Optimized Content Important?

Your blog content is one of the primary sources of content and context that search engines will use to determine the authority of your website. You are providing content that helps your audience, answers their questions, and adds value to your relationship with them. But, you need to help search engines like Google understand what your content is about and whether or not it’s relevant to searchers.

Give Google the clues to understand your blog content, and you’ll be one step closer to achieving your SEO goals.

Grab Your Free Blog Template and SEO Checklist

Our checklist is helping our content writers excel at writing blog articles that are SEO-friendly, while still serving the needs of our clients’ target audience. We are confident that it will help you, too.

We’ve put all of these tips together in an easy-to-use blog template and SEO checklist that you can start using today to optimize your blog posts for SEO and increase your search traffic. Download your copy below!

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