What’s the ‘Best’ Word Count for Google? [Updated for 2017]

Have you wondered how long a blog post or landing page should be for Google?
Over the years, that number has been a moving target.
Once upon a time, SEO consultants recommended that every page has at least 250 words.
Amazingly, some people considered 250 words “too much content.” “People won’t read all of it,” folks complained. “I don’t

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It’s 2017. Is SEO Copywriting Training Still Needed?

Have you shelved SEO copywriting training for your in-house writers, figuring the money was better spent elsewhere?
That strategy may put your company at a competitive disadvantage.
Conductor recently reported that half of all content jobs require some SEO skills.
That means companies (like your competitors) are valuing SEO copywriting knowledge more than ever before.
Are you ready?

This statistic shocked me. Yes,

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What’s the Best Keyword Research Tool to Use?

Are you looking for the best keyword research tool out there — but there are too many confusing options?
You’re not alone.
A popular thread in the SEO Copywriting LinkedIn group is “what’s your favorite keyphrase research tool?” People recommended 11 different tools, ranging in price from free (if you’re willing to forgo search volume information) to

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Win a Webinar Spot with a #SEOCopyHaiku

Here’s a fun game to play — and your answer may land you a free spot in my upcoming SEO Content Writing:Step-by-Step webinar series starting September 19th.
You know I like writing haiku, right? I even wrote 14 SEO writing tips in haiku (check out this blog post for the geeky goodness.)
Now, it’s your turn.
Tweet me your SEO writing haiku (@heatherlloyd) and

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52 Questions to Ask Your New Copywriting Client [Updated for 2017]

Anyone who knows me knows that I tend to ask a lot of questions….
Why? Because that’s how I learn.
When you’re onboarding a new copywriting client — whether you work for yourself, or an agency — asking lots of question is the key to success.
Sure, that means that you’ll be spending an hour (or more) on

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Quit Obsessing Over Your Freelance Writing Niche. Do This, Instead.

Right this minute, someone out there is wondering, “how can I find my perfect freelance writing niche?”
(Maybe even you.)
I receive heart-wrenching letters every week from writers trying to find their true path. These folks have heard they need to “find a niche” — and that’s where they get stuck.
Because people aren’t focused on finding a

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Danny Sullivan, You Changed My Life. Thank you.

Last week, I read the news that Danny Sullivan is shifting away from his role as Chief Content Officer of Third Door Media, and is taking an advisory role.
I was shocked.
Sure, Danny isn’t the first “first generation” search marketer to step away from the industry (I believe my first business partner, Jill Whalen, was the first.)

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3 Ways SEO Can Ruin Content

Do you think keyphrase usage destroys well-written content?
Well, you’re right. Up to a point.
Way back in 2011, Lee Odden wrote “Content Strategy and the Dirty Lie About SEO.” At the end of the post, he posed the question – the question that’s been debated ever since “writing for search engines” started:
Do you think SEO ruins content?
My

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Learn SEO Content Writing for Under $100 (for a Limited Time)

Do you want to dip your toes into the SEO writing waters, and you need a low-cost course to teach you the basics?
Are you tired of trying to learn everything yourself, and you’d love a webinar series with live Q & A and a place to ask questions?
Are you confused by conflicting SEO writing “rules,”and you’re wondering if you’re

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How to Find Easy SEO Copywriting Opportunities

Did you grow up hearing, “If it’s easy, there must be something wrong with it”?
Yeah. Me too.
Instead of looking for the easy way out, we often look for the most challenging, brutal way to do things. We work harder. We work longer hours. If we’re not suffering, we aren’t trying.
It’s all about the hustle.
Granted, this

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CBM092917

Here are the notes from the Chris Brogan Media broadcast for xx/xx/xx. (You can watch this on my Facebook account).

This live video was all shot using Ecamm Live (client), the best way to do Facebook Live for Mac.

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SEO Hacker’s Content Strategy for SEO

In today’s online landscape, an effective SEO content strategy is what most SEO professionals yearn for. But where do we find it? Is there a blueprint for an effective SEO content strategy that would improve your SEO indefinitely? Yes, there is.

Here are the main factors we monitfor for our SEO content strategy :

1. Easier Topics
2. Content Layering and Internal Links
3.  Linkability
4. Content Updates

Having an effective SEO content strategy can help you improve your site’s overall ranking. Let’s get started.

Easier Topics

The first step in any SEO content strategy is topic ideation. The process begins with your keyword research – analyze and inspect keywords or topics that are relevant to your brand. You can use any keyword research tool that you’re comfortable with, however, there are three factors you must take note of. They are:

• Search Volume
• Traffic Value
• Keyword Difficulty

The best thing that could happen is that all your desired keywords have high search volume with a low difficulty. Those keywords, however, are far and few in between often times, keywords that have low difficulty would be the better choice to target.

There are numerous tools you can use such as SEMrush or CognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool. Here in SEO-Hacker we use CognitiveSEO’s Keyword Explore. It’s simple and you just need to put in your desired keyword, then it automatically shows you the data. It measures your keyword’s difficulty from 0 being the easiest and 100 being the most difficult.

I would also highly advise you to do your homework and check keyword difficulty manually. How do we do it?

Simply put in your desired keyword into the search bar, and analyze the results. If the first page results contain popular business names or highly-authoritative websites, it usually means it’s more difficult. Conversely, if you see low-authority websites, it usually means lower difficulty and much better chances to create outstanding content.

Take note that if you’re a new business, and not an authoritative one, it may be better to go for niche keywords. Being able to stand out in a less competitive environment will help you hone your content strategy, and will improve your writing.

Content Layering and Internal Links

Content layering basically means that you layer your content in regards to their topics. You “layer” your middle-of-the-funnel content (content that gives specific solutions to a particular query) above your bottom-of-the-funnel content (your converting/landing pages) through internal linking. We do this because it is extremely beneficial to our website.

Some benefits include:

• Authority Sharing: Having the opportunity to receive inbound links for your middle-funnel content because it has more “linkable” assets than the bottom-funnel. Eventually, this will pass down valuable link equity to your bottom-funnel content. This is beneficial for you because no one will usually link to your bottom-funnel content due to it being promotional in nature.
• Site Authority and Popularity: If your middle-funnel content is ranking highly in the search results, you’ll notice that your site’s authority and popularity are steadily improving. Then, your bottom-funnel content will also improve through increased conversions and more sales.
• Link Procurement for Bottom-Funnel Content: Promoting your middle-funnel content can help you procure links for your bottom-funnel content through the strategic placement of its links inside the promoted content.

Lastly, content layering and an organized link structure will help the users and search engines navigate through your site without much trouble.

Linkability

“Linkability” is your content’s potential to earn links. And we all know that links still remain as one of the most important ranking factors. So, you should create your content with “linkability” in mind.

Remember that people usually link to websites due to the relevance of the content. You should have an idea of the people or webmasters you want to reach out to, and build your content in such a way that your potential of getting an inbound link from them increases.

Some factors that we consider for our outreach targets are:

• Keyword Search Volume: If the search volume for your keyword is relatively high, then it’s highly likely that more people will link to your content.
  • We normally use CognitiveSEO’s keyword tool to find out our target keyword’s monthly volume results. We just put in our target keyword in the tool’s search bar, and wait for the tool to load the data for our keyword.
    
  • Afterward, we’ll be taken to the results page , and the keyword difficulty, average content performance, and monthly volume will be shown on the top of the page.
  • Bonus: Here’s a more in-depth discussion of CognitiveSEO’s keyword tool.

• Unique Domain Links to the Top Results: If the top results for our target keyword has numerous unique domains linking to them, our chances of strategically acquiring links from these domains increases due to our content’s relevance. We usually use Ahrefs or Buzzsumo for checking the backlinks of the top results.

Aside from researching the outreach target, wewill have to examine our link opportunities. A simple approach would be to create something better than what is currently ranking or more commonly know as the skyscraper technique. We create better content than what’s ranking, then reach out to the people that linked to the original content.

Creating better content does not necessarily entail spending numerous hours trying to come up with the best version, sometimes, you only need to change some aspects in order to produce a much better version.

Some changes we make are:

• More searchable title
• Refine and organize readability and structure
• Improve page speed
• Incorporating trusted sources and data
• Explaining the topic in more depth
• Including recent or original data/research
• Presenting it in a different format (e.g. video, infographics, etc.)

Updating Content

Aside from creating new content, our comprehensive SEO content strategy also includes updating existing content or pages – which is easier than starting over to create something new.

The methods mentioned above for skyscraping can also be applied to existing content. For example, you can add a video to long-form guides which can add value and linkability to the page.

Another thing we do is to repurpose our underperforming pages. We inspect the search results for our targeted keyword, check if there is a prevalent format among the top results, then apply that format to our underperforming pages.

It’s important for SEO specialists to invest time, money, and energy into creating new, engaging content, but it’s important to improve and update existing pages as well.

Key Takeaway

Just to help you remember the SEO content strategy above, here’s a short recap:

• Easier Topics:
  • Judge topics by their search volume, traffic value, and keyword difficulty.
  • Another option is to manually find easier topics through search results that show low authority sites.
• Content Layering and Internal Links:
  • Through proper content layering and organized link structures, your bottom-funnel content can benefit from shared link equity, improved domain and site authority, and more link acquisitions.
• Linkability:
  • Determine potential outreach targets through keyword search volume, unique domains that link to top results, and the types of pages.
  • Use the skyscraping technique to have more link opportunities.
• Updating Content:
  • Upgrade your existing content
  • Repurpose existing pages into something more “link worthy”.

Effective SEO content strategies are important for your SEO goals. So, read, learn, and apply the practices explained above to help your content creation and your SEO campaign.

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Ask Yoast case study: SEO for a property inspector

In this new Ask Yoast case study we’ll focus on an Australian real estate company: Building Properties Inspections Melbourne. This company specializes in building and pest inspections and provides its customers with reports, containing all the details of those inspections. What kind of customer makes use of these services? You could think of people who consider buying a property and therefore want to know if it’s in good condition. Or people who have already bought a new home and discovered timber pest afterward.

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Info People search online first

Of course, services like these are offline services. After making an appointment, someone of the company will actually come to your house for the inspection. However, to make this appointment, people need to find the company first. Some visitors may find the company thanks to the advice of a friend who has already used their services. People that don’t know this company will probably use an online search engine to find a business providing these services. This is where SEO comes in: if a website is at the top of the search results, people will be more likely to click on that website. In the end, this will result in more actual clients and more business for the company.

What page should rank for your keywords?

The next step is thinking about what page should rank at the top of the search results. Probably one of the most important services of Building Properties Inspections Melbourne is the ‘Pre Purchase Inspection’. When someone is about to purchase a property, this service can be used to make sure the building is in good condition.

Searching for a service like this using a search engine such as Google, people might insert a keyword like ‘Pre Purchase Inspection’ or ‘Pre Purchase Inspection Home’. When your website ranks high for such keywords, lots of people will visit your website and call in your services. When your website is on the 3rd page of the search results, nearly no one will even see your website.

Adding sufficient content

It’s important to have one specific page for every keyword or keyword group: the cornerstone content page. When someone searches for a query such as ‘Pre Purchase Inspection Home’ in Google, you don’t want your page about pest inspection to rank first. That’s why you need to make sure that Google understands what page contains the best, most relevant information for a specific keyword.

Looking at the ‘Pre Purchase Inspection’ page on the website of this company, we noticed there is too little textual content:

The textual content on the service page.

The current text consists of nearly 100 words. You might understand that it’s hard for Google to rank this page as the best result when only such a small amount of content can be found on the page. Make sure you add a minimum of 300 words to all of your posts and pages. For a cornerstone content page -like this page should be- we even recommend a minimum of 900 words. Tell everything about the specific service, how you operate, why people should choose you (your USP) and of course, use the keywords you want to rank for with that page in the text.

Calling to the next action

Finally, add a call-to-action to the page to give your visitors the opportunity to contact you easily. There is already a contact form on the current service page, but, because of the dark background, it looks like a footer. Visitors could skip the content in the dark block altogether because it looks like it’s not relevant for the actual page itself:

The testimonials and the current call-to-action

However, the testimonials and the call-to-action in the block are important. We recommend adding a button below the textual content which says ‘Book an Inspection’ and link that button to the contact page of the website. Below the button, you can show the testimonials. Showing this content on a white background just like the other textual content will help visitors understand that it belongs to the page.

The homepage as a landing page

Not all visitors enter your website on one of the service pages: most of the other visitors will probably enter the website on the homepage. This is why it’s important to make sure your homepage is clear and easy to understand.

The current homepage contains a slider at the top of the page:

Readers who regularly visit our blog know that we’re not a big fan of sliders. Nearly nobody actually clicks on any of the slides and it often has a negative effect on the loading times of a website. We recommend removing the slider and adding some introductory content instead. This introduction needs to tell your visitors what your website is about and what your USP is. Below the introduction, we recommend adding a clear call-to-action in a color that’s not in your color scheme yet. There already is a call-to-action as you can see in the screenshot above: the ‘Click here to book online’ button. However, this button doesn’t stand out as it is a so-called ghost button. Make sure it does. On their mobile website, they’re already doing this better, as you can see on the image below.

We recommend switching the orange and white colors, so the button has an orange color instead of the complete bar, this would make it stand out more. Add some introductory content above the button, and the top of this mobile homepage would look great!

Lastly, on both desktop and mobile, the homepage contains a lot of textual content. Since it’s mostly the service pages that need to rank for specific keywords, it’s not necessary to add this amount of textual content to the homepage.

In our opinion, the homepage should above all tell your visitors what the website is about and guide them to your main pages. We recommend reducing the textual content on the homepage, especially for the mobile version of the website.

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Info The importance of local SEO

Since the services of this company are offline, it’s important for them to rank locally. You want visitors that live nearby to find your website in their search results. You’ll understand that it’s less beneficial when people at the other side of the country see your website in the search results. Those people will probably exit your site quickly because your company is too far from their area. To rank locally, there are 3 things to keep in mind: structured data, Google My Business and ratings and reviews.

Structured data

Structured data can be beneficial for lots of different pages but for local SEO you should at least add structured data to your contact page. The Yoast Local SEO plugin could help you with that. The plugin will add Google Maps to your contact page. Besides that, you can add your business address and opening hours. The plugin will automatically add structured data to that information and Google might show this directly in the search results as a rich result.

Google My Business

The second thing you need to optimize is your Google My Business account. Having such an account can also lead to a rich result, such as a knowledge graph. When people in your neighborhood search for your services, this knowledge graph might appear. Local SEO expert David Mihm tells you all there is to know about it in this Google My Business post.

Ratings and reviews

Adding ratings and reviews to your site will increase the trust of visitors. Furthermore, they’re a sign for Google that your company can be valuable to others looking for the same services. If you also add structured data to those ratings and reviews, Google might show them in the search results and the CTR to your website could increase because of that rich result.

To sum it up

It was great reviewing the website of Building Property Inspections Melbourne. We think it’s a clear website and with some SEO improvements, the rankings should increase. The first thing is creating cornerstone content pages of the services pages. Adding sufficient textual content to those pages, it will be easier for Google to rank them higher in the search results. The second thing we recommend is optimizing the homepage to make sure visitors immediately understand what your website is about. After that, they should be guided to the main pages of the website. With clear calls-to-action, you’ll create a clear path for your visitors. Lastly, optimizing the website for local SEO can be very beneficial since you want to focus on the people nearby. Good luck optimizing!

Read more: ‘Using cornerstone content to make your site rank’ »

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Should Anyone Even Care If Google Now Powers SIRI Results?

Now that Apple has switched from Bing to Google for SIRI’s web search results, I have been trying to wrap my head around the implications for our clients. In keeping with Apple’s secretive ways, it’s not exactly clear there are any.

Here’s a voice query result for “outdoor seat cushions”:

The results are typically presented as a set of five results in an iOS tile showing the title, description snippet and URL.

These are the same as you would see in the Google SERP for this query. Note, they are stripped of any ads, featured snippets, instant answers, knowledge panels, etc. Google is not making jack off these queries. Neither was Bing btw. And local voice searches such as “gas station near me”, some of the most valuable queries, still show Apple Maps results. But I imagine the traffic and data Google gets from being the default search engine in Mobile Safari makes up for it.

Scrolling to the bottom of the tile reveals a small “Show Google Results” link that takes you to the Google SERP for the same query:

While I can’t definitively say virtually no one will click on the “Show Google Results” link, common sense leads me to believe that the CTR will be relatively low. So whatever traffic you are going to get from SIRI web searches will most likely come from clicks on the initial results tile. This is where it gets challenging.

Clicks to your site from various parts of the Apple ecosystem (iOS and MacOS) when done via Apple’s owned and operated properties (SIRI search,  Spotlight Search, Apple Maps, etc.) typically appear as Direct traffic in your analytics. So there’s no real way to understand how well your site is optimized inside of Apple’s system other than tracking if Direct traffic from Apple devices is going up or down and compare it to Apple traffic trends from other channels, which is to say, it’s not the easiest data to make sense of.

If these voice search web results do drive significant traffic then the difference in your rankings between Google and Bing could make a difference, but again there would be no easy way to track how this translates to traffic from Apple devices.

Over the past few years I have been talking about Apple’s emergence as a source of some of the most valuable search traffic outside of its partnerships with Bing and Google, but until it provides more visibility into how its systems perform for businesses, it will be hard to get anyone except perhaps Google to pay attention.

If you still care about figuring out Apple’s search engine after reading this, this presentation might give you some ideas…

Search Different | Understanding Apple’s “New” Search Engine from DFWSEM

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How to improve WordPress search

The default WordPress search functionality is certainly lacking in areas. Although changes were made in 2013 to improve it, there are still a few areas where WordPress could use some help. It is, however, relatively easy to improve WordPress search by adding a few pieces of code. Here, I’ll list some of the methods you could use to make WordPress search better.

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Info Sort by relevance

In older versions of WordPress, search results were sorted by date and not much else. Because this is (at the very least) annoying for websites with a lot of posts, WordPress core introduced a patch that would change the way search results are sorted.

The changes are as followed:

• Results with a full sentence match in the post title are listed first.
• Search results that include all search terms in the title, but not a full sentence match, are listed next.
• Results including any search terms in the title, but not all search terms or a full sentence match, are listed next.
• Finally, search results that include a full sentence match in the post content come last. Within each group, results are further sorted chronologically by publication date.

Improving the interface

Excerpts in search results by WordPress are not exactly great. Unlike Google, the WordPress search omits emphasis of the keyword if it found matches. Luckily, you can alter parts of the search results and add this feature.

Preparing your theme

In your theme, look for the file that outputs the search results. In this example, it’s a file that I’ve created manually, called /template-parts/post/content-search.php in a Twenty Seventeen child theme. This file is a copy of content-excerpt.php that exists in the same directory.

Next, look for the file called search.php in the theme’s main directory and look for the following line of code:

get_template_part( 'template-parts/post/content', 'excerpt' );

Change this to the following:

get_template_part( 'template-parts/post/content', 'search' );

By making these changes, you’ll ensure that WordPress will use your custom template instead of the default one. Time to add the actual code that will be doing the emphasizing!

Open up functions.php and add the following function:

/**
 * Adds emphasis to the parts passed in $content that are equal to $search_query.
 *
 * @param $content The content to alter.
 * @param $search_query The search query to match against.
 *
 * @return string The emphasized text.
 */
function emphasize( $content, $search_query ) {
    $keys = array_map( 'preg_quote', explode(" ", $search_query ) );
    return preg_replace( '/(' . implode('|', $keys ) .')/iu', '<strong >\0</strong>', $content );
}

What this function does, is taking the passed content and emphasize every occurrence of the word(s) passed in $search_query and return the text. The class that was added to the <strong> tag can be used to further style the end result (if you want to).

Adding emphasis in the title

Now that we’ve gone through the steps to setup your custom template parts adding emphasis in the title is relatively easy to do.

Go into your newly created content-search.php and find the line that looks like:

the_title( sprintf( '<h2 ><a href="%s" >', esc_url( get_permalink() ) ), '</a></h2>' );

and replace it with the following:

$title = emphasize( get_the_title(), get_search_query() );

echo sprintf( '<h2 ><a href="%s" >%s', esc_url( get_permalink() ), $title ) . '</a></h2>';

That’s all there is to it!

Adding emphasis in the excerpt

You’d expect that adding emphasis to the excerpt can’t be much harder than adding it to the title. Sadly, this is not the case. With excerpts, WordPress automatically concatenates a “Continue reading” link to the end. You’d be fine as long as the search phrase doesn’t exist in the slug of the post, but most of the time if you’re looking for specific keywords, it will be present in the slug. This results in a broken “Continue reading” link.

To overcome this, you’ll have to temporarily overrule some default WordPress behavior.

First, add the following to your functions.php:

/**
 * Creates a custom read more link.
 *
 * @return string The read more link.
 */
function modify_read_more_link() {
    return ' <a  href="' . get_permalink() . '">Continue reading</a>';
}

The above code will be called to ensure we have a workable “Read more” link.

This part hooks into the function that creates the actual excerpt and adds our emphasis and custom “Read more” link.

/**
 * Allows for excerpt generation outside the loop.
 *
 * @param string $text  The text to be trimmed
 * @return string       The trimmed text
 */
function custom_trim_excerpt( $text = '' ) {
    $text = strip_shortcodes( $text );
    $text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
    $text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $text);

    $excerpt_length = apply_filters('excerpt_length', 55);

    $trimmed = wp_trim_words( $text, $excerpt_length, '' );

    if ( is_search() ) {
        $trimmed = emphasize( $trimmed, get_search_query() );
    }

    return $trimmed . modify_read_more_link();
}
add_filter('wp_trim_excerpt', 'custom_trim_excerpt');

Sadly, there’s no elegant alternative for this. Hopefully, someday, a filter will be created that can be called instead of having to overrule large portions of the trim function.

Tracking searches

There are a few options to track the search queries that visitors have entered, but we recommend using Google Analytics for this. To get started with tracking searches, please go through the following steps:

1. Login to Google Analytics.
2. Click on Admin (gear on the bottom-left).
3. Under View, click on View Settings
4. Scroll down until you find the Site Search Tracking toggle and turn it on.
5. In the Query Parameter field, enter s. This is the default query parameter that is added by WordPress when using the search function.
6. Click Save

If your website is heavily dependent on categories and allows users to use them to refine their searches, Google Analytics gives you the ability to add tracking on this too. For more information on this subject, you can read Google’s documentation on search tracking in this article.

Alternatives

If your website has grown a lot and you want to supercharge your search, it might be wise to look at a few alternatives. One that we use at Yoast is Algolia. This platform contains a ton of features to make search even better. Some features are: Typo-tolerance, support for synonyms, filters and support for 100+ languages. It also includes integrations with WordPress!

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Info

Another alternative is Amazon CloudSearch. It offers similar features to Algolia, and you can enable autoscaling if you think your website needs it. However, ACS does not provide you with an integration out of the box, so you’ll have to write your implementation or look for a WordPress plugin in the Plugin Directory. At the time of writing, there are only two plugins present; CloudSearch and Lift.

Yes, you can improve WordPress search

As you could read, the WordPress search has improved over the years. Despite this, it still lacks in some aspects. Luckily you can improve it by adding some extra code in your child theme or take it to the next level by using external services such as Algolia and Amazon CloudSearch. Good luck!

Read more: ‘Internal search: why and how’ »

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CBM092817

Here are the notes from the Chris Brogan Media broadcast for 09/28/17. (You can watch this on my Facebook account).

This live video was all shot using Ecamm Live (client), the best way to do Facebook Live for Mac.

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SEO for non-profits

SEO is important for every website that wants to attract traffic. SEO for non-profits, in that regard, isn’t that different from SEO for other businesses. For non-profits -often struggling to make ends meet- it can be a cheap and effective way of attracting traffic. Making sure your website is findable in the search engines increases the chance that people will find their way to your non-profit organization. So, what SEO challenges are the most urgent for non-profit organizations? I’ll tell you all about those in this post.

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Info SEO is a must for a non-profit organization

It’s important for your non-profit organization to rank well in Google. Why? You want your audience, the people you’re aiming to help, to find their way to your website. When you’re findable, it’s much easier for them to get in touch and receive your information. Also, you want potential donators to find your website. Their sponsorship could help you to grow your non-profit business, expand your mission and help more people.

SEO is relatively cheap. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a lot of work. So, you need lots of time, writing skills, and some technical help with our plugin. Provided you have those at your disposal, ranking in the search engines is doable and will get you more traffic and visitors.

What SEO aspects to focus on?

There are a few SEO tactics that are especially important for non-profit organizations. SEO for non-profits isn’t essentially different from SEO for other companies. However, due to the distinct nature of (most) non-profit organizations, there are a few SEO tactics that’ll prove to be extra beneficial.

Content: write about what you do!

The first SEO aspect to focus on as a non-profit organization should be your content. While many businesses have trouble coming up with topics to write about, for most non-profits finding inspiration won’t be the problem. On the contrary, every non-profit organization has stories, a mission, a reason to exist. Translating those stories into awesome content is a great SEO strategy. Write about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and why that’s such a great thing. You’ll probably write content around your most important keywords without knowing it.

A good strategy is to write a few great lengthy cornerstone articles, which truly reflect your main mission. Other (smaller) posts should link to those cornerstone articles.

Optimize for your brand

Make sure that people find you when they search for the brand name of your non-profit organization. Lots of non-profits are known for their name. You want to be found on your brand name, when people search for it. So you’d better ensure you rank number one for that name. This shouldn’t be that hard if you focus on decent writing and make sure your site structure is in order.

Read more: ‘Low budget branding’ »

Get the Local Premium bundle and fully optimize your local site! »

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Info Local SEO

Lots of non-profit organizations focus on a specific location or have multiple locations. You want people in your area to find you. If that’s the case for your organization, make sure that your website is findable on Google maps. Enter the information about your organization via Google Local Business Center. Check out our local SEO plugin if your non-profit organization focuses on multiple or specific locations. That’ll really pay off!

Keep reading: ‘Ranking your local business: introduction’ »

Mobile

Mobile search is becoming more and more important. Google announced that in 2018 the rankings in the search engines will be based on the mobile index. So it’s very important that your website is mobile friendly. Lots of people will search for and visit your website on a mobile phone. The design should be responsive and your site speed on mobile should be in order. Check out Google’s mobile friendliness test to see whether or not your site is mobile friendly.

Conclusion on non-profit SEO

SEO for non-profits isn’t that different from SEO for businesses, blogs or online shops. SEO should be part of the online marketing strategy of every non-profit organization, as Google is the most important channel for information for most people. Ranking high in Google is the way to reach your audience.

Non-profits should have no problem coming up with ideas for content. Focusing on writing awesome content will probably be the best and most effective SEO strategy. Top that off with great technical excellence and good site structure and there’s no doubt your non-profit organization will be on the (search) map!

Read on: ‘SEO for everyone: Yoast’s mission explained’ »

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What’s the Best Keyword Research Tool to Use?

Are you looking for the best keyword research tool out there — but there are too many confusing options?
You’re not alone.
A popular thread in the SEO Copywriting LinkedIn group is “what’s your favorite keyphrase research tool?” People recommended 11 different tools, ranging in price from free (if you’re willing to forgo search volume information) to

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Managing access to Yoast SEO with SEO roles

With the release of Yoast SEO 5.5 comes a great new feature: SEO roles. A site admin can now determine in the backend of WordPress who gets access to the various settings and features of Yoast SEO. This makes for a more fluid and flexible access protocol for different kinds of users on a site. It is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution, but a more tailored one. SEO roles make Yoast SEO even more powerful for every type of user. Here, we’ll explain why these roles are so awesome.

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »

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Info Managing user roles in Yoast SEO 5.5

It’s always been a challenge to use Yoast SEO in a larger site environment. As an admin, you’d have to choose between offering users full access to the plugin or just access to the SEO post editor part. That means a regular user couldn’t use the redirects manager, for instance, and had to ask an admin for help every time he or she wanted to add, change or delete redirects. We’ve seen it happing here at Yoast as well. Of course, there’s a whole range of possible permissions in between. Yoast SEO now introduces two new roles that make this a lot easier to manage: the SEO manager and SEO editor, in addition to the admin who determines who gets to see what.

Roles and capabilities

Roles in Yoast SEO consist of one or more capabilities, like:

• managing options (this gives you full access),
• managing redirects,
• editing advanced metadata,
• access to the bulk editor.

The SEO editor, for instance, can now make redirects, but cannot change the settings of the plugin or access the advanced metadata editor of Yoast SEO. This way, the SEO editor has more access than a regular user, but less than the SEO manager who can manage settings as well. If you use a permission or role manager plugin for WordPress like Justin Tadlock’s excellent Members plugin, you get even more fine-grained control over the capabilities within Yoast SEO. This way, you can mix and match capabilities in any form you’d like.

In Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve also added the capability to manage redirects without having to be an administrator. By activating this, users within a specific role get full access to the redirects manager. No longer do site managers have to be swamped with redirects requests by site editors, they can manage those themselves. Personally, I like that a lot. By adding some magic code to the plugin, the redirects manager now shows up in the WordPress sidebar menu, even if your Yoast SEO menu is hidden by default. How cool is that?

Managing your site has never been easier

The SEO roles in Yoast SEO make it incredibly easy to give more people working on your site access to the features and settings they need, without granting them full access. Does your site editor need to edit advanced metadata? No? Block it in Yoast SEO. Does he or she need to manage redirects and do large-scale SEO optimizations with the bulk editor? Great, grant him or her access to these parts of the plugin. You can do this and more – all from the admin dashboard of Yoast SEO!

Read more: ‘Yoast SEO 5.5: Introducing SEO roles’ »

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Yoast SEO 5.5: Introducing SEO roles

We’ve got good news for site managers and site owners: Yoast SEO 5.5 now supports SEO roles. It’s no longer all or nothing for users of Yoast SEO because two new roles with several capabilities let you make more deliberate decisions about who has access to what SEO settings in the backend. By using a WordPress permission plugin, you have even more fine-grained control over roles and capabilities. Let’s dive right in!

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »

$89 - Buy now »

Info Managing SEO roles with Yoast SEO 5.5

The most prominent feature of Yoast SEO 5.5 is SEO roles. Let’s say you have editors working on your site and you want them to be able to manage redirects for themselves. Previously, these editors had to ask you as a site administrator to do this for them because they didn’t have access to the redirects manager. Now, you can grant them access to these particular parts of the plugin. Two new roles, the SEO editor and SEO manager, make for a much more flexible solution when working with multiple people on your site. The administrator can determine who gets to see and do what, while the users get the tools they need to do their work.

I’ve written a separate post explaining the SEO roles in Yoast SEO in more detail.

Other new features

SEO roles are just one of the new additions to the plugin. Yoast SEO 5.5 is a massive release, with loads of great stuff. Let’s look at a couple of highlights.

Redesigned dashboard widget

Your WordPress dashboard should give you important information at a glance. Our old dashboard widget was in desperate need of a new coat of paint and an overhaul of its contents. The new widget now shows you how your SEO is doing. You’ll see how many posts have good SEO score and how many are just OK or which ones don’t have a focus keywords attached to it. Keeping up with our SEO articles has become much easier since we’ve added links to the most recent posts on yoast.com.

Redirects manager access, plus redirects filter

The redirects manager in Yoast SEO Premium also has a new role within the plugin. Premium users can now make the redirects manager available to other contributors, without them having to have special access. It’s even available in the menu!

We’ve added something else to it: you can now filter redirect types in the redirects manager. This way, you can quickly find all your 410 Content Deleted redirects, for instance, and manage them in a jiffy. If you’re not using the redirects manager, you’re missing out on a killer tool that’ll save you loads of time and headaches.

Focus keyword export

Last, but not least in Yoast SEO 5.5 Premium: Focus keyword export! Select the data you need – keywords, URL, readability score and/or title – and you’ll get a file with an excellent overview of how you use focus keywords on your site. You can quickly see which posts or pages need work! And yes, this works for content that has multiple focus keywords as well.

Update now!

Yoast SEO 5.5 is chock full of new features, enhancements, and fixes. This post doesn’t nearly describe all the changes in this release. We’re very proud of the new SEO roles as these will make site managers much more flexible in permitting users to various parts of the plugin. We hope you like this new feature as much as we do. Happy updating!

Keep reading: ‘Why every website needs Yoast SEO’ »

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SEO Competition Analysis Guide + Tools

SEO Competition analysis is an essential aspect of any SEO campaign. Aside from your link building campaign, content writing and publishing, and keyword research, you must be mindful with how your competition performs in the online landscape.

SEO Competition Analysis

Competition analysis is not as easy as it sounds. You have to be critical in knowing every aspect of your competitor’s performance and how you should adapt your strategy accordingly. If you follow just a single strategy all throughout your campaign and you were never aware of how or what your competitors were doing, then you will be missing out on important things that could have improved the circumstances of your website if you had taken advantage of them. 

Having the ability to analyze your competitors can help you improve your strategies, and be enlightened on opportunities that can take your campaign to even greater heights. Another benefit of knowing your enemy is being able to know the areas where you could be doing better. This will give you the opportunity to step up your online performance and be ahead of all your competitors.

The frequency of your analysis is not limited to a monthly basis. But what’s important is that you should be aware of the metrics of your competitors to regularly measure the distance between you and your competitors. So, today I’ll be highlighting 4 of the most important factors to consider whenever you are analyzing your competitor’s performance. Let’s start.

Your Competitors

Before starting your competition analysis, you should first understand what the word “competitor” means in the online industry. It might seem as though the meaning of competitor is straightforward, but it’s not. You might have a competitor in the physical aspect, but that does not mean that they’re your competitor in the online landscape. This is an important factor that most SEOs forget. They think that whatever physical competition they have automatically has an online presence, but this is not always the case.

Another factor that SEO professionals forget is local SEO rankings, and there’s a much wider scope after that. They might rank high in their local rankings, but in the overall search rankings, they might not even be visible.

The first step to knowing your online competition is a simple act of searching in Google. Input the keyword/s you want to rank for, and see who is ranking for that specific keyword. Afterward, you can input the keywords you want to rank for and the domain names of your competitors in Ahrefs. I particularly like using  Ahrefs because they have a massive database, it’s comprehensive, and it updates consistently – which means that the results they show are timely and useful. If you want to know my complete thoughts about Ahrefs, here’s my Ahrefs review.

If you’re not particularly versed in using Ahrefs, you can use any competitor research tool that you are comfortable with.

4 Factors to Consider

You can’t just take in every little bit of data you see when you analyze your competitors. Whenever you analyze them, you should remember:

Visibility

You should always be looking at your competitor’s visibility in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Take a look at the totality of their organic visibility, and evaluate what position they’re ranking for and their page’s quality. Knowing and understand the difference between their pages and yours can help you understand the things missing on your site, and incorporate them accordingly.

Be mindful of their page’s rankings. Check if it has gone down or up. You might be able to understand why that happened to them, and how you can avoid or mimic what they have done to increase or decrease their rankings.

Another aspect of visibility you need to be aware of is the traffic they receive from paid search. If you find out that they receive high amounts of traffic through paid search, then you might want to put up paid ads to improve your site’s traffic.

Indexation

Aside from monitoring their visibility, you should also be aware of your competitor’s pages that are slowly moving up in the rankings. Do not forget that you are not the only putting out new content or revamping old pages.

Start by keeping an updated list of their content’s visibility, and check if they are revamping or changing anything inside the page, and learn from it.

To have an easier time, I recommend that you use CognitiveSEO’s content assistant whenever you’re revamping your content. It provides immense help in optimizing your content, and could potentially help your page rank higher.

Links

As you may know, links are exceptionally important for your website. One primary way to find links is through assessing your competitor’s backlink profile. Logically, you share a common denominator with your competitor, so your website would most likely be relevant to the websites that link to your competitor.

Monitor your competitor’s newest links, and start earning links from there.

Brand Popularity

Lastly, check your competitor’s popularity across social media and news channels. This will help you understand why they’re known across the online landscape, and be able to increase your own brand’s popularity from there.

This does not primarily relate to the websites linked to them, but it helps you understand the strategy of their PR and Marketing team. Being popular across social media can lead to more links and more brand mentions – which means good news for your brand. There quite a few tools for this that are available in the market. Tools such as Google Alert or Ahrefs alerts can help you with this.

Key Takeaway

Competition analysis is not for making you feel good whenever you find out that you’re doing better than your competitors. It’s done because it helps you know the inadequacy of your strategy, and to make you learn more from other SEOs.

If you have not noticed, the most important aspect of competition analysis is relevance. If your competitors are truly relevant to your website, then whatever they do their website will be applicable to yours as well.

Whenever you do a thorough and comprehensive competition analysis, you can always do better than your competitors. If they have content that ranks well, then you can do a similar approach with your content, but with better quality. If they have links from authoritative websites, you can also attain the same type of links.

Basically, learn from your competitors and then do it on a much higher level.

What other factors should you look at during your competition analysis? Tell me in the comments below and let’s help each other out.

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