Group items tagged

Link Redirect Trace — Uncovers all URLs in a redirect chain including 301’s, 302’s, etc. Very useful for finding (and regaining) lost “link juice,” amongst other things.Other similar extensions: Redirect Path

Scraper — Scrape data from any web page using XPath or jQuery. Integrates with Google Sheets for one-click export to a spreadsheet. Or you can copy to clipboard and paste into Excel.Other similar extensions: Data Scraper — Easy Web Scraping, XPather

Tag Assistant (by Google) — Check for the correct installation of Google tags (e.g. Google Analytics, Tag Manager, etc) on any website. Also, record typical user flows on your website to diagnose and fix implementation errors.

even though the majority of descriptions have been reduced to ~160 characters, there are still many search results with longer descriptions. 

Google feels that site owners could better spend their SEO time on things such as improving or adding quality content, rather than changing meta description tags to some arbitrary number that could change at any time and that Google may not use anyway.

webmasters have received Google Search Console flags for meta descriptions that are too short, but I have not heard of any for descriptions that are too long.

doing things like adding “pizzeria near me” as a title of your pages on your website probably doesn’t make that much sense because we would try to figure out like what is actually near the user.

put your address on your website and to mark that up appropriately with structured data so that we understand where your location is.  The other is to set up a Google My Business local listing

Only 43% of online stores see significant traffic from their social media pages.

Having a video thumbnail in the search results can double your search traffic.

Mobile ad blocking is increasing 90% year-over-year.

By adding structured data markup to your site, you can enable more of your site’s functional and visual elements to appear directly in results and in Knowledge Graph cards.

Contact markup on your official website will not overwrite data provided via Google My Business.

add schema.org Organization markup to your official website that identifies the location of your preferred logo.

Optimizing internal linking. Adding new formats (visual, video, audio, etc.). Deprioritizing promotional language from informational pages. Including more variations and long-tail versions of a key term. Adjusting site structure and moving pages. Link externally to trusted sources (scientific studies, governmental departments, educational institutions, etc.).

Keep in mind that competition will dictate how long it takes to see results.

All of the other major platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, recognize Open Graph tags. Twitter actually has its own meta tags for Twitter Cards, but if Twitter robots cannot find any, Twitter uses Open Graph tags instead.

The tags can affect conversions and click-through rates hugely

Adding Open Graph tags to your website won’t directly affect your on-page SEO, but it will influence the performance of your links on social media

Four symbols regularly appear as snippets within the map pack and local finder. These include Review Mentions, Website Mentions, “Sold Here” Icons, and also more recently Google Post Mentions.

Review Mentions appear in the map pack and local finder when a query matches up with a component of a GMB review published by a customer

it is useful to encourage your customers to mention the service or product they experienced when publishing a review

Certain categories of businesses will have the option to add a link to a menu.  If you’re lucky enough to be in one of these categories, I highly recommend adding this link, as it gives Google an additional set of keywords that your business for which should be considered relevant.

Focusing too much or solely on organic will present long-term growth roadblocks as local organic real estate continues to disappear and become more volatile

A typical unified local SERP campaign will include: Optimized GMB listing

Online reputation strategy (responding to reviews is just as important as gaining new ones) Google Local Services Ads (if applicable) Geo-focused PPC strategy (see below – use PPC to supplement organic visibility) Retargeting (GDN, YouTube, social channels) Local link building (referral traffic is going to be the new DA) Aggregated reporting Citations and NAP consistency

Here is a Summary of Our Key Findings: 1. The #1 result in Google’s organic search results has an average CTR of 31.7%. 2. The #1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click compared to a page in #10 spot. 3. Organic CTR for positions 7-10 is virtually the same. Therefore moving up a few spots on the bottom of the first page may not result in more organic traffic. 4. On average, moving up 1 spot in the search results will increase CTR by 30.8%. However, this depends on where you’re moving from and to. Moving from position #3 to position #2 will usually result in a significant CTR boost. However, moving from #10 #9 doesn’t make a statistically significant difference. 5. Title tags that contain a question have a 14.1% higher CTR vs. pages that don’t have a question in their title. 6. Title tags between 15 to 40 characters have the highest CTR. According to our data, pages with a title tag length between 15 and 40 characters have an 8.6% higher CTR compared to those that are outside of that range. 7. URLs that contain a keyword have a 45% higher click through rate compared to URLs that don’t contain a keyword. 8. Adding “Power Words” to your title tag may decrease your CTR. We found that titles with Power Words had a 13.9% lower CTR compared to titles that didn’t contain Power Words. 9. Emotional titles may improve your CTR. We found that titles with positive or negative sentiment improved CTR by approximately 7%. 10. Writing meta descriptions for your pages may result in a higher CTR. Pages with a meta description get 5.8% more clicks than those without a description. I have detailed data and information of our analysis below.

Digital agencies are incredibly hard to sell; to do so, you need to have streamlined your process as much as possible

12-month net profit average and then times that by a multiple. Typically, a multiple will range between 20–50x of the 12-month average net profit for healthy, profitable online businesses. As you get closer to 50x you have to be able to show your business is growing in a BIG way month over month and that your business is truly defensible

EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.

Google does take action to prevent links like these from affecting our search results, even without the re-nofollow. Links that are nofollowed do have a benefit outside of search, they are essentially called ads, he said.

there is no payment required and it’s not necessary to have a Google Ads campaign.As long as you have a Merchant Center account and sell products in the US, you can upload a product data feed directly to Google.

JSON-LD scripts can be added to a web page in a manner that can be templated within a website, making it easy to add, update and remove.

John Mueller answered:“We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data that are kind of come out for JSON-LD first.

Google said in September 2018 that neural matching impacts about 30 percent of all queries. We asked Google if that has increased, but have not received an update.What is RankBrain? Isn’t it similar? Google told us in 2016 that RankBrain (see our RankBrain FAQ) is also an AI, machine learning-based system that helps Google understand queries.Google said a good way to think about RankBrain is as an AI-based system it began using in 2016 primarily to understand how words are related to concepts.So what’s the difference between Neural matching and RankBrain? Google put it this way:RankBrain helps Google better relate pages to concepts.Neural matching helps Google better relate words to searches

Why it matters. The truth is, there isn’t much a search marketer can do to better optimize for RankBrain, as we said in 2016. The same seems to apply for neural matching, there doesn’t seem like you can do anything special to do better here. This is more about Google understanding queries and content on a page better than it currently does right now.That said, it seems to indicate that search marketers need to worry a bit less about making sure specific keywords are on their pages because Google is getting smarter at figuring out the words you use naturally on your pages and matching them to queries.We asked Google if it has additional recommendations around neural matching and RankBrain and were told its advice has not changed: Simply “create useful, high quality content.”

Google’s neural matching versus RankBrain: How Google uses each in searchNeural matching helps Google better relate words to searches, while RankBrain helps Google better relate pages to concepts.