Deanna Naylor

Whew! We made it through another year, and it seems like we’re past due for taking a close look at the health of our on-page SEO practices. What better way to hit the ground running than with a checklist? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, the fabulous Britney Muller shares her best tips for doing effective on-page SEO in 2019.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re going over all things on-page SEO, and I’ve divided it into three different sections:

How are crawlers and Googlebot crawling through your site and your web pages?
What is the UX of your on-page content?
What is the value in the content of your on-page content?

So let’s just jump right in, shall we?

Crawler/bot-accessible

☑ Meta robots tag allows crawling

Making sure your meta robots tag allows crawling is essential. If that’s blocking Googlebot from crawling, your page will never be in search. You want to make sure that’s all panned out.

☑ Robots.txt doesn’t disallow crawling

You want to make sure that let’s say this page that you’re trying to get to rank in search engines, that you’re not disallowing this URL from your robots.txt.

☑ URL is included in sitemap

Similarly you want to make sure that the URL is in your site map.

☑ Schema markup

You also want to add any schema markup, any relevant schema markup that you can. This is essentially spoon-feeding search engines what your page is about and what your content is about.

☑ Internal links pointing to your page with natural anchor text

So let’s say I am trying to rank for chakra stones. Maybe I’m on a yoga website and I want to make sure that I have other internal pages linking to chakra stones with the anchor text “chakra crystals” or “chakra stones” and making sure that I’m showing Google that this is indeed an internally linked page and it’s important and we want to give it some weight.

☑ HTTPS - SSL

You want to make sure that that is secure and that Google is taking that into consideration as well.

User experience

☑ Meets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Does it meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? Definitely look into that and make sure you check all the boxes.

☑ Responsive mobile design with same content and links

Is it responsive for mobile? Super important with the mobile-first indexing.

☑ Clear CTA

Is there one clear call to action? A lot of pages miss this. So, for this page, maybe I would have a big “Buy Chakra Crystals Here” button or link. That would be a clear CTA. It’s important to have.

☑ Multimedia: Evaluate SERP and add desired media

Are you providing other desired media types? Are there images and video and different forms of content on your page?

☑ Page speed: utilize CDNs, compress images, use reliable hosting

Are you checking the page speed? Are you using CDNs? Are you compressing your images? You want to check all of that.

☑ Integrate social sharing buttons

It’s the easiest thing. Make sure that people can easily share your content.

Content and value

This is where it gets really fun and strategic too.

☑ Unique, high-quality content

Are you providing high-quality content? So if you go to Google and you search “chakra stones” and you take a look at all of those results, are you including all of that good content into your page? Then are you making it even better? Because that should be the goal.

☑ Optimize for intent: Evaluate SERP and PPC, note which SERP features show up

You want to also optimize for intent. So you want to evaluate that SERP. If that search result page is showing tons of images or maybe videos, you should be incorporating that into your page as well, because clearly that’s what people are looking for.

You also want to evaluate the PPC. They have done so much testing on what converts and what doesn’t. So it’s silly not to take that into consideration when optimizing your page.

☑ Title tags and meta descriptions

What are those titles? What are those descriptions? What’s working? Title tags and meta description are still so important. This is the first impression to many of your visitors in Google. Are you enticing a click? Are you making that an enticing call to action to your site?

☑ Header tags

H1, H2, and H3 header tags are still super important. You want to make sure that the title of your page is the H1 and so forth. But just to check on all of that would be good.

☑ Optimize images: compress, title file names, add alt text

Images are the biggest source of bloat of on-page site speed. So you want to make sure that your images are compressed and optimized and keeping your page fast and easily accessible to your users.

☑ Review for freshness

You want to review for freshness. We want to make sure that this is up-to-date content. Maybe take a look at popular content the last year or two of your site and update that stuff. This should be a continual wash and repeat. You want to continue to update the content on your site.

☑ Include commonly asked questions

It’s such an easy thing to do, but it’s commonly overlooked. AnswerThePublic does a great job of surfacing questions. Moz Keyword Explorer has a really great filter that provides some of the most commonly asked questions for a keyword term. I highly suggest you check that out and start to incorporate some of that.

Find common questions now

These help to target featured snippets. So if you’re incorporating some of that, not only do you get the extra traffic, but you find these opportunities of getting featured snippets, which is great. You’re expanding your real estate in search. Awesome. PAA boxes are also a great way to find commonly asked questions for a particular keyword.

☑ Add summaries

Summaries are also hidden gems. We see Google seeking out summaries for content all of the time. They are providing summaries in featured snippets and in different SERP features to help sort of distill information for users. So if you can do that, not only will you make your content more easily scannable, but you’re also making it more accessible for search, which is great.

☑ TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency)

TF-IDF stands for “term frequency-inverse document frequency.” It sounds a little intimidating. It’s actually pretty simple. What’s the number of times that “chakra stones” is mentioned in this particular page divided by the number of times it’s mentioned anywhere? This is basically just a calculation to determine relevance for the term “chakra stones.” Really cool and commonly used by Google. So if you can do this on your on-page, it will just help you in the long term.

☑ LSI (latent semantic indexing) for relevance

Similarly LSI or LSA, it sometimes referred to, is latent semantic indexing, and it’s also for relevance. This helps determine, okay, if I’m talking about chakra stones, it may also incorporate those other topics that are commonly related to this topic. Relevant.

☑ Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

What is the readability of this page? The easier it is to read the better, but you just want to keep an eye on that in general.

Bonus tip!

One final tip that Kameron Jenkins put on Twitter, that I love so much, and Kameron is a world-class writer —she’s one of the best I’ve ever had the privilege of working with — mentioned this on-page SEO trick. Find the top three ranking URLs for your target keyword.

KW research tip

1. Search your target kw & pull the top 3 ranking URLs
2. Compare URLs in @Moz KWE
3. Click on the areas of most overlap
4. See KWs that top-ranking URLs for target KW also rank for
5. Use ideas to optimize your own page! pic.twitter.com/FxJjOxn7DJ
— Kameron Jenkins (@Kammie_Jenkins) November 7, 2018

So if I were to put in “chakra stones” in Google and pull the top three URLs, put them into Moz Keyword Explorer and I see what they’re ranking for, I see what those three URLs are specifically ranking for, and I look at what they’re commonly ranking for in the middle here. Then I use those keywords to optimize my page even better. It’s genius. It’s very similar to some of the relevant stuff we were talking about over here.

Discover new keyword ideas

So definitely try some of this stuff out. I hope this helps. I really look forward to any of your comments or questions down below in the comments section.

Thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to seeing you all again soon, so thanks. Have a good one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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On-Page SEO for 2019 - Whiteboard Friday published first on http://goproski.com/

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

How to Research, Monitor, and Optimize for Questions

Posted by AnnSmarty

Have you been optimizing your content for questions? There are a few powerful reasons for you to start doing it now:

Niche question research is the most powerful content inspiration source
Questions are highly engaging: Asking a question triggers a natural answering reflex in human beings. Using questions on your landing pages and / or social media will improve engagement
Questions are very useful for niche and audience research: What can’t people figure out in your industry and how can you best help them?
Question research allows you to understand natural language better and optimize for voice search
Question optimization allows for increased organic search visibility through both featured snippets and Google’s “People Also Ask” results.

Just to reinforce the latter point, Google is going a bit insane with understanding and featuring questions in SERPs. Here’s just one of their recent experiments showing a multifaceted featured snippet, addressing a possible follow-up question (courtesy of Barry Schwartz):

multifaceted featured snippets

Types of niche questions and how to group them

Basic questions (these usually relate to defining concepts). In most cases you don’t need to write lengthy explanations because people searching for those seek quick easy-to-understand answers.
How-to questions (these usually relate to step-by-step instructions). Adding videos to better explain the process is almost always a good idea here
Branded questions (those usually include your or your competitor’s brand name or a product name). Like any branded queries**, these should be further categorized into:
ROPO questions (“research online, buy online / offline”). These are specific questions discussing your product, its pros and cons, reviews, etc.
- High-intent questions: for example, questions asking how to buy your product.
- Navigational questions: those addressing your site navigation, e.g. “How to login,” “How to cancel,” etc.
- Competitive research questions: those comparing your brand to your competitors.
- Reputational questions: those questions relating to your brand history, culture, etc.

Type of Questions

All branded questions may also be labeled based on possible sentiment.

** Most basic and how-to questions are going to have informational intent (simply due to the essence of the question format: most people asking questions seek to find an answer, i.e. information). But there’s always a chance there’s a transactional intent there that you may want to make note of, too.

For example, “What’s the best CRM” may be a query reflecting a solid commercial intent. Same goes about “How do you use a CRM?” Both can be asked by someone who is willing to give the software a try, and this needs to be reflected within your copy and on-page layout.

Tools to discover questions

1. People Also Ask

“People Also Ask” is a newer Google search element containing related questions to a given query. It’s not clear how Google is generating these (it might be due to enough people typing each question into the search box), but what we do know for sure is:

Google is smart: It would only show things to a user when they have found enough evidence that’s helpful and something their users engage with
“People Also Ask” boxes present more SERPs real estate which we may want to dominate for maximum organic search visibility

2. Google / Bing SERPs

Search results give us lots of cues beyond People Also Ask boxes, provided you use smart tools to analyze them. Text Optimizer is a tool that extracts terms and concepts from SERPs and uses semantic analysis to come up with the list of questions you may want to include in your content:

I believe that is partly what Google is doing to generate those “People Also Ask” suggestions, but this tool will give you more ideas than “People Also Ask” boxes alone.

It supports Google and Bing. You can also copy-paste your text in the tool and it will suggest terms and questions to add to optimize your content better for either search engine.

3. Google Suggest

Google Suggest is another search-based tool for content marketers. Google Suggest auto-completes a user’s query based on how other users tend to complete it. This way, we can safely assume that all Google Suggest results have a solid search volume / demand, simply because they ended up in the suggest index.

The problem with this one is that you need to know how to start typing the question to see it properly completed:

Google Suggest

There’s a workaround that forces Google to autocomplete the middle of the query:

Type your core query and hit search
Put your cursor back at the beginning of the query
Type “how” and Google will suggest more popular queries:

Google Suggest middle of the query

Another way to discover more question-type Google Suggest results is to play with the following tools:

Serpstat Questions is a solid keyword research tool allowing you to generate hundreds of niche questions based on your core query. What’s helpful is that Serpstat allows you to sort results by the question word:

Serpstat Questions

…and filter questions by a popular term in the tag cloud, making it easier to make sense of those multiple results (and optimize for several questions within one content asset):

Serpstat questions filter

Ahrefs is another multi-feature SEO platform that allows users to research related questions with one of its recent updates:

Ahrefs questions

If you end up with too many Google-suggested questions, run your list through Serpstat’s clustering tool to break those questions into meaningful groups based on relevancy.

The screenshot is based on the following settings: Linkage strength - Medium, Type of Clustering - Soft. Once you run it, you can re-run the clustering tool for free with different settings within the project. Don’t forget to export your first set of results before re-running it.

4. Quora and discussion boards

Quora is undoubtedly one of the largest sources of questions out there. In fact, it forces users to post new discussions in a question format, so everything you see there is questions.

Quora’s search functionality is highly confusing though. It has an intricate architecture based on topics (many of which overlap) and it won’t show you most popular questions over time. Its search ranking algorithm is a weird mix of personalization (based on your chosen interests and connections), recency, activity, and probably something else.

Because of this, I rarely use Quora itself. Instead I use Buzzsumo Question Analyzer. It aggregates results from all kinds of discussion boards, including Quora and Amazon Q&A. Furthermore, it analyzes your query and generates results for related keywords allowing you to expand your search and see the bigger picture:

/buzzsumo question analyzer

5. Twitter questions

Twitter is an amazing source of content inspiration few content marketers are really using. One of the must-have Twitter search tricks I always use within my social media monitoring dashboard is Twitter’s question search:

Type [brandname ?] (with the space in-between) into Twitter’s search box and you’ll see all questions people are asking when discussing your topic / brand / product.

If you want to get a bit trickier, monitor your bigger competitor’s tweeted questions, too. This will enable your team to be on top of everything your potential customers cannot figure out when buying from your competitor:

Twitter questiio

Cyfe (disclaimer: this is my content marketing client) is a social media dashboard providing an easy way to monitor multiple Twitter search results within one dashboard. You can use it to monitor all kinds of tweeted questions around your core term or brand name:

Cyfe Twitter Monitoring

6. Reddit AMA

Reddit AMAs offer another great way to pick up some interesting questions to use in your content. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a good reliable way to monitor Reddit for keywords (while restricting to a particular Subreddit) but I’ve been using Twitter monitoring for that.

You can use Cyfe to monitor the #redditama hashtag in combination with your core term. Or you can set up an alert inside My Tweet Alerts. The tool has a pretty unique set of options allowing you to find tweets based on keywords, hashtags, and even words in users’ bios. It sends email digests of most recent tweets making the alerts harder to miss.

For Reddit AMA monitoring, you can set it up to search for tweets that have the #redditama hashtag in them together with your main keyword. Or, to make it more targeted, you can only monitor those tweets published by Twitter users with your keyword in the bio:

MyTweetAlerts Settings

Here’s an example of the announced AMA on a related topic of my interest:

mytweetalerts

All I need to do is to open the AMA thread and scroll through comments in search for interesting questions to note for my future content ideas:

Reddit AMA

How to add questions to your (content) marketing strategy

Niche question research provides an almost unending source of content opportunities. To name a few, here are some ideas on how you can use questions:

Create a separate FAQ section to address and explain basic questions
Identify and optimize existing content to cover the identified questions
Add Q&A to important landing pages (this may help get product pages featured in Google).

But it’s not really only about content:

Different actions + teams for different types of questions

Keeping our initial question categorization above in mind, here’s how question research may (or rather, should) involve multiple departments within your company:

You can download this worksheet with clickable links here.

Basic (what-is) questions:

Types of content to answer these questions: Glossary, FAQ
Specific SEO considerations:
- Clickable table of contents (see sample)
- Implement QAPage Schema
Other teams to get involved: Customer support and sales team (including for training). You want those teams to use jargon your customers use

How-to questions:

Types of content to answer these questions: FAQ (+ videos)
Specific SEO considerations: Use HowTo Schema (Including Yoast for WP)
Other teams to get involved: Include your CRO expert because these could be transactional

Branded ROPO questions:

Types of content to answer these questions: Blog content (+ video tutorials)
Specific SEO considerations: Optimize for as many related branded terms as possible
Other teams to get involved: Include your product management team for them to collect answers (feedback) and implement required product updates / improvements). Add these to your editorial schedule as high-priority

Branded high-intent questions:

Types of content to answer these questions: Product Q&A
Specific SEO considerations: Implement QAPage Schema
Other teams to get involved: Include your CRO expert and A/B testing expert for optimum on-page conversion optimization

Branded navigational questions:

Types of content to answer these questions: Product-specific knowledge base (+ video tutorials)
Specific SEO considerations: Implement QAPage Schema or use a Q&A-optimized solution (like this one)
Other teams to get involved: Include your design and usability teams to solve navigational issues

Branded competitive research questions:

Types of content to answer these questions: Create specific landing pages + videos to explain your product benefits
Specific SEO considerations: Optimize for as many related branded terms as possible
Other teams to get involved: Include your product management team for them to collect answers (feedback) and implement required product updates / improvements. Include your sales team for them to know how to best explain your product benefits to clients

Branded competitive reputational questions

Types of content to answer these questions: Create specific landing pages + videos
Specific SEO considerations: Optimize for as many related branded terms as possible
Other teams to get involved: Include your reputation management + social media teams to address these questions properly when they have to

Takeaways:

Questions are useful on many levels, from audience research to conversion optimization and product development
As far as SEO is concerned, optimizing for questions helps you develop better-targeted copy and gain more organic search visibility (especially through appearing in featured and “People Also Ask” boxes)
Researching questions is an ongoing process: You need to be constantly discovering new ones and monitoring social media for real-time ideas
There are lots of tools to help you discover and organize niche questions (when it comes to organizing them, using your favorite tools or even simply spreadsheets is always a good idea)
Question research is not just for SEO or content ideation. It can help improve social media engagement, help you develop a better product, train your internal teams to better explain product advantages to clients, etc.

Are you researching and optimizing for niche questions yet? Please share your tips and tricks in the comments below!

How to Research, Monitor, and Optimize for Questions published first on http://goproski.com/

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

TOP 5 SKI RESORTS IN HOKKAIDO | JAPAN SKIING GUIDE

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