Learn how SEO and paid ads work together to improve search visibility, uncover valuable keywords, reach more customers, and create a stronger digital marketing strategy.
What Types of Content Perform Best in AI Search?
How Can Businesses Get Mentioned by ChatGPT and Gemini?
Is AI Engine Optimization Replacing SEO?
What Are the Best AI Engine Optimization Strategies for Small Businesses?
Should Every Business Invest in AI Engine Optimization?
Can AI Search Send More Qualified Traffic Than Google?
How Can AI Improve Your Digital Marketing Results?
What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Why Is Topical Authority More Important Than Keywords in AI Search?
How Often Should You Update Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
What Is AI Engine Optimization and Why Does It Matter?
How to Increase Organic Search Traffic
In this blog, we will answer many of your questions about Organic Search Traffic. If you need to improve, track, or gauge your organic search traffic, you’re in the right place.
How to Increase Organic Search Traffic:
There are several ways to increase organic search traffic:
Optimize your website for search engines by doing keyword research, using relevant meta tags, and creating high-quality content.
Build backlinks to your website from other high-quality websites in your industry. This can help improve your website's authority and search engine rankings.
Use social media to promote your content and attract more visitors to your website.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly as mobile searches are increasing day by day.
Update your content regularly with fresh and relevant information, keeping in mind the latest trends.
Use Google Analytics to track your website's traffic and spot areas of improvement.
Utilize long-tail keywords and conversational queries as they tend to rank higher in search results compared to generic terms
It's essential to keep in mind that an increase in organic traffic does not happen overnight; it requires continuous optimization and improvement over time.
How to Find Organic Search Traffic in Google Analytics
To find organic search traffic in Google Analytics, you can follow these steps:
Log in to your Google Analytics account and select the website or property you want to analyze.
Click on the "Acquisition" tab located in the left-hand menu and then click on "All Traffic".
Next, click on "Channels" to view a breakdown of your website's traffic.
Look for the "Organic Search" channel listed under "Default Channel Grouping", which shows traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, etc.
Click on the "Organic Search" channel to see further insights such as landing pages, search queries, geographic locations, and more.
Alternatively, you can create a custom report that includes organic search traffic data. You can do this by clicking on the "Customization" tab in the top navigation bar and selecting "New Custom Report". From there, you can add metrics such as sessions, bounce rate, and conversions along with dimensions such as source/medium, landing pages, etc., and choose organic search as a filter.
Tracking Organic Search Traffic as a Measure of SEO Success
Organic Search Traffic can be seen as a great measure of SEO success. This is because it is a reflection of all your optimization efforts. Analyzing organic search traffic is crucial to understanding the effectiveness of SEO strategies.
Additionally, tracking organic search traffic can help you further optimize your website for SEO. You can use the collected data and analytics to inform decisions around content creation, keyword targeting, website design and much more. Search engine optimization is a dynamic process that involves continuous monitoring and adjustment to maximize visibility on search engine result pages.
What is a Good Organic Search Percentage?
Good organic search percentage typically varies depending on the industry, competition, and website traffic levels. In general, a healthy organic search percentage would be around 40-50%. However, some established websites with high traffic may have lower organic search percentages but still receive a substantial amount of traffic from search engines.
It's important to note that organic search alone should not be considered the only important metric for a website's success, and other factors such as engagement, conversion rates, and overall traffic should also be taken into consideration. Check out this helpful guide to find out more about Google’s SEO metrics.
What is Direct Traffic vs Organic Search?
Direct traffic refers to website visitors who arrive at a website by typing the website URL directly into their browser or by clicking on a bookmark. Organic search, on the other hand, refers to the traffic that comes to a website from search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing.
Organic search results are based on a user's search query and the relevance of web pages to that query. So, in short, direct traffic is when users visit a website directly by typing in the URL, while organic search traffic is when users find the website through search results.
Need help with improving your site’s organic search traffic? Contact us and we'll reach out within 1 to 2 business days!
How Do I Find My Keyword Ranking on Google?
You can find your keyword ranking on Google by using a keyword tracker tool such as Ahrefs or SEMrush. These tools allow you to input your website and target keywords, and then track their rankings over time. Another way is to manually search for the keyword on Google and look for your website in the search results. However, this may not be as accurate or comprehensive as using a dedicated tool.
Measuring SEO Performance with Keyword Rankings
One key metric when looking to understand how well your website is performing is keyword ranking. This looks at where your website is positioned in SERPs for specific keywords, helping you understand if you’ve made the right optimizations and where you need to make further improvements
Keyword rankings provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of an SEO strategy, as they indicate how well a website is performing against target search terms. In order to optimize a website for search engines, it is essential to understand which keywords potential customers are using to search for products, services or information offered on the site.
Ideally, the website would appear at the top of the results page for these keywords. That’s why keyword research is an essential part of any SEO strategy. By analyzing search queries and determining the most relevant keywords, marketers can optimize content using these keywords and increase their website’s visibility in the SERPs.
Tracking Keyword Rankings
Tracking keyword rankings is one of the most important metrics for measuring SEO success. Keyword rankings are a way of measuring how well a website or page is performing in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s a way of seeing if a website is ranking for the right keywords and if it is competing with other websites in its niche.
Keyword rankings can also be used to measure the success of SEO efforts over time, as they can show if SEO strategies are working or if they need to be adjusted. Keyword rankings can be tracked by using a variety of tools, including Google Analytics, Search Console, and Moz.
All in all, keyword ranking is a key metric when evaluating the performance of a website. It shows you how your website is placed for certain keywords in the SERPs and can help you identify whether you've made the right optimizations and what changes you need to make. Keeping track of your keyword ranking will help ensure that your website is as successful as possible.
How to Check What Keywords a Website Ranks For
To check what keywords a website ranks for, you can use a keyword research tool. There are many such tools available, both free and paid.
Here's how you can do it:
Identify the website you want to check the keywords for.
Find a keyword research tool that provides this feature (some popular options include Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, and Moz).
Enter the website URL into the tool and select the option to view the website's organic search rankings.
The tool will generate a report displaying the keywords that the website is currently ranking for in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Note that not all tools may provide the same level of accuracy or depth of information, and results may vary depending on the specific algorithms used by each tool.
Tracking Keywords is critical to measuring your success in maintaining an effective presence online for your business. Our SEO services include monthly updates on your site’s keyword changes. Please contact us to start improving your business’ success.
Why Did My Domain Authority Go Down?
Today we will cover the topics of why my Domain Authority went down and how to improve my Domain Authority. It is important to understand Domain Authority if you want to have a successful digital presence with plenty of web traffic.
Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score that measures the strength of a website's domain. It is measured on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs) and higher visibility in search results. A website with a high Domain Authority can be thought of as a more reliable source than one with a lower score.
Having a higher Domain Authority will allow your website to appear closer to the top of search engine results, leading to increased website traffic and better chances of success. It is important to monitor your domain authority as it can help you understand how well your website is performing in organic search results, and which competitors are outranking you.
If your domain authority is lower than your competitors, you may want to make changes to ensure you are performing better in the SERPs. This can be done by increasing the quality of your content, building more high-quality links, and improving the overall user experience of your website.
Improving your domain authority involves optimizing your website content, improving the quality and quantity of incoming links, and increasing the usability of the website for visitors. Making sure you have these factors in place can help you achieve higher rankings on SERPs and gain increased visibility for your website.
Why Did My Domain Authority Go Down?
There could be several reasons why your domain authority went down, including:
Low-quality backlinks: Your site may have low-quality links that are not relevant to your niche or are from spammy websites. These types of links can harm your website's authority.
Changes in search algorithms: Search engines like Google make updates to improve their services, and their updates to the algorithms might have affected your domain authority.
Lack of new content: Creating fresh content regularly can help maintain and improve your domain authority. If you haven't published any new material, then that could be the reason for the decline.
Technical issues: Speed, mobile response, and crawl errors on your website can cause decreased domain authority.
How to Improve my Domain Authority
Domain authority is a metric that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). To improve your website's domain authority, here are some tips:
Publish high-quality content: Regularly publish informative and engaging content that is relevant to your niche and target audience.
Build high-quality backlinks: Focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites within your niche.
Optimize on-page elements: Ensure that your title tags, meta description, URLs, and header tags are optimized and relevant to your content.
Improve website loading speed: Make sure your website loads quickly, as fast-loading websites are favored by search engines.
Use responsive web design: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as Google now prioritizes mobile-first indexing.
Monitor and fix technical issues: regularly audit your website for any technical issues such as broken links, error pages, and duplicate content, and fix them.
Engage with readers and build your social media presence: respond promptly to comments and questions from your readers and promote your content on social media to increase engagement and referral traffic.
In review, most SEO improvements come from improvements to the quality and relevance of your content, helping the searcher get the best answer they are seeking quickly, and fixing technical issues. To find out more about the SEO metrics that Google uses, check out this useful guide.
Need to improve your Domain Authority? Feel free to contact us for an affordable and effective solution to your digital marketing needs.
What is Page Authority?
In today’s blog, we will cover what Page Authority is and how to increase Page Speed Score for SEO. These concepts are important to understand if you want to rank on Google Search Engine Results Pages.
What is Page Authority?
Page authority is a measure of the overall strength of the page in terms of how it ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs) and is determined by several factors. It's based on a 1-100 scale and measures the likelihood that the page will rank for specific key phrases or topics. It takes into account things like quality, link profile, and content, as well as other criteria that search engines use to determine relevance.
Page authority can help determine the ranking potential of a page, but it's important to remember that page authority should never be the sole factor used when optimizing for SEO. It takes into account a variety of factors, such as the quality of inbound links, the quality and quantity of content on the page, and the age and history of the domain, to determine a score between 0 and 100.
This score can be used to compare pages against one another and to gain insights into how well they are optimized for search engine performance. Additionally, the SEO ranking score is a great tool to use when analyzing a website's potential performance in search engines. It can be used to identify which elements need to be improved and which should be maintained.
How to Increase Page Score for SEO?
There are several ways to increase page score for SEO. Here are a few suggestions:
Optimize your website’s content: Make sure your content is high quality, easy to read, and keyword-rich. Use H1 tags and subheadings to help Google identify what your pages are about.
Improve page speed: A fast loading speed is important for a good user experience and can also improve search engine rankings. You can improve page speed by compressing images, minimizing code, and using a content delivery network (CDN).
Use backlinks: High-quality links from other websites to your website signals to Google that your website is authoritative and trustworthy.
Focus on mobile optimization: Nowadays, mobile optimization is crucial as the majority of users are accessing the internet through their mobiles. Ensure that your website is mobile responsive.
Optimize metadata: it is essential that you optimize on-page elements like title tags, meta descriptions and tags.
Focus on Local SEO: Create and optimize your Google My Business profile for local search rankings. You can also target keywords that have local search intent.
Regularly update your website: Fresh and unique content offers great value to users and search engines rank such websites higher as they see this as a reliable source of information.
How to Increase Page Speed Score for SEO?
Increasing page speed score can improve the user experience and boost SEO performance of your website. Here are some tips to increase your page speed score:
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve your content from a server closest to the user's location.
Optimize images by compressing them without losing quality using tools like Photoshop, GIMP, or TinyPNG.
Minimize HTTP requests by combining CSS and JavaScript files, and avoiding too many plugins.
Enable browser caching to store temporary data on the visitor's computer, reducing loading time on return visits.
Use a fast and reliable hosting service with top-notch security and customer support.
Optimize your code by removing any unused or unnecessary code, especially in CSS and JavaScript files.
Reduce the size of your pages by removing unnecessary elements or large media files.
Make sure to use asynchronous loading of JavaScript files to avoid slowing down other page assets until the script has fully loaded.
Keep in mind that there are many factors involved in page speed and optimization, and it is essential to continuously monitor and test your website to optimize for better performance. If you’d like to learn more about the SEO metrics that Google uses, check out this helpful guide.
Need help with increasing your Page Authority Score? Contact us and we'll reach out within 1 to 2 business days!
What Metric is SEO Measured in?
Why Backlinks Are Important
We've already talked about the first three pillars of SEO: Keywords, Technical, and Content. We will now cover the fourth SEO pillar, Backlinks. Backlinks have been and remain the primary ranking factor for websites for over a decade. This isn't just our experience; it's backed up by a ranking factor study that SEMRush conducted.
Do Backlinks Help SEO?
Yes, SEMRush discovered that domains with more backlinks have higher SERP positions. We briefly touched on this in the Domain Authority blog; backlinks can be thought of as confidence votes that this website is valid and its content is useful. However, not everyone's vote (backlink) counts for equal authority.
You may be surprised to find that some backlinks are hurting your rankings and can cause a penalty on your site. This illuminates a darker side of SEO full of malicious intent known as 'black hat' SEO.
I must issue a word of caution before continuing on this topic. Backlinks are a narrow path surrounded by temptation to do things the wrong way. I cannot stress this enough: Do Not Buy or Pay For Backlinks. Google will issue what's known as a manual penalty and it will severely cripple your rankings and ultimately your traffic.
Do not try to scheme the algorithm. Google's algorithm is far too comprehensive to get away with buying backlinks these days. Trying to recover from a manual penalty will cost much more than doing things the right way.
Before attempting to get new backlinks, you must take stock of your existing profile of backlinks. You can use Google Search Console to view your backlinks for free. Alternatively, SEMRush offers an audit tool that rates backlinks' with a 'toxicity score'.
How to Check Backlinks in Google Search Console
Navigate to Google search console, then select your property in the top left of the dropdown menu. On the left menu, scroll down to Links. Go to Top Linking Sites to see a list of domains linking to you. Clicking on these domains will provide more detailed information about specific target pages and number of links. On the top right of any report, you can also click Export to your preferred spreadsheet.
Is a Backlink No Follow or Not?
While on the page that the link is coming from, press CTRL+U to view the source code (in Chrome/Firefox/Brave), then CTRL+F to Find your domain URL. Here you'll be able to view the anchor text and see if the link is nofollow or not. Simply check if there is a 'nofollow' tag. If there is not a nofollow tag there, then it's a do follow.
It's wise to check some of these domains to make sure they are legitimate and not part of a linkfarm. This is where an experienced SEO specialist can really benefit you. It's difficult to accurately describe signs of a link farm as they are constantly changing and evolving tactics. If you suspect the link could negatively affect you, there are a couple of options we can go into later.
The Links page in the Search Console has External Links, Internal Links, Top Linking Text and Top Linking Sites. Internal links allow you to examine your domain's internal link structure. Backlinks are basically what's known as external links from other sites to your domain.
It's a good idea to check the Top Linking Text section. If the anchor text in this list is mostly the same exact terms, it could look unnatural and lead to a penalty. For example, if you had a long list of exactly the same anchor text, Google would suspect this as manipulation.
How to do a Backlink Audit with SEMRush
If you have a subscription to SEMRush, you can use their backlink tool to easily conduct an audit. Open SEMRush, navigate to the link building section, and click Backlink Audit Tool. Create a project and run an audit. You will be provided with an overall toxicity score. If your site has a high toxic domain percentage, we can handle it in a couple of ways.
The first is to work on getting better quality backlinks. Easier said than done. However, this will offset the negative impact of low quality backlinks. If the backlinks are of really poor quality, you can attempt to remove them by reaching out to the site. If this fails then as the final solution, you may disavow them through google.
What is a Disavow?
Disavowing backlinks can have a negative impact on your SEO performance if you are not careful and this should really be a last resort. You're essentially losing all authority gained from any links you disavow, good or bad.
How to Build Backlinks?
Here are some basic guidelines for acquiring backlinks. First, ensure the link is relevant to your website. For instance, if you run a wedding venue, you should get backlinks from wedding sites and bridal bloggers.
Second, it needs to be a real website with organic traffic, not a fake front propped up by bots or paid traffic. This is a bit of a cyclic chicken or the egg, but if it has organic traffic, then Google probably trusts it. The opposite is likely true if there is no organic traffic and caution should be taken.
Thirdly, the site is authoritative. This may be hard to gauge, but using an authority estimation tool can assist greatly. Moz offers a toolbar, and SEMRush can also gauge domain authority. Simple rule: Higher authority domains offer higher quality backlinks. SEMRush also has a backlink opportunity tool to show if it's worth pursuing that opportunity or not based on its organic traffic and other metrics.
Thanks for following along and we really hope that you find this backlink explanation helpful. Esseodigital is a digital marketing service providing agency experience at a freelance price. If you’re interested in boosting your business’ marketing success, please contact us.
Content Centric SEO
Previously, we covered the first and second pillars of SEO, Keywords and Technical. Let’s talk about the third pillar: Content. You’ve already figured out good keywords, and you have fixed your technical performance. The next thing to do is enhance your content. There is an easy method to improve a web page’s content for SEO.
What is Keyword Cannibalization in SEO?
The first thing to watch for is keyword cannibalization. Keyword cannibalization occurs if multiple pages are focusing on the same search phrase. This will hurt your SEO efficiency because it’s putting the burden on google to make a decision. The decision is to choose the most well-suited page for the keyword. Any time we leave a decision to google, it’s using more of their resources, and they don’t like that happening too much. Also, they don’t know as much about your site as you might. As SEOs, it’s our task to guide google.
The search advocate at google, John Mueller, said the following about Keyword cannibalization:
“We just rank the content as we get it. If you have a bunch of pages with roughly the same content, it’s going to compete with each other, kinda like a bunch of kids wanting to be first in line, and ultimately someone else slips in ahead of them. Personally, I prefer fewer stronger pages over lots of weaker ones - don’t water your site’s value down.”
How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalization?
The easiest way to find keyword cannibalization is to use SEMRush’s position tracking tool: Go to Keyword Research and click on Position Tracking. Click on New Position Tracking to start a new project. Enter your target keywords and start the scan. Once it is complete, open the project and then click on the Cannibalization tab. This report will show you occurrences of keyword cannibalization for the keywords you entered earlier.
How to Optimize Content for SEO?
The second content check is easy. Does the page need to be upgraded? Your SEO pages should be unique and better than the content already there. Third content check - is the page optimized well? On just about every page, your primary keyword should be in the following areas, as long as putting it there sounds authentic to the user:
URL
Title
H1 Tag
In order to step up your performance, it’s a good idea to use SEMRush’s on-page SEO checker. Go to the On Page & Tech SEO section on the left column, click on “On Page SEO Checker” and start a new project. Click continue to import keywords and pages. Then you can select what you want to do. For this example, use the Manual option to enter a target URL and the exact keyword phrase to rank for and then click collect ideas. SEMRush will then offer a multitude of ways to optimize the target page from a strategy, content, semantic, technical, UX and link building perspective. It’s a good idea to benchmark where you stand today and then act on the recommendations SEMRush offers.
The fourth content check you should ask yourself is, does the page have enough internal link coverage? Back on the Audit page, check if your target page is getting enough internal link coverage. The fifth check is does the page need more topical authority? If you think the page doesn’t have much in terms of internal link coverage, then it probably lacks topical authority as well. You need to create more keyword-driven content to support that fundamental resource.
Check out the next pillar of SEO, Backlinks. Esseodigital is a digital marketing service providing agency experience at a freelance price. If you’re interested in boosting your businesses marketing success, please contact us.
How to do Technical SEO
Previously, we covered the first pillar of SEO, Keywords. Now we'll be moving on to the second pillar, Technical SEO. You might think to yourself, “self, I've used some awesome keywords but why hasn't my site started ranking for any of these?” I'll tell you.
How Important is Technical SEO
Your site will not rank without optimizing for technical performance. You can imagine technical as if it were a house's foundation. A foundation alone probably won't get you first page rankings but you have to build on something solid in order to get to the top. Otherwise your site will keep sinking. We can discuss in-depth SEO audits in a future blog. However, let's go over some quick methods to easy gains real fast.
How to Conduct a Technical SEO Site Audit
First, go into SEMrush and on the left menu near the bottom of the SEO section, look for "On Page & Tech SEO". Click Site Audit, then add new project, type your domain in and a name for your project. Before going any further, open a new tab to google.com and type the following: site:yourdomainhere.com. For example, if we use site:esseodigital.com, google has indexed 34 pages at the time of this writing.
So back on SEMrush, I'll select 100 pages per audit. You will just want to set a limit above the number of pages your domain has indexed. The rest of the settings should be fine. Click start site audit to begin, and once it's complete it can be quite overwhelming. SEMrush shows a ton of data and opportunities. If you were able to snap your fingers and fix all these immediately, that'd be quite a perfect world.
However, all fixes take time, so we have to prioritize the most effective fixes and solutions first. This is really where the experience in being an effective SEO comes in to play. Some of these opportunities will have a much larger reaching impact on performance. From a top level, we need to optimize three core categories to accomplish excellent technical SEO performance.
How to Prioritize Technical SEO Tasks
First things first. Your site must be crawlable and indexable. Kind of like Layer 1 of the OSI model, it's like physically plugging in the equipment. Many elements influence your crawlability and indexability but the most prevalent is your site's architecture, page experience, robots.txt, and noindex tags. Some of these could prevent google from crawling some or any of the pages on your site. So back in the SEMrush audit section, click on the Issues tab, then click category dropdown, and select crawlability to see all the possible issues that will negatively impact your site crawlability.
Then change the category to indexability to view what could prevent your site's indexation. Focus on fixing these errors as soon as you can, because if google cannot crawl your pages then they're not going to be indexed. And that means if they're not indexed, it's impossible to rank.
Second, you need to optimize for user experience (UX). One of the most important UX factors is page loading speed. If pages take too long to load, this is the biggest reason people will get frustrated and leave your site. You must do everything in your power to improve loading speed and page experience. While in the overview tab of the SEMrush audit, you'll see the new core web vital score. Click view details and you'll be able to see exactly which pages need improvement.
The nice part about focusing your efforts for core web vitals is that any of this work will have positive influence site-wide. This means you won't have to go to each and every page optimizing for core web vitals for the lion's share of your pages.
Are Internal Links Good for SEO?
The third technical backbone you need to improve is the flow of your site design. In other words, the architecture of your site. How do you use internal linking to guide users along through your site? There are a number of core principles when it comes to internal linking. The first is pages should not be any more than three clicks deep. Any more can hurt crawlability and indexability. Back in the SEMRush audit, click on the crawled pages tab. Click 'more filters', under the dropdown menu select Crawl Depth. To the right of this box, select 4+ clicks and apply filters. This will show you the pages you need to move up in the architecture.
The second step of site architecture optimization is finding the pages that have limited internal link coverage. SEMRush's Audit has an internal link rank that's an easy way to locate these pages. Under the same Crawled Pages tab we just used, select Internal LinkRank (ILR) from the drop down. This is a score mechanism used by SEMRush to measure estimated domain authority and link equity of the pages on your site. If there are many internal links from pages with many backlinks, the ILR score will be higher. A lower score indicates inadequate internal link coverage. You can filter these results by selecting 'Less than 10' from the drop down menu and apply filters again. This will show you all the pages that need more internal link 'TLC' attention.
This has been a quick overview of Technical SEO optimization. There are boundless depths to dive into with Technical SEO that we can cover in a future blog. If you are in search of a Technical SEO specialist, feel free to contact us. We have a plethora of knowledge on the topic and would love to help improve your business' success.