Here’s a Customized List of Keywords You Can Rank For Today

Everyone says SEO takes a while and it does.

Especially if you want to rank for competitive terms like “auto insurance” or “credit cards”.

But there must be a list of keywords that you can rank for today that is super easy to rank for, yet the keywords are still good in which they will drive traffic and sales.

And to help you find those keywords we released a new Ubersuggest feature that will show you a list of keywords that are perfect for your site in less than 60 seconds.

What do you consider “easy” Neil?

What’s easy for my site NeilPatel.com to rank for, maybe hard for your site.

And what may be easy for Wikipedia to rank for, maybe hard for my site.

“Easy” is very relative to the site. Depending on your domain authority and the age of your site, a keyword could be easy or hard to rank for.

So, with Ubersuggest, we took that into account when it came to giving you a list of keywords that are “easy” to rank for.

The list is based on your site and what would be easy for you. We base that on a wide variety of factors such as domain authority, age of the site, what you currently rank for, and your current organic traffic level.

How to find easy keywords that are still valuable

Now let’s go find you some keywords that you can start ranking for.

I want you to head over to Ubersuggest and type in a keyword related to your space and click on “Search”.

If you are unsure what keyword to type in, it can be any related to your website and it can be generic. For example, if you have a site that sells “dog food” you can type in the keyword “dog food” or even something like “dog”.

For this example, I used the term “digital marketing” as the NeilPatel.com site isn’t just about SEO I cover all aspects of online marketing.

You should see a report that looks something like this.

It’s an overview of the keyword. It tells you how many people search for the keyword each month. It even breaks down how many people search for that keyword on mobile and desktop devices.

In the left-hand navigation click on “keyword ideas”.

You’ll see a report that looks something like this:

This report is showing you all the similar keywords of the phrase you typed in. In this case, these are all the words and phrases related to digital marketing. There are also tabs on that report, such as related, questions, prepositions, and comparisons. These tabs show even more keyword ideas for you.

Now click on the button that says “Page 1 Ranking Potential”:

Once you enter your domain you’ll see all the keywords you can rank for.

When I put Npdigital.com, my ad agency, it filters the results and shows me keywords that are easier to rank for.

When I put in NeilPatel.com it doesn’t really filter much because the site has so much authority I have the ability to rank for most keywords.

When I put in brand new sites it filters much more. Like when I put in my holding company site it shows me keywords that aren’t competitive at all, but of course, I have even a smaller list as I barely have any authority with that site.

Once you have a list, I want you to look for keywords that contain the following traits:

  • Traffic greater than 100 – even if a keyword is searched 100 times it doesn’t mean you will get 100 visits if you rank number 1. You will only get a fraction of that. So you don’t want to aim too small.
  • High CPC – CPC stands for cost per click. That is what someone pays per click if they advertised on Google Ads. The higher the number the better as it typically means the keyword converts from a visitor to a customer standpoint.
  • Low SEO difficulty – the lower the “SD” or “SEO difficulty” number the easier the keyword is to rank for. So, target keywords with the lowest number first assuming they meet the above 2 points as well.
  • Relevancy – even if a keyword meets the above 3 points, you have to make sure the keyword is relevant to your business. If it isn’t related to what you do then you wouldn’t want to waste your time targeting it. Traffic for the sake of traffic is just a waste of money because you are putting in time and energy optimizing your site for keywords.

Conclusion

SEO is great, but it does take time.

It’s the reason why some people think SEO is dead when it really isn’t. It is just more so competitive and takes longer to rank for popular terms.

So, give this new feature a try. Head over to Ubersuggest and put in a keyword and see what is easy for you to rank for today.

What do you think about the new feature?

How to Find and Grow Your Amazon Sales Rank

Are you a seller on Amazon?

If so, you need to understand the importance of your Amazon sales rank and how it can help (or harm) your business.

What is Amazon Sales Rank?

Amazon sales rank (also known as best sellers rank or BSR) is a numerical score representing an item’s popularity in both its overall category and respective subcategories.

What does that mean? Let’s look at Jenga’s performance. While Jenga scored position three in the overall category of Toys & Games, it earned the number one rank in Stacking Games.

Where to find your Amazon sales rank

With this level of visibility into performance, sellers can view performance on multiple levels.

Amazon sales rank can range from one to over a million, with lower scores indicating superior rank. The metric is calculated hourly using the number of recent sales, as well as historical sales in relation to other products in the same category.

Wondering how you can find your product’s Amazon sales rank?

It’s easier than you think. Simply scroll to the bottom of your product page until you encounter the Product Details section. Then, look for the Amazon Best Sellers Rank. 

Now that you’ve found your Amazon sales rank, you’re probably wondering, ‘is this a good score?’ When it comes to sales rank, all things are relative. 

If you’re in a saturated category, a “good” score could still be an astronomically high figure. Conversely, if you’re in a small, niche community, a score that may present as low may not actually mean that much. As a general rule, you’ll want to aim for a score under 2,000.

Why Is Your Amazon Sales Rank Important

You might think your Amazon sales rank doesn’t have much bearing on your present performance, as is based on past performance. However, there are four distinct reasons why you should care about your ranking.

Amazon Sales Rank Shows Trust

For Amazon sellers, having a low Amazon sales rank is vital to success on the e-commerce site. Since rankings are used to define product popularity within a specific genre, and comparatively with its competitors, consider your sales rank as a vote of confidence in popularity of your product. 

Provides a Competitive Edge

In addition to serving as a testimonial to the popularity of your product, Amazon sales rank provides insight into your competitors by providing visibility of the most high-performing products in your category. By assessing products that hold top Amazon sales ranks, you can then reassess your own campaign through their lens, optimizing your listing and marketing strategies accordingly.

It Increases Sales

In addition to credibility, consumers are more likely to purchase a product that others have also bought. What’s the likelihood that you would buy a product online without any reviews? None, most likely. 

The same premise is at work here—more sales means more reviews, leading to even more sales. 

It improves Brand Awareness

If your products are routinely ranking in top positions in your category or subcategories, buyers will notice. By increasing your products’ positive visibility, you can increase the visibility and awareness of your brand.

6 Ways to Increase Your Amazon Sales Rank

While it may feel like your sales rank is completely out of your control and dependent solely upon your consumers, there are actions you can take to drive sales and increase your Amazon sales rank.

Let’s look at six strategies to increase your sales rank. 

1. Incentivize Reviews to Increase Amazon Sales Rank

Eighty-eight percent of consumers trust online reviews just as much as they trust word-of-mouth recommendations from their friends and family. Positive reviews can be the tipping point that causes a consumer to choose your product over a competitor’s.

While Amazon has banned true financial incentivization of reviews (such as offering a discount or payments) there are still options to encourage shoppers to leave glowing reviews. Here’s a few ways to increase your online reviews.  

Follow Up

After a purchase is made, send a follow-up email. In this email, you can include a valuable piece of informational content that will grow goodwill between buyer and seller, perhaps leading to future purchases and future reviews.

You can also opt for Amazon to automatically send an email to the purchaser to review the product. This is a quick, easy way to score some valuable reviews.

Amazon autogenerates email to request review for increased Amazon sales rank

Inserts in Packaging

Including a valuable piece of content in your packaging can also encourage customers to leave a review. Consider including a hand-written note that encourages the consumer to leave a review, which will also further foster that sentiment of connection. Even a printed thank you note with a reminder to review can help. 

Amazon Vine

Amazon Vine is an internal program that offers products for free to trusted Amazon customers in return for feedback. The goal is to encourage honest reviews from real customers and is invitation-only for participants. 

The only catch here is that you must be an Amazon vendor to participate in this program.

2. Do Keyword Research to Improve Amazon Sales Rank

We believe that keyword research should be the foundation of any online campaign, and selling on Amazon is no different. Identifying the right keywords for your product can be the differentiator between success and failure. 

As you craft your Amazon listings, include your keywords in your title and bullets. By including these terms, you ensure more searchers see your listing, which, in turn, increases the likelihood that your product will be purchased.

3. Use Quality Photos to Increase Amazon Sales Rank

Photos matter. In fact, 63 percent of consumers report that photos are more important to them when shopping on Amazon than verbal descriptions. It pays to invest in quality photos. 

As you select photos to include in your listing, think about what you would want to see as a consumer. Would an image that incorporates an infographic be effective? Would an image of an individual using your product convey value? If you take your own photos, look for tips that will help you take professional-level photos. 

Regardless of which approach works best for your product, quality photos can attract and convert attention, drive sales, and increase your Amazon sale rank.

4. Write Good Sales Copy

A lot of Amazon product listings showcase some pretty lackluster writing. Common offenses include un-optimized pages, titles stuffed with keywords, and sentences that don’t even make sense (which won’t inspire trust in your company.) 

To help your product stand out from the crowd and drive more purchases, write thoughtful sales copy for each of your product listings. Focus on the benefits your product offers and what makes it stand out. 

Amazon visitors come with commercial intent. If you can attract them with strong sales copy, they’re that much more likely to convert.

5. Optimize Product Description and Title

Here’s a fun fact—90 percent of Amazon product listings don’t adhere to Amazon’s description requirements. Just like Google, Amazon makes frequent algorithm updates. Staying current on recommended listing details, including character counts and word limits, can help your products perform better and increase visibility.  

When crafting product descriptions and titles, remember that Amazon users are shopping on the platform because it is quick and easy. If your would-be consumer struggles to understand your products, they’re likely not returning for a second look. 

To make your titles stand out among the multitudes, try these three things:

  • be creative
  •  adhere to Amazon’s 200-character limit
  •  use descriptive titles that communicates what your product is 

Be sure to use Amazon’s best practices when creating product titles. They exist for a reason, so be sure to implement them in your title strategy

  • first letter of primary words must be capitalized
  • on’t use an ampersand
  • share exact size detail
  • use numerals when conveying numbers

6. Promote Your Products to Increase Amazon Sales Rank

The conversion rate in the Amazon Marketplace averages around 15 percent, considerably higher than other e-commerce platforms. The key to ensuring your products see that level of conversion is to ensure and increase visibility. If no one sees your product, no one can buy it. 

While there are a number of ways to promote your products on Amazon, we’ve gathered our top three to share with you.

Invest in Sponsored Product Ads

To increase your product’s visibility, consider investing in sponsored product ads. As a seller, you only are charged when a buyer clicks on your ad, so this is a reasonably priced way to get your product in front of fresh eyes. 

sponsored products can increase Amazon sales rank

In the above ad, the sponsored product appears on the first page of search results.

Use Your Social Channels 

Harnessing the power of your business’ social channels is a great way to get your products seen by more buyers. While you don’t want to inundate your followers with ad after ad, there are a few strategies you can employ to get your Amazon listings noticed.

  • Host a giveaway or contest: By creating a contest that encourages people to interact with your Amazon product listing, you increase visibility. For example, you could give away a product to a lucky winner who shares your Amazon listing in their bio or in their stories.
  • Share content with a link to your Amazon listing: When you post a helpful blog specific to your industry, people will come to that content to learn. Not only will this establish you as a thought leader in your industry, it also is an opportunity to link to your Amazon listings and increase visibility.
  • Offer a social media promo code: If you have a Professional Selling account on Amazon, you can create a promotion link to share through social highlighting a discount offered on the listing. Here’s a guide for navigating setting up a promotion link.

Offer a Lightning Deal 

Increase interest in your product by offering shoppers a Lightning Deal. These sales are time-sensitive and buyers can locate them in Amazon’s Today’s Deals section. These are extremely popular with shoppers as they urge action given their time-sensitive nature.

When you include your product in Amazon’s Today’s Deals sections, you not only will increase your sales, but you’ll inevitably boost your Amazon Sale Rank. 

Conclusion 

Now that you understand the components that make up your Amazon sales rank, it’s time to start optimizing your store for more purchases.

Whether you start by researching keywords for your e-commerce store or shining up your existing copy, you’ll be on your way to improving product visibility. As that visibility increases, so will your sales, driving your sales rank up simultaneously.

What’s your most successful strategy for increasing Amazon sales rank?

The post How to Find and Grow Your Amazon Sales Rank appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Rank Your Old, Outdated Content

What percentage of your search traffic is driven by your top 10 pages?

Chances are, it’s a large portion.

Just look at the screenshot below. You’ll see that my top 10 pages drive 28.7% of my search traffic.

top pages current

That may not seem like a high number, but I have 5,441 blog posts. In other words, 0.1% of my pages make up 28.7% of my search traffic.

Typically, with smaller sites, the percentages are much higher in which the top 10 pages make up the majority of their search traffic.

So, what does that tell you?

You should just focus on your top 10 pages and ignore the rest? Or, even worse, just focus on cranking out more new content?

Quality over quantity

I used to have the philosophy of “more is better.” I was cranking out dozens of articles each week. At one point, I was publishing 2 articles a day on this blog.

And, over time, my traffic grew, but not by much.

I was spending all of this time writing and realized that the majority of the content I was publishing never ranked.

So, what did I do?

I started focusing on my old, outdated content to boost my traffic.

Just think of it this way: Every week I publish one new piece of content, but my team, on average, is updating 23 older articles.

When I used to write more frequently, my top 10 pages made up 33% of my search traffic.

top pages

Since then, I have increased my search traffic by 107% and reduced my reliance on my top 10 pages by 13%.

So how did I do this? Well, as I mentioned, I have my team focus on updating my old, outdated content while I focus on creating new content.

Here’s exactly what I have my team implement, step by step.

Look for pages that were once loved

With Google Search Console, you have access to data for a much longer period of time. You can go back up to 16 months.

So, I want you to compare this month’s results during the same period as last year.

You can do this by clicking on “date” and then “compare.” Next, select your older date period first (should be roughly from a year ago) and then select today’s date period.

date range

I’ve been doing this for a while, so I selected an older date range so you can see a better set of data before my team really focused on updating old content.

You should then see a report that looks something like this:

compared

What you’ll want to do is look for articles that used to get a ton of traffic and have less now. From the screenshot above, you can see that my article on Instagram used to perform really well, but no so much anymore.

Keep in mind that I selected the older date range first. I did this to see which of my old pieces of content used to rank well so I can see if any of them have dropped over the last 12 months.

This will show you old content that Google used to love, but no longer does.

Now, let’s find content that Google never loved.

Look for pages Google never loved

Log back into Search Console and look for pages that have a high impression count but never got any real clicks.

The easiest way to find these pages is to set your date range to the last 28 days and look at each page’s metrics from an impression, click, and CTR perspective.

Sort the CTR column in ascending order (lowest percentage at the top, the highest percentage at the bottom).

search ctr

Typically, the pages at the top of that list have the most potential. It means that Google is ranking you but you just aren’t getting too many clicks.

It usually isn’t just related to your title tag and meta description. It typically has to do with the content on the page.

Now it’s time to create a list of pages that have the greatest potential.

It’s time to prioritize

Typically, the pages that have the most potential are the ones that used to rank but no longer rank. Google used to rank and like them, which means if you give those pages a little tender loving care, you can easily get them loved by Google again.

The second group of pages that have potential, but not as much as the first, are the ones with a high impression count but an extremely low CTR.

These pages are harder to fix because they never really performed that well.

How to update your old content

Now that you have a list of pages to fix so you can boost your search engine rankings, I want you to log in to Google Search Console, find that article, click on it, and then click on “queries.”

queries

For the keywords that don’t rank in the top 5 or have a high impression volume, I want you to go to your ranking article and see if the article is relevant for that term.

If not, adjust the article to at least include that term and cover that topic.

For the terms you already rank for in the top 5 spots, head over to Ubersuggest and type in those keywords and click on the keyword ideas report.

customer acquasition

You’ll then see a report with all of the long-tail variations of that keyword.

If you adjust the article and include any of the long-tail phrases Ubersuggest gives you, you’ll see quick traffic gains.

In other words, if you already rank for the head term, it’s not hard to rank for the long-tail variation of it as well.

In addition to including the right keywords, you’ll want to update the post. Make sure all of the information is relevant, the pictures are up to date, and if you could include any multimedia (like embedding relevant YouTube videos) you’ll be able to increase the time on site of your visitors.

Finally, when updating your content, make sure your article is more thorough than all of the other sites that rank for the terms you are trying to rank for.

Remember that keyword ideas report I had you check out on Ubersuggest? On the right-hand side of that report, it shows you all of the sites that rank for that keyword.

keyword rankings

You can quickly see who’s currently ranking in each country, visit their web page, and make sure you create something better.

User metrics

User behavior is one of the biggest factors with Google’s algorithm.

Once you update your old content, you’ll want to optimize for user signals as that’ll help boost rankings.

A great example of user metrics is optimizing your title tags and meta description.

For example, if everyone searched a keyword on Google and clicked on the second result instead of the first, it tells Google that the second result is more relevant and that it should be ranking in the first spot instead of the second.

And Google eventually would make that change.

If you can use persuasive copy and convince people to click on your search listing instead of the competition, eventually your rankings will climb. And you can do so by following these 2 articles:

  1. How to Craft Amazing Headlines
  2. How to Write Copy like Apple

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of title tag and meta description tests and I’ve also found that these keywords help increase clicks:

  • What is
  • Best
  • Amazing
  • [lists]
  • How to
  • Free
  • You
  • Tips
  • Why
  • Tricks
  • Great

You can also use tools like Clickflow to A/B test your meta tags.

Don’t forget to promote (again)

Now that your content is up to date and you’ve optimized your meta tags for clicks, it’s time for you to promote your content.

I know what you are thinking… why would you promote old content, right?

Well, technically it isn’t old anymore.

First of all, you should update the published date or last updated date within your WordPress.

published

That way search engines know your content is changed, more relevant, and up to date.

Secondly, you need to promote the article. It’s new now, so why wouldn’t you share it with the world?

The simplest thing you can do is share it on the social web. I typically share my content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn… but you can pick whatever social profiles you have.

Although Google doesn’t really look at social signals, Bing does. Plus, some people who visit your page from the social web may decide to link to your article, which does help rankings.

And if you want to go above and beyond, check out Meet Edgar. It’s what I use to continually schedule my old content to be promoted on the social web. That way I don’t have to manually do it or set reminders.

In addition to social shares, you should consider sending out a text-based email blast to your audience promoting your content.

It’s a great way to get a quick boost of traffic and breathe life into your old content.

Here’s an example of a text-based email blast that I send so you can copy my format.

Subject: How to Generate 10K visitors from a Brand New Blog in Under 6 Months

If I tell you to do 100 things to grow your traffic, I know you won’t do it.

Heck, even I wouldn’t. It’s just too much work.

In the spirit of simplicity, just do this and you’ll get to 10,000 visitors.

I’ll even make a deal with you. If you follow it and don’t hit 10,000 visitors and you can show me you followed it, I will help you for free.

That’s how confident I am that it works.

Cheers,

Neil Patel

email stats

As you can see, simple text-based emails are generating 30% open rates and 6% click rates for me. Not too shabby.

You can also use tools like Subscribers to send out a push notification. Every time I update a post I send out a push. Look at my stats… I can easily generate an extra 7,000 visitors from a single push.

push stats

And don’t forget to build links

The last step you want to leverage is link building. You can use Backlinks to see who is linking to competing articles:

backlinks

All you have to do is put in a competing URL and select “URL” from the drop-down menu and you’ll see every site that links to that page.

From there, you’ll want to reach out to each site and ask them to link to you.

The easiest way to do this is to leverage the skyscraper technique and the steps in this article.

Conclusion

Once you hit the 150 mark in the number of pages on your site, you should consider focusing the majority of your time to updating old content instead of creating new content.

If you have over 1,000 pages, you should definitely spend 80-plus percent of your time updating old content instead of writing new content.

The key to ranking your old, outdated content is to first focus on the content that used to rank but doesn’t anymore.

Once you fix those pages, you should see results within a month or two. From there, you can then focus on pages that have a high impression count but a low click count.

So, are you going to focus your time on ranking your old content or creating new content?

The post How to Rank Your Old, Outdated Content appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Rank New Content Faster

If I write a blog post on any topic, what do you think happens?

It typically gets indexed by Google the same day I publish the content and within a week it tends to rank high on Google.

Then again, I have a domain score of 94 and I have 633,791 backlinks. Just look at the image above. (If you are curious what your link count or domain score is, put in your URL here.)

But if you have a lot fewer backlinks and a much lower domain score, what do you think would happen?

Chances are your content won’t get indexed fast and it won’t rank as high as you want.

But there has to be a way to change this, right? Especially without building more backlinks because we all know that’s time-consuming and hard.

To find the most ideal solution, I decided to run a little experiment.

Around five months ago, I sent out an email to a portion of my mailing list asking people if they wanted to partake in an SEO experiment.

As you could imagine, I had well over a thousand websites who were willing to participate. I had to narrow down the list because for this experiment to be effective, a website had to have a domain score of 30 or less and no more than 40 backlinks.

That way it’s at least a challenge to figure out how to rank new content higher.

In addition to that, the site couldn’t be a subdomain, such as domain.wordpress.com. It had to be a standalone site.

Once I removed all of the outliers, I was left with 983 people who agreed to participate in the experiment. Of those, 347 stopped replying or backed out of the experiment due to time commitments, which means I was left with 636.

How did the SEO experiment work?

For all of the sites, we had them write a piece of content. We didn’t make it a requirement that the content had to be about any specific topic or that it had to be written a certain way… we just had them write one piece of content that was between 1,800 and 2,000 words in length.

We enforced the minimum and maximum length limit because we needed the post to be long enough to naturally include keywords, but if it was too long… such as 10,000 words, it would have a higher chance to rank on Google.

Each site had 30 days to write the piece of content and publish it on their site. Within 30 days of the content being published, we looked up the URL in our Ubersuggest database to see how many keywords the post ranks for in the top 100, top 50, and top 10 spots.

We also repeated this search 60 days after the article was published to see if there were any major differences.

The Ubersuggest database currently contains information on 1,459,103,429 keywords from around the world in all languages (a lot of keywords have low search volume like 10 searches per month). But for this experiment, we focused on English speaking sites.

We then split the sites up into 9 groups. Roughly 70 sites per group. Each group only leveraged 1 tactic to see if it helped with rankings.

Here’s a breakdown of each group.

  1. Control group – this group just published the article and didn’t leverage any promotional or SEO tactics. Having a control group allows us to compare how specific tactics affect rankings.
  2. Sitemap – all this group leveraged was a sitemap. They added the article to their sitemap, and we made sure the sitemap was submitted to Google Search Console.
  3. Internal linking – this group added 3 internal links from older pieces of content to the newly written article.
  4. URL Inspection – within Google Search Console you can request that they Crawl and index a URL. That feature is called URL Inspection.
  5. Social shares – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Reddit were the social sites that this group submitted and promoted their content on.
  6. Google Chrome lookup – for each site in this group, we had 40 people type in the URL directly into their address bar and look up the site. This could have been done on either mobile or desktop versions of Chrome. I added this group in there because I was curious to see if people visiting your site from Chrome browsers affects your rankings.
  7. Meta tags – my team optimized the title tag and meta description for everyone in this group. Based on the article, we crafted the optimal meta tags to not only include keywords but also to entice clicks.
  8. URL – with this group we only optimized their article URL to include keywords and we tried to keep the length around 50 characters as that is what they supposedly prefer.
  9. Everything – this group combined all of the tactics above other than the control group as they didn’t do anything.

Before I dive into the data, keep in mind that if someone was in one of the groups, we did our best to make sure that they weren’t leveraging any other tactic. For example, for everyone who wasn’t in the sitemap group, we had them remove their existing sitemaps for Google Search Console (other than the everything group).

Control group

So how many keywords does an average website with a domain score of 30 or less rank for in Google within a month and even two months?

control

I was shocked at how many keywords a site could rank for when it barely has any links and a low domain score.

But what wasn’t as shocking is how a web page’s ranking can increase over time. The orange line shows the number of keywords that ranked within the first 30 days and the green line shows the number over the first 60 days.

Sitemap group

You know how people say you need an XML sitemap, well it is even more important if you have a low domain score. At least, that is what the data shows.

sitemap

When your site has very few links and a low domain score, you’ll find that Google may not crawl your site as often as you want. But by leveraging a sitemap, you can speed up the indexing process, which helps decrease the time it takes for your site to start ranking for keywords.

Internal linking group

Links, links, and more links… it’s what every site needs to rank well. Ideally, those links would be from external sites, but that’s hard to do. So, we tested how internal links impact rankings.

When you add internal links from your old content to your newer articles, it helps them get indexed faster and it helps push them up in the rankings.

Especially when these internal links come from relevant pages that have some decent rankings on Google.

internal links

Articles that leveraged 3 internal links had more page 1 rankings than sites that just used an XML sitemap.

URL inspection group

If you aren’t familiar with the URL inspection feature within Google Search Console, it’s a quick way to getting your content index.

Just log into Search Console and type in your article URL in the search bar at the top. You’ll see a screen that looks something like this:

url inspection

All you have to do is click the “request indexing” link.

url inspection

Leveraging this feature has a similar result to using the sitemap.

Social shares group

I’ve noticed a trend with my own website, in which if I create a piece of content that goes viral on the social web, my rankings for that new piece of content skyrocket to the top of Google… at least in the very short run.

And after a few weeks, I notice that my rankings drop.

Now, my site isn’t a large enough sample size and there are many reasons why my site ranks really well quickly.

Nonetheless, it was interesting to see how much social shares impact rankings.

social shares

Getting social shares substantially performed better than the control group, but similar to my experience with NeilPatel.com, the rankings did slip a bit in month 2 instead of continually rising to the top.

Social shares may not have a direct impact on rankings, but the more people who see your content the higher the chance you build backlinks, increase your brand queries, and build brand loyalty.

Google Chrome lookup group

Do you know how people are saying that Google is using data from Google Analytics and Chrome to determine how high your site should rank?

Well, I wasn’t able to prove that from this experiment.

I had 40 random people directly type in the URL of each new article into Google Chrome. I spread it out over a week, making sure they clicked around on the site and stayed for at least 2 minutes.

google chrome

The ranking results were very similar to the control group.

Meta tags group

Now this group performed very similarly to the group that leveraged internal linking. And the month 2 results outperformed all other groups.

meta tags

User metrics are a key part of Google’s algorithm. If you can create a compelling title tag and meta description, you’ll see a boost in your click-through rate and eventually, your rankings will climb.

If you want to boost your rankings through your meta tags, it’s not just about adding in the right keywords, you’ll also want to boost your click-through rate. Follow these steps to do just that.

URL group

The 8th group tested if URL length impacts how high a new piece of content ranks on Google.

url

Based on the graph above, you can see that it does. It didn’t have as much of an impact as internal linking or meta tags, but it did have an impact.

The key to creating SEO friendly URLs is to include a keyword or two and keep them short.

If your URL is too long and descriptive, such as:

neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-optimize-your-meta-tags-for-search-engines

The article will rank for very long tail phrases but will struggle to rank for more popular terms like “meta tags” compared to URLs like:

neilpatel.com/blog/meta-tags/

The beautiful part about the short URLs is that they rank well for head terms and long tail phrases.

Conclusion

The charts clearly show that little things like meta tags, URLs, internal linking, social shares, and even sitemaps help.

But the key to doing well, especially if you want your new content to rank well is to not just do one of those things, but instead do them all.

everything

As you can see from the chart, doing everything gives you the best results. Now sure, some of the things are redundant like using an XML sitemap and using the URL inspection feature, but you get the point.

You’ll also notice that when you leverage everything together your results aren’t exponentially better… SEO is competitive and has turned into a game where every little thing adds up.

If you want to do well and have your new AND old content rank faster and higher, you need to do everything.

I know the tactics above aren’t anything revolutionary or new, but it’s interesting to look at the data and see how specific tactics affect rankings.

So, what do you think?

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