Content or Backlinks
-
HI
I have resource issues and need to prioritise my time, I know both content & backlinks are important for SEO, but where will it be most beneficial to spend my time?
We are a generalist site, so this also makes things tougher. I have some core areas to work on, but want to be the most effective in the time I spend on them.
Thanks!
-
It's gets everything from Google but it doesn't give you search volume - just different types of questions / searches.
-Andy
-
Each one of these article pages has links and house ads on it that guide visitors to pages where the product and accessories can be purchased. These customer service pages appear in the SERPs, pull traffic and are a source of the sales that show up in our shopping cart.
We also link to these pages from sales pages. Some people would not do this because they think it is distracting, however, we know that people who land on our sales pages often follow these links. On our site, the average person has a 13 day gap between their first visit to our site and the first purchase being made, so we think that these links on product pages give them confidence in us as a vendor and also answers any questions that they have about the product.
-
For http://answerthepublic.com/ where is the data from - I can't for example find any search volume related to some questions on here, but is that expected?
-
Amazing thank you.
Yes product pages are definitely more focused on the user rather than having too much content, so it's just adding blogs or guides in other areas of the site, Thanks
-
These are some great ideas
Really value your feedback so thank you
-
It sounds like there is a lot of potential for you.
We have two types of sites, info sites with small stores and retail sites with large content libraries.
For the retail sites, our first source of articles is questions that we receive from our customers. These are articles about how to select the right model, features, size, etc..... how to make common repairs.... examples of how to use the products. We used customer emails as starters for these articles and beefed them up to a formal article that included lots of photos, tables, video, etc.
You might be able to get people in customer service to write these articles. Tell them that is a really important job. If they get the same question over and over and over, then having an faq page on the site that links to these customer service articles will allow people to get their answers in a self-service mode instead of bugging your staff.
Make your site the one that has more of this type of content than all of your competitors combined.
-
First of all, one of the best tools to use to find questions is http://answerthepublic.com/ butMOZ also have a very nice tool as well now.
In terms of what I would consider best, it is whatever is going to sit well on the site and make the most sense to be there.
Tread carefully with longer content on your product pages and make sure that however it is done, it doesn't ruin the user experience. I would say you might have to do a bit of both.
-Andy
-
Thanks EGOL
What I find frustrating, is none of the sites in top SERPs have any long pieces of this content, or good shareable content & no quality backlinks.
Apart from the big players like Amazon & Ebay, I have no idea why these sites are ranking.
My struggle is also the amount of areas and trying to product well researched content for the different categories on my own
Thank you!
-
Thanks Andy,
I've put together a couple of guides already, are there any tools I can use to find questions people are asking? I've used SEM rush but there isn't much around questions people ask.
Thank you for the pointers, I'll start putting some into practice.
Would you go for blogs & longer pieces of content or just the longer pieces?
-
We don't do linkbuilding for any of our sites. Instead we put all of our work into creating content.
If you are producing industry-leading content, have decent traffic already, and you have visitors who appreciate and spread the word about your content for you then this is a good strategy.
This is not a good strategy if your content is low quality or even medium quality because nobody is going to spread the word about it or link to it. And, you gotta be honest with yourself about this... don't think that because you wrote an article that you have a good one. You must compare it to the websites that hold the top positions in the SERPs and ask if yours is as good or better.
Someone might argue that if we added a linkbuilding service that we would do even better. That might be true. But instead of doing that I would rather pay someone to take over other duties and keep myself and my content team focused on more content and better content.
-
It's hard to say without doing some digging Becky, but for yourself, I would do the following:
- Create a content strategy. This should be articles of probably 1k words, well researched and informative. Perhaps half a dozen of them.
- See who is talking about / asking questions related to the niche and then fit these into your articles.
- Look on Social Media who is talking about these areas and reach out to them. Discuss this with them and ask them to take a look at what you have produced.
- Use something like Ahrefs content explorer to find other similar articles and where do they get links from - can you also get a link?
- Don't worry about asking for links, but be very careful how you do it - ask if you can be added as a resource and never mention the word 'link'
There is a lot more to this, but it should give you a few pointers to get started - however, it's not going to be a quick fix so expect to put a bit of leg work into doing this.
-Andy
-
HI
I've selected 6 areas to work on, but then I need to juggle other requirements in the business.
Those 6 areas are top level, within those there are any number of lower level categories - some of the businesses most important areas are hugely competitive.
At the moment for example, a priority is shelving - warehouse shelving primarily. I'm looking at what the competition do and I'm stumped - one ranking in first position hides content behind a tab and get their links from directories, so I can't see how they rank.
-
Some great pointers from Patrick there, and this is something that is more common that you might realise - a question that is asked daily.
As a generalist, it does make it a little more awkward because the ideal scenario would be to be creating amazing content based on your niche, but if you have multiple, that makes it a little different.
Do you have particular industries you are focussing on?
-Andy
-
Hi there
Great, relevant content leads to great, relevant links. If you build it, they will come.
Focus on creating great content based on audience research and then focus your efforts on distributing that content in an effective way that reaches your audience where they are actively digesting content and having discussions.
After you get into the mode of developing your content, focus on link building tactics that gets your content placed in front of the right audience. Don't just build links to build links. Expect this to take time, as Rand says, it's a flywheel.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Good luck!
P
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are feeds bad for duplicate content?
One of my clients has been invited to feature his blog posts here https://app.mindsettlers.com/. Here is an example of what his author page would look like: https://app.mindsettlers.com/author/6rs0WXbbqwqsgEO0sWuIQU. I like that he would get the exposure however I am concerned about duplicate content with the feed. If he has a canonical tag on each blog post to itself, would that be sufficient for the search engines? Is there something else that could be done? Or should he decline? Would love your thoughts! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cindyt-17038
Cindy T.0 -
Unique content for international SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a e-commerce store on generic top-level domain which has 1000s of products in US. We are looking to expand to aus, uk and canda using subfolders. We are going to implement hreflang tags. I was told by our SEO agency we need to make all the content between each page unique. This should be fine for cateogry/product listing pages. But they said we need to make content unique on product pages. If we have 1000 products, thats 4000 pages, which is a big job in terms of creating content. Is this necessary? What is the correct way to approach this, won't the hreflang tag be sufficent to prevent any duplicate content issues with product pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geekyseotools0 -
Search console, duplicate content and Moz
Hi, Working on a site that has duplicate content in the following manner: http://domain.com/content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulneuteboom
http://www.domain.com/content Question: would telling search console to treat one of them as the primary site also stop Moz from seeing this as duplicate content? Thanks in advance, Best, Paul. http0 -
Is writing good content the best SEO?
Hi, After reading Mr. Shepard's amazing article on the 7 concepts of advanced on-page SEO (https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts), I decided to share my own experience in hopes of helping others. I started doing legal SEO back in 2013. At the time I really didn't know much about SEO. My first client (my brother) had recently left the D.A.'s office to become a criminal defense attorney. I told him to write content for the following areas: domestic violence, sex crimes, and homicide. He finished his first content piece on domestic violence and I was not impressed. It seemed too unique, individualized, and lacked the "generic" feel that many of the currently ranking pages had. Please note that I don't mean "generic" in a negative way. I just mean that his content regarding domestic violence felt too personalized. Granted, his "personalized" approach came from a Deputy D.A. with over 13 years handling domestic violence, sex crimes, and murder cases. I was inclined to re-write his content, but lacking any experience in criminal law I really had no choice but to use it. IMPORTANT: Please note that I barely knew any SEO at the time (I hadn't even yet discovered MOZ), and my brother knew, and continues to know, absolutely nothing about SEO. He simply wrote the content from the perspective of an attorney who had spent the better part of 13 years handling these types of cases. The result? Google: "Los Angeles domestic violence lawyer/attorney", "Los Angeles sex crimes lawyer/attorney", and "Los Angeles homicide attorney." They have held those spots consistently since being published. I know that MANY other factors contribute to the success of content, but at the time I published them we had few links and very little "technical SEO." Unfortunately, I started learning "SEO" and applied standard SEO techniques to future content. The result? Never as good as the articles that were written with no SEO in mind. My purpose in writing this is to help anyone about to tackle a new project or revamp an existing site. Before getting too caught up in the keywords, H tags, and all the other stuff I seem to worry too much about, simply ask yourself - "is this great content?" Thanks again to the MOZ team for the great advice they have shared over the years. Honestly, I think I sometimes become overly reliant on SEO b/c it seems easier than taking the time to write a great piece of content. P.s. Any "SEO" stuff you see on the above-mentioned pages was done by me after the pages ranked well. P.p.s. I don't mean to imply that the above-mentioned pages are perfect, because they are not. My point is that content can rank well even without any emphasis on SEO, as long as the person writing it knows about the subject and takes the time to write something that readers find useful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14403 -
4 websites with same content?
I have 4 websites (1 Main, 3 duplicate) with same content. Now I want to change the content for duplicate websites and main website will remain the same content. Is there any problem with my thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
Updating existing content - good or bad?
Hi All, There are many situations where I encounter the need (or the wish) to update existing content. Here are few reasons: Some update turned up on the subject that does not justify a new posy / article but rather just adding two lines. The article was simply poorly written yet the page has PR as it is a good subject and is online for quite some time (alternatively I can create a new and improved article and 301 the old one to the new). Improving titles and sub titles of old existing articles. I would love to hear your thoughts on each of the reasons... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
Duplicate blog content and NOINDEX
Suppose the "Home" page of your blog at www.example.com/domain/ displays your 10 most recent posts. Each post has its own permalink page (where you have comments/discussion, etc.). This obviously means that the last 10 posts show up as duplicates on your site. Is it good practice to use NOINDEX, FOLLOW on the blog root page (blog/) so that only one copy gets indexed? Thanks, Akira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahirai0 -
Removing Duplicate Page Content
Since joining SEOMOZ four weeks ago I've been busy tweaking our site, a magento eCommerce store, and have successfully removed a significant portion of the errors. Now I need to remove/hide duplicate pages from the search engines and I'm wondering what is the best way to attack this? Can I solve this in one central location, or do I need to do something in the Google & Bing webmaster tools? Here is a list of duplicate content http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=list&order=name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire
http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=list&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=grid http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=list Thanks in advance, Steve0