Lots of folks think that SEO is about “gaming the system.” Well… that’s true of “black hat” SEO, but those of us who are trying to make pages easy for Google to crawl and evaluate are working towards what I like to think of as “natural” SEO. We put in all the right meta tags, make sure that your page is about what you tell search engines it’s about in your description and generally try to streamline things so that spiders won’t be caught in traps or leave pages entirely. So, let’s say that you have recently built a new website. Is it search friendly? Or more importantly, is it Google friendly? No, Google certainly doesn’t pay me and I don’t worship at the Google altar, either, but let‘s face it. Google brings the most traffic and for some reason, that traffic seems to convert. That’s why we want to please the gods of Google as much as we possibly can.
Experiencing a large drop in rankings can be confusing and frustrating. It could also mean a significant loss in leads or profits for your website. If you don’t have the know-how or the means to fix the issue quickly, the future of your company’s income could be in danger. The first step in recovering from a large drop in rankings is identifying what type of penalty you have. Depending on the type of penalty there will be a very different set of steps you need to take towards regaining your traffic and rankings.
Human brain processes images faster than text — 60,000 times faster. That makes dashboards much more effective communicators than spread sheets full of numbers. Still, pretty dashboards alone will be of little help, with no analysis, proposed actions, or a picture of a better future.
Semrush is my favorite competitive research tool that I use for everything from organic and paid keyword research to understanding market share in a specific region. A few months ago, I was working on a large project where it made sense to look beyond the Semrush interface and pull data directly from their servers via the Semrush API. The problem was that I’d never used an API before and wasn’t able to locate any resources for a noob like myself to get started. As luck would have it, I work with some pretty smart people who were able to point me in the right direction. Now that I understand the basics, I want to pay it forward and create a resource for others who use Semrush, but not familiar with using the API.
Finding keyword opportunities is becoming more and more difficult, with the markets we work in becoming even more competitive. I recently wrote a post that went through my five steps to spotting keyword opportunities using a piece of campaign management software, but there are lots of tools that can help you to spot keyword opportunities. When you use these four useful tools together, they can help you to spot an array of keyword opportunities and determine the effort that is required to gain visibility within the search engines.
Amel will join Semrush on March 4 for a free webinar, “How to Increase Your Website Revenue Using a Data-Driven SEO Campaign.“ Learn more about the webinar after the jump! “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” — H. James Harrington.
