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Responsive Design Improves SEO

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This is the function by Guest Andrew Dysart, a Web developer in Vanamco AG. Vanamco is the design and development company based in Zurich, Switzerland.<br />
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There was a lot of discussion on SEO and increase inspection on the Internet through mobile devices and tablets.<br />
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So far, the response has been recognized design as an answer to user experience, put the site on the Internet to be the power is on. It is a focus on ease of use for multiple approach was also favorable for the design of SEO.<br />
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The recent support from Google and increase mobile by searching on the Internet are some of the factors that contribute to why optimizers and developers are designing a serious response.<br />
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Google loves sensitive design<br />
As anyone who works in SEO Google treats the Internet as a powerful god, and Google said anything or done, and go!<br />
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The last guardian of how they should improve the website by the search engines, Google optimizers carefully taking into account the rules are created to ensure your web site search engine preferences.<br />
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Google proposed a design to improve the site for smartphones response, which is enough for SEO to jump on the bandwagon and follow the right approach to design.<br />
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The fact of the matter is that Google supports responsive design because it makes your life easier. Prior to this design approach, and maintain optimal user experience means there is a need for additional copies of the sites for content that reflects well on mobile devices and tablets.<br />
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Now, regardless of the device shown in a website, responsive design automatically adjusts the page in a way that can retain its contents are the owners of sites in parallel.<br />
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That's less work for the robot Google, where there is no obligation for them to crawl into separate versions of the same site. This makes it easier for search engines to analyze site content increases the likelihood that they will be ranked on the search results - thus achieving the goal of SEO.<br />
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A website, a URL<br />
The purpose of the site can determine whether Mobile version required separately.<br />
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However, in terms of SEO, you must create two optimization campaign can involve greater amount of effort - can be an appropriate slogan helps to overcome design.<br />
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One thing to keep in mind when considering the SEO and mobile sites is that Google recognizes sites that have been created specifically for the desktop or laptop computer and are divided accordingly in the search results depending on the device you looking for.<br />
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This means a website mobile generally not in a good position on the SERPs desktop.<br />
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Create a portable version of the optimized site already requires starting from scratch SEO strategy. The reason is mobile sites have different addresses and HTML, and as such, Google will consider the separate power page.<br />
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All the power vested in the original web pages, it will not move to the portable version, which is a drawback when considering the background and procedures. However, in response design eliminates this problem because you have only the URL of this content, which means that there are no separate campaigns to improve the optimal For there is a need to different devices.<br />
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It can also be seen as a response to the design of modern navigation and ideal for the exchange of experience on the Internet through different devices.<br />
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Make your content easy to share is a great advantage for SEO, because the signals of the search engines that your site is informative and important.<br />
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Help fight high bounce rate response<br />
Can happen bounce rate is high for several reasons, but usually seen as a negative sign by the search engines.<br />
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Despite being frustrating for SEO problem, which also happens to be another factor that could help design response. If a user is left on the Internet shortly after his arrival, and Google can be regarded as a sign that generated content is the most important.<br />
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Google's goal is to ensure that access to the answer to your query in the first SERP visitors, so a high bounce rate on a web page, ultimately, reduce the ranking in the search engines.<br />
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Sites do not translate well into other devices are the cause users to quit smoking.<br />
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Mobile site, for example, can be different from the original version content, if you can summarize or completely excluded.<br />
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Send desktop users by mistake to the wrong Web version, and can not find the information you seek will become dissatisfied, giving way to continue your search. Frustration can also occur for sites that are not optimized for mobile phones.<br />
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The difference in pixel size and high cost of mobile data can take a long time, navigation and display pregnancy problems, but also make users left to find a website that is easier to navigate your device.<br />
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It can be appropriately designed to solve these problems through the provision of content and functional manner without compromising what you choose to show any device. View all its contents to the users in the approach that is easy to see, over time, to keep users on your page.<br />
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Improve the user experience<br />
SEO design and receptive to work together<br />
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That really succeed in south-eastern Europe, it is necessary to think of the big picture.<br />
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The purpose of the Internet and the exchange of information easily on a single platform. Strangely Find easy to find, it's not just what Google wants - is what users want.<br />
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This is where the user and SEO experience both recognize the benefits of a suitable design.<br />
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Response design strongly emphasizes the needs of the UX user. Automatically adjust content to meet a particular offering, for example, this means less happy experience for the user to navigate and work. Keeping the user in mind is why Google encourages developers to use proper design.<br />
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Awareness of potential users habits, such as content exchange is also something that is designed to respond, which aims to homogeneity UX on multiple devices.<br />
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With more people sharing content between different devices, must be well-built site RWD allows desktop and mobile phone users to have a similar experience when viewing the same page.<br />
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There are some startling statistics that appear out increasing the number of Internet users who travel constantly. These indicators are the latest example of why optimizers must consider the user experience solutions that respond to the design in your marketing strategies so that can guide users to search for other devices.<br />
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20% of Google searches are in Mobile<br />
An increasing number of people search Google via mobile devices is the tendency to work in south-eastern Europe must be taken into account when planning a strategy for improvement if they hope to stay ahead of the competition.<br />
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Improving a website design approach to mobile intervention is currently the best solution, but when it comes to a combination of both SEO and user experience.<br />
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I think that Google gives more than one reason to take note of the reasons that there be optimized pointing out that there is a possibility of 61% of mobile phone users and mobile site go to another site that is not optimized for your device.<br />
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In addition, users have a positive experience in the mobile optimized site will have an opportunity to evaluate the top 67% or use the service.<br />
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Another thing to note about Google is that it has 95% market share of search engines via mobile phone. Find amazing statistics indicate through this mobile phone also that if Google's position in the design is very compatible response, then you should seriously consider if the site is hoping to achieve good results in the future mobile search results.<br />
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The first mobile<br />
The first mobile URL and SEO<br />
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Of course, it is quite one-sided.<br />
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Yes, responsive design works for SEO as there is one URL, so it's easy to keep the power Google page copy robots and one of the content pages index. But despite Google's claims responsive design is useful to improve the mobile, developers still have to be decisive, and ask if RWD is the best choice for your website.<br />
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If the site of adopting a sensitive approach to the design, but it is difficult to navigate, and users will have a negative experience.<br />
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Web sites and e-commerce, for example, generally do not work well if they have a website mobile separately. They also tend to contain a lot of jobs on one page, and sometimes can not be translated to RWD.<br />
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Create a separate instance where simplifies design navigation and purchase is required for mobile and tablets, in this case, the user experience is excellent.<br />
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Not all and the end all, if the site is not in the form of a suitable design. (! He can remember optimized for search engines is a long-term process) for long-term success in South-Eastern Europe, it is necessary to satisfy the user, not Google - l If the user likes, Google recognized.<br />
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The question that people ask is if the user experience is improved or if the high conversion rate when they are presented separately for mobile Web site content.<br />
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If yes, then go ahead. Otherwise, stick to responsive design is the most effective way to improve the site on the Internet to approach mobile way.<br />
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Avoid duplication of content<br />
Google Panda<br />
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Having a website mobile alarm separate risk SEO both sites seems this same content.<br />
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Repeater deceptive tactics SEO content to improve search and drive traffic results, and update Google Panda in 2011 illustrates Find seriously address the problem of the poor and happy repetition is also considered.<br />
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So slapping the hands of the many sites that let drop dramatically rearranged or even expelled entirely from the search results, you can understand duplicate content today for what could be a source of concern for SEO.<br />
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The good news is that in this case, Google will not penalize sites for content identical to a large extent.<br />
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Notification background site on the Internet with reverence (mixed = "canonical") integrates the label duplicate content in the group and reporting to the issuance of a page of the engines is preferred to view the search results.<br />
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Certainly, RWD completely avoids the problem is that the content is put on one site.<br />
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There will not be a problem for users sent to the wrong version of a website by accident. Responsive design makes it easy to organize content and save Google must distinguish between similar sites for different devices.<br />
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Reduces Link Building<br />
It helps link building to increase the reference area, which shows the importance of the Internet and allows positioning the top site in the SERPs in the end.<br />
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It is a important to look at aspects of South-Eastern Europe, that's why a very favorable response to the design to be optimized for mobile instead of having a separate mobile version.<br />
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Like all the links for one URL, both mobile and desktop versions have the same binding profile when placed in a suitable design.<br />
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Mobile Web sites of relatively new, profile link their return may not be as strong as the response site design. Even for the purposes of SEO, this approach is an advantage over competitors who have a separate site for mobile and have the authority to create a field from scratch.<br />
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Classification of mobile search<br />
It has been argued that the higher Google ranks mobile sites in their own version of the search results via mobile phone.<br />
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But because Google has also said this good practice for optimization of mobile, and design sensitive sites in the top ranking of mobile sites only.<br />
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Search the Web by mobile phone is becoming increasingly important on the attitudes of users today. We have seen how Google is the dominant player in mobile search engines, which represents nearly 95% of the market, which will be placed in SEO good books of Google, the sites you want to take advice and strategies for your mobile website in a form suitable for the search engine.<br />
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To provide a better user experience<br />
Improve network design one site in this format it has also shown that there is less work on the campaigns of South-Eastern Europe, which can be applied to all devices.<br />
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But regardless of which option displays its contents to its users, sensitive or separate location, modern business can not ignore the optimization of your web site for mobile phones.<br />
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If you want to stay ahead of the competition, with the mobile user experience when creating SEO strategy it has become increasingly important.<br />
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In most cases, you are given the easiest and most effective way to do this design response.

Responsive Design Improves SEO

62 InShare Mail This is the function by Guest Andrew Dysart, a Web developer in Vanamco AG. Vanamco is the design and development co...

How To Structure A Killer Content Marketing Campaign

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Content marketing might seem pretty straight-forward, it might even seem like anyone with a blog can succeed at it.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">This couldn’t be further from the truth.</strong></div>
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Content marketing is an art, of strategy, planning, analyzing, and following through. Content marketing is about connecting to your audience, through a story, educationally, informatively, and by being entertaining, all while focused on an end goal, for both of you.</div>
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In this post I’m going to show you how to lay out a killer content marketing campaign, from beginning to end, in a way that I use at SimpleTiger to achieve huge growth for our clients.</div>
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Let’s get started, shall we?</div>
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1. First answer these three vital questions</h3>
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First and foremost you have to answer three questions to give yourself direction in your content. You have to know where you’re going, before you get started, otherwise you’ll just be wading through an aimless sea, and going nowhere fast.</div>
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Before you start any content marketing effort answer these three quick questions:</div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">What are your goals for this content?</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">What are your visitor’s goals?</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Where can you focus your efforts to achieve both ends?</li>
</ol>
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Pretty simple right? Let me break it down for you.</div>
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What are your goals?</h4>
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What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to get more clients? Are you trying to get more email subscribers to follow up with with other promotions? Are you trying to get more inbound links to rank higher for a certain key term? What’s your objective. Simplify this, this will be your focus for the entirety of this content’s lifetime.</div>
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What are your visitor’s goals?</h4>
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What is someone who will come across this content trying to achieve? Who would benefit from this? Is it someone looking for information, or just trying to be entertained? Once you know what they want, who are they? What do they like? What are they like? Where might they frequent on the web? What is their little silo of the internet that you might be able to tap into? What blogs do they like? What social media communities do they like? Figure all of this out, this will be how you reach out to them.</div>
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Where can you focus your efforts to achieve both ends?</h4>
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If the visitor is more likely to connect to something purely visual, this is great information to have. This means you shouldn’t build out a blog post for this specific piece of content, but instead possibly build an infographic, or a slideshare deck. Figure out the medium to tell your story best, figure out the perfect story to connect to the viewer, and figure out how you can connect the content to them.</div>
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Even though content marketing is basically a piece of SEO, don’t leave it to search engines to do your work for you. The best way to guarantee your presence in search engines, is to proactively seek out these interactions that will in-turn grant you the links, shares, and visitors that search engines will reward you for.</div>
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2. Determine where you’re at</h3>
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Simply speaking, depending on where you’re at you could have resources at your disposal that could make this entire process so much easier, or potentially not. This is information that you need to know though, and to be familiar with moving forward so you’re not leaving any free fruit up for grabs.</div>
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There are three parts to this, simple in nature, but can be huge in promoting your content and taking advantage of information so you don’t repeat potential problems in the future.</div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">If you have any previous content on your site, of any kind, do an audit and figure out what works the best. There are <a href="https://blog.bufferapp.com/content-audit" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">plenty</a> <a href="http://moz.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">of</a> <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/04/24/how-to-conduct-a-content-audit-on-your-site/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">resources</a> on <a href="https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/how-to-perform-a-content-audit/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">content audits</a>, the basis is to figure out what works best for your audience, and what you’ve done in the past that has connected the most, and where.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Audit your competition, and keywords. Using tools like <a href="http://buzzsumo.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">BuzzSumo</a> and <a href="http://opensiteexplorer.org/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">OpenSiteExplorer</a>take your top competition (online, you don’t need to focus about offline competitors) and analyze them to see who has been linking to them, what media outlets have been mentioning them, who the authors of those posts were, and what posts they’ve had that got shared the most throughout your community.</li>
</ul>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-3.15.30-PM.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14721];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="buzzsumo" class="aligncenter wp-image-14725" height="262" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-3.15.30-PM.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="450" /></a></div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Find out where the juice is flowing from, and why. Basically you just need to know where all the influence and buzz is coming from in your community. Is there a single social media group that has a massive presence?<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Is there a forum that has specific resonance with your audience? Is there a blog that has a ton of sway with your potential customers? All of these should be taken note of and closely examined and engaged with to try and create opportunities to contribute or give information to.</li>
</ul>
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3. Plan the big-impact for low-input up-front</h3>
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Always take the 80/20 approach to your content, while you need to be consistent, it is true that sometimes there will be one post that contributes 80% of your traffic for a given period of time, and usually it’s because you positioned it right in the market, it got received well by the community, linked to and shared a lot, then ranks very well for a keyword that will continue to give a ton of traffic for a long time to come.</div>
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These aren’t just dark-shots in a barrel though, they can be planned, and they should be planned.</div>
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Here’s a good way to plan a bit of serendipity around your content:</h3>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Follow big sharers or “influencers” on social media, and connect with what they are sharing. Take note of everything they share and pick up the patterns between them.Using<a href="http://followerwonk.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">FollowerWonk</a> you can do this pretty easily on Twitter, to get a cloud of information that people share most within your community. What you want is to either entice them to share, share something that you know they want to share with their audience, or if possible, loop them in to your content so they will have vested interest in sharing it to their audience. This is simply leveraging a large audience to adopt a larger audience for yourself.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Find the big linkers from your previous research and try to entice them by your content. Either reach out to them pointing to your new content in a carefully crafted <a href="http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/12/07/the-link-builders-guide-to-email-outreach/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">outreach email</a>or through mentioning them on social media where you could get a less-invasive retweet or re-post. Also, find the big content contributor networks, guest blogs, and publications that drive a huge force in the industry, don’t stop until you have contributor access to at least one of them, and use that access to post valuable information as often as possible. Publishing on off-site publications is one of the fastest ways of building a bigger audience of your own.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Find big syndication or guest posting possibilities. If you can get a very targeted blog that you’re allowed to guest post on, and get buy-in from that person’s audience, that can be even more influential and personal than getting contributor access to a large publication. It might have less reach, but it has a more targeted reach, and the more targeted the audience, the more likely it will turn into something beneficial for you. Syndication is a nice thing to have access to too, because you can essentially replicate content you have already produced in a different medium to garner even larger output from energy already spent. Think turning a blog post into a slideshare presentation, or an infographic, or even just shorter posts on different publications like Medium.</li>
</ol>
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4. Set up your systems for success</h3>
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This is basically where I tell you to batten down the hatches and be ready for the onslaught of incoming traffic.</div>
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Hopefully you succeed in all of the above, then you need to really pay attention to this section, but regardless of if you get 10% or 150% of the potential from this guide, you’re going to be happy to have certain systems in place for what you do receive.</div>
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What systems am I referring to?</h4>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">An email list, ready to collect email subscribers and port them to a list like <a href="http://mailchimp.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">MailChimp</a> (my recommendation) where you can easily organize lists and send emails with nice templated designs.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Call to actions and sharing widgets set up to garner those email subscribers and precious social shares. <a href="http://sumome.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">SumoMe</a> has a robust suite of tools that can be set up on any site to easily increase the amount of social shares you get on social media (especially from mobile) as well as call to actions that will set your email list gathering into hyperdrive mode.</li>
</ul>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-3.13.01-PM.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14721];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="sumome" class="aligncenter wp-image-14724" height="356" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-3.13.01-PM.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="400" /></a></div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Robust analytics, at the very least <a href="http://www.google.com/analytics/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Google Analytics</a>, but potentially for the more robust data, <a href="https://www.kissmetrics.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Kissmetrics</a>, and if you’re trying to hone in on the usability of your blog or website,<a href="http://www.crazyegg.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">CrazyEgg</a>, <a href="https://vwo.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Visual Website Optimizer</a>, or even (if you have campaign-specific landing pages that you’d like to A/B test) <a href="http://unbounce.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Unbounce</a>. All of these will help you get more informative data from your website that you can use to sculpt your website and take better advantage of future traffic.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Quality servers and hosting that can properly cope with the potential onslaught of traffic that could result from a viral or some-what viral piece of content. Trust me, the last thing you want to happen when something goes very right is for your entire site to crash and it all go dramatically, horribly wrong. I recommend <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">studying cloud hosting</a> and finding a provider that suits your fancy.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Other than the on-site stuff, you should obviously have your social media profiles well laid out, cohesively designed, and ready to interact with any shares that come your way.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Set up a content calendar that you can constantly append new content to, schedule, iterate with your team, and easily use to edit and write new content. We use <a href="https://gathercontent.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">GatherContent</a>internally, because it can easily be broken down by client, but it can also be nice for in-house teams working with a lot of new content, and needing to create a schedule of posts and rich media.With this in place you can easily add new topics, iterate on those topics, schedule and organize what content should be coming out in the next month, next quarter, or even next year, and where. Set up a posting consistency and stick to it as well, this can’t be stressed enough. If you’re consistent with your content, your users will get used to coming back and checking up on you weekly or even daily, depending on your frequency. Just make sure you keep it to something that you can be consistent with.</li>
</ul>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-3.17.57-PM.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14721];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="gathercontent" class="aligncenter wp-image-14726" height="294" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-3.17.57-PM.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="450" /></a></div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">If possible try to set up guest contributing to your own blog, and setup editorial guidelines for writers to follow. This can be dramatic in its effect. If people bring in their own audience to yours, however small or however large, it’s a fresh audience, and you’re getting free (unless you pay them for it, which would give an added incentive), topically relevant content that will live on your blog forever, and continue to send traffic long after you’ve forgotten about it. The big score is if you can get very influential writers with a large audience to write on your blog, because then you get the benefit of a large social audience, as well as quality writing, all on your own turf, without you having to put in the effort to write or contribute the content yourself.</li>
</ul>
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5. Publish, analyze, rinse, and repeat</h3>
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Once you’ve got your systems set up, you know where you are, you’ve answered all the questions, and you know what’s going to give you the biggest bang for your buck up-front, it’s just time to get down to the nitty gritty. Get posting.</div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Start publishing against your content calendar, focusing as much effort as you can on your own site, as well as trying to do off-site publishing as much as possible to attract new readers from different audiences.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Keep tabs on what’s working and what’s not, using your analytics and content audits. Empathize with why the posts are working or not. Is the subject right? Was it a good headline? What headlines are working best? What kind of content is the community receiving and sharing most?If there was a piece of content that was really successful, take the time to study it, and figure out what was so successful about it. Use the time like a replay in a player’s locker-room to figure out what is the most effective use of your time. Set up CrazyEgg heatmaps on successful content to see where people focus the most within a post. Make sure you pay attention to what quotes people share from your content, and where they share the most. Take note of all of this and plan accordingly in the future.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Focus in on the syndication or off-site publications that are working well, cut out the ones that aren’t working as well. Some sites will just by nature send better leads than others, that’s fine, try to figure out which ones they are and focus in on them.If a post is getting a ton of social attention on a certain publication, take note of that for when you really want to focus on the social side of your operation. If you dramatically need more leads focus on the publication that sends you the best leads. Make sure you use the notes from #2 to move forward and make informed decisions here.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Follow up with linkers, sharers, and even detractors. Be an opportunist here, if someone is linking to you there is potential for more, guest posts, social shares, etc. If someone is sharing your content, the least you can do is reach out and thank them, potentially they will follow you, maybe even subscribe to your email list, then share more.If someone has shared a post of yours that you know a specific post would be a good follow-up to, share that post with them, most of the time they will be really happy to give a look at it as well. If there are detractors in your comments, take the time to own up to it and talk through things with them, see if they have a point, and if they do, empathize with it. This can be a really easy way to turn a detractor into a fan.</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Fill your calendar back up with content based on what you have found out works, and using all of the opportunities that have come your way through the other content you’ve shared.</li>
</ol>
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The entire process is a cyclical thing, an ongoing effort that compounds in its results over time. Keep running through this list. After you’ve completed it once, re-start at #3, and keep going from there, stopping every quarter to re-visit #2.</div>
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If you can empathize well enough, and follow up well enough, you will be extremely quick to compound your audience and create a far stronger presence than any of your competition.</div>
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Here’s the campaign breakdown, simplified step-by-step:</h3>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">1. Answer the three vital questions (to determine KPI’s)</strong><br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Your goals<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Your visitor’s goals<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Where to focus your efforts to achieve both</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">2. Determine where you’re at</strong><br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– If you have any previous content, do an audit<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Audit your competition, and keywords<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Figure out where the juice is flowing from, and why</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">3. Plan the big-impact for low-input up-front</strong><br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Big sharers or influencers<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Big linkers or content contributors<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Big syndication or guest posting possibilities</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">4. Set up your systems</strong><br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Set up email list, analytics & other call to actions<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Set up a content calendar (based on findings from previous parts)<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Set up blog and other networks to be ready to capture all value possible<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Set up guest posting on your site for contributors</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">5. Publish, analyze, rinse, repeat</strong><br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Start publishing against your content calendar<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Keep tabs on what is working and what’s not, empathize with the “why”<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Focus in on syndication or outlets that are working well, cut the ones that aren’t<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Follow up with linkers, sharers, and even detractors (be an opportunist)<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />– Fill your calendar with new content based on what has worked, and opportunities that have come about</div>
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If you really liked this guide, and it helped you a lot, I actually have a quick follow-up for you.</div>
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We at <a href="http://www.simpletiger.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">SimpleTiger</a> are writing a new ebook that will have all of this information and more with mini-interviews with some of the best experts on these individual subjects, we will tackle all the biggest aspects of content marketing head-on.</div>

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133 in Share Email Content marketing might seem pretty straight-forward, it might even seem like anyone with a blog can succeed ...

Realistic SEO – Understanding Rank Potential

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Forrester Research projects U.S. consumers will <a href="https://www.internetretailer.com/2012/02/27/e-retail-spending-increase-45-2016" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="E-retail spending to increase 62% by 2016">spend $327 Billion online</a> in 2016. With Google seeing <a href="http://searchengineland.com/report-mobile-search-queries-29-percent-of-total-but-growth-modest-217501" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Report: Mobile Search Queries 29 Percent Of Total But Growth Modest">approximately 7.1 Billion searches per day globally</a>* (between mobile, desktop, and tablets) we can approximate that every <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">single</em> query in the U.S. is worth $1.26 <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">(based on U.S. representing 10% of world’s internet users)</em>.</div>
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<small style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">*Update: thank you Rand Fishkin for pointing out the original stat was outdated.</em></small></div>
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In a recent study by BrightEdge, SEO accounts for as much as <a href="http://searchengineland.com/study-organic-search-drives-51-traffic-social-5-202063" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Study: Organic Search Drives 51% Of Traffic, Social Only 5%">51% of the traffic being driven to B2B and B2C pages</a>, re-enforcing that SEO is <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">far from dead</em> – and continues to offer a long-term, sustainable ROI channel.</div>
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Regardless of who you need to pitch SEO; your boss, your client, or even your business partner – it helps to be realistic about required investment and expected returns.</div>
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It’s generally a bad idea to pitch an SEO campaign without first researching the keywordsyou’re going to be targeting, and understanding who you’re competing with… if you bet the farm on unattainable keywords, <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">you’re gonna have a bad time</em>.</div>
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So What is Rank Potential?</h3>
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Rank potential is an analytical approach to understanding where a given webpage can actually rank in organic search, with respect to two axes of consideration; <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">time and investment*</em>.</div>
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<small style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">*that’s my definition</em></small></div>
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It’s not realistic to project that you’re going to outrank a Wikipedia page for an informational query, or a Fortune 500 brand for their brand or branded product name – <strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">at least not without significant investment</strong>, <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">if ever</em>.</div>
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My approach is to analyze a page’s rank potential based on the qualitative SEO metrics for the current top 10 ranking URL’s (what I will refer to as the search engine results page 1, or <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">SERP 1</em>).</div>
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The metrics I analyze are:</div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Number of Links</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Number of Linking Root Domains</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Trust Flow</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Citation Flow</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Domain Authority</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Page Authority</li>
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In addition to this core set I also will evaluate additional relative measures of authority including Domain Age, Organic Difficulty, Link Strength, Brand Footprint, and Social Media Impact.</div>
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Now I promise this is far from a beginner post, but to ensure you’re thinking of the base metrics the same way<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> I do</em>, I’m going to run through a quick and dirty description <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">from my perspective</em>.</div>
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My Perception of the Metrics</h3>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Number of Links</strong></div>
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<img alt="rank-potential_Total-backlinks" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-14798" height="164" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/rank-potential_Total-backlinks.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: left; float: left; margin: 0px 1.467em 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" width="200" />More importantly than just the pure number of links, this metric is used in conjunction with the number of unique linking root domains to determine diversity ratio. Organically authoritative websites have high link diversity ratios (LDR – links from many unique, authoritative root domains) versus gobs of links from the same 5 websites, likely owned by the same person.</div>
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In addition to the number of links as a consideration for LDR, it is also important to look at link velocity. If a site is picking up tons of links very quickly there should be an obvious cause such as press coverage, product launch, a new partnership, or a positive mention on a very large publication. If not, this is suspect that darker activities are afoot.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Number of Linking Root Domains</strong></div>
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<img alt="rank-potential_linking-root-domains" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-14799" height="164" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/rank-potential_linking-root-domains.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: left; float: left; margin: 0px 1.467em 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" width="200" />As mentioned above, this is <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">generally</em> a sound measure of the organic authority of a website. Like everything else in SEO there are always exceptions to the rule, but generally websites that maintain an organic link profile should have anywhere from a 10 – 30% diversity ratio.</div>
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Which means 1 linking root domain for every 3.3 – 10 indexed links.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Trust Flow</strong></div>
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<img alt="rank-potential_trust-flow" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-14800" height="241" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/rank-potential_trust-flow.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: left; float: left; margin: 0px 1.467em 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" width="200" />This metric goes hand in hand with the latter metric, Citation Flow (CF), but for the purposes of this post I will try to describe here. This measure, like CF, was<a href="http://blog.majestic.com/development/flow-metrics/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Flow Metrics">developed by Majestic</a>, and is a relative measure of how trustworthy the link is.</div>
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Majestic has built a manually reviewed index of trusted websites and use a general rule they developed from a manual analysis of a representative sample of the URL’s included.</div>
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The rule is based on there finding that:</div>
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<div style="padding: 0px;">
trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbors – Dixon Jones, <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Founder of Majestic SEO</em></div>
</blockquote>
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Trust Flow (TF) is a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100. In my experience you should stay away from links with a TF under 25.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Citation Flow</strong></div>
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<img alt="rank-potential_citation-flow" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-14801" height="219" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/rank-potential_citation-flow.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: left; float: left; margin: 0px 1.467em 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" width="200" />Citation Flow is a predictive measure of how much<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">influence</em> a given URL is likely to pass on to links that it points to.</div>
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With specific respect to link juice, URL’s with higher CF are more likely to pass more of that influence downstream to the URL’s they link out to.</div>
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The practical application of this is links from pages with higher CF will send greater positive signaling than their weaker alternatives (<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">generally below 15 is suspect</em>).</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Domain Authority</strong></div>
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<img alt="rank-potential_domain-authority" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-14802" height="77" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/rank-potential_domain-authority.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: left; float: left; margin: 0px 1.467em 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" width="200" />Domain Authority is an SEO KPI created by MOZ, and represents a relative measure of a domain’s authoritative value based on a logarithmic scale between 1-100. It is generally very accurate as a barometer for how *powerful* a domain is in consideration of that domain’s link profile and citation flow. One limiting factor is that it is calculated based on links contained within MOZ’s web index; Mozscape.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Page Authority</strong></div>
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<img alt="rank-potential_page-authority" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-14803" height="77" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/rank-potential_page-authority.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: left; float: left; margin: 0px 1.467em 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" width="200" />The child of Domain Authority, Page Authority, is the same basis scale as Domain Authority but instead of consideration for the authority of the entire domain, it is scored at the individual URL-level. It is a good indication of how powerful a specific URL is within a given domain, and is a great second-tier barometer for gauging the difficulty to outrank a page.</div>
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For Additional Consideration</h3>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Domain Age</strong></div>
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This one is very obvious, it’s exactly what you think it is. How old is the domain – as in how long has it been registered for? What is the history of the domain and it’s indexed URL’s and links? How many times has it changed owners (<a href="https://www.whois.net/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="WhoIs">WhoIs</a>), IP’s, Nameservers?</div>
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The big search engines use some or all of these metrics as trust indicators. In addition, it is speculated that websites less than ~6 months old (think freshly registered domains) are likely to experience what is often referred to as <a href="http://www.webconfs.com/google-sandbox-article-11.php" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Jumping Over the Google Sandbox">Google Jail</a> if they try to acquire links to quickly.</div>
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While Cutts has <a href="http://youtu.be/-pnpg00FWJY" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Google on Domain Age">hinted</a> that domain age may not be a <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">big</em> factor, older more established and<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">more trusted</em> domains are going to have an advantage when it comes to ranking.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Brand Footprint</strong></div>
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What I am specifically talking about here is a general sentiment analysis that can be quickly and manually run for a website’s brand name. In my experience certain search verticals use variations of Google’s ranking algorithms to serve and rank different kinds of results.</div>
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In my very humble opinion this is why you will sometimes see search results with a lot of rich snippets, or packets of video results, and even sometimes results from review or <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">complaint</em>websites. In these instances it is important to consider the diversity of the results and think about the experience that G is trying to provide.</div>
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If a brand (or Entity) has swaths of negative press around it, from specific kinds of review websites, regardless os how weak that URL may be – it may be harder to unhinge and outrank. I believe this also has a lot to do with the idea behind <a href="http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/time-to-long-click" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="TIME TO LONG CLICK">time to long click</a>, or G’s projected measure for quality / user satisfaction.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Social Media Impact</strong></div>
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I’ve saved the most variable metric for last – which is also the hardest to define. What I’m looking at here more than anything else is what do the social properties for this brand look like; how often do they update them? How popular are they? Do they own at least 80% of their brand SERP?</div>
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If not, what other kinds of websites are ranking? Are there competitor sites in their brand SERP? (that’s generally a good sign – it means that G does not yet see them as a more established Entity for that keyword).</div>
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Getting Realistic with SEO</h3>
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What better way to crush the dreams of all aspiring SEO’s out there then to break down just how realistic (also read: <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">expensive</em>) it would be to rank on some of the most coveted enterprise SERP’s.</div>
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For this I’m going to analyze SERP1 for keywords in the following 3 verticals:</div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">credit cards</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">used cars</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">home loans</li>
</ol>
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For each of these verticals I’m going to run a keyword discovery report, select the 3 keywords with the highest search volume (<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">which is not necessarily the seed keyword</em>), and then analyze the rank potential of the SERP’s based on the metrics I listed above.</div>
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It’s going to be a relatively rough breakdown but my goal is to illustrate the time/money/resources you need to invest if you’re going to crack big money SEO.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ready to get realistic with your SEO?</strong> Drop me a line ›</div>
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The Keyword Discovery Process</h3>
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The fastest way to generate solid keyword ideas <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">while getting all the important metrics you need</em>, is to use a tool that does all the heavy lifting for you.</div>
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Fire up what ever your keyword tool of choice is, for this post I’ll be using <a href="http://termexplorer.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Term Explorer - Keyword Research Tool">Term Explorer</a>, mostly because it gives me practically unlimited relevant suggestions (up to 90,000) but it also provides all the search volume and competitive data I need to get started.</div>
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">*Update:</strong> Term Explorer has published this killer process for <a href="http://termexplorer.com/blog/prioritize-keywords/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="How To Prioritize Your Keywords">how to prioritize your keywords</a></em></div>
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Using each keyword as a base seed, I’m going to run 3 small keyword jobs and get a quick 1,000 related keywords with most of the directional data I need:</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Keyword Discovery Results for Credit Cards </strong><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">(click to enlarge)</em></div>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/CreditCards-kw-discovery.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14731];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="CreditCards-kw-discovery" class="alignnone wp-image-14739 size-medium" height="107" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/CreditCards-kw-discovery-300x107.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; margin: 0px auto 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px;" width="300" /></a></div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Keyword Discovery Results for Used Cars </strong><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">(click to enlarge)</em></div>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/UsedCars-kw-discovery.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14731];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="UsedCars-kw-discovery" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-14740" height="100" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/UsedCars-kw-discovery-300x100.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; margin: 0px auto 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px;" width="300" /></a></div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Keyword Discovery Results for Home Loans </strong><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">(click to enlarge)</em></div>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HomeLoans-kw-discovery.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14731];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="HomeLoans-kw-discovery" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-14741" height="149" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HomeLoans-kw-discovery-300x149.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; margin: 0px auto 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px;" width="300" /></a></div>
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Time to Select Our Analysis Pool</h3>
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Based on the above results I’ve selected the following 9 SERP’s to review for rank potential. I’m going to dissect one of the most coveted terms in search (credit cards) and then select one term from each of the other keyword sets to analyze.</div>
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You can click each one of the keywords below to access all the SERP-specific data for each term – I’ve made it publicly available using Term Explorer’s SERP share functionality.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Credit Cards</strong></div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://termexplorer.com/ViewPublicAnalysisNik.php?analysisId=17537&number=1" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="SERP Analysis - credit cards">credit cards</a></li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://termexplorer.com/ViewPublicAnalysisNik.php?analysisId=17537&number=2" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="SERP Analysis - Credit Cards for Bad Credit">credit cards for bad credit</a></li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://termexplorer.com/ViewPublicAnalysisNik.php?analysisId=17537&number=3" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="SERP Analysis - best credit cards">best credit cards</a></li>
</ul>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Used Cars</strong></div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://termexplorer.com/ViewPublicAnalysisNik.php?analysisId=17537&number=4" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="SERP Analysis - used cars">used cars</a></li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://termexplorer.com/ViewPublicAnalysisNik.php?analysisId=17537&number=5" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="SERP Analysis - used cars for sale">used cars for sale</a></li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://termexplorer.com/ViewPublicAnalysisNik.php?analysisId=17537&number=6" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="SERP Analysis - used car dealerships">used car dealerships</a></li>
</ul>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Home Loans</strong></div>
<ul style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.0049991607666px; list-style: square; margin: 0px 0px 1.467em 1.467em; padding: 0px;">
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://termexplorer.com/ViewPublicAnalysisNik.php?analysisId=17537&number=7" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="SERP Analysis - mortgage rates">mortgage rates</a></li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://termexplorer.com/ViewPublicAnalysisNik.php?analysisId=17537&number=8" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="SERP Analysis - mortgage payment calculator">mortgage payment calculator</a></li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://termexplorer.com/ViewPublicAnalysisNik.php?analysisId=17537&number=9" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="SERP Analysis - fha loan">fha loan</a></li>
</ul>
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All SERP screenshots were taken on 3/15/15 using Google Chrome, Logged Out in an Incognito Window.</div>
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SERP’s for “Credit Cards” Keywords</h3>
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I’ve included SERP screenshots for each of the enterprise keywords I’ve chosen for this post.</div>
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Even though I’m not going to do a full analysis for all 9 keywords, based on some interesting nuances I observed across these SERP’s while selecting terms for analysis, I wanted to include all of the screenshots for reference – I’ll explain more on this later.</em></div>
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“credit cards”</div>
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<img alt="credit cards - Google Search" class="aligncenter wp-image-14762 size-large" height="1024" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/credit-cards-Google-Search-510x1024.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="510" /></div>
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“credit cards for bad credit”</div>
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<img alt="credit cards for bad credit - Google Search" class="aligncenter wp-image-14763 size-large" height="1024" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/credit-cards-for-bad-credit-Google-Search-538x1024.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="538" /></div>
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“best credit cards”</div>
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<img alt="best credit cards - Google Search" class="aligncenter wp-image-14764 size-large" height="1024" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/best-credit-cards-Google-Search-538x1024.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="538" /></div>
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SERP’s for “Used Cars” Keywords</h3>
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“used cars”</div>
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<img alt="used cars - Google Search" class="aligncenter wp-image-14765 size-large" height="1024" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/used-cars-Google-Search-588x1024.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="588" /></div>
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“used cars for sale”</div>
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<img alt="used cars for sale - Google Search" class="aligncenter wp-image-14766 size-large" height="1024" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/used-cars-for-sale-Google-Search-516x1024.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="516" /></div>
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“used car dealerships”</div>
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<img alt="used car dealerships - Google Search" class="aligncenter wp-image-14767 size-large" height="1024" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/used-car-dealerships-Google-Search-511x1024.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="511" /></div>
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SERP’s for “Home Loans” Keywords</h3>
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“mortgage rates”</div>
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<img alt="mortgage rates - Google Search" class="aligncenter wp-image-14768 size-large" height="1024" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/mortgage-rates-Google-Search-442x1024.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="442" /></div>
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“mortgage payment calculator”</div>
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<img alt="mortgage payment calculator - Google Search" class="aligncenter wp-image-14769 size-large" height="1024" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/mortgage-payment-calculator-Google-Search-459x1024.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="459" /></div>
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“fha loan”</div>
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<img alt="fha loan - Google Search" class="aligncenter wp-image-14770 size-large" height="1024" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/fha-loan-Google-Search-624x1024.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="624" /></div>
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A Quick Observation</h3>
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In case you didn’t notice, the SERP’s with “Google News” results only show 9 results outside of the news interface element. Even when a local search pack is rendered, if there’s no new results there are still 10 URL’s shown.</div>
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Let’s Analyze Rank Potential</h3>
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I’m going to approach this 2 ways:</div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The maximum potential search rank I believe can be achieved and at what cost</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">What is going to be required to achieve that ranking, including acquisition costs of domain vs. website, links, and content.</li>
</ol>
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Here are the top 10 ranking URL’s for our first credit card keyword (<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">click to enlarge</em>):</div>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/SERP1_credit-cards.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14731];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="SERP1_credit-cards" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-14804" height="39" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/SERP1_credit-cards-300x39.png" style="border: 0px; clear: left; float: left; margin: 0px 1.467em 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px;" width="300" /></a></div>
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and here is the same results when I highlight them competitively from green to red, i.e. green is GOOD for us and red is BAD, relatively speaking (<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">click to enlarge</em>).</div>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/SERP1_credit-cards_analyzer.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14731];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="SERP1_credit-cards_analyzer" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-14805" height="37" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/SERP1_credit-cards_analyzer-300x37.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; margin: 0px auto 1.467em 0px; padding: 0px;" width="300" /></a></div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Breaking this Down</strong></h3>
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First and foremost, it’s important to understand that the analysis we’re doing here is based on all metrics at this instantaneous point in time (IPT). This is a particularly relevant metric to consider when looking at enterprise SERP’s as they tend to change frequently, not necessarily in terms of rankings, but in terms of qualitative metrics, i.e. these pages will likely continue to acquire more links…</div>
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Be Sure To Consider Velocity</h3>
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As further reenforcement to my note above, to get a better sense of which of these URL’s is building there arsenal versus potentially slowing down (or leveling out) we will want to look at the velocity they are acquiring new links.</div>
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For this I personally pay closer attention to number of new linking root domains a site is adding versus just number of links from pages. So in the case of creditcards.com’s link profile (pictured below) we see they’ve recently been adding crap tons of new links, but the trajectory of new linking root domains is a <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">very</em> different angle.</div>
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<img alt="link-profile_creditcardscom" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-14806" height="238" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/link-profile_creditcardscom.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="580" /></div>
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They went from 9,567 LRD’s on March 1st to 9,273 on March 31st, so a net loss of -294. Let’s compare this to the chase.com sub-domain that’s ranking #2:</div>
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<img alt="link-profile_chasecom" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-14807" height="236" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/link-profile_chasecom.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="580" /></div>
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creditcards.chase.com went from 1,511 linking domains on March 1st to 1,443 by March 31st, so another net loss, but only -68. However, in terms of magnitude creditcards.com lost 3% of LRD’s versus chase.com which lost closer to 5%.</div>
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So at first glance chase.com’s link profile from a diversity ratio looks healthier; 3.6% versus creditcards.com’s 1.1% – but chase is shedding LRD’s at a faster rate.</div>
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It’s also worth noting proper velocity analysis should be done over <strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">at least</strong> trailing 12 months,<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">if not longer</em>, and not just the most recent full calendar month – this was just done to show an example of link relativity for the purpose of this post.</div>
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Circling Back to SEO Metrics</h3>
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So I’ve made my point about velocity, now I want to return to the Excel screencap above.</div>
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What we’re looking for is horizontal bands of <strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: green; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">green</span></strong>, hence the color coding to assist with visual identification.</div>
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So the first row that jumps out at me is #5, creditkarma.com with the following SERP metrics:</div>
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Outbound Links: 0<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Relevancy Score: 6<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Page Links: 391<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Page PageRank: 4<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Page Authority: 32<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Domain Age: 9.5 years<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Domain PageRank: 5<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Domain Authority: 69<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Domain Links: 2,193,824<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Trust Score: 10<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Link Strength: 10<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Difficulty Score: 9.99<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Trust Flow: 16<br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Citation Flow: 25</div>
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So as a whole, and without context, this is a pretty scary set of SEO metrics to compete with out of the gate. But as is the case with everything in life, <strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">context is king</em></strong> – and given these metrics are the foundation behind the URL ranking #5 for the term credit cards, this actually isn’t so bad.</div>
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The scariest numbers are the DA at 69, the trust score at 10, and the domain links at 2.1 million. But on the flip-side of the scary coin is the opportunity coin – and the metrics that actually pretty exciting; page links under 400, domain age under 10 years (on a SERP where the average domain age is ~15 years), and a page authority under 40.</div>
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Backing in Cost to Rank</h3>
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This is where the process becomes subjective, relative to the SEO and their available resources for ranking.</div>
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My process is based on computing the value of the projected traffic using my keyword valuation model, however, I don’t spend my days competing in enterprise SERP’s – so I asked for some insight from some SEO’s who do.</div>
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Here’s how Ian Howells, Owner of <a href="http://www.hustleandsavvy.com/" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Effective Online Marketing">Hustle & Savvy</a>, analyzes rank potential:</div>
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I take a look at the top 20 for the SERP and pull all the usual suspects on metrics. Then I go into ahrefs and look at how many links each is adding in a typical month.</div>
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That gives me a ballpark for how many links I would need to build per month to catch the lowest LRD count for page 1 and page 2 in ~12 months (or whatever timeline I’m looking at) given their starting links + new monthly additions.</div>
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That’s my absolute basement.</div>
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Beyond that, I use that to inform what I label as my conservative and aggressive max attainable positions – you can pretty confidently say you’re not going to outrank Amex for ‘amex small business credit card’, etc.</div>
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I then take the average new LRD acquisition cost (call it $300 for sake of argument). $300 times X links/month gives me my monthly cost just for link acquisition, times however many months for the campaign. That compared to the expected return once I achieve my max attainable position gives me my payback period.</div>
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If the total payback period is beyond Y months (call it 24), I’m probably not interested.</div>
</blockquote>
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Running Ian’s Model</h3>
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So taking Ian’s quantitative model into consideration, let’s use some conservative revenue projections and calculate the rank potential and cost to rank for our next enterprise keyword from the “home loans” set; mortgage rates.</div>
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For the purposes of <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">my spin</em> on the valuation model I’m going to look only at SERP 1 (whereas Ian looks at SERP’s 1 and 2). <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Click to enlarge the image</em> – sorry it’s tough with these super wide screenshots.</div>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/rank-potential_mortgage-rates.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14731];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="rank-potential_mortgage-rates" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-14808" height="38" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/rank-potential_mortgage-rates-300x38.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="300" /></a></div>
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Here’s a rundown of <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">approximately</em> how many links each <strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">URL</strong> is adding or losing (net) per month (based on available data from Ahrefs including both recrawled and dropped links):</div>
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<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Zillow.com = -30,000</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">BankRate.com = -600</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">WellsFargo.com = -1,100</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">MortgageNewsDaily.com = -4,000</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">QuickenLoans.com = -23</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">MLCalc.com = -7,500</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">LendingTree.com = -5,000 (note major swings from 1-2k per day)</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">HSH.com = +1,100</li>
<li style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Topics.Bloomberg.com = -25</li>
</ol>
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So it seems almost all of these are losing a net amount of keyword’s each month…</div>
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Well that was unexpected.</em></div>
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Doing The Math</h3>
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I started writing this post a long time ago, like sometime over the summer in 2014. So I’ve had to update the SERP metrics more than I’d like to admit. So I’m going to update them one more time right now. The SERP has changed again since the last time I grabbed the information above – which was almost a month ago.</div>
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So as of the writing of this sentence, it’s April 13, 2015 and the link counts for the above URL set are different. As it stands right now the lowest LRD count in this SERP is the lendingtree.com page with 83 linking domains (not considering the domain seems to be losing thousands per month).</div>
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If we use Ian’s cost projections (which I think are pretty reasonable) we have a base link requirement of 83 links multiplied by $300 per link = $24,900 to crack SERP 1 for this term (in pure link cost).</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Starting to put things into perspective?</strong></div>
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Big SEO is expensive. Now let’s see if it’s worth it…</div>
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First we need to get a rough approximation of what a mortgage broker is making on these leads. Moneysense.ca estimates a mortgage broker <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#q=how%20much%20money%20does%20a%20mortgage%20broker%20make&es_th=1" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="How much does a mortgage broker make">makes ~$2,250 on a $300,000 mortgage</a>, so let’s say that lead is worth 10% of that give or take, so $225*.</div>
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">*I have have never worked in the mortgage space, if you have a better measure please share in comments and I’ll update here.</em></div>
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I’m going to figure since it’s a pretty qualified search we can assume a lead response rate of 3%. So with the head term having a monthly search volume of 246,000, and the first set of results in the discovery run screenshot coming in conservatively around 2,000,000 searches/month…</div>
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We’re looking at conservatively 6% of 2,000,000 searches making it to that page per month, so ~60,000 qualified visits, 3% of whom are going to convert as leads = 1,800 new leads. If only 10% of those leads convert into mortgages you’re making $40,500.00 per month (180 x $225), but let’s dial this way back to more conservative numbers.</div>
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If an acceptable break-even period is 12 months, that means you would need to make $2,083/mo – which based on this population size would mean getting just over 1% of people searching for <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">just the head term</em> to your website.</div>
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If you can even make it to page <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">2</em> you have a good chance of doing that…</div>
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1% of searches for “mortgage rates” is 2,460 visitors per month, with a 3% response rate that’s 73 leads, converting 10% into customers and you’re already at $1,575/mo (7 new customers per month), and your payback period shifts to 18 months – <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">still within Ian’s model</em>.</div>
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My Rank Potential Model</h3>
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I look at this just a *bit* differently, in that my model is even a <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">little more</em> quick and dirty.</div>
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I like to see the SERP data as a whole (in Excel), identify the row that stands out as the weakest link, put that in context of the other ranking pages, and back into what it would cost to get <strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">there</strong>.</div>
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So moving onto a keyword from the last enterprise set, I’m going to look at the SERP for “used cars.”</div>
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<a href="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Google-SERP_used-cars.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-14731];player=img;" style="color: #16a4c8; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="Google-SERP_used-cars" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-14809" height="42" src="http://www.seonick.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Google-SERP_used-cars-300x42.png" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 1.467em; padding: 0px;" width="300" /></a></div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Do you see what I see?</strong></div>
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">#5</em>, http://www.carsales.com.au/new/, has lots of green in the row… including one <strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">major</strong> flag, no link flow scores.</div>
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Upon further inspection this page is returning a 404 error AND when I check this SERP today, is no longer ranking, which I’ll come back to in a bit.</div>
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But, what this means is these metrics were enough to get this page to this point…ranking in the top 5 for a head keyword that receives 450,000 searches per month.</div>
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Now if I was going to go after this SERP specifically, with the hopes of getting a page to #5 – here’s what I would consider my costs to be:</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Domain</strong></div>
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The ranking domain is only 5 years old, which is great, it’s not an EMD, and has a domain authority of 68 and domain PageRank of 6. I should be able to pick up a comparable domain in the $3,000 – 5,000 range, however – because this is in the auto vertical, it’s likely I would need to spend a little bit more, so let’s call it $10,000.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Development and Content</strong></div>
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So from a quick glance it looks like this site is huge, to the tune of ~40M pages. This is definitely bad news, but the good news is these pages are all database driven, and this content can be scraped from any of the other car listing sites. Still, this is going to represent a major cost for development – let’s say $50,000 for the website and content.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Links</strong></div>
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It gets harder still, the domain link profile for this site is serious – with over 30 million links. Good news is the page we’re looking to rank only has 1,602.</div>
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Thinking Through This</h3>
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Without some very compelling reason to get into the used car space, there’s no way I would build this website. But depending on the projected returns – I may try to rank a page for only the head term set of keywords – and sell the leads.</div>
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In that case I would chop up my budget into $10,000 for the domain, $5,000 for content, and $5,000 for links. At the $10,000 price-point I would be specifically looking for a domain with a DA60+ and an existing base of links so my link budget could be dedicated to new high-end links with laser relevancy to used car topics.</div>
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At that budget I’m fairly confident that I would, <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">at the very least</em>, be able to crack page 1 and if need be sell the website to recover the investment capital (if the average price per lead turned out to be too low).</div>
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Key Takeaways</h3>
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Spot checking enterprise SERP’s has been something I’ve enjoyed more and more each year. What continues to impress me is how often these SERP’s see complete flux.</div>
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For example when I was checking the link numbers above, I re-crawled the “used cars” SERP to find that even logged out incognito, I was still being served some local results based on my ip address, and it was a 3-pack from Craigslist. Craigslist is so hyper-local that it doesn’t even show up on the global SERP.</div>
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What’s more, every one of the SERP screenshots taken above on 3/15/15 is different as of 4/13/15. This is fantastic news to SEO’s as a SERP in-flux represents an opportunity. Another good caveat is the above SERP’s are not crowded by only a domains, wikipedia, or answer boxes.</div>
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So in light that these are all highly commercial keywords with monetization intent, these all represent SERP’s with potential.</div>
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In Closing</h3>
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Earlier in the post I said I would explain why I was leaving up all 9 SERP screenshots despite the fact that I was only going to analyze 3, the reason is I want to know what you think.</div>
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What do you notice based on the signaling UI’s that are rendering? If you decide to pull any fresh link data – please leave a comment and I will update the post to include any new findings.</div>
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Thank you.</div>

Realistic SEO – Understanding Rank Potential

79 in Share Email Forrester Research projects U.S. consumers will spend $327 Billion online in 2016. With Google seeing appro...