Creating in-depth content is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Here’s a guide to ensure your long-form content efforts pay off.
There are many questions about content length in SEO and what ranks the best.
While Google says there’s no specific word count they recommend, some studies have shown that long-form content tends to rank higher than short-form.
If you’re interested in writing long-form content, you probably want to make sure it’s going to rank, get read, and convert so you create an ROI for your effort.
What is long-form content?
Most consider long-form content to be over 1,000 words. It’s a content piece that goes in-depth, offers extra value for the reader and includes more research, insights, and information than a quick read.
Long-form content should leave the reader feeling comfortable with the subject and as if their questions have been answered and they know what to do with the information or how it applies to them.
What should you include in long-form content?
You want to create content that helps your reader. Think about them and what they need or want to learn from this piece. What questions do they have?
It’s your responsibility to anticipate their questions and answer them in your work. If you’re unsure what questions they have, then think about what you want to ensure they know.
Use the following guide questions to identify which information is most important to help them get to the next stage:
What do they need to know?
Why do they need to know it?
What can they do with the information?
What baseline information should they know to make this make more sense?
What if they don’t have that baseline knowledge already?
How does this information impact them?
What’s their next step?
Don’t write a bunch of unnecessary fluff to try to hit some word count.
You must ensure you’re providing value and helping your ideal customer so they want to consume more of your content.
If you get them to the site but find nothing of value, they’ll be less likely to stay or return another time.
Write to tell a story and provide value rather than writing to an arbitrary word count. Your content will be better in the long run.
Where do you start when creating long-form content to rank, get read and convert?
To start, make sure there’s a conversion path for your reader. Your content pieces need to tie to your products or services to drive revenue and conversions.
If you’re answering questions for your potential customer and providing helpful information, they’re more likely to convert if you offer a solution to their issues. Be helpful, and link to additional information that might help them move to the next step.
If you have an opt-in that ties to this content piece and is the next step for them, offer it in your work. You’re helping them and building your email list at the same time.
If you want your content to convert, you need to make sure there’s a conversion path. Everything you write needs to somehow tie to your core products and services.
I teach my students to choose content pillars that link to their products and services and write about topics related to those subjects.
Creating a long-form content piece and ranking at the top of Google is great, but if it drives irrelevant traffic, it won’t convert, and that’s a waste of your efforts.
How do you make sure your long-form content ranks?
We all know we have no control over the Google ranking algorithm, but we also know how it works and what’s most important from an optimization standpoint.
First, verify there’s search demand for your topic idea, choose a keyword (or keywords) you can rank for, write for your audience, and finally, optimize your content piece.
Make sure there’s interest in your topic
Start by making sure there’s an audience for your content piece.
It may seem like a great idea to you. However, if no one is searching for information on the subject, it’s unlikely that you’ll get much traffic due to low demand.
That said, search volume is not the most critical factor in choosing a keyword, and we’ll talk more about that.
Brainstorm the topics you think you want to cover, and then go to Google and see what’s there today.
Who’s written on the subject you’re considering using for your content piece?
Is there already information on the topic?
Do you have a new angle, new insights, or something more to add to the conversation?
If not, this might not be the best topic. Search the topic and see what shows up in Google Suggested Search.
Is there something closely related to your topic that Google suggests, or are there questions related to it in the People Also Ask section?
If you see your topic idea in either of those places, that’s good because it means there’s interest in your potential topic.
Research keywords
Once you know your topic is viable, use your favorite keyword research tool to identify the keyword or keywords you want to target for this new long-form content piece.
Long-form pieces can rank for multiple keywords a bit easier than short-form pieces just due to the length of the content piece.
Choose your keywords wisely. Look for a primary keyword with good search volume and the ability for your website to rank on Page 1.
Choose your keywords
Go to Google and see who’s currently ranking on Page 1 for the keyword you’re considering using as your primary one.
Are the websites similar to yours?
Are they more prominent brands or companies?
How in-depth are the articles?
Can you provide additional insight or value (not just more words) than the sites currently ranking?
If you see other websites similar to yours and content pieces that you feel aren’t as in-depth or are missing information on the topic you want to write about, then you’re probably making a good choice in your keyword selection.
Choose the keyword with the highest search volume that your website has the best chance of ranking for and is the word your Ideal Customer uses when searching for information on this subject.
How to make sure your content gets read
Now it’s time to write. Go back to your brainstorming notes.
What information do you need to include to answer your readers’ questions?
Be sure you have that information. Sort it in a way that it’s easy to follow and understand so your reader wants to continue.
A long-form content piece is a time commitment for someone to read.
Thus, you must provide value, insights, statistics, and things that are unique from something else they might have read on the subject before – or they won’t continue reading.
Format your piece in a reader-friendly way. This is especially important with longer pieces. Consider:
Using bullets and lists – white space is your friend.
Using headers (suitable for SEO and your reader).
Breaking your text up into small, easy-to-read chunks.
Keeping your sentences and paragraphs short.
It’s better to have many small paragraphs broken up with bullets and numbers than big blocks of text.
People will shy away from reading a piece if the content isn’t formatted in a reader-friendly way.
Your final step is to optimize your content piece
Use your keyword in all of your SEO elements. Make sure it’s in the first paragraph of the copy, which it should be since your keyword is closely tied to your content topic. In most instances, your keyword will be in the title of your piece.
Add your keyword to your URL, image file name, and header tags, and use it throughout your copy.
Focus on providing value, being helpful, and offering information your ideal customer needs rather than how often you use your keyword. You’ll use it naturally by concentrating on your reader.
Done right, long-form content is worth the investment
Long-form content can be a significant time investment. It takes longer to write in-depth pieces than quick bites or short-form.
However, the payoffs can be great. Long-form pieces often rank higher in the search results than short pieces.
And if you’re creating content with an audience, you can rank for and tie to your business, bring relevant traffic to your website, and hopefully, get the conversion.
It’s worth testing long-form content if you haven’t done it yet. Not every piece you write has to be long, but those most important to your business should be longer and more in-depth.
If you are interested in original article by Rachel Lindteigen you can find it here
Downplaying doorway pages can get you dinged. Here’s how doorway pages emerged, what Google thinks of them, and tips to avoid penalties.
I have an admission: I once created “doorway pages” on a large scale.
In my defense, this was years before Google existed. And, it was not considered spam in those days.
Doorway pages might seem like a nebulous concept for some marketers to grasp. Since Google announced that creating such pages was considered illicit practice, there has been some confusion.
However, such mixups are just as wrong as cloaking in SEO. So read on, and I will explain what doorway pages are, how to watch for them, and what to do about them.
What are doorway pages?
Google defines doorways as:
“…sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.”
They also cite the following examples as doorways:
• Having multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page to maximize their reach for any specific query • Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page • Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s) • Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
The early days of doorway pages
Doorway pages seemed like a mystical, magical thing back in the earliest days of search engines.
This is partly because, in the advent of the commercialized/public internet, everyone thought that website visitors would only enter your site via the homepage.
Essentially, visitors would only arrive and enter through the “front door.” This idea led people to obsess over the design of homepages, while the rest of the website was often nearly an afterthought.
Thus, as search engines absorbed and reflected webpages, it suddenly felt like reaching some high stage of Buddhist-monk-level enlightenment to realize that a website could now have many “front doors” through which visitors would enter.
I did not know what doorway pages were when I thought I invented them circa 1996/1997. Search engines grew first out of curated directories of links, but once pages began being spidered, things changed fast. I had been tasked with increasing traffic to one of Verizon’s biggest websites at the time.
I recognized that the site’s homepage could not be particularly optimized for ~8,000 business categories and ~19,000 cities. I realized that individual pages should be spawned, each optimized to rank for business categories, cities, or combos of both.
I named my pages “portals” because the whole process seemed almost magical. I was following nearly mystical ritual-like designs in optimizing the pages and experimenting. I imagined I was virtually teleporting people who had a search need for “restaurants in springfield” or “doctors in bellevue” into our website where I would match them up with precisely what they wanted.
Despite the lack of any guide or formula that talked about such doorways at scale, many others came up with similar solutions, seeking to expand content to match up with growing varieties of user queries in search engines.
My “portal pages” skunkworks project was a clear success, although it would be some years further before leadership in the company recognized the value and allowed me to deploy the concept beyond my pilot research project.
The rise of doorway pages in search results
When doorway pages were first added to the list of spam practices, there was some degree of hubbub about them, with heavy emphasis expressed by Googlers reinforcing that the use of doorways was contravened.
Not as much has been said about the topic in the years since. Google appeared to be increasingly circumspect about the imposition of penalties related to the practice and other quality rules.
The lack of attention brought to doorway pages seemed to cause some marketers to believe that they are not a big deal.
The typical rationalization is: “Amazon does it, and Google SERPs are full of Amazon, so…”
Often, these folks employ doorway pages on their own websites.
There has been a spike in lawsuits involving doorway pages in the last six years. I first wrote about this in 2017, “Initial Interest Confusion rears its ugly head once more in trademark infringement case,” where I mentioned an older lawsuit where watch company Multi Time Machine sued Amazon for hosting a search results page for “mtm special ops watches” (and other similar keyword searches that could be related to the watch company’s marks).
Amazon hosted the “MTM special ops watches” page, but only showed search results for other competing products.
Multi Time Machine contended that this could confuse consumers expecting MTM products, which was therefore an infringement.
That suit was eventually dismissed as the court determined that no “reasonably prudent consumer” would be confused about the Amazon page that presented products that would be considerably underpriced for MTM watches.
In yet another case (“Bodum USA, Inc. v. Williams-Sonoma, Inc.”), French press coffee maker manufacturer Bodum sued their former retail partner Williams-Sonoma under similar circumstances.
Williams-Sonoma had sold Bodum products for a time but eventually discontinued selling them, opting instead to manufacture their own branded French press coffee makers.
However, the Bodum search results page on the Williams-Sonoma.com website continued to be maintained, only it now presented Williams-Sonoma products and not Bodum’s.
Thus, the circumstances, including accusations that the products themselves were confusingly similar, were arguably much more confusing than in the Multi Time Machine/Amazon case.
The Bodum v. Williams-Sonoma case settled out of court, with Williams-Sonoma adding a disclaimer to their web results, “We do not sell Bodum branded products.”
I subsequently spoke with the CEO of another company that formerly sold their products through Williams-Sonoma. In a similar sequence, the latter also dropped them, began featuring their own, competing products, and maintained a search results page that used (and ranked for) the dropped company’s brand name.
In Google’s recent overhaul of its Webmaster Guidelines, including renaming them to Google Search Essentials, Google could have easily avoided this category if they were no longer a concern.
Instead, the newly updated Spam Policies section page promotes Doorways to the second-listed contravened practice, right after Cloaking. Google also added another example of Doorways as well.
Google’s take on doorway pages: A brief history
Doorway pages were against the rules very early in Google’s 20-plus-year history. I could find reference to doorway pages in Google’s rules as far back as June 2006 (although I think there may have been a rule in place a little before that):
June 2006: Google Webmaster Guidelines prohibited doorway pages early on.
In a session at the first SMX Advanced conference in 2007, Google’s former head of web spam Matt Cutts was asked for more descriptive guidelines.
Just a few days later, Vanessa Fox announced on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog that they had expanded on the guidelines, providing more examples, among other things.
“Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links – often several hundred – that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.”
By 2013, Google’s Webmaster Tools content guidelines section had modified this description, stating:
“Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination. Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users.”
In 2015, Google saw fit to post an article on the Google Search Central Blog, further highlighting what Google disliked about doorway pages and announcing a specific “ranking adjustment” (read: a core update that would penalize doorway pages).
“Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their “search footprint” without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we’ll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.”
At their best, doorway pages could be an effort to provide navigation between search engines’ results pages and the most granular content within a website. If one had a limited crawl budget, such pages could provide collecting pages for many granular-level, individual website pages.
But, at their worst, doorway pages could inflate a site’s indexed pages by thousands and millions of pages, lending little value between the various ones and seeking to enable the site to appear for many more searches than the site merited.
Jennifer Slegg’s analysis of the doorway pages ranking adjustment announcement at the time was that it was most likely focused on improving the quality of local search queries and mobile search results.
Indeed, local business directory websites had tried to index their webpages for all category and location combinations. (This was what my early doorway pages were, before the anti-doorway rules got instituted, as I worked for Verizon’s Superpages – one of the largest of the early online yellow pages.)
That said, there is cause to think that local directory sites somewhat get special treatment from Google (as I will describe shortly in the “Types of doorway pages” section below).
Barry Schwartz outright called the “adjustment” a “doorway page penalty algorithm.”
The automated penalty likely made many realize that doorway pages were considered a serious violation of Google’s guidelines.
Websites had been penalized for this in the past, but many believed that if their sites were not currently penalized, then what they were doing was okay in Google’s eyes.
This irrationally founded belief was proven untrue as the doorway page penalty rolled out.
Seven years later, a whole younger, fresh set of organic search marketers have forgotten that doorway pages are a serious violation, just as some did in the past.
This can happen as an oversight in some instances. Other times, SEO marketers can get progressively bolder and more ambitious about expanding indexable pages to the point where they have crossed a boundary. By then, Google detects doorway pages and dings them pretty sharply.
While having even one doorway page is considered against Google’s rules, in truth, doorway page infractions are determined by scale.
Having a few may not cause issues, but a large ratio of them versus meatier pages is far likelier to be detected, resulting in a negative outcome.
Types of doorway pages
Spammy city/region pages
This corresponds to Google’s example of “[h]aving multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.”
For instance, imagine a law firm in a small state like New Hampshire:
Creating pages targeted to “[legal specialty] in [city name]” with all identical templates having just the city name replaced on each page.
The pages all funneling users to a “Contact Us” page.
It would begin to look pretty spammy and repetitive if done for the roughly 234 towns in New Hampshire.
But, also imagine this sort of thing done with over 19,000 incorporated cities and towns in the United States.
There is cause to think that local businesses for large metro areas implementing this (i.e., targeting the roughly 88 cities of greater Los Angeles or the more than 200 cities of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex) could incur a penalty, particularly if the business did not have a physical address in each targeted city, which would qualify it for having such pages.
Here is an example of a doorway page used by a current international business directory (name redacted).
There are clearly some caveats to Google’s algorithmic rules around defining spammy city/region types of pages.
One can perform a search right now and see local business listings pages from major directory websites like Yelp and Yellow Pages appearing in the top search results for a huge number of business category keywords combined with local city names (e.g., “accountants in poughkeepsie, ny”).
Sites like neighborhoods.com and nextdoor.com are doing great. If the page shows high-quality, valuable information about each city a website targets, it likely won’t be considered a doorway page. This is a key criterion that many seem to miss when assessing whether doorway pages are policed by Google.
Now, if you display a page like “Attorneys in New York City”, but the page merely has links to listings for all the boroughs, that would qualify as a doorway page.
If a user seeks “attorneys in nyc” and clicks on a page that does not contain listings for “attorneys in nyc” but merely links to other pages, then that would be a very poor user experience.
But, if they clicked on the page and got listings of attorneys, that would not fit in the model of being a doorway page per se.
You can understand this by searching for “attorneys in nyc.” You will see on the first page of search results listings from Justia, FindLaw, Cornell University attorney listings, Yelp, the New York City Bar Association, Martindale-Hubbell, and Expertise.com.
Microsites
Google does not refer to “microsites” in their guidelines, but this is what the tactic used to be called.
Google’s current rule states, “Having multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page to maximize their reach for any specific query.”
The concept of microsites was employed more when SEOs noticed that Google seemed to give ranking preference to websites incorporating the keyword in the domain name.
Imagine if Target.com pursued this. They sell over 3,000 types of products based on their sitemaps file.
Creating a “subwebsite” for each type of product with links back to their main website to conduct a purchase would have been massively irritating. It would also be largely unnecessary because Google can fully show their existing category pages in search results.
This is an attractive idea for website operators who think this will be a shortcut to successes they failed to achieve by insufficiently optimizing their existing websites.
I have argued with CEOs before about this very thing, telling them that “to successfully employ a microsite, you must market it equivalently to your main website – promote it, advertise it, use social media with it, etc – don’t do it, because nobody markets microsites sufficiently when they create dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of them!”
You can create a special promotional website for a few things, but you better treat them pretty close to complete, standalone websites to achieve good rankings.
A unique, keyworded URL is insufficient in itself. This is not a shortcut to across-the-board high rankings.
Indexable internal search results pages
Google has stated for many years now that they do not want to index a website’s search results pages as this could be an infinite set of pages, considering all the many keywords that could be used to conduct a search on a website. Search-results-in-search-results is an irritating user experience.
This is perhaps the most confusing aspect of Google’s guidelines because there are a few ways to define “search results” on websites.
Category pages or item listings pages on some websites use website/database search functionality to display these types of pages.
Google’s SEO Starter Guide states:
“Avoid: Letting your internal search result pages be crawled by Google. Users dislike clicking a search engine result only to land on another search result page on your site.”
However, there are differences between allowing one’s category pages to be indexed (of a limited number and very specific) vs. having many variations indexed for category-type keywords that display substantially identical pages.
This can happen with ecommerce websites when marketers create category pages including every variation of product options. Ecatalog software often supplies “faceted” navigation options that produce such pages. Here’s an example:
Micro SD Digital Cameras $100 to $250, 9 or less megapixels
SD Digital Cameras $100 to $250, 9 or less megapixels
Micro SD Digital Cameras $250 to $500, 9 or less megapixels
SD Digital Cameras $250 to $500, 9 or less megapixels
Micro SD Digital Cameras $500 to $700, 9 or less megapixels
SD Digital Cameras $500 to $700, 9 or less megapixels
Micro SD Digital Cameras $100 to $250, 10 to 11 megapixels
SD Digital Cameras $100 to $250, 10 to 11 megapixels
Micro SD Digital Cameras $250 to $500, 10 to 11 megapixels
SD Digital Cameras $250 to $500, 10 to 11 megapixels
Micro SD Digital Cameras $500 to $700, 10 to 11 megapixels
SD Digital Cameras $500 to $700, 10 to 11 megapixels
Now, some websites have such a breadth of content that they might be able to produce such pages without running afoul of a doorway page assessment.
But many websites may display virtually identical content on such pages or display only a single product listing – which would have been served better by only having the product page itself indexed.
In yet more egregious cases, some websites have set up things such that when consumers conduct searches on their websites, it will automatically produce indexable search results pages for each of those queries.
This can result in loads of pages indexed with only the keyword name changing, while the contents of the pages are substantially or wholly similar to others on the website.
This is the case for those Williams-Sonoma pages where an indexed search result for “bodum coffee makers” might be the same content as for a “French press coffee makers” category page.
Even more concerning, blindly generating pages from users’ search results can create pages featuring keywords that are no longer relevant to the website. In other words, spam and, put in another way, potential trademark infringement.
In one lawsuit I worked on, an online retailer allowed thousands and thousands of pages generated by users’ search queries on the site to be indexed, including for major brand names that the website did not carry, such as Nike, Versace, Burberry, Gucci, Yves St. Laurent, Chanel, Eddie Bauer, and more.
An even greater number of pages were indexed from the website, focused on keyword phrases that would produce substantially similar to identical search results pages:
“white jeans”
“white jean”
“size 17 jeans”
“jeans size 17”
“black jeans”
“black rip jeans”
“black rips jeans”
“black ripped jeans”
“black ripped jean”
“ripped black jeans”
“black jeans men”
“black jeans mens”
Imagine these sorts of keyword phrases multiplied hundreds and thousands of times over, and you get the picture. Huge scale, duplicate content, and spammy.
Any website with substantial content and search functionality that uses the GET method can end up with indexed internal search results.
I had a client circa 2007/2008 whose business model was creating a sort of curated search results pages that got de-indexed by Google overnight when this rule was promoted.
Substantially duplicate content propagated via keyword variations
You can already see how this could work in the example above where pages were indexed for an online retailer under multiple, highly-similar keywords, and the pages would have identical content.
There may be some level of plausible deniability where SEO software paired up with Shopify or other online shopping software can result in more and more user-generated search queries getting indexed as pages.
But, some websites have sought to programmatically create alternate versions of content pages using synonyms, keyword research APIs, AI, or some human editors. The page’s content could be published on multiple pages, each titled and headlined with different keywords.
Many thin content websites have done this very thing in the past, and it likely does not work well in Google these days.
You may wonder if you are at risk of having your website “dinged” by Google for having doorway pages. If you *know* you have doorway pages, eliminate them in favor of focusing on pushing the quality and promoting your other content pages.
If you are unsure if you have what Google would consider doorway pages or want ideas on how to fix them, read on for some recommendations.
There has long been the suggestion that Amazon gets away with doorway pages because they have loads of PageRank. Therefore, Google displays many of Amazon’s doorway pages where other websites would not.
With 135 million pages indexed and ranking for top product name queries across the board, Amazon is indeed in a unique position. Google can – and does – take the position that providing users with what they seek is the first and foremost priority.
So if the site is desired/expected in the search results, Google might allow infractions to pass to maintain the page in the search results where consumers can find it. That does not mean that Google likes doorway pages, however.
But, I do not think Amazon’s pages are particularly doorway pages.
Generally, if you click on an Amazon listing in Google’s search results for a product, you will find what you are looking for. Those can be category listings pages or specific product pages.
But, you see pictures, typically, of what you are looking for, and the results are pretty satisfactory. This is a key determinant.
Doorway pages are typically:
A sort of interstitial between Google’s search results and the actual destination pages users are seeking.
Duplicated across many similar keywords.
Are even spammed at keyword combinations with the content of the pages bearing little relation to what the user is specifically seeking.
The takeaway is not that “Amazon gets away with Doorway Pages”. The takeaway is that “Amazon provides a very satisfactory experience for searchers by delivering on the promise of the keyword targeting of their pages.”
Here are some tips for reducing your risks of a doorway “ding”.
Simply remove doorways from the index
Google suggests using robots.txt, but I have another take.
A robust internal link hierarchy is valuable for SEO, as that can help ensure Google finds and indexes the site’s granular content.
For this reason, perhaps the quickest fix is to add a robots meta tag to those pages with a “noindex” directive, along with the “follow” directive to keep the links on the page getting crawled.
Keep internal search from generating pages
It is true that you can mine your internal website search data to discover keywords that your users may be using to find your type of content.
You should still use that as a guide for creating new content, modifying existing content, or introducing other pages related to the top-searched terms.
But do not let your internal searches automatically transform into pages of search results that search engines can index.
Doing so will put your site squarely on an increasing curve of cookie-cutter-templated pages that will generate levels of duplication, pages with low value, and open you up to possible spam-hacking exploits.
You should human-curate the pages added to your site, so stop the uncontrolled flow of pages created each time users type word combos into your search forms.
You should also consider tech modifications if your internal search URLs are indexable because it is natural for users to share page URLs with others. This can result in user-generated external links growing over time until you involuntarily have a large set of doorway pages.
You may need to set all those robot meta tags with noindex directives or disallow them in robots.txt.
Alternatively, you could switch the search functionality to only work with the POST method, revoking the ability for full URLs to be bookmarkable/indexable.
Redesign your category pages to be richer
Category and subcategory pages do not have to be mere navigational lists of links to deeper pages. You can display top items from the categories on the page along with navigational links deeper.
Informational text content could be included, as well as videos and preview snippets and links to related blog posts. Highlight the newest items, recently-updated content, top-sellers, or endorsement blurbs.
In short, you want to transform what have been essentially linking pages for search engines into pages that are simultaneously highly usable and useful for end users.
Make core content pages more relevant for alternate keywords
If you are using doorway pages to try to have content that appears for many related keyword phrases, you are using only one SEO method.
Instead of doorways, you can judiciously add one or two other keyword phrases onto the page itself if you add them in a natural way that reads well for users. Do not go overboard, or you will run afoul of Google for keyword stuffing.
Another option is to create external links pointing to the main page for any given topic, using alternate keyword phrases for the link text. Again, avoid going overboard with too many and do not resort to external link building to accrue the links.
You could write posts on your website’s blog or in articles to link the alternate keywords’ text back to the main page for the topic.
Do away with doorway pages
Doorway pages have now been a contravened practice for about two decades.
Google’s recent update to Search Essentials increased the prominence of doorway pages in the contravened spam policies section. They also added an example among those long present.
This indicates that doorway pages continue to be considered a bad practice and every bit as severe as the other black hat SEO practices that are risky, wrong, and unethical. Otherwise, Google would have used the opportunity of updating the section to revoke the doorway guidelines.
Despite some level of rationalization and confusion on the part of the search community, doorway pages will continue to remain a bad practice.
It could penalize your website (or a portion of it) such that the pages are buried far down in the search results or even de-indexed entirely so that they cannot be found for any search.
Alternative optimizations can provide perceived benefits associated with doorway pages and reduce or avoid the conditions that can cause them.
Stick with contemporary SEO best practices and avoid involvement with doorway pages. You’ll see your organic search rankings program grow and benefit without the risks of getting on Google’s bad side.
Managing doorway pages (by eliminating them) has further benefits as well. You’ll do away with potentially significant legal liability associated with the practice.
If you are interested in original article by Chris Silver Smith you can find it here
When it comes to SEO, some questions divide the industry. The potential benefits of outgoing links is one example. Learn more here.
Google dismisses the idea that outgoing links are considered a direct ranking signal – but tests have proven otherwise.
Who should SEOs believe? Why should we link out at all?
When asked about the impact of outgoing links on “link juice,” Google’s John Mueller flatly ignored the question stating again that any advice containing the term “link juice” should not be taken seriously
Thus, we have to research a little deeper and go back a few years to find out.
Incoming vs. outgoing links: Do they both matter?
So what’s the difference between outgoing (outbound) and. incoming (inbound) links?
This infographic by Morningscore explains it pretty well.
Most people in the SEO industry and beyond agree that links to your site alias incoming links, also called inbound links or backlinks, matter.
Inbound links are still an important ranking factor on Google.
While the search engine continuously adds other signals to refine results, the original Google algorithm is based on counting and assessing the value of incoming links.
More complex additions like the RankBrain algorithm or the concept of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) ensure that only usable, credible and content-rich sites get ranked on top.
Yet the ranking itself still heavily relies on good old editorial links – those leading “back” to your site.
But what about outgoing links (i.e., links from your site to others)?
That has been an evergreen debate among SEO practitioners and marketers alike.
Let’s recap what we know about (outgoing) links first.
Mueller repeatedly said that they are not a direct ranking signal. Yet he and many SEOs still advocate linking out.
One approach could be called the egoistic one. It assumes that you have to hoard the authority you get from other sites by way of links. Thus, linking out as rarely as possible in order not to lose that authority, link value or “equity”.
The other approach (I abide by) is the rather altruistic one. It assumes that the web is built on links (hence hypertext as in hyperlinks) and the more you are interconnected with other sites – both ways – the better.
Why are SEO experts scared to link out?
Not only beginner-level SEOs are often literally scared to link out. Some experienced SEO experts are also not keen on risking their site authority on outgoing links. Why is that?
There are actually instances when Google penalizes sites for linking out or simply algorithmically reduces their ranking.
Here are a few examples.
Bad neighborhoods
Bad neighborhoods are often websites that are dealing either with adult subjects or gray areas like prescription-free drugs and gambling. They are also referred to as 3P (porn, pills and poker).
Other obvious examples are so-called “warez” or copyright infringement sites in general.
That said, even legit but low-quality sites you link to may have some detrimental impact.
Link schemes (i.e., reciprocal links, link farms)
“Link schemes” is a Google term describing all kinds of “unnatural” links meant to increase the chances of ranking on Google organically.
Reciprocal links (I link to you so that you link to me) or link farms (interlinked sites just created, acquired or paid for the links) are common examples.
Such links may get demoted by Google or lead to an “unnatural links” penalty.
Text link ads
Text link ads or in Google’s words “paid links” are links to other sites you have been paid for one way or another.
These payments can be sponsorships, donations or free products as well.
When in doubt, Google may penalize you for outbound links you have received some kind of remuneration for.
Google wants you to add the “sponsored” attribute to such links. The same procedure also applies to paid reviews you have been asked to place on your site.
User-generated content (UGC)
UGC are comments, forum entries or any type of submitted content without editorial oversight linking out to third-party sites – which are also risky.
Google advises you to use the “UGC” link attribute on such links. Check all contributions prior to publication ideally.
Guest posts, widgets, infographics, etc.
Over the years, Google has added a lot of common SEO techniques to the list of unnatural link practices. Some widely used link building techniques like guest posts, widgets and infographics were among them.
Thus, when you have some of those on your site, you are required to use the “nofollow” link attribute on outbound links associated with them.
Broken links
Broken, or dead links that have been linked out to reputable resources, may overnight become hazardous to your site’s health.
It’s not just the SEO issues. You also risk your reputation when visitors end up on defunct sites, error pages or parked domains.
Monitor and fix broken or redirected links regularly. The latter ones can be even more harmful as deceptive sites won’t always send an error code but instead a “200” OK to fool you to link to them.
No wonder many SEO experts got more and more reserved when it comes to linking out. Some of them only link to Wikipedia or the like “for the potential SEO benefit of linking out.”
Others play it safe by adding “nofollow” to all outbound links even though Mueller also stated that there is no benefit in that either.
What does Google say about the benefits of outgoing links?
Despite all the possible pitfalls (I didn’t even list all of them), there are also benefits to linking out – both for Google and also for the website owners who do it.
In 2019, Mueller published an actual video on linking out and why it matters. At 1:19, he specifically encouraged linking to other sites that “offer additional value and more context.”
Given Google’s increased focus on E-A-T criteria in the ranking algorithm, linking out to established sources and experts has additional benefits.
What does that mean specifically?
Proof of authority
How do you prove authority? You literally add the author’s name and short bio, then link out to their website and social media accounts.
Anonymous posts by “admin” as the default author on WordPress are usually called or outsourced content that has no name attached to it.
Such content is, of course, far less convincing to potential readers and also Google algorithms.
Citing sources
Even accomplished experts usually rely on the work of others.
By citing and ideally quoting sources from scholars in academia, journalists and bloggers ensure their expertise is backed up by others.
Linking out to sources, especially highly credible ones like universities, government agencies or leading publications (think The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal), establishes credibility even if you’re not a world-renowned expert yourself yet.
More resources
No matter how extensively you cover a topic, there is always something to “read more” you haven’t mentioned. This goes beyond just crediting sources.
Assuming that you have satisfied the reader and they are still interested, you are welcome to add more resources on the subject matter to broaden the scope of your content.
Linking out to content that elaborates on some aspects you haven’t covered in-depth yet is a good idea to enhance a trustworthy article.
The web in general also benefits from sites actively linking out as sites devoid of outgoing links tend to become dead ends in the worst case.
Proving the direct SEO impact of outgoing links
Luckily, we don’t just have to rely on Google’s words.
Some SEOs have actively looked for an answer by simply testing whether there is a positive impact of outgoing links.
And there is!
Opinions are always to be considered with a grain of salt in the SEO world. Actual tests are often more reliable.
The people of Reboot Online, “a data-driven SEO company,” have tested the potential effect of outbound links or lack thereof – not just once, but twice (first in 2016 and again in 2020).
As we can see above, the test sites which included outgoing links outranked the “stingy” sites that did not contain outgoing links.
Even test results may be biased of course, as the testers expected a positive impact. Reboot Founder Shai Aharony explains his motivation as follows:
“I’m repeatedly astonished at the numerous times we come across the absurd and old fashioned belief that Pagerank should be religiously kept within the site and that any outgoing links are ‘diluting’ your site’s authority…”
While it’s hard to ensure that a test only checks a particular ranking factor or hypothesis, SEO experiments can often provide useful hints for your ongoing optimization efforts.
In this case, the test has been repeated so that we can be pretty sure that the results are valid.
Ideally, you also conduct your own tests of course but it’s not an easy feat given the complexity of the current Google ranking algorithm.
Why do outgoing links make sense beyond SEO considerations?
Beyond the more or less obvious benefits that even Google spokespeople mention, there are many “social SEO” aspects of outgoing links that can ultimately improve your rankings or at least help you to gain traction in other ways.
Even if you still frown upon linking out to other websites for fear of risking your organic reach, here are some direct benefits of outbound links to be aware of before giving them up completely.
Getting noticed
First of all, when you link to someone – and usually there is a person who runs a website and who may notice – you are “getting out there.”
Especially when you’re new in a given niche, industry or market you want to “say hello” by acknowledging those who came before you.
When I started a new blog in the past, I would usually make a list of “the best blogs” covering the specific topic the blog was meant to be about.
As a welcome side effect, those lists not only would draw in other, already-established bloggers to my fairly new publication. They would usually also rank on top of Google for phrases like [(topic) blog].
Looking back at blogging about SEO for 15+ years I have to admit that many of my most valuable connections and often clients have been a direct result of my linking out to someone.
Of course, numerous links did not get noticed, have been ignored or were acknowledged without any significant reciprocation.
Yet those that did actually start a conversation and a process of relationship building have helped me a lot over the years.
This is especially important for “introverts” who usually don’t go to conferences, meetups or trade fairs.
Give and take
Once you link out you give the present of attention, appreciation and often support. Even if you disagree with what you link, the vote has been counted by Google.
We have been primed for mutual aid for literally millions of years so when you receive a gift from someone, you are usually likely to reciprocate sooner or later. At least you are much more open-minded to suggestions down the road.
Many people in the SEO industry reach out to a list of “100 prospects” and get a response rate of like 2%. Their main mistake is that they are contacting strangers out of the blue and asking for favors right away.
Even if you don’t enjoy socializing with like-minded individuals working in the same industry, you are thus motivated to be friendly and literally make friends or “build relationships.”
User experience
No single person or even entity is all-knowing. Even Google can’t answer all queries in a satisfactory way. Thus while creating content, we will always rely on other people’s expertise.
Even if you just rephrase it without directly quoting, you will probably not cover everything in as much depth as possible – so here comes the link.
You can simply link to other content without having to reinvent the wheel and can stand on the shoulders of giants. This is a much better user experience than letting the visitor hang and not being able to cover the topic extensively enough for every reader.
Let people read more elsewhere or check out the details you only mention without a lot of background.
Don’t be afraid that they will leave the site. They will be more likely to return given the positive user experience.
How to link out to make it count
Now that you are considering linking out for SEO or other benefits, you probably ask yourself how to link out to have a positive impact on your site. Follow these tips.
Do not add a ‘nofollow’ when you don’t have to
Some publishers and blogs add nofollow tags to all outgoing links in order to minimize any potential risks of linking out.
Yet, that’s like saying that all of your content is untrustworthy and lacks editorial control. Not only is there no gain from it, but there is also an additional risk of appearing low quality.
Make sure to treat each link individually. Add nofollow tags only when needed.
Editorial links should be treated accordingly – as proper links with no potentially discrediting attributes.
Check and update outgoing links regularly
Once you link out you vouch to some extent for the resource you link to. After all, you ensure the validity of the content you effectively recommend.
Even if you disagree with the information you link to, you at least assign enough importance to it to send your visitors that way. Thus, it’s also advisable to check such links on existing content regularly.
On WordPress, that task can be automated. Whenever a resource disappears, you have to unlink it or better replace it.
No tool can warn you when third-party resources become outdated. Thus, it’s a good idea to check manually and regularly so that you don’t link to something that has been debunked or updated by now.
Link out to specific authority sites (not Wikipedia)
Another common shortcut is just linking out to Wikipedia instead of taking the time and looking up actual sources. That’s almost like saying, “just Google it!”
Most people have searched for a topic to find you and they have probably seen the Wikipedia entry above your result as well.
They want to learn more, not just find out the basics like the definition of the keyword.
Link out for users first, for SEO benefits second
Make sure that the resource you link to offers some “additional value” for the reader. Do not just link out for SEO benefit.
When someone notices you and ideally shares your content or, in the best case, links back it’s a nice-to-have.
In the search industry, sometimes, it’s better to link to Google directly (even though they don’t notice or link back) than to a blog that only rehashes the news.
In other cases, Google has only cryptic announcements you need some explanations on so a third-party blog is better.
Mention experts by name and ‘ping’ them
When you link out to actual experts from your niche, industry or country you may benefit from their audiences noticing your content as well.
In the past, WordPress pings ensured that every linked blogger would notice in their comment section.
As that pingback and trackback features have been abused over the years, most blogs have deactivated that feature.
You have to notify people manually again, like in the good old days before blogs. Mention experts you included by name and tell them that you linked to their content (on social media or by mail).
If you are interested in original article by Tadeusz Szewczyk you can find it here
How is the content on your website performing? What about that blog content you published two months ago? Two years ago?
Is it all helping you meet your goals? Do you know – or do you have no idea?
Then it’s time for a content audit.
What is a content audit? Why should you do one?
A content audit is a systematic review of the content across your site, including:
Blogs.
Landing pages.
Product or service pages.
Core content pages.
This review helps you understand whether your content is working to meet your goals, including reaching your desired audience.
But that isn’t all it does.
4 benefits of doing a content audit
1. It shows you which content needs improvement (backed by data)
Besides showing you whether your content is working in general, a content audit also gives you concrete direction on areas you need to improve.
For example, you might find broken links you weren’t previously aware of, keyword opportunities you’re missing, absent metadata, and other issues you can easily address to improve your content’s usability and search visibility.
2. It gives you a bird’s eye view of your content as a whole
If you have a lot of content on your website, an audit can be a mammoth undertaking. However, completing a content audit is the only way to dig through your entire trove of content and get a true understanding of whether it’s serving your business… or falling flat.
3. A content audit helps you optimize your content so it performs
Even if you have a very small business and not a lot of content, a content audit is still useful. It will help you optimize the content you do have so it performs at its peak.
And content that performs is powerful.
It can convince prospects that your brand is trustworthy: 64% of consumers said they feel a brand is trustworthy after reading a piece of educational content from that brand. (Conductor)
Good content can influence purchase decisions: Consumers were 131% more likely to purchase from a brand with effective content. (Conductor)
Optimized content is a lead machine: It brings in 3x the leads of traditional marketing but costs 62% less to maintain. (Demand Metric)
4. It will improve your future content creation
Since a content audit helps you understand what works and what doesn’t (because you’ll see evidence of both across your site!), you can apply this to your future content creation for better results.
When to do a content audit
Now that you know what a content audit is and why you should do one, the next question is when.
When is the best time to do a content audit?
Consider these scenarios:
Your website is a few years old, and you’ve never done a content audit before. (You’re probably past due!)
You’re building a content strategy, and you want a clear picture of what you’re working with.
You’re overhauling your content strategy or redesigning your website.
Basic steps of a content audit
How does a content audit work? The basic steps include setting goals, gathering your content and data points, and critically analyzing what you discover.
Step 1: Set goals
Don’t go into a content audit without a clear objective, otherwise, you won’t know which types of content or data points to focus on. Figure out what you hope to get out of your content audit.
Step 2: Gather, categorize, and organize your content
You need a way to compare and contrast your content pieces, have a bird’s eye view of the data and categorize each piece based on the action you’ll take.
Step 3: Analyze your content
Look at the data and determine which pieces you’ll update, rewrite, keep, or delete.
Step 4: Make a plan based on your findings
Make a priority list for which content pieces need immediate attention, and make a plan for how you’ll carry out updates and rewrites.
Step 5: Adjust your content strategy
What did you learn from your content audit? Carry that forward into your future content strategy.
Tools to use for a content audit
When you’re ready to do your content audit, there are a few options for how you can collect URLs, data, and metrics and put it all together for optimal analysis.
Here are a few of the tools you might need.
1. A plain old spreadsheet
For a no-frills content audit – or one for a relatively small site – a plain spreadsheet is a good option.
A spreadsheet will help you lay out your content information and data in an organized way that will make it easier to analyze.
This is the lowest-cost way to do a content audit since you don’t need any special tools besides Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
Cons: It may be time-consuming to collect all your data manually, especially if you have more than a few dozen content pieces to audit.
2. Analytics software
Analytic data is important to your content audit. This includes metrics like page views, number of internal links and backlinks, bounce rate, time on page, conversion rate, average position on Google, and many more.
You need concrete data about each piece of content so you can decide what action to take moving forward (update, rewrite, delete, or keep as-is).
If you aren’t already tracking your content performance in a tool like Google Analytics, you can pull your various metrics from SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or SEO Site Checkup.
3. Content quality tools
To help you quantify content quality, you may want to use some of these tools to check your content for readability, grammar and word usage, and reading level.
Yoast SEO: This tool analyzes your text and provides scores and suggestions to improve readability.
Grammarly: Besides checking grammar and spelling, the paid version of Grammarly offers performance scoring that can be useful to include in a content audit.
4. A content inventory tool
If you have a large site, you may need to invest in a content inventory tool to help make your life easier. These tools use your sitemap to grab your content URLs and associated metrics automatically.
A few good options are Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Semrush’s Content Audit Tool.
Types of content audits and their associated goals
While you certainly can audit every single piece of content on your site, it’s a better idea to narrow your focus and complete an audit based on content type and goals.
For example, audit all of your blog content, all of your landing pages, all of your product/service pages, or all of your core content pages.
After you choose a content type, decide which goal you’re aiming for with your content audit. Here are a few common ones:
1. Goal: SEO
When you approach a content audit with the goal of improving your SEO, you’ll be concerned with how your content pieces are performing in Google. You’ll need to ask yourself if your content pieces are properly optimized for searchers and search engines. Look at:
Content quality.
Word count.
Keyword difficulty and search volume.
Average Google position.
Organic page views.
Content structure and keyword optimization. (Are headers with keywords present? How is the piece organized? Is the focus keyword placed optimally?)
2. Goal: Better engagement and usability
With a goal of improving engagement and usability, your content audit should focus on how your readers interact with your content – and how to increase that engagement. Look at:
Social shares.
Time on page.
Bounce rate.
Conversions.
Internal links and/or broken links.
Specifically, look at which pieces are earning the most/least engagement, and analyze what’s contributing to that success/failure.
3. Goal: Conversion optimization
Another goal you might shoot for with a content audit is looking at how well your content is converting, and figuring out what needs improvement. You might look at:
How well your content addresses each stage of the buyer’s journey, and whether any gaps exist
Which pages are converting well vs. which aren’t converting, comparing metrics like:
Time on page.
Bounce rate.
Conversion rate.
What is a content audit? Answer: A necessary piece of your content strategy
A content audit is, quite simply, the only way to understand your content at a few different levels: down in the weeds, and up from a bird’s eye view.
Whether your site is massive or tiny, a content audit can help you understand what you have, what you need, what you don’t need, and what actions you can take in the future to make sure your ecosystem of content is contributing to your goals.
Remember: There isn’t one perfect or set way to do a content audit. Your audit can shift depending on the type of content you’re analyzing and the goals you hope to reach by the audit’s completion. With that in mind, tweak your content audit to suit what your site and content strategy demand.
Finally, don’t shrug aside doing regular content audits. One-and-done will only help your site/business for a limited time. As your content keeps growing, you need to keep taking snapshots of how it’s working, continually tweaking and course correcting.
Content audits are integral to a well-oiled content strategy – don’t neglect this task, and you’ll see results.
If you are interested in original article by Julia McCoy you can find it here
10 popular options when considering link-building service providers.
Link building is essential. While Google has made numerous advancements in machine learning and content comprehension, links remain a critical element of how Google ranks websites.
We know that Google doesn’t want you to proactively build links. They want you to create high-quality content and hope for the best (i.e., build it and links will come).
Whether you’re a well-known brand or a local SMB, you need to be findable in the SERPs when people are searching for your product, service or expertise. Getting that initial push to get the front page creates a virtuous cycle where the better you rank, the more links you get because of how well you rank.
Enter: link-building services.
While link building is essential, it’s also tedious. It’s time-consuming. And, honestly, it can seem quite boring. (Though we’d politely disagree!)
Luckily, there are companies that can do this tedious and time-consuming work for you!
Link building, done right, can be a win-win – for your website and the site linking to you. The key is reaching out to your own personal network of publishers and bloggers within a niche to offer a piece of content that they can either write about themselves or link to when relevant.
If you haven’t built the types of relationships that can turn into links – this is where link-building services providers become incredibly valuable.
In this article, we will introduce to you to 10 popular options when considering link-building service providers. Choose wisely – there are always risks and rewards when choosing a link-building service to scale your SEO efforts.
We’ll start shamelessly with our own and if you understand the risks and rewards of proactive link building this way, try them.
Link-building services list
The following are in no particular order. We are not claiming anyone is better than any other. This is simply a list of link-building service providers you can choose from.
Here’s what makes us a bit different. We are a team with vast experience in the link-building space and have identified and tried to address the following pain points.
Transparency: Unlike most services, you can pick the right publishers upfront from our marketplace. Metrics like the primary niche they operate in, organic traffic, and DA (by Moz) are filters you can apply to find the right blogs, so there are no surprises after reviewing the report.
Pricing: Unlike most service providers, we will not charge you hefty fees based on the domain metrics. Instead, we take a fixed success fee and pass on the benefit of a low cost of link acquisition irrespective of how big or small that publisher is.
Flexibility: Even with the marketplace model, you are working with us to get the job done and not waiting for the publisher to react despite operating on a dynamic pricing model like other marketplaces that only serve as a platform provider. You also have managed posts and custom link-building campaigns and the option to upload your content, so the number of ways you can get this done is highly flexible.
Now let’s move on to some other notable link-building providers.
Page One Power focuses on giving you a personalized experience. They will sit down with you to discuss your individual needs, analyze your existing website and give you a customized link-building plan. They are willing to do the research and heavy lifting for you, giving you the extra breathing room to focus on other aspects of your business.
To help you get started as quickly as possible, Fat Joe features an intuitive order intake form and a dashboard to monitor active orders and manage them. They seem to be the go-to service provider for agencies that need a lot of links for multiple clients with tight deadlines and provide content services that seem reasonably priced.
If you considered link-building services, there is a high probability you have come across The Hoth already. They are one of the oldest link-building service companies with diverse offerings across various off-page SEO services. Their dashboard is intuitive, and one can navigate through their diverse offerings quite easily; however, given their large-scale link-building services, you might have to be careful in picking the right product for you as some could do more harm than good if you do not understand the product and its risks, so talk to them about your goals before you go ahead.
No BS could have kick-started the transparent approach to link building, where you get to pick publishers upfront that they would suggest based on your requirements. So if you appreciate transparency and would like tighter control on the links you want to acquire, they are another great alternative to look into.
If you’re looking for a tried and true SEO and link-building agency that works with high-profile industry names like Robinhood, Monday, Freshworks, Hotjar, and others, uSERP fits the bill. Working with small businesses and large enterprises alike, they craft and initiate content-based link-building campaigns.
Siege Media is another agency that offers content-driven link building, where they prospect and reach out to authority publishers in your industry with amazing content. Although the specific link-building services they provide won’t give you an exact number of links they can expect to build, they will provide you with a ballpark figure instead.
The folks at Posirank have been at it for a while as well. The team offers both custom campaigns and some large publishers’ lists from which they could secure a backlink for you. In addition, they have an easy dashboard where you can quickly sign up and start your first link acquisition campaign immediately.
Beginning its operations in 2011, this link-building company is a trusted business partner of some of the largest brands, including established names from the Fortune 500 list. The philosophy of their approach is to build relevant backlinks that could stand the test of time.
10. Hire a Freelancer: For many, hiring an experienced blogger outreach and link-building expert from Upwork could work out best, especially if you want to control the process at every level and keep the costs in check at the same time. There seem to be plenty of skilled freelancers for hire with great feedback.
Conclusion
Google is no fan of “link building,” – but who can blame them? For years, links were a commodity that was abused by SEOs.
But proactive link building is incredibly hard. As it should be.
That’s why you should partner with an experienced agency with clear goals and quality control. For that, we highly suggest OutreachZ – but admittedly, we’re biased!
If you are ineterested in original article you can find it here
Have you noticed that some statistics pages naturally earn links while others fall flat? I analyzed successful stats pages and this is what I learned.
You’ve probably already heard that statistics pages are a great way to generate links.
You’ve also likely noticed that some statistics pages are much more successful at earning links than others.
So I wanted to figure out what separates the most successful statistics pages from those that fall flat.
After researching and experimenting with my own content, I found five key things that seem to significantly improve a statistics post’s link attraction.
I’ll discuss each tactic in detail below and provide step-by-step instructions so that you can duplicate the results.
Incorporate Journalistic Keywords
I learned the reverse outreach hack from Brian Dean, and it’s now my favorite strategy to incorporate into any statistics page.
In the case study he wrote, his content organically earned over 5,000 links thanks to this method.
The idea is that instead of you reaching out to journalists and content marketers and begging them to link to your content, they find your content when looking for data to support their argument and naturally link to you.
So start by finding long-tail keywords that are clearly hunting for data – Brian Dean calls them “journalistic keywords.”
To find these keywords, you can use a couple of different tactics:
Find long tail keywords on competing statistics pages. Answer “People Also Asked” questions. Finding long-tail keywords is pretty easy. You can Google the main keyword (e.g., “SEO statistics” or “coaching statistics”), take the top-ranking URL, and put it into your favorite keyword tool. Then, you can look at all the long-tail keywords and questions the page ranks for.
Here’s an example of this in action:
Screenshot from Ahrefs, September 2022
The other option is to look at the People Also Asked question box for your main keyword:
A pro tip is to click on each of the questions as it will generate even more questions:
Screenshot from search for fast food statistics, Google, September 2022
As you include the statistical answers to each question in your post, optimize them for featured snippets by setting up the People Also Asked phrase as a question and then answering it as a complete sentence.
Here’s an example:
How many people eat fast food every day?
Approximately 85 million Americans eat fast food every day.
Find And Update Popular Stats
Ahrefs did a popular link-building study that walked through how it built 36 backlinks (for free) to a stats page by emailing websites with outdated statistics and offering more recent statistics posted on its brand-new stats page.
As a result, its post quickly became the top-ranking post for the term “SEO statistics.” Two years later, it’s still sitting in the second position.
Step 1: Take the top-ranking URL for your main keyword (e.g., “SEO statistics”) and put it into your favorite keyword tool.
Step 2: Check out its backlink profile and look at the most popular statistics. You can do this by scrolling through the backlink profile for the page and then doing an anchor text search for numbers you notice repeatedly.
For example, this statistic (“a third of Americans eat fast food each day”) seems to be popular:
Screenshot from Ahrefs, September 2022
Step 3: Check that the statistic is outdated (at least 2-3 years old).
If it is, try to find a more updated statistic to replace it. If you can’t find a more up-to-date statistic, consider creating a new statistic yourself.
For example, I was doing a stats page for chatbots and found some dated statistics on how many people use chatbots by country.
So, I used Clearbit and another data extraction site to come up with more current statistics and then compared the new data to the dated statistics:
Screenshot from Chatfuel.com, September 2022
Step 4: Reach out to the websites with the dated statistics and offer the updated statistics.
Most people don’t respond to the traditional “link to my stats page because it’s better than the old page!”
However, most people like to have up-to-date content and, therefore, might be willing to swap out their old statistics for newer ones that you offer on a silver platter.
In fact, if you wanted to go the extra mile, you could even offer to update the whole page for them.
As mentioned earlier, this process helped Ahrefs earn 36 links in just a few weeks and catapult its page to the top of the search results.
Use A Hub And Spoke Model/Skyscraper Technique
I’ve noticed that many of the most successful statistics pages are organized in a hub and spoke/skyscraper style.
HubSpot’s Marketing Statistics page is an excellent example of a well-organized skyscraper-style statistics page.
Specifically, it includes the following sections:
Content Marketing Statistics.
Social Media Marketing Statistics.
Video Marketing Statistics.
Email Marketing Statistics.
Lead Generation Statistics.
Advertising Statistics.
Marketing Technology Statistics.
Sales Statistics.
This page even ranks well for many of these “spoke” statistics keywords. For example, the general page still ranks second for the term “content marketing statistics.”
So next time you create a statistics page, separate it into several categories and continuously update and build out those categories.
Include Original Data
Given that the meat of statistics pages is data, creating original data is another great way to attract links.
However, most people assume that creating new data is time-consuming and expensive.
While this is true if you intend to do a major “state of the industry” study, there are plenty of ways to create or extract original data for free (or cheap).
Below, I’ll walk you through a few of my go-to methods.
Scan Public Data
There is plenty of data available that most people simply don’t want to organize.
The first person to introduce me to this method was Andy Crestodina. He told me he wanted to know the average lifespan of a website, but that statistic didn’t exist.
So he pulled a list of the top 200 marketing websites (according to Alexa) and hired a VA to go into the Wayback Machine and record the last time the website had a major overhaul.
The answer was two years and seven months.
Today, that single statistic has earned that post over 1,000 backlinks from websites like HubSpot, Forbes, Wikipedia, the Content Marketing Institute, and other websites that you could never buy a link from:
Screenshot from Ahrefs, September 2022
Leverage Internal Data
Another great way to create fresh statistics is to pull internal data.
Ahrefs has several excellent examples of this:
90.63% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google
At Least 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years Are Dead
Do Links Still Matter for Rankings? A Study by Ahrefs
I want to point out that Ahrefs always creates an individual post on each of these statistics and then later adds the statistics to its other dedicated statistics pages.
I’ve found that this is a clever way to maximize the links you can get for a single statistic.
For example, the first post I mentioned (90.63% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google) has over 8,000 backlinks (over 3,000 referring domains).
Without a dedicated post, that statistic could have easily gotten lost on a massive statistics page.
Therefore, consider pulling out your most valuable statistics and creating a dedicated post to promote that statistic and maximize links.
Send Customer Surveys
If you have a large email list, another option is to survey your customers or audience. For example, Andy Crestodina does an annual blogger survey, which always receives much attention.
He says that it takes over 100 hours to put together, though you can see that it is well worth the effort, given that it organically attracted over 13,000 backlinks (over 3,000 referring domains).
If you don’t have a list, you can also use a market research tool like SurveyMonkey or Pollfish, though this can get more expensive.
Create Graphics
Content marketers need data to support their claims, but they also need graphics and images to support their claims. Therefore, I strongly recommend creating graphics for your data as well.
For example, in the Google Lens search for the graphic below, you can see that a lot of different websites have shared it.
Screenshot from Google Lens search, September 2022
The best part about graphics is that you can take existing statistics and make graphics of them with your branding (just be sure to credit the original source).
Oberlo has plenty of examples of this:
Screenshot from Oberlo, September 2022
If you don’t have a designer on staff, you can hire someone on Upwork or Dribbble to create graphics for you.
Start Updating Your Statistics Pages Now
Creating a great statistics page is a lot more than just creating the longest list of statistics that exists.
It’s about creating a resource that journalists and other content marketers find useful and can use to support their claims.
If you are interested in original article by Megan Mahoney you can find it here
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Screenshot from Ahrefs, September 2022
Screenshot from search for fast food statistics, Google, September 2022
Screenshot from Ahrefs, September 2022
Screenshot from Chatfuel.com, September 2022
Screenshot from Ahrefs, September 2022
Screenshot from Google Lens search, September 2022
Screenshot from Oberlo, September 2022