Why this book? 

If you’re anything like me, you have probably found it nearly impossible to find useful
and non-generic tips when it comes to on-page or technical SEO.

Over the years, I’ve developed my own playbook of ‘quick wins’ instead.

Not all of them have remained relevant as time has gone on, but the ones included in
this book are the ones that are as close to evergreen as you will ever find.

A portion of them deal directly with the changes we’re all facing today, such as Voice
Search or “Position 0”. Others focus on things people have been missing out on for
years.

All in all there is something for people of all stages & abilities in this book, there are
going to be tips and advice you’ll see here that you’ve never seen elsewhere.

I recommend that you look at tips and quick wins like these as your
personal library of methods...

Methods that can be effortlessly introduced to the various frameworks and strategies
that you use.

You never know when they're going to be useful.

You will use some more often than others.

Some may simply change the way you think.

Eventually though, you’ll notice them creeping into your workflow at an almost
‘subconscious’ level.

I hope you enjoy the book.

Thanks,
Daniel

1
  

About the author 

Daniel Cuttridge​ built his first website in 2004. Over the last 15 years he has built and
worked on over 1,000 websites.

Starting SEO in 2012 he quickly put his web development

skills to good use, helping one of his first full-time clients
successfully exit at £4.2 million pounds in 2014 after
implementing new internal systems, SOPs and on-page
strategies.

Since 2014 he has sold his agency, built over 100 affiliate
websites, sold a successful ecommerce brand and
founded On-Page Academy. A free group with 3,000+
members.

He has won several awards for his work as a web designer. And has also been featured
in various publications and blogs such as WHAT THE AFF, Drift, AuthorityHacker, The
Startup, and more.

He currently works on several websites of his own, and runs his consultancy Pathtorch
where he offers analysis based audits, and consulting to brands and startups.

You can find him on -

Medium
YouTube
Twitter
LinkedIn
Or
Facebook​.

2
  

Table of Contents:
STEAL COMPETITORS INTERNAL LINKING STRATEGY

INTERNAL ANCHOR TEXT: THINGS NOT STRINGS

FIND INTERNAL LINKING OPPORTUNITIES BY SEARCHING ON GOOGLE

INTERLINK FROM YOUR LINK HOTSPOTS

REVERSE RELEVANCE TO MAKE YOUR INTERLINKS & BACKLINKS PASS MORE VALUE

USE YOUTUBE FOR SUPPORTING CONTENT IDEAS

FIND POWERFUL SUPPORTING CONTENT IDEAS WITH GSC

TWO EASY WAYS TO FIND KEYWORDS FOR ANY NICHE

UNSTICK YOUR RANKINGS WITH HYPER-RELEVANT TOPICALITY OPTIMIZATION

ADD SUPPORTING CONTENT TO PAGES, MONEY CONTENT TO POSTS

MOVE YOUR SCHEMA ACROSS WHEN USING PAGES INSTEAD OF POSTS

SCHEMA MARKUPS YOU NEED TO USE

BECOME THE SCHEMA PACMAN (STEALING COMPETITORS SCHEMA)

USE FLATTER SITE STRUCTURES AT THE TOP

USE NUMBERED PAGINATION WITH ‘JUMP POINTS’

COMBAT DECREASING CTRs WITH MAGNETIC TITLES

USE SERP ADS TO IMPROVE YOUR CTR’S

CUT THROUGH THE COMPETITION WITH CONCISE CONTENT

EXACT ORDER VS EXACT MATCH

RAP ANALYSIS FOR REALISTIC KEYWORD DIFFICULTY

GROUP CLICK DATA FOR KEYWORD RESEARCH, NOT JUST SEARCH VOLUME

BAIT AND SWITCH TECHNIQUE FOR AFFILIATES EXPLAINED

THE INDIVIDUAL REVIEW TEMPLATE THAT MADE ME OVER 6 FIGURES

ENTITY HACKING FOR BETTER RANKINGS

NOINDEX VS NOFOLLOW CHEATSHEET

COMPOUND SIGNALS BY KEEPING URLs THE SAME

CONSOLIDATE CONTENT THE RIGHT WAY

UPDATE YOUR REDIRECTS

3
  

USE REDIRECTS CORRECTLY

CONTEXTUALLY LINK TO CATEGORY PAGES

COMPRESS + CONVERT IMAGES

REMOVE UNUSED CSS FOR BETTER LOADING TIMES

NOFOLLOW YOUR AFFILIATE LINKS

ALLOW YOUR FILES TO BE CRAWLED

BLOCK WORDPRESS CRAWLER TRAPS WITH ROBOTS.TXT

CHECK YOUR THEME FOR SELF-REFERRING CANONICALS

STAY AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION WITH DEVELOPER TOOLS IN CHROME

USE “HTML” SITEMAPS FOR BETTER INDEXING!

THE EXCERPT TRAP “CONSPIRACY”

USE THE RIGHT CATEGORY ARCHETYPE FOR YOU

TOPICAL OPTIMIZATION WITH GOOGLE NLP = $$$

CREATE A CUSTOM AUTHOR PAGE

SET EXPIRATION DATES FOR SEASONAL CONTENT & OFFERS

SET DIFFERENT TITLES AND HEADLINES

UX AUDIT FOR CONTENT UPGRADES

2 SIMPLE WAYS TO IMPROVE DWELL TIME FOR BETTER USER ENGAGEMENT SIGNALS

FONT-SIZE RATIOS FOR READABILITY

BUCKET BRIGADES TECHNIQUE

CALL TO ATTENTION POINTS

“SMASH UP” YOUR SITE FOR BETTER RANKINGS

KEEP A CHANGELOG

TERM FREQUENCY + IMPORTANT TERMS = $$$

FOCUS ON POWER FACTORS OR YOU’RE F****D!

DECODE ALGORITHM UPDATES THE RIGHT WAY

TIPS FOR THE NEW DECADE, 2020 & BEYOND

Afterword

4
  

STEAL COMPETITORS 
INTERNAL LINKING 
STRATEGY 
In our industry we love to reverse engineer.

Though when we do we’re usually focused on backlinks.

Instead, one thing I’ve had constant success with is reverse engineering top competitors
internal linking strategies.

Luckily it’s got a lot easier this year thanks to a new feature on Ahrefs.

To discover anchor text and supporting content:

Step 1: Search your competitors URL

Step 2: Click Internal Backlinks

This should then take you to a page that lists out all of your competitors incoming
internal links.

Step 3: Check Them Out

At this stage it should show you a few things.

5
  

In the left hand column you’ll see the number of links, and the referring page (the
supporting piece) itself.

On the right hand side, it will then show you the anchor text and the backlink.

Of course, you can export all of these as well.

Doing this across multiple pages of a top performing competitor can help you not only
find a blueprint for what is working, but also reverse engineer their general strategy
once you uncover a pattern.

Equally though, you shouldn’t be too reliant on what your competitors are using for
anchor text...

6
  

INTERNAL ANCHOR TEXT: 

THINGS NOT STRINGS 
A common mistake people make is thinking of their internal anchor text in the same way
that they do with backlinks.

When it comes to building links to your site, we often prefer to use exact match anchor
text that is as specific as possible.

However, when it comes to internal links do we need to do that?

Yes and no.

Within the context of our website, we need to optimize our links based on the
assumption that bots already know what it’s about.

This means our anchor text doesn’t need to be as specific.

Example:​ Best Chest Exercises vs Chest Exercises

At this point we’re talking about entities, and one type of entity is known as a thing.

This is also known as a ​partial match anchor​, and these anchor text types are strongly
correlating with better results from internal linking.

7
  

Source: ​https://www.authorityhacker.com/internal-links/

People are now talking about “things not strings” more than ever, because using the
broad or ‘thing’ reference in your anchor text is what’s working better than it ever did.

Later in the book, you will read about Google’s Natural Language Processing Demo.

This tool is fantastic for helping you optimize your anchor text for the “things not strings”
approach.

   

8
  

FIND INTERNAL LINKING 

OPPORTUNITIES BY 
SEARCHING ON GOOGLE 
Ever wonder how some sites do their internal linking so well?

Well, one way is that they use what they’ve already got, and they do so regularly.

Step 1: Head to Google

Step 2: Search the following

site:domain.com intext:”keyword”

This will then return a list of URLs which contain your keyword.

Note: ​You can also repeat this with your intended anchor text, instead of your keyword.

   

9
  

INTERLINK FROM YOUR 

LINK HOTSPOTS 
Over time, most big and aged websites will start to naturally reflect power laws.

One such power law, the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule states that 80% of any outcome
is derived from 20% of sources.

When it comes to backlinks, I call these Link Hotspots.

The obvious one is the homepage, but there are always others.

On Ahrefs, head to ​Pages > Best By Links

And you should see something like the below

And there is usually more than one non-homepage hotspot.

10
  

These pages pass value to other pages in your site at a disproportionate level
compared to pages with even ¼ of the amount of links. ​Most don’t even have that.

Source: ​https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/

55.24% of pages have zero referring domains pointing to them​, which just furthers
my point in saying that Link Hotspots are incredibly important pages...

It is incredibly important to not only put in place a strategy that manufactures these
pages into existence, but to also utilize the existing ones to their full potential as
supporting content.

Step 1: Head to your link hotspot

Step 2: Hit CTRL + F or CMD + F.
Step 3: Search your target keyword or anchor text.
Step 4: Add in the internal link to the target page where there is a good match.

11
  

REVERSE RELEVANCE TO 

MAKE YOUR INTERLINKS & 
BACKLINKS PASS MORE 
VALUE 
Want to know the easiest way to make your links pass more value?

The answer is simple.

You just need to tap into relevance...

Using the reverse relevance method you can do it in just 3 steps:

1. Keyword In Title
2. Keyword In H1
3. Keyword In URL

All you need to do is make sure your keyword is in those 3 places and you’ll start seeing
big movements, especially from your link building campaigns.

In my own studies, these three elements correlate with better rankings across the
board.

So it was no surprise to me when I started to see improvements from my links when I

implemented reverse relevance.

12
  

USE YOUTUBE FOR 

SUPPORTING CONTENT 
IDEAS 
This tip is particularly good for creating pieces of supporting content that with a little
promotion, can potentially land you a lot of links.

The benefit of this is that you can then power up other pieces of related content with a
supporting piece that has some serious ‘juice’.

When finding videos with a lot of views, it can be a good sign that the topic is a hot one.

Here’s how to use this method:

Step 1: Head To YouTube

Step 2: Search Your Keywords

Step 3: Check The Views

Repeat this process to create a big seed list of ideas to then do further research and
analysis on to know which to target first.

It’s that simple.

13
  

FIND POWERFUL 
SUPPORTING CONTENT 
IDEAS WITH GSC 
Want to find out EXACTLY what Google believes your existing content is relevant to?

Of course you do, we all do!

While search console can be useful for gathering content update ideas, I want to focus
on showing you how you can use this for identifying powerful supporting content ideas.

Internal links can be very powerful and adding more & better quality internal links is one
of the easiest ways to improve your rankings...

Aside from not having enough in the first place, the main reason why people aren't
getting better rankings from their internal linking is this...

Their supporting content sucks.

However, there are a few rock-solid ways to do this...

Step 1: Go to Google Search Console.

You need to have an account with Google Search Console and already have at least 30
days worth of data for this tutorial to be useful.

Step 2: Filtering The View

Click on 'Performance'.

Click on 'Impressions'.

And now click to deselect ‘total clicks’.

14
  

Now you need to scroll down a bit, and Click ‘Pages’. Unselecting Queries in the
process.

Step 3: Selecting Your Page

15
  

The next step is to select the money page or cornerstone content piece you’d like to get
supporting content ideas for.

Simply Click the URL of the page you want more details for.

Step 4: Re-Adjust The View

Now that we’ve selected our page, we want to re-adjust the view back to ‘Queries’.

From here you can either manually analyze the opportunities, or if there is a lot it might
be a good idea to use the export feature.

16
  

17
  

TWO EASY WAYS TO FIND 

KEYWORDS FOR ANY 
NICHE 
So you’ve got loads of ideas for supporting content, but not all of them will have
significant search volume.

You want to bring more people into your funnel with supporting content, so what can
you do?

Easy.

Take these two off-the-wall methods and repeat them ad infinitum...

1. Grab Q&A Keywords From Quora

Quora is a giant.

It ranks for over 62 million keywords, and that’s after almost a solid year of heavy
losses…

This makes it ideal for reverse engineering keywords for just about any niche.

Step 1: Stick Quora.com in Ahrefs (or other)

Just search the Quora root domain in Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc.

Step 2: Click ‘Organic keywords’

Now filter your view, by selecting the Organic keyword section (Ahrefs).

Step 3: Filter by KEYWORD

18
  

Step 4: More filters & export

Now all you need to do is apply some more filters and export that list.

Super easy.

2. Steal Keywords From Forums

Forums aren’t as popular as they once were, but there are still some huge ones out
there.

The ones that still exist tend to be pretty big.

Mark that another target for reverse engineering!

Step 1: Find a forum.

The easiest way to find the big forums is by using the website
https://www.findaforum.net/

19
  

Step 2: Add the forum to Ahrefs or similar.

Just add it to your favorite reverse engineering tool.

Step 3: Click ‘Organic keywords’

The same as we did before, just repeat this step.

Step 4: Filter by keyword.

I’m going to use the head term ‘Boeing’ for our example.

Step 5: More filters & export

These keywords have significantly less volume, but are also absolute keyword gold in
terms of targeting them as they are all likely to be relatively easy to rank for.

   

20
  

UNSTICK YOUR RANKINGS 

WITH HYPER-RELEVANT 
TOPICALITY OPTIMIZATION 
Have you ever had articles or product get stick on the second page, and no matter what
you do it won’t budge?

You’ve added links, adjusted the content, added more internal links, and much more?

Yeah, what’s up with that?

Well, quite often your missing the mark on ​topical optimization​.

There are two scenarios:

1. Some section/s of your site are pulling away topical relevance.

In this case you want to actually UNLINK some of your articles that aren’t related
enough.

I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it works.

21
  

In the image above, I ran a test.

- I took a site that wasn’t ranking.

- I removed a silo from the site.
- I added that silo to a new domain.
- I redirected the old silo URLs to the new sites URLs.

You can see that this site shot to life quite suddenly.

Sometimes what you don’t say is just as important as what you do say… This is exactly
why niche sites work so well, and why when building authority sites you need
AUTHORITY.

2. Not enough topically focused supporting content.

Just because we think our content is relevant enough doesn’t mean Google does.

You might need different supporting content in order to get your rankings unstuck.

22
  

In the above venn diagram you can see exactly how I do this for my sites.

- I remove non related internal links.

- A portion of the originals remain.
- I then add three new supporting pieces that link to as many as 3 money articles.
- I wait 30 days to see the results max.

Usually the result is that the target articles get “unstuck”.

You want to get to the point where you’re creating entire hubs of content.

23
  

Where most of the content is supporting a singular topic, and within that topic you might
have a number of “money articles”.

It’s far better to look at this from the perspective of supporting the topic than
supporting the money posts.

24
  

ADD SUPPORTING 
CONTENT TO PAGES, 
MONEY CONTENT TO 
POSTS 
Sometimes it can be useful to use pages instead of posts, especially for supporting
content.

The SEO reason for doing this is that it moves the supporting content away from the
blogroll, which is quite often the homepage.

Often people do the opposite of this, which doesn’t always make sense.

Since your homepage is the main authority hub for the rest of your site, you can move
supporting content to pages and preserve the majority of the link equity for your money
content.

Which moves me along nicely to…

   

25
  

MOVE YOUR SCHEMA 

ACROSS WHEN USING 
PAGES INSTEAD OF POSTS 
Want to know one mistake that pretty much every single person I know has made?

Using pages instead of posts - without moving across the schema.

The reason why this matters is obvious, you want to use the correct schema markup for
your content.

The reason why people don’t always catch this though isn’t so obvious.

Pages and Posts (on WordPress) use different templates.

This means that when people build themes, they assume that you’ll only be using posts
for content.

So the Schema that is used is totally different.

The Structured Data Tool

You can use the Google Structured Data Tool to find out what Schema is being used on
your Posts but not Pages and vice versa.

Head to Google's ​Structured Data Testing Tool​.

>> ​https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/

26
  

Note: ​Check out my ​How To Add JSON-LD Schema To WordPress​ video to see how
you can place unique schema anywhere on your site.

   

27
  

SCHEMA MARKUPS YOU 

NEED TO USE 
In the same way that theme authors might not know how you intend to use your site, it’s
also the case that they don’t always know what the best schema to use for SEO is.

​ o a lot of stuff gets missed.

Or the best way to use it. S

Markup You Should Implement Wherever/Whenever Possible:

- Table Markup
- ItemList Markup
- Speakable Markup
- FAQ Markup
- Q&A Markup
- HowTo Markup
- Author Markup
- sameAs Markup

Showing you how to implement them all is far beyond the scope of this book, however,
these are the standout pieces of Schema that I think every site should have as standard
for certain content types or even sitewide in some cases.

   

28
  

BECOME THE SCHEMA 

PACMAN (STEALING 
COMPETITORS SCHEMA) 
This tip comes straight from one of my email series.

It's been by far one of my most popular emails to date.

Why?

Because I showed people that Schema is in fact a ranking factor by citing a ​case-study​.

And then I gave people a solution for how to use it.

It's been the entire premise of most of the tips in this book.

So here’s how -

Step 1: Pick 3-5 Top Competitors.

You don't need to worry about how broad or niche you go here...

Just pick 3-5 competitors that are ranking extremely well.

Step 2: Identify 2-3 Templates

A template is a "common theme" that is used to dictate how a page should be

displayed.

Examples are -

- Posts
- Category Pages
- Products

29
  

If your competitor is mainly an informational site, you might want to identify different
types of posts.

Make a list of 1 URL for each template/type of each competitor.

Step 3: Test The Structured Data

Head to Google's ​Structured Data Testing Tool​.

>> ​https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/

Now start adding your URLs that you previously collected (one at a time unfortunately).

'Run Test'...

Step 4: Check Their Schema, Take What You Like =]

30
  

You should now get a nice list of every type of Structured Data being used on the page.

In my example, you can see that we've got an Article type being returned on a /blog/ as
well as the article itself.

This is a knowledge bomb that I discovered using this method and have since been
using on my sites.

Obviously use common sense as some sites are using redundant schema (a big no-no),
and yes you'll have to take the code they are using and adapt it for your site!

   

31
  

USE FLATTER SITE 

STRUCTURES AT THE TOP 
Today, there are more websites than ever.  
Because of this, crawling becomes increasingly computationally expensive over time.

We SEOs have seen the results...

Sites that are more crawl-friendly have a significant advantage.

The best way to make your site friendly to crawlers such as Googlebot is reduce the
crawl depth of your site, also known as click depth.

Crawl Depth Intensity

The intensity of your URLs click depth is one such consideration.

Do the majority of your URLs sit at Crawl Depth 1, 2, 3, or possibly higher?

Reducing this, by moving the majority of your URLs to a “lower” crawl depth is one way
you can improve your sites crawlability.

Crawl Depth Extensity

The extensity is totally different, this is how deep your structure spans in total, or the
range.

So when you’re optimizing crawl depth, never forget to optimize the extensity as well.

32
  

It all matters.

Nabla Structure

Nabla Structure is a term that I coined based on the shape of the structure that seems
to work best for crawlability.

This structure encourages keeping as many of your URLs at CD 1 and 2 as possible.

Which simultaneously reduces the extensity of your crawl depth.

The nice thing about this structure is that you can use whatever other type of internal
linking strategy you like, as long as structurally you’re keeping things “flat”.

You can ​read more about it here​.

   

33
  

USE NUMBERED 
PAGINATION WITH ‘JUMP 
POINTS’ 
Ever wondered if all pagination setups are equal?

​ o​.
The answer ​is n

When it comes to SEO, you always need to take crawl factors into consideration.

A simple next/prev style pagination system isn’t nearly as friendly as one that does the
below:

1, 2, 3, 4 .. 8 .. 16

This is also more friendly than a system that follows a chronological order of 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, etc.

Why?

Because this use of ‘jump points’ makes sure that archived content, 16 pages in, isn’t
extremely difficult to access for crawlers.

This simple change, especially on big sites, will often result in much improved rankings.

34
  

COMBAT DECREASING 
CTRs WITH MAGNETIC 
TITLES 
Organic click-through-rate is at an all time low.

But what can you do?

Easy.

Stand out in the crowd with magnetic titles.

What is a magnetic title?

A magnetic title is something that draws the person in.

It plays on both emotional triggers, without being too “clickbaity”.

Brian Dean at Backlinko ​conducted a study​ on this very thing.

He found that results with emotional titles correlated with better rankings and
click-through rates, there is an inverse relationship there, but check it out nonetheless:

35
  

Source: https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year#combat-decreasing-ctrs

Titles which contained more power words, the words that are typically more associated
with clickbait, did far worse.

36
  

Source: https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year#combat-decreasing-ctrs

Headline Templates For Magnetic Titles

Headline template:

Why I’ll Never <Strong feeling> <Something> Ever Again

Headline:​ Why I’ll Never F***** Design Ever Again

Why it works:

- Strong stance
- F***** conveys anger
- Makes us wonder why

37
  

Headline template:

The Science of "<some cliche>"

Headline:​ The Science of "The Law Of Attraction"

Why it works:

- Offers explanations (people crave resolution)

- Implies the author is trustworthy
- Creates curiosity

Headline template:

How <Something unexpected leads to> <An unexpected result>

Headline:​ How Anti-Fungal Shampoo Cured My Acne

Why it works:

- Offers a solution
- Surprising combination
- Curiosity

Remember, these templates are just examples.

It’s important that you construct your headlines with psychology in mind for best results.

If you ever find yourself completely lost for ideas, then I recommend something like
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer​.

   

38
  

USE SERP ADS TO 

IMPROVE YOUR CTR’S 
This is a tip that I picked up some time ago, and over the last few years it’s become
relatively well known thanks to publishers talking about it such as Backlinko and more.

But it still doesn’t get enough attention...

Basically, in Google Ads you’re bidding on keywords and based on many factors,
including your CTR you’ll get a better discount on your clicks and a better chance for
your ad to continue being shown.

With me so far?

Ok, so when you see these ads on Google you’re basically seeing ads that have been
super optimized for what?

Clicks.

So the opportunity for you or I as an SEO, is that we can benefit from their hard work in
order to get better CTR %s on our own sites.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: ​Search your keyword on Google.

Step 2:​ Now check out the ad results.

Step 3:​ Look for repeating words (CTRL/CMD + F in Chrome).

Step 4:​ Sprinkle them into your title and description tags.

And sometimes you’ll see an improvement in your CTR %s on Google Search Console,
and subsequently more traffic in your Analytics.

39
  

Note:​ You can always add in an extra step and start split-testing titles, but that’s for
another day.

   

40
  

CUT THROUGH THE 

COMPETITION WITH 
CONCISE CONTENT 
Some people in our industry still believe that Google can’t read our content.

Erm?

I invite anyone with this belief to look at the Google NLP tool mentioned in this ebook.

But this belief has come from somewhere.

It mostly comes from the fact that you can 80/20 your way to victory, so people assume
the rest of the content doesn’t matter or simply gets ignored.

It’s not the case, it’s just that some things matter a lot more than others​ (see
power factors later in the ebook).

It’s also been my universal experience that you can also completely overwhelm Google.

This is why concise content is killin’ it.

Concise Content

Concise content can be either long-form or short-form content.

This is why people feel passionately for one or the other, but it’s just that both work
when done right.

Well organized content that is well optimized is what I call concise.

41
  

Content with too much or too little information isn’t going to rank as well.

If you find yourself trying to hit a specific word count, it’s safe to say your writer might
unnecessarily conflate separate ideas into the article to hit that number.

Incidentally, this is how cannibalization happens.

Even from ​my own data studies​, it’s not always the bigger articles that rank best:

42
  

How To Write Just Enough With This One Change

I don’t want to talk about tools like Surfer SEO at this stage, just because that’s covered
elsewhere in the book…

But what I can say is that ​Dynalist​ made my life so much better as someone who
creates content, and it also made life easier for my writers as well.

Before we write any article, we make sure to map out each section. Much like a book.

This allows us to know exactly what we’re going to write about before we start.

It helps keep things concise.

Obviously research is required, but as always the devil is in the details.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail!

   

43
  

EXACT ORDER VS EXACT 

MATCH 
You’ve heard of exact match keywords.

Did you know though, that most people consider that having the keywords anywhere in
a phrase means exact match?

It doesn’t though.

So I’ve found it better to say ‘exact order’.

When I conducted a study earlier this year, I found that 61.25% of all ranking sites had
the keyword displayed in the exact order it was searched in the page title.

Sites with those words in the title, but not in the exact order didn’t rank nearly as well.

Exact Order actually outperformed ‘Exact Match’ in 77% of cases in all of the top 20
results I checked.

This is clearly not groundbreaking news, but nonetheless, the data is telling us that it’s a
mistake to be avoided at all costs.

   

44
  

RAP ANALYSIS FOR 

REALISTIC KEYWORD 
DIFFICULTY 
Are you sick of doing your keyword research perfectly only to find that your content
doesn’t rank for what was supposed to be a sure thing?

I too was in this situation, until 2018 when I decided to test out all the different methods.

What worked best?

RAP Analysis.

This stands for Relevancy, Authority, Popularity.

Relevancy -

The objective here is to quickly analyze the relevance of your competition.

High relevance can be ok, assuming that you have higher authority.

However in some cases the opposite holds true. If there are a lack of relevant results
present, you can sometimes sneak in to a SERP with more authoritative domains.

To quickly analyze the relevance of the results in the top 10, I have a basic 3 point
system that works incredibly well when paired with Authority & Popularity.

Check the results for the presence of the keyword in three places.

1. Title
2. Headline or <h1>
3. URL

45
  

If all three are present, you score that site with a 3/3, and as there are usually 10 regular
organic results in most SERPs, you give that SERP a score from 0-30.

An industry poll performed by SparkToro in August, ‘19 clearly shows that in SEO today,
the majority of people believe that the ‘Relevance of overall page content’ is king.

Authority -

This one is a little more tricky, as I personally find that Ahrefs’ Domain Rating or DR is
very accurate and correlates well with rankings.

Not everyone uses Ahrefs though, but nonetheless, authority is one thing you will want
to check with whichever tool you use.

46
  

Popularity -

While authority might deal with the number of referring domains that a site has in total,
popularity is more of a granular check, at the page level.

Again, I like to check this with Ahrefs.

I ignore their UR metric, which is their version of a ‘popularity’ metric and instead opt for
raw domain data.

The number of links a page has in total, and the average number of domains the top 10
of that SERP has.

What next?

Once you’ve checked all of these factors, and compared them to what your domain has
to offer or what you think a campaign you run can achieve, you have one more thing to
do…

See if you think you can win in one or more of the RAP areas.

Scenarios where you can win:

- A SERP with mid-high “authority” but low “popularity”

- A SERP with high authority, low relevance and low popularity.
- A SERP with high relevance, low popularity

Well, you get the idea.

You’re looking for gaps that you can utilize to your advantage.

47
  

This is real keyword difficulty research, it’s what works best, and while a lot of it is
manual there’s a rare task that can’t be automated or delegated.

   

48
  

GROUP CLICK DATA FOR 

KEYWORD RESEARCH, NOT 
JUST SEARCH VOLUME 
A fundamental technique people use when planning out their content strategy, is taking
a group of keywords that they want to target, and then grouping those keywords
together to see the combined search volume.

This helps figure out traffic potential, and alongside other considerations such as
keyword difficulty, helps you ascertain whether or not it’s worth doing the content in the
first place.

The problem is that search volume - even when you apply CTR estimates is way off the
pace in terms of traffic.

Some SERPs today are virtually zero click SERPs, regardless of the search volume or
average industry click-through-rates for position 1.

Thankfully you can use click data from Ahrefs to see how much traffic a group of
keywords is actually likely to bring you.

I feel like this is one of those important things that I can put in this book about keyword
research alongside the RAP Analysis Method.

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Note:​ I’m certainly not the first to talk about this, but the fact is we need to keep
repeating it until it becomes an industry standard operating procedure.

   

50
  

BAIT AND SWITCH 

TECHNIQUE FOR 
AFFILIATES EXPLAINED 
Many people ignore certain keywords due to a lack of affiliate programs and simple
monetization options.

Even if you aren’t using display ads, these keywords can be used to funnel people to
your intended product.

Here’s how you do it:

Step 1:​ Find products without affiliate programs or monetization opportunities

Step 2:​ Perform keyword research, including difficulty

Step 3:​ Write the content

Now you will write the product review as you normally would, but instead of placing a
CTA (Call To Action) to buy the product…

You instead switch the narrative, and basically say;

“We prefer this product instead, read the review here”.

This is an incredibly powerful technique that allows you to build traffic quickly, build trust
by not immediately going for the sale and become your affiliate managers favorite
person.

   

51
  

THE INDIVIDUAL REVIEW 

TEMPLATE THAT MADE ME 
OVER 6 FIGURES 
Here’s another setup I use for my individual product reviews.

Switching to this setup on some of my core sites helped me 10x my conversion rate in
2019 and it’s because it focuses on one thing…

Trust.

You can grab the template to see all the details ​here​.

   

52
  

ENTITY HACKING FOR 

BETTER RANKINGS 
As you can tell, as an affiliate I’m massively invested in individual reviews.

One of the big wins for me has been what my team and I call “entity hacking”, and we’ve
noticed considerably better rankings since doing it.

Now, I won’t bore you unnecessarily with the technical theory of why this works, ​but I
will tell you exactly how to do it.

1. Note the full name of the product as it is displayed on the manufacturers website.
2. Add this into your article, either as a heading or beneath a heading.
3. Add more entity based details into the Schema.

The third one is kind of critical… ​Above is an example where I setup the Schema
for entity hacking.

- The product name as displayed on the brands website

- The actual URL of the image the brand uses

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- Then I use the brand schema to declare the brand of item, rather than the name
of my own website (as many people mistakenly do).

In the last couple of tips I shared with you the two strategies I use for my individual
reviews, but without entity hacking I wouldn’t rank nearly as well as I do.

Always, always, always use common threads to establish relevance between you and
the product, product brand, etc.

   

54
  

NOINDEX VS NOFOLLOW 
CHEATSHEET 
Here is something that people regularly get wrong, and addressing it in the book seems
like good sense.

NoIndex -​ This is used to tell bots to not index the content, usually as it offers little value
to the search results.
NoFollow - ​This is used to tell bots not to follow a link, thereby preventing the URL from
being crawled.

Remember, that if a page isn’t followed it’s not going to get crawled.

So Google can’t see that content and any benefits you might receive from having that
on your site are lost.

NoIndex, Follow:

● Legal pages
● Paginated pages
● Categories (sometimes)
● Author pages (sometimes)

NoIndex, NoFollow:

In most cases, if you want to use this combination you will be better off removing that
section from your site OR setting a Disallow rule in robots.txt!

Index, NoFollow:

● Certain landing pages

Most of the time you want to avoid using NoFollow on “low value pages” and instead
make sure they don’t index.

55
  

The reality is that some of these pages are important for E-A-T Factors (Expertise,
Authoritativeness, Trust) so you want Googlebot to give you the credit for having them.

   

56
  

COMPOUND SIGNALS BY 

KEEPING URLs THE SAME 
If you’ve been in SEO for some time, you will know the following two things to be true.

1. Importance of URLs has decreased

2. Compounded authority and signals has increased

Because of this, one tactic that has been useful in certain niches is sacrificing the exact
match URL in favor of the compounded URL.

What does this mean?

In the gaming industry, gaming fans regularly see games announced at an event called
E3.

This usually includes a trailer, some gameplay and a few details about the game.
Including the launch date. Gaming websites will cover these announcements, and later
when the game is released they will then review the game.

One tactic these sites could use is the compounded URL...

The title and headline might initially read “God of War Announcement & Release Date”.

With the URL /god-of-war/ - to keep it broad for repurposing later.

At this later point, the title and headline can be changed. Along with the metadata, and
schema for the date.

You then have a page with a considerable advantage over your competitors from the
day of the products launch.

This works in many industries, and often works better than simply consolidating the old
URL into a new one.

Speaking of...

57
  

CONSOLIDATE CONTENT 
THE RIGHT WAY 

Ever suffered from cannibalization? Have you ever done some content pruning?

If you’ve read any of my content before you might have seen my articles about these
two topics. (So I won’t repeat them in the book).

One thing I didn’t talk about was how to consolidate the content the right way.

Why consolidate?

First of all, you’ll receive ​more traffic​ from one higher ranking piece of content than two
lower ranking ones.

Consolidating content, especially cannibalized content, often results in ranking

improvements.

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If you’ve decided to prune content, it’s also often better to take parts of one article or
multiple articles and put them into a new one or an already existing piece.

You do this by placing a .301 redirect between two pieces of content.

Post A > Post B

Post C > Post B

And so on!

When to consolidate?

One of the hardest things about cannibalization and content pruning is knowing when to
consolidate, what parts to consolidate and so on.

It can be easy to remove articles that are part of a funnel.

If your content is an important piece of content for funnel reasons, obviously it makes no
sense to consolidate it.

The same can be said for content that is present as supporting content, either directly
via internal links or as part of providing enough information to satisfy topical
classification, relevance, etc.

This makes it incredibly difficult to know when to consolidate.

If in doubt, don’t consolidate.

If it’s not a definite yes, it’s a no…

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You can exhaust plenty of other options first; you can get a second pair of eyes to help
you figure out if the content is important for other reasons, you can set the content to
NoIndex instead of removing and redirecting, etc.

Everyone out there knows about the power of these methods, and as such want a
guaranteed-success approach to do it.

There isn’t one as no two websites are exactly the same.

So for me the best piece of advice I can give on the subject is to proceed with caution.

You can also check out my article about cannibalization ​here​, and my one about
pruning ​here.​ This will at least give you a framework for the more obvious pieces that
are a definite yes.

   

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UPDATE YOUR REDIRECTS 

There are many situations where an old piece of content or a product will be removed
from your site.

And it’s common to setup redirects from the URL that is no longer there, to a new one or
already existing one.

But leaving it there is a mistake people make too often…

In fact, ​85.71% of crawls​ report redirected URLs.

This is a big problem.

It’s common knowledge that redirects dilute the power of links, not just inbound links or
“backlinks” either.

Those internal links that would otherwise be passing full value, if you simply updated
them, are now having to perform what is known as a “hop”.

It’s this hop that costs sites big, with the loss of link value and equally bots don’t like it.
It’s not crawl friendly, and if an overall site quality score does exist this is also going to
mark you down for that reason.

Of course you should still use the redirects, just make sure to update the initial link
sources.

   

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USE REDIRECTS 
CORRECTLY 
While you should always update your redirects, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set the
redirects up.

Google often tries to crawl URLs that are no longer there.

So we don’t want to waste crawl equity.

But when you set up your redirects, do so strategically.

A lot of people just redirect to the homepage, which is missing a lot of opportunities.

Treat your redirects like internal links.

Redirect to the page that is most relevant!

Sometimes this is an article, a product or even a category.

Which brings me to another common missed opportunity...

62
  

CONTEXTUALLY LINK TO 

CATEGORY PAGES 
Even if you’re not trying to rank a page, you should still be pointing contextual links to
them.

Especially categories.

These pages act as information hubs, and as such the more you can link to them, the
stronger they become and the more relevance they will pass back down to the
posts/products that are categorized there.

Many sites today forget to link to their category pages despite it being a common
practice not even half a decade ago.

Use the same search operator as I mentioned earlier with a twist;

site:domain.com intext:”category”

You should be able to find dozens of good internal linking opportunities for your
categories.

63
  

And it personally helped me give life to articles that were previously not ranking at all.

Powering up your categories with more link equity and relevance can make a big
difference, so don’t miss the opportunity to utilize them correctly.

   

64
  

COMPRESS + CONVERT 
IMAGES 
Do you know what the biggest files on your web pages are?

Images.

You’ve heard about CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), Lazy Loading, and
Compression.

You might also have heard of formats such as WebP.

Which are smaller than JPEG and PNG files.

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Two Myths, Two Solutions

There are a couple of myths about this format.

Myth #1

First of all, you’ll probably have heard that it isn’t compatible with certain browsers.

That’s not true.

Safari which is increasingly used less and less, does not natively support the format.

So there is a redundancy known as a fallback that is used by developers, to make sure

that Safari users see the JPEG or PNG file instead.

This is done based on browser detection, so you’re not loading both images, just the
one that is specified by the browser.

So there is no good reason to not use this format.

Myth #2

The second myth is that formats like WebP are just all round better, but it’s not the case.

In 2019, ​I conducted a study​ which found that compressed JPEG files are actually
smaller than non-compressed WebP files.

But if you first compress the image, then convert it to WebP you could in fact decrease
the original size of that file by 92.07%.

Bottom-line -

One of the best things you can do to improve the loading time of your pages, is actually
focus on your images.

If you can move beyond the myths then you’ll be in a good position to make massive
gains by doing just that.

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REMOVE UNUSED CSS FOR 

BETTER LOADING TIMES 
Another big performance upgrade you can do is remove unused CSS from your
stylesheets.

Using sites such as ​https://purifycss.online/​ you can see what isn’t being used.

Remember though, you should ALWAYS backup your site prior to making any changes.

AND, CSS that isn’t being used on one page, might be being used on others.

For this reason, you need to do this at a template level.

- Page
- Post
- Author Page
- Custom Post Types

Once you’ve gone through all of the templates on your site, you should still be able to
reduce the size of your stylesheets by around 50% if your site uses any of the popular
CSS frameworks.

Note: ​Be extremely careful removing media queries. When in doubt, you can always
hire a good developer to do this for you on Upwork which should cost at max $100 to do
for your whole site.

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NOFOLLOW YOUR 
AFFILIATE LINKS 
In early 2019, I had a friend come to me for help with their site which simply wouldn’t
take off despite good content and links.

Being someone who has audited hundreds of sites, I said I would take a look.

I noticed a problem right away.

The site had thousands of affiliate links, that were not set to ‘NoFollow’.

And they were all redirecting, as the affiliate network had changed the links final
destination.

This created the perfect storm...

Basically the site wasn’t getting crawled as well as it should be, therefore not indexing
as well as it should be.

Internal links weren’t getting all the juice they could and the problem with the redirects
was also giving Google a reason to question the site as to whether it was trustworthy or
not.

After fixing the issue:

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The point here is that, for many reasons it should be standard practice to NoFollow your
affiliate links, especially as you can’t control the destination URL.

I love this tip because it is also a poignant example of the growing importance of
Technical SEO.

   

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ALLOW YOUR FILES TO BE 

CRAWLED 
Have you heard mixed things about how to handle bot rules for resource files?

The answer to that is probably a yes.

Because of this many webmasters decide to block crawler access to things like CSS
files, JS files and other critical assets.

This is a bad idea.

Google have stated multiple times, spanning back to 2012 at least, that they need
access to these files in order to properly render your website.

That’s right, at the render stage you need to allow Google to access these files.

Check your robots.txt file to make sure that you’re not blocking these files, and
additionally you can also add the following to make sure they are definitely getting
access.

User-agent: Googlebot

Allow: *.css

Allow: *.js# global

   

70
  

BLOCK WORDPRESS 
CRAWLER TRAPS WITH 
ROBOTS.TXT 

99% of the sites I audit fall for this trap.

The easiest way to deal with them for most, is simply blocking them with a disallow rule
in robots.txt

Since you’ll just be blocking these in your robots.txt file, here’s my recommendation on
how to edit it​ by the way, I want to only recommend conservative options.

There are others, but we’ll get to that in a moment…

Add this to your robots.txt

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Disallow: /xmlrpc.php

Disallow: /trackback/

Disallow: /feed/

You can optionally disallow feed links, comment links, ​shortlinks​, and wp-json links as
well.

But on some sites you might want to keep them crawled (there are edge cases for
everything) so I’m not including them out of the box in this tip.

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CHECK YOUR THEME FOR 

SELF-REFERRING 
CANONICALS 
Do you know if all of your themes posts/pages/products/categories have self-referring
canonicals in place?

Chances are you won’t know the answer to this for sure.

And I say this because it’s something I ask people all the time, and most of the time we
check and it’s totally fine.

But in around 20% of cases people are using a theme where the developers haven’t set
these self-referring canonicals.

It causes all kinds of carnage if a few circumstances are present.

I highly recommend ​this extension​ for Google Chrome which allows you to check this
kind of stuff in seconds, and then just go and quickly check different content types on
your site.

   

72
  

STAY AHEAD OF THE 

COMPETITION WITH 
DEVELOPER TOOLS IN 
CHROME 
Did you know that dev tools in chrome will tell you about big upcoming updates before
they even happen?

If you open up a few pages on your site and hit ​CMD + F12​ or ​CTRL + F12​ you will
open up the Developer Console.

Next, click on ‘Console’.

This will then give you any notices about how any planned updates on Google Chrome
are going to affect your website personally.

A lot of people miss this, and it’s especially useful in niches where you have a lot of
competitors using the same theme or even CMS (as a lot of these issues are often
applicable to all WordPress sites, etc).

73
  

USE “HTML” SITEMAPS 

FOR BETTER INDEXING! 
This is one of the best tips for improving indexing that people are ignoring…

A ‘HTML Sitemap’ is a regular page with a complete list of links for all the pages on the
site, or in some cases categories which then go to more “sitemap” pages.

People usually link to these via the footer of their website, and set the page to NoIndex
to prevent soft 404 or low quality content issues.

Critically though, they get crawled and help with indexing.

Big sites use them…Amazon, Barnes&Noble, LinkedIn and so many more.

https://www.linkedin.com/directory/people-a

Props to Suresh Kumar G for showing me the LinkedIn example!

And as you can see, that page is designed for a purpose, and it’s not for humans.

Most sites aren’t as big as LinkedIn. But I still recommend having a page like this, that
then links to locations, products, services, posts, etc!

74
  

THE EXCERPT TRAP 

“CONSPIRACY” 
Don’t ask me why, but Google has really been hating on excerpts this year.

Excerpts are the little piece of summary text you get beneath your content when viewing
your blog or category page.

This is what happened to me, and many others this year -

I had a problem with one of my sites, where the post wasn’t indexing.

So I decided to check Google Search Console.

When I inspected the URL it gave me back a coverage issue:

‘Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical’

Google’s selected canonical? ​My homepage.

I got tired of numerous reports of people having the exact same issue getting blamed on
their site...

75
  

It made no sense.

And no reply from @JohnMu

How could a 1,000+ word post be mistaken as being a duplicate of my homepage?

There were two potential options.

1. The post name or ‘headline’

2. The excerpt

So I decided to test it, and I decided to test the excerpt first.

Note:​ You can set a custom excerpt for your posts, it’s a default option in WordPress,
so most good themes support it.

And wouldn’t you know it, the post indexed and the problem disappeared.

The importance of this can’t be understated.

A small excerpt was enough to be considered duplicate content by Google. Not all
duplicate content gets deindexed, most of it just gets a soft 404 or devalued.

76
  

Since then I’ve been making sure to set custom excerpts on all my articles where I use
a blogroll archetype (more on this soon).

And many sites such as The Huffington Post don’t use them at all;

Instead opting to use headlines only.

Another option that you will see many sites utilizing, is instead opting to set NoIndex on
their category pages, while creating a custom homepage that doesn’t utilize excerpts at
all…

   

77
  

USE THE RIGHT CATEGORY 

ARCHETYPE FOR YOU 
Different kinds of sites require different kinds of solutions.

Category pages are some of the most important pages on your site. So getting them
wrong is costing brands big time.

We operate at a time where search engines don’t want to be carrying any deadweight
after all.

Blogroll Categories

Blogroll categories on WordPress are your default setup on homepages that list recent
posts, paginated pages, author archives, date archives, category pages and tag pages.

If you read what I said about the excerpt issue, you can see why this becomes a
problem quickly.

If you choose to use blogroll logic, you’re going to have to either change the excerpts,
remove them or set the aforementioned types of pages to NoIndex.

That or you can convert things to one of the other category archetypes...

Custom Categories

The custom does away with templates. Instead, you create the category from scratch.
Usually starting off with a blank page.

There is usually a lot of unique content on the page, it might not contain images, and
they rarely contain excerpts at all.

78
  

A Custom Category Page. Credit: https://www.theminimalists.com/start/

This means these pages can be better optimized in an attempt to rank for broader
search terms and even head terms.

These pages offer unique, non-duplicate content value and as such can be safely
indexed.

79
  

Hybrid Categories

The easiest way to describe hybrid categories is that they are a mixture of the two of the
above.

They utilize both unique content, and a blogroll where posts are automatically pulled
into the page.

In the above example, you can see that my favorite marketer, Noah, is utilizing a
hybrid category perfectly.

- He adds in some custom text, making this page offer unique value to the search
engine.
- He then removes the excerpt from the posts so that he doesn’t get slapped for
any kind of duplicate content issues.

80
  

Product Categories

I wanted to comment on this, as people often see the parallels and worry accordingly
when I talk about category archetypes...

Product categories are unique to ecommerce sites, and while they are very similar to
blogroll categories they are also their own “kettle of fish”.

Most of them don’t use excerpts, and as such they are immune to many of the duplicate
content issues you’ll come across on a blog.

Pagination can be an issue, but when isn’t it… As can various logic on the page.

But if you have all of that setup correctly, and add some sort of buyers guide or at least
category description to the main product category - you will be fine.

   

81
  

TOPICAL OPTIMIZATION 
WITH GOOGLE NLP = $$$ 
Want to get easy ranking improvements?

Then start optimizing for topics.

One of the best ways to do this is find out EXACTLY what Google thinks your content is
about with NLP (Natural Language Processing)

And you can do this for free, with zero coding skills required, on small amounts of text
with the Google’s NLP Demo.

I recommend people do this for -

- Creating descriptions for categories

- On headings such as H1, H2, H3, etc
- Intro and outro content sentences
- Anchor text

And I’m sure you can come up with even more creative uses for this by yourself!

Here’s how to do it.

Step 1:​ Go to the Google NLP Demo.

Needless to say you need to know where to go.

>> ​https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/#natural-language-api-demo

Step 2:​ Paste Your Content

82
  

Click 'Analyze'. And now complete the Captcha (if you get it come up).

Step 3:​ Analyze Associated Entities

The tool is going to show you the Entities and Entity Types it is associating your content
with.

P.S. Salience is a measure of how much something is about something (how important
it is).

Step 4:​ Analyze Categories

83
  

The Categories section shows you the main category/sub-category of the analyzed text.

This is really useful especially when optimizing category pages to pass more relevance
associations to all the articles or products within them.

You just add the text to the ‘Description’ area when you go to ‘Edit Category’.

It’s been working amazingly for me and will continue to do so.

84
  

CREATE A CUSTOM 
AUTHOR PAGE 
Ever wonder why some sites don’t have author pages?

Assuming it’s not because of an ill-fated decision that ignores the growing important of
E-A-T, it’s simply because default author pages, especially on WordPress, suck.

They are usually little more than duplicates of content that can be found elsewhere on
the site.

Especially if a site only has one or two authors.

The solution is not to simply disable author archives!!!

The real solution is to create a custom author page, which works much like a default
about page, except you better optimize it.

You better optimize it by;

- Removing excerpts
- Removing pagination (instead highlighting only the best and most recent articles
by the author)
- Adding in details about the author
- Adding in social links to the author
- Implementing relevant Schema.

   

85
  

SET EXPIRATION DATES 

FOR SEASONAL CONTENT 
& OFFERS 
Do you have a website that has seasonal content and offers?

Then you need to be setting expiration dates for your content.

Not many people talk about this, but it’s an extremely useful trick that gives your site the
kind of logic it requires for best results.

Rolling certain content off of your site allows you to preserve link equity and crawl
budget for more important and evergreen content.

If you have a developer, this is easy enough to achieve. However if you’re managing
your site by yourself then you might want to follow ​this tutorial​ on how to do it for
WordPress.

   

86
  

SET DIFFERENT TITLES 

AND HEADLINES 
It’s always a good idea to use a different title and headline, it gives you a lot of options.

If you want to use a different headline/title to one of your top ranking competitors for a
keyword you can actually have the best of both worlds.

How?

Using the competitors title as anchor text for one of your internal links.

Especially if you’re using custom categories, this allows you to link to the posts in that
category with whatever anchor text you like (with no developer intervention).

If you are using the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress you can do this incredibly easily.

When on a page, post or product, in the top right of your dashboard, there should be a
Yoast logo.

Click it once.

Now on the right hand side, it should pull up a new menu.

Click on ‘Snippet Preview’.

87
  

Now you should see an overlay menu, and there should be a section called SEO title.

You can change this section to create a unique page title, that doesn’t change the name
of the post on the site itself.

Voila. It’s that easy!

   

88
  

UX AUDIT FOR CONTENT 

UPGRADES 
If you are familiar with content analysis, you’ll know that people perform various types of
analysis to find low-hanging fruit opportunities.

These opportunities then often result in ranking improvements after the scope of work is
outlined and carried out.

One thing you don’t hear about nearly enough, that I think matters increasingly more are
UX Audits.

User Experience Audits are one of my favourite types of site audit, because it can
simultaneously improve conversions and rankings.

This makes them an ideal on-page quick win.

The first thing you need to do is retrieve information about your sites most important
pages/posts/products/categories.

Then look for the ones that are performing really badly from a usability standpoint.

● Bounce Rate
● Visitor Duration
● Conversion Rate
● Goal Completion

And just about anything else you’ve got setup.

You then go about finding ways to improve that page to bring those metrics more in line
with your site average, industry average, etc.

I recommend checking the following reports in Google Analytics:

89
  

Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages

You can then use these to quickly gather that exact kind of data about your content.

Note: It’s important to remember to filter the view by traffic source, as most of the time
we’re interested in organic traffic rather than referrals, direct visits, etc. They all perform
differently!

It’ll become easy to find outliers to begin with, and more difficult as time goes on (law of
diminishing returns).

These pages then become your focus pages, and there are numerous things you can
do to improve all of these.

I wrote an article for Drift.com about this very thing, talking about visitor retention
techniques, ​check it here​.

I’ve also got more to say in the next few tips about this subject...

But what I didn’t talk about in that article is one of my favourite tools for doing this kind
of work.

90
  

UsabilityHub

I’ve been using UsabilityHub for years. In fact, it’s helped me increase conversions on
some sites by crazy amounts.

The reason I like it is because the testers are usually real designers, although they have
also added good options for demographic targeting in recent years too.

While I like tools like Google Optimize that let you test things with live visitors, this tool is
just as important.

You need to find out data about how users are interacting with your site, but it’s still
important to run mockups by designers with years of experience first.

91
  

Of course, this is a paid platform, but it’s relatively cheap and something I definitely
recommend you using on specific articles, landing pages, product pages, etc.

From the standpoint of a tester, they get given basic instructions based on the kind of
test you want to run.

But you can also run all kinds of surveys as well;

92
  

So it’s just a tool that as someone who is focused on usability, you can’t discount its
usefulness.

That being said, I want to give you some more tried and tested ideas before you go out
there and start testing things of your own...

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2 SIMPLE WAYS TO 

IMPROVE DWELL TIME FOR 
BETTER USER 
ENGAGEMENT SIGNALS 
Have you created some amazing content, then ranked the page only to have people
bouncing like crazy and hanging around for little to no time?

You have to try to keep people on your page, and on your site and that means
manufacturing reasons to do that.

Especially due to things like RankBrain, which deals somewhat with user engagement.

Definition: ​Dwell time is how long someone spends on your page.

It used to be that the search engines were more focused on bounce rate, but as the
average bounce rate is around 41-51% - according to ​this study​, i​ t became increasingly
clear that it wasn’t a good enough way to measure result satisfaction alone.

So today, we’re seeing a lot more talk about dwell time, and this is because of the
increasing reliance on machine-learnings role in influencing the search results.

For results in the top 10, dwell time is an important battleground that you want to
master.

Two ways to improve your dwell time

Option 1: Add videos to your page.

Adding videos to your page encourages people to stay on the page by watching the
video.

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A study​ on Wistia found that there was clear and massive difference between the
average time spent on a web page with videos and those without videos.

Simply embedding a YouTube video can give your page a massive advantage
compared to those without it.

There are other options though...

Option 2: Add audio embeds to your page.

Audio embeds can sometimes work even better than video, as most videos are fairly
short. An audio version of your article, or something like a relevant podcast episode can
help increase dwell time significantly.

Noteworthy: ​A lot of people, myself included have also had good success creating
quizzes and embedding them into the content. However, it’s not as universally
applicable to multiple types of content.

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FONT-SIZE RATIOS FOR 

READABILITY 
A good font-size ratio that works for most designers is the 3:4 ratio:

Unappealing pages that are difficult to digest make people leave. This then affects
things like Bounce Rate, Dwell Time and inevitably your actual conversion rate!

You should use size and contrast to help break up your content and establish hierarchy.
This then helps direct the flow of the user, and hopefully helps guide them to a
conversion.

Font-size in pixels: 9, 12, 16, 21, 28, 37, 50, 67 etc.

This refers to the typographic scale, which is something that nearly all good designers
use. Many people prefer the 3:4 ratio, while others prefer different scales.

I prefer to use the 3:4 ratio, as I feel that it is best for optimal legibility.

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While you don’t have to use all of these font-sizes on your site, you will likely want to
use most of them for various heading sizes and so on.

Recommended:​ You can use ​type-scale.com ​to look at various scale ratios and do the
calculations automatically.

   

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BUCKET BRIGADES 
TECHNIQUE 
The bucket brigades technique is a content writing technique that holds people's
attention.

It helps you skim read in a productive way, which incidentally, skimming is exactly how
we do read… ​So you need to make sure it’s “directed skimming”.

This then helps all of our user experience based metrics, which can mean better
rankings!

This strategy also makes the writer seem more friendly and personable, which instills
trust and keeps attention. ​Like a conversation vs an essay.

Here’s the deal…

You can use them anywhere in your content.

Here are some examples

- So, here's the deal

- You might be wondering
- It gets better
- But here’s the kicker
- Think about it
- Want to know the best part?
- Simple

These are just some generic examples, but you can and should use them to break up
your content.

Nestle these kinds of words amongst your sentences where you can.

Simple.

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CALL TO ATTENTION 
POINTS 
Call to attention points are additional areas of content that are intended to grab people's
attention.

To snap them out of “skim scroll” mode.

Be specific and detailed, use exact figures and bullet points when you can.

And emojis 🤯🤯🤯 really help break up your content visually.

Big brands are doing stuff like this all the time.

They use vibrant images and sections with lots going on to grab your attention, then
couple it with a call-to-action:

There are many other call-to-attention techniques that I recommend

you look into.

- Chatbots

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- Quizzes
- Interactive Elements
- Gifs
- Videos
- CSS Transformations
- Embeds such as Tweets

The main thing to know, is be creative and then once you have their attention be
sure to do something with it.

Even if it’s not a call-to-action, it can be a critical message you want to convey.

Peoples attention is valuable, it costs you a lot to get it.

Don’t waste it.

   

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“SMASH UP” YOUR SITE 

FOR BETTER RANKINGS 
This is one of the secrets that helped me become “SEO-Famous”.

And it involves demolishing parts of your site for better crawlability and link flow.

Essentialism - “Eliminate everything that doesn’t matter”.

3 Things You Can "Smash" For Better Rankings & UX.

Obviously always backup your site before doing this and leave up to 30 days to determine results.

#3 - Comments Section

Not everyone gets a lot of comments these days, and a lot of sites actually opt-out of
providing any form of comment system on their content.

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However, by default most CMS' (Content Management Systems) such as WordPress do

enable comments.

If your comment section ISN'T being used, or you don't want it to be. It's actually best to
remove them.

I've had insane results just from removing comments (see screenshot above).

This is most likely because it adds a whole bunch of links to every page, which ​as I
mentioned here​ is a link flow issue.

#2 - Date Archives

Date archives are becoming less used now, but they still exist on more sites than you'd
think.

While it is important to display the date of when your content was published, it's not
important to create an entire page for articles from Sep' 2015 (as an example).

The reality is that you just shouldn't need to use them if you have a good site structure
or a search function.

It adds nothing to users, and it definitely adds nothing to your SEO.

#1 - Sliders

Sliders suck.

More than that, they're plain costly.

They reduce the load time of your site more than anything else, and what's worse is
they introduce EVEN MORE links.

If there was a UX argument to be made, trust me I'd be the one to make it...

But ​even studies​ show that they're not worth the trade-off.

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Pretty much nobody bothers with anything after the first "slide".

While fewer sites are using them than a few years ago, it's still the #1 thing I smash on
any website I help with their SEO/UX.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that I bulldoze them. Just get rid of them permanently, let
them be resigned to history as another one of those things where we learned better.

   

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KEEP A CHANGELOG 

When you’re making any changes to your site, for just about any reason, you can screw
things up.

The problem is that if you’re not keeping track of what you did and when, it can be
nearly impossible to figure out what caused the problems.

This is so important for SEO in particular.

Webmasters have a tendency to change a ​whole​ bunch of things at once.

This then makes it hard to decipher the data and learn what worked and what didn’t.

Keeping a changelog teaches you about patience, it teaches you to optimize in a more
organized and step-by-step way.

I built a template that you can use ​here​ (link makes a copy).

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TERM FREQUENCY + 
IMPORTANT TERMS = $$$ 
Don’t obsess over an entire article, obsess over the parts that matters.

That’s the essence of the 80/20 approach.

While I think everything is important, I can’t argue with results I’ve had simply adding my
keyword in more (or less) times.

Nor the importance of adding in important terms that are missing.

---

Let me say though, you won’t get great results with this unless everything else is
on point...

- That means targeting the right keywords (head back to RAP Analysis if you
skimmed it).
- It means having good enough content to begin with.
- It means having a domain with a solid foundation of links and technical SEO.
- It means tracking your data effectively, including using changelogs *ahem*

Term Frequency

I used to do this manually, it was a huge pain.

Then I built a simple script.

Then SurferSEO came out. *doh*

But I’m so glad, because with the “Audit” feature in Surfer, you can instantly get all the
data you need.

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It shows you what the term frequency is for your term, your competitors (avg) and then
they make a suggestion.

This also shows missing terms.

Important Terms

I prefer to use one of the other features of this tool though for important terms, where it
shows you the occurrence of certain terms in all of the top 10 results of that SERP.

This means you can get an idea of how important this term actually is in that SERP.

My Personal Tip

Never decrease actions initially, always increase actions first.

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I’d rather start with an article that is purposely unoptimized which I can then add to later.

This gives me a great deal of control over the ​on-page power factors​.

   

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FOCUS ON POWER 
FACTORS OR YOU’RE 
F****D! 
“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right
thing is probably more important than working hard” - ​Caterina Fake

Winding down this book to the last few tips I want to take a minute to ground things.

In SEO, an incredible amount of new information is released every single week.

There are also an infinite amount of things that you could be working on at any given
time.

When it comes to on-page I see this a lot...

People obsessing over their themes, featured images and much more.

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The reality is that these things don’t make a huge difference once you’ve already got
something good in place.

The things that you should be spending most of your time worrying about when it comes
to on-page (and no I don’t mean technical seo) are what I call ​power factors​.

On-Page Power Factors

● Page Title
● URL
● H1
● H2
● H3, H4, H5, H6
● Term Frequency
● Important Terms

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You’ll benefit the most from optimizing these and even within this group, not all of them
are equal.

My point is that while there are so many things you can do, most of your effort should
still be going here.

Focusing on progressively optimizing these factors on key pages, backed by analysis of

both what pages to focus on and what factors/elements to change.

Nobody giving this advice, myself included, believes people aren’t working hard on
other things. It’s just that all that effort is usually misplaced.

“Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic

fundamentals” - ​Jim Rohn

Make these factors the foundation of all your on-page efforts.

   

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DECODE ALGORITHM 
UPDATES THE RIGHT WAY 
If you have ever been hit by an algorithm update, you know how bad it can be.

But what you absolutely must do… Is ​remain calm.

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You need to let the dust settle and gather as much data as possible about your own
situation in order to decode the algorithm update the right way.

Then you can ask questions of your data with more confidence, because acting
too soon will just “muddy the data”.

1. Has it been more than one page?

2. Which pages?
3. Do these pages have anything in common?
4. Is it the whole site?

If it was 1, 2 or 3 then you will be able to decode the issue much easier, but people are
rarely this lucky.

If your site fits 4 then know this…

Sitewide issues are caused by sitewide things.

- Your backlink profile

- Your anchor text strategy
- Your site speed
- Your content strategy
- Other technical issues

The point here is to give you some ideas, nobody knows your site better than you do, so
you’ll have to take some initiative in becoming your own detective.

The main thing to know is not to act too quickly, and never use algorithm update posts
as anything more than a useful tool for ideas… It starts and ends with YOUR site.

   

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TIPS FOR THE NEW 

DECADE, 2020 & BEYOND 
I couldn’t possibly write this book and avoid talking about some of the trends you need
to be paying attention to going into 2020 and beyond.

Voice Search Optimization

Get a load of this…

41% of adults perform at least one voice search per day. - ​Source

20% of all searches on mobile are voice searches. - ​Source

If you haven’t already got a voice assisted device in your home, chances are you’ve
thought about it, or will do one day soon.

You want to be one of the sites out there that are adapting to this trend, and if you do,
you'll reap the rewards.

Types of voice searches:

- Question & Answer Searches

You want to be the site that frames the question, and provides the answer.

In fact, many smart marketers and brands are creating FAQ pages solely to
optimize for voice search.

If you aren’t already, then you should be considering voice search as part of your
content strategy.

- How-To Searches

Ever seen one of those adverts where voice assisted search is helping someone
follow a recipe?

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Me too.

These ‘what next’ type searches are going to keep growing in popularity, so you
should definitely be thinking about them.

No matter which type of voice search you’re optimizing for, you’re going to have to
implement a Schema markup known as ​Speakable​. You can read about it ​here​.

It is used by the Article or WebPage object. So this might require some changes, as a
😔
lot of themes still utilize CreativeWork in place of Article ​Just consider that another
tip!

Optimize For Featured Snippets

This is a piece of advice for those who are already ranking on page 1 for their keywords.

Why?

Well that’s because ​over 99.58% of featured snippets​ are awarded to URLs already on
page 1.

This means that if you’re already ranking well that you’ve got an incredible opportunity
to rank for featured snippets.

Especially if you follow this one tip…

My personal featured snippet “hack”:

SEMRush performed a data-study​, which found that most featured snippets are 40-60
words max.

This means that you can create a single paragraph, or section in your content that is
created just for gaining the featured snippet.

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As I already mentioned in the previous section about voice search, smart marketers are
creating sections and strategies that deal with voice search differently to the rest of their
content.

You should do this with featured snippets as well...

Step 1: Write 50 words of NLP optimized content that satisfies the snippets intent.

Step 2: Use <section> or <div> html to create a special “section”

Step 3: Place the content into the section.

Step 4: Place a single H2 or H3 prior to the section.

Step 5: Add ​one of these​ Schema for the type of snippet you’re optimizing for.

Less Publish, More Edit

Wikipedia ranks incredibly well, and one thing you will never hear talked about is the
fact that some of their best ranking pages have been edited hundreds, if not thousands
of times.

With organic search providing less clicks than ever, and algorithm updates hurting sites
badly. It’s going to slowly become more profitable to focus on solidifying rankings.

Making sure that you capture and keep strategically important keywords for your
business has always been important, but content burnout is starting to truly come to a
head.

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Competition is at an all time high, traffic is at an all time low.

Less will become more...

That’s just my humble opinion and prediction for the next 5+ years.

I know that I am already spending a lot of my time focusing on systems and processes
for getting the most out of what I’ve got.

You should definitely start doing the same in 2020 and I should think a lot of the tips in
this book will help you do just that, and if not at least give you some incredibly useful
ideas for how to do so.

Mobile-First Design

“With mobile-first indexing, Google will only index what it is able to crawl on
the mobile version of the site, so if there is important content on the

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desktop version which is not available on the mobile version, this will not be
indexed.” - ​Google

Designing for “mobile-first” isn’t just about responsive websites.

It’s about making sure that you understand your audience.

If you have a desktop first design, your theme might decide to “hide” certain elements
when on mobile.

The problem is, this won’t get indexed.

This means that more than ever, we now need to be thinking about providing a
consistent experience across devices.

There are also lots of desktop designs that utilize widgets, which are demoted to the
bottom of the page on mobile… ​The logic just isn’t ‘logical’.

All of these things are going to change over time, but the question is whether you’ll be
one of the brands to take advantage of this before the rest of the crowd has time to
catch up.

   

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Afterword 
Tips are useful, and can often save you from making mistakes that would have
otherwise been a painful lesson.

However it’s about much more than just avoiding mistakes…

It’s about being proactive and benefiting from what we all look for from our on-page and
technical work.

And no, it’s not about ranking without links as some ethically dubious folks like to
claim...

It’s about ranking with less links than your competitors, in less time, for less money and
simultaneously future-proofing your brand.

When used as methods actionable tips, like the ones in this ebook, help you do exactly
that.

---

More from the author -

You can find out more about what I’m up to on ​https://danielcuttridge.com/

If you are interested in what services I offer -

Audits

Consulting

If you’d like more on-page and technical seo content then join my group ​on-page
academy​ on facebook where I regularly answer questions, discuss ideas and post links
to my latest articles.

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