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Articles by SEO Meetup
Enterprise SEO Platform Buying Guide
Onboarding an enterprise SEO platform can be a long and difficult process. Getting rid of a bad solution once it’s integrated into your systems can be even harder. Make sure you do your homework and select the right platform for you. Choosing an enterprise SEO platform can be complicated. Let’s look at what is involved in the decision-making process.
Google Says "Links Matter Less"-We Looked at 1,000,000 SERPs and Our Data Both Agrees and Disagrees
Google has said links are less important than they used to be, and most SEOs have come to accept that as true. Our findings indicate that this is true overall, but for certain types of queries, links matter more. I still believe that links should be a part of your SEO strategy, but they shouldn’t be your whole strategy. A while back, I answered the question, “Do links still matter for rankings?” by disavowing all links to a few blogs. Traffic and rankings fell, so yes, links still matter.
Bidding on Branded Terms Increases Clicks by 18.3% Original
We ran this study to find out if running paid ads cannibalize organic traffic or not. Most SEOs are against bidding on branded terms because it is believed that buying paid ads cannibalizes organic traffic and it can also impact attribution for conversions and revenue. Paid advertisers believe there is an uplift in overall traffic. Who is right?
The Realities of In-House SEO: What to Expect and How to Succeed
In-house SEO refers to the practice of managing and executing search engine optimization strategies using a company’s internal resources, rather than outsourcing to an external agency. There’s a long-term trend of companies bringing SEO programs and expertise in-house. Companies usually want someone who is invested in the long-term success of the company and who can collaborate closely with other teams in a way that is difficult for external agencies to do.
Enterprise SEO Challenges & Mistakes You Need To Overcome Original
Whether you are working in-house at an enterprise company or you’re an agency working with enterprise clients, you’ll find that navigating the corporate landscape is complex. You may know exactly what the company needs to do in order to be successful, but actually getting things done can be a challenge. One person’s challenge is another person’s opportunity. Being able to cut through red tape and get things implemented is a super power.
Unlocking Growth Through Enterprise SaaS SEO Original
Enterprise SaaS SEO is the practice of improving the visibility and rankings of an enterprise SaaS website in search engines. The goal is to attract people who are looking for solutions that your product can provide. It works like this: Let’s dive in. There are many reasons SaaS companies should focus on SEO. These include: Credibility. With every new touchpoint, you have the opportunity to be seen as the expert and dominant offering.
SEO OKRs: Driving Performance & Measuring Impact
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a popular goal-setting framework. It helps SEOs define and measure the success of their projects, teams, and individual SEOs. The objectives should be clearly defined. Some people prefer the SMART framework to make sure their goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Key results are how you track your progress against your objective. Goals are usually set at a few levels. You usually have company, team, and individual goals.
Enterprise Sites Are Where Technical SEO Shines
Enterprise technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a large, enterprise company’s website to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. It helps increase visibility and rankings in search engines. Enterprise websites are where technical SEO shines. There’s so much money at stake. One mistake can keep millions of pages out of the index or remove an entire site from search results. One fix can potentially be worth millions of dollars in revenue.
Enterprise Link Building & The Power Of Links
Enterprise link building is the process of acquiring links to a large, enterprise company’s website to improve its visibility and rankings in search engines. Enterprise companies get a lot of links naturally. While they may have some challenges with link building, these companies also have a ton of opportunities because of who they are and how much money is at stake. Links play a role in many of Google’s systems including Experience Expertise Authoritativeness Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Duplicate, Google Chose Different Canonical Than User. What It Is, Causes, & How to Fix Original
The Google Search Console status “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” means that Google chose a different URL to index than the one the user selected. This can happen when Google finds two or more pieces of content on a site that are very similar or identical. The issue will show in the Page Indexing report in Google Search Console. This is how it looks. When I check on one of our pages with this issue, I see that the content hasn’t been translated yet for either language.
Google Documents Leaked & SEOs Are Making Some Wild Assumptions Original
You’ve probably heard about the recent Google documents leak. It’s on every major site and all over social media. Where did the docs come from? My understanding is that a bot called yoshi-code-bot leaked docs related to the Content API Warehouse on Github on March 13th, 2024. It may have appeared earlier in some other repos, but this is the one that was first discovered.
What Is Enterprise Content Marketing? Strategies You Need To Be Successful Original
Enterprise content marketing involves creating and sharing relevant content to attract, engage, and retain an organization’s target audience. When enterprise content marketing is done well, it can drive tons of leads, conversions, and, ultimately, revenue. In addition, it can help with things like brand perception and awareness. There’s a misconception that big enterprise websites rank for everything.
The Role of SEO in Mergers and Acquisitions
SEOs have a lot to offer companies during the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. They can help identify acquisition targets, do due diligence and help with valuation and risk identification, identify future opportunities, work with teams on website migrations, monitor migration progress, and train new teams in best practices. Acquisitions can have a dramatic impact on your search visibility. Long ago, one of the main competitors of an engineering company I was working with shut down.
You Can't Compare Backlink Counts in SEO Tools: Here's Why
Google knows about 300T pages on the web. It’s doubtful they crawl all of those, and at least according to some documents from their antitrust trial we learned they only indexed 400B. That’s around .133% of the pages they know about, roughly 1 out of every 752 pages. For Ahrefs, we choose to store about 340B pages in our index as of December 2023. At a certain point, the quality of the web becomes bad.
Does Adding a Related Post Section Help Your Blog? We Tested It Original
We already do a great job with internal linking on the Ahrefs blog. But we wondered if adding a related posts section would help us and whether users would use it. Our marketing team was fairly split on whether we should have a section like this and whether it would help. I’ve had great results with this personally on sites with a lot of content, and I was convinced it would help the Ahrefs blog.
Yep & Ahrefs Support IndexNow. Fresher Data, Faster Indexing, & Announcing a Game-Changing Site Audit Feature
I’m thrilled to announce that Yep, our search engine, and Ahrefs will support IndexNow along with Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, & Seznam.cz. This puts us in a unique position. Not only are we an SEO tool who will be submitting data to IndexNow, we’re also a search engine and the first and only SEO tool that will be receiving data from IndexNow. Ahrefs is giving users a reason to use IndexNow besides faster crawling and indexing in search engines.
How to Visualize Ahrefs Data with ChatGPT
SEOs have access to so much data that sometimes, it’s hard to know what to do with it all. I’ve been experimenting with visualizing Ahrefs data using GPT-4, so I thought I’d share the results with you all. We’ve already launched some AI-enhanced features like search intent, but we made it even better by adding the traffic share for each intent. Check out this write-up from Si Quan for some more things we might add. For the visualizations, you’ll need GPT-4.
Enterprise SEO Metrics & How to Report On Your Successes Original
Enterprise SEO metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Monitoring these metrics helps you prove value and shows the success of your SEO program. You’ll create a lot of different SEO reports for a lot of different people in an enterprise environment. Let’s look at some of the reports you’ll want to create and the metrics to include in them for different people. Money is what businesses care about.
How To Do an Enterprise SEO Audit Original
An enterprise SEO audit looks at large enterprise websites to find issues and opportunities that will improve rankings and visibility on search engines. The basics are the same as any other SEO audit. Yet, an audit like this is an entirely different beast because of all the complications that come from large sites and large companies such as: All the different systems. All the different teams working to shape the audit. All the things you might need to look at.
I Deleted the Content From Two Posts To See if They’d Still Rank. Here’s What Happened
I removed content from two of our pages to try to measure the impact that content has on rankings. We lost a few positions for many terms, and it hurt, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected. These pages still ranked relatively well without any content. You can see the current content for these pages on the blog (top Bing searches, top YouTube searches). Both have 1-2K words and tons of data.
We Studied Over 1 Million Domains to Find the Most Common Technical SEO Issues
There’s a lot that can go wrong on a website, and every site is going to have some issues to fix. We looked at 1,002,165 domains to find the most common technical SEO issues. Keep reading to see what we found. These are the issues flagged the most across the 1 million+ domains. The number is the percentage of domains where the issues were found on at least one of their pages. These are the most common issues, but every website is different.
Over 67% of Domains Using Hreflang Have Issues (Study of 374,756 Domains)
We ran the largest hreflang study ever, nearly 10X larger than any other study. In total, we looked at issues on 374,756 different domains that used hreflang tags. Our findings show that 67% of them have at least one issue. Let’s look at the most common issues you should actually care about. Setting an x-default is not required. But it is recommended if you need a fallback page for users whose language settings don’t match any of your localized versions. Hreflang works by the most specific match.
SEO Community Spotlight: Raleigh
SEO communities around the world are struggling to get back to normal after COVID-19. Ahrefs is looking to highlight different communities globally to see if we can reignite some of them. If you want your community featured, send me a message. Raleigh, North Carolina, is where I’ve called home for more than a decade. It’s a community that I know and love, so I’m featuring it first. It also has one of the largest and oldest SEO communities in the world. But why Raleigh? And what makes it special?
The Story of Blocking 2 High-Ranking Pages With Robots.txt
I blocked two of our ranking pages using robots.txt. We lost a position here or there and all of the featured snippets for the pages. I expected a lot more impact, but the world didn’t end. Warning I don’t recommend doing this, and it’s entirely possible that your results may be different from ours. I was trying to see the impact on rankings and traffic that the removal of content would have.
How to Use PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool provided by Google that analyzes a page’s performance and provides suggestions for improving its speed and user experience. PageSpeed Insights works by analyzing a webpage’s HTML, CSS, fonts, and JavaScript, and provides suggestions to optimize the performance of the page. This includes things like compressing images, minifying code, and reducing the number of HTTP requests made by the page. Let’s look at PageSpeed Insights more closely.
First Input Delay (FID) - Defined, Measured, & How to Fix
First Input Delay (FID) is the time from when a user first interacts with your page to when the page responds. It measures responsiveness and is one of the three Core Web Vitals metrics Google uses to measure page experience. Example interactions include: Clicking on a link or button. Inputting text into a blank field. Selecting a drop-down menu. Clicking a checkbox. Some events like scrolling or zooming are not counted. Let’s look at how fast your FID should be and how to improve it.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - Defined, Measured, & How to Fix
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the amount of time it takes to load the single largest visible element in the viewport. It represents the website being visually loaded and is one of the three Core Web Vitals (CWV) metrics Google uses to measure page experience. The first impression users have of your site is how fast it appears to be loaded. The largest element is usually going to be a featured image or maybe the <h1> tag.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - Defined, Measured, & How to Fix
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the visual stability of a page as it loads. It does this by looking at how big elements are and how far they move. It’s one of the three Core Web Vitals metrics Google uses to measure page experience. CLS is calculated during the five-second window where the most shifting occurs. Sidenote. Expected layout shifts, like after a user action, are fine and expected. Shifts within 500 ms of a user interaction are excluded from the calculations.
Is It OK to Remove 301 Redirects After a Year? We Tested It
In 2021, Google’s Gary Illyes said on Twitter that redirect signals consolidate permanently to the new location after one year. This means that, in theory, signals to the original URL are permanently passed to the new one after a year. If the redirect is removed and the original page is restored, the original page has to build brand-new signals on its own. Even though the old links still point to the original page, they count for the page that was the redirect target for over a year. Sidenote.
Does Going Viral Help With SEO? Not Really
I wanted to find out how going viral impacts SEO for different businesses. I thought that with all the news coverage and links these sites received that their businesses would be booming and they’d be ranking for everything. Spoiler alert: I was wrong. There has to be some merit to it though, right? Even Google’s John Mueller seems to be on board with digital PR. To learn more, I looked at dozens of sites. Some are from when I judged search awards. Others are from various Slack groups.
Founder of SEO Meetup, Ross Kernez, Announces a January Marketing Event to Start off the New Year
Read full article On the heels of a successful and community-building marketing event in December, Kernez urges everyone not to miss this next informative event. NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / December 20, 2022 / Ross Kernez founder of SEO Meetup has officially announced a January meetup event where entrepreneurs and inquiring minds can continue building their digital marketing and SEO skills. The SEO Meetup event will take place on January 9th at 6pm.
How to Perform a Competitor Link Analysis in 3 Steps
A competitor link analysis is an assessment of the link profiles of major competitors where you look at their link building strategies to gain insights. Implementing some of the same strategies in your own link building can lead to higher rankings in search engines and increased business outcomes. Performing this kind of analysis allows you to find sites that commonly link to websites similar to yours.
Almost Half of GSC Clicks Go to Hidden Terms - A Study by Ahrefs
Most SEOs consider Google Search Console (GSC) their source of truth and trust the data to be accurate. What if I told you that GSC doesn’t tell you all of the keywords you’re getting traffic from? In fact, the tool doesn’t show a term for nearly half the clicks. These instances of hidden terms account for 46.08% of all clicks in our study. The study includes one month of data across 146,741 websites and nearly 9 billion total clicks. Let’s dive in.
Canonicalization: What It Is & How It Works
Canonicalization is the process that search engines use to determine the main version of a page. That is the page that will be indexed and shown to users. The chosen version is canonical, and ranking signals like links will consolidate to that page. This process is sometimes referred to as standardization or normalization. According to Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes, ~60% of the internet is duplicate content. Canonicalization is complex and often misunderstood.
At Least 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years Are Dead (Ahrefs Study on Link Rot)
Link rot is when links stop pointing to their intended file, web page, or server. The links are dead. Link rot happens as pages on the internet are removed, redirected, or updated causing the links on these pages to go to broken pages or pages whose content has been altered. Since January 2013, 66.5% of the links pointing to the 2,062,173 websites we sampled have rotted. We found another 6.45% with temporary errors. We don’t know if they’re still there or not.
How to Create Great Content for Search
A lot of content that you’ll find on the web is created by SEOs or writers who do a little research and rehash a lot of the things other articles talk about. Some content may even cover a topic well and touch on the main points. But the information is usually basic, and the articles all read the same. While this content may bring you some search traffic, it’s not going to impress anyone. Great content is useful, in-depth, and memorable content that shows real expertise.
Core Web Vitals Data Study w/ CrUX & 5.2M Pages - Ahrefs
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: Core Web Vitals (CWV) are the speed metrics part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. The metrics measure visual load with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), visual stability with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and interactivity with First Input Delay (FID). We wanted to look at the data to see how websites were doing and if we could glean any important insights.
What Is Googlebot & How Does It Work?
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: Googlebot is the web crawler used by Google to gather the information needed and build a searchable index of the web. Googlebot has mobile and desktop crawlers, as well as specialized crawlers for news, images, and videos.
Do Links Still Matter for Rankings? A Study by Ahrefs
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: In the past few years, I’ve seen more people saying that links are dead, they don’t matter for rankings, or they’ve lost their importance. Links are a confirmed major ranking factor, so I figured it would be interesting to test their impact. Instead of building links to pages, I figured the easiest way to test this would be to remove links to a page and see what happened.
What Are Redirects? Types, SEO Impact, & More
A redirect is a way to send people and bots to a new URL when they request the old URL, but the page has changed locations. When you move to a new address in the US, you set up mail forwarding with the United States Postal Service (USPS). If someone sends mail to your old address, USPS will look at their mail forwarding rules and realize you no longer live at the old location. They’ll take the mail and deliver it to your new location instead of the old one. That’s also how redirects work.
9 Easy Local Link Building Tactics
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: Every major local SEO organic and map pack study and survey shows links as one of the most prominent ranking factors. So if you want to rank yours or your client’s local business higher in Google, then you’re going to need backlinks.
What Is Crawl Budget and Should SEOs Worry about It?
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: Crawl budget is how fast and how many pages a search engine wants to crawl on your site. It’s affected by the amount of resources a crawler wants to use on your site and the amount of crawling your server supports. More crawling doesn’t mean you’ll rank better, but if your pages aren’t crawled and indexed they aren’t going to rank at all.
What Are Core Web Vitals & How Can You Improve Them?
Article stats Linking websites 188 Tweets 76 Data from Content Explorer Shows how many different websites are linking to this piece of content. As a general rule, the more websites link to you, the higher you rank in Google. Shows estimated monthly search traffic to this article according to Ahrefs data. The actual search traffic (as reported in Google Analytics) is usually 3-5 times bigger. The number of times this article was shared on Twitter.
Subdomain vs. Subfolder, Is One Better Than the Other for SEO?
Article stats Linking websites 54 Tweets 65 Data from Content Explorer Shows how many different websites are linking to this piece of content. As a general rule, the more websites link to you, the higher you rank in Google. Shows estimated monthly search traffic to this article according to Ahrefs data. The actual search traffic (as reported in Google Analytics) is usually 3-5 times bigger. The number of times this article was shared on Twitter.
How Ahrefs Counts Links and Domains
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: Every backlink tool will store different links. When building an index of the web, companies have to make many choices around crawling, parsing, and indexing data. While there’s going to be a lot of overlap between indexes, there’s also going to be some differences depending on each company’s decisions. In the name of transparency, we want to let people know more about Ahrefs’ link index. What is a link? Which links get indexed?
Mobile-First Indexing: What You Need to Know
Subscribe for weekly updates Leave this field empty if you're human: Mobile-first indexing means that Google is shifting how they index and rank content from the desktop to the mobile version of sites. We’re in a mobile era. It’s been over five years since the number of mobile searches overtook the number of desktop searches. It makes sense for Google to index and rank content based on the mobile pages since more people will see the mobile versions.
New Study: Is Google Biased Towards Particular News Sites?
Recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was called to testify in front of Congress about potential bias in Google’s algorithms. This isn’t the first time Google has been accused of bias and likely will not be the last time. Google alleges there is no bias, yet many Conservatives argue that Google is biased against them.
The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO
Since this is a beginner’s guide, let’s start with the basics. What is Technical SEO? Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines like Google find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. The goal is to be found and improve rankings. How complicated is technical SEO? It depends. The fundamentals aren’t really difficult to master, but technical SEO can be complex and hard to understand. I’ll keep things as simple as I can with this guide.
How to Succeed in Enterprise SEO
Article stats Linking websites 18 Data from Content Explorer Shows how many different websites are linking to this piece of content. As a general rule, the more websites link to you, the higher you rank in Google. Shows estimated monthly search traffic to this article according to Ahrefs data. The actual search traffic (as reported in Google Analytics) is usually 3-5 times bigger. The number of times this article was shared on Twitter and Facebook.
How to Use Data Forecasting for SEO [Scripts Included]
Article stats Monthly traffic 40 Linking websites 45 Tweets 145 Data from Content Explorer Shows how many different websites are linking to this piece of content. As a general rule, the more websites link to you, the higher you rank in Google. Shows estimated monthly search traffic to this article according to Ahrefs data. The actual search traffic (as reported in Google Analytics) is usually 3-5 times bigger. The number of times this article was shared on Twitter.
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