SEO Tips That Work (Even for Beginners)
Today, I'm going to walk you through some
of my favorite SEO tips that actually work and are easy and fast to implement. Let's zip, zap, zoodle right through these
starting with the first SEO tip which is to preserve link equity by fixing broken backlinks. Broken backlinks are links
that point to a broken page. And because they're pointing to a 404 page,
your site isn't getting any value from them. But if you restore your broken pages with
backlinks or redirect that URL to a live and relevant one, you should be
able to get that value. So first, we need to find pages
with broken backlinks. To do that, I'll use Site Explorer, which
is free to use on your own websites with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account. To get started, I'll enter
our blog as the target.
Next, I'll go to the broken backlinks report. And as you can see, we have
around 160 broken backlinks. Take this one as an example. This DR 73 site is linking to our post on
submitting a website to search engines. But they've actually made a typo in
the URL, hence, the broken backlink. So all we would need to do is redirect the URL
with the typo to the correct one and we get ourselves a contextually relevant
link from an authoritative website. Alright, the next tip is to license your
custom images with Creative Commons. Creative Commons licenses allow creators
to license their content under copyright law. Meaning, if you license out your work through
Creative Commons, people can use your images on their site legally. Now, this might not sound all that appealing,
but some of these licenses require people to provide attribution to the creator, which
often comes in the form of a link. For example, Pexels, a popular stock photos
site, licenses some of their photos through Creative Commons. And in their terms of use, they state that
"some photos are covered by the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
This means that people don't
even have to give credit. Now, despite the license not requiring attribution,
they've managed to get around 7,000 backlinks where "creative commons" is mentioned
in the anchor and surrounding text. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If we look at their anchors report, you'll see
creator names as anchor texts which have led to thousands of referring domains. And yes, these are links because of attribution. Now, you might be thinking – well this is
a stock photo site so of course people will link to them. That's probably true, but there are other
sites like, openfoodfacts.org who have also used this tactic in a pretty smart way. Their site has different food products
from around the world. And when you click one of these product pages,
you'll find details about the product, ingredients, and even nutritional facts. All things that typically lead to links. Now, if we look at their terms of use, you'll
see that they've licensed their product images with Creative Commons. More specifically, it's the BY-SA 3.0
license, which actually requires people to link to the material.
And their site has generated over 37,000
referring domains, many of which are a result of their product images. So if you have custom images or your own
product stock photos, then you may want to consider licensing them
with Creative Commons. Alright the next SEO tip is to strategically
repurpose blog posts to videos to own more SERP real estate. As I'm sure you've seen, Google is showing
more and more videos in their search engine results pages.
And the vast majority of these
results are from YouTube. Many people complain about this, but the way
I see it is that your brand has the opportunity to own at least two spots
on the first page of Google. And this is a big plus because the more
SERP real estate you own, the more clicks and impressions you'll get. Now, when you're choosing blog posts to repurpose,
you don't want to aimlessly choose any old blog post on your site.
Instead, you'll want to look for SERPs that
have video results on the first page because this tells us that there's "video
intent" for a query. So to find these queries, you
can use Ahrefs Site Explorer. Just enter your domain or blog path and
then head on over to the Content Gap tool. Now, this tool is typically meant to help
you find keywords a competing domain or URL ranks for where yours doesn't. For example, if I add moz.com/blog/
at the top, then the tool is saying… Show us keywords that moz's blog
ranks for where Ahrefs' blog doesn't. But you can actually search for common
keywords between targets too. To do that, I'll remove our URL from the bottom
section and paste our blog URL in the top section. And just below that, I'll add www.youtube.com/watch,
which are YouTube video pages. So what this is saying is, show us keywords
that Ahrefs blog and YouTube watch pages are ranking for.
Period. Let's run the search. Now, because it's showing us all keyword rankings
for a target, let's click on the "All Intersections filter" and select just two targets. And this is going to show us common keywords
between Ahrefs blog and YouTube watch pages. And as you can see, you'll get a nice list
of common keyword rankings between these targets. Now, there's going to be a lot of irrelevant
keywords in here because we're looking at the top 100 keyword rankings for all
targets where just one of them needs to rank in the top 10. So let's export this report. And for the sake of time, I've already
imported it into Google Sheets.
And what we're going to do is set two filters. First, we want to narrow our data down to
where YouTube ranks in the top 10 of Google because that's where the clicks are happening. And then we'll do the same thing for Ahrefs
blog which will keep our keywords relevant. Alright, now that we have a full list of keywords,
we need to check which keywords will likely lead to the most search traffic from Google. So let's go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, paste
in our list of keywords, and run the search. Then, head on over to the Traffic Share by
Domains report, which is going to show us the websites that get the most search
traffic for our list of keywords. And as you can see, YouTube is
among one of the top results. From here, you can click on the keywords
number to see the ranking videos and the estimated search traffic
they get from Google. Now, it's important to note that the traffic
estimations are based on just a single keyword. But in reality, pages can rank for hundreds
or even thousands of keywords.
So to see the total global traffic potential,
just click on the caret beside one of the URLs. And once you've found a target, it's just
a matter of looking at the SERP for the query, assessing search intent for top-ranking videos,
and then repurposing your content to match it. Now, ranking our videos in Google sends
us around 200,000 views per year. So if you want to learn more video SEO
tips, I'll link up a video in the description. Alright, the next SEO tip is to go after
low-hanging featured snippet opportunities. Featured snippets are excerpts from an article
that usually appear at the top of Google's SERP. And because they typically appear at the top
of Google, they usually get clicked a lot.
Now, according to our study of 2 million
featured snippets, you need to have a top 10 ranking position in order
to win the featured snippet. So in order to find these opportunities,
we need to find keywords where we rank in the top 10 and a featured snippet is in the SERP. To do that, I'll go to Ahrefs Site
Explorer and search for my target.
Then, I'll head over to the Organic
keywords report. Next, let's set a filter for keywords that
rank in positions 2 – 10, and I excluded position 1 because that would mean
that we already own the featured snippet. Finally, I'll set a SERP features filter to only
show featured snippets where our target doesn't rank. Now it's just a matter of checking out these
SERPs, paying attention to the snippet format, doing a bit more digging into how your
competitors have structured the snippet content, and then making adjustments
to your post as needed.
I know that was a bit of a mouthful so if
you want me to create a video on getting featured snippets, let me know in the comments. Alright, the next tip I have for you is to add
internal links to boost important pages on your site. Internal links are the easiest way to
pass pagerank throughout your site. And you don't need to do outreach
because you have full control over them. Now, there are tons of different ways
to find internal linking opportunities. The easiest is to do a site search in Google. For example, if I wanted to add internal links
to our post on search intent, then I'd search for: site:ahrefs.com/blog "search intent", which
will show us all pages on our blog that mention search intent as a phrase. Then we can simply visit these pages
and add internal links where relevant.
Now, the downside to this method is that
many of these pages will already be linking to your target page assuming you've
been adding internal links over time. So another way to do this is to use Ahrefs
Site Audit, which is also free to use with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. After you've run your crawl, just head
on over to the link opportunities report. And this report shows you internal linking
opportunities based on keywords your pages rank for. So we show the page you can link from, the
keyword that's mentioned on that source page, which is also the keyword that the target page
ranks for and the page we recommend you link to. On top of that we show the context of where the
keyword appears on the source page, making it easy for you to identify good targets. Now, assuming we wanted to find internal linking
opportunities for our keyword research guide, we can set a rule where the target
page is our keyword research URL. And as you can see, we're left with 54
opportunities and none of these source pages are currently linking to that guide. We have a full video on how to use internal
links for SEO, so I'll link that up in the description.
Now, these are just a few SEO tips that are
fast and easy to do and have been proven to work for us, others, and now hopefully you. I'll see you in the next tutorial..
