The Advanced SEO Formula That Helped Me Rank For 477,000 Keywords

Can you guess how many keywords I rank for?

Well, you are probably going to say 477,000 because I used that number in the title of this post. 😉

And it’s true, just look at the screenshot from Ahrefs. It shows the number of keywords I rank for.

But what’s crazy is that I am in a super competitive niche… digital marketing.

So, are you wondering how I did it?

Well, it starts with proper keyword research.

See most marketers start their keyword research with tools like SEMrush or Ubersuggest and they type in a keyword like “SEO”. You then get a list back with hundreds of keyword suggestions with cost per click and competition data.

And once you have a list of keywords you like, you probably do what most marketers do, which is to start inserting them into your website or creating content around the keywords.

Does this process sound familiar?

Well, of course, it does because that’s what everyone has been teaching you to do.

But what’s wrong with this?

This process is like gambling… there’s no guarantee that you’ll rank for these new keywords. And even worse, those keywords may not generate you any leads, sales, or revenue.

But thankfully, I have a process for you that will not only help you rank for thousands of keywords, but it will also ensure that this new-found traffic converts into leads, sales, and more revenue.

Here’s the 5-step process that helped me rank for 477,000 keywords.

Step #1: Focus on the pages that drive revenue

Going after the right keywords won’t guarantee you success.

If you rank a page that isn’t converting well, you’ll get more traffic, but your revenue won’t go up.

Sure, you can eventually focus on conversion rate optimization and try to fix that over time, but you are better off driving traffic to pages that are already generating you revenue.

If you haven’t setup goal tracking, watch the video below as it will teach you how.

Assuming you set it correctly, let’s look for the pages that are driving your revenue.

You can see from the image above, I sorted the results by conversions.

You now have a list of pages to focus on. But it isn’t as easy as just picking the top page and going from there.

For example, your top page could be a “check out” page, which, of course, won’t do any good if you rank it higher.

Instead, you should focus on:

• Product pages
• Service pages
• Content pages

Once you have a final list of pages, you’ll want to take those URLs and look them up in your Google Search Console.

Step #2: Log into Google Search Console

Once you’re in Google Search Console, you’ll want to click on, “Search Traffic > Search Analysis”.

This will lead you to a report that looks something like this.

You’ll then want to click on the “Pages” option as it will sort the results by top pages.

At this point, you’ll have to go through your list of pages and find them within Google Search Console.

Once you find one of the pages, click on the URL and then select “Queries” at the top.

This will give you an overview of the specific terms that generate traffic to your high converting pages.

Now let’s download the data in CSV format and open it with Excel.

Once you load it up, it should look something like this.

I want you to first sort the data by impressions. Look for the keywords that are generating the highest impression count as those keywords have the potential to drive the most traffic.

If you feel those keywords are relevant to your product or service that you are offering, make sure you include them within the title tag of your website.

You won’t be able to add all of the keywords to your title tag because it is limited to roughly 60 characters, but adding a few of the most popular terms will ensure that you are going to get higher click-through rates, which will boost your overall search rankings.

Once you’ve adjusted your title tag, let’s do the same with your meta description.

Meta descriptions can be longer these days. Google is ok with roughly 300 characters. So, feel free to sprinkle in a few more keywords, but make sure your meta description still flows in a readable sentence.

And before we get back to the Excel sheet, let’s expand your content by adding in some of the keywords you don’t rank high up on page 1 but should.

You can do this by adding more content to your page, or if you can insert the keywords without “stuffing” them in (just make sure your content flows and provides value).

Now let’s head back over to Excel. You should see a filter icon that looks something like this:

Select column E, as this will select all of the keywords based on their rankings. Then click on the “sort & filter button” and then select “filter”.

You’ll see a table that pops up. Unselect any numbers that are 1, 2, or 3.

You’ll also want to unselect any number that is 11 or greater. This will show you all of the keywords ranking on page 1 that are NOT in position 1, 2 or 3.

These are the keywords that have the most potential as the top 3 positions generate 20.5%, 13.32%, and 13.14% of the clicks respectfully. You want to be in the top 3 spots as that is where the majority of the clicks are happening.

By, having a list of keywords that are in position 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10… you can now focus on moving them up.

You’ve already done the hardest part which is getting on page 1. It’s not that much more work to get into the top 3 spots (at least for most keywords).

You’ll want to take all of the keywords that are relevant to your page and see if you can blend them into your content or headings without ruining the user experience.

This may mean that you’ll have to re-write your content and make it double the length.

Or if you have a product or service page that you are trying to rank higher, it may mean that you can’t include all of the keywords as it will ruin the user experience and hurt your conversion rate (but you can probably include a few more).

Over time you’ll find that your rankings will slowly climb for keywords that will bring in more revenue.

Step #3: Add in related keywords

You know what’s one thing I love about Google? They are really generous when it comes to giving marketers data. From Google Analytics to Google Search Console… Google has some amazing tools!

Another product I love (technically it’s more of a feature) is that Google shows you all of the related keywords to the ones you are already ranking for.

This is going to be a manual grind, but it’s worth it.

Log into Google Search Console and look at the top 10 keywords that you rank for. You can get this data by clicking on “Search Traffic > Search Analytics”.

Make sure you exclude any branded terms and compile a list of your top 10 terms.

Now go to Google, type in each of these keywords manually and scroll to the bottom where it says, “related keywords”.

Google gives you a list of other popular terms that people are typing. What is beautiful about this list, is that these keywords are already related to the one you are ranking for and they are typically much easier to rank for.

So, for neilpatel.com, I already rank for the term “SEO.”

So Google is telling me that in addition to the word “SEO,” people are also searching for:

• what is seo and how it works
• seo definition
• what is seo marketing
• how to do seo
• seo wiki
• seo google
• seo tutorial
• seo company

As you can see I already integrated some of those phrases to the page on my website that already ranks for SEO.

You should do the same. It’s an easy way to rank for more relevant keywords, boost your traffic, and, eventually, your revenue.

If you do this for your top 10 keywords, you’ll have an additional list of 80 keywords (8 keywords per term).

And by integrating these terms into your site (only when it makes sense, don’t spam) you’ll quickly rank on page 1 for dozens of other terms.

If you want to go crazy like me, you can do this for 1,000 terms, which will then give you suggestions for an additional 80,000 keywords!

But again, don’t force it and ruin your user experience. This will hurt your conversion rate. You should only add keywords when it is natural and makes sense for the user.

And hopefully, you selected keywords from pages that are driving your revenue (remember Step 1!). The last thing you want is to spend time increasing your rankings and find that your revenue isn’t going up.

Step #4: Go after the low-hanging fruit

Have you noticed that there is a huge difference in traffic between the pages on your site that rank on page 2 compared to the content ranking on page 1?

Like most marketers, you probably don’t notice it because your pages that rank on page 2 of Google don’t get much traffic… which causes you to forget about them.

It’s sad but true.

So, let’s fix this!

Log into SEMrush, type in your domain name, and click on “Organic Research > Positions”.

You’ll want to look for all of the terms that you rank number 11 or 12 for.

You can do this by using the filter setting (just copy the settings in the screenshot below).

You’ll have a list of keywords that are almost on page one.

Now just make sure those keywords are pointing to pages that are responsible for driving your sales, leads, and revenue (go back to step 1 if you don’t know how to do this).

For the keywords that aren’t driving sales or leads, you can ignore them for now.

For one the ones pointing to pages that are driving sales or leads, perform a Google search for each of those keywords.

Now compile a list of web pages that are ranking above you.

Take those URLs and plug them into Ahrefs. Once you plug in each URL, click on “Backlinks” in the left navigation bar.

This will show you a list of sites linking to your competition.

I want you to get in touch with each of those sites and beg for a link. Here’s an email template you can use (you’ll have to modify it to fit your site).

Hey [Insert website owners name],

I noticed that you are linking to [insert competing web page] from [insert the URL of on their website linking to the competition]. Did you know that the page you are linking to isn’t the best resource for your website readers?

It’s missing [insert multiple points on what that competing page lacks].

If you want to provide an even better experience for your website readers, you should consider linking to [insert your URL that you want to rank higher] as it has [insert why your web page better than the competition].

Cheers,

[Insert your name]

You’ll find that after emailing hundreds of sites that only 3% to 5% will link back to you assuming your page is comparable to the competition.

If you can’t get at least 3% to link back it means that you either didn’t do a good job modifying the email template or your page sucks compared to your competition. 🙁

I know this is tedious work, but it’s a great way to boost your traffic.

Just think about this stat when doing the link outreach… 91% of searches never go to page 2. Or as my sales team says, page 2 is the perfect place to bury a dead body.

Step #5: Attract buyers before they are ready to buy

Another reason I love Google is that they have this neat tool called Google Correlate.

What Google Correlate does is shows you search patterns. In other words, they show you what your customers are typing in weeks or even months before they become customers.

And if you want to upsell your users, you can use Google Correlate to see what your customers type in weeks or months after they become a customer.

This will help you determine what products or services to offer assuming you want that upsell revenue.

Here’s how it works… let’s say you are selling beard oil. You type in “beard oil” into Google Correlate and you can see what people are typing in before they become customers.

As you can see some of the keywords people are typing in are…

• beard oil
• beard oils
• flannel outfits
• trek farley
• sweater crop
• beard products
• best beard oil
• sweater crop top
• acne studios
• what is beard

To get those results I got, I selected “-3” weeks.

I am looking at what people typed in 3 weeks before they searched in beard oil. That’s why I put a “-” sign before the number 3 to see what they typed in before they searched for my main keyword.

If you want to attract more customers and build brand loyalty with people who may be interested in beard oil products, I would create content around the best beard oil or flannel outfits that go well with beards.

That’s what I got from the Google Correlate data.

And if I wanted to figure out what products to create in order to upsell my beard oil customers, I would perform the same search on Google Correlate but use a positive number such as “2 weeks.”

Based on the data above, I would consider offering beard balm as an upsell as there seems to be a strong correlation.

The cool part about Google Correlate is that you can do this for any keyword and sort the results by the country you are targeting.

Conclusion

I know my method of keyword search is a pain in the butt, but it works.

Just think of it this way…

Creating content on new topics is hard because there is no guarantee a new page on your website will rank for competitive terms.

But if you take web pages that already have traction and you improve them using the techniques I described above, it’s a guaranteed way to generate more search traffic.

Now if you want to create content that focuses on new keywords, by all means, you should do so!

I am not saying that creating new content is a bad idea… heck, I do it all the time.

But consider creating new content after you modify your existing pages that are already driving your traffic and sales.

And when you do go after new terms, don’t forget to use Google Correlate as it will help you gain the right type of traffic (plus your competition isn’t doing it).

So, what do you think of my keyword research and SEO process that I used to rank for thousands of keywords?

The post The Advanced SEO Formula That Helped Me Rank For 477,000 Keywords appeared first on Neil Patel.

You Are Doing Your Marketing Wrong (and I Have the Data to Prove It)

You know what’s interesting about having an ad agency?

It’s that you get to talk to companies of all sizes and learn what causes them to grow.

And I know what you are thinking… “Neil, shouldn’t you be the one telling companies how to grow”?

Technically, yes. And I do.

But at the same time, I need to analyze what a company has done so far to come up with the best marketing strategy for them.

And the sad reality is, most marketers and companies are focusing on the wrong things. (I’ll go over how to fix it later in this post.)

Over the last 7 months, I talked to 208 companies to find out where they are spending their marketing efforts and what’s working. And best of all, I got the approval to share their data with you. 🙂

I talked to companies generating anywhere from one million dollars in yearly revenue to $291 million.

I avoided talking to companies less than a million in revenue because most of them weren’t doing much marketing. And I avoided talking to companies generating over a billion in revenue because you wouldn’t be able to replicate what they are doing.

As for the industry, I talked to companies in the B2B space as well as the B2C space. From ecommerce to lead generation to software as a service and everything in-between.

The first question I asked each of these companies was:

Where do you spend your marketing dollars?

In essence, I got a breakdown of marketing spend by channel.

It was obvious that most companies spend their money on Google and Facebook ads.

Even if they didn’t share that data with me, you can tell by just looking at Google and Facebook’s market cap. They are worth $790 billion and $554 billion respectively because of paid ads.

Now let’s break down the data by company size.

Does marketing spend by channel change by company size?

When talking to these companies, I broke them down into three groups.

The first being under 5 million in yearly revenue (with a minimum of $1 million per year). The second group was $5 million to $100 million, and the third was over $100 million.

Do you see a trend? No matter what size a company is, the majority of their marketing budget is going towards paid ads.

When I asked why the most common responses were: it’s easy to scale and you can see a direct ROI.

Now let’s look at the conversion rate per channel…

Conversion rate by channel

Before I share with you conversion data, out of the 208 companies I interviewed, only 73 of them had the correct tracking set in place for me to get accurate numbers.

If you want to succeed as a marketer, you need to set up your tracking correctly.

You don’t have to pay for an analytics solution, you can just use Google Analytics and set up goal and conversion tracking. It’s better than nothing.

Here is the average conversion rate per channel:

When looking at the conversion data per channel, you’ll notice that I combined SEO and content marketing because they go hand in hand.

The more content marketing you do, in general, the better you’ll do when it comes to SEO.

The graph clearly shows paid ads convert better. And they usually do because you can control the landing page the traffic goes to. That’s why I love paid advertising!

Just look at these 2 pages below. They are both on page 1 of Google for the term “auto insurance”.

This one takes the top spot through paid ads:

And this one takes the top organic listing:

It’s obvious why the paid one converts better. The design focuses on converting a user into an auto insurance client. The organic listing (the second one) has tons of text because, without the content, it wouldn’t rank high on Google.

But looking at pure conversion rates doesn’t tell the whole story because some marketing channels are more expensive than others.

To get an idea of how effective a marketing channel is, you have to look at return on marketing spend.

Return on marketing spend doesn’t necessarily mean how profitable a channel is.

All it’s doing is showing the return based on marketing spend.

For example, although Facebook Ads don’t convert as well as Google Ads, they are much cheaper. Out of all the companies we interviewed, on average, they generated $3.04 in revenue for every dollar they spent on Facebook ads.

Again, this doesn’t mean profit. But typically, companies won’t keep spending money unless it is profitable.

What’s interesting about this data is that it shows 2 things:

1. Facebook Ads produce a better return on ad spend over Google Ads – this makes sense because it’s much cheaper to advertise on Facebook and it hasn’t been around as long as Google. Facebook Ads are quickly increasing in cost and over time the return on ad spend will probably even out with Google AdWords.
2. SEO produces the best returns – assuming you have set up your conversion tracking correctly, SEO is very effective because you can focus on increasing traffic from the right keywords that are causing sales. The only problem with SEO is that it is a long-term play and you won’t see results instantly.

So what’s wrong Neil?

Well, nothing yet, because you don’t have all of the data yet. 🙂

Let’s look at a few more trends and data point points…

The first is that paid ads are just increasing in price, which means you can expect to pay more for them each year.

Google generated $50 billion in 2012 and $109 billion in 2017. Yes, Google generates revenue outside of ads, but ads still make up 90% of their income.

Second, the majority of users don’t click on ads. But still, companies focus their marketing budgets on ads. Did you know that only 2.6% of the searches result on a paid ad click?

That’s crazy!!!

Now, I am not saying the remaining searches cause clicks on organic listings.

34% of searches get no clicks because Google is solving a lot of search queries through their knowledge graph, which means a user won’t have to click. Plus, people are clicking on images, new stories, map listings, and whatever else Google decides to show.

But still, the majority of the remaining clicks are going towards the organic listings.

So why are you focusing all of your efforts on paid ads?

Just think about it. You know ad costs are going to keep going up because they have over time. And users prefer to click on the organic listings, yet you still spend the majority of your budget on paid ads.

And no, I am not saying that you shouldn’t leverage paid ads. Heck, I still think you should spend the largest portion of your marketing budget on paid ads because they are easier to scale, they convert better, and you’ll see an instant return assuming you know what you are doing.

But what you should be doing is maxing out your SEO spend because it produces the best return.

Here are 3 lessons for you when it comes to your marketing efforts and where you should be investing your time and money.

Lesson #1: Get good at SEO

You have no choice!

You’re going to struggle to keep your business profitable as your cost to acquire a customer is going to continually rise.

If you don’t believe me, just look at Google’s revenue graph that I shared above.

And learning on-page SEO and link building isn’t enough. To do well these days you’ll have to incorporate social media marketing and content marketing.

But here’s the beauty: If you get it right, your cost for SEO will continually go down over time compared to how much traffic and sales it’s driving.

Let’s look at NeilPatel.com.

I’ve been doing SEO on my own site for many years now. And when I mean SEO, I’m encompassing social media marketing, content marketing (including podcasts and videos), and crazy experiments.

Here’s my overall traffic excluding any cost per click type of ads for 2015.

A whopping 868,821 unique visitors. During that year I spent $320,301 on SEO related efforts, excluding CPC ads.

And in 2016 I generated 3,448,929 unique visitors and I spent $1,430,133 on SEO related efforts, excluding CPC ads.

Last but not least, I generated 7,442,647 unique visitors in 2017 for a total spend of $581,495 on SEO related efforts, excluding CPC ads.

2018 isn’t over yet, but my costs are even going to be lower than 2017 and my traffic is higher.

Technically if you include how much money I’m spending on building out the Ubersuggest tool it will be higher… but that’s not really considered SEO. 

Here’s a recap…

In 2015, SEO was really expensive for me when you look at it from a cost per visitor standpoint.

It got worse in 2016 because I really wanted to grow faster, and then in 2017, I started to run out of places to spend my money and naturally, my growth rate slowed down.

If you fast forward to today, my cost per visitor is drastically lower than 2017. But still… I’m able to generate a B2B visitor for less than 8 cents.

That’s ridiculously cheap considering some of the terms I rank for would cost me $11 a click.

In other words, SEO is very expensive in the beginning, but it generates one of the highest ROI because you don’t have to keep spending money at the same pace to generate the greater results.

With paid advertising, if you stop spending money, your traffic and sales will stop. And if you want to scale fast, it tends to cost more per visitor instead of less per visitor like SEO.

If you are going to max out your SEO efforts like I’m recommending, make sure you know what is causing an ROI or else you’ll waste time and money acquiring traffic that won’t ever convert into sales.

Lesson #2: Ugly is the new sexy

I asked each of the 208 companies one simple question… which marketing strategy has provided you with your biggest return on investment?

Can you guess what the answer was?

No, it wasn’t SEO.

It was CRO (conversion rate optimization)!

The second runner-up was SEO.

It makes sense though.

If you already have traffic, optimizing for conversions is one of the simplest ways to grow… assuming you can come up with tests that perform better than your control.

But here’s what’s interesting… less than 1.7% of marketing spend was allocated towards CRO when you look at all companies as a whole.

I do understand why companies generating under $5 million a year in revenue don’t spend much on CRO because they don’t have as much traffic.

But if your company generates over $5 million a year you should consider allocating more of your budget towards CRO.

Yes, it’s not as sexy as SEO or social media marketing, but it works.

Lesson #3: Don’t forget lesson number 2

Most marketers and companies want to be hip and cool. In other words, they want to spend more time and money on cool marketing channels.

When I asked each company, “which marketing channel do you feel has the most potential”, here are the responses I got back:

What’s shocking about the chart above is that both B2B and B2C companies almost equally agreed Instagram and YouTube have the most potential.

Although Instagram is cool, ads are really expensive and it’s hard to generate a positive ROI on Instagram.

As for building up your Instagram reach organically, it’s definitely doable, but it’s hard to drive traffic from Instagram to your site unless you are having people swipe up.

As for YouTube, there is huge potential in it as long as marketers are willing to create videos. YouTube SEO isn’t competitive and ads are still affordable.

But here is the thing, you can see from the data above that most of these large companies have been built off of traditional channels like paid ads and SEO.

Yes, these newer channels are sexy, but the old ones still work extremely well.

And here is the kicker… you haven’t even seen the maximum potential of both paid ads and SEO because most you haven’t fine-tuned them.

So why would you want to go after unknown channels that aren’t as proven when you haven’t made the most out of the channels that work for your competition?

Conclusion

Yes, I spend a lot of my time and money on podcasting and videos, as well as leverage all of the cool channels such as Facebook Watch, but I do the fundamentals really well.

If you want to grow your traffic, leads, and sales, here’s how you should prioritize your marketing budget:

• Spend more on SEO – whether you are a small company or a large one, SEO will produce a better return on your investment than paid ads in the long term. With all of the companies I talked to, less than 3% dominated the organic listings. But before you go all in on SEO, you need to setup tracking correctly so you so aren’t wasting your time driving traffic that doesn’t convert.
• Keep your SEO budget reasonable – I’m kind of crazy, but most companies should never spend more than a million on SEO. Yes, really big companies will… but when you are maxing out your SEO budget it’s nowhere near as expensive as paid ads. As for what the amount will be, it ranges a lot depending on the industry, how competitive it is, and how fast you want to grow. So sadly I can’t give you an answer on how much, but it should decrease over time.
• Invest more in CRO – if your company is generating at least 5 million dollars, you should consider spending more money on CRO. I know many of you don’t care for it based on the data above (plus my CRO blog posts aren’t as popular as my SEO ones), but it will help tremendously. It will allow you to spend more on paid ads as costs rise and it will increase your overall profit margin.
• Avoid the sexy marketing channels – you shouldn’t consider copying me or others when it comes to Facebook, YouTube, etc. if you haven’t figured out the basics yet. Spend more time and energy on what’s proven.
• When you’re small, test – many of you have businesses that generate less than a million dollars a year in revenue. If this is you, don’t follow the formula above. When you are starting off, it is best to test 4 or 5 marketing strategies out at the same time. Spend very little money on each of them… whichever one produces the best return, that’s what you should focus on in the short-run.

And if you are one of the rare marketers in which you’ve mastered all of the above strategies and already implemented them, the next step for you is to think outside the box and be a bit more creative.

Just like I am doing by creating marketing tools.

So where are you spending your marketing dollars?

The post You Are Doing Your Marketing Wrong (and I Have the Data to Prove It) appeared first on Neil Patel.

User Engagement: The Most Important KPI You’re not Tracking (but should be)

“The goal of a SaaS CEO should be to increase the profit they make from each customer (LTV), and lower the costs in sales and marketing that it takes to acquire each customer (CAC). Measuring Customer Engagement is a key tool that will help you achieve that goal, as it will allow you to increase your trial conversion rates, which directly reduces CAC. And it will help you lower your churn rates, which directly increases LTV.”

– David Skok, https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/customer-engagement/

I think every SaaS CEO would agree that user engagement is the lifeblood of any SaaS business.

These CEOs know that the SaaS business model is based on retention. And that retention is dependent on engagement. Unengaged users simply don’t stick around and certainly don’t continue to pay for a product.

So…no engagement, no retention. No retention, no business. Therefore, given the transitive property of SaaS…no engagement, no business.

If this is the case, then why isn’t user engagement one of the top KPIs for every SaaS business? Why isn’t it a metric that’s featured in every executive team meeting? Why isn’t it called out in board decks or posted on every company dashboards?

Probably because, up until now, user engagement has been a difficult thing to measure.

How do you measure user engagement?

Conceptually, calculating user engagement is pretty straight forward.

TOTAL USER ENGAGEMENT = {NUMBER OF ACTIVE USERS} x {AVERAGE ENGAGEMENT PER USER}

This is a simple formula your product’s overall engagement score. You can measure it over time by calculating it on a daily/weekly/monthly basis and it will indicate whether your total engagement is going up or going down.

Measuring the first part of the equation – Active users in a time period – is pretty easy.

The second part of the equation – average engagement score per user – is the tough part. But this is where the magic lies. So…how do you find the average engagement score per user?!?

Well….this is what Sherlock was built for.

Calculating user engagement scores in Sherlock

Sherlock was built as a user engagement scoring application – a perfect way to give your product data the important context that makes it actually useful.

With Sherlock, users weigh each of their important product events on a scale of 1-10:

At which point Sherlock calculates an engagement score for each user based on the number of times each user triggered each event times the weight of the event. In practice, the calculation looks like this for each user:

From there, Sherlock calculates a raw engagement score for each user based on the above model and then normalizes that score across a product’s entire customer base. The result is that every active user is given a score between 1-100.

Looks cool, but how do you get from here to overall product engagement?

Well…pretty easily. When every user has an engagement score, these scores can be aggregated to calculate engagement at several levels above the individual user level. For example, you can see engagement:

• At the account level;
• At the specific segment level; and, of course
• At the product level

By aggregating these individual user engagement scores across an entire user base, Sherlock can calculate the second half of the product engagement calculation defined earlier:

TOTAL USER ENGAGEMENT = {NUMBER OF ACTIVE USERS} x {AVERAGE ENGAGEMENT PER USER}

Voila. You now have a KPI that you can use along side all the other important metrics that you use to assess the health of your business.

From here, you can start to assess your company efforts against this overall engagement score.

How are you new features affecting engagement? How about your new onboarding plan? What about your product marketing efforts? How about retention/churn/upsells? Etc.

And you will have a new KPI to help drive your important, high-level strategic decisions.

Taking the next level with engagement scoring

While measuring total product is important there are also many other reasons for quantifying user engagement scores. By quantifying user engagement, you can:

1. Help prioritize your Sales efforts: If you have a free trial or freemium product, then it’s essential that your sales team prioritize their efforts on the accounts that are most engaged.
2. Optimize your Customer Success efforts: Most of your CS team’s important efforts can and should be prioritized based on user engagement. From identifying
   upsell opportunities to re-engaging high risk users to everything in-between. All of it can be assessed and prioritized based on engagement-levels.
3. Refine product messaging: Target users and accounts based on engagement.
4. Identify potential advocates: Your most engaged users are your most likely advocates.
5. Forecast your business: User engagement is a leading indicator of your SaaS business’ health. By quantifying engagement, you can start forecasting the future of your business.

Try Sherlock

To start quantifying user engagement for your SaaS business, you can signup for a free trial of Sherlock today.

Anchor Text SEO: Everything You Need to Know in 2018

There’s a lot of conflicting information about anchor text out there.

One site tells you to focus as heavily on your keywords as you can.

Another tells you to stay as far away from any kind of anchor text and backlinks as possible.

And another says anchor text doesn’t matter.

What are you supposed to believe?

Knowing what anchor text can improve your SEO strategy isn’t always easy – especially when you have a dozen conflicting messages trying to tell you what to do.

But in 2018, it’s essential to optimize your anchor text to attract more attention from search engines.

To help you out, let’s start from the very beginning.

Here’s what anchor text is, how it helps (or hurts) SEO, and what you can do to keep it optimized.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the clickable words that appear in place of a hyperlink.

For example, this is anchor text.

Anchor text allows you to add links within your content contextually. It also gives readers – and search engines – a better indication of what they’ll find on the other side of the link.

The anchor text usually relates back to keywords associated with the contents of the link.

However, not all anchor text is created equally.

Let’s take a look at the different kinds of anchor text you might find online.

Exact Match

An exact match anchor text is when the anchor text directly matches the words or phrases associated with the link’s contents.

Here’s an example of anchor text within an article.

If the writer was hoping to target the keyword “chatbots,” this would be an exact match.

Partial Match

A partial anchor text match appears when your targeted keyword is within the anchor text, but it’s not an exact match.

Check out this example.

Say the marketer’s targeted keyword was “guest posting.”

Using “a series on guest posting” is not an exact match, but it does still include the keyword.

This means it’s still targeting the keyword you’re trying to rank for, but it seems more natural.

Branded

Branded anchor text is when the anchor text features the company or individual’s name.

Here’s an example.

This type of anchor text is frequently used when you’re linking to a company’s homepage.

Generic

Usually, anchor text is somewhat hidden within the content.

However, generic anchor text typically stands out and is obviously a link.

Here’s an example.

This kind of anchor text usually associates with a call to action.

Generic anchor text is also sometimes called “natural” anchor text.

Images

Images can also be anchor text.

This text occurs when you click on an image, and it brings you through to a link.

However, the actual anchor text associated with the image is the alt text that you include.

LSI Keywords

LSI keywords, or Latent Semantic Indexing keywords, are words or phrases that closely associate with the keywords you’re trying to target.

These might be different names for the same principle or product, or other keywords closely related.

Here’s an example.

The keyword “micro-influencers” is related to influencer marketing, without being a partial match.

Blog Title/Post Title

When the name of the anchor text you’re linking to is the full name of the blog title, page title, or content title, this is simply called Post Title anchor text.

Check out this example.

Like the example, this kind of anchor text usually appears when marketing a course, referencing a specific blog post, or showing off a page.

Naked URLs

A naked URL doesn’t have any anchor text at all.

Instead, it’s just a link to a page featured on your site.

Naked URLs may contain the “www” or might just be “Domain.com.”

Here’s an example from Sprout Social.

The anchor text for this link is the link itself.

This can still appeal to keywords because subdomains typically include keywords.

They can also appeal to branded keywords, including the company name in the domain.

How does anchor text influence SEO?

Anchor text helps search engine crawlers and readers identify what the contents of the link contain.

As more and more websites link to a particular page with various forms of anchor text, the search engine can begin to get a better idea of what kind of content the site provides.

In a way, anchor text is like a keyword that others use to describe your content.

However, it isn’t simple enough to just use anchor text directly associated with the keyword you’re trying to rank for.

In the past, Google relied heavily on anchor text.

Unfortunately, this allowed marketers, writers, and webmasters to do something called “Google Bombing.”

This led to pages ranking for keywords that weren’t related to the content that was appearing.

The most famous example of this is in 2007 when a search for “miserable failure” would result in articles about President George Bush.

In fact, now when you search “miserable failure,” you get results about the Google Bomb.

Google responded to this error in anchor text with the Penguin Update, which they launched in 2012.

Like most updates, the search engine released Penguin to help identify spammy listings and remove them from their rankings.

There are two particular triggers for Penguin.

First, links that seem to be purchased, resulting in a number of similar links appearing on low-quality websites around the same time.

Second, links that appear to use keyword stuffing.

This stuffing means that if your anchor text matches your keywords too directly, it could penalize you.

Julie Joyce from LinkFishMedia described anchor text’s importance to SEO by saying, “A site that has 75% exact match anchors has to look unnatural… when I overdo it and it works, it doesn’t stick.”

The idea is that if a website is linking to your content naturally, it will use a more diverse keyword phrase.

While keyword stuffing may help you get results quickly, any change in ranking will only be wiped away when Google discovers this strategy.

So, if you can’t link to the keywords that you’re trying to target, how should you use anchor text to improve your SEO?

Let’s take a look.

How to optimize anchor text for SEO in 2018?

When trying to control your anchor text, there is one thing you want to keep in mind – relevance.

To show Google that your anchor text and link is not black-hat, you need to prove it’s natural – even if it is strategic.

Let’s take a look at how you can do this.

1. Only include links when anchor text fits naturally.

One of the biggest reasons Penguin was first introduced was to stop website owners from adding anchor text just for SEO purposes.

This means they’re on high alert for anchor text that doesn’t seem like it fits.

With the Penguin Update, sites who over-optimized their anchor text saw severe penalties that hurt their web traffic.

To avoid this, you want each anchor text you include to fit naturally within the content.

For anchor text to be SEO friendly, it should be succinct and relevant.

You want your anchor text to describe the contents of the link as accurately as possible in as few words as possible.

Here’s how:

Using the anchor text “start a blog” then links directly to a page about how to start a blog.

It’s direct, to the point, and only features three words.

However, you also want to avoid using an exact match to your keyword as often as possible.

Are you confused?

You don’t have to be.

When trying to decide what to use for anchor text, consider what part of your sentence might spark your reader’s interest the most.

For example, if there is a statistic in your sentence, this would be a great place to include your anchor text.

Check out this example from a Kissmetrics article.

Both readers and search engine will know you’re linking back to that site because it backs up your claim – not because you’re trying to stuff results for that keyword.

The same idea applies to quotes.

As mentioned, anchor text should be direct and to the point.

If you’re linking to an entire quote, this is usually much too long for anchor text.

Instead, make your anchor text the individual’s name or the resource you pulled the quote from like Oro Inc does on this blog.

Here, we have two bits of anchor text.

First, her name is anchor text pointing the reader to her Twitter. Second, there is anchor text pushing the reader to Kate’s blog.

Again, this can show that you’re using that link to support your data or claims.

Relevance is also crucial for anchor text and links.

First, the anchor text you choose to display on your website will influence what Google believes your page is about.

While it’s okay to have a few links that may seem out of context to a search engine, you want most of your anchor text to be within your industry.

If you’re in the finance industry and all of a sudden you have anchor text about baking cakes, this might be a red flag to Google and Penguin.

When adding links and anchor text, first think if it is necessary.

Does it provide value and help make your argument stronger?

Or are you just trying to squeeze in another link to meet some imaginary quota?

Don’t add links just for the purpose of adding links.

Instead, work links into your content as naturally as possible.

2. Make sure you diversify your types of anchor text.

Anchor text variation might be one of the most significant factors when it comes to using links for SEO.

When all your links are one style, this could cause a red flag.

For example, if the only anchor text you use throughout your entire website is exact match keywords, it might seem like you’re not putting genuine thought into what you’re linking to.

A natural link profile will include many different kinds of links.

Let’s take a look at what you want your optimal anchor text profile to look like.

It’s essential to begin by saying that an anchor text profile should look different depending on if you’re a national or local website.

Your homepage and internal pages of a website will also look different.

Let’s cover a national page first.

Serpstat recommends you break down your anchor text distribution like this.

The majority of your anchor text should be branded.

In fact, over half of your anchor text should be branded. This includes anchor text that is branded with a keyword.

You should also notice that exact match anchors are incredibly small.

In fact, you only want exact match anchors to make up about 1% of your entire link distribution.

A partial match should only be about 2%.

Maybe surprisingly, naked links should also make up a sizeable chunk of your link distribution.

Now, let’s take a look at how your sub-pages should compare.

SEOJet breaks down a website sub-page link distribution like this.

Notice how branded anchor text is much, much smaller than the homepage portion.

For sub-pages, “page title” anchor text had a significant influence on top ranking pages.

This influence typically occurs because page titles usually include the keywords you’re targeting, but they aren’t seen as “exact match” anchor text.

This allows you to easily target keywords within your anchor text without penalties for seeming unnatural.

But you’ll also see that “exact match” keywords are used much more frequently within sub-pages than they are on homepages.

Now, let’s compare this to a local homepage anchor text profile.

For a local homepage, your anchor text profile can be much more diverse.

Unlike the national page, you only need about 20% of your anchor texts to be branded.

But you’ll also notice that your exact match keywords should still be incredibly low.

An internal local page should have the same anchor text profile as a national page.

Keep in mind that these percentages are just recommendations.

You may find that a different distribution brings you better results.

3. Stay away from low-quality or toxic websites.

Google loves high-quality websites.

When considering who to rank at the top of their results lists, they’re going to push sites to the top that they believe fit their list of important factors.

This means gaining high-quality links from awesome pages – and avoiding those that might hurt your “cool” factor.

Let’s break down what bad links are.

Mostly, bad links are links that Google believes you’ve gained unethically, either outgoing or incoming.

On the outgoing side, you have much more control over who you’re linking to.

However, you need to be careful of broken links or people leaving spammy links in your comments section.

If you don’t monitor your comments, they may become bogged down with low-quality backlinks that hurt your reputation.

But the real problem occurs when you have bad incoming links.

Unfortunately, these can be more difficult to control.

Because you can’t delete these links from your website like you can with low-quality outgoing links, you’ll need to find and eliminate your association with them through Google.

If you’re not paying proper attention to where your backlinks are coming from, you could ruin your credibility without even knowing it.

Now, let’s talk about how you can find these low-quality links.

The Moz Spam Analysis tool is one way you can check the quality of websites you connect with.

The Spam Score, which their Open Site Explorer features, gives you a ranking of each link.

The tool uses 17 different flags to identify links that might be seen as spam, including things like content strength, if there is contact info on the page, or if the domain name contains numbers.

If a domain has fewer than four flags, it is considered a strong link.

However, if there are more than seven, this could be seen as a bad link and should be looked at.

If there are links with over ten red flags, this could be severely damaging to your online reputation.

Google allows you to disavow any low-quality links that you believe is hurting your online ranking.

When you disavow a link through Google, you’re letting the search engine know that you do not wish to associate your website with that link.

To disavow your backlinks, you want to begin by finding the low-quality links that would be damaging your site.

If you’ve already done this with the Moz Spam Analysis tool or another backlink tool, you can move on to the next step.

Through the Google Disavow Tool, you can upload your list of links to disavow.

Keep in mind that it can take a few weeks before you start to see your links disavowed.

Let’s consider this case study IMPACT did on Udemy.

Upon doing a keyword audit, they found that just over 67,000 domains were linking to Udemy 6.35 million times.

If you break this down, it means that each site was linking to Udemy 94 times.

Unfortunately, this probably isn’t accurate and can bring up a red flag for Google.

With a bit of additional digging, they found that one website alone was linking to Udemy over 400,000 times.

This kind of unnatural linking may not be Udemy’s fault or intention, but it can still cause severe damage with search engines.

When determining high-quality and low-quality links, you’ll also want to consider something called co-occurrence and co-citation.

Co-occurrence happens when you use similar keywords to other sites across the web.

These are similar to LSI keywords.

However, it can influence your SEO by allowing you to rank for terms you may not have been targeting.

Co-occurrence goes hand-in-hand with co-citation.

Co-citation happens when two different websites mention the same brand but do not link to that brand or website.

Those two sites then get connected through the mutual mention of the third website.

Both co-occurrence and co-citation can help you become associated with other high-quality websites.

4. Go deep with your anchors.

Another critical aspect of anchor text and backlinks is what content you’re linking to.

Google wants to see that you’re linking to valuable pages within a website.

Not only does this improve relevance, but it also seems more natural than if you’re just linking to a homepage or product page.

When deciding what to link to, choose the most relevant page possible.

If linking to a study, quote, or statistic, pull the actual page that information came from – not just the homepage.

Always opt for shareable content over surface-level generic pages.

Here’s an example from Moz.

While the anchor text says “Moz blog,” you’ll see that the link pushes back to a specific blog – not just the blog page.

This kind of specificity pushes both Google crawlers and readers deeper into the page, creating more relevance and making a more genuine impression.

It seems much more natural to link to this kind of in-depth, specific content and will improve your credibility with Google.

However, it is okay to have some of your anchor text push back to a surface-level page.

For example, if you’re going to link to a specific brand, it’s okay to have that link push to the company’s homepage.

You don’t want these kinds of links to make up the majority of your distribution.

Conclusion

As with any SEO factor, you want to include anchor text and links within your content as naturally as possible while providing clear value to your readers.

If you’re merely stuffing links into your content, you can severely damage your reputation with Google.

This can make the already uphill battle of getting web traffic even more difficult.

Understanding anchor text and adequately optimizing each link can help improve your ranking while also driving traffic to your page.

Keep these four optimization tips in mind when creating your website and backlink strategy.

What anchor text strategies are you using in 2018?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.