Carlos Castro

Whenever there's a Google Algorithm Update, it's normal to be scared and continuously check Google Search Console to validate that we don't have a drop in rankings.

If you're lucky, you may even see a significant improvement for your site, but there's always a risk of losing organic rankings, and you'll want to know which terms and pages have been affected.

So, if after a Google Update, your GSC data looks like this:

google update gsc data screenshot

You'll want to dig deeper and assess the drop in impressions, clicks and position at a query and page level.

I've developed a Google Sheet that you can copy and use during a post-Google Update assessment to facilitate that work.

You can access a live example of this Google Sheet and create a copy to use with your data.

Table Of Contents

Gathering the data

The first step is to go to GSC, select a 7-day date range before the identified decrease in rankings, and export that data into Google Sheets or Excel.

gsc export button

Select your data from the "Queries" tab of your exported file, go to the Google Sheets file, go to the Pre-Update Queries tab, select all the sheet range (by clicking on the left side of the A column and above the first row), and paste only the values.

google sheets paste values

Repeat this step with the data from the "Pages" tab of the exported file and paste it on the Pre-Update Pages tab.

Go back to GSC and select a 7-day date range from when you saw the decrease in clicks & impressions.

Paste the data from your "Queries" tab in the Post-Update Queries tab and the data from your "Pages" tab in the Post-Update Pages tab.

You can now go to the Insights tab and find a summary of all the things that this Google Sheets analyzes:

insights tab screenshot

Clicks

In the clicks section, you can see how many queries lost clicks, the total clicks from before and after the update and the loss (or gain) of clicks.

Impressions

The impressions section shows how many queries lost impressions, the total impressions from before and after the update, and the impressions loss (or gain).

Lost terms

If there are any lost terms (terms that no longer appear in your post-update queries), you can see how many of them are and the impact of those lost terms from a clicks and impressions perspective.

Position

The position section shows the average position for all your pre-update and post-update terms and its difference.

Analyzing this is helpful to assess if you lost rankings or it's just a seasonal change that's reducing your impressions and clicks.

Pages that lost clicks

I also included a page-level analysis that analyzes the number of clicks per page before and after the update.

Pages that lost impressions

This section analyzes the change in impressions per page, similar to the "pages that lost clicks."

You can find all the data from these insights in the following tabs that are described below:

Lost Terms tab

If there are any terms for which you didn't get impressions and clicks in the post-update date range, they'll appear here.

You can see each term's clicks, impressions, and average position from the pre-update date range.

You'll also find the lost terms' insights here that summarize the loss of clicks and impressions from these terms.

You can quickly assess if these are important keywords for your site and double-check that you rank for it. Just because you didn't get clicks & impressions in 7 days, it doesn't mean that you lost rankings for that term; it could be a seasonality issue.

lost terms tab

Loss of Clicks Tab

This tab gets all the queries' clicks from the pre-update and post-update data and calculates the difference between them.

By default, the data is sorted by the number of pre-update clicks in descending order.

The difference in clicks column has conditional formatting to highlight in red terms that decreased clicks, yellow for terms that had no change in clicks, and green for terms that increased their clicks.

loss of clicks tab

Loss of Impressions Tab

This tab gets all the queries' impressions from the pre-update and post-update data and calculates the difference between them.

The data is sorted by the number of pre-update impressions in descending order.

The conditional formatting from the difference of impressions column highlights in red terms that lost impressions, in yellow terms that didn't change its impressions, and green for terms that increased their impressions.
loss of impressions tab

Loss of Position Tab

This tab gets the average position for each query in the pre-update and post-data data and calculates the difference between them.

You can then assess if a significant drop in the average position caused the loss of clicks & impressions.

Remember to double-check your rankings for the identified lost terms to make sure it's not a seasonality issue.

The conditional formatting of the position difference column highlights in red the queries that decreased their position, in yellow for queries with minimal position fluctuations (between 0.1 and 0.9 change), and green for position increases.

loss of position tab

Pages that Lost Clicks Tab

This tab gets the clicks for each page from the pre-update and post-update data and calculates the difference between them.

After you've analyzed the impact of the Google Update at a query level, it's time to assess the impact at a page level.

You can easily identify which type of pages had a decrease/increase in clicks.

The conditional formatting of the clicks difference column highlights in red terms that decreased clicks, in yellow terms that didn't change the number of clicks and green for terms with an increase in clicks.

pages that lost clicks tab

Pages that Lost Impressions Tab

This tab gets the impression data per page from before and after the update and calculates the difference between them.

You can assess the update's impact from an impression perspective, considering that the selected date range could mean a seasonality drop in impressions & clicks.

The conditional formatting of the difference in impressions column highlights in red pages that lost impressions, in yellow terms that didn't change their impressions, and in green for pages with increased impressions.

pages that lost impressions tab

Pages that Lost Position Tab

This tab gets the average position for each page from before and after the update.

Each column has conditional formatting to highlight in green pages with an average position of 1 - 10.99, yellow for pages with an average position of 11-19.99 and red for pages with an average position of more than 20.

pages that lost position tab

Even if this Google Sheet is meant to analyze the impact of a Google Update, you can use it to assess the loss of clicks & impressions due to a redesign, change of content or web structure, etc.

If you find this Google Sheet useful, share it on Twitter!

As you may know, Google already considers user experience to rank pages. Some of these signals validate whether a web page is mobile-friendly or if it's secure.

In its mission to become more user-centric, Google has announced a new ranking factor that will be incorporated this year, 2021: Core Web Vitals.

These ranking signals are meant to evaluate a page's loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

Let's go through some key topics so you can start assessing and optimizing your website for these new Core Web Vitals:

Table Of Contents

What are the Core Web Vitals?

Page experience is a set of signals measured by Google to see if a page provides a good experience when a user visits it.

Some of these page experience signals are already taken into consideration to identify a "good page experience":

page experience graphic

Page Experience Signals

In addition to this, Google is adding the Core Web Vitals that measure the page experience based on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

The Core Web Vitals are expected to be introduced in May 2021 in an update.

As the graph shows, Google will use three metrics to measure these new page experience signals.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is used to measure page loading performance, i.e. how long it takes for a page to display the most important elements.

This doesn't reflect the total loading speed of a certain page but rather the first "piece" of content that should be shown within 2.5 seconds according to Google's standards.

To better understand this, let's look at the loading timeline of Instagram.

instagram page loading graph

Instagram Loading Timeline

As you can see, LCP is reached once the logo is loaded, but the login button and other elements are "hidden". This is because the logo is the largest element on that page, so the moment that it's loaded, it's the "LCP point".

lcp scoring graph

LCP Score by web.dev

First Input Delay (FID)

The First Input Delay (FID) measures the time between when a user first interacts with your website (like clicking on a button) and when the browser can respond to that interaction.

A good FID is when that interaction takes less than 100 milliseconds.

FID only measures the "delay" in event processing; it doesn't measure the exact time it takes for that event to happen.

Scrolling and zooming are continuous actions that have completely different performance constraints, so don't get confused.

fid scoring graph

FID Score by web.dev

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability and frequency in which unexpected layout changes occur.

A visual change happens every time an element on your page changes its position unexpectedly.

I'm sure you've encountered with sites (mostly news sites) that an ad banner shows up in the middle of the screen when you are reading the content. This is a great (and annoying) example of a layout shift.

However, not all layout shifts are bad. A layout shift is only bad if the user isn't expecting it.

This means that layout shifts that happen due to interactions like clicks on a button, typing in a search box, and similar, are fine as long as the shift occurs close enough to the interaction that the relationship between the interaction and the shift is clear.

cls layout shift

Take a look at the previous image, the "Click Me!" button appears at the end of the gray box, which causes the gray box to change its size but not its position, so it can't be considered an unstable element.

The "Click Me!" button wasn't at the start of the DOM, so its initial position didn't change either.

However, the start position of the green box does change, and it's that element that affects your CLS score.

What happens with animations and transitions?

Many websites love the use of animations and transitions on their websites. The truth is that content that shifts abruptly and unexpectedly creates a bad user experience.

To avoid animations and transitions to impact your CLS negatively, use the CSS transform property to animate elements without triggering layout shifts.

Commonly, websites use properties like height or width to use animations and transitions. However, using transform: scale() to change the size it's better.

Similarly, instead of using top, right, bottom, and left attributes to change the position of an element, use transform: translate() instead.

cls scoring graph

CLS Score by web.dev

Measuring your Core Web Vitals

There are many extensions and tools out there that can help you to measure your website's Core Web Vitals.

I will show you some of the tools and extensions that I've tested myself, but if you want to know more, you can check out Aleyda's tweet in which she shares some useful free tools to do it.

Are you doing Speed & Core Web Vitals analysis? To prioritize actions w/ clients I've found useful to do competitive speed & CWV analysis to show its importance and impact vs. other player for meaningful queries!

Here's a thread about how to do it w/ free tools ⚡️🛠

... pic.twitter.com/PwuZTEbrSv

— Aleyda Solis 🇺🇦 (@aleyda) December 11, 2020

Core SERP Vitals

Core SERP Vitals' extension is a little bit more complex to set up than the previous one but nothing to worry about. After installing it, you'll be taken to the Settings Page, in which you'll need to obtain and enter a Chrome UX Report API Key and choose the device for which the metric data will be shown.

After it's installed and configured, you can do a normal Google search (like one of your website's most important keywords), and you will see the score of each metric in the SERP results.

However, this extension won't show results for every page but only for pages with existing data in the CrUX report.

core serp vitals extension example

Lighthouse

Using the Lighthouse extension, you can generate a report for your website in which you can see scores for areas like SEO, Performance, Accessibility, Progressive Web Apps, and more.

The report shows in the performance section the values of different metrics, including the Core Web Vitals.

light house extension example

Core Web Vitals in Search Console

A Core Web Vitals report is also available in Google Search Console; it may not be available on your website if it's very new or there isn't enough data available, but if your website has this report available, you can easily see the affected URLs and issue that they have so you can optimize them.

core web vitals search console graph

core web vitals search console details

Optimizing your website's Core Web Vitals

With the data gathered from the tools listed above, the big question is "How do I fix these issues?".

There's no standard recipe for optimizing these metrics because different factors can affect your website's Core Web Vitals. Hence, the better way to approach this is to review the data and suggestions that some of these tools offer so you can know where to start fixing/optimizing.

Optimizing Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

By reducing your server's response, you can normally ensure that your largest element is loaded sooner. However, render-blocking resources like JS and CSS can seriously impact your LCP.

Try minifying your CSS and JS files, use inline stiles whenever possible (normally with small custom tweaks in CSS but not with the entire website's CSS styles), defer the execution of <script> tags unless the script manipulates the DOM or if it depends on other scripts.

Use compressed images, limit their size to 100 MB, use lazyloading. If possible, use CDN's so they can be loaded faster. Try to use new generation images like WebP or JPEG 2000 (keep in mind that not all browsers are compatible with those formats).

Optimizing First Input Delay (FID)

Again, minify and compress your JS files, defer any scripts that aren't essential for the website's main visualization.

Remove unused CSS and JS. Many WordPress websites use plugins for contact forms, sliders, etc., which are loaded on every page, and most of them don't need those resources. So it's also important to assess if the resources loaded on the page are actually used.

TL;DR: Keep the number of requests low and transfer sizes small.

Optimizing Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Instead of adjusting the size of images in your CSS, make sure that their proper dimensions are specified with the width and height attributes of the <img> tag.

If possible, use different sized images for mobile and desktop (if sizes vary in these two devices) and specify the proper image file in the srcset attribute according to the device's width. See an example below:

img srcset code img

Test every change

It's fundamental that every change and fix you make it's previously tested. Maybe when deferring the load of a certain <script> an important functionality or element is not correctly displayed, so you'll have to try deferring another non-essential script.

You don't want to publish a live version of your site that isn't working as expected.

Over the last years, I've worked with clients in need of an SEO consultant for their web migrations. Usually, these were a change of URL structure or a change from HTTP to HTTPS.

I was contacted by the owner of a small business in the beauty industry asking if I can help them with their CMS migration.

The client arranged a call with, the development and design agencies he was working with. The web migration was just about to start and was due to happen in 2 days.

Taking into consideration that this was a fairly complicated web migration for an e-commerce site moving from Shopify to Woocommerce it's almost impossible to do all the SEO planning in 2 days.

In this post, I'm going to detail the outcome of this web migration as well as the challenges faced during the process.

Table Of Contents

Planning the Web Migration

During the first call with the client and the two other agencies working on this project, I asked if the web migration could be delayed a couple of weeks since 2 days is not enough time for me (or any other SEO!) to do all the required SEO planning.

After 1 hour of negotiations, the client accepted to delay the web migration 3 days more. Now I had 5 days to assess the SEO impact and plan the redirects implementations ASAP.

First, I crawled the website with Sitebulb and found several duplicated product pages (something to be expected when working with Shopify sites). There were product pages for each category: "/product-category-x/product-y", and finally the "original" product URL: "/products/product-x".

The site had a discounts page that listed the products that currently have a discount. These products had also a duplicated URL that looked like this: "/collections/discounts/product-category-x/product-x".

Similarly, the featured products that appeared on the home page had a URL that looked like this: "/collections/homepage/product-category-x/product-x".

I also found that the about and contact pages had a URL that used "/pages/" as a prefix. For example, "/pages/about-us", instead of being just "/about-us".

This is not the way I would recommend structuring the site, every product page should be unique and be "inside" its product category, and the normal pages don't need to have the "/pages/" added as a prefix.

So far, the URL structure was the main issue to fix on the new site. The duplicate titles and H1s should be fixed when we eliminate those duplicated product pages.

I also found several page speed issues, mainly because the product images were over 1MB. This became worse on pages that needed to load 2 or more product images.

Before Launching the Migration

The URL structure I recommended to the development agency is the following:

Of course, the main shop page with all the products would be "/products".

The development agency and I agreed that the category pages created by WordPress are not so useful and somewhat hard to customize.

Instead of trying to customize the default product category pages, they created new pages for each category so they could customize them with Elementor.

The category pages created by WordPress, as well as the product tag pages, were noindexed.

While the product category pages were being created, the design agency was optimizing the existing product images. Since the old product images weighed more than 100KB, the new product images weigh on average 35KB.

I used Sitebulb's URL explorer to export all the URLs to Google Sheets and started to map the redirections that needed to be implemented.

Since the new website was going to be hosted in WordPress, I asked the development agency to install the Redirection plugin because implementing every single redirection on the .htaccess file was impossible due to the high amount of redirects.

The Google Sheets file looked like this:

google sheets url redirection map

This will then be exported as a .csv file that could be easily imported to the Redirections plugin and have the redirects implemented in a few seconds.

Normally, I would use Google Analytics and Search Console data during the Sitebulb crawl so I can identify the pages that were bringing the most organic traffic, the ones that have high impressions and CTR, etc, to identify which pages were going to be kept or eliminated.

This step was avoided because the client created the website in Shopify 3 months ago, no Google Analytics was installed and no SEO efforts were made at the time.

I asked the development agency for the URL of the testing environment so I could validate that the redirects were working correctly and fix anything that was wrong before launching the new site.

Unfortunately, the development agency was using a local server on their computer so it was impossible for me to crawl it and test the redirects behaviour, the new URL structure, missing pages, broken internal links, etc.

Launching the migration

We all agreed to launch the new site on Saturday because the client said that it was the day in which the traffic to the site was lower.

While the development agency was moving the domain to their server and installing WordPress to move the new site, I was waiting for confirmation on the live site so I could run a Sitebulb crawl and find any issues that needed to be fixed.

Once the site was live I only found a few broken internal links from the navigation menu and a few pages missing meta descriptions.

I used the HEADMasterSEO tool to validate the redirects, I only needed to upload a .txt file with all the URLs that were going to be redirected and another .txt file with the rules of the redirect. For example: /from-url-1 /to-url-2.

Once you upload these files to the tool, it starts to validate if the URLs in the first file are present in any redirect rule of the second file and validates that they redirect to the specified URL.

headmasterseo tool redirect validation

The first column indicates PASS or FAIL according to the URL behaviour, the URL that it is redirecting, the status code, response time and the URL that it redirects to.

There was only one URL that failed the test, the 301-redirect was implemented but on the wrong URL, it was a non-existing URL that returned a 404 error.

This way, I was able to quickly identify any errors and ask the development agency to fix them right away.

Conclusions

Even though this CMS web migration was done in a few days, it wasn't that hard to do because the site is relatively small (excluding the fact that each product had different URLs).

It would've been harder if the site had more time of being live with a decent amount of organic traffic because that would have required an additional analysis to identify which pages to keep and which ones weren't bringing any value.

The main challenge here was to deal with a web migration with two external agencies involved. Because of my technical background and experience, I was able to communicate well with the development agency by explaining what to do, how and on which URLs.

Now, the site is up and running with an optimized URL structure and a lower page speed. It was the first time that I had to deal with an external development team and I thought it was going to be very difficult but it turned out very well.

If the client would've never thought of SEO, I don't know what URL structure would the development agency have used and the page speed would have been the same or higher.

The improvements made on the website made the client realize the importance of SEO, without me or any other SEO consultant the site would've not been optimized and these results wouldn't have been achieved:

search console ecommerce cms migration results

A limited marketing budget is something SMBs have to struggle with. They need to use profitable and effective strategies. SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that they could be investing in.

Luckily, there are effective strategies that will improve your business's search visibility. Let's get started with these SEO strategies for small businesses.

[joli-toc]

1. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords have low search volume but with focused search intent. You may be asking yourself, "but Carlos, if they are not popular keywords, why should I focus on them?"

This is a question I've been asked very often, and the answer is that most Google searches are long-tail keywords. Very popular keywords tend to be very specific keywords with unclear search intent.

For example, the keyword "hamburger". What is the search intent? Maybe the users want to search for restaurants, a recipe, a list of different types of hamburgers, etc.

This is not an issue with these long-tail keywords: "hamburgers in west Ottawa", or "how do you make hamburgers juicy". They both have two different search intents, and it is impossible to know with the generic search "hamburger".

Let's add some data to this answer. An Ahrefs analysis showed that 92.43% of them get 10 searches per month or less!

long-tail-keywords-search-volume-distribution

Monthly Search Volume Distribution of 1.9 Billion Search Queries

As a small business, you need to find ways to connect with your customers. Long-tail queries are great for identifying what your audience is specifically searching for.

With great content and very little link building, you can rank #1 for these keywords that will drive you qualified leads and customers.

2. Understand the Importance of Technical SEO

Your website's technical structure can have a huge impact on its performance. As a small business, you have a great advantage compared to other big brands in your industry: you can implement and fix things much more quickly.

Whenever there is a technical SEO problem like broken URLs, chains of redirects, broken internal links, etc., big brands cannot fix the issue immediately.

They need to contact the development team, informing them of the detected issue, and the lead developer adds it to his team's to-do list. If they don't have a monitoring tool for this kind of issue, they won't notice immediately and will likely discover it during a scheduled crawl.

Small businesses can identify these issues with a quick Screaming Frog crawling and know exactly which URLs are having problems. They can then fix the issue themselves or contact the person in charge of the website, asking them to fix the issue.

You must monitor changes to your robots.txt and sitemap that could cause crawlability and indexability issues and check for broken internal and external links, URLs with redirect chains, website speed issues, etc.

3. Enhance Your Local SEO with Google My Business

If you are a restaurant, a dental clinic or a gym, you may want to create a new or claim an existing Google My Business listing to enhance your Local SEO presence.

By creating an optimized Google My Business listing, your business has the chance to appear on the Google Local Search results that are shown in queries with local intent, as you can see in the screenshot below:

google local search result screenshot

Google Local Search Results

4. Create a logical web structure

Both search engines and users appreciate a website that has a clear web structure. Users can find the information they need more easily. For example, in a small e-commerce site that sells smartphones, you may want to search first by brand and not by model.

Imagine you are searching for your new smartphone, but you want to change from an Android-based device to an iOS-based device, so you start by entering the Apple category and then choosing the models that best suit your needs. This is better than first entering the iPhone X category page and not comparing prices with models like iPhone 11 or iPhone 8.

As you can see, it is easier to understand when the web structure is "store/apple/iphone-x/" than "store/iphone-x/apple/". Your web structure should be based on a logical content organization.

Make sure to organize your web structure correctly and avoid having pages within sections that are not relevant. Take a look at this crawl map generated with Sitebulb as an example of a well-organized web structure.

sitebulb crawl map

Crawl Map by Sitebulb

5. Have a Mobile-Friendly Website

Since Google started migrating websites to their Mobile-First Indexing, companies have invested in having a responsive website to be prepared for this new crawling and indexing approach.

With Mobile-First Indexing, Google predominantly uses your website's mobile version for indexing and ranking. If you created your website after July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is already enabled for it.

Google has slowly started to migrate older websites to mobile-first indexing, giving those businesses time to deal with potential issues resulting in loss of organic rankings.

You can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to validate if your website is mobile-friendly.

mobile friendly test

Mobile-Friendly Test

6. Focus on Creating TOFU Content

One of the main problems small businesses face is getting new clients. It is crucial to understand the AIDA model, which has 4 steps: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.

You need to understand your potential clients' problems regarding your product to create content that will answer those questions.

For example, let's say you are a business that sells computers. When someone wants to buy a computer, they need to do some previous research like the best computer for students, designers, video editing, etc.

By knowing this, you now have to create guides that will help your user to find a solution to this first question. This content will need to be reachable to them either on the search results or social media.

This first step will let your potential client know that you understand them and answer the questions they have regarding your product.

After the user answers its question, they'll want to know more about your products and what you have to offer. The best way to do this is by letting them know what you do and what makes your business different than others; you must have a unique selling proposition that will the user a reason to choose you and not your competitors.

Once they know what makes you stand out from other businesses, it is time to generate desire. They already enjoyed your content and think your product or service is the best. Offer them the possibility to subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for a coupon code or any other offer.

The last step is to give your potential clients the option to act on their desire. You know they want to buy something from you, so you need to include calls-to-action on your website and newsletter to incentivize their purchase.

If you have already shown empathy with your potential clients, convinced them that you stand out from the rest, and offered them a limited discount or offer, they will end buying from you.

aida model

AIDA Model

7. Structure Your Content Correctly

I will use the last example of the computer business to explain this strategy. Use the inverted pyramid style of content writing. This method allows you to structure your content to allow the reader to gather information more easily.

Most blogs tend to introduce their main point after some extensive background intro. As a reader, I want to see the main point of the article right when I see the content.

You can think of it as a small AIDA version for content. In a concise paragraph, introduce the problem you are addressing and present a solution.

This is similar to what I have done in this article; I presented the problem many small businesses face and presented my solution for them. After that, I go into detail about my proposed solution.

At the end of the content, introduce a CTA. It can be as simple as a question to incentivize comments or a sign-up form to a newsletter.

8. Use Structured Data for Increased Visibility

Structured Data is a way of making it easier for Google to understand your content. When a website has recipes, job postings, or event information, it needs to be marked up, so search engines know that you have a specific type of content.

There are many things you can use structured data for; schema.org has a listing of all the things you can use structured data.

The best way to use structured data is with JSON-LD that can be inserted as a script in any HTML page. I use the Schema Markup Generator by Merkle Inc., which generates the JSON-LD code for your specified type of structured data, and you can test the code with either Google's Structured Data Testing Tool or their new Rich Results Testing Tool.

schema markup generator technicalseo

Schema Markup Generator

After you have implemented this JSON-LD code on your website, Google will be able to recognize your recipe's structured data and may show your recipe on the search results like this:

tacos al pastor recipe result

Recipe Page on the SERPs

9. Optimize your Title and Description Tags for CTR

The click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who saw it. In terms of SEO, this represents the ratio of clicks in the organic search results vs the number of impressions the page has.

Backlinko's CTR study shows that:

Backlinko found that the CTR of the top 3 organic results is 75.1%. But how do users choose which result to click on?

It all depends on how engaging their title tags and meta descriptions are; your title tag has to match the user's intent of the search.

If a user is searching for "best laptops for students," and the two top results have these title tags: "Best Laptops for Students 2020", and "Best Laptops 2020". It is clear that the first title tag clearly shows what the user is searching for.

backlinko top 3 results ctr

10. Start Building Your Online Authority

It can be difficult to build authority for your business if you're just starting, but building online authority is somewhat easier.

You can build your business's online authority by earning links to your website. Consider your links as "votes" or "references" other websites give you.

Earning links, however, can be challenging for small businesses with limited resources. Guest blogging and broken link building are the two main strategies that you can use to earn links.

Let's say you are a business with a new healthy candy bar; you can reach out to food blogs that accept guest posts and write informational content about your product, for example, "More Sugar Doesn't Always Mean More Flavour in a Candy Bar".

You should write informational content, explain how sugar is unhealthy, how a candy bar can still be delicious with low sugar amounts, how you can eat your candy bar without any health concerns, etc.

Most sites allow you to link back to your website and include an author biography. You can write in your bio "Founder of Company X. The delicious candy bar with no sugar".

You can also complement this guest blogging strategy with the broken link-building strategy. Let's remember the example of the business that sells computers and published a guide on the best laptops for students.

You can see your competitors' broken backlinks using the Free Broken Link Checker by Ahrefs and find out which sites link to pages for which you also have an alternative content page on your website.

Reach out to the author of that content and tell them about the broken link on their webpage and offer yours as a substitute for it, and just like that, you obtained a backlink that will add up to your website's online authority.

If you can't find any broken backlinks related to your published content, try and create pages with content similar to those broken pages of your competitors, improve their content and repeat the process of reaching out to the author.

Conclusion

You are now ready to improve your organic rankings with these SEO strategies for small businesses. Remember that implementing an SEO strategy takes time, so don't expect immediate results like in PPC, but these strategies will allow your business's organic visibility and rankings to improve over time.

Did you miss the Marketing Scoop Podcast last December 12? Don't worry, I made this blog post to summarize what was discussed on this podcast so you can read what each expert defended on this Digital Marketing Battle.

Guests in this episode shared what they think was the number one digital marketing story in 2018.

David Bain and Judith Lewis reveal the latest digital trends and technologies that impact your marketing strategy. Together with industry experts, they dove into SEO, advertising and content marketing to uncover the ultimate recipe for digital marketing success.

marketing scoop podcast semrush recap

The guests in this episode are:

The European Search Personality of 2018, International SEO Consultant, Speaker & Author and Founder of Orainti - Aleyda Solis

A writer on conversational AI and digital marketing, Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft - Purna Virji

Passionate of unicorns, he sold his last company (Wordstream) for 150 million dollars and has turned his attention to Facebook Messenger Chatbots, Founder of MobileMonkey - Larry Kim

Self-proclaimed search geek, US Search Personality of 2018, Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and News Editor at Search Engine Land - Barry Schwartz

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#1 Digital Marketing Story of 2018 - Aleyda

Aleyda thinks that the search impact of the mobile-first index was the most important change this year and picked it as her story of the year from an SEO perspective.

Although there were many changes and updates in SEO like the Medic Update, mobile-first is a change in the way that Google works because mobile content is taken into consideration.

Aleyda says that it hasn't been as huge as everybody expected because they have done it in stages to avoid a negative impact on websites but it has impacted the way of doing audits, verifying rankings and overall SEO activities.

We now should prioritize mobile crawling, mobile indexing, mobile relevance, mobile searches and search behaviour along with mobile rankings.

The impact of the mobile-first indexing depends on the business, for example, in B2B where some industries have a low percentage of searches from mobile devices because of the business model or target market the impact is not as big.

For most B2C and many B2B businesses, it will mean that the users accessing their website through mobile devices will be a priority in order to have an optimized mobile website.

#1 Digital Marketing Story of 2018 - Larry

Larry chose Cambridge Analytica to be his top story of 2018, the impact on Facebook was huge and caused some questioning in the safety of our data.

Larry points out that the number of active users on Facebook in countries like Canada, Australia and the UK is in decline as well as the time spent on Facebook.

As a result of the decline in usage and time spent, ad prices (pretty important for marketers) have doubled in the last 12 months making Facebook Ads extremely difficult.

Facebook Analytics or the audience analytics capabilities for analyzing the performance of social campaigns have been totally neutered.

These are all global issues impacting marketers and individuals but the biggest impact is actually that Facebook's posture has been put on the defensive.

In summary, Larry thinks the biggest marketing story of 2019 is the Facebook news armageddon and all the collateral damage that it has created for marketers and for the world in general.

#1 Digital Marketing Story of 2018 - Purna

Purna picked the launch of the Microsoft Audience Network because it covers all the way that search is maturing and they´re back with the AI dominance and growth in innovation.

It was announced in May and it's a product that's been in pilot but what it's doing is it's allowing advertisers to really go from this whole "keyword dominated industry" to not thinking about the customers and intent.

Now that it is powered by AI we can understand all of these different intent signals without any identifiable information.

Signals like browsing history, preferred websites and even data points from LinkedIn profiles such as industry, job function and the company you work for.

These things can be used to really target the person to reach them at the right time and the right place.

#1 Digital Marketing Story of 2018 - Barry

Barry thinks the other guests are all wrong. He argued to Larry that Facebook is a tiny player compared to Google in terms of reach people can get in general to their website.

He also said that the mobile-first index was probably 2017 leaving into 2018 and it didn't really have that much of an impact because people who were ready for it because of 2017 and all the things Google has said for the past 5-10 years around mobile they took action and also because mobile-first indexing didn't fully roll out.

The most important thing obviously it's Google-related because Google is the most important thing out there for digital marketers.

Thinking about voice assistance, Google assistant, voice search and Google slipping into zero results are crucial because they are everywhere even into your thermostats.

Now, this is where the interesting part begins, Barry began determined to start a fight because that was what David wanted to see and now Aleyda started to express herself about voice search and zero results.

Aleyda thinks that these changes are a predecessor of a conversational journey because Google said on their 20 year anniversary that at some point they want to predict the searches, to advise and recommend stuff with the assistant.

However, she agrees with Barry that it is a good story and it is the first step of a bigger paradigm but what she didn't like about it is that a lot of people thought that everything was going to go voice and voice will kill SEO.

The searches for which Google, and any search engine, can realistically provide one answer or zero results without damaging the user experience are very limited and they can't do this when trying to compare products or prices.

Barry said that it made people really lazy, they don't want to read or research, they just want to be told what to do and that is the world we live in now.

Aleyda agrees with what Barry said but she also adds that she completely sees voice input replacing in a much bigger way the typing input but, for the output stage, voice can comply with only so much and visual is going to play a bigger role.

Purna added to the conversation that it is going to expand search because now we can search in more places than we could before and searches are not limited to being on desktop or mobile, you now can search while driving or cooking.

Aleyda commented regarding what Barry said about users being lazy with only one result that, as a user, it is scary and from an SEO perspective you will want to be the result displayed.

Also, this helps to expand the presence of websites, and businesses face this opportunity of more exposure.

Barry thinks that it is amazing that search is everywhere but for marketers, there is the question of how do you get your content in there.

Purna picked zero results as the most important story for 2018. When Larry was asked this question he said that all they all talked about search like if something important had happened in 2018.

Larry says that mobile-first index is no news, they have been saying that for years and argues that the zero-results pages are already here with the button called "I'm feeling lucky" when you do a Google search and has been there for 20 years.

Aleyda added that there are two parts to it, realistically we can say that the influence of Facebook as a social network platform in society is a very important impact.

But, from a marketing perspective, it influenced probably only the people relying on Facebook from an organic perspective on doing social ads but points out that search plays a bigger role from a digital marketing perspective.

Aleyda and Purna both agreed on their vote to the best story by picking Barry's.

Larry argues that there are more advertisers on Facebook than there are on Google and more Facebook page managers than there are SEOs, but Aleyda commented that Google provides more traffic and conversions than Facebook.

Barry thinks Facebook will be around for another couple of years or so and Larry immediately says "this is classic search engine blindness, search is at the very bottom of a funnel".

By definition, in order for search to work, people need to know what to search for in the first place and this demand happens usually not on Google.

Barry was asked what story had the biggest impact on marketing and he chose Larry's proposal because of how much Facebook marketing has changed and what they can target.

Judith says that at the core of all the different stories, the thread that kind of runs through it is artificial intelligence and in essence, Purna wins the debate.

David asked the guests an actionable takeaway for each story.

Aleyda said that SEO is the change in the way SEO work is done, the reporting, the analysis, the validation and the research with mobile websites.

Barry said that featured snippets and structured data are things to look at with the zero results trend.

Larry recommends following the engagement with Instagram live streams and messaging.

Purna advises marketers to look at exploring audience marketing, test it out and change your thinking from the keyword focus world to intent and relevancy.

That wraps up the complete episode of Marketing Scoop Podcast which you can see on Youtube or listen to the podcast.