SEO
10 Websites That Tried to Fool Google (And Failed)
SEOs have been trying to outsmart Google for as long as it has existed. Sometimes, they win; other times, their attempts fail.
Here are 10 extraordinary examples of websites that failed to fool Google.
Key stats
- 2,794,551 keywords ranking, August 2022
- 255,527 pages, August 2022
- Estimated traffic: 3.6M, August 2022
Conch House is a review site that ranked for over 250,000 “best+[product]” keywords and acquired 14,000 number #1 rankings.
This huge rise in organic traffic meant the website became notorious in certain SEO circles.
We can see there is some serious money at play here, and this didn’t go unnoticed on SEO Twitter.
How did it fool Google?
It used an authoritative expired domain and created content targeting “best +[product]” keywords.
It also used dynamically created pricing tables on its landing pages to encourage visitors to click through to Amazon and maximize its income. If a user bought a product, it would earn an affiliate commission.
Shockingly, for a few months, this setup was good enough to fool Google.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened.
Content
There was speculation that the site used AI to create its content, but it might have been much simpler than that.
It might have used concatenation to stitch sentences together and insert product titles to slightly differentiate each post.
Take a look at some of its posts:
From the website, you can see several stock phrases it used to build content at scale quickly.
Examples:
- “Are you looking for the most reliable and efficient [product title]?”
- “If so, congratulations!”
- “What is the importance of [product title] to you?”
- “The service we provide will save you time from reading thousands of reviews.”
It also used dynamic pricing tables like the one below to supplement the content.
If we jump into the code, we can see this is a popular table plugin called AAWP.
This plugin allowed the site owners to:
- Create best-selling product lists at scale for all of their posts dynamically.
- Geo-target multiple locations.
- Get automatic updates of product information via Amazon’s Product Advertising API.
Links
I mentioned earlier that this site used an expired domain—let’s look at it.
Let’s go to the Top pages report in Site Explorer:
- Click on the downward facing caret ▼ next to the homepage URL
- Click View on Archive.org
We can see the site’s history:
Surprisingly, the domain has a continuous history back to 1996, one of the things the new owners might have been interested in. With history also came links and a degree of trust from Google.
Sidenote.
Having a continuous history this far back in the Wayback Machine is not that common. Most domain names and websites have changed digital hands many times. (1996 was two years before Google was released—making this website older than Google.)
How did it fail?
The site got serious traction for about three months. But then the traffic suddenly plummeted, and the domain was auctioned off.
The site has had three significant dips in organic traffic in its lifespan:
In a further twist, Glen Gabe, who was following the site, tweeted that he believed it was not impacted by the HCU.
What do you think happened?
Did it really fail to fool Google?
In terms of organic traffic, it’s much lower than it was previously, with no hope of returning to those previous levels.
However, you could argue that the site owners successfully exploited a gap in Google’s algorithm at the right time to make money. If that was their only objective, then they achieved it.
Key stats
- 2,794,551 keywords ranking, August 2022
- 255,527 pages, August 2022
- Estimated organic traffic: 3.6M, August 2022
Just going by its homepage, this is a website that, in all honesty, doesn’t look that bad.
But this website may remind you not to judge a book by its cover.
How did it fool Google?
This site scraped content word for word from Amazon product listings and targeted “best +[product]” queries. It also likely used some dodgy-looking high Domain Rating (DR) links to try and fool Google.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened.
Content
When it came to great content, this site didn’t disappoint. Somehow, Google didn’t seem to pick up on this site, but it didn’t go unnoticed by SEOs on Twitter.
Let’s look at the site.
Looking at one of the highest traffic pages from the Top pages report in August, we see the formatting of the page looks like an Amazon product page.
Let’s see how it compares.
If we copy and paste part of the product description into Google, it immediately brings up the equivalent Amazon product page for the same product in the search results.
If I paste the content from the Amazon product listing and the equivalent from this website into Diffchecker, we can see that the two files are identical.
Using Ahrefs, we can get an idea of how many of these types of pages exist.
Let’s go into Site Explorer’s Top pages report and add a URL filter containing “best-” to filter for any “best-” keywords.
We can see that this site was targeting ~77,809 “best” keywords at its peak.
If we add a “Position” filter to filter out only the number #1 ranking positions, we can see that this site had ~4,583 number #1 ranking pages at its peak.
This is what it looks like in Ahrefs’ Top pages report.
Using this level of low-quality scraped content, it was able to reach huge levels of traffic, even in 2022—albeit briefly.
Links
Let’s plug this site into the Wayback Machine to see its history.
As it’s a relatively new domain from 2020, we can probably assume to get these traffic levels, it’ll need some high DR links.
We can look at the domains by going to the Referring domains report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. We can see that this site has some dubious-looking high DR URLs pointing to it.
Here’s an example of an unconventional-looking DR 81 site.
We can see the link if we open the inspector and search for the domain name.
How did it fail?
The site had two sharp drops—one in mid-June and the other steeper one in September.
The organic traffic drop rebounds slightly in early 2023, potentially suggesting that this is not a manual penalty.
It’s impossible to confirm what exactly happened here. But based on the timing of the second drop, we can speculate that this site was hit at least by the HCU.
What do you think happened?
Did it really fail to fool Google?
For the most part, yes. But judging by the most recent organic traffic graph, the site appears to be trying to resuscitate itself.
Key stats
- 604,926 keywords, March 2022
- 82,611 pages, March 2022
- Total traffic: 1.3M, March 2022
This next site is a basic-looking blog loaded with lots of display ads.
Can you spot the content?
The site had quite a good run compared to other sites mentioned here but experienced a slow death for almost a year.
How did it fool Google?
One of the problems this site may have had (apart from its low-quality content) is the sharp increase in unnatural-looking links.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened.
Content
The website describes itself as: “The place to answer many questions in life, study, and work.” If we head to the About page, we don’t get much more information—just four lines of content surrounded by ads.
Not a good start.
The content appears to be a mix of People Also Ask (PAA) spam, forum comments, lists, and reviews. Most pages are no longer live. But if we look at the Wayback Machine, we can see how it used to look.
If we look at one of the articles, we see it isn’t helpful or high-quality content.
This content could have been scraped from a forum or somewhere like Quora.
And here’s another example:
These examples indicate that the content standard, on the whole, is very low.
Links
Looking at the Referring Domains report, we can see some potentially dubious-looking links.
The same DR 81 site we saw linking to our second site also links to this website.
At least two other sites in this list also seem suspicious. We will come back to these later.
How did it fail?
If we go back to Overview 2.0 and switch to the “Referring domains” graph, we can see a significant increase in referring domains in December. This looks suspicious to me.
The huge spike is probably a red flag for Google’s algorithm.
As soon as the sharp increase in the graph starts to fall, we see a much more dramatic plunge in organic traffic.
These updates appear to have killed the site completely, and now the organic traffic is flat-lining.
Did it really fail to fool Google?
Yes. Undoubtedly.
Key stats
- 4,047,559 keywords, April 2022
- 523,455 pages, April 2022
- Total traffic: 1.3M, April 2022
When you come across a website called Bike Hike, you’ll probably assume that it has something to do with bikes, cycling, or even hiking.
However, in this case—you’d be mistaken.
At its organic traffic peak, this site’s top keyword was “slurp fish.” Make of that what you will.
And here’s a Twitter reaction to the site:
How did it fool Google?
This site used an expired domain and created People Also Ask (PAA) spam content. It also 301 redirected several expired domains with high DR to its domain.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened.
Content
Let’s start by going to the Organic keywords report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see what terms this site was ranking for at its peak.
Looking at the URL column, we can see that this is probably a People Also Ask (PAA) spam site—as all ranking keywords appear to target these low Keyword Difficulty (KD) and unrelated PAA questions.
Let’s go further and filter the domains to include only those in position #1.
We can see that many PAA-style keywords held the top spot in Google in April 2022, near this site’s peak.
It’s safe to say that none of these landing pages are on a consistent topic. And it seems they were designed to exploit Google’s algorithm.
Looking at one of the pages, we can see that the content is never longer than four lines and is followed by a heading.
Once we put a few lines of this content into Google search, we can see this content is likely scraped from multiple websites.
Looking through some of the other top-performing pages, we can also find they follow the same content format. I believe this site scraped PAA questions and answers from multiple websites for content and turned them into articles.
Links
When it comes to links, one of the tactics used was to 301 redirect expired domains with bbc.co.uk (DR 93) links to its website.
We can see this in Ahrefs using the Backlinks report and adding a “Referring page domain” filter: bbc.co.uk.
Looking at the Anchor and target URL column, we can see that the ultimate destination for all these links is Bike Hike. This looks like an unnatural and unlikely pattern.
Adding to this, the site was built on an expired domain. We can see this using the Wayback Machine.
The site doesn’t have a continuous history, and the most recent owners likely bought the site in 2021.
Let’s go back in time and see what it used to look like.
Bike Hike 2018 looks like it had something to do with cycling. From what I can see, it used to be a legitimate site. So it seems that the recent owners of the domain revived it to exploit this site’s past authority and links.
How did it fail?
The sharp fall of this site’s organic traffic graph looks like a site hit with a manual action.
Sidenote.
The only way to confirm if there is a manual action is to check the site’s Google Search Console. As we don’t have access to this, we can only speculate that this happened based on the sharp drop in the organic traffic graph.
What do you think happened?
Did it really fail to fool Google?
Yes. (Once a site receives a manual action, it’s usually game over.)
Key stats
- 1,397 keywords, March 2022
- 957 pages, March 2022
- Total traffic: 664.6K, March 2022
From the domain name alone, it feels like this site could be a legitimate business. But as you’ll see, when we look at the content and the links on the site, it becomes clear that this website has changed from its original intended purpose.
How did it fool Google?
There are examples of paid link placements on the blog, and it looks like the site is trying to rank for betting login pages.
When it comes to links, there are also a few suspicious ones there. When it comes to content, it appears to not be the best either.
So what happened?
Content
Let’s start by looking at the history of this domain through the Wayback Machine.
The history of this website looks continuous back to 2008–2009, but the domain expired around August 17, 2019.
This is how the site used to look in 2009. Even though the design is old-fashioned, it still looks much more legitimate than the present site.
We can see the difference if we compare that with the current site version.
Even though the images aren’t rendered properly, we can see how the text content has changed for the worse.
With the focus of the content changing to topics like “casino,” “gambling,” and “loans,” this immediately looks like a red flag.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the articles on the site to see what we can find.
Selling links is against Google’s terms of service. But the above is an example of a link that was probably paid for, with no attempt to hide it.
Here’s another example—this time for a different type of service.
You can see the pattern that is emerging.
It turns out that almost every article in the blog has a single exact-match keyword anchor text link within a body of text, which leads me to believe that links were likely being sold here.
The final nail in the coffin is the website categories—when you see dating, loan, and casino in the same category as SEO, you know that it’s likely links were sold here.
If we turn our attention to the Top pages report in Site Explorer, we can see that one of the primary purposes of the site was to rank for login pages of betting and cockfighting sites.
This shows the website’s intent and doesn’t look like a typical website’s top pages.
Links
As we have seen above, the site is an expired domain that has been revived, so it has gained a decent amount of links and authority in that period.
If we look at the Referring domains report, we can see the type of high DR links that this site once had.
Here’s an example of a directory link (DR 72) from a website called the Link Centre.
Here’s another example of a DR 72 website with a non-related link to our website on the profile page.
With two university links in the top Referring domains report, you wonder whether these were compromised sites as well.
How did it fail?
Taking a look at Overview 2.0, we can see that there were two critical Google updates in this period.
- The first is the Product Reviews Update, which occurred on March 23, 2022. The second is the May 2022 Core Update. Although there isn’t an exact correlation here, these updates could have impacted the site.
- As I suspect they were selling paid links, this could have been another factor. But the gradual fall of the organic traffic chart doesn’t align with the typical look of a manual penalty.
What do you think happened?
Did it really fail to fool Google?
The website didn’t reach the heights of some of our other sites mentioned here, but it did manage to fool Google for around a month.
The site hasn’t been resurrected since, so it’s fair to say that it didn’t fool Google.
Key stats
This next website was created by someone who hated vowels in their domain names.
The main idea behind the site seems to have been to create a database-driven site targeting “people named [insert name]” searches.
If we add an “Include” filter into Keywords Explorer, we can see a lot of low-competition searches for this type of query, almost 22,000. This is probably why they decided to create a site around this particular topic.
How did it fool Google?
One of the problems with this site is that most of the content was scraped, and it had several dodgy high DR links pointing to it that didn’t look natural.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened.
Content
If we go to the Top pages report on August 19, we can see that the top page is “People named Dick.”
Let’s look at what this page looks like on the site.
You can see there isn’t that much information here, and most of the content is ads.
Even when we scroll down the page, we can see that it’s a list of people with some key facts about them and nothing more.
I’ve decided to click on the profile of the number #1 Dick—Dick Cheney.
Pasting the text of his detailed profile in Google brings up a match for Wikipedia.
Checking a few other profiles on the site using this method also brings up Wikipedia, so it seems reasonable to conclude that this site was scraping at least some of its content directly from Wikipedia.
Returning to the homepage, you can see the general strategy of the site is quite basic. This is what the site owners did for country selectors:
And when it came to birth years, they did something similar.
Overall, the content standard is low, and we see a lot of scraped content on this site.
Links
Looking at the Wayback Machine, we can see this is a relatively new site that was started around 2021.
We can assume that it needs some powerful links to get this site off the ground.
There are several suspicious high DR links linking to this site.
To look at them, we can jump into the Referring domains report. I’ve chosen to take a quick look at the DR 82 link, but there are many examples of high DR links with spammy content here.
Here’s an example of a DR 82 website linking to this website, and this is what one of the links looks like.
We have just scratched the surface here, but it’s likely that this is not an isolated case. It’s probably fair to say that this looks like a website designed to exploit search engines rather than inform people.
How did it fail?
The website appears to have been hit by two Google updates. With neither the content nor the links being that great, I can’t say I am surprised.
I believe that this site was hit by the following:
Sidenote.
Even after the October Spam Update appears to have crushed the site, it seems there was an attempt to build more links to the site.
What do you think happened?
Did it really fail to fool Google?
Yes. I imagine this site’s traffic will be flat-lining shortly.
Key stats
- 22,852 keywords, October 2021
- 195 pages, October 2021
- Total traffic: 8.3M, October 2021
This website allows users to download YouTube videos by simply entering a URL and then hitting the download button—you can see why this type of website would be popular.
How did it fool Google?
The website used an interesting tactic to stay at the top of the search results and try to fool Google repeatedly.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened.
Content
The murky world of YouTube download sites is often filled with ads, surveys, and random floating buttons.
YT5S is, by contrast, a fairly minimal site, which may be how it became popular early on.
When it comes to content for a YouTube download site, there usually isn’t much on the page—this site doesn’t have a blog, for example.
So its main focus is on content to assist people in downloading YouTube videos. Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar shows us it has just 818 words on the page. Not a lot.
If we look at its Site structure report, we can see that there are many subfolders with numbers at the end.
Clicking on the en variations often results in pages that are 301 redirected to the latest version.
As this is such a competitive industry, certain subdomains will get penalized for various reasons. When a subdomain loses traffic, it will be redirected to a new number subfolder.
We see a pattern emerging if we overlap the organic traffic charts for each subfolder.
The site’s owners appear to be 301 redirecting the entire website to a new subfolder once the old subfolder has lost traffic.
This site is not alone in this tactic. Looking at the Position history in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, we can see that some of the other websites in this category have cottoned on to this strategy and are doing a similar thing, judging by some of the names of the subfolders.
Links
With a site on this topic, it will be shared widely and linked to naturally. Most of the links appear to be relatively natural.
How did it fail?
The cut-throat nature of this SERP means that it’s highly competitive. The site owners thought they had found a way to get around the loss in traffic by redirecting the website into a new subfolder. It worked for a while. But over time, the impact diminished.
Did it really fail to fool Google?
Yes, for now. But this method will continue being used to try and fool Google in the short term.
Key stats
- 6,347,025 keywords
- 698,643 pages
- Total traffic: 3.8M
In case you were wondering, this site didn’t have much to do with board game tips.
Despite this, it reached 3.9 million organic traffic during its peak through low-quality content and some dubious-looking high DR links.
How did it fool Google?
It seems to have taken PAA scraping to the extreme, sometimes veering way off topic in the process on some of the posts.
From my research, it also had some suspicious-looking links from some unlikely sources.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened.
Content
Using the Top pages report, we can look at some of the articles.
Let’s highlight a section of the “Organic traffic” graph to select the top pages between two dates.
Let’s click through to the Wayback Machine again and take a look at one of the URLs. (I’ve picked a random URL with Wayback history.)
Even from the table of contents, we can see that this is PAA spam. The subheadings wildly switch from deploying parachutes to shotguns, tasers, and guns.
Scrolling down the page further, we get the familiar three or four lines of text followed by a heading.
If we paste the content into Google, we can understand whether it’s scraped.
It looks to me like this answer came from this site.
Turning to Twitter, we can see that we are not the only people to have discovered this.
We can conclude then that the content standard for this site is again incredibly low. But it was enough to fool Google at one point.
Links
There is a horror show of links from this site.
Our old friend, Grid Server (DR 82), is linking to the site again.
Here’s another reference to a broken link to this DR 81 domain, which you may remember from earlier on.
Finally, here’s a dubious-looking link from an unlikely source—Swansea University (UK) (DR74). It’s one of the domains we saw also linking to our third website.
Should these other academic sites be concerned?
How did it fail?
This site has it all—bad links and scraped content. As the organic traffic drop doesn’t tie in with any specific Google algorithm updates, the website may have received a manual penalty.
What do you think happened?
Did it really fail to fool Google?
Yes. The site owners tried to 301 redirect their old domain to a new domain. Looking at the new domain in Overview 2.0, we see that the new website worked for a while and likely got hit again by a few other updates.
Key stats
- 4,046,226 keywords, April 2022
- 911,725 pages, April 2022
- Total traffic: 1.9M, April 2022
This next website only lasted for a few months, but it did fairly well considering the standard of content and the type of links it had.
How did it fool Google?
As the name suggests, this was a low-quality PAA spam site. It also had some dubious links pointing to it. When the site tanked, the site owners tried to 301 redirect it to a new name, but that site also had issues.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened.
Content
You can probably guess what type of content this will be with a name like this. Let’s look at one of the pages to see how bad it is.
We’ve seen quite a few of these examples. But if I paste the first two lines of content into Google, we can see that this is likely scraped from Quora.
The flow of the content on the page follows the familiar pattern of two or three lines of text followed by a subheading. Scrolling down the page, we see the topics become less related.
Checking a few other pages, I see the content has also been lifted from other sites. It’s relatively safe to assume that this is another PAA spam site.
Links
When we look at links, we see a few of the same culprits again.
Swansea University’s website is back, along with 38 other academic domains.
I didn’t check them all, but they could likely be spam. Some more familiar faces in the links department include our favorite DR 81 website.
As well as Grid Server’s DR 82 links.
It seems reasonably clear that this activity is not normal and may be designed to manipulate rankings.
How did it fail?
Looking at the Overview 2.0’s “Performance” graph, we see that the drop in organic traffic occurred before the May 2022 Core Update.
This update may have contributed to the drop, but it doesn’t appear as though it is the main reason.
It’s clear from this quick analysis that bad links and poor content are present. It may be likely that this site received a manual action for its links, although it’s impossible to confirm this.
What do you think happened?
Did it really fail to fool Google?
Yes. I can’t see any way back for this site.
Key stats
- 79,543 keywords, April 2022
- 1,204 pages, April 2022
- Total traffic: 5.2M, April 2022
This website describes itself as the “world’s best news site”—a bold claim.
Sadly though, it doesn’t appear to have the content or the links to back up this claim.
How did it fool Google?
It mainly focused on providing information to the Indian market about popular movie torrent sites.
When it came to fooling Google, it used suspicious-looking links combined with fairly low-quality content that was just about good enough to fool Google for a short period.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened.
Content
Going to the Top pages report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, we can see everything’s not right here.
Rather than providing news content, this site seems to contain content about movie torrent sites for the Indian market.
Let’s look at the top-performing landing page that got an estimated 4,276,681 organic traffic on April 25.
The top-performing page appears to be an instruction manual for downloading movies from this site.
Running the text through an AI detection tool—GLTR—it seems from my tests that this content may be partially AI content or just badly translated.
Either way, you’ll probably agree it’s not the type of content you would expect from the “world’s best news site.”
This is low-quality content by most people’s definition.
Links
When it comes to links, I noticed the website has many Blogspot links.
If we go to the Anchors report and add the following settings, we can filter the Blogspot domain anchors. As they are all very specific, it seems likely that this was part of a low-quality link building campaign.
If we click on the links to target for the second row and filter by Dofollow, we can see around 50 links with exactly the same, tediously long anchor text.
Again, this type of link building doesn’t look great.
If we head back to the Referring domains report, we can see Grid Server is mentioned again.
Finally, to top it off, it has a DR 67 link that redirected a domain into its domain from this site below.
And here’s what this site looks like.
How did it fail?
Looking at Overview 2.0, this site was probably hit by the May 2022 Core Update.
What do you think happened?
Did it really fail to fool Google?
Yes. Looking at the organic traffic, it’s nowhere near the levels it used to be. The site isn’t completely dead, but it’s fair to say that it won’t fool anyone in the future that it’s the “world’s best news site.”
How did you find these sites?
Here’s how we did it: Internally, we call this the “Content Explorer Hack.”
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and start an empty search
- Go to the Websites tab
- Filter for high traffic and low DR
And that’s it!
Final thoughts
As we have seen, what Google can giveth, it can also taketh away.
The methods used by these sites to rank in Google are obviously not replicable for businesses, and I don’t suggest you try any of the methods above.
Many SEOs like to think that the days of paid links, trashy content, and shortcuts to ranking are long gone. But clearly, from these examples, it’s still possible to get significant organic traffic by breaking the rules—but only if you are willing to risk everything.
Got more questions? Ping me on Twitter. 🙂
SEO
The Most Engaged YouTube Fans For NCAA Basketball Teams
Imagine that you head up digital marketing at Turner Sports or CBS Sports, which have the exclusive rights to license NCAA marks, tickets, and taglines in commercial promotions.
Or suppose that your social video agency was just invited to pitch AT&T, Capital One, or Coca-Cola, which are official NCAA corporate champions.
And you have an assignment to identify the most engaged YouTube fans for the NCAA Division 1 Men’s and Women’s basketball teams.
I realize that you probably don’t work at one of those sports media and entertainment companies and it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be asked to pitch one of those brands in the foreseeable future.
So, why should you care about what makes engaged NCAA fans on YouTube?
Keep reading, there is method in the madness.
Cognitive, Emotional, And Behavioral Metrics
As mentioned previously, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has identified 30 metrics – 7 cognitive, 4 emotional, and 19 behavioral – that brands or agencies can use to measure the “engagement continuum.”
But fan engagement can fluctuate depending on whether a college basketball team is on the bubble, makes it to the Big Dance, or goes deep into the Sweet 16, Elite Eight, and Final Four.
Fan engagement can also vary depending on the number of logo 3s, buzzer beaters, or overtime wins.
That’s why this hypothetical assignment is so hard.
Nevertheless, exploring various video engagement metrics from several video intelligence sources can help you better understand the most engaged YouTube fans for NCAA basketball teams and how to apply what you’ve learned to your brands or clients.
Here are three cognitive metrics that you should explore when measuring engagement:
- Change in Brand Awareness/Familiarity: You can use surveys to measure the extent your brand is recognized by potential customers before and after this year’s NCAA tournaments.
- Change in Brand Consideration: You can also use pre- and post-March Madness surveys to measure your brand’s inclusion in a set customers would select from.
- Change in Purchase Intent: You can also use Brand Lift surveys to measure the delta in customers’ plans or willingness to purchase your brand in the future.
Here are three emotional metrics that you should look at using to measure engagement:
- Change in Baseline Brand Perception: Surveys enable you to measure the pre-post delta in what potential customers think and feel about your brand.
- Change in Baseline Brand Favorability: Surveys also enable you to measure what potential customers like and value about your brand before and after the Big Dance.
- Change in Baseline Brand Loyalty: Surveys enable you to measure customer loyalty in terms of weight and frequency of usage – as well as likelihood to switch – from Selection Sunday, March 17, to the women’s NCAA championship game on Sunday, April 7, and the men’s NCAA championship game on Monday, April 8, 2024.
Here are six behavioral metrics worth exploring to measure engagement:
- Watch Time: The total amount of time viewers spend watching a video, including any replays or rewatches, should be a key metric. Since it’s only available if you have access to your brand or client’s YouTube Analytics, digital marketers and social video agencies use “views” as a metric to compare videos across other YouTube channels.
- Applause Rate: The number of likes a YouTube video gets.
- Amplification Rate: The number of shares a YouTube video gets.
- Conversation Rate: The number of comments a YouTube video gets.
- Engaged-View Conversions (EVCs): In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), an engaged-view conversion (EVC) indicates that someone watched a YouTube video for at least 10 seconds and then converted on your website or app within 3 days of viewing the video.
- Economic Value: This is the monetary value of visitors from YouTube to your site who go on to complete micro conversions like subscribing to a newsletter or initiating a chat with your business, as well as macro conversions like purchasing a product or registering for a service.
In addition, here are some of the video intelligence sources you should evaluate:
- Official Team and Conference Channels: Many NCAA Division 1 teams and major conferences, like the ACC, Big 10, and SEC, have their own YouTube channels. These channels feature highlights, interviews, and behind-the-scenes content. Comparing their metrics can provide you with insights.
- Media and NCAA Basketball Channels: YouTube channels like CBS Sports and March Madness upload video content about various college basketball teams, allowing you to compare fan engagement based on comments and viewership.
- Third-Party Tools: Tubular Labs, a social video intelligence company that provides data on social video audiences, and Pixability, a company that helps brands monitor their YouTube and CTV campaigns, can provide deeper insights into engagement, but they require paid subscriptions.
For this article, I contacted Matt Duffy, the company’s CMO, and Sean Alie, the head of its insights team, to see if they had any critical data or strategic insights worth sharing.
They did – and it appears below.
There are four sections: men’s team views, women’s team views, year-over-year (YoY) data for men’s and women’s teams + men’s vs. women’s teams, and lastly, views by popular players (such as Caitlin Clark, the NCAA Division I all-time leading scorer of the Iowa Hawkeyes in the Big Ten Conference).
Here’s what the men’s NCAA basketball views look like.
They are filtered to sports videos only, and each video includes the keywords “*team name*,” “basketball,” and “men” somewhere in the metadata.
The timeline is February only.
Men’s Basketball
Houston, the #1 ranked team, earned 7.5% more views than the next leading team, Kansas (21M vs 19.6M). Kansas did rank first in engagements, though, earning 13% more engagements than Houston (442K vs 391K).
Duke ranked 3rd in views (16M) and engagements (389K). One thing to note is Houston is the #1 ranked team and the most viewed team on YouTube.
However, Kansas was ranked 14th and Duke 9th, yet they were able to rank 2nd and 3rd in views. This is a testament to the brand awareness these programs hold.
Women’s Basketball
This data uses the same methodology as the men’s data except with “women” as a keyword instead of “men.”
Iowa, home of star Caitlin Clark, earned 51% more views than the next leading program, LSU (12.4M vs 8.2M). This makes sense as Angel Reece plays for LSU and is widely considered the second most popular player in women’s college basketball, after Caitlin.
The individual stars may influence views for women’s programs more than the team’s fan base. Iowa earned 9.5% more engagements than LSU (178.5K vs 162.9K). Indiana ranked 3rd in views, followed by UConn.
Men’s Vs. Women’s Teams And YoY Stats
- The top 16 men’s teams earned a combined 130.8M views in February 2024, which is 157% more than the top 16 women’s teams have earned (50.8M). Men’s teams earned 247% more engagements (2.4M) than women’s teams (690K).
- YoY, the top 16 ranked men’s teams earned 61% more views this year compared to the top 16 ranked teams last year in February (130.8M vs 81.2M).
- YoY, the top 16 ranked women’s teams earned 147% more views this year compared to the top 16 ranked teams last year in February (50.8M vs 20.5M). This means that views for women’s college basketball are growing faster than the men’s. A large part of this was due to the rise of Caitlin Clark.
Views By Popular Basketball Players
The stats below are based on players participating in the tournament: Caitlin Clark earned 17.5M player mention views in February, which is more than any other player in the men’s and women’s tournaments.
Caitlin earned 10.6x more views in February than the highest male player (Kyle Filipowski) views polled in February (17.5M vs 1.6M).
The second most viewed player was also a woman, Angel Reese, who plays for the LSU Tigers in the Southeastern Conference. Angel earned 3.9x more views than Kyle Filipowski, who plays for the Duke Blue Devils in the Atlantic Coast Conference (6.4M vs 1.6M).
The rivalry between these two women stars has fueled incredible engagement on YouTube.
Again, men’s teams are more popular than women’s teams, but at the individual level, women players are outperforming men by a large margin.
Although the USC Trojans of the Pac-12 Conference won’t make the tournament this year, LeBron Raymone “Bronny” James earned 32M views, which is 87% higher than Caitlin Clark’s views.
This is still incredibly impressive for Caitlin as she is putting up numbers that compete with someone as well-known as Bronny James.
Of course, you could figure out who are the most engaged YouTube fans for NCAA basketball teams without using third-party tools.
But that might take so much time that you’d miss some of the games that make March Madness worth watching and create highlights worth sharing on YouTube.
Hey, you make the call.
How Marketers Can Use Insights Into The Most Engaged Fans
So, how can digital marketers use these insights about NCAA basketball’s most engaged fans?
Well, I can think of three key ways to apply what we’ve just learned.
First, as I mentioned in “39 Emotions Digital Marketers Can Use In Advertising,” people share videos that elicit “high-arousal” or intense emotions twice as much as ones that elicit “low-arousal” or moderate emotions. And March Madness elicits several intense emotions.
For example, the Big Dance triggers nostalgia, a sentimental longing or wistful affection for some past period or irrecoverable condition. How do you make use of this insight?
Watch Continental Tire’s “Grant Hill, Christian Laettner, and the Smart Choice!” Basketball legends Grant Hill and Christian Laettner of Duke not only tell us about the importance of making smart choices but also remind us of “The Shot” during the 1992 NCAA tournament.
During a game between East Region #1 seed Duke and #2 seed Kentucky in the East Regional Final to determine a spot in the Final Four, defending national champion Duke trailed 103–102 with 2.1 seconds remaining in overtime.
That’s when Hill threw a pass three-quarters of the length of the court to Laettner, who faked right, dribbled once, turned, and hit a jumper as time expired for the 104–103 win. In 2004, Sports Illustrated called it the greatest college basketball game of all time.
Second, college athletes can now make money from their name, image, and likeness (NIL). So, brands like State Farm Insurance can now feature players like Caitlin Clark in YouTube videos like “Shoot! (feat. Caitlin Clark, Jimmy Butler, Reggie Miller) :30 | State Farm Commercial.”
It’s worth noting that State Farm uploaded this video on Nov. 21, 2023, almost three months before Clark broke “Pistol” Pete Maravich’s NCAA Division I scoring record on Feb. 15, 2024. Kudos to the brand and their agency for being ahead of the curve.
Third, the line between creators and their audiences is blurring.
At last year’s Brandcast, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan told advertisers, “The universe of ‘creators’ is growing every day as more people make videos on their phones.
This limitless access means the world of creation is changing. Fans used to engage with a like or subscribe. But now, you can see a trend and easily jump in with your own video.”
For an example, check out “Meet the New Face of March Madness – Robbie Avila #collegebasketball #indianastate #sports #funny.” BenchwarmerBran, the online alias of Brandon Carney, a sports content creator who makes jokes about teams, players, and fantasy leagues, uploaded this video on March 7, 2024. And it currently has 405,000 views and 63,500 engagements.
If you use Tubular Intelligence, then you will see that 1,536 accounts in the U.S. uploaded 3,208 videos about “March Madness” to YouTube in the last 90 days.
And influencers uploaded 2,359 of these videos (73.5%), while media and entertainment companies uploaded 602 (18.8%), and brands uploaded only 224 (7.0%).
Now, these 3,208 YouTube videos about March Madness got a total of 11.6 million views and 455,000 engagements.
So, targeting affinity segments, people who already have a strong interest in relevant topics, may be a much smarter option than targeting placements, specific YouTube channels or websites and apps on the Google Display Network.
How SEO Pros Can Use This Information, Too
So, how could an SEO specialist use this information to make actionable decisions?
Well, I’m sad to say that some won’t.
Why? As Captain Spock (Leonard Nimoy) said in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn”,
“He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.”
In other words, some intelligent SEO specialists think their job is to work with text, not videos. And they also think that the content that their optimizing is to help people make rational decisions, not emotional ones.
But YouTube videos have been appearing in Google’s search results since May 2007. And as I mentioned in “Customer Personas Can Transform SEO, PPC and Content Marketing,” Google has talked about emotions driving search intent since May 2019.
As Justin De Graaf, Head of Ads Research and Insights at Google, observed back then,
“The truth is, decision-making is not a rational process, but one driven mainly by how people feel. The rational brain layers on reasons for our choices only after they’re made.”
So, if SEO specialists continue to focus on optimizing text to help people make rational decisions, then their pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.
Now, they may continue to be somewhat successful, especially if they can answer “yes” when asked: “After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?”
But, as Google has said,
“The helpful content update aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well.”
So, SEO specialists who can’t create (and optimize) video content that tells a good story and makes a visitor feel something emotionally may struggle to provide a satisfying experience.
In conclusion, this is why it’s worth dreaming about getting a starring role in a Cinderella story.
I realize that you probably won’t get a job at one of those media and entertainment companies and it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be asked to pitch one of those brands in the foreseeable future.
But, if and when your opportunity presents itself, then you will be ready to take your best shot at the buzzer.
More resources:
Featured Image: adriaticfoto/Shutterstock
SEO
7 Easy SEO Tips for Small Businesses
If you’re a small business owner, people are searching for what you do on Google. Unless you show up, you’re missing out on customers or clients.
SEO is how you do that, and the basics are quick and easy.
Follow these tips to rank your small business higher in no time.
If you only do one thing as a small business owner, make it to claim and optimize your GBP.
A Google Business Profile helps users find and learn about your business in Google search and maps. It’s free to set up and lets you share important details about your business with customers, like its phone number, opening times, and offerings.
But here’s the real beauty of Business Profiles: People don’t have to search for your business to see your profile. They can appear for broader searches like “pizza restaurant near me.”
This makes them a powerful way to attract new customers searching for what you do.
Here are the basics of optimizing your profile:
- Set the right business category and type
- Add opening hours (and keep them up to date!)
- Add contact details
- Add photos
- Add your products or services
Learn more in our 30-minute Business Profile optimization guide.
People don’t always turn to Google to find small businesses. They also search popular business directories and trusted review websites.
Even if they do search Google, they’ll often end up browsing a popular directory anyway because that’s often what ranks.
For example, I was recently searching for a cat sitter for an upcoming vacation. I started my search by typing “cat sitter near me” into Google. But I soon ended up browsing a niche directory because that’s what all the top results were.
In fact, I even ended up booking a cat sitter through one of these websites:
Long story short, if you’re not listed on popular niche or local directories, you’re losing out on second-hand search traffic and customers.
Let’s look at a couple of ways to find the best directories to get listed on.
Search Google
Head over to Google and search for “[what your business does] in [location]”, then add your business to directories that rank on the first page.
For example, if you’re a cat sitter in Seattle, you’ll probably want to get listed on:
- Meowtel
- Rover.com
- Yelp
- Care.com
Find the directories your competitors are listed on
Most directory listings also link to your website, which means you can use your competitors’ backlink profile to find relevant directories.
Here’s how to do it in Ahrefs:
- Go to our Competitive Analysis tool
- Select the “referring domains” mode
- Enter your site in the “Not linking to target” field
- Enter the sites of a few competing businesses in the “But linking to these competitors” fields
- Hit “Show link opportunities”
You should see a list of domains that link to your competitors but not you. Eyeball this list for sites that look like relevant directories and add your business to them.
Not sure who your competitors are?
Search Google for “[what your business does] in [location]” and go to Maps. Follow the website links on their profiles to find their domains, then copy and paste them into Ahrefs.
Having technical SEO issues can hurt your rankings, so it’s worth checking that your website is technically sound and fixing any major issues.
The easiest way to do this is with an SEO audit tool like Ahrefs’ Site Audit. You can use this free of charge with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account. Just sign up, follow the steps to crawl your site, then filter the All issues report for Errors:
For advice on what the issues mean and how to fix them, hit the tooltip:
For example, Site Audit found eight 404 pages on our blog during a recent crawl:
To fix this issue, we can either reinstate, redirect, or remove internal links to the pages.
If you also schedule regular crawls in Site Audit, you’ll get alerts about new SEO issues so you can fix them before they cause problems.
People often search for specific products or services rather than what your business does. For example, they might search for “bathroom remodel near me” instead of “plumber near me.”
If they do this, Google tends to show pages about that service, not plumbers’ homepages.
You might struggle to rank for these terms unless you have these pages.
But you might be thinking, “I offer lots of services. I don’t have enough time to create pages for all of them.”
Keyword research is the answer. This is the process of discovering what words and phrases your customers are typing into Google. You can use it to find the products or services they’re searching for the most and then prioritize creating pages about them.
Here’s how to do it:
- Brainstorm all the products or services you offer
- Paste them into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer (make sure to select the country you’re in)
You’ll see the keywords sorted by their estimated monthly search volumes from high to low:
This should give you a good idea of relative interest in the products or services you offer and the pages you should prioritize creating.
Sidenote.
These are national volumes, but that shouldn’t really matter. If a service is more popular than another nationally, it’s probably more popular in the local area where your business operates, too. The only caveat is if you offer something like HVAC services and the climate in your country differs greatly from region to region.
For example, it would make sense to have a page for boiler servicing if it’s something you offer.
Having pages about your products and services is one thing, but you also need to make sure they tell searchers what they want to know. If you know your customers well, you can probably get halfway there easily. But it’s always best to do a bit of research.
For example, I was recently searching for someone to repair our boiler…
My process went a little like this:
- Searched Google for “boiler repair near me”
- Had a quick look at the reviews and websites of the top-ranked businesses
- Called the most promising ones
I knew that our boiler brand isn’t very common, so I was specifically looking for engineers who mentioned working with our brand on their websites. Out of a dozen sites I checked, only one mentioned this:
As a result, this was the first company I called.
If the other engineers had only done a bit of keyword research, they’d have known this is something customers care about and included it on their pages.
Here’s how you can do that in Ahrefs:
- Go to Keywords Explorer
- Search for your product or service (e.g., “boiler repair”)
- Go to the Matching Terms report
- Go to the “Cluster by terms” tab
From here, skim the list for similar terms that might indicate the kind of information searchers are looking for.
For example, the highlighted terms below are all boiler brands:
I also see mentions of different types of boilers, like oil, gas, and electric:
From this quick skim alone, it’s clear that searchers are looking for engineers who can repair their type and brand of boiler.
If you’re a local boiler engineer, having this information not only helps searchers but also saves wasted time answering the phone to give your “Oh… I don’t work with that brand of boiler, sorry!” response.
Can this also help you rank higher?
In all likelihood, yes.
For example, had I searched Google for local engineers who work with our brand of boiler, the engineer’s website that actually mentions the brand ranks in position #3:
Backlinks are a known ranking factor. The only problem is that high-quality backlinks are far from easy to get. (This is what makes them such a good ranking factor.)
For small businesses, taking advantage of existing relationships is a good starting point.
Here are a few ideas:
- Give suppliers testimonials. These often get featured on their sites along with a link.
- Publish client spotlights. For example, if you’re a plumber who recently helped renovate your local church, write it up and ping them about it. They might feature it on their website.
- Pitch stockist pages. For example, if your store stocks a local craft beer, see if the brewery lists its stockists on its website. If its does, you can usually get featured just by asking.
I would also recommend trying to replicate your competitors’ best backlinks. To find these, plug their site into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and check the Backlinks report.
Sidenote.
If there is a lot to go through, toggle the “Best links” filter to narrow things down.
For example, this local plumber has two links from sites listing small businesses that offer discounts to health and other key workers:
Both of these would be pretty easy links to replicate (assuming you’re happy to offer this discount!)
Google itself advises small business owners to remind customers to leave reviews and reply to them to build trust:
As Google says, the easiest way to do this is to create and share a link to your Business Profile with customers. You can do this in “thank you” emails, at the end of customer support interactions, or simply by including a link or QR code on receipts.
This is also likely to help with your “map pack” rankings, at least according to BrightLocal’s survey. It states that 17% of SEOs deem reviews to be the most important ranking factor.
But don’t limit yourself to asking for and replying to reviews on your Google Business Profile. Many customers also trust other websites. If you’re wondering which review sites matter most for your small business, Google its name and look for other review sites in the results.
For example, reviews on TripAdvisor are clearly important for my favorite pizzeria:
For my favorite local craft bottle shop, niche review sites like RateBeer and Untapped seem more important:
FAQs
What is small business SEO?
Small business SEO is the process of improving your online presence to get more customers from Google and other search engines. It almost always revolves heavily around optimizing for local searches.
What are the benefits of small business SEO?
There are three main benefits of doing SEO for your small business:
- More brand awareness. Showing up in more places online means more people will become familiar with your business.
- More traffic. Ranking higher in Google and other search engines leads to more traffic.
- More customers. As long as your traffic is targeted, it’ll bring in more customers or clients.
What’s the difference between small business SEO and local SEO?
Unless you sell products or services beyond your local area, not much.
If your small business sells products nationally or internationally, check out our guide to ecommerce SEO or our guide to international SEO.
If your small business sells services in multiple locations (e.g., car hire), read our guide to local keyword research to learn how to optimize for that.
SEO
A Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist for 2024
If you’ve invested time and effort writing an epic piece of content, don’t forget about on-page SEO. It helps google to understand what your page is about and show it to as many people as possible in the search results.
Even better, many on-page improvements are super quick and easy to do.
Follow this checklist for perfect on-page SEO every time:
If you’re looking for a reusable interactive checklist to use time and time again, here are a few other formats
Let’s run through everything real quick.
Google says it’s best to use words that are relevant to your content in page URLs, so you don’t want random gobbledygook urls like domain.com/734/834753956756
if you can avoid it. It’s better to use something short and descriptive like domain.com/mens/shirts
.
It only takes a few seconds to change this in most content management systems:
If you’re not sure what words or phrases to use, the main keyword you’re targeting is usually a good bet. That’s what we do on the Ahrefs blog 90% of the time.
For example, our target keyword for this post is “on page SEO checklist,” so that’s what the post’s URL is:
Few best practices to keep in mind:
- Avoid repeating words. If your page is about mens shirts and it’s nested in the /mens/ subfolder, you don’t need to repeat the word “mens.”
domain.com/mens/shirts/
is better thandomain.com/mens/mens-shirts/
- Avoid dates. If a searcher comes across
domain.com/blog/2020/fashion-tips/
in 2024, they’re going to assume it’s out-of-date even if you updated the content yesterday. Sodomain.com/blog/fashion-tips/
would be better. - Avoid being too specific. If your URL is
domain.com/blog/20-best-fashion-tips/
, it’s going to look weird if you add more tips to your post later on. Using the less specificdomain.com/blog/best-fashion-tips/
gives you more future freedom.
Google says that title tags are often the main piece of information searchers use to decide which result to click on. If yours is boring and dull, you’re probably not going to get as many clicks as you could—even if you rank.
It’s the same story for meta descriptions, which Google often uses for the descriptive snippet.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for title tags, but the ABC formula is a decent starting point for blog posts:
For your meta description, my best advice is to try to expand on your title tag to give searchers more detail and context.
If you’re struggling or just want a fast solution, give our free AI title tag generator and meta description generator a shot. Tell the tools what your page is about and your desired writing tone and they’ll generate a few options.
Remember to keep them both short and swee, too. If they’re too long, they’ll get cut-off in search. This looks odd and makes them less compelling. You can use a free tool like this one to check for truncation before publishing, or Ahrefs’ Site Audit to find all the issues on your site.
Google recommends using one H1 tag per page. It makes sense to use this for your page title as H1 is the highest level heading there is.
Most content management systems do this automatically, but you can double-check your title is indeed a H1 for free using Ahrefs SEO toolbar. Just click the Content tab:
If the copy you’d expect to be wrapped in a H1 tag isn’t, hit up your developer!
People want what you promised them in your title and meta description, so don’t kick things off with a load of fluff. Get straight to the point and give the reader what they came for in the first sentence.
There’s no one-size-fits-all way to do this. It all depends on what searchers are looking for.
For example, when people search for “toxic backlinks,” they’re overwhelmingly looking for a definition above all else. That’s why I made the very first paragraph of my article the definition:
But when people search for “best snow blower,” they just want a recommendation—so that’s what Wirecutter gives them in the first paragraph:
Sidenote.
I think Wirecutter’s opening paragraph could be even better because there’s no point in that first sentence. If you’re searching for “best snow blower,” you already know the benefits of the product. You just want to know which one is best!
Google’s John Mueller said that the search giant uses headings to help better understand the content on a page. This is why you need to make sure they’re clear and descriptive.
It’s easy to miss the mark here. We’ve even been guilty of it ourselves.
For example, look at these two subheadings from our list of blogging tips:
Do you have any idea what those mean at first glance?
Me neither. And many of the other subheadings in our post were also unclear.
If you suspect the same might be true for your subheadings, try this: ask ChatGPT to rewrite them for clarity.
This is exactly what Sam did for our post, and it made them much clearer in seconds.
For example, “Create a ‘Do 100’ project” became “Start a ‘write 100 blog posts’ project”:
Make sure your subheadings have proper hierarchy, too. It helps Google to understand the structure and makes it easier to skim for readers.
Search intent is the reason behind the search. Unless your page aligns with intent and gives searchers what they’re looking for, your chances of ranking high are slim to none.
To show just how important this is, look at this graph:
This shows our ranking position for the keyword “backlink checker” over time. You can see that in late 2018, we suddenly went from struggling to rank higher than position #5 to consistently ranking #1.
How? By optimizing our page for search intent.
Here’s what the page looked like before:
Here’s what it looks like now:
Minor design tweaks aside, there’s one important difference: there’s now a free backlink checker embedded. Before it just asked visitors to start a trial of our SEO software.
By catering to what searchers actually wanted, we improved the page’s rankings and its estimated search traffic from ~18K to ~215K monthly visits. That’s a 12X improvement!
But how did we know what searchers wanted?
Back then, we had to do a manual analysis of the top search results. While you can still do that, it’s much easier just to click the “Identify intents” button in Keywords Explorer:
This uses the power of AI to analyze the top search results and tell you what searchers are looking for.
Broadly aligning your content with search intent isn’t enough. It should also cover the topic in full to tell searchers everything they want to know. This can help it rank for more keywords and bring more traffic as a result, too.
To find what searchers are looking for, look for common subtopics among top-ranking pages.
There are a few ways you can do this.
Manually check the top-ranking pages
Search for your target keyword in Google, open a few top-ranking pages, and eyeball them for commonalities.
For example, many top results for “best running shoes for flat feet” give a budget option:
Check the keyword rankings of top-ranking pages
Pages often rank for keywords related to the subtopics they cover. If you see many top pages ranking for these keywords, it’s probably an important subtopic to cover.
Here’s how to find these keywords:
- Go to the Competitive Analysis tool in Ahrefs
- Enter your page’s URL in the “This target doesn’t rank for” field. (If you haven’t published your page yet, enter the URL you plan to use.)
- Enter the URLs of a few similar top-ranking pages in the “But these competitors do” fields
- Look for keywords that represent subtopics
For example, the top three results for “best running shoes for flat feet” also rank in the top 10 for many keywords related to men and women’s shoes:
This tells you that the best picks for men and women is an important subtopic to include.
Find subtopics with the help of AI
It’s currently in beta, but the new AI Content Grader in Ahrefs finds “missing” subtopics. It does this by comparing the content of the three top-ranking pages for your target keyword to your content.
To use it, just enter your target keyword and your page’s URL. (If you haven’t published your page yet, enter the URL you plan to use).
For example, here’s one of its suggestions for the keyword “best running shoes for flat feet”:
Information gain is a measure of how unique your content is. Google describes a mechanism for scoring this in a patent granted in June 2022.
Two months later, in August 2022, Google launched the helpful content update, which they described as “part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.”
Are these two things related? Nobody knows. But what we do know is that Google cares about the originality of your content, and almost certainly has mechanisms in place for identifying it.
This means that covering what other top-ranking pages cover isn’t enough for a well-optimized page. It also needs to bring something new and valuable to the table.
For example, my colleague Chris collected data on how folks deal with low-quality backlinks for his post on removing backlinks:
Ryan interviewed three B2B marketers for unique insights for his post on B2B content marketing:
And I worked with Patrick Stox to create an interactive workflow and template for my content audit guide:
None of these posts are completely unique. They contain plenty of information that you can probably find elsewhere—and that’s fine. What matters is that we’re bringing at least something new to the table.
Google’s algorithms are designed to surface content that demonstrates E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust.
If you’re an expert in your field or crafted your content from personal experience, your page already has E-E-A-T. But searchers aren’t going to know that without reading it, so you should try to showcase it as obviously as you can on the page. Let’s look at two ways to do this.
Flash your credentials
Healthline does this extremely well. The very first thing you see on their page about rheumatoid arthritis is that the content was reviewed by a rheumatologist:
Put your uniqueness front and center
If you’ve put time and effort into adding “information gain” to your content, don’t bury it. Make sure searchers see it right away so they know they can trust you.
For example, to curate our list of the best Facebook groups for SEOs, we asked the 12K+ members of our customer-only group to vote for their favorites. Instead of burying this fact deep in the post, we highlighted it in the very first paragraph.
For a page to earn backlinks (which are a strong ranking factor) and shares, people have to actually consume the content. This isn’t going to happen if the copy is hard to read.
You can use free tools like Hemingway and Grammarly to fix this.
For example, Hemingway gives my recent guide to toxic backlinks a reading grade level of 7:
Given that 54% of Americans lack literary proficiency (essentially reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level), this means we’re alienating at least 46% of readers. If we could bring the reading grade level down, more people would be able to read it.
Sidenote.
This isn’t absolutely necessary for every topic. It depends on who your audience is. If they’re technical folks, don’t worry about it. But if you’re publishing content for the masses, accessibility matters.
Here are a few more tips to improve readability:
- Use short sentences and paragraphs
- Use bulleted lists
- Use images
Featured snippets give searchers a short answer right in the search results.
But here’s the cool thing: Google pulls the snippet from one of the top-ranking pages. This means that if your page already ranks in the top 10 for keywords where Google shows a featured snippet, there might be an opportunity to steal it without much effort.
This is exactly what I managed to do a couple of months ago, which led to a ~38.9% jump in estimated search traffic to our page:
Here’s what happened:
In Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, I used the Organic Keywords report to find the page’s top 10 keyword rankings with featured snippets we didn’t own.
Right away, I noticed a trend: many of the keywords were people searching for the most searched thing in Google (singular) rather than a list of top searches (plural):
After searching for a few of these keywords in Google, I saw that the snippet was pretty much always pulled from this very short paragraph in a competing post:
So… I added a similar paragraph to our post (using our data instead):
This quick big of on-page SEO won our page 163 more featured snippets:
Images on your page can rank in Google Images and send you more traffic. There are three things you need to do to optimize them.
Filenames are descriptive
Google says that these give clues about the subject matter, so avoid random file names like IMG_5497.jpg in favor of something short and descriptive like brown-dog.jpg.
Alt text is present and descriptive
Google also says that image alt text helps them understand subject matter, so the same rules apply as filenames: keep them short and descriptive.
Most content management systems have a place to add alt text in the UI, so there’s no need to mess around with HTML:
Images are compressed
Compressed images are smaller and faster to load. Some platforms like Shopify claim to do this automatically, but the results aren’t always great. It’s generally better to employ the help of a plugin like TinyIMG or Shortpixel.
Internal links are links from one page on your site to another. They help Google understand what a page is about and boost its authority, which can lead to higher rankings.
For this reason, when you publish a new page, it pays to internally link from there to other relevant pages. This won’t help the new page’s rankings, but it might help the rankings of the pages you internally link to.
To find relevant opportuntities, use Ahrefs’ Site Audit:
- Go to the Internal Link Opportunities tool
- Enter the URL of your newly-published page in the search box
- Choose “Source page” from the dropdown
Sidenote.
Site Audit needs to have crawled your site since you published the new page, otherwise this won’t work.
Pay attention to these columns:
- Source page → your newly-published page, where you will add the link
- Keyword context → where on the page to add the link
- Target page → where to link to
For example, here the report is suggesting that I link from my post on toxic backlinks to our bad links guide:
Citing valuable resources is helpful for readers. Even Google says so.
Does that mean it’s a “ranking factor?” No. But it does improve your content’s credibility with readers, and that can impact things that do matter like links and shares.
This is something we regularly do on the Ahrefs blog:
If you’re trying to boost the rankings of the page you’re optimizing, you’ll want to add internal links to it from other pages on your site.
To find relevant opportunities, use Ahrefs’ Site Audit:
- Go to the Page Explorer tool
- Enter your target keyword (or part of it) in the search box
- Choose “Page text” from the dropdown
This will find pages on your site that mention your target keyword, which may be good places to add internal links.
For example, it tells us that our guide to removing backlinks mentions the word “toxic”:
If we search that page, this is the mention:
That looks like the perfect place to internally link to our guide to toxic backlinks.
Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. It also powers many rich snippets you see in Google, which can lead to more clicks.
If you’re not sure whether schema markup is worth prioritizing for your page, search for your main target keyword in Google and look at the top results. If all or many are rich results, it’s probably worth adding it.
If you use WordPress, you can easily add schema with a plugin like Yoast or RankMath. Alternatively, use a tool like Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator to generate the JSON-LD code yourself and add it manually.
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