SEO
8 Reasons (And How to Get Started)
No matter your line of work, people are searching for your business online.
Let’s look at a few reasons why search engine optimization (SEO) is important.
Look at these SEO stats:
- 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search.
- 92.96% of global traffic comes from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps.
- SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media.
If you want more traffic coming to your website, you need to rank high on Google. To do that, you need SEO.
Did you know that 90.63% of pages get zero traffic from Google?
This likely happens because these pages:
- Have no backlinks.
- Are not targeting topics with search traffic potential.
- Are not matching search intent.
- Are not indexed by Google.
To fix them, you need to:
- Get your pages indexed by Google.
- Target topics with search traffic potential.
- Align your content with search intent.
- Earn or build backlinks.
Guess what? These are all crucial aspects of SEO. That’s why SEO is important.
When you promote your content, you’ll get a short burst of traffic. But this doesn’t last.
However, if your content ranks high on Google, you can get consistent traffic month after month.
For example, take a look at the organic traffic coming to our link building guide. It was first published in 2016, and traffic has only continued to grow:
Your potential customers almost certainly turn to Google when they have a problem. Depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey, the way they search and the queries they use will be different.
For example, if you have a product that helps businesses with outbound sales emailing, a naive prospect may use search to figure out their problem, with queries like these:
- Why do emails from me end up in spam
- Sales email subject lines
- How to check if email was opened
Later on, this same searcher may learn about sales automation and realize that products that help them send deliverable emails and check open rates exist.
They’ve now moved into a different stage of the buyer’s journey, searching terms like “best sales outreach tools” or even for brand names and specific technical features.
At each stage, there’s an opportunity to create and rank content that addresses a wide array of questions and concerns:
If you can rank strategically for content that answers the queries your customers have and search for, then it’s as if you magically show up every step of the way and cement your brand into your prospects’ minds.
You’ll be top of mind when it comes time to buy.
Only 0.63% of Google searchers click on results from the second page. If you’re not ranking for your niche’s top keywords, then someone else is.
It can be a brutal competition.
And SEO is the price of entry.
The Ahrefs Blog gets an estimated 380,000 monthly search visits:
If we had to acquire this traffic from Google Ads, we would have to pay an estimated $860,000 per month.
But we’re paying nowhere near that amount for our content marketing efforts, so it’s reasonable to say SEO is more cost effective in the long run.
If you’re a local business or your business has a physical presence, you’ll want to appear on Google Maps when someone searches for your business or related keywords:
To do this, you’ll need to create a Google Business Profile—which is part of doing local SEO.
Setting up a Google Business Profile is straightforward:
- Claim your business profile
- Add your business hours and details
- Manage your profile, share any business updates, and respond to customer reviews
SEO Lily Ray ran a survey of 1,100 respondents and found the majority of them trust the information they find on Google—both in terms of the results themselves, as well as the content they find within SERP features (e.g., featured snippets).
That means if your website or your content appears at the top of the results whenever your potential customers search on Google, it shows you’re trustworthy and an authority in your industry.
When it’s time for them to buy, your brand will be top of mind.
Convinced that you need to start doing SEO? Here’s how you can get started.
1. Run a technical audit of your website
If search engines cannot find, crawl, or index your website, then you can’t rank your website for any important keywords. So the first and most important step is to make sure there aren’t any technical SEO issues hindering you from ranking.
To do this, audit your website by signing up for our free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and running a crawl using Site Audit.
When the crawl is done, you’ll see all the top issues for your site. Click on the number in the Crawled column to see the affected URLs.
You can also click on the “?” to see why it’s an issue and how to fix it:
2. Target topics with search traffic potential
If you want search traffic coming to your website, you need to target topics that people are actually searching for. You can find these topics by doing keyword research.
One way to get started is to see what topics your competitors are already ranking for. Here’s how:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter a competitor’s domain
- Go to the Top pages report
- Toggle SERP titles on
Here, you’ll see the pages sending the most search traffic to your competitor’s website.
Look through the report and pick out the keywords that are relevant to your website.
3. Create content that ranks
Once you have a list of keywords you want to target, you’ll have to create pages that are optimized for them.
By optimization, I don’t mean “mention the keywords as many times as possible.” Keyword stuffing no longer works. Google today can understand synonyms and semantically related words.
What should you do then? Here are the best practices:
- Align your content with search intent – This is the reason behind why someone is searching. You’ll want to look at the SERPs for your target keyword and see what kind of pages are ranking. For example, are they mostly category pages, product pages, landing pages, or blog posts? If they’re blog posts, what type of blog posts are they?
- Cover important subtopics – If the top-ranking pages mostly talk about similar things, it may mean that searchers are looking for them. So you’ll want to include these subtopics in your content. Look at the subheadings for the top-ranking pages or run a content gap analysis.
- Make your content unique – Ultimately, your content needs to stand out so people will click through from the SERPs. (Being unique also helps with earning links.) Find an angle or include original tidbits that the top-ranking pages don’t have. These could come from your personal experience, expertise, data, interviews, and more.
- Ensure your content is simple to read – People are busy. They don’t want to read more than what’s necessary. Keep your words simple, use formatting like bullets, and insert plenty of images, videos, GIFs, and more.
- Sprinkle on your on-page SEO – This is the “icing” on the cake that makes it extra clear to Google and searchers that your page is relevant. Follow the best practices in our on-page SEO guide.
4. Promote your content
Links are an important Google ranking factor. In fact, according to Google’s Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the top three ranking signals:
But links can’t appear out of nowhere. Even if your content is valuable, people need to know it exists before they can link to it. That’s why you need to promote your content and build awareness.
Here are some tips on promoting your content:
- Share it with your audience on email and social media – If you don’t have an audience yet, it’s time to start building!
- Email people you’ve mentioned in your content – If you’ve linked to or mentioned anyone or their work in your post, let them know.
- Distribute your content in communities – If you’re part of any online community, say Slack, Discord, or Reddit, share your content there. Make sure to provide value and don’t spam.
- Add internal links – Internal links are how Google and visitors find new pages. Don’t forget to add them whenever you publish something new. If you’re using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, you can check out the Internal link opportunities report in Site Audit to find places where you can internally link pages together.
- Build links – Look for potential people you can reach out to via Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, find their emails, then reach out to them.
For example, say we search for “mechanical keyboard” and apply the following filters:
- Domain Rating: 30–90
- Website traffic: 500+
- Words: 500+
- Language: English
- Live & Broken: Only live
- Filter explicit results: On
- One page per domain: Checked
- Exclude homepages: Checked
- Exclude subdomains: Checked
Doing so gets you over 3,800 potential websites you could reach out to:
Find their emails and reach out to them.
Learn more
Need to convince your boss or upper management to invest in SEO? Check out these resources:
Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out these guides:
Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter.
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
SEO
All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024
Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.
What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?”
Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.
Let’s go!
OUR HUGE SCREEN
The largest presentation screen I’ve ever seen! #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/oboiMFW1TN
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is the biggest presentation screen I ever seen in my life. It’s like iMax for SEO presentations. #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/sAfZ1rtePx
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF
It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.
The Ahrefs conference venue feels like being in inception. #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/18Yjai1Cej
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
I’m in Singapore for @ahrefs Evolve this week. Keen to connect with people doing interesting work on the future of search / AI #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/s00UkIbxpf
— Alex Denning (@AlexDenning) October 23, 2024
OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
“would I even do this if Google didn’t exist?” – what a great question to assess if you actually have the right focus when creating content amazing presentation from @amandaecking at #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/a6OKbKxwiS
— Aleyda Solis ️ (@aleyda) October 24, 2024
Attending @CyrusShepard ‘s talk on WTF is Helpful Content in Google’s algorithm at #AhrefsEvolve
“Focus on people first content”
Super relevant for content creators who want to stay ahead of the ever evolving Google search curve! #SEOTalk #SEO pic.twitter.com/KRTL13SB0g
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) October 24, 2024
@thinking_slows thoughts on AI content – “it’s very good if you want to be average”.
We can do a lot better and Ryan explains how. Love it @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/qFqWs6QBH5
— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) October 24, 2024
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
GREAT MUSIC
First time I’ve ever Shazam’d a track during SEO conference ambience…. and the track wasn’t even Shazamable! #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs pic.twitter.com/ZDzJOZMILt
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2024
AMAZING GOODIES
Ahrefs Evolveきました！@ahrefs @AhrefsJP #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/33EiejQPdX
— さくらぎ (@sakuragi_ksy) October 24, 2024
Aside from the very interesting topics, what makes this conference even cooler are the ton of awesome freebies
Kudos for making all of these happen for #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs team pic.twitter.com/DGzk5FSTN8
— Krista Melgarejo (@kimelgarejo) October 24, 2024
Content Goblin and SEO alligator party stickers are definitely going on my laptop. @ahrefs #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/QBsBuY5Yix
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is one of the best swag bags I’ve received at any conference!
Either @ahrefs actually cares or the other conference swag bags aren’t up to par w Ahrefs!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/Yc9e6wZPHn— Moses Sanchez (@SanchezMoses) October 25, 2024
SELFIE BATTLE
Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!
Got the rare selfie with both @timsoulo and @samsgoh #AhrefsEvolve
— Bernard Huang (@bernardjhuang) October 24, 2024
THAT BELL
Everybody’s just waiting for this one.
@timsoulo @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/6ypWaTGDDP
— Jinbo Liang (@JinboLiang) October 24, 2024
STICKER WALL
Viva la vida, viva Seo!
Awante Argentina loco!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/sfhbI2kWSH
— Gaston Riera. (@GastonRiera) October 24, 2024
AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!
#AhrefsEvolve let’s goooooooooooo!!! pic.twitter.com/THtdvdtUyB
— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 24, 2024
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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!
