SEO
How to Create Great Content for Search
A lot of content that you’ll find on the web is created by SEOs or writers who do a little research and rehash a lot of the things other articles talk about. Some content may even cover a topic well and touch on the main points. But the information is usually basic, and the articles all read the same. While this content may bring you some search traffic, it’s not going to impress anyone.
Great content needs to be useful and memorable. It has to go beyond other content in a way that shows real expertise.
With brand-new content, you have an uphill battle. Many of the pages that are currently ranking have likely been in those positions for years. In fact, the average top 10 ranking page is 2+ years old.
They’ve had time to gain a lot of links, and many of the pages may have updated content. If you want to beat these sites, you really have to put in the work needed and go that extra mile to create great content.
In this article, we’ll look at the following:
Let’s dive in.
Creating content is hard work. But to truly make something special takes even more work, resources, and expertise. You need to have a great process and the right team in place.
Here’s a framework that may help.
What content should you create?
Rather than starting with a list of keywords as SEOs usually do, I like to start with page-level research and then work backward to keywords and topics.
Plug each of your organic search competitors into the Top pages report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and export the files. I recommend saving them in a new folder.
Export the top pages of competing sites.
Now we need to combine all the files with the top pages from different competitors. You may want to do this with one of the online tool options to combine CSV files if that’s easier for you.
But I usually do this with Windows Command Prompt. Here’s the process with Command Prompt. You should:
- Save the files to a new folder.
- Get the path either by using shift+right-click on the folder and “Copy as path,” or copy it from the address bar when viewing the contents of the folder.
- Open Command Prompt, which you can find by searching “cmd.”
- Type “cd,” press “Space,” right-click and paste, then press “Enter.”
- Type “copy *.csv whatever-name.csv” and press “Enter.”
For MacOS, you’ll use Terminal instead of Command Prompt, and the command to combine them is “cat *.csv >whatever-name.csv” for step five. But otherwise, the instructions should be the same.
What you end up with is an easy-to-filter list of the most successful pages your competitors have created in your niche.
Combine CSV file with the top pages of competitors.
- With this file, go to “Insert” > “Pivot Table” > press “OK.”
- From there, select “Top Keyword” and either “Traffic” or “Traffic Value,” and optionally “URL” if you want to see which competitor pages are ranking for terms.
- You’ll want to use “Data” > “Sort” to get an idea of valuable content in your niche and may need to adjust the column width to make it easier to read.
Here’s what the process looks like:
Process for turning this data into a pivot table.
You’ll end up with a useful pivot table like this:
Pivot table showing top pages.
Once you’ve determined the content driving value to competitors, then you probably want to prioritize which ones have the most business value for you. Then you can go back to keyword research to determine what you should include in your content.
Keyword research
Being able to see all the things that people search for is like having a superpower. People are telling you all the things they want. They’re giving you a blueprint of the content they find useful, and that’s exactly what you should include in your content.
Plug a term into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and go to the Matching terms report. With all of the terms, you want to group them in a way that makes sense to you. We have some suggested groupings either by common terms or parent topics.
Matching terms report for “content marketing.”
You may want to go even further for grouping. For example, for head terms (short searches with high search volume) that are mostly informational, the head term itself—“what is head term”—and “definition of head term” will likely all have the same intent and can be grouped together.
With your terms or groups of terms, you want to determine what should be targeted as a page or just be part of another page. There’s not really a right or wrong answer here. Again, you just need to organize the data in a way that makes sense to you.
You may not want to create pages for things where you don’t have much to say or if there aren’t enough people searching for the terms.
There’s an exercise I like to do that helps people understand this part. Print or write all the terms on index cards. I’ll have people or teams of people group these in whatever way makes sense to them. I’ll even share how I group them. What’s fun is it’s rare for two groupings to be the exact same.
Sometimes, a page with more content on a topic will work better. Other times, a page that’s more specific and specialized will work better. The main thing for now is to create the content. You can later test if it performs better combined or separated.
Now that you know what you want to write about, let’s look at that process.
Create an outline or content brief
Every article and video we create at Ahrefs starts with an outline. We use the data from the keyword research process to come up with the main content we want to include.
From there, we add any important points we want to make, data we have, and additional insights or expertise that will be useful to readers.
You may want to read through some of the pages that already rank for additional ideas. Look at the kind of language and related topics that are mentioned. Many of these terms may not show up in traditional keyword research.
We also have a report in Keywords Explorer that can help you see the related topics and language. It’s called the Also talk about report and shows you the kind of language that’s used on these ranking pages.
Even for something that you may know absolutely nothing about, you can get an idea of the kind of language used in the industry. You may want to include this kind of terminology when writing about your topic.
Also talk about report for “brain surgery.”
That covers the basics of the outline, but there are a couple of additional items I like to add.
Writing for featured snippets
For informational content, I recommend that you do a little more research and include the featured snippets that are currently eligible or even write a featured snippet that you think has a chance of becoming the top snippet.
This is arguably the most important section to rank for informational queries. You can see what is already eligible for a snippet and the kind of things that these snippets mention, along with why one may be better than another. Now you just have to make something that’s better.
Here’s an example: For “how to create content,” the main snippet is from inc.com.
Google search result for “how to create content.”
If you append “-inc.com” to your search, you’re removing this site from the results and can see the second eligible featured snippet from hubspot.com.
Google search result for “how to create content ‑inc.com.”
You can repeat this process, removing more sites from the results to see more eligible featured snippets; also, you can glean insights into what it takes to get featured snippets and figure out why one may be considered better than another.
For some head terms that are more informational in nature, you may have to refine the query as “what is head term” for this to work.
Internal links
The other thing that I like to include is suggested internal links that will go to the new piece of content.
Ever had content that ranked well early on, but the rankings dropped shortly after? New content can inherit some signals and may rank well for a period of time. But eventually, it has to rank with its own signals.
To give your content its best chance to rank, go ahead and link to it where it makes sense in your other content.
If your content already exists, we make this easy for you in Ahrefs’ Site Audit with the Link opportunities report. For instance, for the recently updated content audit post we wrote, there are nine opportunities we can link to using relevant anchor text.
Internal link opportunities for content audit.
With a brand-new blog, what you may want to do is use Page Explorer within Site Audit to search for relevant terms within the text of other pages. In this case, you can see we have 33 pages that talk about content audits. These can potentially link to the blog post about content audits.
Searching for “content audit” within the page text of ahrefs.com.
You’ll only get so far in most niches with content alone, and you’ll likely need links to rank higher. You can go after external links later, but internal links are an easier target.
For instance, when I disavowed links to some of our blog posts, all of the posts lost several positions for important terms and quite a bit of traffic.
With your outline in hand, let’s look at how to create the content.
Producing the content
I’d argue that a single person isn’t likely able to create great content. It usually takes a team of people with different skills.
The team I usually want includes an SEO, an expert, a writer, and an editor involved in the process.
It’s possible that one person can fill more than one of these roles, and there are tools you can lean on for the various functions (except expert insights). But the content is never going to come out as great as the one created by all of these people.
For example, for this article, I’m filling the role of SEO, expert, and writer. I can comfortably fill the SEO and expert roles in this case. In fact, much of the article is about my personal processes.
However, I’ve never been a great writer. Someone who likes to write and has a way with words will likely produce content much faster than I can. Also, their content will likely be easier to understand and more enjoyable to read.
Research
SEOs have the tools and experience to do research, target the right things, and create content that will likely rank well in search. However, most SEOs will probably not be writing about SEO, so they will not be the expert.
While I’ve known many SEOs who have crazy amounts of knowledge in random niches their clients are in, they’re not involved in that niche directly and aren’t true experts.
At best, they can fake expertise by copying what others said, which may not even be correct. This happens with articles on SEO a lot, where people copy and repeat what someone said without knowing that information is wrong. This causes bad information to spread to even more SEOs.
An SEO may even be able to identify some of the language or abbreviations that are used in a niche or relevant related topics and maybe even repeat some points they read, but they lack real expertise and unique insights.
At least some basic research and processes are required to create content for search. Lots of content is created but never gets seen. According to our search traffic study, only ~4% of pages get more than 10 visits a month from organic search.
Knowledge and insights
Experts have years of knowledge and experience in what they do. Most of the time, the people creating articles for search will not have this in-depth knowledge and experience.
Experts are busy being the experts and are rarely the ones who create content. What you really want is to differentiate your articles, show that expertise, and provide those additional insights.
This takes additional work. But if you can interview the expert or have them review the content for accuracy and add their additional insights, this can really differentiate you from the crowd.
If you find a unicorn, i.e., an expert who wants to write their own content, then support them with the research and editing needed to make their content better.
Writing
The output of a good writer is incredible. Their articles are clear, to the point, and a pleasure to read. Anyone can write, but it’s truly an art and a skill to write well.
When you’re writing, you want to cover a topic well. A page may be targeted toward one or two main terms or topics, but top pages usually get traffic from hundreds of different keywords.
Editing
A good editor pays attention to details. They make suggestions and give feedback to writers on how to make their articles better and communicate more effectively. They do a lot more than what Grammarly or Hemingway can.
There are a lot of different indicators you can use to measure success. There’s no one right answer for this, so measure what is important to you.
Different indicators have different use cases. SEOs may want to look at rankings, traffic, or links. But ultimately, businesses should measure things like conversions, qualified leads, and revenue.
The closer to money you can get when reporting, the more impactful that report is for stakeholders. If the content isn’t meeting your goals or expectations, you may want to revisit and audit the content created for search periodically to assess its performance and figure out if/how you can improve it.
If you’re using WordPress, check out the Ahrefs WordPress SEO Plugin, which helps with content audits and more. If you’re not on WordPress or just want a visual guide, this flowchart covers how I make decisions.
Content audit flowchart.
Final thoughts
Creating great content is hard work and requires a lot of resources. If you skimp in some areas, it creates an opportunity for a competitor to beat you.
Being the leader is also hard. You’ve set the bar. Now people behind you know the expectations they have to meet or exceed if they want to win. That’s why I highly recommend evaluating your most important content from time to time to make sure you’re still ranking where you need to be.
Message me on Twitter if you have any questions.
SEO
An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices For Mobile SEO
Over the years, search engines have encouraged businesses to improve mobile experience on their websites. More than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile, and in some cases based on the industry, mobile traffic can reach up to 90%.
Since Google has completed its switch to mobile-first indexing, the question is no longer “if” your website should be optimized for mobile, but how well it is adapted to meet these criteria. A new challenge has emerged for SEO professionals with the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which replaced First Input Delay (FID) starting March, 12 2024.
Thus, understanding mobile SEO’s latest advancements, especially with the shift to INP, is crucial. This guide offers practical steps to optimize your site effectively for today’s mobile-focused SEO requirements.
What Is Mobile SEO And Why Is It Important?
The goal of mobile SEO is to optimize your website to attain better visibility in search engine results specifically tailored for mobile devices.
This form of SEO not only aims to boost search engine rankings, but also prioritizes enhancing mobile user experience through both content and technology.
While, in many ways, mobile SEO and traditional SEO share similar practices, additional steps related to site rendering and content are required to meet the needs of mobile users and the speed requirements of mobile devices.
Does this need to be a priority for your website? How urgent is it?
Consider this: 58% of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices.
If you aren’t focused on mobile users, there is a good chance you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of traffic.
Mobile-First Indexing
Additionally, as of 2023, Google has switched its crawlers to a mobile-first indexing priority.
This means that the mobile experience of your site is critical to maintaining efficient indexing, which is the step before ranking algorithms come into play.
Read more: Where We Are Today With Google’s Mobile-First Index
How Much Of Your Traffic Is From Mobile?
How much traffic potential you have with mobile users can depend on various factors, including your industry (B2B sites might attract primarily desktop users, for example) and the search intent your content addresses (users might prefer desktop for larger purchases, for example).
Regardless of where your industry and the search intent of your users might be, the future will demand that you optimize your site experience for mobile devices.
How can you assess your current mix of mobile vs. desktop users?
An easy way to see what percentage of your users is on mobile is to go into Google Analytics 4.
- Click Reports in the left column.
- Click on the Insights icon on the right side of the screen.
- Scroll down to Suggested Questions and click on it.
- Click on Technology.
- Click on Top Device model by Users.
- Then click on Top Device category by Users under Related Results.
- The breakdown of Top Device category will match the date range selected at the top of GA4.
You can also set up a report in Looker Studio.
- Add your site to the Data source.
- Add Device category to the Dimension field.
- Add 30-day active users to the Metric field.
- Click on Chart to select the view that works best for you.
Screenshot from Looker Studio, March 2024You can add more Dimensions to really dig into the data to see which pages attract which type of users, what the mobile-to-desktop mix is by country, which search engines send the most mobile users, and so much more.
Read more: Why Mobile And Desktop Rankings Are Different
How To Check If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Now that you know how to build a report on mobile and desktop usage, you need to figure out if your site is optimized for mobile traffic.
While Google removed the mobile-friendly testing tool from Google Search Console in December 2023, there are still a number of useful tools for evaluating your site for mobile users.
Bing still has a mobile-friendly testing tool that will tell you the following:
- Viewport is configured correctly.
- Page content fits device width.
- Text on the page is readable.
- Links and tap targets are sufficiently large and touch-friendly.
- Any other issues detected.
Google’s Lighthouse Chrome extension provides you with an evaluation of your site’s performance across several factors, including load times, accessibility, and SEO.
To use, install the Lighthouse Chrome extension.
- Go to your website in your browser.
- Click on the orange lighthouse icon in your browser’s address bar.
- Click Generate Report.
- A new tab will open and display your scores once the evaluation is complete.
Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024You can also use the Lighthouse report in Developer Tools in Chrome.
- Simply click on the three dots next to the address bar.
- Select “More Tools.”
- Select Developer Tools.
- Click on the Lighthouse tab.
- Choose “Mobile” and click the “Analyze page load” button.
Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024Another option that Google offers is the PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool. Simply add your URL into the field and click Analyze.
PSI will integrate any Core Web Vitals scores into the resulting view so you can see what your users are experiencing when they come to your site.
Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, March 2024Other tools, like WebPageTest.org, will graphically display the processes and load times for everything it takes to display your webpages.
With this information, you can see which processes block the loading of your pages, which ones take the longest to load, and how this affects your overall page load times.
You can also emulate the mobile experience by using Developer Tools in Chrome, which allows you to switch back and forth between a desktop and mobile experience.
Screenshot from Google Chrome Developer Tools, March 2024Lastly, use your own mobile device to load and navigate your website:
- Does it take forever to load?
- Are you able to navigate your site to find the most important information?
- Is it easy to add something to cart?
- Can you read the text?
Read more: Google PageSpeed Insights Reports: A Technical Guide
How To Optimize Your Site Mobile-First
With all these tools, keep an eye on the Performance and Accessibility scores, as these directly affect mobile users.
Expand each section within the PageSpeed Insights report to see what elements are affecting your score.
These sections can give your developers their marching orders for optimizing the mobile experience.
While mobile speeds for cellular networks have steadily improved around the world (the average speed in the U.S. has jumped to 27.06 Mbps from 11.14 Mbps in just eight years), speed and usability for mobile users are at a premium.
Read more: Top 7 SEO Benefits Of Responsive Web Design
Best Practices For Mobile Optimization
Unlike traditional SEO, which can focus heavily on ensuring that you are using the language of your users as it relates to the intersection of your products/services and their needs, optimizing for mobile SEO can seem very technical SEO-heavy.
While you still need to be focused on matching your content with the needs of the user, mobile search optimization will require the aid of your developers and designers to be fully effective.
Below are several key factors in mobile SEO to keep in mind as you’re optimizing your site.
Site Rendering
How your site responds to different devices is one of the most important elements in mobile SEO.
The two most common approaches to this are responsive design and dynamic serving.
Responsive design is the most common of the two options.
Using your site’s cascading style sheets (CSS) and flexible layouts, as well as responsive content delivery networks (CDN) and modern image file types, responsive design allows your site to adjust to a variety of screen sizes, orientations, and resolutions.
With the responsive design, elements on the page adjust in size and location based on the size of the screen.
You can simply resize the window of your desktop browser and see how this works.
Screenshot from web.dev, March 2024This is the approach that Google recommends.
Adaptive design, also known as dynamic serving, consists of multiple fixed layouts that are dynamically served to the user based on their device.
Sites can have a separate layout for desktop, smartphone, and tablet users. Each design can be modified to remove functionality that may not make sense for certain device types.
This is a less efficient approach, but it does give sites more control over what each device sees.
While these will not be covered here, two other options:
- Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which can seamlessly integrate into a mobile app.
- Separate mobile site/URL (which is no longer recommended).
Read more: An Introduction To Rendering For SEO
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
Google has introduced Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a more comprehensive measure of user experience, succeeding First Input Delay. While FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with your page (e.g., clicking a link, tapping a button) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. INP, on the other hand, broadens the scope by measuring the responsiveness of a website throughout the entire lifespan of a page, not just first interaction.
Note that actions such as hovering and scrolling do not influence INP, however, keyboard-driven scrolling or navigational actions are considered keystrokes that may activate events measured by INP but not scrolling which is happeing due to interaction.
Scrolling may indirectly affect INP, for example in scenarios where users scroll through content, and additional content is lazy-loaded from the API. While the act of scrolling itself isn’t included in the INP calculation, the processing, necessary for loading additional content, can create contention on the main thread, thereby increasing interaction latency and adversely affecting the INP score.
What qualifies as an optimal INP score?
- An INP under 200ms indicates good responsiveness.
- Between 200ms and 500ms needs improvement.
- Over 500ms means page has poor responsiveness.
and these are common issues causing poor INP scores:
- Long JavaScript Tasks: Heavy JavaScript execution can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to respond to user interactions. Thus break long JS tasks into smaller chunks by using scheduler API.
- Large DOM (HTML) Size: A large DOM ( starting from 1500 elements) can severely impact a website’s interactive performance. Every additional DOM element increases the work required to render pages and respond to user interactions.
- Inefficient Event Callbacks: Event handlers that execute lengthy or complex operations can significantly affect INP scores. Poorly optimized callbacks attached to user interactions, like clicks, keypress or taps, can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to render visual feedback promptly. For example when handlers perform heavy computations or initiate synchronous network requests such on clicks.
and you can troubleshoot INP issues using free and paid tools.
As a good starting point I would recommend to check your INP scores by geos via treo.sh which will give you a great high level insights where you struggle with most.
INP scores by GeosRead more: How To Improve Interaction To Next Paint (INP)
Image Optimization
Images add a lot of value to the content on your site and can greatly affect the user experience.
From page speeds to image quality, you could adversely affect the user experience if you haven’t optimized your images.
This is especially true for the mobile experience. Images need to adjust to smaller screens, varying resolutions, and screen orientation.
- Use responsive images
- Implement lazy loading
- Compress your images (use WebP)
- Add your images into sitemap
Optimizing images is an entire science, and I advise you to read our comprehensive guide on image SEO how to implement the mentioned recommendations.
Avoid Intrusive Interstitials
Google rarely uses concrete language to state that something is a ranking factor or will result in a penalty, so you know it means business about intrusive interstitials in the mobile experience.
Intrusive interstitials are basically pop-ups on a page that prevent the user from seeing content on the page.
John Mueller, Google’s Senior Search Analyst, stated that they are specifically interested in the first interaction a user has after clicking on a search result.
Not all pop-ups are considered bad. Interstitial types that are considered “intrusive” by Google include:
- Pop-ups that cover most or all of the page content.
- Non-responsive interstitials or pop-ups that are impossible for mobile users to close.
- Pop-ups that are not triggered by a user action, such as a scroll or a click.
Read more: 7 Tips To Keep Pop-Ups From Harming Your SEO
Structured Data
Most of the tips provided in this guide so far are focused on usability and speed and have an additive effect, but there are changes that can directly influence how your site appears in mobile search results.
Search engine results pages (SERPs) haven’t been the “10 blue links” in a very long time.
They now reflect the diversity of search intent, showing a variety of different sections to meet the needs of users. Local Pack, shopping listing ads, video content, and more dominate the mobile search experience.
As a result, it’s more important than ever to provide structured data markup to the search engines, so they can display rich results for users.
In this example, you can see that both Zojirushi and Amazon have included structured data for their rice cookers, and Google is displaying rich results for both.
Screenshot from search for [Japanese rice cookers], Google, March 2024Adding structured data markup to your site can influence how well your site shows up for local searches and product-related searches.
Using JSON-LD, you can mark up the business, product, and services data on your pages in Schema markup.
If you use WordPress as the content management system for your site, there are several plugins available that will automatically mark up your content with structured data.
Read more: What Structured Data To Use And Where To Use It?
Content Style
When you think about your mobile users and the screens on their devices, this can greatly influence how you write your content.
Rather than long, detailed paragraphs, mobile users prefer concise writing styles for mobile reading.
Each key point in your content should be a single line of text that easily fits on a mobile screen.
Your font sizes should adjust to the screen’s resolution to avoid eye strain for your users.
If possible, allow for a dark or dim mode for your site to further reduce eye strain.
Headers should be concise and address the searcher’s intent. Rather than lengthy section headers, keep it simple.
Finally, make sure that your text renders in a font size that’s readable.
Read more: 10 Tips For Creating Mobile-Friendly Content
Tap Targets
As important as text size, the tap targets on your pages should be sized and laid out appropriately.
Tap targets include navigation elements, links, form fields, and buttons like “Add to Cart” buttons.
Targets smaller than 48 pixels by 48 pixels and targets that overlap or are overlapped by other page elements will be called out in the Lighthouse report.
Tap targets are essential to the mobile user experience, especially for ecommerce websites, so optimizing them is vital to the health of your online business.
Read more: Google’s Lighthouse SEO Audit Tool Now Measures Tap Target Spacing
Prioritizing These Tips
If you have delayed making your site mobile-friendly until now, this guide may feel overwhelming. As a result, you may not know what to prioritize first.
As with so many other optimizations in SEO, it’s important to understand which changes will have the greatest impact, and this is just as true for mobile SEO.
Think of SEO as a framework in which your site’s technical aspects are the foundation of your content. Without a solid foundation, even the best content may struggle to rank.
- Responsive or Dynamic Rendering: If your site requires the user to zoom and scroll right or left to read the content on your pages, no number of other optimizations can help you. This should be first on your list.
- Content Style: Rethink how your users will consume your content online. Avoid very long paragraphs. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” to quote Shakespeare.
- Image Optimization: Begin migrating your images to next-gen image formats and optimize your content display network for speed and responsiveness.
- Tap Targets: A site that prevents users from navigating or converting into sales won’t be in business long. Make navigation, links, and buttons usable for them.
- Structured Data: While this element ranks last in priority on this list, rich results can improve your chances of receiving traffic from a search engine, so add this to your to-do list once you’ve completed the other optimizations.
Summary
From How Search Works, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
If Google’s primary mission is focused on making all the world’s information accessible and useful, then you know they will prefer surfacing sites that align with that vision.
Since a growing percentage of users are on mobile devices, you may want to infer the word “everywhere” added to the end of the mission statement.
Are you missing out on traffic from mobile devices because of a poor mobile experience?
If you hope to remain relevant, make mobile SEO a priority now.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
HARO Has Been Dead for a While
I know nothing about the new tool. I haven’t tried it. But after trying to use HARO recently, I can’t say I’m surprised or saddened by its death. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.
I used HARO way back in the day to build links. It worked. But a couple of months ago, I experienced the platform from the other side when I decided to try to source some “expert” insights for our posts.
After just a few minutes of work, I got hundreds of pitches:
So, I grabbed a cup of coffee and began to work through them. It didn’t take long before I lost the will to live. Every other pitch seemed like nothing more than lazy AI-generated nonsense from someone who definitely wasn’t an expert.
Here’s one of them:
Seriously. Who writes like that? I’m a self-confessed dullard (any fellow Dull Men’s Club members here?), and even I’m not that dull…
I don’t think I looked through more than 30-40 of the responses. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt like having a conversation with ChatGPT… and not a very good one!
Despite only reviewing a few dozen of the many pitches I received, one stood out to me:
Believe it or not, this response came from a past client of mine who runs an SEO agency in the UK. Given how knowledgeable and experienced he is (he actually taught me a lot about SEO back in the day when I used to hassle him with questions on Skype), this pitch rang alarm bells for two reasons:
- I truly doubt he spends his time replying to HARO queries
- I know for a fact he’s no fan of Neil Patel (sorry, Neil, but I’m sure you’re aware of your reputation at this point!)
So… I decided to confront him 😉
Here’s what he said:
Shocker.
I pressed him for more details:
I’m getting a really good deal and paying per link rather than the typical £xxxx per month for X number of pitches. […] The responses as you’ve seen are not ideal but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take as realistically I dont have the time to do it myself. He’s not native english, but I have had to have a word with him a few times about clearly using AI. On the low cost ones I don’t care but on authority sites it needs to be more refined.
I think this pretty much sums up the state of HARO before its death. Most “pitches” were just AI answers from SEOs trying to build links for their clients.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not throwing shade here. I know that good links are hard to come by, so you have to do what works. And the reality is that HARO did work. Just look at the example below. You can tell from the anchor and surrounding text in Ahrefs that these links were almost certainly built with HARO:
But this was the problem. HARO worked so well back in the day that it was only a matter of time before spammers and the #scale crew ruined it for everyone. That’s what happened, and now HARO is no more. So…
If you’re a link builder, I think it’s time to admit that HARO link building is dead and move on.
No tactic works well forever. It’s the law of sh**ty clickthroughs. This is why you don’t see SEOs having huge success with tactics like broken link building anymore. They’ve moved on to more innovative tactics or, dare I say it, are just buying links.
Sidenote.
Talking of buying links, here’s something to ponder: if Connectively charges for pitches, are links built through those pitches technically paid? If so, do they violate Google’s spam policies? It’s a murky old world this SEO lark, eh?
If you’re a journalist, Connectively might be worth a shot. But with experts being charged for pitches, you probably won’t get as many responses. That might be a good thing. You might get less spam. Or you might just get spammed by SEOs with deep pockets. The jury’s out for now.
My advice? Look for alternative methods like finding and reaching out to experts directly. You can easily use tools like Content Explorer to find folks who’ve written lots of content about the topic and are likely to be experts.
For example, if you look for content with “backlinks” in the title and go to the Authors tab, you might see a familiar name. 😉
I don’t know if I’d call myself an expert, but I’d be happy to give you a quote if you reached out on social media or emailed me (here’s how to find my email address).
Alternatively, you can bait your audience into giving you their insights on social media. I did this recently with a poll on X and included many of the responses in my guide to toxic backlinks.
Either of these options is quicker than using HARO because you don’t have to sift through hundreds of responses looking for a needle in a haystack. If you disagree with me and still love HARO, feel free to tell me why on X 😉
SEO
Google Clarifies Vacation Rental Structured Data
Google’s structured data documentation for vacation rentals was recently updated to require more specific data in a change that is more of a clarification than it is a change in requirements. This change was made without any formal announcement or notation in the developer pages changelog.
Vacation Rentals Structured Data
These specific structured data types makes vacation rental information eligible for rich results that are specific to these kinds of rentals. However it’s not available to all websites. Vacation rental owners are required to be connected to a Google Technical Account Manager and have access to the Google Hotel Center platform.
VacationRental Structured Data Type Definitions
The primary changes were made to the structured data property type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.
The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.
The primary changes were made to the structured data type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.
The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.
Address Schema.org property
This is a subtle change but it’s important because it now represents a recommendation that requires more precise data.
This is what was recommended before:
“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy.”
This is what it now recommends:
“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Unit 6E”
Address Property Change Description
The most substantial change is to the description of what the “address” property is, becoming more descriptive and precise about what is recommended.
The description before the change:
PostalAddress
Information about the street address of the listing. Include all properties that apply to your country.
The description after the change:
PostalAddress
The full, physical location of the vacation rental.
Provide the street address, city, state or region, and postal code for the vacation rental. If applicable, provide the unit or apartment number.
Note that P.O. boxes or other mailing-only addresses are not considered full, physical addresses.
This is repeated in the section for address.streetAddress property
This is what it recommended before:
address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing.
And this is what it recommends now:
address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing, including the unit or apartment number if applicable.
Clarification And Not A Change
Although these updates don’t represent a change in Google’s guidance they are nonetheless important because they offer clearer guidance with less ambiguity as to what is recommended.
Read the updated structured data guidance:
Vacation rental (VacationRental) structured data
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