SEO

Outreach: Make every email count

Published

3 days ago

March 17, 2023

30-second summary:

Send emails manually to be able to build longer-lasting relationships with your recipients
Set up your email signature to make your emails look professional
Track email opens to be able to tell which emails were never seen
Create an effective follow-up strategy (which includes Twitter)
Organize your email campaigns using labels

Email fatigue is real: People get weary of opening yet another email pitch, especially people like bloggers and journalists who are bombarded by emails on a daily hourly basis.

Editors are skeptical of people looking for links, popular bloggers have more offers than they can handle and influencers are too busy to give your email a chance.

Fortunately, there are a few little email tricks you can use to help make things easier and help you get more responses.

Don’t email from an outreach tool

I know the overall industry’s standard is to always use some kind of email outreach platform in order to be able to send hundreds of emails a day. Most outreach managers will tell you that you cannot have a successful email outreach campaign without streamlining it with tools (and they actually told me that).

When I am not a professional outreach manager, and when you do outreach for clients, that’s likely true. But when you reach out to people on behalf of your own business or about your own project, have your team do it manually.

Yes, it will take more time but the reward will be more niche relationships.

Somehow tools make it too quick and faceless. You automate pretty much anything and move on from contact to contact without paying much attention.

When you send manually, you get to know each contact better. You spend some time reading their site or their column. You may even click on their social media links and follow them. You take time to personalize your email with some nice details.

People respond to these emails better. It always feels like there’s a truly personal touch. You just cannot fake it.

Create a detailed email signature

Have your outreach people set up their email signatures which would mention your business, their position, and maybe your social media accounts.

This is a great way to show that you represent a trustworthy brand and can be worked with. It makes it easy for the editor you’re trying to reach to do a little bit of research on you beforehand and know that you’re not hiding anything.

Here’s how to add a signature in Outlook, and here’s how to do that in Gmail. Here’s also a guide for Mac Mail users.

Outreach Make every email count

It is also a good idea to include some kind of soft CTA into your email subject. For example, you can invite your prospects to subscribe to your newsletter. This way there will be an additional conversion funnel for those who didn’t feel like replying right away.

Experiment with your copy

This step can never be perfected because there are no limits to improving your response rate. Just try different subjects and copy ideas to try and get more people to notice your email.

Asking ChatGPT for some email subject and copy ideas is a good way to get inspired!

ChatGPT on email ideas

There are also quite a few templates to experiment with different layouts and wording.

Track your email opens

There are quite a few tools that track certain emails to see whether or not they’ve been opened. You are in control of which emails you want to track so you are not overloaded with information, and those tools work with Gmail, Outlook, and even a few specialty email platforms.

I am using one called Mailtrack, and here’s what it looks like when my email wasn’t read:

Icon when email is unread

The icon changes once your email is opened:

Change email icons

If an email has been opened, you will get a notification at the top of your screen. You can also organize your sent messages to show only unopened emails you are tracking. You can “mute” a conversation whenever you’d like and there are plenty of customizable settings.

This is an excellent way to see where you should spend your time sending follow-up messages. If you know that someone opened your email and did not respond, it means they will likely recognize a second one and may have forgotten to respond. You don’t want to be overbearing, but this helps you see where your opportunities may lie.

Fine-tune your follow-up strategy

Life is busy, so your email may be unnoticed by those who would otherwise find it useful. Following-up is an integral part of any outreach.

Gmail comes with a few nice features helping you follow up manually. For example, it will remind you of unanswered emails automatically after a few days. You can also snooze your emails to be reminded of them once the time comes. To enable snoozing:

Select the email you want to Snooze.
Click the Snooze button on top of the list
Pick a date and time to bring that email back to the top of your inbox.

Snooze emails

You can find your snoozed emails in the Snoozed tab in Gmail.

When it comes to follow-up, a little automation won’t hurt, so you can use one of the many follow-up solutions that work on Gmail or your email client.

It is always a good idea to ping that person on Twitter. This will make you look real and will likely help your lead remember you and find your email in the inbox. Obviously, you can only do that for those contacts that are very important to you.

Use labels to create folders for your pitches

There are certainly different ways you can craft your email pitch, but there are also methods you can use that are directly related to your email interface that can help you stay organized if you use them in the right way. Using labels is one of those methods.

This is another way to stay organized if you’re trying to find different opportunities. As you continue to pitch different editors, you can create a label to sort out all of your emails. You will already have System Labels, such as your Inbox, Starred, Sent, etc., as well as Categories, such as Social, Updates, etc., but you have the opportunity to create custom labels.

If you group your email pitches using campaign-based labels, you can help keep them away from your other work emails and have one specific place to see everyone you’ve tried to reach out to within every campaign; thus helping you know when it’s time for a follow-up email.

Conclusion

Email outreach is still the most effective way to generate backlinks, build niche contacts and create brand awareness. It is becoming harder year by year. Hopefully, the above tips will make yours easier and more productive!

Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Brand and Community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.

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SEO

OpenAI Experiences Outage Affecting ChatGPT Users

Published

6 hours ago

March 20, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

OpenAI Experiences Outage Affecting ChatGPT Users

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Labs experienced an outage today. Mobile users report receiving the dreaded “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” message and its outage limerick. ChatGPT Plus subscribers can receive a subscriber login link, which would typically bypass any capacity issues. That option also appears to be broken.

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

Desktop users receive a link to the incident page for this outage, which shows OpenAI began investigating the issue at 9:41 a.m. PDT. They discovered the root cause of the issue and are working on a resolution.

ChatGPT Is Down: OpenAI Reports Major Outages For ChatGPT And Labs Users

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

The OpenAI Status page shows that in addition to ChatGPT, Labs is having an outage related to an underlying capacity failure. OpenAI is adding extra capacity to resolve this issue. Paid labs traffic has been restored, and they are working towards restoring free traffic.

Screenshot from OpenAI, March 2023

DownDetector also has received thousands of reports from ChatGPT users about the outage, which began several hours ago.

Screenshot from DownDetector, March 2023

ChatGPT Plus users are particularly frustrated because the premium pricing plan includes “General access to ChatGPT, even during peak times.”

Some users are turning to the OpenAI Playground while OpenAI resolves the issues with ChatGPT. It offers a chat mode (currently in beta) that can use your choice of GPT-3 or CODEX models.

Screenshot from OpenAI, March 2023

New accounts receive an initial $18 credit for the OpenAI Playground. Once you reach your usage limits, you must pay for additional credits. Prices are per 1,000 tokens, where 1,000 tokens are equal to about 750 words. Pricing varies based on the language model and context needed.

ChatGPT users can subscribe to updates from the incidents page to be notified when OpenAI has resolved the issue.

Featured Image: Vitor Miranda/Shutterstock

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SEO

Google Explains Why Sites Should Combine Structured Data

Published

13 hours ago

March 20, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

Google Explains Why Sites Should Combine Structured Data

Google’s Lizzi Sassman answered a question in a Google SEO Office hours session about whether it’s okay to combine different structured data types.

The answer illuminated an important point about how Google interprets structured data and whether it’s better to combine structured data or two separate them out.

Combining multiple structured data is called nesting.

What is Nesting?

Structured data is basically about high level data types (called Types) and the attributes of those Types (called Properties).

It’s kind of like with HTML where the main HTML building blocks of a webpage are called Elements and every element has properties that modify them that are called “attributes.”

The HTML of a webpage begins by communicating that it’s an HTML webpage like this:

<HTML>

Similarly, a structured data script begins by saying what the main structured data for the webpage is.

A recipe structured data on a webpage that is about a recipe looks like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Recipe",

Nesting is the addition of other structured data types within the main structured data.

So if the page is about Reviews, then the main structured data should begin like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Review",

But what about when the page is about a recipe and it has a review?

Do you create two structured data scripts?

Or do you combine the two structured data types?

Lizzi Sassman shares that there is a right and a wrong way to do it.

Is Combining Structured Data Allowed?

Structured data follows a logical set of rules. Once the rules are learned it’s easy to make sense of structured data.

This question is about the organization of structured data and how that impacts how Google interprets it.

This is the question that was asked:

“Is it allowed to add one structured data inside another type of structure data? For example, adding carousel structured data inside Q & A structured data.”

Lizzi Sassman answered:

“Yep. Nesting your structure data can help us understand what the main focus of the page is.

For example, if you put recipe and review at the same level, it’s not as clear as telling us that the page is a recipe with a nested review.

This means that the primary purpose of the page would be a recipe and that the review is a smaller component of that.

As a tip, always check the specific feature documentation to see if there’s any more notes about combining various structure data types.

Right now, the only supported carousel features are course, movie, recipe, and restaurant.”

Structured Data Tells Google What a Page is About

This is really interesting because what Lizzi is saying is that the structured data helps Google understand what a webpage is about.

But if you have two separate structured data scripts on the same webpage it makes it harder for Google to understand what the “focus” of the webpage is about.

She advises that it’s best to combine them so that the first part says what the webpage is about.

So if the webpage is about recipes, the structured data should start like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Recipe",

Google’s Search Central documentation about JSON-LD structured data discusses nesting:

“JSON-LD* (Recommended)
A JavaScript notation embedded in a <script> tag in the <head> and <body> elements of an HTML page.

The markup is not interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express, such as the Country of a PostalAddress of a MusicVenue of an Event.

Also, Google can read JSON-LD data when it is dynamically injected into the page’s contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content management system.”

What the above quoted section from Google’s documentation means, in plain English, is that a webpage that is about a musical event (using the Event) structured data type, can also include additional data types for the music venue and the postal address.

The webpage in the above example is about an Event, not the venue of the event.

So the JSON-LD script that contains the Event structured data would begin like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Event",

Event is a structured data type:

And the Postal Address for where the event takes place is also a structured data type:

Screenshot of the PostalAddress Schema.org webpage

Communicate the Focus of the Webpage

Sometimes it can feel like the “O” in SEO means optimizing a webpage for better rankings. But that’s not what search optimization is.

The “O” in SEO stands for means optimizing a webpage so that it’s easy for search engines to crawl and to understand what the webpage is about.

A webpage can’t rank without accomplishing those two optimizations.

Nesting structured data fits into that paradigm of “optimization” because it helps to make it clear what the focus of the webpage is.

Listen to the Google SEO Office Hours session at the 14:58 minute mark.

Featured image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero

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SEO

The 9 Best Keyword Research Tools

Published

14 hours ago

March 20, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

Keyword research is a three-step process:

Find keyword ideas that people are searching for
Check their ranking difficulty
Figure out the best way to rank

In this post, you’ll learn how to do these tasks with nine free keyword research tools.

The best free keyword research tools

Keyword Generator shows up to 150 keyword ideas. Just enter a broad topic, choose your target country, and hit “Find keywords.”

For example, search for “bitcoin,” and you’ll see the 100 most popular keywords containing that word from our database of over 19 billion keywords:

You also see a list of the 50 most popular questions people are searching for:

50 bitcoin-related keyword ideas phrased as questions

Each list also has a Keyword Difficulty (KD) score for the first 10 keywords. The closer this is to 100, the harder it’ll be to rank for the keyword (more on this in point #9).

Keyword ideas too broad? Feed them back into the generator

Let’s say you enter “bitcoin,” and the generator kicks back “bitcoin mining.” If you want to explore that topic further, feed it back into the generator. If you want to go even narrower, do another round.

Feed keyword ideas back into the keyword generator to explore that topic further

Answer The Public uses autocomplete to find questions people are searching for. Just enter a broad topic, choose your target country, and hit “search.”

For example, search for “bitcoin” and you’ll see 392 keyword ideas split into five categories:

Each category (except for alphabeticals) visualizes the keyword ideas like this:

Unfortunately, it doesn’t show keyword search volumes. However, the red circles next to each keyword (supposedly) tell you whether it gets a high, average, or low number of monthly searches.

Looking for actual search volumes?

Paste keyword ideas from Answer The Public into Ahrefs’ free keyword generator. The first keyword on the list will usually be the one you entered, and you’ll see its search volume.

Use Ahrefs' keyword generator to get actual search volumes

ChatGPT is a chatbot from OpenAI. It’s not very useful for keyword research as a whole, but it is useful for finding seed keyword ideas.

For example, if you ask for a list of terms related to bitcoin, here’s what it comes up with:

Not all these are good seed keywords because they’re too generic and have multiple meanings (e.g., “fork”), but some are.

For example, suppose you plug a not-so-obvious seed like “hashrate” into our free keyword generator. In this case, it looks like many people are searching for the hashrates of different mining hardware:

Search volumes, via Ahrefs' free keyword generator

Unless you know the crypto industry inside out, you probably wouldn’t have thought of this seed keyword or discovered these keyword ideas.

Getting underwhelming results from your ChatGPT prompts?

Don’t ask for keyword ideas. Ask for terms related to a topic by starting your prompt with “give me a list of terms related to…”

How to find better seed keywords in ChatGPT

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools shows all the keywords you currently rank for in the top 100. Just go to the Organic keywords report in Site Explorer.

64,120 keyword rankings for the Ahrefs Blog, via Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

There are many ways to use this report for keyword research, but one of my favorites is to find low-hanging page two rankings. To do this, filter for keywords in positions 11-20 and toggle the “Main positions only” switch.

Filtering for low-hanging keyword opportunities

As hardly anyone clicks on page two results, boosting your rankings for these keywords by just a few positions to page one can often massively boost traffic.

For example, we rank in position 11 for “pagerank”:

Example of a low-hanging keyword opportunity

By applying our SEO checklist to this post or refreshing and republishing the content, we could likely hit the first page for this keyword and get way more traffic.

Not sure which keywords to prioritize?

If you have thousands of page two rankings, prioritize keywords with the highest “business potential.”

How to score a keyword's business potential

Google Keyword Planner is a keyword research tool for advertisers. But you can also use it to find keywords for SEO. It’s particularly useful for finding related keywords that don’t contain your seed keyword.

For example, search for “crypto,” and it kicks back ideas like “altcoin” and “safemoon coin”:

Keyword ideas, via Google Keyword Planner

In fact, of the 880 keyword ideas found by Keyword Planner, 735 don’t contain the seed keyword “cryptocurrency.”

Unfortunately, Keyword Planner only gives search volume ranges instead of exact volumes (unless you’re running search ads). But you can always copy and paste ideas into Ahrefs’ free keyword generator for a more accurate estimate.

Looking for even more related keywords?

Instead of starting with a seed keyword, start with a seed website.

For example, suppose you use bitcoin.org as the seed site. In that case, you get some hyper-specific keyword ideas that you might easily overlook in “conventional” keyword research tools.

Enter a seed site to find keyword ideas you might otherwise overlook

Google Search Console (GSC) shows how your website performs for its top 1,000 keywords in organic search. Just go to the Search results report.

Search results report in Google Search Console

There are many ways to use this report for keyword research, but one way is to find declining keywords that need your attention.

For example, if we compare the last three months’ performance for the Ahrefs Blog to the same period last year and sort the table by “Clicks Difference” from high to low, we can see that we’ve lost the most clicks from the query “google keyword planner”:

Example of a declining keyword that could use our attention

To try to fix this, we recently updated and republished our guide to Google Keyword Planner—and it worked.

Here are the clicks from that keyword for the past two months:

This shows how there’s sometimes more to gain from retargeting old keywords than going after new ones.

Don’t make the mistake of ignoring seasonality

Make sure to choose a year-over-year comparison period in GSC. Otherwise, you risk seeing skewed numbers due to seasonality.

For example, our traffic always dips in December when people are off enjoying the holiday season. If we were to compare the first and last six months of the year, the numbers would be skewed and might lead us astray.

Google Trends visualizes the relative search popularity of a keyword over time. It also shows related rising and breakout searches. This is useful for finding trending keywords.

For example, search for “ai content,” and you will see a massive spike in interest recently:

Trend for "ai content," via Google Trends

If you then scroll down to the “Related queries” section, you’ll see rising and breakout keywords like “ai content creator,” “open ai,” and “chatgpt”:

There’s often a delay before trending keywords like these appear in traditional keyword research tools, making Google Trends a neat way to find newly popular topics before your competitors.

Looking for specific ideas related to trending topics?

Just plug a rising topic back into Google Trends.

For example, if you put “chatgpt” (a rising topic from our search) into Google Trends, you see more specific things people are searching for around that topic.

Results of plugging a rising topic back into Google Trends

SERP Checker shows the top-ranking pages for (almost) any keyword, plus useful SEO metrics for the top three pages. It’s particularly useful for understanding a keyword’s traffic potential.

For example, Keyword Generator shows that “best bitcoin mining rig” has an average monthly search volume of 500 in the U.S.:

Estimated monthly search volume for "best bitcoin mining rig," via Ahrefs' free keyword generator

But if you plug this keyword into SERP Checker, you see that the top three search results get between 1K and 1.8K estimated monthly search visits. That’s 2-4X more than the keyword’s search volume.

SERP overview for "best bitcoin mining rig," via Ahrefs' free SERP checker

This happens because pages tend to rank for (and get traffic from) many keywords, not just one.

Because of this, the estimated search traffic to the top-ranking pages is usually a better proxy of a keyword’s true traffic potential than search volume. So it’s worth plugging promising keyword ideas into SERP Checker to better understand how much traffic you can get by ranking.

Do top-ranking pages get less traffic than the keyword’s search volume?

Traffic potential isn’t always higher than a keyword’s search volume. Sometimes, it’s lower.

For example, “how many people own bitcoin” gets an estimated 1.4K monthly searches in the U.S., but SERP Checker shows that the top-rankings get significantly less traffic than this—despite ranking for hundreds of keywords:

SERP overview for "how many people own bitcoin," via Ahrefs' free SERP checker

There are many reasons this can happen. In this case, it’s probably because Google answers the question on the SERP, so most searchers don’t need to click a result.

Example of Google showing the answer on the SERP

Keyword Difficulty (KD) Checker estimates how hard it will be to rank in the top 10.

For example, the KD score for “bitcoin” is 99/100, meaning it’s super hard to rank for:

Keyword Difficulty for "bitcoin," via Ahrefs' free KD checker

Yet the KD score for “litecoin vs bitcoin” is only 9/100, so it should be quite easy to rank for:

Keyword Difficulty for "litecoin vs bitcoin," via Ahrefs' free KD checker

That said, KD is based solely on backlinks. It doesn’t consider anything else that may affect ranking difficulty, such as content quality.

Because of this, a high KD score just means you’ll likely need lots of backlinks to compete. You should always investigate ranking difficulty further before going after a keyword.

Looking for a rough estimate of how many backlinks you need?

Check the estimate below the Keyword Difficulty (KD) score.

Estimated number of websites you'll need backlinks from to rank in the top 10 for "litecoin vs bitcoin"

Free vs. paid keyword tools: how do they compare?

Free keyword research tools are super useful when you’re just starting out. Still, the number of keyword ideas and data they show will always pale compared to paid tools.

For example, search for “bitcoin” in our free keyword generator, and you’ll get 150 keyword ideas. But if you search for the same seed in our paid keyword research tool, Keywords Explorer, and go to the Matching terms report, you get 763,256 keyword ideas:

Over 763,000 keyword ideas related to "bitcoin," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Plus, there are a bunch of filters to help you find the best ideas for your website.

For example, if you have a new website, you might want to find low-difficulty keywords with good search volume and traffic potential. You can do this in seconds by applying Keyword Difficulty (KD), volume, and Traffic Potential (TP) filters.

Filtering for low-difficulty keywords with high traffic potential

From there, you can easily check the top-ranking pages to assess the competition. Just click the “SERP” dropdown or click the keyword and scroll to the SERP overview:

Analyzing competitors via the SERP overview

Final thoughts

If you’re new to SEO, free keyword research tools will be enough to discover some good keyword ideas for your website. But once your website grows and the value of your time skyrockets, paid keyword research tools are worth every penny.

This is because paid keyword tools give you more data and allow for more efficient workflows, so you can find better keyword ideas in less time.

Looking to learn more about keyword research? Read our beginner’s guide to keyword research or watch this video:

Did I miss any good free keyword research tools? Ping me on Twitter.

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