23 Quick SEO Tips To Boost Your Traffic In 2020

Check out the latest SEO tips for optimizing your content in 2020.

Looking for SEO tips and best practices?

Great! Then you have come to the right place. We’ve compiled a list of SEO tips to help you dominate the search results in 2020.

If you want to make your content to be found on any search engine, SEO is not an option anymore. It is an important requirement that needs to be fulfilled. Without them, it is nearly impossible for any searchers to find you.

Without further ado, let’s begin!

Best Seo Tips To Boost Your Website Traffic

1. Research keywords to target

Keywords are the words or phrases that users use to find you. They are the pinnacle of your SEO strategy.

Ideally, you want to target keywords that have high search volume but low competition. And this can only be achieved by doing keyword research and analysis. Good keyword research will help you answer what people are searching for and how you should format your content.

The best way to do so is to go to BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence, and analyze your potential target keywords.

The total search volume for the keyword above is high but so does the competition. Scroll down and analyze the rest of the keywords to see if there are any other better keywords to target.

2. Use long-tail keywords

The long-tail keyword query does exist for every niche, although it can be very small in numbers.

Nevertheless, one can’t deny its advantages. Search Engine Journal has seen a 78% increase in organic traffic after optimizing for long-tail keywords.

A long-tail keyword, like “best plumbing service in Italy” may not have as many monthly searches as “plumbing service”. But, it has lower competition and you could easily rank on a search engine for it.

It’s easy to find long-tail keywords when you have the right tool to do so. Just enter the keyword you want to research in BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence and filter to view only the long-tail keywords.

3. Use related keywords

Whenever possible, don’t focus only on creating content about Tom but add a few SEO articles about ‘Jerry’ as well to push up your rankings on search engines.

Using related keywords attracts higher organic traffic. It attracts a broad range of audiences that you may not know to exist.

The search volume for “inbound marketing” is 9,900. But the total search volume of the related keywords when combined together is approximately 1.4 Million! This reminds me of the quote by W. Clement Stone:

“Aim for the moon. If you miss, you will land among the stars.”

When deciding which related keywords to use, you can refer to the ‘Value’ column. It tells you how valuable a keyword is.

Sort the keywords based on their value to help you decide which keywords to use.

4. Create engaging and valuable content

Interesting and valuable content attracts readers. It sparks word-of-mouth followed by getting your business found.

If you’re stuck for content ideas, you can use BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to find out what your audience wants to read.

Or even better, you can also use BiQ’s Rank Intelligence to reverse engineer your competitors’ ranking content.

Create content that provides real value and is better than what’s currently already out there. See what your competitor already has, then create something better for your audience.

5. Use Keyword In Title Tags

Your title tag will be displayed on the search results. It tells both readers and search engines what your page is about.

Add the exact keyword you are targeting to the title tag. Place them towards the front of the title. But do not repeat the same keyword in the title tag with the intention to get better rankings. Instead, use the keywords naturally in your title by mixing them with words that generate emotion. For example, “awesome”, “best” and “how to”.

6. Use heading tags

Another SEO tip that I would like to highlight is – use heading tags. Heading tags like H2, H3, H4 highlight various headings, sub-headings, and important points. It helps readers to skim and navigate your content easily.

Use your target keywords in the heading tags. It helps to reinforce what your page is about. Also, when deciding which tags to use, remember to follow a logical hierarchy. Ideas at the same hierarchical levels should be grouped together under the same heading tag.

7. Write unique meta descriptions

Always have a habit to write a unique description of your content. This is especially important because it is the description shown in the search results.

Make sure to use a persuasive and intriguing copy to convince the users to click your link on the results page. The content should deliver the promises you made on the description.

8. Use Image Tags

Using the same keywords too many times in your image alt tags may risk being marked as spam. Therefore, put a variation of the targeted keywords (related keywords) on your alt tags.

For example, if you are targeting “Japan travel”, you could use “traveling to Japan” and “best Japan guide” by including image alt tags within them.

9. Focus on the user intent

Know what your readers want and give it to them. It sounds pretty easy, isn’t it?

The challenge is this: different users will use different keywords when making searches.

Think about what keywords a user might search for to be able to find your content. If you are selling cat food, these are the keywords that searchers may be using:

Take account of these keywords while writing your content. Don’t just write what you feel like writing, but write what the users want. This could produce positive results in your ranking.

If you would like to know the intent for the keywords, check out the ‘Intent’ column in the Keyword Intelligence. Different keywords show different types of intent. For example, “cheap homemade cat food” indicates that users are looking for ‘transactional’ information.

10. Focus on local SEO

Local SEO is an effective way to market your products or services to customers that are looking for a local solution.

Writing for local SEO is different from writing for a general audience. You want your listing to show up in local searches. To begin, you can write locally-oriented messages that include geographic keywords, such as your city.

Your keyword research should also be focused on local keywords. After entering your keywords, select your preferred location and languages.

These are the results returned for the same keyword with different locations.

It is no surprise that the same keyword may have different search volumes. Your research will be more targeted when you have specified the location.

11. Perform keyword gap analysis

If you want to be the best, learn from the best.

Keyword gap analysis helps you to discover keyword opportunities by ‘learning’ from your competitors. It is the process of finding keywords that drive traffic to your competitors’ websites.

Once you have identified who is your competitor, check out what keywords are driving traffic to their website.

Type in their domain name in Rank Intelligence, and you will see all the keywords they are ranking for.

Do the same steps for your website and compare what keywords are bringing traffic to their website but not yours.

12. Optimize your old content

Everything constantly changes. The pieces that once caught everyone’s attention may not have the same effect today. If you don’t update your content, it may possibly lose its positions.

Treat search engines like a human. They are always in search of new information and want to keep themselves updated. Feed them with fresh and up-to-date information for search engines to deem you as valuable to the users.

If you lose your position, it will be possible for you to get it back through content upgrading. Make it into a weekly or monthly routine to visit and upgrade your blog content.

Let’s say your content is about “SEO tips for bloggers”. These are some of the trending searches for that particular topic. Analyze the list of trending searches and update them accordingly.

13. Optimize anchor text

An anchor text is a word that is hyperlinked and directs readers to other websites. The search engine uses anchor text to help understand the context of the link.

If there are a number of users pointing to this page with “effective search engine optimization tips” as the anchor text, it will increase Google’s confidence that this page should potentially rank for “tips for search engine optimization”.

Optimize your anchor text by keeping them relevant to the content. The more relevant your anchor text is, the easier it will be to get high rankings.

For example, if your target keyword is “plumbing service”. Writing an article about the types of plumbing service would be the best for you.

14. Voice search optimization

According to PWC, 71% of users would rather use their voice assistant to search for something than physically typing their queries.

With the rise of Alexa and Siri (many more to come), voice search has become one of the most important search optimizations that must be done.

When users speak, they can be more specific about what exactly they are looking for. Using long-tail keywords would serve this purpose as they are more specific and intent-focused.

15. Use images

Using images in your content provides the user with information and interactivity. Use your feature image at the top of the post so that your readers can use them when sharing your post.

A good rule of thumb is to include an image between every couple of paragraphs. This will attract readers’ attention to keep them reading until the end.

16. Use videos

Videos are not just great for engaging your audience – they can also help you to improve your website rankings.

Nowadays, people prefer watching videos rather than reading a 3,000-word content. When a visitor comes to your website, you don’t have much time to convince them to read until the end. But an engaging video will do the trick.

Users spent 2.6x more time on pages with video than without. This indicates a good signal to Google: longer dwells time and a lower bounce rate.

17. Build an internal link

Internal links are not as powerful as links from other websites, but they still help in your SEO. Other than spreading link juice, it also helps users to navigate your site to find relevant information.

When deciding which page to link to, check the relevancy between the two pages. The links should be pointing only to relevant content. For example, if you are writing a blog post about SEO techniques, the linked content should also have something to do with SEO techniques or strategies.

18. Increase site speed, to reduce the bounce rate

If this page loads forever, I don’t think you will stay up until this point. You may already have closed the browser and searched for other SEO tips.

Since 2011, Google has made it clear that site speed matters in search rankings. Page speed correlates with the user experience. The faster the page speed is, the better the user experience.

Use Google PageSpeed Insights to fix issues that may crop up. Once you run the speed test, take a look at the recommendations and find out what you need to do to make it faster.

19. Use HTTPS

An article dated August 2014 by Google mentioned that:

“We're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal”

During the start, it was merely just a lightweight signal because they are giving users time to switch to HTTPS. But we have seen Google putting greater importance to it now.

HTTPS sites have a ranking advantage over the HTTP site. It guarantees security and privacy by ensuring the website is encrypted and cannot be hacked.

20. Use structured data

Structured data helps the crawler to understand not only the content but the purpose of it. It translates articles into machine-friendly content to help search engines understand what we’re talking about.

Using structured data helps with the relevancy signals and also enables your site to benefit from enhanced results in search result pages, such as: Knowledge Graph, carousels, and rich search results.

These enhanced results are naturally more visually appealing. Thus, it can improve your click-through rate and drive additional traffic.

21. Optimize for mobile-friendliness

This next SEO tip almost seems unnecessary, but as it is very important, I have to mention it: if you want your SEO strategy to be successful, you absolutely need to cater to mobile users.

79% of smartphone users made a purchase online using their mobile devices. Therefore, failure to put great importance on mobile users’ experience means you are ignoring a majority of your potential customers… which you don’t want to happen.

You can easily check your site’s mobile-friendliness with the Google Mobile-Friendly test.

22. Find and fix broken links

Broken links make a bad user experience. Imagine when you click on links and reach a dead-end that shows 404 errors. I’m sure you will feel frustrated and may never return.

Google’s aim is to provide the best experience for users. If there are two sites, Site A and Site B, and Site A has broken links, Google will prioritize Site B over Site A in terms of ranking.

I would recommend you to regularly check if there are any broken links in your site. Simply search for free broken links tools online. Or you can also use Google Webmaster Tool to generate reports of broken links.

23. Monitor your SEO performance

How would you know if you are doing the right thing? That’s where monitoring comes into place. The next step after you’ve put so much work into your SEO strategy is to monitor them.

You want to see how those efforts are paying off and most importantly – whether it’s all working the way you want it to.

Check if your website is ranking for any keywords using BiQ’s Rank Intelligence.

It shows the keywords your website is ranking for and the search position. Add these keywords to the Rank Tracking module and observe the performance regularly.

If you want to track keywords that are not ranking yet, click ‘Add Keyword To Track’ to do so.

You can see a quick overview of your ranking distribution, overall ranking movement and the average position. Of course, you want to see a positive change in the statistics.

Conclusion

Google algorithm is prone to changes several times a year, which means we must constantly make sure our sites are up-to-date and comply with the latest updates.

I have previously written an article that talks about the strategies to create best SEO content. If you have yet to start creating your SEO content, you may want to check out the article.

Dominating the first page of search results can have an extremely dramatic impact on your business. But it isn’t just about SEO tips, tricks, or hacks. You need to start doing it to see the results!

It is no secret that it may take a considerable amount of effort to optimize every single page, but it will be a great investment in the long run!

Let me end this post with this inspiring quote by Tom Hanks:

“It's supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it.”

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

Content Marketing,SEO

10 World-Class Content Marketing Strategies in 2020

Content marketing isn’t something new today. In fact, you may have already seen an evolution over the years.

How many times have you heard of the phrase “Content is King”? A plethora, I believe.

It first started with magazines, pamphlets and little guides, long before anyone could imagine the existence of the Internet. Today, content marketing doesn’t only come in the form of text. Most, if not all businesses resort to using videos, audios, visuals, and podcasts to promote their brand.

So what is content marketing?

It is a marketing technique of creating and distributing content that is consumed by the customers who will purchase your product or service. By providing valuable content to your users, they will be led to your products and services.

Back in the 1900s, the Michelin brothers Andre and Edouard published a small red book called “Guide Michelin” – a travel guide for free. It was the earliest and best example of content marketing.

Guide Michelin, the firs content marketing strategy in the 1900s

Understanding the needs of their target audience, they wrote helpful information including tips about how to change your tyres, where to refuel your car, suggestions for hotels and even places to eat. By printing so many copies, it helped create demand for cars – and tires.

Michelin even rated upscale restaurants in faraway countryside locations with ‘Michelin Stars’, similar to winning a Nobel Prize. Readers of this travel guide would drive around more to get to these locations, and their tyres would wear out.

Guess who they went to for new tyres? Michelin.

This story is a positive proof of how powerful content marketing can be. In this post, you’ll learn the 10 world-class content marketing strategies in 2020 that you can implement right away.

10 World-Class Content Marketing Strategies for 2020

Content Marketing Strategies #1: Goal-Setting

In life, if we want to win something, we have to identify our goals and what it takes for you to get there. And if you’re not getting there, you’ll need to get back on track.

A good starting point of your content marketing strategy is to set a goal or mission statement. It helps you to focus on what’s more important for your business. Marketers that write down their goals are more likely to turn them into reality.

As you set your goals, make sure they meet the SMART criteria. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

SMART Goal as the first content marketing strategy

Writing vague goals like “I want to get more exposure with content marketing this year” should be avoided because stating does not give you an indication of how or when you’re going to achieve them.

Instead, think clearly about each component of your content marketing strategy inclusive of the SMART elements. For instance, “I want to increase traffic to my site by 12,000 visits in May”.

Weigh between “I plan to lose weight this year” vs “I plan to lose weight this year by eating healthier and hitting the gym on weekends”.

I guess it’s pretty clear which way of goal setting should be the way to go now.

Remember, always try to be more specific and set real deadlines and checkpoints for your goals so you can measure the results.

Content Marketing Strategies #2: Build A Customer Persona

When we think about the buyer’s journey or building customer experiences, the foundation for marketing needs to be around “who”. Who are you writing for? Who should this message be known to?

Buyer personas help marketers build the most genuine conversations with the most important person to your company: your customer.

When Superdrug wanted to target their perfect customer, they first had to build a persona. They knew that their audience was of a certain demographic, age and with unique goals and desires.

Your customers will be the same. Every business has THE persona to target. Do some digging around and find out who you should be targeting. This will frame all of your content marketing strategies.

Superdrug knew that their target audience consisted mainly of women who cared about health, beauty and body image. With that piece of information, they set about to create a campaign that would earn tens of millions of views.

To raise awareness about body image, Superdrug posted a controversial and focused on a trendy topic. They hired graphic designers to edit photos of models. The request was to edit the models so they match the standard beauty norms of different countries.

Content marketing in the form of visuals

The article titled “What the Perfect Woman Looks Like Around The World: Designers Photoshop the SAME Model To Show How Beauty Ideals Differ in Every Country” published on DailyMail UK and HuffPost and soon went viral. It got international coverage and got picked up by the New York Times, the Telegraph and Business Insider. Celebrities started sharing it, and it racked up over a million times.

So have you identified who is your customer persona? What do they care about? Your job is to create content that they want to read.

Content Marketing Strategies #3: Understanding User Intent

Search intent is the main goal a user has when typing a query into a search engine. You’ll need to have an insight into what your user actually wants. Better still, what information he wants to retrieve from the keyword?

This example continues from the last strategy. Michelin knew that their targeted customers (drivers) wanted to know where to go. They needed travel advice, destinations and restaurant guidance so they had a direction to drive around.

Next, let’s look at Superdrug. They knew that their customers cared about body image, so they focused their content on ‘ridiculous beauty standards’.

Try to understand what your users care about. What problems are they looking to solve, and what are their pain points?

Ask yourself, ‘what is my customer doing before and after they use my products?’.

See, Michelin didn’t target customers interested in tyres. They target customers who are interested in driving. And that’s how their content marketing strategy worked for them many years ago.

Create content that fits to what your customers are already doing, and they will end up where you want them to be. At the end of the day, they’ll be reading your content, using your products and following your brand.

Content Marketing Strategies #4: Create Content Guidelines

Wouldn’t we all like to make content marketing easier for ourselves?

You can actually do so by creating and building guidelines and content types. These will help you structure your content and produce a larger amount of higher quality content.

The 4 main types of content that people normally focus on are: Blogs, videos, infographics and e-books/guides. And from these, you can create many other types of content.

For instance, you can get the audios from videos to make podcasts and audio tracks. You can also screenshot images and use them for Instagram posts. Highlight quotes, turn them into tweets and take snippets of articles and post them on various social media platforms.

Over the years, we have many of our readers that struggled with using video to boost their SEO. If that’s you, check out this post on how you can use video in your marketing strategy: https://biq.cloud/blog/video-seovideo-content-marketing-boost-seo/

If you’re just starting out, begin with these 4 main types of content, and then leverage that content to make tons more ‘mini-content’ for further distribution.

Content Marketing Strategies #5: Perform Keyword Research

Keywords are the heart and soul of online marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Every time someone types something into Google, they use a keyword. A keyword is a word or phrase that someone uses to search. In an SEO strategy, they open the food to your efforts to be discovered and engaged with online.

To search for relevant keywords, the BiQ SEO Suite comes into the picture! The Keyword Intelligence module would be perfect to execute this strategy, Give your business niche or topic a search, and you’ll find many keywords that people search for when they look for you.

While doing so, one good idea is to focus on long-tail keywords. These are keyword phrases that are longer, and therefore less searched. They usually consist of 3 words or more. These less searched keywords are less competitive and easier to rank for in the search engines.

BiQ SEO Suite Keyword Intelligence related keywords view

So instead of targeting the keyword “yoga poses” you can focus on the keyword “yoga poses for pregnant women”. This longer tail keyword phrase is less competitive, and you’ll rank faster for that keyword.

Some SEO content marketing practices are an embarrassment. Don’t make these same mistakes that we’ve outlined in this article- https://biq.cloud/blog/7-content-marketing-practices-embarrassment-seo/

Content Marketing Strategies #6: Use Idea Generators

If you’re stuck and are desperately looking for ideas, it’s nice to be able to use an idea generator. The Keyword Intelligence in BiQ SEO Suite has a “Content Idea” tab that enables you to find hundreds of potential ideas. Let’s take a look at what content ideas are returned with the keyword “prenatal yoga”.

Content Ideas in Keyword intelligence BiQ SEO Suite

These are ideas you can write about surrounding the main keyword you’ve entered.

Wanna have old school fun with this? Take out a pen and paper and draw a good old-fashioned brainstorm mind-map. Put your topic in the center and then use the strategies in these posts to come up with as many ideas as you can.

In the center, put your target customer and start listing out what they might be thinking. Write down ideas from the idea generator. Then for each idea returned, head to the “related keywords” tab in the BiQ SEO Suite to find more keywords. Start linking these ideas together, and you’ll have an infinite resource of content ideas.

Content Marketing Strategies #7. Analyze Your Content

Content analysis aids in finding what exactly is and isn’t working for marketers. You want to make sure you target the right content to the right audience.

To check and grade your content, the BiQ SEO Suite is here to help you too! Make use of the Content Intelligence module. But what is content intelligence?

BiQ’s Content Intelligence aims to help you break the chain by giving you insights into what your customers are looking for in your content. You’ll start by analyzing your content by entering the URL of your content together with your target keyword in the search box.

Overview of BiQ SEO Suite content intelligence

From the results returned, you will get an overview of how your content is actually performing, in the eyes of both human and search engines. Optimize your content until it reaches a satisfactory level and you’ll see your rank increase in no time!

Content Marketing Strategies #8: Visuals All Day

Visual content is a must in your arsenal. Humans love consuming colorful content. The usage of graphics such as screenshots, graphs, GIFs, and videos will lure your readers’ eyeballs and keep them interested.

Example of Coke that uses visuals to attract attention of their target

Coca-cola is a great example of a company that does this well. Although they are a manufacturer of carbonated soft drinks, the visuals they use in most if not all of their advertisements will take you on a journey that’ll excite and enlighten you.

One strategy coke used was the “Share A Coke Campaign”. They put your name on their bottles and invited customers to post their name so Coke could create personal bottles for everyone.

This created a powerful visual effect where customers felt connected to the Coke brand.

In terms of content marketing, think of ways that your customers like to view content. Then create images and graphics that they will love.

Content Marketing Strategies #9: Schedule Consistency

Remember strategy #1? Let’s head back to the original SMART goal that you started with. Take that goal and break it up into a daily or weekly consistent strategy.

Well, the saying of consistency is key applies very well here.

By right, you should have a regular schedule of when you will be posting your content. This consistency will be the number one factor in your content marketing plan. The more consistent you are, the more likely you’ll create a post that will go viral.

Like the posts we’ve scheduled for BiQ’s Facebook page for our readers.

BiQ's Facebook posts that are lined up and scheduled for later

Consistency tells your readers that you’re reliable, that you run your business efficiently and that you’ll be there when they need you. All you have to do is just spend a little time each day/week interacting on social sites to build a long-lasting relationship with your readers.

Plan – Schedule – Execute. That’s all it takes for you to get the ball rolling.

Every single post you create will add up positively to your marketing strategy. Slow and steady wins the content marketing race. You’ll be so effective in your content marketing strategy that it will become impossible for people to ignore or forget you.

Content Marketing Strategies #10: Distribution

We’ve reached the final marketing strategy that is the time to distribute your content.

There are many places you can go ahead to execute this but we’ll start with the big ones. Start on your own website and blog. Create relevant posts for your target audience and stick to a regular schedule.

These posts should be easy to share and ultimately lead your readers to sign up so you can collect their email information. Try posting videos on YouTube, and audios on podcast distributors.

Or you can break your articles into pieces and rewrite for Linkedin, Quora, Medium and other sites where you can post written content.

Most importantly, share your business and brand on social media! This is indefinitely a powerful way for you to reach your prospects and customers. If you’re not speaking directly to them through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you’re missing out!

Don’t just stop there! Email your audience, and post on relevant groups and forums. You should scream your voice from the rooftops so people can hear about what you’ve got to say.

An example of BiQ's facebook post filled with content

For those of them who arrive on your main blog content, it should be easier for them to share. Don’t forget to include social media buttons that are visible and clickable or ask people outright to ‘share this post.’

So, share this blog!

Conclusion

In 2020 it’s easier than ever to create and share content. The world is more connected than ever because of the internet. You can use the time-tested strategies that companies were using hundreds of years ago and grow your business right now.

Whether you take inspiration from content strategy examples like Michelin, Coke or Superdrug, rest assured that you’ll be heading in the right direction. Once again, content marketing is a great way to reach your audience with content that they actually want to hear about.

Follow the 10 content marketing tips in this post and you’ll find yourself receiving customers that’ll constantly come knocking on your door. Inspire yourself by the big companies that have made good use of content marketing and start making your own content that fits these ideas.

Keep creating content and improving it where you can, and your strategy will pay off sooner than you think. Content marketing for the win!

Do share with me if you think there are other content marketing strategies that should be included in this article. Let me know your thoughts on these strategies in the comments section below.

About Winnie

Winnie is a copywriter and digital marketer in the vast world of SEO and marketing. She's as curious as she can be; constantly hunting for answers to her questions, never saying no to new experiences. When she's not spending her time typing up a storm, she is at home keeping up with her never-ending movie marathon & self-improvement books.

Content Marketing,SEO

On-Page SEO Checklist (2020) + 25 Actionable Steps

The practical on-page SEO guide in 2020.

Looking for practical ways to improve your search visibility on the search engine? Let’s start!

Search engine optimization or SEO strategies can be divided into two different categories; on-page SEO and off-page SEO. It is understood that both are important to the success of an SEO campaign but today’s article, we will be focusing only on on-page optimization techniques.

We will be covering all of these:

What is on-page SEO?
Why is on-page SEO important?
10 on-page SEO checklist for better ranking in 2020

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO or also known as on-site SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to improve a website’s search engine rankings which is followed by organic traffic.

This can be done by making sure your content is loved by readers and understandable by the search engines. We will look deeper into this later on but for now, let’s see why on-page is important.

Why Is On-Page SEO Important?

A good on-page SEO is not an attempt to manipulate the search engines in any way; it is simply the means by which you make sure that they understand what your pages are.

For example, you optimize a keyword in your content because you want to let the search engine know what your page is all about which indirectly improves your ranking.

The search engine and its spiders will try to understand your page by looking at indicators of relevance. This will include the text in the title tags, header tags, meta descriptions and so on.

A good on-page SEO is able to tell search engines what your pages are about and convince them why you should be at the top of the search results.

What Is The On-Page SEO Checklist in 2020?

Now, I am going to share with you a handful of tested on-page SEO checklists that you can apply in your SEO strategies. To make sure you are not lost in the in this on-page SEO guide here is an infographic prepared for you:

The complete on-page SEO guide in 2020 : on-page SEO checklist — The complete on-page checklist for 2020.

1. Target Keywords

First things first, you need to make sure your keyword research is done well before the rest of your on-page SEO strategies follow through.

It is essential to select the right keywords to target, as it can make or break your entire on-page SEO strategy.

Keyword research helps you find the right keywords to be included in your content. Let’s start with entering your topic in the Keyword Intelligence module.

Use the results that you’ve retrieved to brainstorm the terms that your potential customers might be searching for. The related keywords are the terms that people search for in relation to your topic.

When deciding which keywords to target, analyze the search volume and the value of the keywords.

The search volume tells you the potential number of people who will visit your website. The keyword value shows how valuable the keyword is. Higher valued keywords give you more traffic at a lower competition.

Once you have your keywords ready, it’s time to rearrange them strategically in your content. Place your keywords in your introduction or first 100 words, for example:

on page seo rips - place the right keywords in your introduction — *Did you notice that I put my target keywords “on-page SEO” in the post introduction?*

Skip the surprises, help the search engines know what your page is about by using the keywords in your introduction and later in the content body.

2. Title Tag

The title tag tells the title of a web page. It is displayed on the search engine results page as the clickable headline. It is one of the important factors that will affect the number of visitors to your website.

Every title tag should be unique and reflect what your content is about. A good rule of thumb is to write for humans and optimize for search engines.

Here are some quick tips on how to optimize your title tag:

#1 Keep it short

Google displays only the first 50-60 characters of a title tag. So you may want to follow the rule by keeping your titles under 60 characters.

When your title exceeds 60 characters, it will be truncated and will look like this:

#2 Include your primary keywords

Title tags should contain your target keyword. Try to put your keywords at the beginning of your title. This will help readers and search engines to see if your content has what they are looking for.

3. Meta Description

A meta description is a short description of the page. It summarizes the content readers will find when they click on the link of a page on the search results page.

Not sure whether your page has a meta description? Head over to Content Intelligence.

Enter your URL and it will show the meta description for the page:

Here are some quick tips on how to optimize your meta descriptions:

#1 Don’t make them too short or too long

Different from the title tag, you can write up to 155 characters for your meta description. Optimally, keep them between 70 to 155 characters.

#2 Include your primary keywords

You can see certain keywords are being highlighted in the meta description when it matches the search. For example:

Put your keywords at the beginning of the description. This is because readers will usually skim the description and you do not want to miss the shot.

#3 Be different; be unique

Ever wanted to be the site that stands out from the rest? Write a unique meta description.

If your meta description is the same as those on the search results, what would make searches decide to click on your site?

Write a unique summary of what you are offering, and not deceptive. If your page is about “how to write the best meta description”, make sure to include them in your description. But if it’s not, you should not include that phrase.

4. Header Tags

Header tags can help you immensely in your on-page search optimization efforts. It is used to differentiate the headings and subheadings of a page. It tells Google that the text in this tag is important and that the other content on this page is essentially related to what is defined in that tag.

The header tags are H1-H6 tags in order of importance – the H1 tag is the most important, and the least important is the H6 tag.

Here are some quick tips on how to optimize your header tags:

#1 Include keywords in your header tags

Same as title tags and meta descriptions, use your keywords on your header tags. This will help Google to gather context for your page.

Use your keywords naturally in your header tags, without being spammy.

#2 Don’t forget to use H1

H1 tag indicates your most important topic, and the rest of the tags create subtopics. I would recommend using only one H1 tag per page because it’s basically the subject of your page. You don’t want to have many subjects on one page as it doesn’t make sense to do so.

#3 Optimize for featured snippets

Check if your keywords have featured snippets on the search results page. If there is, optimize your content for featured snippets using the header tags.

For example, if the keyword you are targeting, “content marketing strategy tips” has a featured snippet as shown below:

You definitely want to structure your content using header tags to capture that featured snippet.

5. Related keywords

Related keywords are the keyword variations that you can use for your primary keyword. Related keywords or semantic keywords increase the relevancy of your page and help search engines to understand your page better.

Furthermore, you are more likely to rank well for multiple keywords. Enter your keyword on the Keyword Intelligence module search bar and you will find that the total search volume for your related keywords is huge.

Go through the list of related keywords and use them to support your main keyword.

Here are some quick tips on how to use related keywords in your SEO strategy:

#1 Use related keywords in the title

Use related keywords naturally in your title, for example:

#2 Use related keywords in the meta description

Use the related keywords at least once in your meta description. It helps to further reinforce what’s in your content.

#3 Use related keywords in the headings

Related keywords give more meaning to your overall content.

For example, using “free SEO tools” tells exactly what type of SEO tools that we are looking at when compared to just “SEO tools”. It gives a clear differentiation of the type of SEO tools (paid vs free) readers will find in the article.

6. High-quality content

High-quality content is anything that is worth sharing and deserves the spot on the search results page.

So how do you write a search optimized content?

#1 Get to know your target audience

It all starts with knowing who your audience is and getting to know what they’re interested in.

Once you are able to answer the questions they’re asking, solve the worries they have, or achieve their goals, the search engine will eventually reward you handsomely.

#2 Do keyword research

Once you know who your target audience is, find out what keywords they will use to find you.

If you are selling face masks, type in the keyword ‘face mask’ in BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence.

Doing so will give you an idea of what people are searching for when it comes to your product or services.

Hover to the ‘Popular Questions’ tab to see what questions people have in mind when it comes to the keyword that you have entered.

From the example above, when it comes to ‘face mask’, most searchers will think of beauty products. Therefore, if you are selling ‘medical face mask’, you may want to include the keyword ‘medical’ in your target keywords to avoid confusion.

7. Length of content

It has always been a debate about whether short or long-form content is good for SEO. In 2016, Backlinko found that the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words. Their research shows that longer content tends to rank higher in the search results. But I’ve had also found out that some claim 300-500 words also work for them.

As I dig deeper, I found this tweet:

So, what exactly is the best length for your SEO content?

I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no rule engraved on stone regarding the number of words.

Instead, go to the top 10 of the search results page and emulate them. Enter their URL on BiQ’s Content Intelligence to check their total word count.

Repeat this step to check the word count for each of the sites on the first page.

As we can see from the example above, the average word count for the content that ranks for the keyword ‘seo content length’ is 1,610 words.

(1,420+2,441+1,383+1,199) / 4 = 1,610 words

When targeting the same keyword, that could be your guideline to the ideal word count for your optimized content.

Nevertheless, regardless of the word counts, satisfying the user intent should always be your top priority. Satisfy the searcher’s intent and write in a way that helps search engines figure out what your pages are about.

8. Image optimization

Without proper image optimization, you are at risk of wasting a valuable SEO resource.

Image optimization, when done right, creates many benefits such as increasing the page load speed, enhancing the user experience and helping search engines understand your content better.

Here are some quick tips to optimize your image for search engines:

#1 Use unique and relevant images

Let’s try this: which of the following images managed to catch your attention?

Images play an important role in catching a user’s attention. It helps to increase the impact of the words that you use on the page.

Make sure to choose images that are unique and relevant to your content. Let the image speak for you and explain your content.

#2 Reduce the size of your image file

The size of the images can have a big impact on the loading times whereby bigger images make the loading time longer. Loading times are important for user experience. The faster the loading speed of a website, the better.

You want to make sure you compress your images before uploading them to your website. Increasingly.com managed to improve their website speed by 33% / 2 seconds after compressing their images.

#3 Include caption for your image

Captions can be crawled by search engines. It helps to tell the crawlers what the image is about.

Always write a caption that is relevant to the image. It helps readers to skim your content and decide whether to continue reading or click the exit button. In fact, captions under images are read on average 300% more than the body copy itself.

#4 Use a descriptive alt text

Just like captions, the alternative text helps to boost your content by promoting the user experience and search optimization.

Here is an example of a weak alt text:

To make it more descriptive and able to convey the message that you want to send to the readers and search engines, you can write them this way:

9. Readability

Content’s readability has a huge influence on search optimization. It is the practice of making sure your content is understandable and easy to digest for the readers.

When your audience stays longer on your website, it helps to improve your website’s results in terms of increased on-page time and decreased bounce rate.

Check your content readability by using Content Intelligence.

It will show the overall content readability together with the line by line analysis. Using this information will aid you in deciding which area you should first improve.

Once you’ve identified which paragraph to act upon, use these quick tips to improve your readability score:

#1 Break into paragraphs

Break long sentences into smaller paragraphs. Use subheadings and shorter paragraphs to increase your content readability.

#2 Use shorter sentences

Readers might lose track of your point when your sentences are more than 25 words long. Keep your sentences short and to the point.

#3 Do not use jargon

Use jargon only when you are writing for a specific audience, and when they have definite knowledge in the industry.

10. Page URLs

The URL of your web page should be short and keyword-rich. In fact, the average URL length for the Google blog is 76 characters.

Here are some quick tips to optimize your page URLs:

#1 Include the keyword in the URL

Use the exact keyword in the URL. For instance, you can see the exact keyword “minimalist tattoo” included in the URL below.

#2 Don’t include special characters

According to Google, some characters cannot be a part of a URL because it may cause problems. This is their recommendation when building your URL:

#3 Cut out stop words

Stop words are words like ‘a’, ‘is’, and ‘the’ that some people omit because it makes their URL shorter and cleaner.

For example, instead of /a-content-marketing-strategy/, it can be cut down to just /content-marketing-strategy/.

Conclusion

In my previous post, I wrote a post titled “SEO Content – The Ultimate Guide”, in which my goal was to give you an overview of SEO content and how to optimize your content for better rankings.

In this article, I have decided to do the same. The SEO strategies may be different but the destination is still the same: to make sure your content is loved by both readers and search engines.

I hope this post helps you with how to improve on-page SEO. Have you tried any of the on-page SEO strategies? Let me know in the comments below.

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

Competitive Analysis,Keyword Research,SEO

How To Use Keyword Intelligence to LEVEL UP Your SEO Strategy

In this article, you’re going to learn exactly how to use BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to beat your competitors in the game of SEO.

What is an SEO strategy?

For starters, SEO (or search engine optimization) is the method used to optimize your website so it can achieve a higher ranking on search engines’ organic results.

SEO is made up of multiple different elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important.

In other words, an SEO strategy can be considered as a complete blueprint since the whole process consists of multiple SEO elements that you wish to implement to get organic traffic.

elements of seo strategy keyword intelligence

Why do you need an SEO strategy?

While paid advertising and social media can generate traffic to the website, the majority of online traffic is actually driven by search engines.

For example, if you’re craving pizza, where do you search for more information on the nearest pizza joint? Google it!

In fact, 70-80% of search engine users are only focusing on the organic results. This means that people don’t want to click on the paid ads at the top of the search results, they want the organic results that come below the ads.

Here’s what a great SEO strategy does for you:

Generates a continuous stream of organic traffic to your website
Helps to build trust and credibility for your audience
Good SEO means a better user experience
Impacts buying cycle, which in turn increases conversion rate

About Keyword Intelligence

In case you didn’t know, BiQ is a complete SEO suite that lets you control the price.

Yes, you’ve heard it right! BiQ is a suite of advanced SEO tools that does your keyword research, tracks the keyword strategy used by your competition, runs an SEO audit of your blog, looks for new keyword opportunities and lots more.

What makes BiQ stand out from other SEO suites is our unique pricing model that seems to hugely benefit small-to-medium-sized businesses as well as freelancers and entrepreneurs—you only pay for the features you actually use.

This revolutionary SEO suite revolves around six modules but we will not discuss them because we’ve already covered them in our previous article. You can read the full article here.

In this article, we are going to take a look at one of the modules, Keyword Intelligence and how it can help you to develop an effective SEO strategy.

Using the Keyword Intelligence module will give you access to four sections:

Related Keywords
Content Ideas
Popular Questions
Trending Search

So, let’s take a look at how Keyword Intelligence can help to build a good foundation for your SEO strategy.

1. Keyword Research

You should most likely have this drilled into your heads by now: the first step of developing a successful SEO strategy for your website is keyword research.

A good keyword helps to get your targeted audience for your website through the search engine.

But what makes a good keyword “good”? Here are some criteria that make a good keyword:

Search intent: Search intent is the reason behind a search query. Simply put, we want to make sure the intent of the user matches the intent of the web page or piece of content we want them to find in search results.
Search volume: There’s no point in choosing keywords that no one is searching for on Google. The higher the search volume, the more organic traffic the keyword can generate for your website.
Competition: Competition refers to how competitive the first page of search results is for a given keyword. You should plan and target keywords with reasonable competition if you wish to get ranked on Google.

Now that you understand what makes a good keyword, it’s time to see how our Keyword Intelligence can help you in this – step-by-step.

1. Start with a list of seed keywords

The first step of every keyword research is to come up with a seed keyword (or main keyword).

Coming up with seed keywords is as easy as describing a product or service with your own words or think how other people might search for it.

Let’s say that you’re running an auto repair workshop. The seed keywords that appear in your mind are probably these:

Auto repair services
Mechanics
Car maintenance

2. Generate keyword ideas

Once you’re done, head over to BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence and insert one of your seed keywords into the query.

For example, since one of BiQ’s target audience is bloggers, let’s use “blogging” as my seed keyword.

Tip #1: You can choose which specific location and language you want to target for your seed keyword. This is a great way for optimizing keywords for local SEO. For example, you can choose a location such as Los Angeles if you are running a local business and want to target the audience there.

BiQ keyword intelligence keyword strategy generate keyword ideas

You will be given a list of keywords semantically related to your seed keyword in a matter of seconds.

If you don’t know the importance of semantically related keywords in your keyword research, Google is trying to understand our language at a higher level to give users more accurate search results.

From the SEO side, by including more semantically related keywords, Google will be able to understand the topics that your content is trying to cover and how your information answers the questions being searched for online.

Well, back to our main point. Here’s the list of keywords generated based on our seed keyword “blogging”.

BiQ keyword intelligence keyword strategy list of keywords

If you want to go through hundreds or thousands of keywords from the list, it will take hours and even days to complete.

Fortunately, we’ve experienced this problem in some keyword research tools before. So, we’ve included some great filtering options to save you time in keyword research:

Trend
Search volume
CPC (cost per click)
Competition
Intent
Value
Include/Exclude terms
Relatedness
Long-tail/Short-tail option

3. Select and group your list of keywords

Once you got your list of keywords, it’s time to select the best ones using the metrics given as highlighted in the screenshot above.

Tip #2: For beginners, it’s always a good idea to choose high search volume keywords with little competition to avoid competing with other big dogs on Google.
Alternatively, you can select keywords with high value. Higher valued keywords give you more traffic at a lower competition.

BiQ keyword intelligence seo strategy export as pdf csv add to collections

You’ve selected your keywords and now you have the options of either exporting as a CSV/PDF file or Add to Collections.

Of course, you can always export it and group the keywords manually in a spreadsheet. But there’s a much easier way to group your keywords.

Using Add to Collections, there are two ways that the team here at BiQ: topic and intent.

Grouping keywords by topic is pretty much self-explanatory. Take a look at the screenshot below on how we usually do it at BiQ.

BiQ keyword intelligence seo strategy add to collections

In the past, grouping keywords by intent is a complex process because you need to analyze each keyword to identify what is the user’s intent behind it.

But, that’s in the past. SEO has come a long way since then.

With the Keyword Intelligence module, you can see the intent of each semantically related keyword that is generated from your seed keyword. Take a look at the highlighted column in the screenshot below.

BiQ keyword intelligence seo strategy search intent

Once you’ve categorized the keywords based on topic and intent, you can start planning on which keywords you want to prioritize for your next content creation process.

Tip #3: A lot of SEO experts tend to include a few long-tail keywords into their content.
Using long-tail keywords will instantly filter out the right kind of audience you are targeting, thus resulting in a higher conversion rate and lower bounce rate.
You can find these keywords using the Advanced Filter option.

2. Competitor Analysis

SEO and content go hand in hand.

If your website doesn’t have any content, there’s nothing there for Google to rank.

Since you’ve done with your keyword research, you must be thinking it’s time to write some content and start publishing.

Woah, slow down there!

If you want to create a good SEO strategy, you need to know what your competitors are doing and the keywords that they used for their content.

After all – “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.

According to Campaign Creators, performing an SEO competitor analysis lets you build:

An understanding of how your existing and potential customers rate the competition.
A mechanism to develop effective competitive strategies in your target market.
An idea of what gives your company an advantage over its competitors.
A good idea of what your customers are in need of.
Strategies for how to expand into a new market.

For this process, all you need is BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence.

1. Identify competitors’ winning keywords

To find out your competitors’ winning keywords, you need to use the Content Idea section.

This section will help you to analyze and gives you a list of keywords straight from the top 10 SERP results.

BiQ keyword intelligence competitor analysis winning keywords

The Content Idea section will give you a much better understanding of the type of content that your top competitors are doing.

For example, looking at the screenshot above, I know that my competitors are creating content about “how to start a blog” or “how to build a WordPress site for blogging”.

Tip #4: If you want to take a look at your competitors’ content and analyze to find out why they are at the top on SERP, copy the keywords and do a simple search on Google.

BiQ keyword intelligence competitor analysis wordpress blog

2. Spy on competitors’ featured snippets

Another thing you should pay attention to while analyzing your competitors is the featured snippets that they are ranked on.

You’ve definitely seen this block many times before at the top of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

It is a snippet chosen to be featured by Google when it thinks the page and content are most relevant and helpful to the users’ search query.

BiQ keyword intelligence competitor analysis featured snippet

To find out which featured snippets your competitors own, check out the Popular Questions section.

This section will not only give you hundreds of questions that users are searching online and the answers provided by your competitors.

For each answer, there will be a link at the bottom for you to click and find out how your competitors are answering the question.

BiQ keyword intelligence competitor analysis competitor link popular questions

Depending on the topic that you want to create, you can use the Advanced Filter option to include or exclude terms that aren’t relevant to your content.

Once you found out which snippets your competitors are ranking for, you can begin to optimize your own pages for those same terms.

3. Content Strategy

“Content is king”.

You must have seen this quote over and over again on many sites and it’s not wrong. Content marketing is still the heart of a good SEO strategy.

What else can you do to create an effective content strategy? Well, let’s find out more!

1. Question research

So, you’ve implemented keyword research as part of your SEO strategy. But have you considered doing niche question research?

Here are some powerful reasons why you should start doing it now:

Answering questions in your content may improve your search visibility
It lowers the bounce rate, which in turn results in a higher conversion rate
You’ll be able to find out what are the daily problems your audience is facing in the industry
Question research gives you more content ideas

In the process of finding out which type of answer(s) is ideal for your content, you need to find out what are the most popular questions being asked by people in your industry.

Well, there are a few ways that you can find these questions:

“People Also Ask” section
Google AutoSuggest
Social media

The only problem with these methods is that you need to enter each keyword into the search bar which makes it really time-consuming.

Fortunately, there’s a faster way in doing so – with the Popular Questions section.

This section will use a separate algorithm to not only generate a list of popular questions but also acts as a guide for your content structure.

Let’s take a look at our example again. Once you got your list of questions, you can always have the option to export as a PDF/CSV file or Add to Collections.

BiQ keyword intelligence content strategy popular questions

From the screenshot above, there are lots of questions we can use to create an outline for our content.

You can always create short content to answer one major question. But, a long, comprehensive content can help to answer up to three major questions, giving you a better chance to rank on Google’s featured snippet.

BiQ keyword intelligence content strategy what do you mean by blogging

To keep this simple, let’s say we want to create content based on one question “What do you mean by blogging?”

Think about it in your customer’s shoes. If someone wants to know what is blogging about, what informational keywords that you want to use in your content?

Based on the keyword research that we’ve done above, this will involve terms such as:

Blogging
Blogging for beginners
What is the point of blogging?
Blogging examples
….and more.

When it comes to question research, you need to have an idea of the users’ knowledge prior to looking at the content, what answers they want, and what they should do after consuming the content.

Ultimately, this forms the basis of question research using the Keyword Intelligence module.

4. BONUS: Update and revise your old content

Since you’ve read till here so far, here’s a little ‘thank you’ gift from us at BiQ. Do you know that you can use Keyword Intelligence for the post-SEO strategy?

Now, if you’ve been doing content marketing for some time now, you’re bound to have some old content lurking in the depths of your blog.

Here are some reasons that you should start updating your old content:

Google loves them: Google likes fresh content as it is more relevant to users. Take a look at the example below when I used “gaming headset” as the search term.

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content date

Giving it new life: By updating your old content, you can extend the life of your best blog content as well as increase the results it continues to achieve over time. For example, Geoff Kenyon updated his Technical Site Audit Checklist post on Moz. You can see the before and after results below:

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content trend

Easier and faster: It’s often much easier and quicker to update and republish an old post than it is to write a new post from scratch.

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content repurpose content

Sure, you can use the list of keywords that you’ve researched beforehand. But there’s a better way of doing so – fresh keyword targeting.

In other words, you need to look for newer and trending keywords with the “Trending Searches” section.

Trending keywords tend to have lesser competition and you can capitalize on them to rank higher on the SERP.

The “Trending Searches” section will extract keywords from the Google Autocomplete search feature. If you didn’t know about Google Autocomplete, it’s an algorithm that shows a list of search predictions based on factors like popularity and freshness.

For instance, take a look at the screenshot of the “Trending Searches” feature.

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content trending search

For instance, previously, we’ve created an article with the title “Blogging Tips for Beginners 2019”. As you can see, the title is already outdated and it doesn’t generate traffic as it used to.

So, what we need to do is pick out some of the trending keywords and update the article.

From the screenshot below, here are some keywords that we can capitalize on since our competitors haven’t realized them yet.

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content trending keywords

One thing that stands out from the list above is that people are searching for blogging ideas online.

To update my article, we can now include blogging ideas into our content outline for our audience.

Conclusion

There you have it – All the things you can do to develop an effective SEO strategy with BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence. We tried to keep it brief but there’s just so much you can do with one module.

If you’re interested to find out more about the Keyword Intelligence or BiQ in general, you can click the link here to sign-up for our beta access.

About Kelvin

Copywriter. Digital Marketer. Tech Enthusiast. Hi, my name is Kelvin. By day, you can find me creating content, analyzing post performance or just scribbling around for the next content idea. By night, I will be busy updating myself with the latest digital news.

Keyword Research,Rank Tracking,SEO,SEO Tools

The Best Free SEO Tool You Should Be Using – BiQ SEO Suite

What can you do with BiQ? Learn all about the features you can use with this free SEO tool.

If you want to make money through online business and content marketing, you need traffic.

To do so, you’ve checked out all the online SEO tools out there.

But there’s just one problem – they’re TOO EXPENSIVE!

Sure, there are some free SEO tools online too, but some of the features are limited and you’re not sure whether you’re ready to invest in them or not.

Whether you need to find the best keywords for SEO, audit your website, do competitive research, or just want to see how well you rank on Google, BiQ SEO Suite is the ULTIMATE tool that you need. And it’s free!

So, what can you do with a free account with BiQ?

With a free account, you can access to 4 key features of BiQ:

Keyword Intelligence
Content Intelligence
Rank Intelligence
Rank Tracking

1. Doing Keyword Research with Keyword Intelligence

Most free keyword tools for SEO will only show you the data and metrics for specific keywords. If you’re a content creator, you will need more than that to make sure you deliver valuable content that users actually want and need.

With our Keyword Intelligence tool, you can now access to 4 reports to help you understand what people are searching for with the specific keyword:

Related keywords
Content Ideas
Popular Questions
Trending Searches

Choosing The Right Keywords Is No Longer Rocket Science With Related Keywords

If you’re a marketer like me, you will understand the challenges of selecting the right keywords.

The first keyword that pops up in your head is the accurate descriptions of your company’s products and services – but they also described what your competitors are offering as well. The competition for these keywords is high and you will be wasting a lot of time and effort optimizing them with little to no results.

Instead, you need to identify longer, more specific keywords (called “long-tail keywords”) with clearer intent. If you’re new to SEO, this may sound impossible, but that’s what you can do with our ‘Related Keywords’.

To give you a clearer picture, for example, my company sells home electrical appliances and I want to rank one of my products, washing machines, to get more website traffic.

Here are the steps that I can do to do my keyword research using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence”:

After signing in to my BiQ account, click the Keyword Intelligence tab.
Then, enter the target keyword you want to rank for in the keyword field.
You can also choose the location and language if you want to target the keyword to a specific audience.

best free seo tool BiQ keyword intelligence related keywords

Once BiQ finishes analyzing your keyword, you will get the results with all the related keywords as shown in the screenshot below. You can see the trend, monthly volume, number of search results, cost per click (CPC) and competition of each related keyword.

If I’d like to focus on certain keywords, you can find options to filter your keyword suggestions based on relatedness, long tail, intent, and the advanced include and/or exclude filter.

Writer’s Block? Try Content Ideas!

In this new decade, your content will be all about your audience. Because, when you write to the right people in the right way, your writing and content will rank higher on Google.

But you are experiencing a writer’s block. You don’t know what will be a good topic for your users. “Content Ideas” will help you to brainstorm those ideas by giving you a list of topics your users are interested in based on the targeted keywords.

best free seo tool BiQ keyword intelligence content ideas

From the screenshot, the report will list out keywords that users also searched for such as ‘energy efficient’, ‘water level’, ‘water efficiency’ etc. This gives me an idea to create articles such as ‘Top 10 Energy Efficient Washing Machines to Buy in 2020: According to Experts’.

And people will start clicking on your article and check out the washing machines that are listed there.

Know Your Customers Better with Popular Questions

Whether you know it or not, you’ve probably seen countless featured snippets from Google when searching for information or answers to your questions.

We often refer to the position that featured snippets give to content as “position zero”.

This is because featured snippets take up the most space on a search results page. They’re usually at the very top of the page, too.

Here’s an example of what a snippet looks like when I searched for “best washing machine”:

Ranking for a featured snippet is really helpful for driving visitors to your site than competing with others to rank for #1.

And you don’t have to be the number one in your industry or fork out additional money to rank for them.

That’s why you need to take advantage of the ‘Popular Questions’ report to help you to rank easily in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

best free seo tool BiQ keyword intelligence popular questions

Many of the questions generated in the report are valuable search queries that are asked by users relating to your target keyword. Provide the definitive answer to some of these questions in your content and…

VOILA!

Your content will drive a huge amount of traffic with Featured Snippet opportunities.

And that’s not all. You can simply click the hyperlinked answer title and look at what your competitors are doing to make better content for your visitors.

Pretty neat, right?

Keeping up with Trending Search Report

Every day, Google receives BILLION of searches and pumps out even more answers. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a clear view of these search patterns and learn the population’s most nagging questions and topics?

With the ‘Trending Search’ report, you can. The report uses AI-powered suggestions that are constantly being updated to help you uncover the latest trends related to your targeted keyword.

best free seo tool BiQ keyword intelligence trending searches

2. Fix Your Content Marketing with Content Intelligence

More than 20 years ago, Bill Gates made a bold statement “Content is King”, signaling an era in which successful digital marketing strategies would need to revolve around content as its core.

As a result? Marketers have begun pushing out massive amounts of content – creating blogs, e-books, videos, social media posts, and website content.

And if you’re like many other marketers, you will notice that getting the same results you did even two or three years ago is challenging.

It shouldn’t be surprising!

We are flooding the internet with massive amounts of content, and your audience is getting distracted by thousands of content out there.

Yet, this doesn’t mean that content marketing as a strategy is dead. You need to change your content marketing plan to focus more on your audience instead.

When people ‘content is king’, it’s only true IF your content is relevant to your target audience. This is where BiQ’s ‘Content Intelligence’ tool comes to play.

Our ‘Content Intelligence’ tool helps to rank every paragraph in your content and assigns a rating based on relevance, readability, and sentiment.

Here are the few simple steps to start getting results with BiQ’s Content Intelligence Tool:

Select the Content Intelligence icon from the sidebar menu
Enter the URL of the page you wish to analyze in the URL field
Enter the primary target keyword of the page you are analyzing in the keyword field
Submit your query and give your report a few seconds to generate.

Report Overview

The screenshot below shows you what the report will look like once it is generated.

On the left panel, the Content Intelligence tool will analyze each paragraph of your content to make sure your content remains relevant, using the right sentiment and readable by your target audience.

You can also check the overall readability and sentiment of your content on the upper-right panel of the report.

Word Vector SEO

If you’re not up-to-date with Google’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) research, Word Vector or Word2Vec is an AI model to learn about the relationship between words, based on actual language usage.

Word Vector SEO helps to analyze your content and improve your content relevance against your top competitors.

It will analyze the performance of your current content and point out all the “gaps” that you need to improve on.

best free seo tool BiQ content intelligence word vector SEO

Keyword SEO

The keyword SEO overview will help to optimize your content based on your target keyword. This part is important to make sure that you will utilize every SEO technique to satisfy both user search intent and search engines.

Fundamental SEO

The Fundamental SEO overview gives general on-page SEO suggestions that are easy to implement to boost your SERP rankings.

Start Optimizing Your Content with BiQ

Do you know that you can actually use the Content Intelligence tool to check your top competitors too?

Yes, you’ve heard it right!

After you’ve got the report from analyzing your content, you can do the same thing with other top competitors too.

Just type in the targeted keyword on Google search and copy the URL of the first few results. Enter the URL in the search box, with the same target keyword and submit to generate the report.

Now, you can analyze your competitors and find out why they are ranked higher on Google. Find out what’s missing in your content and optimize it to rank up as high as they do.

best free seo tool BiQ content intelligence competitor analysis

And that is the SECRET of optimizing your content using BiQ’s Content Intelligence Tool!

3. Track Your Keyword Ranking using Rank Intelligence

We understand.

You’ve spent hours researching for the right keywords and publishing content onto your website and blog. Now, you need the right keyword tracker to analyze all ranking data of your entire keyword portfolio.

With ‘Rank Intelligence’, you can find out exactly which keywords you rank for, including keywords you didn’t know you’re ranked for.

Find keywords that your site already rank for

To get an overall picture of how many keywords your site is currently ranking for, just follow these steps:

Select the Rank Intelligence icon from the sidebar menu
Enter the URL of the page you wish to analyze at the ‘Create New Rank Intelligence Profile’ tab.
Submit your query and give your report a few seconds to generate.

Our tool will generate a report that tells you exactly what keywords you’re ranking for and for which exact pages. You will be surprised to find certain keywords are ranked for other variations that you’re not aware of.

For example, you are aiming to rank for “best food blender in the United States”, but you may never know that you are already ranking for the keyword “best energy-efficient food blender”.

Sometimes, you may notice that your ranking position for certain keywords will change on the next day. So, you should use the app to monitor your keyword ranking movement. Just choose which keywords you want to monitor, and click “Track” so you’ll be notified if there are any changes in the ranking movement.

best free seo tool BiQ rank intelligence track keyword

Discover underperformed keywords and improve them

At BiQ, we believe that great content deserves great ranking.

You’ve spent so much time on that great article and you find out that the keywords are not ranked as high as others.

With “Rank Intelligence”, you can now find out which keywords aren’t doing so well.

For example, if I want to check and improve which keywords are ranked at position 5 to 20 on Google. I just turned on the ‘Advanced Filter’ and enter min 5 and max 20 in the SERP Position field.

best free seo tool BiQ rank intelligence filter serp position

From there, I can see which pages you need to allocate to focus my resources and time to improve on.

best free seo tool BiQ rank intelligence underperformed keywords

4. Monitor Your Site Progress with Rank tracking

If you’re running a website that relies on revenue from search engine traffic, then being able to track the performance of keywords and pages is important.

‘Rank tracking’ gives you a lot of benefits beyond just helping you to monitor your site‘s performance in search engines. It helps you to identify which SEO techniques work (and which don’t), monitor the performance of your competitors, and more.

To monitor your site progress, just follow these steps:

Select the Rank Tracking icon from the sidebar menu
Enter the URL of the page you wish to analyze at the ‘Create New Rank Tracking Profile’ tab.
Submit your query and give your report a few seconds to generate.

Monitor Site’s Performance

One way to check the performance of your site is to check the overall progress of the keywords you are tracking across all pages.

Using the ‘Pages’ tab, you can see all the pages from your site together with its number of keywords tracked.

To check the overall performance of keywords in a specific page, the app will show you a summary of any keywords gained, keyword loss, and its average position.

best free seo tool BiQ rank tracking monitor site's performance

Assess Your Website’s Volatility

Remember that Google sneakily rolled out the BERT algorithm back in 2019?

The results? Well, a lot of marketers and businesses were not happy because they noticed a drop in both their ranking and website traffic.

Google loves to update their algorithm because they want to deliver more relevant results to its users. And no one will know when Google updates or changes its algorithm again?

By creating your own “Rank Tracking” profile, you will get an overview of your website performance over the period of change. Select from either average position, featured snippet position, or ranking with extra features. And you will see the overview over the last few days, weeks, and months.

best free seo tool BiQ rank tracking access your website's volatility

If you see high volatility on a specific day and notice that your ranking and traffic drop, it could be a sign that Google is changing its algorithm and your site has been affected.

With these insights in your hand, you can start preparing a plan to minimize the traffic drop.

Check Your Competitor’s Progress

Just like our other features, you can make use of “Rank Tracking” to monitor your competitors’ progress and see what they are doing that causes their rankings to increase.

All you need to do is create a Rank Tracking profile like your website and you can start checking their progress over time.

If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to identify the keywords that they are targeting and start putting some effort to compete with them on those keywords.

Is This The Best Free SEO Tool For You?

If you want your website to be successful, using the right SEO tools is a must. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend a fortune to do so.

At BiQ, we believe in our statement that users should “Pay for what you use, and don’t pay for what you don’t use”. In other words, if you want to use BiQ for keyword research purposes, then you will be charged on the Keyword Intelligence part.

We believe that everyone deserves an opportunity to fight with SEO giants out there.

Now BiQ is open for beta users. Sign up and be the first to try BiQ to see for yourself why we are the best free SEO tool out there!

About Kelvin

SEO

Building An SEO Proof Anchor Text Strategy

Start optimizing your anchor text strategy for SEO in 2020

Anchor text optimization is one of the easiest SEO strategies that you can use to skyrocket your ranking.

But what exactly is anchor text and how you can use it to achieve your SEO goals?

That brings us to today’s post. Here are what you will learn:

What is anchor text?
What makes a good anchor text?
How will the anchor text affect your SEO strategy?
What are the anchor text strategies you can use in 2020?
What are the different types of anchor text you can use in your content?

Let’s start!

What is anchor text?

In short, anchor text is the visible and clickable text in a hyperlink that links to another location on the web.

Generally, anchor text appears as blue and underlined like this: Lead generation mistakes. You’re probably familiar with that already. These days, we can see many websites use different styles and colors for links.

This is how anchor text looks like in HTML:

<a href=”https://biq.cloud/blog/lead-generation-mistakes/”>Lead generation mistakes</a>

Anchor text is an integral part of SEO which has a great impact on search ranking factors. It helps search engines to read your site and understand its relevance to the user’s search.

For example, if we look at the anchor text below, “ideal length of content”, we can guess that it will lead to a page that talks more about the topic of ideal length for content. Well, that’s how it is supposed to be.

Anchor text informs readers what to expect when clicking the text.

The “ideal length of content” is an anchor text that leads to this blog post- https://seopressor.com/blog/the-ideal-length-for-every-online-content/. The linked source talks about what is the ideal length for every content.

Using the anchor text in the excerpt above helps the readers to know what to expect if they click them.

Anchor text and SEO: Is anchor text important for SEO?

The short answer is: YES!

Anchor text gives important information to not just the reader but search engines too. It helps search engines to understand the context of the website and gives a clear idea of your website and what it is all about.

Looking back at the previous example, “ideal length of content”, search engines understand the referred page is about a content’s ideal length.

The keywords in the anchor text are one of the many signals search engines use to determine the topic of a website.

It analyzes the anchor text people use when linking to websites to see how authoritative a site is on various topics. Websites are more likely to rank high in search results for keywords related to them.

Now, let’s look at the example of a good and bad anchor text:

Bad anchor text

Click this link, click here

Using “click this link” as your anchor text will not tell much about what the referred link is about. It could lead the user to content that does not match their interests.

As a result, it will increase the website’s bounce rate and this gives a bad signal to the search engines.

Good anchor text

Anchor text vs hyperlink, how does anchor text work, anchor text generator

Using a descriptive anchor text helps Google’s bots to instantly understand what the linked page is about. It will help pages rank for queries related to the topic. Most importantly, the users will have a better idea of what the linked page is about.

Anchor text for backlinks, internal links, and external links

Backlinks – link that comes from someone else’s website to yours

Internal links – link that directs the readers to the target page on your own website

External links – link that directs the readers from your website to a different website

As a rule of thumb, you can’t really influence the anchor text of your backlinks, but you can do so for your internal link building or also known as “inlinking”.

By linking related pages internally, you can actually boost your rankings on Google. Your website structure is used to determine the quality of your on-site SEO. And a good inlinking is the key to it.

Thanks to anchor text, it makes the linking easier to understand for your readers and search engines as well. Hence, Google bots will be able to freely crawl through your website which directly improves your site’s SEO.

Read more on how to use an internal link to quickly boost your website’s ranking position (You guessed it right, this is another example of anchor text!).

Anchor text best practices: Optimization strategy

Now, what makes a good anchor text? Know that using good anchor text practices can result in a positive impact on your SEO.

In this section, you will get to know how to optimize your anchor text for better SEO performance in 2020.

Let’s dive in!

1. Keep anchors relevant to the content

Keep this in mind: always do it for the searchers’ best interest.

Google or any other search engines always want to offer the best and relevant information to their users.

Unfortunately, not all anchor texts are able to deliver what they have promised. This results in a high bounce rate and low average time on site. Thus, the lower ranks on search results.

The next time you want to create an anchor text, ask yourself this question: how relevant is this anchor text to the referred link?

If the anchor text is “social media engagement strategy”, the destination link should talk about topics that are related to a social media engagement strategy. For example,

Tips to improve my social media engagement
Social media engagement examples
How to increase social media engagement organically

Just imagine if any of the anchor text above leads you to a pet shop website… It does not make sense in any way, right? Would you find it relevant or valuable to you? I’m sure it’s a 100% no and it would be the same for Google.

The anchor texts should (always) offer real value to the users.

2. Keep your anchor text natural

Your anchor text should be natural in the eyes of readers. It must flow naturally within your content.

Always remember that you are writing for humans and not bots. To give you an example, exact match anchors often don’t look natural in the context of a web page.

We will look further into the different types of anchor text in a while.

When you try to force a specific exact match anchor text on your content, your reader and the search engines will easily notice.

As we all know, Google’s algorithms are getting smarter every day. Therefore, you should avoid using multiple repetitive and keyword-based anchors on your web page. It doesn’t do any good to you especially when Google detects them. Failure to do so may result in a penalty.

Google is now becoming more and more rewarding to quality content that uses sentence structure variations. By using anchor text naturally, you are more likely to see better results in the long run.

3. Keep your anchor text brief

More is not always better. There is no restriction on an anchor text length but it is best to keep it short and sweet.

To illustrate this better, let’s look at the example below:

“Keep your anchor text length as short as possible, but still relevant to your readers. Your goal is to make anchor text easy to read and able to deliver real value to readers.”

Using anchor text that has too many words does not really help readers, but only making it hard to understand and lose track of what you’re linking to.

Here’s how you can fix them:

“Keep your anchor text length as short as possible, but still relevant to your readers. Your goal is to make anchor text easy to read and able to deliver real value to readers.”

Shorter anchor text length definitely helps readers to read them and know what to expect.

4. Make your anchor text stand out

Why would you hide the anchor text when it does not serve its purposes?

Anchor texts are there to let readers notice and click the link when it is relevant. Therefore, you may want to make sure your readers can easily see the links in your content.

I am very sure we are already familiar with the common blue underlined text, but we are not limited to just that. We are free to express our creativity using other colours and styles, as long as it helps readers to see it is a clickable text.

Let me share with you some examples that I’ve found on how you can style your anchor text. Anchor text example:

Example 1: Red colour

anchor text seo best practices — Source: Millo.co

Example 2: Orange colour

Example 3: Bold and underline

It is actually pretty easy to change your link’s colour.

Just change ‘red’ to your preferred colour and it is done!

How do you make sure your anchor text stands out in your content? I would love to hear from you. Do let me know in the comment below!

5. Distribute your anchor text in the right proportions

Some may have overlooked this important practice; the distributions of your anchor text should be proportionate.

It’s hard to tell the ideal distribution of an anchor text, but it is best to avoid overstuffing with exact match and partial-match keywords on your content. You can rely on branded and website name anchor texts as it is allowed by the search engines.

Check out the top-performing website anchor text distributions in your niche or industry. Explore and discover their distribution percentages of the different types of anchors to get a good idea of what they have been practicing to gain the top ranking.

6. Don’t over-optimize

Everything has its own limit. Avoid overstuffing with exact match keywords because it may result in penalties. Using the same keyword too many times does not bring any good to your site. Not just in the eyes of the Google bots, but also readers.

In short, keep your anchor text natural and spread it across your site in an appropriate proportion.

7. Track your hard work

Tracking your anchor texts is a must. Track the percentages of all kinds of anchor text. It is to make sure that you are not over-using certain keyword anchors for one particular web page.

Failing to do so means you will risk falling into the “over-optimized” category. Also, you don’t want to let your hard work go to waste.

You can easily get this done by using BiQ’s Link Intelligence.

Tracking your anchor text would help you to follow a systematic process and avoid overusing keywords that are already used.

Types of anchor text

As a matter of fact, there are different types of anchor text you can use.

Here are the six common types of anchor text that you may have noticed on different websites:

The six common types of anchor text.

1. Exact match anchors

Exact match anchor text includes the exact keyword or phrase that you are targeting. The exact match would be exactly the keyword that you want to rank for on the search engine result page. It is without any keyword variations or diversification.

Example: BiQ’s Link Intelligence helps you to manage your anchor text distribution.

If “link intelligence” is my target keyword, then my exact match anchor text would be “link intelligence”.

Exact match anchors are known to have the power to increase your rankings. At the same time, it also has the power to get your site penalized by Google. This is because using the same exact keyword excessively leads to keyword stuffing.

2. Partial match anchors

Partial match anchor text includes your target keyword with some variation. It has all the keywords of your target keyword but is not an exact phrase.

Example: BiQ’s latest Link Intelligence helps you to manage your anchor text distribution.

The keyword variation for the anchor text above is “latest”. Using keyword variations is a more organic alternative to using the same keyword repeatedly on a page.

3. Branded anchors

Branded anchor text contains your business’s brand name and it is unrelated to your target keyword.

Example: BiQ’s Link Intelligence helps you to manage your anchor text distribution.

“BiQ” is a branded anchor text as it is the name of an SEO Suite. Branded anchors are the safest type of anchor text.

4. Naked link anchors

Naked link anchor text means the URL itself is being used as the anchor.

Example: BiQ’s Link Intelligence (https://biq.cloud/closed-beta-invite/) helps you to manage your anchor text distribution.

The link is described as “naked” because you can see the whole URL being displayed as its own text.

5. Generic anchors

Generic anchor text is the common anchor that you see everywhere. It is completely unrelated to the link that you’re linking to.

Example: Click here to see how BiQ’s Link Intelligence can help you to manage your anchor text distribution.

Generic anchor text uses non-specific keywords or phrases like “learn more”, “click now”, “more info”,” read here”, or “click this button”. It encourages the readers to click but may not be able to tell them what the content of the referred link would be about.

This may hurt the user experience if the content of the referred link is not able to deliver what the user wants.

By adding a short description before using the generic anchor text would help the user to know what to expect before clicking the anchor text.

6. Image anchors

There isn’t any actual anchor text for images but there’s what we call an alt tag. The alt tag is a description of what the image is about.

Example: <a href=”https://biq.cloud/closed-beta-invite/”><img src=”/linkintelligence.png” alt=”BiQ’s Link Intelligence”/></a>

It’s obvious that search engines cannot interpret images. Because of that, alt tag plays an important role by telling search engines what the image is about. Alt tag should be kept short to maximize its impact.

One thing to take note: Don’t excessively use the same alt tag as this will lead to keyword stuffing. Again, the search engines disfavor such strategy.

Conclusion

In 2020, anchor text still has a big impact on SEO, but the game has changed. To make it work effectively, keep your anchor text natural. Make sure it is not over-optimized and maintains a good proportion of keywords to help boost your ranking.

You can’t really control who links to your site and the anchor text they use to link you. So try your shot at internal linking.

The best part about internal linking is you can control the anchor text used within your site. With this in mind, I would suggest you to use the anchor text best practices to govern how to best use anchor text within your own website. When done right, anchored links will help to enhance user experience on your website.

Can you see how anchor text strategy applies to your SEO strategy in 2020?

Try them out and let me know in the comments below if you have done so!

I hope you have a great year ahead!

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

SEO,SEO Tools

The Best Free SEO Tools Marketing Experts Actually Use

Learn what SEO tools marketing experts use in 2020.

There are literally hundreds of free online SEO tools out there. So for today’s blog post, I thought it would be great to compile a list of top SEO tools marketing experts actually use. I decided to reach out to these respected marketing experts and ask them the tools they’d use to gain desirable results.

Now before I dive into the tools recommendations, here are the list of best free SEO tools being mentioned:

LSIGraph
GDoc SEO Assistant
AnswerThePublic
Help A Reporter Out
Ubersuggest
Google Analytics
Google Search Console
SEMRush
SEO Book Keyword Density Analyzer
WordPress
Structured Data Testing Tool
GTMetrix
Pingdom
Textmechanic Tools

Let’s get started!

1. Winnie Wong – Head of Content at LSIGraph

I’ve always believed this: To excel in SEO, you have to know the right tools that can help you achieve that. Better still if it’s free, right?

Now, over the years of developing and testing out SEO tools in the market, I’ve compiled some that I think can really serve all of us well. These two tools come hand-in-hand so feel free to go over them!

LSIGraph

Keyword research is one of the first things that everyone would come across when learning SEO. LSIGraph is designed to help you solve your keyword research problems that result in this tool being the best choice.

The main takeaway of this tool is that it is extremely easy to use and efficient when searching for LSI keywords related to your topic. With a database of over 30 million keywords, you’re sure to benefit from it. So, get those valuable keywords and sprinkle them in when writing in your content right away.

As a digital marketer, having a tool like this gives you access to the secret vault of valuable keywords that not only pleases your audience but search engines too. It is also a great tool to rank and bring in massive traffic to your site!

GDoc SEO Assistant

As SEO practitioners, we often face problems of ensuring your content is at its peak of being SEO-friendly. GDoc SEO Assistant is your saving grace.

This plugin is an add-on to your Google Document where it can generate SEO suggestions and related keywords for content optimization. It is also a perfect addition for those of you who are online marketers, bloggers, and writers wanting to analyze and improve your content based on valid SEO standards.

Also, since it gives instant feedback, I’d always use it to check on my content. Hurray to optimization done right on the spot where everything is done in a simple click!

* I think these tools are worthy of mention which I am grateful for their existence too:

Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, and the new kid on the block BiQ; Revolution of a new SEO Suite!

2. Ryan Scollon – SEO & PPC Consultant at RyanScollon

AnswerThePublic

My favorite free SEO tool has to be AnswerThePublic.

It takes keyword research to the next level. Instead of getting a few keyword ideas from the other tools, this can generate hundreds of ideas for keywords and content that you could create, just by entering one single word or search term. It essentially pulls all of the auto-suggests from Google search covering questions, prepositions, comparisons, etc.

While I don’t use it so much for main keyword research, it is perfect for content marketing ideas and helps with creating negative keywords lists for PPC.

HARO

A close second for my favorite free SEO tool is HARO, also known as help a reporter out.

It’s a great place for businesses to get involved in PR without the need for a PR agency or the need of publishing press releases. You simply get 3 emails a day that will often include around 70 different questions that journalists need expert inputs for. Once you find one that is a good fit for you, you simply send them an email with your input and a few other details and if successful, you could be featured on a site or magazine, etc.

This is a perfect opportunity to get your business mentioned in some very well known and authoritative publications and websites.

3. Viken Patel – Head of Marketing at eZee Technosys

SEO tools are important to grow your business to the next level. The right tools can make your life so much easier. While most marketing tools are paid and often expensive, I prefer using many free tools to perform a huge chunk of my marketing activities.

I use these tools because they provide me with a lot of insights that I can’t get if I try doing them manually.

Here are the top three tools that I use daily.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is my favorite and is first on my list because I perform a lot of activities using this tool. It helps me a lot, especially when it comes to SEO such as finding blog topics, site audits and more.

I mostly use it for researching keywords to target along with related keywords, optimization insights for a website, paid and SEO difficulties for all such keywords.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an all-in-one tracking tool that can track your visitors and give you great insights. I track channel-wise visitors, their behaviors and conversions using Google Analytics. Additionally, they offer a very good reporting service that can help you make the right decisions and improve your business.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the most powerful SEO tools there is. It can help you increase your website’s organic traffic. I use this tool to check the current web page position, CTR, clicks, and impressions. Based on that data, I determine the site’s performance and update content accordingly on the website to improve rankings and CTR.

There are many marketing tools that I use from time to time such as Canva, Semrush, Mailchimp, Yoast SEO plugin, webpagetest.org and more.

4. Rachel Baker – Head of Content at Kumo

SEMrush

As a content SEO practitioner, first and foremost, SEMrush is an invaluable tool for me.

Not only does it provide the most helpful information about keywords your site is currently ranking for, but it is also a really comprehensive tool with lots of different reports all in one place. This means you can have a really productive content planning session without having to constantly flick between different tools.

The Organic Search Positions report lets you identify pages for optimisation, while the Keyword Gap and Keyword Magic tool helps you find keyword opportunities to plan new content around.

SEO Book Keyword Density Analyzer

This is a really handy free tool for analysing keyword density either for an existing web page or for texts that you are writing.

Although there is no set keyword density you should be aiming for, it’s helpful to get an overview of how much you’re using keywords in a text – showing if it’s not optimised enough or if you are at risk of keyword stuffing!

It can also flag up any other keyword phrases you’ve been using that could cause cannibalisation issues.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the key tool for any digital marketer, but from an SEO and content point of view, I find the acquisition and content drilldown reports particularly useful. Seeing which pages have had the most organic traffic and pageviews lets you see what works and what doesn’t. You can then use this to plan more effective content in the future.

5. Marko Saric – MarkoSaric.com

WordPress

My favorite free tool is WordPress. I work in content marketing and WordPress is my preferred platform for publishing content. It makes it very simple to create beautiful and attractive content that grabs people’s attention.

You don’t need to code or to know design or to have much technical experience in order to create posts that will be consumed and shared. And great looking content that is consumed and shared is a great way to get search engines to take notice and start sending traffic too. I have a guide on getting started with WordPress for those interested.

6. Alston Antony – Digital Agency Founder & Blogger at Clicktug.co m

Google Search Console

This is an essential SEO tool in my arsenal because the data provided are directly from Google. There can be so many premium tools, but always remember those data is from the third party, and it can never match data accuracy from Search Console.

Structured Data Testing Tool

It is a simple tool, but it’s very powerful from the perspective of SEO. Search is changing from text to all sorts of crazy mediums, so we need to have the right markup to be visible on all search types. This tool allows us to test the written markup to see whether it’s valid or if it’s missing some properties.

GTMetrix & Pingdom

I know both of these are two different tools, but both serve the same purpose, and I will always use both of them. These will analyze the webpage and let you know speed test results for it. When it comes to SEO, fast-loading web pages is a requirement because slower pages will have a negative impact on your CTA.

Textmechanic Tools

It is an online tool that allows pretty much any text manipulations. These are not direct SEO tools, but it’s a frequently used tool for my SEO work. I mostly use the keyword research process.

Which Tools Do You Use To Ensure Your SEO Success?

Of course, there are tons of other free SEO tools out there that might not have made on the list. What other SEO tools that you would recommend me to add in the list? Anything that you wish existed still isn’t out there yet? Share with me in the comments below!

On a side note:

Those of you keeping a close eye on BiQ should have known that BiQ has 60+ features waiting to be explored.

Head over to the designated page and see them for yourself today https://biq.cloud/closed-beta-invite/

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

Lead Generation,SEO

8 Surprising Lead Generation Mistakes Discovered

The common lead generation mistakes you need to stop making.

Lead generation is a very critical piece of the puzzle in your business’ website. If it fits nicely in the whole picture, you can expect to see more sales and higher conversion rates.

But we know that it is easier said than done. As mentioned by CSO insights, 68% of businesses report mentioned that they are struggling with lead generation.

In 2017, I started learning more about lead generation, and a year after that, my team and I launched a super-cool website. Despite knowing nothing much about blogging or SEO, we managed to hit 8,500 organic visitors in 3 weeks! It was one of the exciting weeks until the number goes down like this…

Long story short, we learned a good lesson from that experience – we may have gotten quite promising traffic but in reality, we only managed to get only 270 signups…

That’s pretty disappointing!

Then the real question hit us hard: What went wrong?

It didn’t take long for us to figure out that we’ve made some unforgivable mistakes in our lead generation funnel.

That is the reason why for today’s post, I want to share with you some of the lead generation mistakes I wished I knew when I started.

That’s why we’re here to learn what the common lead generation mistakes are, and how to fix them to get more leads in return.

Let’s get to it.

Mistake #1: Getting distracted by 80% and not focusing on the 20%

I still remember the first few months before the website launched We had prepared a list of marketing checklist on how to generate more traffic to our website. It includes email marketing, posting content on Twitter, creating some Facebook advertisements, writing blog posts and the list goes on and on… Not to forget, we spent ample time on designing graphic design and attractive images.

The result? We’ve gotten more than 8,000 traffic! It was a great achievement but it still did not hit our ultimate goal – to get at least 1,000 sign-ups. There may be a surge of traffic coming in but it doesn’t equal conversions.

Despite spending so much of our time on beautifying the whole website and getting huge traffic in return, what we forgot about was the “20%”.

20% of what you do leads to 80% of your results.

Let’s look at a common funnel example:

1,000 unique website visitors
100 people sign up
10 becomes a customer

If you focus on the top of the funnel and manage to increase your website traffic by 20%, it will look like this:

1,200 unique website visitors
120 people sign up
12 becomes a customer

Now let’s take the 20% energy to the middle funnel:

1,000 unique website visitors
200 people sign up
20 becomes a customer

The number of customers has now doubled and more leads become your customer!

We learned that by focusing on the right stage of the funnel, you can easily double your end goal.

As a matter of fact, it is easy to get distracted by all the tasks on hand that need to be completed. Therefore, layout your funnel and list down an action plan for each stage, not forgetting to prioritize those with the biggest contribution to your end goal.

Mistake #2: Asking too much in your contact form

Throughout my journey as a digital marketer, I have seen contact forms with 10 fields to fill in. Upon seeing such bizarre requests, I will close the tab the same as how 86% of visitors will leave a website if the sign-up procedure takes too long.

If your contact form is too long and needs a lot of work to fill out, visitors will weigh the effort it takes to complete your form against the value they’ll actually get from using your website.

Most of the time, the sign-up page is the step where visitors have already decided to share their personal information in exchange for something valuable from you. Therefore, the sign-up page should be focusing less on persuading but more on making the process simple and easy.

Common lead generation mistakes : long contact form — Source: Growthlab

If we look at the example above, only two information requested; Name and email. The goal is to get someone to sign up without a second thought. So make the whole thing as simple as possible.

Here’s a simple guideline when deciding what information you want to ask from visitors:

No financial transaction involved – email and name (if needed)
A financial transaction is involved – email, name and a minimum amount of information required by the credit card processor

If your registration process is combined with the checkout process, I would recommend you to break up the long process into steps. The key is to make sure your visitors do not have to think twice once they’ve decided to sign up. Any extra field to fill in means more opportunities for visitors to get frustrated and leave.

Mistake #3: Not using your top pages for lead generation

Can you recall what are the top three landing pages on your website? You will probably say the majority of your website traffic comes from the homepage and some blog posts. But are you utilizing them as your lead generation hub? I hope you are…

All pages shouldn’t be treated the same. In fact, they should be treated differently.

Dig into your analytics and sort the pages by the number of page views. Identify at least five top web pages on your website. Then, optimize these five pages for leads.

If one of your top webpages talks about “how to reach financial stability”, you can create a downloadable guide on “10 habits to develop for financial stability” for your visitors. It would not make sense for a financial website to develop an ebook promoting health and fitness.

Since your visitors’ come to your website to read more about reaching financial stability, they could possibly be looking for ways on how to achieve them or to know more about them. Therefore, make sure you provide something that is valuable and relevant to their topic of interest.

For example, I came across an article about how to recover visitors who abandon their shopping carts in ABTasty.com. After finishing the article, I found further reading material that is downloadable, talking about shopping cart abandonment at the bottom of the page:

Lead generation examples — Source: ABTasty

Would I download the ebook? Yes, of course!

Creating a brand new offer can be time-consuming, but it often gives much better results than offering the same offer to all. Your downloadable content can be in the form of ebooks, templates or and whitepapers.

Mistake #4: Not actively testing and optimizing your landing pages

When it comes to deciding which copywriting or design is performing better, you should not trust your gut feelings.

The only way to get a definite answer to that question is by testing and getting a data-proven answer.

I would recommend you to actively test and keep on optimizing your landing pages until you’ve achieved satisfactory results.

There are a few things that you can test on your landing pages. Some of them are:

Headline – create and split test two or more headlines that will nudge people to read the rest of the copy

Title – create a few titles that are relevant to the offer

Benefits – highlight the benefits of your product or services in different forms, i.e. bullet, checklist, numbers. And also the copy itself

Call to action – differentiate your CTA by changing the color of a CTA button and also its copy.

Design – create different designs that may potentially catch your visitors’ eyes

The goal is simple; to compare your landing page performance with the previous versions until you reach the peak of optimization.

Believe it or not, a simple tweak can make a big difference. In one test, Hubspot found that red buttons worked better than green buttons.

How could they possibly know which button will perform better if they had never done this simple test?

Split testing allows you to optimize your lead generation strategies by testing what is working and what isn’t. Not doing so means you may be missing out on greater opportunities out there. Start testing!

Mistake #5: Not leveraging social media power

There are more than 4 billion social media users across the globe reported early in 2019. Social media is much more than just a way to let people know about your brand or connect with your current customers. It is also a great platform for you to generate massive leads at a low cost.

Rather than trying to be “Jack of all trades”, start with choosing which social media can deliver your business goals. That way, you can laser focus your resources on building and growing them.

Since Facebook contributes to more than 2 billion users, let’s discover how you can use them for lead generation.

Create blog posts

The easiest way you can start is by linking your blog posts that have generated a high number of leads. Pin the post to let it stay at the top of your timeline and get maximum visibility.

Below is an example of how a pinned post will look like. Once users click on the link, it will lead them to a landing page. The lead generation form is placed on the landing page to get visitors to sign up.

Create Facebook lead generation ads

Lead generation ads can help you reach your audience and acquire more leads. If you have an existing customer list, use them to create a lookalike audience. In return, you will be able to target those who are greatly interested in what you have to offer.

The best part – your potential customers can fill out the form without leaving the Facebook app.

Create a Facebook group

A Facebook group has proven to be a valuable resource for companies looking to generate leads and raise awareness. You can use groups to build a relationship with your target audience. Start with providing information about what you do, how it can help them and create discussions.

When compared to public Facebook Pages, Groups provide more opportunities for personalization. By knowing what your target audience really wants, you can easily personalize a message or content that resonates.

Mistake #6: Failing to nurture leads

You may have created a great product, but still not achieving your targeted number of customers. One of the reasons is because you’ve failed to nurture your leads from the start.

According to a study by Marketingsherpa, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. The lack of attention towards your leads is the main cause of this.

When lead nurturing is done correctly, you can easily generate more leads. More leads mean more opportunities for you to convert prospects into paying customers.

If you are selling a product like a calendar or a table, it would be easy to understand what it is. But when you’re selling something complex, your potential customers may not understand why they need to purchase from you. What’s worse is when they do not even know you exist.

That’s when lead nurturing comes into the picture. It helps you to educate your potential customers over time. Instead of forcing someone to purchase from you, educate and let them know how your products can help them.

Begin with identifying your target audience. Knowing what your audience wants and needs will help you to craft and design the right message. Different visitors will be at different buyer’s stages when they visit your website. Therefore, you may want to visualize each stage properly to identify their real needs and wants.

Understand what content your leads will be interested in each buyer’s stages. Then, create different content that will deliver value and help them along the path to conversion.

Learn more about buyer’s stages here: 4 Killer Keyword Mapping Steps To Match The Buyer’s Journey

Mistake #7: Not communicating your value well

What’s one of the worst mistakes you can make? It is not communicating your value in marketing correctly.

How often do we hear marketing messages that say, “I will provide the ultimate solution” or “An all-in-one solution”?

Nowadays, some words are overused in marketing to attract customers. Slowly, it tarnishes the credibility of the brand. Due to long exposure to messages like these, people will think it is just another product in the market.

If you want your potential customers to believe that your product is the best solution to their pain points, show them directly in your marketing and selling efforts. Help them to understand how your product can solve their problems.

Let me show you a great example below.

It is clearly shown on their homepage that you can use Crello to create animations or graphics even without prior design skills.

When your marketing messages always revolve around how great you are, it will not be relevant to your potential customers. But when you focus your messages on your customers’ problems, needs, or wants, it can inspire them to take action.

Mistake #8: You give up on lead generation too early… Are you?

“Know when to quit… But don’t quit too soon”

Often times, lead generation does not work because marketers give up way too soon.

The first month when I tried working on Facebook’s lead generation ads, I can’t even get 50 leads. I don’t know how to get started or what I should be doing next. But after months of learning and testing, I managed to get 10x of the results. Since then, it has kept on growing.

Just imagine if I had given up at that time. I wouldn’t reap the results that I’ll be getting today.

Lead generation can be complicated and difficult if you don’t acquire the skill needed. How many people you know that speak often on something big, and yet never actually take the necessary steps to get it achieved? A lot.

If you want your business to grow, the only way to go is to go up!

Go through the 8 lead generation mistakes mentioned previously and identify if you are doing any of them.

Take your time to learn and acquire the necessary skills or knowledge needed. For example, getting to know who your real target audience is not an hour process. It takes more than just checking your analytics. You may need to go the extra mile, such as conducting a survey or make a phone interview.

Conclusion

To sum it up, here are the 8 lead generation mistakes that we have discovered the past few years:

Mistake #1: Getting distracted by 80% and not focusing on the 20%
Mistake #2: Asking too much in your contact form
Mistake #3: Not using your top pages for lead generation
Mistake #4: Not actively testing and optimizing your landing pages
Mistake #5: Not leveraging social media power
Mistake #6: Failing to nurture leads
Mistake #7: Not communicating your value well
Mistake #8: You give up on lead generation too early

What works for others may not work for you. But being aware of the common mistakes that may be the answer to improving your lead generation growth.

After optimizing your lead generation, keep monitoring their performance. Make sure to avoid these 8 lead generation mistakes, and you will be on the track to success.

Let me know in the comments below if there are any other lead generation mistakes that you have encountered before!

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

SEO

Internal Link: The Most Overlooked SEO Tactic That Is A Quick Win

If you’re looking for an SEO strategy that can quickly boost your website ranking position, you are in the right place.

Today, we will discuss the most overlooked SEO tactic; internal linking.

You’ve probably heard about internal linking a lot, but have you really gotten deep into the topic and implemented the strategies in your search optimization? Chances are you’ve been doing them all these while, but may not get the chance to explore how it can really help your SEO.

In this blog post, we will look into these fundamentals about internal linking:

What are internal links?
Why should you invest in better internal linking?
What is an ideal internal link structure?
How to find which content you should link to?
Top Internal Linking Mistakes That You Probably Have Done Before
Conclusion: It doesn’t cost you anything.

Let’s dive in!

What are internal links?

In short, internal links are links that connect your web pages to one another in the same domain.

Before we go further, let’s look into what is site structure and how it is related to internal link. The site structure is bound to internal links because the search engines use internal links to find your pages and determine how it is related to one another.

Internal links function as a personal tour guide to the search engine crawlers. They give these crawlers an idea of your website structure to the search engine; which to enter and not. Other than that, they show the hierarchy on your site, allowing search engines to know which pages are most important and has more value than the rest.

Internal linking may appear difficult, but you will learn that it is actually very simple once you read until the end of this post.

Internal links vs External links

Some of you may be asking, what is the difference between internal and external links?

An internal link only links to pages in the same domain, while an external link points to an entirely separate domain.

External links may be links from your website to another website to provide additional information for your readers. They serve as a great benefit for your readers because they can easily find more resources from your content.

With that being said, it does not mean you should stop doing external linking. Linking to trustworthy and informative materials will help improve the credibility of your website, whereas adding poor materials will indefinitely hurt your site.

Why should you invest in better internal linking?

Let’s take a look at the four benefits you will be getting by doing strategic internal linking.

1. Internal linking helps Google to discover your new content

Just finished writing new content? Hooray!

It’s time to let the search engine know about the good news… but how are you going to do it?

Here’s what Google says:

“Google must constantly search for new pages and add them to its list of known pages. Some pages are known because Google has already crawled them before. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page.”

Yes, you have gotten the answer there! Link from a page that is already indexed to your new content.

2. Internal linking helps search engines to understand the structure of your website

A proper internal linking tells search engines how different pages interact with one another and which pages are truly important.

Site structure helps search crawlers navigate and understand your website easily. For example, the more internal links you point to a page, the more important search engine bots will think that page is.

The goal is to make it easy for search crawlers to understand your website by letting them be aware of which pages are most important and should be shown in the search results.

3. Internal linking helps users navigate the website

Again, think of internal link as your personal tour guide. It functions to guide or navigate you from one place to another, not just the search engines but also us,humans.

Visitors will appreciate it when you can bring them to pages that are relevant to their interest. For example, while reading this article about remedies for a sore throat, it also mentioned about gargling with salt water to soothe a scratchy throat. Since I would like to know what “scratchy throat” meant, I proceeded to click on the link, and it’ll lead me to a page that explains further about the topic.

*Use internal linking to provide content that is relevant to your visitors.*

Tip: Create the linking path depending on what is the next step you would like to see your visitors do.

The benefits visitors are getting here are the same as what they’d get from a guided tour; clear direction and guidance on what to do and where to go next.

4. Internal linking prompt visitors to act as calls to action

What is the ultimate reason you want someone to visit your website? Once you’ve identified the answer to this question, use internal linking to do exactly what it is that you want them to do.

Let’s look at this example by Marketersmedia. They have this article explaining “how MarketersMedia works?”. If you scroll until the bottom, you will see a link that will prompt you to learn more about their starter pack by clicking on the internal link.

*Use internal linking to guide your visitors on what to do next.*

5. Internal linking improves time on site

Have you ever find yourself reading various content in a single website for more than 30 minutes? To be honest, I have done that before!

Linking to related posts can easily help to increase visitors’ time on your website and lower bounce rate. Visitors are more willing to stay on your website longer as long as you are giving them real value.

Just take a look at this blog post by Aileen:

Travelers who are planning to travel to India may find this post helpful because it includes some links that are helpful to them.

What’s better? It is all linking to the same domain. It is the same feeling as reading a book that has all the information you need in one place.

What is an ideal internal link structure?

Now you know the benefits of using internal links. Next, let’s look into what you can do to make an ideal internal link structure for your visitors and search engines.

Include keywords in your anchor text

Anchor text is where the link is added. Basically, it is a short description of the linked page. Don’t just limit yourself to using primary keywords, but also secondary, tertiary, or any related search terms.

Take note: if there are too many of a site’s links containing the exact same anchor text, it may be a sign that the links are not acquired naturally and Google will start to see them as suspicious.

Focus on link relevance

Before you decide on which pages to link, look at the type of content those pages focus on. Only link them to one another if the two are directly related.

Links that point to content related to the topic of the source page are likely to send stronger relevancy signals. This ranking signal itself plays a vital role in the SERPs ranking.

Link useful content to visitors

Readers love content that provides value to their daily life. What benefits the readers, favor search engines. Therefore, you may want to think carefully before you link to the content. Be in their shoes and only link pages that provide real value to the reader.

Tip: Understand your buyer’s journey to decide what type of content matches with their intent.

Maintain a reasonable number of links on each page.

Google Webmaster Guidelines recommends everyone to limit the number of links to a reasonable number. But the thing is, nobody knows what exactly is the “reasonable” number that we should be using.

Well, there is no magic number to how many links you should use but keep in mind that if you were to point to the same destination multiple times on the same page, priority will be given to the first anchor text.

Don’t orphan pages

Search engines may find their way to find orphan pages, but users can’t. Users can’t possibly find them as there is no single link found on the entire website.

Orphan pages are bad for your SEO. So, make sure every important page is linked or you may even choose to delete or block them from indexation.

How to find which content you should link to?

If you have just 10 articles published on the internet, it may sound easy to decide which pages you should link to. But imagine if you have over 500 or 1,000 content published up until today. Which content should you be linking to?

Let’s start with the free method; using the search engines.

Type in [site:yourwebsite.com “keyword”] on the search box. You will see a list of web pages from your entire website that includes all the keywords you are targeting.

Replace the URL with your website and include your target keyword in quotes. These are the pages that contain the exact phrase you are searching for on your website.

Basically, Google will show you the strongest page on a topic you’ve searched at the top of the search results. Try them out when you want to find which existing content you should link to your new content.

Let me know if you have tried them out in the comments below!

Conclusion: It doesn’t cost you anything

Internal link may not earn you link equity-like external links do, but they’re essential for directing traffic to your pages that attract fewer links or need a boost in the SERPs.

It is a strong signal to both the search engine and visitors that the content you’re linking to is really good and that they should check them out. With this, you are not just helping the readers by giving good content recommendations but also helping in your SEO.

The best part – unlike other SEO strategies, internal link is something you can control. Moreover, it is not too complicated or difficult to execute.

With the power you have in your hand, it’s your turn to breakthrough! Go back to your content, and identify the linking opportunity that lies ahead of you.

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

Check out the latest SEO tips for optimizing your content in 2020.

Best Seo Tips To Boost Your Website Traffic

1. Research keywords to target

2. Use long-tail keywords

3. Use related keywords

4. Create engaging and valuable content

5. Use Keyword In Title Tags

6. Use heading tags

7. Write unique meta descriptions

8. Use Image Tags

9. Focus on the user intent

10. Focus on local SEO

11. Perform keyword gap analysis

12. Optimize your old content

13. Optimize anchor text

14. Voice search optimization

15. Use images

16. Use videos

17. Build an internal link

18. Increase site speed, to reduce the bounce rate

19. Use HTTPS

20. Use structured data

21. Optimize for mobile-friendliness

22. Find and fix broken links

23. Monitor your SEO performance

Conclusion

About Allysa

Related Posts

10 World-Class Content Marketing Strategies for 2020

Conclusion

About Winnie

Related Posts

The practical on-page SEO guide in 2020.

What is On-Page SEO?

Why Is On-Page SEO Important?

What Is The On-Page SEO Checklist in 2020?

1. Target Keywords

2. Title Tag

#1 Keep it short

#2 Include your primary keywords

3. Meta Description

#1 Don’t make them too short or too long

#2 Include your primary keywords

#3 Be different; be unique

4. Header Tags

#1 Include keywords in your header tags

#2 Don’t forget to use H1

#3 Optimize for featured snippets

5. Related keywords

#1 Use related keywords in the title

#2 Use related keywords in the meta description

#3 Use related keywords in the headings

6. High-quality content

#1 Get to know your target audience

#2 Do keyword research

7. Length of content

8. Image optimization

#1 Use unique and relevant images

#2 Reduce the size of your image file

#3 Include caption for your image

#4 Use a descriptive alt text

9. Readability

#1 Break into paragraphs

#2 Use shorter sentences

#3 Do not use jargon

10. Page URLs

#1 Include the keyword in the URL

#2 Don’t include special characters

#3 Cut out stop words

Conclusion

About Allysa

Related Posts

In this article, you’re going to learn exactly how to use BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to beat your competitors in the game of SEO.

What is an SEO strategy?

Why do you need an SEO strategy?

About Keyword Intelligence

1. Keyword Research

1. Start with a list of seed keywords

2. Generate keyword ideas

3. Select and group your list of keywords