Any marketer will tell you that creating quality content for SEO is no easy task. This is why there are numerous tools designed to help you make better content that are available today. One of them is Surfer SEO. This tool offers a data-driven analysis of your content. It provides you with some nifty improvement suggestions to obtain better search rankings and attract more visitors to your website. 

If you’re interested in using this tool, here’s how you can optimise content using Surfer SEO.

1. Select the best keywords to use in your new content

Before creating and optimising content with Surfer SEO, you need to identify the keyword or search terms you want your content to rank for. There are various keyword research tools you can use for this task, including Google Keyword Planner. 

You can also use the tool integrated into the Surfer toolset. It can provide you with valuable information about your main keyword, including related search terms and their similarity level and monthly search volume. 

2. Develop your draft

After identifying the search terms you want to target, the next step is to create a draft for your web content. You can start by creating a query in Surfer’s Content Editor. Follow these steps: 

• Type the search term into the Content Editor and click on “Create a Query.”
• If you want to create a multi-keyword analysis, enter a list of phrases. You have the option to create separate queries or a combined query.
• Select the scraping device and localisation you want to use. 

Afterwards, you’ll receive pointers about the length and structure of your content. Surfer SEO will also recommend some words you can use in the body of your text. With this helpful information in mind, you can now create a draft for your new content. 

3. Fine-tune the guidelines

Although you don’t have to adjust the guidelines, you still have the freedom to fine-tune them to have complete control over your content. You can refine the following elements to improve the optimisation process further: 

a. Competitors

Surfer SEO automatically selects competitors with the highest content score. In case the tool didn’t include a particular piece of content, but you recognise it as one from your direct competitors, you can still add it to the guidelines. 

b. Content structure

Surfer SEO recommends creating content with the same length as those they have chosen for their analysis. This can reportedly help increase your content’s chance of getting better placement on search result pages. However, you still have the freedom to choose your desired content length. In return, Surfer SEO will automatically adjust its data and metrics to meet your preferences. 

c. Topics

When you optimise content using Surfer SEO, the tool will suggest a list of topics and questions you can write about or discuss in your post. These suggestions are from Google’s People Also Ask section, your content database, and your competitors’ content. You can combine these suggestions or add your own topics to create the best content for your audience. 

4. Start writing your content

Once you’re happy with the guidelines, you can now start creating your blog post or article on Surfer SEO’s Content Editor. You’ll see the guidelines on the side of your screen as you write the content. You can also view your post’s content score and the words/terms you can use to optimise it further. 

a. Content Score

Content Score is an original metric created by Surfer SEO. As the name implies, it measures content quality to help you craft articles your audience and search engines would love.

b. Words/terms to use

On the sidebar of the Content Editor, you’ll see a counter for the number of times you use certain words or phrases. The box will turn green if you use a word as many times as recommended. But if you see an exclamation point on the box, it means you have gone over the recommended word usage limit. Following Surfer SEO’s suggestion will help ensure that your content won’t look “spammy” because you used a particular word or phrase one too many times. 

5. Confirm the optimisation

Once you are finished with the content creation process, verify the optimisation to save the document. Then, export it by copying and pasting it to your CMS. Alternatively, you can also export the text as an HTML file. 

Use Optimisation Tools to Your Advantage

One of the challenges of search engine optimisation is creating high-quality content regularly. Because it takes time and effort to create content that meets Google’s guidelines and appeals to your audience’s interests, you’ll need to exert some effort into the content creation process. Fortunately, there are tools you can use to help optimise your content for search engines. 

Use these steps to enhance your SEO strategies using Surfer SEO.

1. Identify Underperforming Content

Start by pinpointing a page on your domain that isn’t performing as expected. This could be a page that’s not generating enough impressions or clicks, one that’s on the cusp of breaking into Google’s top 10, or simply outdated content. Effective SEO isn’t a one-and-done task; it demands ongoing attention and refinement.

2. Generate a Targeted Audit

Initiate an audit for the selected content. Choose a primary keyword that best represents the essence of your article, and specify your target Search Engine Results Page (SERP) location. This tailored audit will be the foundation of your optimisation strategy.

3. Analyze and Implement Changes

Once the audit is complete, Surfer SEO will provide you with a detailed report. This report is a goldmine of insights, offering recommendations on enhancing your content’s SEO performance. Scrutinise these suggestions and implement the changes that align best with your content strategy and SEO goals.

4. Refresh and Review

After updating your article and ensuring it’s been re-indexed by search engines, it’s time to revisit Surfer SEO. Refresh the audit report to evaluate the impact of your optimisations. This step is critical in understanding the effectiveness of your changes and further refining your SEO tactics.

Following these steps, you can breathe new life into your existing content, ensuring it performs optimally in today’s competitive digital landscape. Remember, the key to SEO success is continual adaptation and improvement.

Do you need help creating high-quality and SEO-friendly content for your website? At Springhill Marketing, we are happy to assist you. Please speak to our team today and let us provide you with the content marketing and SEO solutions you need. 

A Google business page is a free online marketing resource from the search giant that lets you control how your business or company appears on local search results. Besides helping you generate web traffic, it also helps you attract visits to your physical location by allowing you to appear on Google Maps.

However, simply claiming your Google Business Profile (GBP) and filling in the basic details about your business is not enough to help you reach more potential customers. To help you give your profile a boost, here’s a quick guide from our team at Springhill Marketing.

Take Advantage of GBP Tools

Previously known as Google My Business or GMB, Google Business Profile offers a wide array of marketing tools that can help you build better brand awareness. Here are a few of them: 

1. Google Marketing Kit

Google Marketing Kit is an excellent help for increasing your online presence. It allows you to create posters, stickers and social media posts you can use to promote products or events. The best part is that these marketing tools are free to use.

With the Google Marketing Kit, you can unleash your creativity to entice more people to check out your business online and offline. For instance, you can customise posters by featuring snippets of positive customer reviews. Then, you can share them on social media to advertise your business.

2. Google Posts

Google Posts allow you to promote events, new products, discounts, and other exciting deals using images, videos, and call-to-action buttons. An excellent feature of Google Posts is that they come with an analytics feature that lets you determine how people interacted with your posts. You can use the data you obtain to improve your GBP content to increase user engagement.

Consider these pointers to make the most of Google Posts:

• Ensure that each post is high-quality.
• Always check your posts for broken characters, irrelevant information, and spelling and grammar errors.
• See that your posts are respectful and non-offensive.
• Incorporate engaging visuals and relevant links.
• Ensure that your links always point to trusted websites.

3. Local Favourites Programme

Google’s Local Favourites programme provides digital and physical badges to the top-performing local businesses per category. Receiving a badge is a great boost to your local SEO campaign as it lets prospects know that you belong to the top 5% of businesses in your niche or industry.

Leverage the Special Attributes

The new Google business page allows owners to showcase unique or special information about their enterprises. For instance, they can highlight on their profile that their business is Black-owned or woman-led.
In particular, healthcare-related businesses can take advantage of additional attributes, such as:

• Informing customers if they provide online care.
• Offering clients a direct method for booking and receiving online care.

The special attributes available for your GBP will depend on your business’s primary category. Ensure that you choose the appropriate category to find the special attributes applicable to your business.

Encourage Reviews

Customer reviews are amongst the most effective ways to grow your GBP. Not only do they build your credibility, but they also help you attract potential customers. Research showed that 89% of consumers are “highly” or “fairly” likely to choose businesses that respond to online reviews. Therefore, encouraging customers to review your business and responding to them should be amongst your top GBP optimisation strategies.

1. Reach out to your customers

Because online reviews do not show up overnight, you should proactively ask former customers to say something good about your business. You can reach out to them by:

• Sending them an email or postcard.
• Asking them personally after a successful transaction.
• Using review management platforms.

2. Consider rewarding reviewers

Consider providing incentives to encourage people to review your business. For example, you can offer special coupons or discounts on their next purchase.

3. Ask reviewers to provide as much detail as possible

Most consumers are more inclined to trust honest and genuine reviews. Therefore, ensure that your review requests encourage former customers to be honest in their testimonials. You should also ask them to provide more details or photos of the work or product you sold them.

4. Always respond to negative reviews

You should never dismiss negative reviews just because they don’t tell you what you want to hear. Otherwise, it would create bad publicity and hurt your business.

When a disgruntled customer leaves a negative review on your Google business page, you should reach out to them as soon as possible. Apologise and empathise with them. If possible, offer ways to improve the situation. This would show your prospects that you value your customers even after they are done with your business.

Start Crafting a Robust Google Business Profile

A highly optimised Google Business Profile is an excellent tool for building better brand awareness and a more substantial online presence. Best of all, you don’t have to spend anything to use it. All you need to do is provide all the necessary information about your business and take the time to craft a robust optimisation strategy to make the most of your GBP.

If you don’t have the time to optimise your business profile on Google, we at Springhill Marketing are happy to help. We can provide you with the SEO solutions you require to dominate local search results and drive more traffic to your site. Please speak with our team today.

Are you still using old-school link building strategies? If you are, it’s likely that you’re not achieving much success. With quality backlinks being an essential Google ranking factor, you must have a solid link building campaign to obtain your desired results. To help you out, we at Springhill Marketing have compiled several advanced link building strategies in SEO you should consider implementing.

Link Reclamation

Considered the easiest way to build quality backlinks, link reclamation is a strategy where you reclaim a previous backlink to your site that is now removed. This advanced strategy can be broken down into several steps:

• Find mentions of your brand or business online by using advanced search tools.
• Determine if the brand mentions a backlink to your site.
• If they don’t have a backlink, you can reach out to the site owners and ask them to link back.

Quick tip:

Consider setting Google Alerts to your email address whenever a site or publisher mentions your brand/website. This will help you keep track of new brand mentions, making it easier to identify link building opportunities.

Reverse-Engineering Competitors’ Links

Another way to build backlinks is to study your competitors’ link building strategy and reverse-engineer it to benefit your site. The idea here is to examine all relevant data and determine how your direct competitors earned each link. For instance, you can identify the websites linking to theirs or the anchor texts they are using.

You don’t have to copy every strategy they have. However, you can use it as a reference or inspiration to improve your link building tactics. Whatever your competitors are doing, ensure that you’re doing a much better job.

For example, you can reach out to the websites linking to your competitors and then offer them much better content. By giving them reasons to link to your site, you can improve your chances of building more quality backlinks.

Broken Link Building

Broken link building is quite similar to link reclamation. However, the only difference is that you’re reclaiming broken backlinks instead of abandoned links. This is one of the best advanced link building strategies in SEO because it enables you to build relationships with site owners by helping them first.

To implement this strategy, first, you need to look for any relevant web pages with broken backlinks. You can use search tools or a Chrome extension called LinkMiner to make this task much easier. Then, reach out to the web page’s owner or administrator and ask them if you could replace the broken link with yours.

Before contacting site owners, ensure that you have relevant and high-quality content that you can offer as a replacement for those broken links. Otherwise, websites are less likely to link to yours.

Quick tip:

Don’t waste your time on websites or pages with more than 30% broken links. Chances are, no one maintains them anymore. It’s unlikely that someone will respond to you when you reach out to them.

Skyscraper Technique

The main idea behind this strategy is to find a piece of content ranking highly for the keyword you want to target and create a better version of it. This way, more people are likely to share and link to it.

When you say “better”, it might include adding a video to the content, making it longer and more extensive, or incorporating images and infographics to make it more engaging. As you can see, the Skyscraper Technique requires a significant amount of time and effort because you’re further improving a piece of content that is already lengthy and meaty. However, as seasoned SEO specialists, we can assure you that building extensive and high-quality content remains an effective way to attract new backlinks to your site over time.

Ego Bait

Ego bait has been proven to be one of the most effective advanced link building strategies in SEO today, and it can be used in many ways. As the name implies, it is geared towards appealing to an influencer’s “ego” by tagging them in your content or the snippet of a post. Hopefully, this will entice them into reading your content and linking back to it later on.

This link building strategy aims to encourage interaction between your brand and an influencer in your niche or industry. This would help start a conversation and eventually lead to a relationship between the two of you.

You can use several strategies to appeal to influencers. Here are some of them:

• Consider writing an article about thought leaders in your industry. Don’t forget to include a link to their respective websites and/or social media profiles.
• You can also place an @ mention to notify and mention them in your content.
• Sending them an email and asking for comments once a post goes live is another effective way for them to notice you.
• You can also interview influencers or invite them to contribute content to your site.
  

Start Refining Your Link-Building Strategy Now

When basic strategies don’t cut it anymore, it’s time to use more advanced tactics to generate quality backlinks to your site. This way, you can build more online authority, which can help boost your SEO rankings. Consider implementing the strategies discussed above to obtain the results you want.

If you neither have the time nor knowledge to develop and implement advanced link building strategies, we at Springhill Marketing are happy to assist you. Please contact our team of experienced SEO specialists, and we’ll craft a bespoke optimisation strategy just for your business.