How to improve visibility of new content
-
What are best SEO practices to improve visibility in SERP for new content apart from meta data.
-
This is a long answer
To get content to rank you need to have a good plan in place before you write the content and then patience after.
Make sure your content is something that people are interested in and are willing to share before you actually write it. Good content actually starts with keyword and viral research. So for example lets say your site sells dog collars. Instead of writing all your content about dog collars, you can think in more broad terms like: Dog collars for training purposes, Things you need to know about puppies, dog skin irritations, do prong collars hurt or help training... Do keyword research to find what these terms can be. (use google ad words to estimate traffic).
Next use content explorer from AHREFS to see what content having to do with your keywords has been viral in the last 24hrs to 6 months.
For Example: If you type in dog collars it shows that in the past 24 hours an article about "16 things you need to know about getting a puppy." has been shared on Facebook 4.2k times and retweeted 82 times. Narrow your keyword list to the top content ideas.Next go to google, search your new keyword list to see what ranks for the them.
Next quickly use Moz Open Site Explorer to check the DA/ PA / and link and spam metrics of the guys on the front page of those results. Try to identify if there are sites you can knock out with a properly optimized piece and some links.
Narrow down your keyword list again based on your results and then you can run a keyword difficulty report on Moz. Run a FULL REPORT so you can see all the different variables that makes those sites rank. This can give you a strategy for what you will need to outrank what is already there.
Next start to write your content based on what is MOST SHARABLE SOCIALLY, what is MOST ATTAINABLE to rank for, and what shows decent traffic. Make sure you follow proper on page SEO. Use Moz On Page Grader to grade your content while you write it. Check the results. Adjust your content to get the best grade. You should also grade the competitor pages you are trying to outrank to make sure your on page SEO is at least as good or better than theirs.
Link Tip: see who the top sites are linking to and link to those resources or better ones. Research in Moz and Ahrefs and Majestic who is linking to the already ranking content. Try to see if there are ways to build links from those same places. Replicate what is making them rank, follows, no follows, as long as they are relevant are good.After you are happy with your content it's time to distribute it. This part is the hard part.
Make sure you use Google web master tools / search console to Fetch and Render the new page. Then submit it to index.
Start your Social Distribution Campaign by first posting to your sites social media pages.
Check your visibility for the article by seeing how much it is shared, liked, retweeted...
If you are posting to a businesses Facebook page you can see how many people have viewed the post. You may be surprised to see that not too many people see posts at first due to Facebook's sharing algorithm.
There are 2 ways to get more distribution on Facebook, the easy way is pay for it, promote/boost your post or run an add with your post pointing to your content, make sure you target the ad to your preferred audience.
The harder way is to get engagement on your post (likes, shares, and comments) in the first hour(s) your post is published.
If you run an ad you can track conversions on sales or goals with Faceebook's pixel so that you can see people coming back and purchasing after the first visit. This pixel will also place your post/ad in front of visitors after they leave your site if they did not complete a transaction.Hopefully you can get some traffic from here. Check your web analytics to see what networks sent better traffic. More conversions, more time on site, etc... Based on this data you can invest more time and money in promoting to that network as your target customers are more likely there than on the other networks.
Monitor the groups on these networks as well to see if your content can add value to the discussion in the groups. Word of caution DONT SPAM the groups it just looks bad for you in the long run. As with reputation management it is better to already be a part of the Group and have an established presence by sharing valuable content, so when you share content you're affiliated with as long as it adds value it wont be seen as SPAM and you won't get banned.
To see if Google has indexed your new page do a site:websiteURL search and check to see if your new page is listed.
Next search your target keyword and synonyms to see where you rank for those. Record your position.
Next you can use google to look for outreach points. Sites you can contact to do traditional link building. If your content is original and adds value to the conversation you have a better chance at getting good links. Don't worry if you don't get too many, this can be really hard depending on what you are writing about.
Check your Google Results positions regularly. (I do it every morning and again throughout the day).
Track your results and keep doing competitive research. As you learn more of what your competitors are doing, repeat your outreach process to get more exposure.
If you are a site with low authority you can have the most amazing content and still have trouble ranking or getting traffic. For example in the hair product space, L'Oreal will always have an easier time ranking a page than a small hair care brand. It can be done but it is a harder job because of the trust google places on Authority. To help rank less authority sites you need social presence and social importance.
Hope this helps. Make sure you track all of this in a spreadsheet of some sort, so the next time you launch a new piece of content you can just follow a blue print. MOZ's white board Fridays cover how to do a lot of this and Ahrefs has a great series called over simplified SEO that talks about all this in easy to understand terms. Let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Erick -
If this is good content that is highly sharable then I would start by promoting it prominently on every page of my website. If you use social get it out there with a carefully crafted pitch.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Content Strategy/Duplicate Content Issue, rel=canonical question
Hi Mozzers: We have a client who regularly pays to have high-quality content produced for their company blog. When I say 'high quality' I mean 1000 - 2000 word posts written to a technical audience by a lawyer. We recently found out that, prior to the content going on their blog, they're shipping it off to two syndication sites, both of which slap rel=canonical on them. By the time the content makes it to the blog, it has probably appeared in two other places. What are some thoughts about how 'awful' a practice this is? Of course, I'm arguing to them that the ranking of the content on their blog is bound to be suffering and that, at least, they should post to their own site first and, if at all, only post to other sites several weeks out. Does anyone have deeper thinking about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Content suggestions from MOZ
Hello, I checked moz content suggestions and for one of my keywords “Burgundy bike tours”. It gives me expressions such as “Burgundy France” and “Burgundy wine”. My question is whether I should include the exact expression “Burgundy wine” in a sentence or if include burgundy somewhere in my text and wine somewhere else if it is fine ? PS : What is the real difference between marketmuse and moz ? and why do they sometimes give different suggestions ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Moving site to new domain without access to redirect from old to new. How can I do this with as little loss to SERP results as possible?
I've been hired to build a new site for a customer. They were duped by some shady characters at goglupe.com (If you can reach them, tell them they are rats--phone is disconnected, address is a comedy club on Mission in SF). Glupe owns the domain name and would not transfer or give FTP access prior to dropping off the face of the earth. The customer doesn't want to chase after them with lawyers, so we are moving on. New domain, new site with much of the same content as previous site. All that I have access to is the old wordpress site. I plan to build the new site, then remove all pages/posts from the old site. Is there anything I can do to salvage the current page 1 ranking? Obviously, the new domain will take some time to get back there. Just hoping to avoid any pitfalls or penalties if I can. If I had complete access, I would follow all the standard guidelines. But I don't. Any thoughts? Thanks! Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c_estep_tcbguy0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Noindexing Thin News Content for Panda
We've been suffering under a Panda penalty since Oct 2014. We've completely revamped the site but with this new "slow roll out" nonsense it's incredibly hard to know at what point you have to accept that you haven't done enough yet. We have thousands of news stories going back to 2001, some of which are probably thin and some of which are probably close to other news stories on the internet being articles based on press releases. I'm considering noindexing everything older than a year just in case, however, that seems a bit of overkill. The question is, if I mine the logfiles and only deindex stuff that Google sends no further traffic to after a year could this be seen as trying to game the algo or similar? Also, if the articles are noindexed but still exist, is that enough to escape a Panda penalty or does the page need to be physically gone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlfredPennyworth0 -
How does google recognize original content?
Well, we wrote our own product descriptions for 99% of the products we have. They are all descriptive, has at least 4 bullet points to show best features of the product without reading the all description. So instead using a manufacturer description, we spent $$$$ and worked with a copywriter and still doing the same thing whenever we add a new product to the website. However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too. I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content. I am asking it because we are a relatively new ecommerce store (online since feb 1st) while we didn't have a lot of organic traffic in the past, i see that our organic traffic dropped like 50% in April, seems like it was effected latest google update. Since we never bought a link or did black hat link building. Actually we didn't do any link building activity until last month. So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings? I see that our organic traffic is improving very very slowly since then but basically it is like between 5%-10% of our current daily traffic. What do you guys think? You think all our original content effort is going to trash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serkie1 -
Pages with Little Content
I have a website that lists events in Dublin, Ireland. I want to provide a comprehensive number of listings but there are not enough hours in the day to provide a detailed (or even short) unique description for every event. At the moment I have some pages with little detail other than the event title and venue. Should I try and prevent Google from crawling/indexing these pages for fear of reducing the overall ranking of the site? At the moment I only link to these pages via the RSS feed. I could remove the pages entirely from my feed, but then that mean I remove information that might be useful to people following the events feed. Here is an example page with very little content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andywozhere0 -
Duplicate content on sub-domains?
I have 2 subdamains intented for 2 different countries (Colombia and Venezuela) ve.domain.com and co.domain.com. The site it's an e-commerce with over a million products available so they have the same page with the same content on both sub-domains....the only differences are the prices a payment options. Does google take that as duplicate content? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0