DA and PA are Moz metrics not google ones.  That's the first thing to note.  Moz recently made some changes to their way of calculating the metrics that made them a more accurate predictor of the ranking capability of a page.

So basically they are an integer that's arrived at by a calculation involving the number of links pointing to a page and the power and authority of those links. DA is global, so one domain in the pond of the whole internet and PA is a local to your individual site.  So each page you own in the pond of your whole site.

So how do you use these metrics?

1. find out whether google is ranking links and a pages 'power' or the content therein.  Sometimes the first three results all have very high DA of 60-70 and 80+.  This means that to compete you'll probably need to get a ton of links to your page to be in that top three.

Other times the top three can have little or no domain power and just be great articles.  This is more common now.

2. You can look at the PA or your individual pages and rank them according to PA. Then see where each ranks and whether there are any statistical outliers.  Sometimes a page with low PA will be doing well.  That's great.  Other times a page will bomb and if you find that it has a low PA then you might want to insert some internal links to it to bump it up a bit.

By way of additional research look here:

https://moz.com/blog/the-new-link-explorer-is-here - rand on DA updates

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ - matt cutts on pagerank

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pagerank-patent/250603/ - roget montti on pagerank patent and lots of _science, yo. _

Go get em!

She certainly fits the genius bill for sure.  That's funny because my PPC guy was saying there's loads of CRO opportunities.  You're right - I'm becoming obsessed.  All this gamification of apps is making me crazy.  Seeing just a 5% drop in traffic will ruin my day and we could have converted £25,000 of new patients lol.  I'm not even kidding either. I'm getting bummed out by stupid stuff.

Who was it who said you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.  I think it's time to bin the dashboards for a week and come up with some new thinking.

Thanks for your advice. I'm also gonna hit Joy up at Sterling.  Even her lowliest agency tea-boy could probably move the needle for our site.

Yeah you nailed it as usual.

Schema stars just don't show up on homepages.  You're probably right.  A homepage is a homepage and it's going to kill my local rankings to try to mess around with a 'dentist Liverpool page'  Should I take all the schema review attempts (that failed) off the homepage?  Is it damaging things?

I went through a big phase of consolidating content and it worked really well and now I'm number one for lots of stuff (or sometimes one and two!) I'm experimenting with more specific 'topics' now trying to write more content - also trying not to fall foul of maccabbees or beinng so specific that I just don't get enough traffic/keywords on each page to get them ranking.

It's all testing and I really feel now like I'm in a maze just randomly testing routes and trying to stick to best practice but doing it blindly.  I audit my competition every time I do a search.  Sometimes I just don't know.  The auditing tools all come up with different ideas and they are less and less reliable as google is taking these giant leaps.  But that's the point.  If we were able to work it out then the whole thing would fall apart.

One thing that has had a HUGE effect is all the DCMA's i've been putting in and disavowing dodgy domains.  I really don't think google is as good at ignoring them as they say they are.

I've experimented with Ad Words (appearing first on all the mobile searches as a sort of branding exercise) but i'm not sure that's helped with CTR like the research suggests.

Sometimes I want to pay some pure genius to look at it for me and run a really comprehensive report but I know I'm just going to pay for a crappy SEM Rush branded PDF report or a something straight from an SEO SAAS product.  I need someone with a brain to look at it for me.  I feel like i'm at the limit of what I'm actually mentally capable of and it's frustrating me.

I also think that it's sometimes not me moving the needle but the whims of google.  Search console is showing some really strange results with demand like some days there'll be 3x the impressions but I don't see any featured snippets or reasons.

Im sorry - i'm ranting at you.

YES! WP custom area.  That's the one I want.  Thanks roman.

Hi Roman,

Thanks for this - some great options here for my page. But what about when people want to upload their own photos rather than reviews. So it's hosted on our site and could potentially one day form a sort of Q&A and brochure of our lovely patients.  I also need one for our recruitment page where people can upload CV's and cover letters but think I can fix that with one of my forms plugins.

Cheers,

Ed.

I have looked at lots of different plugins and wanted a recommendation for an easy way for patients of ours to upload pictures of them out partying and having fun and looking beautiful so future users can see the final results instead of sometimes gory or difficult to understand before and after images.

I'd like to give them the opportunity to write captions (like facebook or insta posts and would offer them incentives to do so.

I don't want it to be too complicated for them or have too many steps or barriers but I do want it to look nice and slick and modern.

Also do you think this would have a positive impact on SEO?

I was also thinking of a Q&A app where dentists could get Q&A emails and respond - i've been doing AMA sessions and they've been really successful and I would like to bring it into out site and make it native.

Thanks in advance

Great advice here, I'm with casey on constant updating and that's a solid article from Herb.

But for me you're asking the wrong question.  Sure updating content is great but you should really be testing it.  So test meta descriptions, H1's and other elements using a tool (there's this great keyword tool I believe it's called MOZ lol - lots of chat about that lately - they've really made some great changes.)

But in the interests of openness I also use SEM Rush and GOOGLE  that's the best keyword tool out there.  Just get googling and see what sorts of articles are overtaking you and model them and make better versions.

Having a young kid (congrats) means you're tired and creativity is really hard when you're tired and stressed - even for very creative people.  So model the articles of others and use the keyword suggestions and volumes as a guide.

But always be testing and tweaking.  Add just a paragraph and revisit and change up some words and phrases and keep it fresh. Use the date in the Meta Description.  CTR in the SERPS is really important and If I see 2018 up there i'm going to click on it.

Don't just add '2018' to everything though because google will catch you out. you actually need to add some contemporary stuff in there and it will revitalise and refresh the content.

Also remember that there have been lots of changes at google lately. So your drop in traffic might be external ranking factors bumping other sites up because google can understand them better and is better able to get good user feedback from Chrome.

Also be granular about it. Ask yourself of each article, "does this answer the question?" Is it up to date and is it correctly optimised using the keywords that are coming up in your research.

The best SEO tool in the world is the 100 billion neurons sitting on your shoulders.  Use that tool first and foremost

So to be clear I've ruled out:

1. Domain and page authority

2. Content and KW density and stuffing

3. comprehensiveness and content topics etc

So all that's left is domain age but I read that doesn't matter anymore so much and how are we outranking them for the non-branded keywords? some of them really super-comeptitve?

It's a mystery.

Hey,

Thanks for the response.  I've done loads of top ten benchmarking and their sites are older.  I worry that could be the reason too.  We're only a few years old.  The one and two positions are 6 and 10 yrs old.  But we're outranking them for all our services so my question really is can I ignore the homepage and create a 'services page' with 'dentist liverpool' as the focus KW?

So I understand that I'm never going to get google review stars appearing on my homepage.  The only term I really want my homepage to rank for is the term 'dentist liverpool'.  This figures.

But what I'm seeing from my google analytics is that I can rank pretty much any keyword really well (with stars and a great serp entry) except my homepage.  Which is languishing at position 3-5.

Now I made some observations from the data and the only people who are landing on my homepage are branded searches.  So people who are searching for us.

Why cannot I just make a page and optimise it for 'dentist Liverpool' and go for the number one spot?  That way all the branded people can end up on the homepage and everyone else looking for a dentist in Liverpool can land on my highly optimised 'dentist Liverpool' page?

I think I might be missing something really obvious here and know i'd need to de-optimise the home page.  But I find it so easy to rank for all sorts of keywords but our homepage (because it has everything on it) is just not getting to position one.  It's not specific enough to that keyword. Also how awesome would it be to have the only serp entry with 250 google reviews and stars and sitelinks and all that cool stuff?

I would ignore what other people are doing.  The charity sector is not always known for it's super-efficient and industry leading digital marketing activities.  So although the advice that John Mondt gives is sound for many industries, he is right to include the phrase 'what's working' for them.  So don't just copy their link profile or go after links before carefully analysing them for quality and their potential to be relevant in the future.  I work in Dentistry and copying other dentists link profiles is more likely to land me with a penalty than take my DA anywhere special.

Charities tend to be filled with people (at the senior levels) who have pretty impressive backgrounds and CV's.  Also you're in a very strong position because charities are good for the world so no matter who you contact, you're always going to be coming from a place of positivity and wanting to make the world a better place.  This is huge.  So I would round up everyone at your charity on the board who belongs to any university, trusted organisation, professional body or other trusted domains and reach out to them for guest posting ideas and shameless plugs of your organisation.

Link building for a non for profit is about just putting together a great pitch about how you're helping the world and then asking for help to spread the word.  Don't be afraid to be totally authentic and honest about wanting to improve the visibility of your website (short of asking for links which is against the guidelines)

Hope this helps.  But I was looking at a big charity just now and there are CBE's on the board, people with honorary degrees from universities and people who are members of huge and trusted organisations.  So as a linkbuilder, i'd reach out to those people and put together a strategy of how to leverage those relationships to gain links.  Or in this case 'do PR' as white hat linkbuilding and PR are now pretty much synonymous. (used to say not synonymous, sorry, PR and linkbuilding are the same - that's a typo)

hope this helps.  PS: I love helping charities so maybe hit me up and I could help you in more detail. Obviously i'm not going to charge you but a mention from a charity website is always a great thing for us.  We just did a huge campaign for international women's day that bumped our DA three clear points.  Win!

NOT  is the answer.

Directory submissions are the WORST way to spend your time and resources.  They just don't work. And I'm not being 'holier than thou' because I actually tried them out last year (because I test everything and have a fairly small site so thought it might work) but it didn't.  There was no benefit and the directories I used were all paid with links to internal pages.  It took me a couple of days (+ about $500) and after a month I ended up having to disavow most of them and then the others kicked me off after 6 months wanting more money!  It's a total joke.  Run by total jokers.

Even automating it is a very bad waste of time.  **If you're a local business and are actually talking about 'citations' then that's a different thing altogether. ** But directories died years ago.  Many of them aren't even in the index or google has algorithmically discounted them because they have literally too many links spread too thinly so each link carries a tiny proportion of juice.  And the ones that are in the index come back with very high toxic score in SEM Rush and AHrefs with the exception of one called Joe Ant.  That one is showing green lights.  So I didn'd disavow but i've not seen one single referral from them.

I also noticed an ENORMOUS increase in spam following my little test.  I get hundreds of submissions to my forms and site and even people calling.  I've also seen a significant increase in strange black-hat links added to my list.  This is not 'negative seo' but the scrapers and black hat people crawl the directories to find people still dumb enough to pay them (like me!!!) and see them as easy targets for other dreadful SEO products.

Avoid. Avoid. Avoid.

Absolutely correct.  Google disregards TM and R symbols so use them when you legally should for yours and other products and it will not impact your exact match SEO efforts.   I think they have a small effect on CTR in the SERPS because they show you mean business and are more professional and are also being professional when using the hard won TM's and R's of other brands (which is a legal requirement and you can get into trouble for not using them)

Did you know that if another brand doesn't have a R or a TM then you can mention them directly in your adwords too?  Just a fun fact.

If you want to outsource, delegate or abdicate link building (don't worry we all secretly want to have nothing to do with it because it's hard) then hire a PR.  That's going to get you MILES further than any of this stuff.  That's what we did and now we've been featured in the news all over the place and on tons of really high quality sites.

Linkbuilding is now synonymous with PR.  It's not done from basements and dark rooms at 4am and you can't do it with shady tools. If you want a tool then use an outreach tool to automate your relationship building with the sites you want to feature on.  Or just hire someone to 'do PR' not to 'build links' because the people i've hired to 'build links' have been using as much black and grey as white hat techniques.  Everyone wants to cheat and if you do then you are fighting against Google.  Or here in the UK we say 'biting the hand that feeds you'.

If you can get a good relationship with one of these link-building specialist agencies and have the confidence and insight to know when they've sold you a pup - and ask them to fix it for free - then you can get somewhere.  But its expensive andeasier just to set a strategy, hire someone and execute.

I'd say you're way to close to your products here and need to start asking your customers.  For example, the stoves in the picture - to me - are all the same stove.

I have the same problem with dental products.  Are 'All on Four Implant retained Dentures' the same 'topic' in the eyes of google as 'Dental Implants' and then are they going to internally compete with my dentures and Implants pages?  It can be a nightmare and the way around it is with testing and also taking a more global view of things and taking a step back from the technicalities.

People don't want a 'black trim 85/1 wood burner.  They want to feel warm and have a beautiful addition to their home that makes them feel aspirational or romantic or happy.  This is what you sell.  Not technical specifications. People want simplicity not complexity and they want benefits not features.  So bundle it all up into one page with some really evocative and emotionally charged sales copy about how having a stove like this is going to change their hoes and make their lives better.

From a technical perspective there's going to be a hopeless amount of internal competition that's going to be depressing your rankings like crazy.  So experiment with bringing the pages all together and having variations available on page.

I got some headphones the other day and there were about a hundred variations of colour, size, type of ear bud and it was all just available to me with dropdown menus that brought up an image of what i'd chosen.  People don't want to have to navigate around from page to page to page to find what they want.  They want to get the general picture and then decide on the specifications later.  If I listed everything we did at our dental practice do you think that would make patients want to buy?

How about a root canal with a .0012/in burr and chlorhexadine irrigation? High-speed or low-speed handpiece? Would you like a rubber-dam with that or take your chances with a file in the windpipe??  Perhaps you'd like me to irrigate with hypochlorite instead?

OK i'm being silly but this is actually kind of like what you're doing here.

Keep it simple. Merge the pages together and watch your rankings creep up for all your high traffic high purchase intent keywords. This (as you say) helps with links and also helps users stay on one page for longer and it's this implicit user feedback like time on site, scroll depth and bounce rate that google is looking at.

When customers get lost and bounce this also MASSIVELY depresses your results. i see it with my visitor recording software. and it's a very strongly correlating ranking factor.

I'm not ecommerce but i've had HUGE success figuring out which topics google considers to be topics and which are separate and the only way you can find this out is with testing it. For words and search terms it's easy.  If you type in "wood burner cost" and "wood fireplace price" comes up in bold in someone's meta description then google considers them to be the same.  So price is the same as cost etc. Sometimes that can be a good place to start.  Also do a search using site:www.yoursite.com wood burner and see how many pages come up.  If it's hundreds then you've got internal competition problems. Use more and more granular searches like this to determine if you're getting stacking or competition or even cannibalisation in the SERPS (which is getting filtered altogether)

Hope this helps!

Optimising for search will create organic traffic - this is 'owed media' - the benefits ow owned media are that it's always there so long as you keep optimising.  But a high ranking page can generate lots of revenue on autopilot for many months and years for just a couple of days research and writing time.  The downsides of this is that you have to be a real expert in your field or have done so much research that you can write like one and know how to optimise to get the high rankings that will generate the traffic and revenue.

Organic is not immediate.  It might take a month to get your domain authority up to a reasonable level through link-building and then each page might take a week or month to get onto page one and then after a bit of tweaking to position 1-3 (where the money's at.)

Paid is different - it's immediate.  You don't own it you pay for it.  It's someone else's system (ad words or Facebook) and you're buying their advertising space.  The benefits of this is it can yield instant returns and is extremely flexible so you can run flash sales and offers etc.

There is a huge amount of research to suggest that the long term benefits and ROI or ROE or ROMS (or whichever metric you go for), of organic far outweigh those of paid.  Because when you turn off paid media it's gone.  Whereas you can't turn off organic, it's evergreen and the traffic just keeps coming.

If your questions is more about which keywords to use, traffic ones or money ones then this depends on how your site operates.  But always have money in mind if you're running a business or helping someone else with theirs for a fee.  The highest bid PPC keywords are clearly the ones that are going to generate more conversions and money.  Because the huge google marketplace has decided that for you in a billion ways. So if it's a service business and there are people bidding on '[service] cost' then write an article about cost, price comparisons or what people are actually paying for inside the product (is it research (pharma) or the actual materials (jewellery) or the skill of the creator (art) - so that you rank for cost/price.  Or even just put the cost on there. This is something lots of B2B companies don't do - and it's a conversion killer.  People want to know how much something costs.  Like at least a ballpark figure.

Or if you make your money with the ads network then go you may wish to go after the high traffic keywords and get the traffic so that you get paid more per ad impression. I like to go for both traffic and money.  Why limit yourself to one or the other?  And with traffic comes authority and lots of other benefits, you may find that a bigger site with more traffic is like a snowball and starts attracting links so you can rank better for the money terms too.

But start small. Everything starts from nothing.  And there'll be niche keywords with moderate traffic and low competition and commercial intent that you can rank for to kick things off.

That's a difficult question because it's not 100% clear whether you're asking about paid vs organic or traffic keywords vs commercial intent ones.

Hope this essay helps though. Feel free to ask again if i've misunderstood.

You need to use the disavow tool in google search console.  I keep trying to attach a link but it's not letting me today for some reason.  Just google disavow links and read how to do it from the google webmaster forum and google manual and then go into search console, upload your file of bad / spammy links and submit.

Piece of cake. Don't panic though.  Make sure you use the tool carefully and come back if you get stuck with anything.  How do you know it's a competitor?  Have the links appeared overnight? you can't find out who's doing it usually (without a lot of wasting of resources) but google will keep the data for the future and sometimes bad links won't cause you any harm at all.

But other times they'll get you a penalty so get the disavow file in as soon as you can.

Great advice here, I'm with casey on constant updating and that's a solid article from Herb.

But for me you're asking the wrong question.  Sure updating content is great but you should really be testing it.  So test meta descriptions, H1's and other elements using a tool (there's this great keyword tool I believe it's called MOZ lol - lots of chat about that lately - they've really made some great changes.)

But in the interests of openness I also use SEM Rush and GOOGLE  that's the best keyword tool out there.  Just get googling and see what sorts of articles are overtaking you and model them and make better versions.

Having a young kid (congrats) means you're tired and creativity is really hard when you're tired and stressed - even for very creative people.  So model the articles of others and use the keyword suggestions and volumes as a guide.

But always be testing and tweaking.  Add just a paragraph and revisit and change up some words and phrases and keep it fresh. Use the date in the Meta Description.  CTR in the SERPS is really important and If I see 2018 up there i'm going to click on it.

Don't just add '2018' to everything though because google will catch you out. you actually need to add some contemporary stuff in there and it will revitalise and refresh the content.

Also remember that there have been lots of changes at google lately. So your drop in traffic might be external ranking factors bumping other sites up because google can understand them better and is better able to get good user feedback from Chrome.

Also be granular about it. Ask yourself of each article, "does this answer the question?" Is it up to date and is it correctly optimised using the keywords that are coming up in your research.

The best SEO tool in the world is the 100 billion neurons sitting on your shoulders.  Use that tool first and foremost

Of Course! EGOL this is another extremely solid piece of advice.  I'm wishing I worked for a charity now. EVERYONE will want to publicise their giving so make sure that rather than them writing up their good work on their blog that you go over and take photos and write up the story and have that on your blog to say thanks to the business for their generous support.  They will 100% want to link to it.

You need to create the content on your site though for maximum effect.  It will not always get a link but it's a solid strategy because content is loved by google anyway.

EGOL can you confirm the position with linking in return for links.  I read somewhere at Google that it was a problem if someone links to you and you link back to them.  Because Google thinks you're just 'swapping links' and trying to game the system.  So be careful that not every inbound link has another link from you back to it because you may fall foul of a sort of algorithmic penalty.

Someone else will have to confirm this is correct though as I'm not 100% sure.

Tons of great advice here.  My responsive design drops the sidebar to below 5% of the average scroll depth so I binned it and nothing bad happened to pages per session or time on site or bouncerate or any of the important user signals.  I do have a site-wide 'BOOK AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT' button but people use it and we're killing it for emergencies.  It's one of our best catagories and is hotly competitive.  It's in red and replaced a trustpilot widget that was taking people off site.

One of the best decisions I ever made and I was tearing my hair out about site wide links messing with SEO but it didn't happen for us.  All the google results were 'no it's SPAMMY' - but they are just a load of content creators jumping on a bandwagon, here in the Moz community, as you can see, things are more nuanced.

So if it's relevant and helpful keep it.  Do you have Hotjar.  Allows you to see what peope are clicking on.

SWL and footer links Is one of those where spammy sites use it so people say - "ooh don't ever use it" - but you must not be that binary.  If it helps the users then keep it.  In my case hardly anyone used them so I dropped them in favour of one important button.

But an additional bump in pageviews and time on site because people are navigating around your site is absolute gold.  So you must encourage that.  but remember Cialdini's jam experiment.  More than three choices is going to induce decisional paralysis especially when you have only a second and the user is almost making unconscious decisions navigating. It's like driving.  You're not thinking what you're doing - it's automatic. So make is fluid and easy and watch the user feedback signals.

How about  "Learn more",  "buy something" or 'back to navigation'