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Ever wished that there was a simple SEO hack to increase your blog traffic? Does it seem like your organic blog traffic has plateaued?
You may not be aware of this but Google updates its algorithms 3,200 times every year.
So, it means that you can expect to see 8.7 minor updates every day of the year.
While it could make you want to throw in the towel and give up. I want to assure you that if you keep reading you will be able to gain a peek into how you can win.
You see many bloggers struggle to understand SEO and keep up with everything that is happening with Google.
The truth is that it is a lot better to focus on creating really good quality content. Also, ensuring that your content is optimised properly for indexing.
In this post, you will leave gaining a real insight into how to easily get a 33% increase in your blog traffic by implementing a simple trick.
Since 2017, Google’s algorithm updates have been heavily focused on the end-user experience.
As you can imagine that is a very big job because there are so many different topics as well as a wide variety of users.
Let’s spend some time in the shoes of the end-user to see how we can better understand them with a view to improving the search experience.
A user comes to Google looking for a great recipe to make an apple crumble. They type in ‘best apple crumble recipe’ in the search bar and this is what they get.
I think it is so interesting that only one of the three results have ratings. Also, the fact that it takes 55 minutes to make an apple crumble could be a turn-off.
Clicking into the first option this is what I see above the fold.
As you can see, it is very attractive in terms of its presentation. Which is probably why it gets a lot of great reviews.
Recently Google had a major update where their change was to cater for phrases that focused on solving a problem.
When you think of any problem the most important phrases that surround problems are questions.
This means that Google’s core update is heavily focused on answering questions as a way of solving problems.
Many years ago I would laugh at the fact that some people would ask Google a question as if it were Siri.
However, in recent years, Google’s algorithm has become so complex that it is able to offer answers to questions.
Position zero refers to the area on the search engine results page that is normally inside a featured snippet.
The term position zero is becoming more and more popular in the vocabulary of marketers.
One major reason for this is that it has been discovered that the result in position zero gets the majority of clicks or traffic or visitors.
Let’s look at a practical example. I did a search for ‘digital marketing plan’ and here are the results.
Ready to take your SEO understanding to another level? Check out this free video course here.
As you can see having a page ranking in position one in the Google search engine is not as valuable as it was in the past.
You are better off either appearing in position zero or the next best place to be is in the “people also ask” section.
To appear in these positions you may need to tweak your current strategy to include answers to problems in your niche.
Let’s spend some time looking at how you can incorporate this neat SEO hack in the simplest way possible.
Here is more information on the simple SEO hack that will help you to increase your blog traffic by 33%.
Neil from Neilpatel.com writes about the three types of keyword phrases that can be used to get more readers to your blog.
When someone does a Google search, what are they typically doing? They are trying to find a solution to their problem, right?
So how can you easily identify these problems people are searching for?
Typically, you want to look for 3 types of keyword phrases:
Questions – people type in questions because they are looking for answers. And if your product or service helps answer those questions, you’ll see a boost in conversions.
Comparisons – when someone is searching for comparison keywords such as “MailChimp VS Converkit” there is high buyer intent, even if your company isn’t mentioned in the search phase. (I’ll go into how to leverage this in a bit.)
Prepositions – when keywords contain a preposition, they tend to be more descriptive.
If you aren’t sure what a preposition is, simple prepositions are words like at, for, in, off, on, over, and under. These common prepositions can be used to describe a location, time, or place.
Neil does not leave us hanging without an execution plan. In fact, he shows us in more detail on how to find these golden nuggets.
Well, I just updated Ubersuggest to now show you questions, comparisons, and prepositions.
Just head over to Ubersuggest and type in a keyword that you want to go after. For this example, I typed in the word “marketing”.
Then as you scroll down, in the keywords ideas table you’ll see tabs for questions, prepositions, and comparisons.
I want you to click on the “view all keyword ideas”.
You’ll now be taken to the keyword ideas report that looks like this:
Now, click on the tab labeled “questions”. It will adjust the keyword recommendations to show you all of the popular questions related to the main keyword you just researched.
You’ll then see some suggestions that you could consider going after. Such as:
Why is marketing important?
What marketing does?
How marketing works?
But as you scroll down, you’ll find more specific questions such as:
Why a marketing plan is important?
How marketing and sales work together?
How many marketing emails should you send?
It is possible that you are already ranking in position zero for a number of keywords on your blog or website.
One of my favourite tools that I use to get visibility on my featured snippets or position zero rankings is SEMRush.
You simply head on over to their site and plug-in your website or blog URL and check the results.
For this example, I decided to use the neilpatel.com website for this section of the research.
As you can see his site ranks for over 294,000 keywords and the monthly traffic is around 400,000.
Now let’s take a look at his results for position zero or featured snippets.
As you can see, although the website neilpatel.com ranks for over 290,000 keywords only a few of them are in position zero.
In fact, 986 snippets represent only 0.34% of the total number of keywords in the SERPs.
Is it possible to optimise existing content so that it shows up in position zero?
Well, I recently came across a tool that I believe helps to make this task more systematic in getting this done.
The folks at Internet Marketing Ninjas offers a featured snippet tool that allows you to run 3 URLs for free.
If you want to analyse more than 3 URLs they offer a package where you can do 30 URLs for $49.99.
This is a one-time payment where you run an analysis on the URLs to see how you can improve your chances of getting to position zero.
Would you like to see how this tool will work for your blog or website?
Are you ready to commit to improving the overall traffic results of your blog with Pinterest and SEO? Grab this free trial course here.
Most bloggers and small business owners dislike the single task that has the potential to drive more revenue.
That task that many marketers dislike is optimising existing content or old blog posts.
The good news is that this featured snippet tool actually makes the tasks easier to swallow because it shows you what to update or add.
When you click on the link you will be prompted to register for a new account.
Just enter your details and you will instantly get access to a dashboard that looks like the screenshot below.
Verify your email address then click on “try the tool for free”. You will then be presented with a screen that allows you to enter your three URLs.
Before entering three random URLs spend some time considering which three of your content generates an income for you.
You could go for the ones that are the lowest hanging fruit as well. Whatever you do choose wisely.
After only a few short minutes you are then presented with a full report on all 3 URLs.
Click on view to see the entire report. The results are quite comprehensive as you can see from the screenshot below (I have hidden the column with my keyphrases for privacy purposes).
As you can see the report not only include the keyphrases that you currently rank for but also those that have a featured snippet.
Across the top, you are presented with 5 options. Namely, results by URL, Top 50 ‘people who ask’, competitors, your optimised content and historical ranking.
The people who ask options are quite interesting to see. As it gives you a sense of how to fine-tune your content.
I really like the fact that a list of related searches is also provided as you can see in the screenshot below.
After making your choices you are then given the opportunity to use the page optimizer to improve your on-page content.
There is a cool button to pull the contents of your page or post into the optimizer so that you can tweak it accordingly.
So, what did you learn today? To help you recap on what you learned from today’s post let’s sum it up.
Google is not the bad traffic police trying to keep entrepreneurs from getting readers to their content.
In fact, Google just wants to give their users the best experience possible so that they will keep using the search engine.
The next time you think of creating content ensure that it is focused on solving a problem.
Position zero in the Google search results is where you want to be to get the attention of your ideal readers.
Neil Patel has updated his Ubersuggest tool to include questions, comparisons and prepositions. Yay!!
Take advantage of the handy featured snippets tool to help you improve your chances of getting into position zero.
Google is constantly trying to improve the user experience every single day and every year. They are in the business of providing a great search engine experience.
The moment Google’s engineers fall asleep and get comfortable they are in danger of becoming irrelevant.
There is always a competitor waiting in the wings to provide a better more up-to-date customer experience.
As a blogger or business, you may have a love-hate relationship with Google but you can see that from the user’s point of view their problem is being solved.
Can you see the benefits of giving an awesome user experience?
Do you think that this SEO hack will help you increase blog traffic by 33%?
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Are you looking for ways to stay ahead of the competition or for innovative content ideas? Check out this content marketing resource.
Do you need more ideas to upgrade your SEO game? Head on over to this on-page optimisation resource.
If you are at the start of your SEO journey and you want to take things one step at a time then check out this awesome SEO checklist.
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