How to Compete in SEO When You’re the Market Underdog
You won't out-resource the largest sites in your space, so stop trying to beat them at the game they have already won. The underdog strategy is asymmetric: take the searches...
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215 postsHow to Do SEO for a Marketplace Website
A marketplace has two audiences searching in opposite directions. Buyers search to find and choose: "hire a freelance designer", "used camera gear", "dog walker near me". Sellers and providers search...
How to Do SEO for User-Generated Content Sites
A user-generated content site isn't judged one good thread at a time, and it can't be fixed that way either. Google's guide to its ranking systems says its systems work...
Competitors Are Stealing Your Brand Keywords
"Stealing" hides two different problems with two different fixes. A rival bidding on your brand name in paid search is something Google's ad policy allows, and it is answered with...
How to Do SEO for Browser Extensions
Browser-extension SEO is two channels, and it is easy to work only one. Store optimization, in the Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons and Edge Add-ons, gets you found by people...
How to Do an SEO Content Audit
A content audit ends in one decision per URL: keep, improve, consolidate, redirect, noindex or remove. You reach it by joining performance, link and intent data for every URL and...
How to Do SEO for News Websites
Google names six of the factors that influence ranking in Google News: relevance of content, prominence, authoritativeness, freshness, usability, and location and language. Nothing on that list is a submission...
Google Keeps Choosing the Wrong Canonical
A canonical tag is a signal, not a command. Google's URL Inspection tool documentation says there is no guarantee Google will choose your preferred canonical, only that it will take...
Glossary Pages That Actually Rank
Glossary pages struggle when they are thin definitions that restate what general reference sites already say, and they can compete when they become topic pages: the definition first, then the...
Google Demoted Your Page for a Schema Error You Can’t Find
Your markup passes every validator, the Rich Results Test reports no errors, and yet the rich results are gone. First, be precise about what was lost. Google's structured data guidelines...
How to Do SEO for Single Page Applications (SPA)
A single-page application can fail at SEO when its content, and sometimes its URLs, only exist after JavaScript runs in a browser. Google does render JavaScript: its JavaScript SEO basics...
How to Do SEO for a Blog
Blog SEO is maintenance, not setup. Installing a theme and publishing posts is the easy part. Much of what decides whether a blog grows or slowly declines is the recurring...
How to Do SEO for a SaaS Website
SaaS SEO can underperform for one structural reason: the team puts its effort into top-of-funnel blog content that attracts readers who aren't buying, while the pages that serve people actively...
How to Do SEO for Regulated Industries
Regulated-industry SEO can be won by producing value inside the constraints, not by routing around them. Compliance can be read as a cap on how much you publish, or as...
How to Build Topical Authority for SEO
Google does describe a system called topic authority, but it is built for news queries, and it publishes no authority score for ordinary sites. For everyone else, "topical authority" is...
How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis
An SEO competitor analysis starts with the search results, not the sales battlecard. The sites occupying the results you want can have little to do with the companies your sales...
Data Pages That Journalists Actually Link To
A journalist on deadline links to data they can cite quickly, and that constraint should shape the page. A reporter with little time is best served by one URL whose...
Google Is Indexing Parameters You Blocked in Robots.txt
Robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing, and that one distinction explains why parameter URLs you blocked keep turning up in search. Google can list a URL it has never fetched, learning...
Google Crawls Daily But Your New Pages Take Months to Index
Daily Googlebot activity in your logs and slow indexing of new pages can both be true, because they answer different questions. A recrawl asks whether a page Google already knows...
How to Find and Fix Orphan Pages
An orphan page is a page no internal link points to. Visitors browsing your site have no path to it, and Google can only learn about it from a sitemap,...
Content Refresh Killed the Page That Was Ranking
A refresh can demote a page when the edit changes what the page was being chosen for. The old version answered a specific search through its format, length, structure and...
Case Studies Nobody Finds on Google
Imagine a case study titled "How Acme Logistics Cut Onboarding Time 40%." It doesn't rank for anything useful because it targets a query nobody types: the client's name carries the...
How to Build Topical Authority in a Competitive Niche
Matching an entrenched incumbent's coverage is a hard way to displace it. If a site has owned a topic for years with hundreds of pages, recreating its map subtopic for...
How to Fix “Page with Redirect” in Google Search Console
"Page with redirect" isn't an error. Google's help for the Page indexing report describes it as a non-canonical URL that redirects to another page, and says that as such the...
How to Diagnose Why Google Is Not Indexing Your Pages
Search Console's Page indexing report gives every non-indexed URL a reason and a source, and the source column answers the first question before you touch anything: is this yours to...