If your website has been penalized by Google, they may believe either that you have used manipulative methods on-site or off-site or that your site gives your visitors a bad experience. This blog post explains more about how penalties are placed on sites, what these penalties will do, and what exactly you can be penalized for in the first place.
A penalty could have been placed on your site manually (someone from Google looked at your site and penalized it) or algorithmically (your site broke a safeguard or trigger that Google set up). Algorithmic penalties come in two forms: Pandas, which come out every month and are based on how usable your site is and on the quality of the content, and Penguins, which can come out a few times a year and are related to there being too much optimization on your site.
If you notice your site has dropped by at least 10 spots on Google searches for several of your keywords, you have likely been penalized. A smaller drop is more likely a result of your competitors increasing their optimization, Google changing their algorithm, or your backlinks lowering in their rankings. Anywhere from one page to your entire site can become penalized, depending on the severity of the penalty.
Here are some specific reasons for penalization.
An abundance of low quality backlinks
It’s likely that some low quality sites (with less than 40 on Ahrefs) will link to your site, but if over 75% of your backlinks come from these sites you could have a problem.
Your backlinks have been paid-for or are a part of an exchange
If Google suspects any of the following, a penalty may follow: you’ve paid other sites to link to you or to build up backlinks for you, you get paid by other sites to link to them, or you’re a part of a link exchange scheme.
Too much optimization for anchor link text
The text that visitors to your site click on to reach another page is called the anchor link text. You can use your targeted keywords as anchors, but don’t use this tactic more than 20% of the time. We saw one of our past clients have this issue after some poor SEO work from a previous company. This is how we solved the problem.
Backlinks that are irrelevant to your site’s topic
At least a quarter of your backlinks should have some relevance to the topic of your site–the more that are, the better off your site will be.
The overuse of keywords, unoriginal content, and advertisements
You need to find the right balance when it comes to these aspects of your site. Creating engaging, unique content that naturally includes keywords is key for this. As well, don’t let ads on your site become excessive or make it difficult for visitors to find the content.
Suspected spam or hacking
If Google suspects that links on your site lead to spam, or that your site has been hacked, they could believe you’re not looking out enough for the security of your site.
Visitors don’t stay on your site
It’s not enough to get visitors on to your site–if about half of them stay for less than thirty seconds or they don’t check out more than one of your pages before heading back to the search results, Google could think you’re not providing a good user experience.
The use of redirects, hidden text, and other manipulative techniques
Your visitors shouldn’t be forced to view certain content on your site, and you shouldn’t have to hide anything to increase your rankings.
If your site has been penalized, Meaningful Marketing can figure out why and make a plan to fix it. Contact us to learn more.
This post, however, is going to talk about the time spent and the return on investment on creating more and more of these great pieces of local SEO content. We’re seeing this as we dive into our client’s analytics and even the analytics on our website here and finding how many people are actually searching long-tail search terms.
Target Long Tail Search Terms
So, long-tail search terms are anywhere from three to seven words in a search term. So “massage therapy for runners in Victoria, BC” would be a long-tail search term, or “how much does massage therapy cost in Victoria BC?”
Those are long-tail search terms. So, as you create more of those pieces of content, whether it’s a blog post, whether it’s an article, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same thing, it’s a webpage going on your site that targets a long-tail search term, you’re going to see a lot of traffic coming to your website.
And like I said, we are analyzing our clients’ sites because we are writing this type of content for them, we are advising them to write that piece of content that says, you know, “Who is the best massage therapist in Victoria BC”. You might list three competitors and you might also list yourself and say ‘hey, we’re pretty good as well, learn more about us.’
Put In The Effort
But, the time spent on creating those is very minimal, you know, it might take a maximum of five hours if you really want to write it well, and if you really want to do your research and if you really want to create some nice design elements to make it visually appealing, but that five hours goes a long way in the overall scheme of things, and I’m going to tell you why.
This is because not many of your competitors are going after these long-tail search terms, and this lower-hanging fruit. They all want to rank for the big, juicy search term, you know, let’s use a massage therapist example again. Everybody wants to rank for a “massage therapy in Victoria BC”. But there’s probably 100 websites+, whether it’s a local, just a small one-person massage therapy clinic, or whether it’s a huge one, everybody wants to rank for that search term. But what they’re not looking at is all these other search terms that people are searching
And it could be “massage therapy for runners in Victoria, BC”. It could be “who is the best massage therapist in Victoria BC”. It could be “how much does massage therapy cost in Victoria BC”
Those types of search terms, nobody’s creating content for them, or there might be a few, but how well-written are they, and do you think you can improve upon it? There are people searching those terms and if you can get to your website and that page in front of that person who’s searched them, you’re going to be doing them a favor, and you’re going to have a lot of traffic coming to your site.
Your Website Is A Bicycle Wheel
So, again, this is part of the bicycle wheel strategy we call it when it comes to content. The homepage is the middle of the bicycle wheel, but all these other pages that are targeting these long-term search terms, they’re spokes, and the more spokes you create, the more web traffic you generate. But, these spokes have little competition, so you’re going to see a lot of quick results coming to them.
One of our clients is in the home renovation industry, we’ve written articles based on each renovation, whether it’s kitchen, bathroom or basement that talks about cost. So, we’ve got three articles right there that target “how much does bathroom renovations cost in Victoria BC?” “How much does basement renovations cost in Victoria BC?” And “How much does kitchen renovations cost in Victoria BC?”
And those pages alone are generating close to 15% of his traffic, so outside of his website, he’s getting another, you know, 15% more traffic coming to his website through those pages. As you multiply all those pages, you’re going to see more and more traffic. The time spent on creating those pages is not going to take you more, it’s going to take anywhere from an hour to five hours, depending on how well you want it to sound and depending on any other types of content that you want to promote once that person is on that landing page.
Increase Visitor Time Spent On Your Website
So, again, you know, if you’re writing a lot of content, you’re interlinking to all this other great content to keep people on your website. You know, the whole goal is to not only get more traffic to your website, but it’s also to keep these people there and keep them engaged. So, creating good pieces of valuable information and linking to them from all these pages you’ve created.
And that’s the whole goal; you want to keep people on your website as long as you can. So, the time spent on creating these pages is very little, but the return on investment from them is huge. And you just think about that bicycle wheel and you think about creating spokes over the course of three years, if you create 30 articles a year that generate 10-30 visits a year, you know, over three years you’re going to see a lot of traffic coming to your website outside of your homepage and through those bicycle spokes. If you’re doing things properly, you’re keeping them on your site by interlinking to other good pieces of valuable content for them.
So, just a quick little ‘hey,’ I want to tell everybody how easy it is, it’s just a little bit of investment of your time and energy and to get the point across that when you create this piece of content, whether it’s a blog post, or article, on your website, it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not like a newspaper ad where the next day it’s gone or a magazine ad, when next month the new edition comes out and your magazine ad is not in there, or the TV or radio, those mediums, you have to continuously pay to have your brand in front of people, whereas content marketing and doing things properly when it comes to SEO, you are going to generate a lot more traffic and a lot more leads for your business for a lot less money.
A little bit of effort spent in sitting down and thinking about the content that needs to be created and going out and writing it and making sure it’s good. Put in the time, but think about the big picture and how the return on investment is so much greater when it comes to content marketing, because as long as your website’s doing things right, your pages, all these little spokes, are going to be ranking high, as long as you’re doing things right. So, they stay there, unlike that newspaper ad where you’ve got to make sure you’re in the next day’s newspaper.
The last couple blog posts here at meaningful marketing have talked about how to create great local SEO content, and within those blog posts, we’ve mentioned how important interlinks are. As I’ve gone through those last two blog posts, I realize that I haven’t even mentioned why interlinks are important, so that’s what I want to do today: I want to talk about the importance of interlinks.
Why Interlinks Are Important
Interlinks are important for a couple of reasons.
The first one being that it helps keep people on your website longer. So, if you have an article or a landing page that people are on and you’ve got three to six or ten interlinks on that page to other useful articles, you’re going to keep people on your website longer. And it’s kind of a theory that’s been known as a click-hole. The click-hole is if you get on a website and then twenty minutes go by and you don’t even realize it, next thing you know you’ve been through fifteen or thirty articles, depending on the website.
And a prime example of who does the click-hole well is buzzfeed. You’ll be on buzzfeed, you don’t know how you got there, and you landed on an article, it could be something to do with “What The Cast From Saved By The Bell Looks Like Now“, or something like that. Then next thing you know, 25 minutes have gone by and you’ve gone through 30 articles just of useless information.
Now, your idea and your concepts shouldn’t be much different, but you want to provide your website visitors with some good, useful information. You want to be sure to keep on linking to good articles within all of your pages.
So, that’s the first reason interlinks are important.
The second reason is it tells search engines which pages on your website are important so that those pages can get better rankings for their own keywords or targeted keywords. So, as you write more and more of the articles we’ve talked about in the great local SEO content blog posts, you want those rankings for those blog posts to improve themselves.
The Bicycle Wheel Strategy
Again, the bicycle wheel, the homepage is the middle of the wheel, and all these other little pages and pieces of content that you get off your website are spokes in that wheel, so the more spokes you have, the better off you are. Those spokes and those pages are going to be landing pages for people who are searching a lot of these long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are any of these three to seven to ten word keywords, like ‘the best blah blah blah in whatever city you’re in,’ or ‘how much does your service cost in the city that you’re in?’ Those are long-tail keywords.
As you get more and more of those pages created, you’ve got to improve their rankings. You can do that by providing interlinks from your blog posts to those pages. And again, the more and more of those pages that you have, the more and more interlinks you’re going to have for those pages and the better rankings they’re going to get. Why? You’re telling the search engine that these pages are important. As long as you have the right anchor text, the linking to that page, to that other blog post, you’re going to tell the search engine that ‘hey, this page that we’re going to link you to is descriptive,’ and the text that is linked, that’s the actual concept of this next page or blog post.
Interlink Text Is Very Important
So, an example here for Meaningful Marketing would be we mentioned the word ‘interlink’ throughout a lot of our blog posts over the last three years. But we don’t actually have an article on interlinks, thus why I wanted to create this one.
What we’re going to do is we’re going to go through and find all those mentions of interlinks on this site and change the text a little bit to focus on the keyword “the importance of interlinks”. So then, we’re going to link that text, “the importance of interlinks” to this blog post.
Hopefully I haven’t confused you on talking about interlinks while using an example of interlinking text, but that’s what we’re trying to do, because we want this blog post to rank high for the search term “the importance of interlinks”. Hopefully that makes sense and I haven’t confused you.
The last thing on interlinks is to make sure that you use a very descriptive anchor text, so don’t provide a lot of ‘click here,’ where that’s the text that links to a different page, or “learn more about by clicking on this page” don’t have a lot of “this page” linked to the next page. You’re not providing the search engine with very good information there, so be as descriptive as you can in your text link.
If you have a page that talks about massage therapy for runners, anytime that you mention “massage therapy in running”, you want that text linked to that page. Make it very descriptive and make it so that text is actually what that page is going to talk about that the page is going to link to, or even the searcher is going to link to.
There you go, that’s a quick little blog post, and I guess the Soundcloud recording here on the importance of interlinks, we’ll see you again soon.
As you go back and as you read through that, you’ll better understand what I’m gonna talk about in a second here which is – how to really create good local content for a massage therapist in Victoria BC.
In that last blog post and Soundcloud recording, I talked about how a massage therapist can create a good piece of content for the runners in Victoria BC. And I think I pretty much said write an article that targets “massage therapy for runners in Victoria BC”. But I didn’t really talk too much about what to put in it this piece of content. And here’s what you need to do to put in your content to make it really powerful.
If you are small business and you’re struggling with trying to create good local SEO content for your website, then you’re gonna want to listen to this Soundcloud recording, or read this blog post for ways on how to do that.
Sorry I got confused there, but we’re trying something new here at Meaningful Marketing and I decided, “You know what, I want to utilize my Soundcloud account here and get a voice memo that talks about how to create good local content”. Actually, it all really comes down to the fact that I kind of hate having to write and it’s just easier to talk!
The concept and strategies I’m going to talk about in this blog post, teamed up with this local SEO content strategy I’ve already talked about will no doubt increase your web traffic.
Read on and I’ll go into greater detail on how to create great local SEO content.
