Today, I'm going to walk you through some of my favorite SEO tips that actually work
and are easy and fast to implement.
Let's zip, zap, zoodle right through these starting with the first SEO tip which is to
preserve link equity by fixing broken backlinks.
Broken backlinks are links that point to a broken page.
And because they're pointing to a 404 page, your site isn't getting any value from them.
But if you restore your broken pages with backlinks or redirect that URL to a live and
relevant one, you should be able to get that value.
So first, we need to find pages with broken backlinks.
To do that, I'll use Site Explorer, which is free to use on your own websites with
an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account.
To get started, I'll enter our blog as the target.
Next, I'll go to the broken backlinks report.
And as you can see, we have around 160 broken backlinks.
Take this one as an example.
This DR 73 site is linking to our post on submitting a website to search engines.
But they've actually made a typo in the URL, hence, the broken backlink.
So all we would need to do is redirect the URL with the typo to the correct one and we get
ourselves a contextually relevant link from an authoritative website.
Alright, the next tip is to license your custom images with Creative Commons.
Creative Commons licenses allow creators to license their content under copyright law.
Meaning, if you license out your work through Creative Commons, people can use your images
on their site legally.
Now, this might not sound all that appealing, but some of these licenses require people
to provide attribution to the creator, which often comes in the form of a link.
For example, Pexels, a popular stock photos site, licenses some of their photos through
Creative Commons.
And in their terms of use, they state that "some photos are covered by the Creative
Commons Zero (CC0) license.
This means that people don't even have to give credit.
Now, despite the license not requiring attribution, they've managed to get around 7,000 backlinks
where "creative commons" is mentioned in the anchor and surrounding text.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
If we look at their anchors report, you'll see creator names as anchor texts which have
led to thousands of referring domains.
And yes, these are links because of attribution.
Now, you might be thinking - well this is a stock photo site so of course people
will link to them.
That's probably true, but there are other sites like, openfoodfacts.org who have
also used this tactic in a pretty smart way.
Their site has different food products from around the world.
And when you click one of these product pages, you'll find details about the product, ingredients,
and even nutritional facts.
All things that typically lead to links.
Now, if we look at their terms of use, you'll see that they've licensed their product images
with Creative Commons.
More specifically, it's the BY-SA 3.0 license, which actually requires people
to link to the material.
And their site has generated over 37,000 referring domains, many of which are a result
of their product images.
So if you have custom images or your own product stock photos, then you may want
to consider licensing them with Creative Commons.
Alright the next SEO tip is to strategically repurpose blog posts to videos to own more
SERP real estate.
As I'm sure you've seen, Google is showing more and more videos in their search engine
results pages.
And the vast majority of these results are from YouTube.
Many people complain about this, but the way I see it is that your brand has the opportunity
to own at least two spots on the first page of Google.
And this is a big plus because the more SERP real estate you own, the more clicks
and impressions you'll get.
Now, when you're choosing blog posts to repurpose, you don't want to aimlessly choose any old blog post
on your site.
Instead, you'll want to look for SERPs that have video results on the first page because
this tells us that there's "video intent" for a query.
So to find these queries, you can use Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Just enter your domain or blog path and then head on over to the Content Gap tool.
Now, this tool is typically meant to help you find keywords a competing domain
or URL ranks for where yours doesn't.
For example, if I add moz.com/blog/ at the top, then the tool is saying…
Show us keywords that moz's blog ranks for where Ahrefs' blog doesn't.
But you can actually search for common keywords between targets too.
To do that, I'll remove our URL from the bottom section and paste our blog URL in the top section.
And just below that, I'll add www.youtube.com/watch, which are YouTube video pages.
So what this is saying is, show us keywords that Ahrefs blog and YouTube watch pages
are ranking for.
Period.
Let's run the search.
Now, because it's showing us all keyword rankings for a target, let's click on the "All Intersections filter"
and select just two targets.
And this is going to show us common keywords between Ahrefs blog and YouTube watch pages.
And as you can see, you'll get a nice list of common keyword rankings between
these targets.
Now, there's going to be a lot of irrelevant keywords in here because we're looking at
the top 100 keyword rankings for all targets where just one of them needs
to rank in the top 10.
So let's export this report.
And for the sake of time, I've already imported it into Google Sheets.
And what we're going to do is set two filters.
First, we want to narrow our data down to where YouTube ranks in the top 10 of Google
because that's where the clicks are happening.
And then we'll do the same thing for Ahrefs blog which will keep our keywords relevant.
Alright, now that we have a full list of keywords, we need to check which keywords will likely
lead to the most search traffic from Google.
So let's go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, paste in our list of keywords, and run the search.
Then, head on over to the Traffic Share by Domains report, which is going to show us
the websites that get the most search traffic for our list of keywords.
And as you can see, YouTube is among one of the top results.
From here, you can click on the keywords number to see the ranking videos and
the estimated search traffic they get from Google.
Now, it's important to note that the traffic estimations are based on just a single keyword.
But in reality, pages can rank for hundreds or even thousands of keywords.
So to see the total global traffic potential, just click on the caret beside one of the URLs.
And once you've found a target, it's just a matter of looking at the SERP for the query,
assessing search intent for top-ranking videos, and then repurposing your content to match it.
Now, ranking our videos in Google sends us around 200,000 views per year.
So if you want to learn more video SEO tips, I'll link up a video in the description.
Alright, the next SEO tip is to go after low-hanging featured snippet opportunities.
Featured snippets are excerpts from an article that usually appear at the top of Google's SERP.
And because they typically appear at the top of Google, they usually get clicked a lot.
Now, according to our study of 2 million featured snippets, you need to have a top
10 ranking position in order to win the featured snippet.
So in order to find these opportunities, we need to find keywords where we rank
in the top 10 and a featured snippet is in the SERP.
To do that, I'll go to Ahrefs Site Explorer and search for my target.
Then, I'll head over to the Organic keywords report.
Next, let's set a filter for keywords that rank in positions 2 - 10, and I excluded
position 1 because that would mean that we already own the featured snippet.
Finally, I'll set a SERP features filter to only show featured snippets where our target
doesn't rank.
Now it's just a matter of checking out these SERPs, paying attention to the snippet format,
doing a bit more digging into how your competitors have structured the snippet
content, and then making adjustments to your post as needed.
I know that was a bit of a mouthful so if you want me to create a video on getting
featured snippets, let me know in the comments.
Alright, the next tip I have for you is to add internal links to boost important pages on
your site.
Internal links are the easiest way to pass pagerank throughout your site.
And you don't need to do outreach because you have full control over them.
Now, there are tons of different ways to find internal linking opportunities.
The easiest is to do a site search in Google.
For example, if I wanted to add internal links to our post on search intent, then I'd search
for: site:ahrefs.com/blog "search intent", which will show us all pages on our blog that mention
search intent as a phrase.
Then we can simply visit these pages and add internal links where relevant.
Now, the downside to this method is that many of these pages will already be linking
to your target page assuming you've been adding internal links over time.
So another way to do this is to use Ahrefs Site Audit, which is also free to use with
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
After you've run your crawl, just head on over to the link opportunities report.
And this report shows you internal linking opportunities based on keywords your pages
rank for.
So we show the page you can link from, the keyword that's mentioned on that source page,
which is also the keyword that the target page ranks for and the page we recommend you
link to.
On top of that we show the context of where the keyword appears on the source page, making
it easy for you to identify good targets.
Now, assuming we wanted to find internal linking opportunities for our keyword research guide,
we can set a rule where the target page is our keyword research URL.
And as you can see, we're left with 54 opportunities and none of these source
pages are currently linking to that guide.
We have a full video on how to use internal links for SEO, so I'll link that up in the description.
Now, these are just a few SEO tips that are fast and easy to do and have been proven to
work for us, others, and now hopefully you.
I'll see you in the next tutorial.