6 Ways To Increase Search Traffic

Video Transcript

Welcome to Unboxed SEO, where I show you how to apply different SEO strategies in the real world. My name is Matthew Woodward, and I’ve helped thousands of people just like you to increase their search traffic. Today, we’re going to be focused on a site that suffers from some of the most common SEO problems. It’s very likely that you suffer from them as well. So, please follow along with everything you’re about to learn step by step. And if you suffer from any of these problems, leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to help.

Now, our target site is an eCommerce site built in Magento 2. Its organic search traffic has flatlined over the last years, it’s neither grown or declined. So, we’re going to fix that together today. Now, I want you to remember that SEO for the most part boils down to three components, technical SEO, content, and link building. You need to get each of those layers right. And if you do get each of those layers right, you will see search success.

Unfortunately, our target site today has problems in each of those layers. So, I’m going to show you how to identify the problem, show you why it’s a problem, and then show you how to fix it, but before we get started, please like and subscribe to the channel to get more great videos like this.

Ready? Okay, let’s get started. Now, if you haven’t been paying attention to website speed, I guarantee you’re leaving both traffic and money on the table. Website speed is one of the first things we fix for clients because it brings human benefits almost immediately and Google search traffic benefits four to six weeks down the line.

First of all, let’s talk about the immediate human benefits. Every one-second delay in your website’s load time reduces conversion by 7%. On top of that, you have less than five seconds to engage visitors before they leave. So, if your load time is higher than five seconds, you are losing a lot of money. Now, Google also made this a confirmed ranking factor. This is important because Google doesn’t confirm many ranking factors, but website speed is one of them. They’ve also doubled down with this recently by announcing that the Core Web Vitals report is going to be part of the search algorithm soon.

And if you look in Google search console, you can come to this report, Core Web Vitals, and see how you’re performing right now. Now, you want to focus on mobile. And the reason you want to focus on mobile performance is because Google is now using mobile-first indexing. So, if you come to Google search console, in settings, you will see if your indexing crawler is using Googlebot Smartphone or not.

If it is, which it more than likely is, and if it’s not, it will be in the near future, Google is switching everyone to mobile-first indexing, but what that means is that the performance of your desktop site is judged by the performance of your mobile site. So, if your mobile site is slow and sluggish, it will restrict your desktop site’s ability to rank in the desktop search results. So, we need to pay attention to that.

We can use a tool called Batch Speed to check this in book. What this tool does is go out to Google PageSpeed Insights and does batch testing across all your URLs. Now, what we’re looking for here is to see mobile PageSpeed scores of 60 and above. Here, you’ll see we’re posting less than 20 most of the time, not good, and you’ll see that we’re posting desktop scores in the mid 40s when really they should be 90 and above. Now, I highly suggest you go do this test right now. If you’re not seeing mobile scores of 60 and above, and you’re not seeing desktop scores of 90 and above, you are leaving money and search traffic on the table. No doubt about it.

Now, drilling into Google PageSpeed scores, you can kind of see why there are issues, and I’m going to talk to you about how to fix the issues in a little moment, but I want to just be absolutely clear that Google PageSpeed Insights is not the be all and end all of metrics, what really matters is how your site actually performs in the real world. Sure, having a nice score is fancy and all of that, but we want to use WebPageTest.org to make sure that we’re delivering low times under five seconds, ideally three. Now, three is very hard to achieve, but if you can get under five, that’s a sweet spot. Here you can see we’re loading in nearly 12 on the homepage and then the important in a category page nearly 13. So, we’re quite far away from where we need to be on our target site here.

How to fix it. Well, I’ve got a tutorial on my blog, hit matthewwoodward.co.uk, the SEO section website speed on the right, and I’ve shown you six free ways that you can increase website speed. Takes a couple of hours to do, and yeah, it’s nothing but a bit of elbow grease, and the benefits are immediate.

Now, in the case of our target site, thefurnituremarket.co.uk, this is a bit harder to optimize because it’s built on Magento 2. And if it’s built on WordPress or WooCommerce, we have tons of options available for Sitespeed, but Magento 2 and Shopify and OpenCart and other things like that, our choices are limited, but NitroPack’s great, it has a Magento module and you can see if we just run this test, what it does for our PageSpeed scores.

Ooh, let me come back here. Here we can see the results of the score. So, before we were getting mobile PageSpeed scores of 17, with NitroPack 83 before, and desktop 46, after 90. So, NitroPack brings us where we need to be. And what’s great about NitroPack is it takes a few moments to set up, you just sign up, plug your website in, and you instantly fix all of your site speed issues, but it does cost money. So, if you are on a budget and you’re seeing PageSpeed scores like this and web page speed scores like this, please follow my free recommendations in the tutorial, it will get you about 80% of where you need to be, and in some cases all of the way. So, that’s why site speed is critically important. It’s a ranking factor for humans and it’s a ranking factor for search engines. So make sure you take care of it.

Now, index bloat is one of those problems that lives below the surface, but if you’re not paying attention to it, it’s like having a big weight around your neck. And that’s really the opposite of what you want when you’re trying to grow your search traffic.

In the case of The Furniture Market, this is actually quite severe, and their index bloat is created by category pages and tag pages. So first of all, let’s look at the category pages. They have categories for acrylic accessories, acrylic furniture, acrylic interiors, acrylic seating, acrylic tables, and then oak tables, oak… And they’ve created a category for every type of material and every type of product. And if we scroll down the page here, you will see that 95% of these pages are just big, long lists of categories that are completely unnecessary.

On top of the category index bloat, we’ve also got a lot of tagging index bloat coming into play here. So, the issues here are quite widespread and it’s a really easy fix. All you need to do is consolidate the categories and tags. So, instead of having acrylic lighting, acrylic seating, acrylic tables, you should either have just acrylic and then over materials, acrylic oak, for example, or you should have product categories where you have seating, tables, accessories, right? But you shouldn’t combine both. So, we want to get between five and 10 categories here either as just acrylic, oak, or the different types of materials, or a list of the different types of product category, seating, desks, and those kinds of things, right?

Now, let me show you why this is particularly important on the furniture market. If we jump into Screaming Frog here, you can see… let me scroll down on the right, in response codes, and specifically blocked by robots.txt, 66% of the entire website is blocked by robots.txt. So, we’re wasting all of… like the majority of our crawl budget, 66% of it is being wasted because of index bloat to category pages and tag pages, right?

And look at this, look at this graph, look at all of that wasted crawl budget, right? We really want to be having next to zero URLs blocked here. So, in the case of The Furniture Market, they need to consolidate their categories and consolidate their tag pages, and then submit URL removals for the URLs they have removed. That will make a much more efficient use of crawl budget, and Google will reward you for that.

Now, internal link building is one of the most underutilized SEO techniques. And that is despite the fact that Google themselves say that the number of internal links pointing to a page signal to search engines the relative importance of that page. Well, that’s what the guidelines used to say, they removed that unusually specific advice, but you can hit my internal linking article. There’s a link to it in archive.org. But basically what they’re saying is that if a page has 100 internal links, it’s more important than a page that has 10 internal links, right?

On top of that, they went on to say that the context we pick up from internal linking is really important to us. With the kind of anchor texts that’s used and the texts that’s around links, that’s really important to Google. So, how do you know if you have a good internal linking structure? Well, for that, we can use Google search console. Come to the left, come to the report links, on the right hand side you’ll see the internal links report. And this gives you a list of the top linked pages, the pages with the most internal links at the top, the pages with the least internal links at the bottom.

Now, if I was to ask you to write down a list of your five or 10 most important pages in terms of revenue drivers, you would expect based on what Google tells us about the importance of internal links that those five or 10 pages would rank highly in this list. If they don’t, you’ve got a problem. Essentially, what this report should reflect is the most important page at the top and the least important pages at the bottom. So, spend some time reviewing that using the computer between your ears and see how your current setup aligns.

Now, if we look here, we will see the FAQ page has three times more internal links than any other page. Right now we’re telling Google by far the most important page on this site, on The Furniture Market, is the FAQ page, which is a lie. The owner gave me a list of the most important pages in terms of driving revenue, and it’s none of these pages in the top here. All right? So, this is a big problem.

Also, diving into it, into the FAQ section here, we can see there’s actually internal links coming from a dev site. And if we follow the link to this dev site, it’s now dead, but Google is still including this in their index. So, what actually needs to happen is this site needs to be recreated, added to Google search console, then they need to come to the URL removal tool under that dev2.thefurnituremarket.com and process a global removal to help accelerate that problem, but here you can see, do I have internal linking problems, right? So, let’s explore that a little bit.

Here you’ll see a category page, pretty typical eCommerce category page, and here they are using internal links. They’re hard to see, they should change that because that’s deceptive in my opinion, they should change the font color here to make it easier, but they are using internal links and they are making good use of exact match anchor text. Exact match anchor texts, you can use to nearly a hundred percent here when you’re doing internal linking, you don’t get a penalty for that, and that’s actually a very strong way of building internal links.

So, this category page is great, but this category page does not use any internal links whatsoever despite there being multiple opportunities to add internal links, they’re not doing that in all of their category pages. So, if you’re in an eCommerce store, a blog, an affiliate site, and you’ve got category pages and those category pages you’re not making use of contextual internal links within text, you are leaving a lot of search traffic behind.

On top of that, they have a lot of blog content like this, right? And despite having a lot of blog content, there’s no internal links here, not a single internal link to any product, any category, or anything like that, we’re totally underutilizing the content that they’ve published. We’re not extracting as much SEO value as we can from this because we are not using internal link building. For example, they have this page they need to go through and work on formatting and make things tidy, but right here you’d expect an internal link to Oak furniture somewhere here. There’s literally talking about markings in Oak furniture yet there isn’t a single internal link here.

Again, look here on this Cheshire Oak page. They’re just not making uses of internal links despite this page being completely relevant to here. These markings in Oak furniture should be internally linking to this page, but it’s not. So, how do we go about cleaning up our internal link profile? There’s two ways that we can do it, it’s really easy.

The first one is with Screaming Frog. And with Screaming Frog, what we’re looking to do is optimize our existing internal links. So, what do I mean by that? Well, you can do a search for a page up here. Let’s find the Oak furniture page specifically here. And if you come down to the bottom here, there’s the Inlinks tab. This is a list of all the internal links pointing to this page. So, we can actually come and sort these by anchor text, and we can see this is our target page linking to itself, probably a sub-category, Oak furniture, office furniture, but then we can see that almost every other page on the blog here… Sorry, on the site, is linking with the exact match anchor text of Oak furniture, nearly all of them. I’d say 98% of the internal links are using an exact match anchor text of Oak furniture. That is what we want to see.

So, take your five or 10 most important pages, do this exercise, see what the current internal links are, and update all of the anchor texts so that there is close to exact match to your target keyword as possible. So, that’s how you optimize existing anchor text.

Well, what about when we want to add new internal links? Well, adding new internal links is easy. All we need to do is use the site command, sitethefurnituremarket.co.uk, we’re going to put Oak in there. And these are all the pages that Google thinks are the most important in terms of Oak. So, that means we can go through each of these and we can open them and… Wrong one, that is our target page, we can open them and then look, oh, here’s an article all about Oak furniture, does not internal link to our target most important page. So, for each of your most important five to 10 pages, you can do this search at a relevant term here, and then go through and add your internal links to all of the pages that need it, where relevant, and using exact match anchor text.

So, we know that internal linking is important, we know that pages with more internal links are considered more important than pages with less internal links, go and make a list of your most important pages and then go and see how that list compares to the top linked internal pages report here. If there’s a big difference, you need to close that gap by either possibly removing internal links from some pages, like in this case with FAQs we need to remove the amount of internal links. Then we want to optimize the existing internal links and their anchor texts and then look for opportunities to add new internal links until eventually, this report comes as close to our list of top five or 10 pages as possible.

So, let’s dig down into some more of the fundamental errors that we found with The Furniture Market. Now, Ahrefs, great dashboard for driving everything, has a site audit feature. And here the report gives us an overall health score of 57, you know, fair, it’s all right, but there’s a number of errors that we need to fix, and we can see the top issues here. Now, the biggest issue is this page that has broken links.

So, we can click on any issue, you can learn more details about it, it tells you how to fix it, and we can view which URLs have been affected by this. So, if we click on that and the report loads, we’ll see that all of these pages are linking to this free delivery page, which is resulting in a 404 and generating a ton of these errors. So, if we look at the free delivery page, we can see it is in fact a 404. So, we need to fix all of the internal links pointing to that. Coming back to the report with broken links, we can sort from high to low, and we can see that not only is the free delivery page broken, but there are other examples of broken links that need to be taken care of.

Drilling down, there are also additional errors here, but you can just work through these issues. You can click on actual, all issues, importance, so all of the areas you want to take care of, all of the warnings you might want to consider and review on a case by case basis, but all of the areas need taken care of these are fundamental SEO problems you must have right. And you can work through any of these, click on them to learn more about the details, and then learn how to fix them along with the associated URLs.

Now, if we look in Google search console, we can see in the index coverage report that the 404s are present here as well. And we see all of these issues. So, we really want to see zero errors here, right? And we can also see in the mobile usability report that there are some fundamental issues that need taken care of as well. Remember, mobile is important because most sites now are using the mobile first index.

If you go on settings here, okay, it’s a little slow for me right now, but you will see if you’re using the Googlebot Smartphone Crawler. If you are, you’re on the mobile-first index, you need to fix all mobile issues. On top of that, one of the fundamental issues I saw here, and this is especially important if you’re an affiliate site, now more than ever before, Google wants to know that you are a real person or business, it’s accountable for what you’re publishing online. And the easy way to do that is publish your business information, business registration information, address, phone number, those kinds of things, some of which are legally required in some countries.

I think many affiliates actually forget that they’re running a business, they’re not running an affiliate site and you must treat it like that. And Google are less and less favorable to those anonymous affiliates that are hiding behind a site and specifically not publishing addresses and phone numbers and things like that.

So, in this example, they are publishing address and phone number, but they’re not putting it into structured data. So, they’ve got the organization structured data, but we’re not seeing the address listed in there. And this is very incomplete. On top of that, looking at structured data on other pages, for the product pages it’s great, but for the blog content we’re only publishing the organization structured data when really we should be publishing the article format of structured data.

So, there’s some issues here that need to be taken care of. From a structured data standpoint, fixing this adding articles structured data in most cases is just enabling a plugin like Rank math or Yost. And then fixing the fundamental issues that we found in the Ahrefs site audit is nothing more than a little bit of elbow grease and just working through these problems, but it’s important that you have that fundamental base ready.

You remember? SEO is just three pillars, the fundamental technical SEO, content, and links. Most people have links and content right, but not the fundamentals right, which is what we’re seeing here. So, make sure that you run an audit and take care of any of the issues that you find like this.

Now, let’s focus on backlink audits. Now, in general, Google is much better at detecting if a backlink should either help you or be ignored. When they introduced Penguin back in 2012, backlinks could either help or hurt you before they either helped you or they were ignored. So, Penguin, when it was released originally, essentially gave birth to negative SEO because for the first time links could hurt you.

Now, we’re on Penguin [inaudible] Google is much better at discrediting spammy links, but it is something that you should review. Now, in the case of The Furniture Market, in Ahrefs, we can come and look at the anchors. For me, what are red flags when we’re looking at these reports is usually you want to see branded anchor text at the top. If you don’t, and if you seek some kind of weird thing like this at the top, especially when it’s accounting for 23% of your link profile, you might have an issue and it’s worth investigating.

The same, if you’re looking at this anchors report, and you’re seeing lots of kind of spammy anchors, abusive anchors, my own blog has had a number of backlink based negative SEO attacks, you can find some really fruitful anchors pointing to my blog, but if you see those kinds of things you need to pay more attention. Now, the best way to do any kind of backlink audit is with LinkResearchTools. There just isn’t a better tool. It’s the most comprehensive tool, and it’s literally built to do exactly this and nothing else. So, that’s not a lie, it does do a lot of other things, but we use it for backlink audit specifically because it is just excellent. It is honestly the most excellent tool to do so.

Now, in this case you can see we crawled 574,000 backlinks. And based on that, LinkResearchTool gave us a high DTOX score. Now, what we want to see is this DTOX score to be as low as possible. We want it to be green and happy, right now it’s red and angry. So, we need to take care of that. Now, let me show you why LinkResearchTools is the best tool for the job here. It literally categorizes a list of actions in the order that we need to take care of them.

So here we can see that we’ve got 13 links coming from sites that are reported as being infected with malware or viruses, right? We do not want those links pointing to us, we can click to review that, LinkResearchTools will pull back this report that gives us all of the information about these links. Then on a link by link level, we can choose to either disavow the page or the domain, you should disavow the domain, or you can just say, “Hey, all of these links are malware. I am just going to select them all and do a bulk disavow,” right?

So, the aim of the game here with LinkResearchTools is to work through these problems. And you can see, here’s a spam from the globe. We found a common scraper spam footprint. We recommend to review the domains and disavow them, right? And all of these different risks that we have, we just need to review them, decide if we’re going to disavow them or ignore, and LinkResearchTools then allows us to download our updated disavow file, upload it, and then it will go back through and confirm our DTOXRISK score for us, right?

So, it’s a bit out of scope on this video to go through and review all of these, but ultimately what we’re going to do is review every single link and disavow it accordingly with the intention of reducing our DTOXRISK score as much as possible. That is the best and quickest and easiest way to perform a backlink based audit, but remember, the majority of people do not need to do this. Only do this if you see some kind of warning signals. Don’t make the assumption that you have a backlink based penalty, Google are very good at picking that up now. And for the most part, unless you have a manual backlink based penalty, you shouldn’t worry here too much unless you’re seeing these weird anchors or giving you reasons to investigate, right?

Here we’re also seeing anchor texts including like JPEG extensions and file dimensions and all kinds of things. And actually, if we look at these, let’s see what’s causing this. Yeah, we see this is just scraper sites from blogspot, so we know that these are all relatively junky links as well. When we’re clicking down into the details, let’s take a look at these no text referring domains. Again, you can see here if we probably open this up, this is going to be, well, it’s a dead site. Lets open this. Again, a dead site. So, all of these are links that we want to disavow, and you can use Ahrefs to get just a rough idea, looking at your anchors, should I be investigating here? And if you are, run a LinkResearchTools report and get control of your DTOX score.

So now let’s get into some of the nitty gritty page analysis. Now, in Ahrefs, the [inaudible] a list of the most important key words to them, and we’re going to just break down the four of these in a page by page analysis, because each of these offer a different challenge, and I’d like to talk you through each of them.

So, the first keyword, Oak furniture, this is the target page that they want to rank for. And you can see pretty standard category page, content at the top, some internal links that could be better and more obvious, but pretty standard stuff for an eCommerce category page. Right now, the first thing that we do on a page level analysis is look, is the page optimized to rank? And for that we use Surfer SEO.

Surfer SEO goes and pulls down the top search results. It then analyzes over 500 different factors. And based on that, give you a report of what you should do in order to be competitive. So, here we can see we have an optimization score of 52 out of a 100. There’s definitely work to be done. We can click on audit and it will give us some specific recommendations of what we need to do. Now, different people interpret these audits in different ways, but the way we do it is the first thing we do is we scroll down to this word section, and we take care of everything here first.

In this instance, it’s explaining that we should remove words from the page, which kind of counter-intuitive, right? Usually, SEOs tell you, you want bigger, better, more word count, right? But that isn’t really true. If you go on my blog actually, I have a Surfer SEO review, which told me to delete 30,000 words from a page, yeah, and I deleted them, and then I got the number one position the next day. So, take a look at that. The video is great that step you through all of that, but in this specific example for the Oak furniture keyword, it’s saying that we have to remove up to 500 words from our body, we need to remove some things from bold tags, we need to add some stuff into headers.

Now, this is the first thing that we do. We fix all of these word issues, then we come up here, press the refresh button. Next we want to fix all of the true density issues. These are terms that the algorithm are expecting to see, and it shows you how your competitors are using those terms in comparison to you. So for example, solid Oak furniture.

Solid Oak furniture is used by nearly every competitor, but not used a single time on our page. And if you’re talking about Oak furniture, you would expect phrases like solid Oak furniture to appear, and if it doesn’t, solid wood furniture, NLP. NLP is Google’s natural language processing engine, and you can feed it a term and it will spit out what it says are relevant terms. So, when you see this NLP tag, this is Google’s NLP engine telling us it’s relevant. And we can see here, we’re using that term exactly zero times.

We work through the True Density report, we fix all of the phrases so that they say all good, and then once done, we refresh the report again, and then continue here. We have all true density taken care of, we have word count taken care of, and then we fix all of these other issues here. It’s a paint by numbers optimization on the page level, right? For your specific keyword in your specific country. So, that’s what we do first.

Once we’ve done that, then we, in this specific example, Oak furniture itself, is highly competitive. We can see this has a high keyword difficulty score. So, in this specific example, we are going to be looking to add internal links to that Oak furniture page. So, we can just do the site command, we can do the thing for Oak here, and then just open these pages and add internal links using exact match anchor text for Oak furniture where possible, and it makes sense to do so.

Content optimization with Surfer SEO, internal linking with this kind of search, and then we just need to figure out things from a backlink perspective. So right now we can see our ranking kind of way down here in position 17, they are 26 with 31 linking domains, but we can see up here, there’s a DR 23 with 270 domains, but there’s a DR six with 89, a DR 18 with 44. So, let’s take a look at some of those, DR 18 with 44 domains pointing to it, and we want to filter by dofollow. So, of the 44 only 13 are dofollow. And most of these are relatively low powered links.

There isn’t actually that much of a strong backlink profile powering this specific results. So, you can dig into these SERP overviews here and look based on DR where you kind of fit into things. So, this DR 23 they got 270 linking domains. Let’s see how competitive that is. We can see that most of these are spam just by looking at the domains, but how many are dofollow? 118 are dofollow and they’ve got a good mix of authoritative domains here, but in my opinion, a lot of these are irrelevant just looking at the surface here.

In this example for Oak furniture, along with the content optimization, along with the internal linking, I think that they could compete if they built four to six kind of good links per month for the next three months. If they were to follow that kind of link building strategy, they would see significant traction in the Oak furniture search results, especially when you layer up the content optimization and indexing as well.

The next key word, Grey Painted Furniture. Now, this one presents its own unique challenge. Again, category page, but it’s lacking the content underneath like we had on the Oak page, but the client tells me this is a page they want to rank. The problem is this isn’t actually the page that’s ranking, it’s a different page here, right? So, they are intending that I rank that page, but what’s actually ranking in number six is this subcategory page. So, that’s interesting because it means that either their target page is underoptimized, which is most likely, or Google’s made a mistake, and you’ve got a decision to make here.

You can either go and deoptimize this so that it’s not cannibalization and moves down the rankings and then optimize the target page so it takes its place. That’s one thing you could do. In my opinion, that introduces a lot of risks and factors outside of your control. What’s probably better in this example is to accept the fact that Google was ranking the wrong page, then go and deoptimize the page it’s already not ranking, and further optimize this page. So, we can do that again. This is a page that Google’s actually ranking in comparison to this page that the client wants to rank.

We can see here pretty simple, not too much going information here, but here a lot more detail, a lot more products going on. This is why Google is choosing to rank this page and not the other one, right? So, same thing. How do we optimize this page for the term? We put it in Surfer SEO, we can see it’s got a 25 optimization score right now, hit the audit, same thing. First, come down to the words, take care of this, refresh the report. Then come take care of true density, refresh the report. And then come back and finish off everything else. That is how we would optimize, right?

In this case, it’s a very low difficulty score. I wouldn’t bother with internal linking too much. And here we can see that many sites are ranking with zero links excuse me, zero links whatsoever. So, this page here probably with maybe just one DR 20 link and one DR 35 link will be enough to propel this open to the top three positions.

Painted Furniture. This is where things get a little bit more simple. This is pretty much plain sailing. This is the page they want to rank. And this is the page that is actually ranking right now. Same gig, right? We’re going to run it through Surfer SEO, we’re going to see that there’s room for an audit, we’re going to go through… It’s a wrong one. Where are we? The furniture market currently ranking number three, there’s room for optimization, we’re going to run the audit, we’re going to fix all of the words first, then we’re going to do true density and then fix all of the other issues.

Moving into the keyword itself, let’s see. Right now we are ranking number three. We are DR 26 with 14 domains. There is a DR 23 with 54 domains in the first position. Let’s take a little closer look at those 54 domains, and I am simplifying this, but this is how you get a good top down look to get a rough idea of how many links you need to compete. So, of the 54 links only 24 are dofollow, which is what we want to pay attention to, sort those by authority, bt.com, I imagine that’s an easy link to go and replicate and win, it’s just a directory list and not a very powerful link in my opinion, but not really that strong of a link profile, a lot of directory based stuff here. So we can easily give this search result a bit of a spanking, and in my notes here I think that if we attacked it with four to six good links, that would bring us up into the number one position from number three.

Again, another example, Mirrored Furniture. Similar story here, right? In this example where they could benefit is by adding text up to the top here. You saw in the other pages, they all had this at the top. In mirrored furniture we do not have that, we’re very weak on word count. Moving into Surfer SEO, let’s find our result here, probably should have prepared that. Coming in number 14 right now, pretty weak optimization score. At least it’s a right page, despite not having much content.

Coming to the audit, and interestingly, Surf is telling us that we don’t need words, additional words in the body, but we do need some extra words in paragraphs. So, a little bit weak on the word count. We can add a couple of paragraphs at the top and take care of that. Get all of this green first, then come refresh the report, take care of the true density phrases, ignore words and numbers, just the phrases, get all of those all good, and then fix everything else. Same gig, right? It’s painted by numbers.

Surfer we also use for creating content as well, not just auditing existing content, we also use the content editor up here to create content that’s perfectly optimized the first time, right? So, let’s take a look at things from a backlink perspective, very easy keyword difficulty here, and where are we? We’re here number 15, nine domains, but let’s take a little look at what those nine referring domains are. Of those nine, nine are nofollow. So, we’re essentially at zero linking domains and that means we’ve got a little bit of work to do when it comes to link building. Let’s wait for this to load up again, my bad for doing it the way that I did it there. Okay.

Their furniture market, DR 26, essentially is zero. Let’s take a look at the top spots. We’ve got DR six, basically a brand new site ranking number three with 14 domains. How many of those are dofollow and actually worth anything? Okay, 13 of the 14 are dofollow. So we can see that this site is competing very much on the page level metrics rather than the domain level authority. So, that tells me that if we are to build just three or four good links to our DR 26 result, we’re going to see significant traction here. So, you can just come and order something like this, and that will take care of it, sorry, three or four good links would do it in fact, and that will take care of it, right?

These are the most important keywords and pages to the client, and you can see how we step through and do page-level optimization. Oak furniture, because it’s more difficult, I recommend adding some additional internal links to it, optimizing with Surfer, and then the link building. Mirrored furniture… No, sorry, grey painted furniture, we had the conflicting pages, we need to either optimize or deoptimize one and pick which of the two strategies that we go for there. I would recommend deoptimizing the wrong page that doesn’t already rank, and then optimizing the page that’s already ranking there on the first page, right? And the others, again, just optimizing with content and link building. So, that’s how we approach at the top level the page by page analysis, and these are the things that should be done to these four pages that you want to rank.

In summary, the furniture market suffers from some of the most common SEO problems that we see. There were issues with site speed, internal linking, index bloat, they had fundamental errors, and their main pages were heavily underoptimized in terms of content and links. So, to say thank you to the furniture market, we’re going to give them Ahrefs, which is the best SEO multi-tool, we’re going to give them NitroPack to seriously speed things up, we’re going to give them a free copy of Surfer so they can optimize existing content and create new optimized content, we’re going to give them a copy of the Screaming Frog, SEO Spider, we’re going to give them a copy of LinkResearchTools so they can audit their backlinks, and we’re going to support the new link building with links from LinksThatRank, along with a free copy of my step-by-step SEO course, 90 Day SEO.

Big thank you to the furniture market. And please like and subscribe if you want to see more videos like this, and please comment if you have any problems, any questions, if you failed any of these checks as well, please comment below, I will help you out. Alternatively, you can visit my SEO portal and that has answers to just about any SEO question you have. Whether you’re just getting started with what is SEO, you’re stuck with keyword research, you’re stuck with link building, we’ve got nearly 18 different link building strategies here and along with a bunch of ranking case studies and experiments.

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