No Search Traffic, Content Or Links? Watch This Immediately!

Video Transcript

If you’re just starting out and have no existing search traffic, this episode of UNBOXED SEO if for you. Today we’re going to answer the question, what should you do if you have no existing content, links or traffic? But before we dive down into that, I wanted to recap the results of the site featured in the previous episode of UNBOXED SEO. They integrated my advice really quickly and they’ve seen search traffic grow. Originally they had 834 keywords ranking in the top three. And now after just a few weeks, they have 1078, which continues to grow.

So please subscribe to the channel to make sure you don’t miss out on other videos like that, and be sure to check out the previous episode. In today’s episode, we’re going to be looking at an e-commerce site, built in WooCommerce. Now they have no existing content and they have no existing or authority. They’ve got a lot of work to do, and they really need to focus on the three pillars, technical SEO, content, and link-building. So today I’m going to break down each of those issues, why they’re important and how to fix each of them, step by step.

Most people are completely ignoring Google authenticity signals. What do I mean by that? I mean, giving Google what it wants so they know that you are an accountable person or business. Now you may have noticed in search results that less and less affiliate sites and smaller sites are showing up, and search results now are getting dominated by bigger brands. They’re getting dominated by real businesses and real people that are accountable. And most affiliates and even e-commerce sites in this example, are almost acting completely anonymous and they’re not publishing company information. If we jumped down to the foot of here, there’s no company information, there’s no address, company registration number, there’s no phone number, nothing like that.

All of the kinds of things that you need to be showing to prove that you are an accountable business or individual, and Google can trust that they can send traffic to you. And this information isn’t available on the sharp, it is not available in the footer anywhere, on the about us page where you might expect to see something like that. We don’t see anything, some links to some LinkedIn profiles, but nothing that tells Google you’re a real, accountable business, despite the fact that this is a real accountable business. And they’ve published a phone number here and partial address, maybe if you use a postcode there you’ll find it. But they’re not really letting Google know, “Hey, we’re a real business.”

And if you’re running an affiliate site, don’t be fooled, your real business as well. You just make money in a different way, but you must treat your affiliate site like it’s a real business. Real businesses have phone numbers and addresses, right? So how can we add them? Well, I mean, first let’s just look at the structured data as well, sorry. In the homepage here, we can see there’s no structured data that says this is an organization or a company or anything like that. So as well as not publishing it in the footer, they’re not publishing it in the structured data as well.

Looking at the structured data of the contact us page. Now the contact us page did display a phone number and partial address, but here we’re not seeing that information shared in the structured data. So it’s very important to add this information to the footer, and to the structured data where necessary, homepage, about, contact. If you’re running Yoast, it’s pretty tricky to do. You’re going to need to use a separate schema generator, just fill it out, copy the Java script and paste it into the relevant pages. Or if you’re using Rank Math, you can just come here, Local SEO & Knowledge Graph, hit the settings button and fill that out. And that will take care of it for you. So make sure you’re paying attention to Google authenticity signals. Google wants to know that you’re a real business that they can trust to send traffic to.

Now I found a really weird problem when I was looking through the internal linking structure of the site. I first started looking through the site map, and I could see they had all of these posts. And then I was checking if these were indexed in Google, weirdly this Guayusa versus coffee, just wasn’t showing up when I was looking through the site, commanding Google, nor the direct info command. I just wasn’t finding it in Google. And I couldn’t really work out why that was. So I did a little bit of digging and came across the blog. Now what’s interesting is, the blog does not have a single internal link to it. The main site and the blog a completely separate and the blog is orphaned. So we can see the post here, posted December 3rd, 2019. We can see it’s in the recent post here, but this page has no links to it. And we can check that in Screaming Frog.

So here in Screaming Frog we did the crawl and if we type in blog up here, you’ll see it doesn’t find it. Weird, right? So this site has some kind of issues with the internal linking structure, specifically not linking to the blog, which then means all of these content pieces that they’re trying to rank for those long tail keywords have absolutely zero chance of success. So make sure that you’re paying attention to your internal linking structure. And it’s always worth just doing a little quick review to make sure that all of the dots are connecting upright. Now nearly every e-commerce site has poor product category pages, and poor product pages themselves. So let’s take a closer look at that. Here on Athlete’s Brew, you can see the category page is very bare. There’s no information about the product or which product buy. There’s nothing that educates you about the product or helps you learn more about it whatsoever.

It’s very plain, it’s just three products and that’s it. Some irrelevant recent posts on the right hand side, and really not much to report. In contrast, if we look at a competitors category page for Matcha Tea, you’ll see they have a great intro, imagery, they’re educating about their teas and why they’re better. They’re allowing you to learn more by linking to relevant content in the blog. They’ve got a nice infographic that helps you make the right buying decision. And then it goes into the list of products. You can see there is a night and day difference between this category page, and the one on Athlete’s Brew.

So it’s important that you take care of your category pages and add relevant content, not just to appease Google, but to also help the humans that are going to be clicking through these pages, as well. Now, in my opinion, although this is a much better page, I would have put this infographic here at the bottom and maybe not even had it as an infographic, but actually had it as text with headers and sub-headers and things like that. It’s the only improvement I might make on this category page, but it’s worlds apart from our target category page. And this is a kind of typical category page I see on many e-commerce sites. So make sure you’re paying attention to that.

The same is true with your products pages. Here you’ll see… Now, I spent some time doing conversion eye studies and all of that kind of thing. And this page really, really hurts me. If anyone’s on your product page, the only thing you want them to do is buy the product. That’s the only goal. So right now the, Add to Basket button is very small. It blends in with the design of the site, the green here, right? And it should be big and bold and ugly, and it should be the most aggressive thing on the page. But here it’s very subtle and hidden away. On top of that we’ve got these recent posts on the right. If you’ve got someone in this page, do you want to click the buy button? Or do you want him to go and review a recent post?

So the recent post has to go, the buy button has to be big and clear. This discount table is not clear. It makes the buying process more confusing rather than simplifying it. So from a conversion point of view, there’s a lot to do here. From an SEO point of view, the description’s kind of weak. It doesn’t really tell you that much. And then we can look at reviews from customers from Amazon. That’s the additional information you’ve got? Not how to brew it, not how to use a product, nothing like that. Just, “This is what it weighs.”

Great. And the reviews are kind of weak, as well. Both came in on the same day. Probably not real reviews, let’s be honest, if you’ve not had any before or after. All right. Just a very generally weak product page, right? In contrast, let’s take a look at this product page. Great bold imagery that you can zoom in. Oops. Just kick the camera there. Let me bring it back with my foot. There we go. Nice big, bold imagery. Easy to click through lots of options in terms of weight, you can gift wrap it. Big, bold button, great product description, should tell you how to use it. It talks about the ingredients. Links to recipes, shows you the region that it’s from, the tasting notes, how to brew it. Everything you need to know about the product, not just in terms of, “Should I buy it?” But also then once you’ve bought it, how to use it and what to expect. This is a great example of a product detail page done right.

And again, in stark contrast to what we see here on Athlete’s Brew. So this is a common issue I see across a lot of e-commerce sites. You really need to put some effort into your category pages, so that they aid the customer’s buying decision, and also give Google the content that it wants, and also in your product pages as well. Don’t sleep on this. It’s very, very important. Now lots of people struggle with keyword research and putting a content strategy together. So I’m going to talk you through how to do that using Athlete’s Brew as an example. They sell Guayusa tea and loose, leaf products. So that means that from a Google perspective and a human perspective, we need a solid base of Guayusa content, which we don’t currently have. So let’s figure out which keywords we need to target and which content to produce.

For that I use Ahrefs keyword explorer. It’s the best tool for keyword research. And you can just put in your head term up here, and it’s going to spit out all kinds of data. Now, this also ranks for report, it’s going to be super handy in a moment. But first let’s focus on the Guayusa content base that we need to create. And this having same terms report is awesome, because it tells you every single keyword on the planet that has Guayusa in it, along with the keyword difficulty and search volumes. Now, I don’t actually use Ahrefs for my analysis and selections. We’ve built an internal tool for that. And if you’re a member of the 90 DAY SEO program, you will have access to this. But basically it gives us a top down view of topics, their average difficulty of search volume, and then the keywords within those topics that we need to target.

And from there, then we can make our selections and our observations, and move forward with creating the content. So if we look at the final strategy tab here, you’ll see, I already made some selections. Now these are Guayusa tea side effects, the benefits, what is Guayusa tea, and Guayusa tea versus another product. These are all the types of content that customers are going to want to see, and it’s going to help their buying decisions. And they’re also super easy to rank for. And it’s going to tell Google that we are all about Guayusa. There’s going to be no stone left unturned with that. So when I’m planning content, it’s really important to know how much resource each piece of content is going to need. So you’ll see here I’ve already calculated how many words are required.

How? Well, our writing team uses Surfer SEO, and it allows you to put in your target keyword, it’s going to go out and spider all of the search results. And then it’s going to come back and say, “If you want to rank this as a type of content you need to write, these are all the terms it needs to include. These are all the headings. This is how much word count it needs, and everything like this.” It’s really a paint by numbers for creating highly optimized content straight out of the gate. Now, while it’s nice to rely on automated tools, you also have to use the power of observation and your noggin a little bit as well. What I always do is, I do a manual Google search of each term, just to see what I see. Now, let me show you why it was important in this case. I was going to create Guayusa tea side-effects article, and a Guayusa tea benefits article. Two separate pieces of content, one 1,700 words, one 1,600 words. And that was it plan.

But if we do a search in Google, you’ll see Guayusa tea side effects. And if you look at the title here, Guayusa benefits, side effects and more. Guayusa tea, benefits, side effects and preparations. What is Guayusa? Benefits, side effects. Guayusa tea, benefits, side effects. Organic Guayusa tea use has been… So what Google is telling us here, is it does not want a separate article for benefits and side effects. It wants one article that combines both. If we do the search for Guayusa tea benefits, we see the same thing. Benefits, side effects, benefits, side effects, benefits, side effects. Just from the power of observation, we know that Google does not want to say articles discussing the benefits and the side effects. It has to be one.

But if we’d have just relied on tools and automation, we wouldn’t have made that discovery. So it’s very important when you come to making your selections and creating content, that you actually do a search in Google and use your own eyes and the power of observation to see what Google actually wants. This is an output of the algorithm. This is Google telling you what they want. So all you need to do is, figure out what they want, and then give it to them. That’s it. So it’s very important that you pay attention to that.

Now, once we’ve created this base set of content that we’re planning to create, you’ll see the search volumes aren’t all that attractive, because it’s a relatively unknown product, right? So how can we bridge that gap? Now we’ve got a base of Guayusa content, how can we go to the next level and start attacking more relevant keywords? Well, before I told you about this also ranks for report. Basically what this says is, “If sites are ranking for this keyword, they’re also ranking for these keywords.” So we can go view all, and we can take a look at some of the other keywords and search volumes and things like that. Okay. It’s a little slow to load, but I found one earlier, for example, coffee alternative. Not many people are searching for Guayusa, the actual product, but many people are searching for the problem, which is they want a healthier alternative to coffee, and Guayusa is that solution.

And this is a mistake many people make. Many people would go after these bigger, more attractive keywords from the get-go before establishing a base of content, a foundational base of content that’s relevant to their product, service and audience. So please make sure you build the content that your readers want, that’s also getting search for, that assists in conversions. Once you’ve got that foundation base of content, don’t pay attention to search volume, just make sure you’re giving Google what it needs, and humans what it needs, so they know that your website’s about Guayusa or whatever it is.

Then once that’s in place, you can layer it up with other layers of content, targeting other relevant keywords like this one, right? Coffee alternative, maybe energy drink alternatives. Guayusa versus coffee, and lots of other keywords here. And if we go back into this Ahrefs report, now we can see they’re talking about green tea, yerba-maté, and lots of other ideas that we can then jump into and create more content, casting a wider net to catch people from Google.

Now, if you have any existing content on your site, you really want to make sure it’s perfectly optimized. In the case of Athlete’s Brew, they have this article, Guayusa versus coffee, but it’s not really that well optimized for the term, and really underperforming. So how can we make sure that the content we have published is perfectly optimized? Well, for that we use Surfer SEO. And specifically for existing content, we use the SERP Analyzer. You can enter your target keyword and country here. It’s going to go out, it’s going to pull back the top results, it’s going to analyze over 500 different ranking factors, and then you can see how your page compares.

So right now we have an optimization score of 25, and the domain score of zero. So the content score is the optimization of the actual content. And the domain score is the overall or authority of the site, which is lacking. Now, in terms of optimizing the content, we can just click on audit here, and this is going to come through and give us a paint-by-numbers guide on how to optimize the content. Now, the first thing that I do, is I come scroll down and I take care of this word section. Here it’s telling us that we need to add 800 words into the body of the content. And if we click on show details here, these green lines show the mean average, and we can see that we are way below what the average should be.

So I always come and take care of word count before anything else. Then come refresh the report. Next, come down and take care of any of the other issues. So, for example, we’re not using the exact keyword in the title. Guayusa versus coffee is not used in the title, nor is it used a H1 tag. I’d come through and make sure we’re getting green ticks on all of these things. Once that’s done, hit refresh, come back, look at the report. Then I take care of the true density. So what’s being said here is, “Look, your competitors are using this term, but you’re not. So you need to add it once. You need to add this one. So you need to add this one.” And there’s a number of recommendations here that you should follow.

So, that’s how you optimize existing content. You can use Surfer SEO SERP Analyzer. You can come in here and then get, really, a paint-by-numbers report of how to optimize your content perfectly. And in this case, we can see, well, they have a lot of work to do in terms of optimizing the existing content that they have. So if you have any existing content on your site, I highly recommend you run it through Surfer SEO SERP Analyzer, just to see exactly where you stand right now.

So a lot of people and businesses really struggle with link-building, but it’s really, really important that you get it right. And I’m going to just talk you through it with Athlete’s Brew. So Athlete’s Brew, right now, they are a DR3 out of 100. That means they are a very low authority site, basically non-existent. And when you have a site with lower authority, it’s very, very important that you build that authority as quick as you can, because when you build the DR of a site, it raises all ships. That means that all of your inner pages are going to see ranking increases as the authority of your site increases.

So when you’re in a position like this, it’s very important that you spend the first few months building authority to the site. And let me show you in this Guayusa tea keyword example. If we look at the sites that are currently ranking now, you’ll see there’s some pretty heavy hitting sites in terms of DR. Now we can see that there’s a DR7 here, and that gives us hope that we can rank our DR3 site without too much hassle. But overall, if you’ve got a higher authority site, it’s easier to rank. So the first two or three months of link-building should be focused on building as many relevant and authoritative links to the homepage as possible.

Now, if you go on my blog, Matthew Woodward dot co.uk, you can come to the SEO section up at the top. And here I got a link-building section, there’s 15 or 16 different link-building strategies that you can use to increase the authority of your site. Now, if you struggle with link-building or you haven’t got the time to do that, you can use a LinksThatRank and my outreach team will take care of the link-building for you. And you can just pick how many links you want, and we take care of everything else. Now, when you’re building the authority of the site, you should really assign as much budget as possible in the first three months to building that authority, whether that’s $200 or $2,000. Just as much as your budget allows you to do. The quicker you build the authority, the quicker you’re going to see all ships or raise and rank.

Now after two or three months of building the site’s authority, we’re going to see the DR jump up. Once you start seeing the DR showing positive increases after two or three months, then you can adjust your link-building strategy so you’re building half of the links to the homepage, so you continue to build that authority. And then you’re building half of the links to inner pages and the target keywords that you want to rank for. In this example, Guayusa tea, or if we were going to create an article, what is Guayusa tea or Guayusa tea versus coffee, we would start building links to those inner pages only after we’ve started building or authority to the site.

So Athlete’s Brew suffers from all the problems that sites with no existing search traffic typically have. Remember, SEO just boils down to three components, technical SEO, content, and link-building. In the case of Athlete’s Brew, they had things wrong in every single area. Technical SEO, the site was slow. They weren’t giving Google signals that they need to send. And they had problems with internal linking. In terms of content, there was no existing keyword research, and the content that was published, wasn’t really that well optimized. In terms of authority, there’s not any existing link profile. It’s a DR3, so they need to build links to increase it.

And it’s important that you attack things in that order, technical first, then content, then link-building. Don’t do what most people do, which is just throw together some junk article and start getting heavy on the link-building. Start with the technical, do your keyword research and content creation. Make sure it’s well optimized, and then move into link-building. So to say thank you to the Athlete’s Brew team, I’m going to give them a copy of Ahrefs, which will allow them to take control of their search traffic and do keyword research, rank tracking and all of those other nice things.

They’re also going to get a copy of WP ROCKET, IMAGIFY and NitroPack (see my full NitroPack review) to help speed up the site. I’m also going to give them a copy of Surfer SEO, so they can optimize existing content and create new, perfectly optimized content every time. They’re also going to get a copy of Screaming Frog to help with the internal linking issues that they had. And I’m going to support them with links from my outreach team at LinksThatRank. On top of that, I’m also going to give them a copy of my step-by-step SEO course, 90 DAY SEO.

Now, if you have any SEO problems, I encourage you to check out my SEO portal. It includes tons of free tutorials, case studies and experiments that you cannot find anywhere else. And if you’ve had any of the problems that we’ve spoken about in this video, please leave a comment below. I’ll be answering them personally. So anything you’re stuck with, just ask the question, I’m there to help you. Otherwise, please support the channel, please like and subscribe the video right now. And I’ll see you in the next episode of UNBOXED SEO.