Have you ever flipped through the yellow pages of your local phone book? If so, you might remember the ads. Usually printed in black and perhaps accompanied by a grainy photo, their goal was to communicate essential business information to nearby potential customers.

A Google Business Profile (GBP) is the more modern (and free!) version of one of those ads. When users use Google to search for a certain business or type of business, they’re presented with a Business Profile highlighting all the most important aspects of relevant nearby options. If you know how to optimize your Google Business Profile, you can get your listing in front of users’ eyes, no five-pound phone book required.

Why Learn How to Optimize Your Google Business Profile?

Want to generate higher site traffic? Earn customers’ trust? Drive more purchases? If you answered “yes, yes and yes” (and we sure hope you did), then a Google Business Profile can help you achieve all three.

The purpose of a Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) is to make it easier for users to find the businesses they’re seeking via Google Search. When people search for a specific business or category of businesses, Google displays a handful of business listings at the top of its search engine results page (SERP):

From there, prospective customers can click on one of those listings to see the business’s full details on Google Maps, including its website, hours of operation, phone number and more. The Business Profile of Fox and Jane Salon offers a perfect example:

For users, this functionality makes finding the information they need a breeze. For business owners, a GBP presents a prime opportunity to improve performance across the board. In a study of 45,000 businesses, digital marketing platform provider BrightLocal found:

• 84 percent of GBPs are found through discovery searches (i.e., searches for a related category, product or service), while 16 percent are found through direct searches (searches for the business’s name);
• 49 percent of businesses receive more than 1,000 views on Google per month; and
• a typical business gets 59 actions from their GBP every month, more than half of which are website visits.

These statistics make it clear: When you incorporate Business Profile optimization into your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, you directly enhance a business’s online presence, organic search traffic, sales and customer engagement.

Complete and Verify Your Listing

If you leave your GBP incomplete, you’re missing the chance to attract a great number of customers. In fact, Hootsuite confirmed Google’s statement that “customers are 70 percent more likely to visit businesses with a complete [Google Business Profile].”

So make the most of your listing by ensuring it’s completely filled out, including the business’s:

• primary category (and secondary category, if applicable);
• business description (hint: sprinkle some relevant keywords throughout this section);
• phone number;
• profile photo;
• physical address;
• business hours;
• holiday hours;
• outdoor seating availability;
• website URL;
• service area, if you’re optimizing the profile of a hybrid or service-area business; and
• other business attributes, if applicable.

For some business types, Google makes it possible to provide even more niche information. For example: restaurants can add popular dishes and menu data; hotels can add a list of amenities; and businesses selling consumer products can create product listings.

Don’t underestimate the value of adding all those additional details — depending on the search query a user makes, they could result in higher search rankings, increased customer interaction and more happy customers overall.

Also be sure to verify the listing. Google reports verified businesses are twice as likely to be viewed as reputable by users.

Upload Plenty of Photos

Learning how to optimize your Google Business Profile isn’t just about filling out the required information—it’s also about creating a stellar first impression with users.

One of the best ways to do so takes just a few minutes. Upload high-quality photos showcasing the business’s logo, popular products, services or area of expertise to help draw customers right off the bat.

Businesses with photos receive 42 percent more requests for directions, and 35 percent more click-throughs to their website than those without.

Listings like the one from Crumbl Cookies make it easy to see why:

If you instantly started craving cookies upon seeing those photos, you’re not alone—and you also now have firsthand knowledge of the enormous impact a few enticing product photos can make.

Note that customer photos can be displayed on your Google Business Profile too, so make sure your business is always ready for its close-up.

Be Responsive

While Google isn’t a social media platform, one key element of social media marketing does apply to optimizing your GBP: responsiveness.

This is especially important for customer reviews, as BrightLocal found in a 2022 study that among consumers:

• 98 percent read online reviews for local businesses at least occasionally, and 77 percent always or regularly do;
• 99 percent use the internet to find details about a local business in the last year, 78 percent do so every week and 21 percent do so every day; and
• 55 percent feel more positively about a local business if the owner has responded to a review.

By responding to their reviews, you can show customers you hear and care about their experiences and earn their trust, as well as the trust of any potential customers who may be reading too. Here, the owners of Café Corazón show us how it’s done:

Whether you’re responding to positive or negative reviews, specifically address each customer’s unique comments. Don’t copy and paste a generic response—the goal is to make customers feel valued, not expendable.

The only bad reviews not worth responding to are those that are clearly fake or otherwise inappropriate. Luckily, you can get such reviews removed entirely. First check Google’s policy on prohibited and restricted content to ensure the reviews in question meet its criteria, then flag them for removal.

Another way to successfully engage customers on your Google Business Profile is to answer questions whenever you get the chance using Google Maps’ Q&A feature. If you haven’t received any yet, you can even ask common questions yourself from your personal Google account and reply with your business one.

Even better, you can take your customer service to the next level by turning on the business messaging feature, i.e. chat. Just know that you’ll need to respond to all messages within 24 hours or Google will automatically deactivate chat for your profile.

Provide Regular Updates

Ever gone out to buy a cup of coffee you’re really looking forward to, only to arrive and find your java joint of choice is unexpectedly closed? Once you got done crying into your steering wheel, you had to drive around looking for another place to get your brew before the lack of caffeine forced you to settle for a disappointing cup of instant (no offense, Nescafé devotees).

To ensure customers never have to suffer through that same type of denial, update the business’s GBP when the:

• contact information changes;
• hours are temporarily altered for holidays or events;
• hours are permanently altered;
• category shifts, e.g. from coffee shop to brunch spot;
• website is created or moved to a new URL; or
• physical location changes.

You’ll be showing existing and potential customers you value their time, are up to date on current events and stay on top of business operations.

Remove Incorrect Information

Since anyone can suggest edits to your GBP via Google Maps, it’s possible for people outside your organization to add or alter information with the click of a single button (don’t worry, Ironside Fish & Oyster, we didn’t make any changes):

While this feature can be helpful, such as when users correctly report a business as being permanently closed, it can also result in false information being posted. Whether in the form of a nonexistent website or incorrect hours, misinformation can negatively affect business.

Although Google will typically send a notification email if any edits have been made, regularly review your listing’s information to ensure it’s 100 percent accurate.

Add Owners and Managers

If your day-to-day tasks involve anything other than GBP optimization, you may find it difficult to stay on top of adding new photos, responding to reviews and updating information, and understandably so.

If that’s the case, you may find it helpful to take some of the burden off yourself by adding Owners and Managers.

• Owners have access to all GBP functionalities. While each Business Profile can only have one Primary owner, additional Owners can be added as needed.
• Managers have access to most of the same GBP functionalities as Owners, save for adding or removing users, and removing Business Profiles.

Familiarize yourself with each role’s capabilities, as well as detailed instructions for adding and removing Owners and Managers.

Once you’ve appointed other Owners and Managers, you can delegate tasks to ensure the listing is always maintained and accurate, even if you’re on a long vacation (lucky you!) or out sick (not-so-lucky you).

More Than Just a Listing—It’s Free Advertising

By mastering Google Business Profile optimization, you’re doing more than creating a listing in a directory. You’re effectively creating a dynamic ad. When users make the right query, they’ll be presented with a summary of everything a business has to offer.

From fantastic photos to useful business information, your GBP is a powerful tool which offers a wealth of opportunities to capture the attention of prospective customers and cement the trust of existing ones—all for a grand total of zero dollars. Phone books never stood a chance.

Image credits

Screenshots by author / October 2022

Whether you’ve realized it or not, you’ve come across plenty of duplicate content just by browsing the web. Sometimes it’s obvious—ever seen the same news article published on two different sites? That’s duplicate content. Other times, it’s so subtle it’s barely noticeable. If you type a URL into your browser bar without the www prefix but are automatically sent to a URL that does have it, you’ve just been moved from one duplicate page to another.

This can be achieved with the canonical tag, a powerful tool that tells search engines which duplicate page is the original version (i.e. the canonical version) and which is the secondary version (i.e. the non-canonical version). By using this tag effectively and sidestepping common mistakes, you can avoid duplicate content, boost search result rankings and authority, and improve a site’s user experience.

How the Canonical Tag Helps You Control Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is to search engines what a wrench is to a spinning gear. When a site has two or more identical versions of the same piece of content, Google doesn’t know which version to index, which should rank for search results or what to do with link metrics. Worse still, its bots may spend valuable time crawling multiple copies of the same page rather than crawling the site’s new or updated content.

However, it’s important to note that in general, duplicate content is not inherently deceptive. A site might have duplicate content for a variety of valid technical reasons, including inadvertent URL variations, improperly configured content management systems (CMS), different language variants and printer-friendly page versions. Accordingly, Google doesn’t typically penalize any duplicate content it perceives as innocuous.

Even so, the less duplicate content a site has, the more likely it is to be efficiently crawled and achieve greater prominence in search results.

This begs the question, how can duplicate content be avoided in the first place? The answer lies in the canonical tag, an HTML element that prevents and eliminates duplicate content issues. When you tag a page in this way, its address becomes a canonical URL.

By learning how to use this tag properly, you can boost a site’s visibility, performance and user experience in one fell swoop.

Choose a Canonical Page

First, specify which version of a page you want Google to view as canonical—i.e., choose which page version you want people to see in search results. Your preferred version should be the one with the best performance. If all versions perform equally well, pick your favorite one.

The simplest way to indicate which page is canonical is to use the canonical link element. In the(not) of a non-canonical site page, insert the tag to direct search engines to the canonical one. The tag itself is both straightforward and brief:

To be clear, the canonical tag is technically an HTML element, not a tag—that designation belongs to the portion of the element. Nevertheless, it’s almost always colloquially referred to as such, so to avoid confusion we’ll call it the rel=canonical tag or canonical tag for short.

You can also use the canonical HTTP header instead of the canonical link element. Google added this option to give webmasters the ability to canonicalize non-HTML documents such as PDF versions without increasing page size.

By adding the canonical HTTP header to a non-HTML page, you can choose the HTML page you want to direct search engine crawlers to.

Please note that using the canonical HTTP header is considered to be an advanced technique. Google has marked it as such because the headers can be difficult to keep up with on large sites or sites with frequently changing URLs and URL parameters .

If you feel up to the challenge, you can insert a canonical HTTP header using the following snippet of code in your page’s source code:

Link: <http://www.example.com/resources/ebook.pdf>; rel=”canonical”

Throughout the canonicalization process, remember self-referencing canonical tags are OK. For example, the homepage www.example.com can point to the same URL, www.example.com. This may seem unnecessary, but it can help further clarify to search engines which page you want to be indexed.

Identify Canonicalization Issues

If the canonical tag is already being used on a site, it can be difficult to find pre-existing issues.

To avoid tediously combing through your XML sitemap, try using a free tool like the Screaming Frog SEO Spider (the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is a stellar option too).

Once you’ve downloaded the SEO Spider, enter the URL of the site you want to analyze.

Then, click on the “canonicals” tab. This will bring up a complete list of the site’s canonical URLs and show you which pages are indexable and which aren’t.

When reviewing this list, keep an eye out for canonical tags that:

• Point to the wrong page. For instance, one non-canonical page might point to another non-canonical page instead of the canonical one.
• Use the wrong URL. For example, a tag might point to a URL that doesn’t include a trailing slash (www.example.com) when it should be pointing to a URL that does (www.example.com/).
• Send mixed signals to search engines. This can occur when page X points to page Y, and page Y points to page X. In that scenario, search engines won’t know which page is canonical.
• Point to the first page of a paginated series. If the second page of a series points to the first page, then the second page will not be indexed.
• Contain relative rather than absolute URLs. Relative URLs don’t specify the protocol (example.com), while absolute URLs do (https://example.com). If a tag contains a relative URL, search engines will likely interpret it incorrectly.
• Appear multiple times on the same page. If a single page has more than one canonical tag, search engines will ignore all of them.

When fixing any canonicalization issues, always keep in mind even slight canonical URL differences can matter in the eyes of search engines.

The following URLs are all viewed as distinct by search crawlers:

• http://www.example.com
• https://www.example.com
• http://www.example.com/
• https://www.example.com/
• http://example.com
• https://example.com
• http://example.com/
• https://example.com/
• www.example.com
• example.com

So, be sure to keep things consistent while addressing existing canonicalization issues or adding new canonical tags, whether you’re using Yoast SEO, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider or another tool altogether.

Give Precedence to HTTPS Pages

Google specifies in its canonicalization guidelines that it prefers HTTPS pages over HTTP pages by default.

What’s the difference between the two? HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, is a communications protocol used to transfer information via the internet. HTTPS, or hypertext transfer protocol secure, is the same type of protocol, except it’s encrypted.

With HTTPS, data is transferred using transport layer security (TSL) protocol. TLS offers three key security benefits: encryption, data integrity and authentication.

In an effort to protect user data and promote widespread encryption, Google has expressly encouraged the adoption of HTTPS over HTTP. Given that 95 percent of Google traffic was encrypted as of September 17, 2022, that effort has proven to be largely successful.

With that in mind, it’s prudent to specify HTTPS pages as being canonical while specifying any duplicate HTTP pages as non-canonical.

Allow Indexing on Canonicalized Pages

You can use the noindex directive to stop Google from indexing pages you don’t want to be included in search results, such as login or thank you pages.

At first glance, it seems logical to include noindex on non-canonical pages, too. If you’re going to point search engines toward one main canonical page anyway, why not block indexing on the pages you don’t want to rank?

The answer has to do with link equity, once known as link juice, a process in which external or internal linkspass authority and ranking power to other links.

By adding the noindex directive to a non-canonical page, you’ll be losing any link equity that page may have, which can lower the ranking power of the canonical page. But since canonical tags pass link equity, they don’t create the same problem.

To avoid any negative impact on valuable internal link equity, allow indexing on canonicalized pages and save the noindex directives for pages that truly shouldn’t be indexed.

It’s also worth noting Google no longer supports noindex in robots.txt, so be sure to use noindex in either the HTTP response headers or page HTML instead. To check if search crawlers can access a page you don’t want to be indexed, try using the Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool.

Take Advantage of Cross-Domain Canonicalization

By canonicalizing pages across multiple sites, you can tell search engines you’d like them to index a page’s content on a single domain rather than each one individually.

This is referred to as cross-domain canonicalization, a strategy often used to generate traffic from content syndication, i.e. content that’s re-published on sites other than the original.

For instance, one news website (site A) may publish original content that’s then re-published on another news site (site B). Site A gets exposure and increased organic traffic, and site B gets fresh and relevant content.

Site A can benefit from that scenario even further, though, by canonicalizing the article. Even though the article is re-published on site B, the canonical tag will tell search engines the definitive version of the article is on site A.

As a result, users making relevant search queries are more likely to see the original article as it appears on site A in search results.

Cross-domain canonicalization isn’t just useful for canonicalizing content on third-party sites, either. If multiple domains belong to the same owner and the same article is published on several of them, the site owner can use the canonical tag to specify which domain they want to show up in search results.

Prioritize Responsive Design

For sites with separate mobile URLs, you can set the desktop version as the canonical URL to tell search engines to index it instead of the mobile version.

However, Google explicitly recommends eschewing separate URLs in favor of responsive web design, which automatically adjusts page layout to suit the device type being used to view it.

With responsive design, if a user visits a page on a mobile device, they won’t be redirected to a separate mobile-specific URL (for instance, www.m.example.com).

Instead, the website will identify the type of device they’re using and alter its layout accordingly while using the same URL (www.example.com). This provides a better user experience, eliminates the need to manually create multiple layouts of the same site, and streamlines analytics and performance tracking.

As such, when you want to ensure a positive user experience across platforms and devices, it’s best to prioritize responsive web design over a separate canonical URL when possible.

Know When to Use 301 Redirects

There are times when the canonical tag isn’t the best way to specify which page is canonical. For example, when deprecating a duplicate page, Google recommends using a 301 redirect (also known as a 301 status code) instead.

In users’ eyes, the difference between the two options is a 301 redirect means they never see the page they were trying to reach in the first place. With the canonical tag, they’re still taken to the URL they entered or clicked on, such as a URL for products in a specific color, even if it’s non-canonical.

What makes 301 redirects different from other types of redirects? Unlike 302 and 307 redirects, 301 redirects tell search engines the page in question has been permanently moved to a new location. By comparison, 302 and 307 redirects indicate a page has been temporarily moved to another location.

The result is that pages with 301 redirects immediately transfer about 95 percent of their link equity to the new destination page.

Preserving link equity this way can significantly impact a site’s authority and search rankings. Although 302, 307, and other types of redirects are no longer directly penalized, it takes some time for Google to realize the redirect is no longer temporary and start passing on link equity accordingly.

You can also replace a site’s 404 pages with 301 redirects when appropriate. For instance, you could use a 301 for a URL leading to a non-existent (but previously well-trafficked) page about custom shoes.

The redirect sends visitors to a current page about custom clothing and ensures Google indexes the correct page. Remember, though, to always guide visitors to the most relevant alternative page possible.

If you do decide a 404 page would be more appropriate (for instance, for a URL that received minimal traffic or was never functional to begin with), consider using custom 404 pages for a better user experience.

The Rel=Canonical Tag? You Can Rel=Conquer It

Proper use of canonical URLs isn’t as much of a complicated subject as it may initially seem. From implementation to troubleshooting to fine-tuning, anyone can master the rel=canonical tag with the right strategies (and reap SEO benefits in the process).

Once you’ve canonicalized a site’s pages and blog posts with the canonical tag, you’ll be able to unify pesky duplicate versions of identical content, direct search engine traffic where you want it to go while boosting your authority, improve overall search engine optimization and create a streamlined and intuitive user experience.

Image Credits

Screenshot by author / March 2020

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that here at iloveseo.com, we talk a lot about SEO (short for search engine optimization, FYI). But one thing we haven’t spent a lot of time doing is answering one of the most important SEO questions of all: How does SEO work, anyway??

Now, we’re changing that. Let’s take a look at the functionality of SEO and explore how you can make it work for you.

How Search Engines Work

SEO simply wouldn’t exist without search engines. So when explaining how SEO works, it’s crucial to also unpack the search engines it’s based on.

To do so, we’ll have to rewind time back to the 1990s. Back then, search engines were rudimentary compared to those we’re used to today. They based their rankings almost exclusively on keywords alone, and while that initially didn’t seem like a bad idea, it soon culminated in less-than-awesome results and an even worse user experience.

For instance, let’s say you’re a passionate gardener circa 1993. You create a webpage explaining how to plant and grow roses, and it begins to show up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

But there’s another website that wants to rank higher than you for the keyword “roses,” so instead of writing an even more informative and helpful page on the topic, they publish one with content that looks something like this:

red roses pink roses plant roses prune roses grow roses rose gardening rose nursery english roses turkish roses china roses french roses tea roses types of roses species of roses

For obvious reasons, that tactic is called keyword stuffing. And although you and every other human can tell such a page offers no value to readers, the search engines at the time weren’t as smart. So, that spammy, keyword-stuffed page would rise to the top of the SERPs, while your genuinely helpful page would sink to obscurity.

Computer scientists knew there had to be a better way, but Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin were the first to create one and put it in a polished, scalable package. It was called Google, and they introduced it in a 1996 paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”

There, they described how their unique search engine algorithm would evaluate pieces of content based not only on keywords, but also on external backlinks and anchor text.

In that way, the algorithm could use signals from human users to determine how relevant and trustworthy a page was.

Today, Google’s algorithms work in much the same way—they’ve just gotten more advanced. Since rolling out the page experience update, for example, Google has started to rank pages based on a slew of other user-focused metrics.

These include the three Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP);
• First Input Delay (FID); and
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

A page’s mobile-friendliness, Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) and lack of intrusive interstitials are considered as well:

All modern search engines work in a similar fashion, although non-Google engines are admittedly usually not quite as advanced. And don’t get us wrong, they still take keywords into consideration — but crucially, keywords are just one search engine ranking factor among many, not the be-all and end-all.

How SEO Works

Knowing how organic search and search engines themselves work, it’s much easier to understand the core components of SEO.

Keep in mind that the “O” in “SEO” stands for “optimization.” And how does one optimize a web page (or even an entire website) for search engines specifically? It all comes down to a few key areas:

• Ranking factors such as Core Web Vitals, keyword use and mobile-friendliness.
• Quality content that keeps human users engaged and interested.
• Backlinks from trustworthy sites.
• Crawlability, i.e. the ease with which search engine bots can crawl any given page, whether it’s a blog post or contact form.

It’s only by addressing all of those categories that SEO practitioners can drive the results they’re looking for. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

Ranking Factors

Google doesn’t publish an exhaustive list of its ranking factors for organic search (and neither does any other major search engine we know of), but it has confirmed the existence of several. These include:

• relevant keywords;
• anchor text;
• relevance to the given search query;
• page speed;
• backlinks (i.e. inbound links);
• mobile-friendliness;
• HTTPS; and
• content freshness.

Other metrics such as bounce rate aren’t ranking factors on their own, but they can be indicators of poor page speed or a lackluster user experience.

Needless to say, people who want their site to achieve higher search rankings would be wise to pay attention to those factors.

High-Quality Content

As we discussed earlier, it takes more than a string of search terms to fool Google into thinking online content is high-quality.

That’s because its algorithms (and human Quality Raters) take a disciplined approach to evaluating content quality. From a page’s layout, to its design, to its images, everything is taken into consideration when determining the overall quality of a piece of content, even if those individual elements aren’t official ranking factors.

To gain a deeper understanding of how Google assesses quality, just take a look at its E-A-T concept. Rather than focusing on technical details, this concept is all about giving value and a better user experience to potential customers.

Backlinks

You already know that relevant links are a ranking factor, but they make up such a major one that it’s worth exploring further.

Here’s the gist of how inbound links work in the context of search algorithms: Every time a high-quality site links to yours, that counts as a vote of confidence. The more votes your site has, the stronger its reputation.

And if a very authoritative site links to yours, that vote has even more sway. So if you get a couple quality links from a longstanding site like CNET, for example, they could be worth dozens of backlinks from less trustworthy sources.

Think you can make Google believe your site has more authoritative backlinks than it actually does? Think again: With its stringent guidelines on link schemes and similar tactics, your chances of getting away with it are slim to none.

If you really want to improve your rankings, it’s wiser to stick to tried and true link building methods.

Crawlability

It makes sense that if Google is having trouble accessing and reading a site’s content, it won’t assign it with a higher SERP ranking. That’s why crawlability is so crucial to every site’s success.

However, crawlability can be easy to overlook because it requires thinking like a bot to fully understand. Specifically, you’ll have to think like the search engine crawler Googlebot. As Google puts it, Googlebot is “the general name for two different types of crawlers: a desktop crawler that simulates a user on desktop, and a mobile crawler that simulates a user on a mobile device.”

Whether Googlebot is crawling your site in a mobile or desktop environment, though, it will essentially do the same thing: Visit various pages on the site by following internal links, and gathering content as it goes.

After your site’s content is gathered, it’s then indexed in Google’s database so it can be efficiently retrieved to provide users with relevant search results.

But if Googlebot isn’t able to crawl your site, it won’t gather any content, that content won’t get indexed, and your site won’t show up in nearly as many search results. The solution? Ensure crawlability by creating an organized sitemap, improving internal link structure, cleaning up your site’s code (or even minifying it), mending broken links, increasing page speed and focusing on mobile-friendliness.

Off-Page SEO vs. On-Page SEO

To truly understand how SEO works, you should also be able to distinguish the two main types of SEO: off-page and on-page SEO.

Put simply, on-page SEO refers to SEO elements and tactics that take place directly on your site. For instance:

• writing optimized title tags;
• creating a high-quality content strategy;
• using structured data;
• frequently publishing fresh blog content;
• improving your site’s speed;
• streamlining your site’s code;
• including strategic external links; and
• addressing user intent, also known as search intent.

On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to all the SEO techniques that take place outside your site. These can involve:

• guest posting on other sites;
• publishing content on social media sites;
• content marketing;
• creating a Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business);
• purchasing Google Ads, or any other paid search ads; and
• influencer marketing.

Both on-page and off-page SEO are part of a successful SEO strategy. So whether you’re crafting a guest post to be published on another site or using your favorite keyword tool to optimize one of your own site’s pages, you’ll still be working to boost your rankings and increase your brand’s online visibility.

Want to Master SEO? Learn How It Works

Just as with any other craft, you can get started with SEO without fully grasping the driving forces behind it. After all, any SEO beginner can sprinkle strategically chosen keywords throughout their site without knowing the ins and outs of Google’s latest algorithm update.

But if you want to push your SEO strategy to the next level, it’s worth taking the time to learn exactly how SEO works, and why some methods are effective while others aren’t. You won’t just be boosting your knowledge and attracting more potential customers by doing so — in the end, your rankings will surely benefit too.

Image credits

Google Search Central Blog / November 2020

If you’re familiar with the basics of link building, then you already know that not all links are created equal. There are good links and there are bad links, and sites with lots of the latter will undoubtedly perform worse in the SERPs.

But what are bad links exactly, and how can you recognize them at first glance? That’s what we’re here to explain. Up ahead, you’ll discover all the answers you’re looking for, plus 15 types of bad links you need to steer clear of and why.

• What Are Bad Links?
• How Do I Find Bad Links?
• How Do I Stop Bad Links?
• 15 Bad Links to Avoid At All Costs
• 1. Comment Spam
• 2. Discussion Forum Spam
• 3. Paid Links That Pass PageRank
• 4. Excessive Link Exchanges
• 5. Excessive Guest Post Links
• 6. Sitewide Links
• 7. Links Included in Contracts
• 8. Press Release Links
• 9. Links Embedded in Widgets
• 10. Links from Private Blog Networks
• 11. Links from Low-Quality Directories
• 12. Links Created with Automated Programs
• 13. Social Bookmarking Links
• 14. Excessive Guestbook Links
• 15. Links from Unrelated Sites
• Bonus: Broken Links

What Are Bad Links?

Put simply, bad links are low-quality backlinks that lower Google’s opinion of your site. Such links can be described as spammy, toxic and unnatural, and the effect is the same whether you created them or not (and no, affiliate links don’t count).

This can be chalked up to Google’s algorithms and their heavy emphasis on link quality. The search engine giant has been leading the way for backlink analysis since its 1990s debut—prior to that point, many search engines generated results based on keywords alone.

This meant that if a page contained the same keyword repeated hundreds of times, it was liable to rank higher than a page containing truly relevant content about the same topic. But Google’s founders thought there must be a better way, so they developed a search engine that evaluates links and anchor text as well as keywords.

Crucially, it views backlinks as votes of confidence. In other words, the more links a website has pointing back to it, the more trustworthy and respectable it must be. But where there’s a ranking system there are people who will try to exploit it, so Google uses advanced algorithms to determine when a link is good (i.e., when it constitutes a genuine vote of confidence) and when a link is bad (i.e, when it was created in an attempt to game the system).

How Do I Find Bad Links?

Given the sheer size of the web, the challenge of finding all the suspicious links leading to your site is a formidable one.

Fortunately, there are a host of both free and paid tools available that can help you turn that monumental task into a simple one.

If you’ve got the resources to pay for a top-tier tool, Semrush’s Backlink Analytics is undoubtedly one of the best. As of May 2021 it has 36 billion backlinks, making it the most extensive of all available databases.

Simply enter the domain of your choice and you’ll be presented with a wealth of detailed information about its backlink profile, including an extensive list of links:

In the upper right-hand corner of the report you’ll see the overall toxicity score; This metric will indicate how many bad backlinks are in your site’s profile.

Looking for a free tool instead? Moz Link Explorer, Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker and Majestic’s Link Graph are fantastic and effective options, although none of those tools are backed by a database quite as comprehensive as Semrush’s:

And if you have Google Search Console set up, you can always use its links report feature to see who’s linking to you (and get lots of valuable information about your own internal links, too. Similarly, Google Analytics can reveal where your traffic is coming from via its Acquisition reports.

Regardless of which tool you choose to use, you’ll have made a significant step toward identifying (and ultimately removing) bad incoming links that are tarnishing your site’s reputation.

How Do I Stop Bad Links?

If you’re lucky, your site won’t have any toxic links pointing in its direction. But if your backlink analysis does reveal some bad backlinks, the next step is to get rid of them.

Note that Google Search Console says that it can already determine which links to trust without outside input but you’re still free to stop bad links yourself for peace of mind.

You can do so in one of two ways:

• Request removal: If you discover that your site has backlinks on low-quality directories or a similar location, you can simply reach out to the site’s webmaster and request that all links to your site be removed (or at least be changed to nofollow links).
• Disavow: If another site’s webmaster won’t remove the spammy links in question, or if there are simply too many toxic links to request removal for each one, you can instead add the links to a disavow list yourself. Google Search Console provides a straightforward way to do this, as does Bing.

15 Bad Links to Avoid At All Costs

You’ve done your due diligence by learning what bad links are, how you can find them and how they can be stopped. Now you can take your knowledge to the next level by learning about 15 specific types of links you must always avoid.

1. Comment Spam

It’s not unusual for people to link to their or someone else’s website within comments on blog posts and articles, and it’s entirely possible to do so in a natural and non-spammy way.

But when comments sections across multiple websites are filled with keyword-stuffed links leading to a site, search engines start to take notice.

For example, a non-spammy comment on an article about page speed optimization might look something like this:

Conversely, a spammy comment on the same article might look something like this:

And even if a blog comment link doesn’t look spammy on its own, it may raise some red flags if it’s repeated over and over again in an identical way.

The lesson: Only link to your site in comments sections when it makes contextual sense to do so, don’t repeat the same comments across multiple sites and never keyword-stuff your anchor text.

2. Discussion Forum Spam

Unnatural links are also known to appear in comments made on discussion forums. For example, users may add keyword-stuffed links to their signature.

These types of bad links are nearly identical to their comments section counterparts, and can sprout up on any type of discussion board, whether it’s on a major social network or a niche website.

The lesson: If you’re active on industry discussion forums, keep keyword-optimized links out of your signature and forum posts.

3. Paid Links That Pass PageRank

To be clear, it’s perfectly fine to purchase or sell pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements that contain links which don’t pass PageRank to the buyer of the ad.

But if you buy or sell inbound or outbound links that do pass PageRank then you could be subject to a penalty.

The lesson: Don’t buy or sell links that pass PageRank, and always use a qualifying attribute (e.g. rel=”sponsored”) to let Google know when a link is paid for rather than organic.

4. Excessive Link Exchanges

Webmasters are no stranger to the concept of “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Practically since the dawn of the search engine, they’ve found ways to help each other achieve higher search engine rankings.

This can take place in the form of link exchanges, i.e. agreements between webmasters to link to each other’s sites in an effort to boost organic traffic.

This practice isn’t bad on its own, but when performed in excess it can be viewed as a link scheme.

The lesson: Be careful to not overdo it when exchanging links with other websites, even if they’re quality sites.

5. Excessive Guest Post Links

Guest posting can be a great way to get your name out there and expand your brand’s reach, but it’s not the best idea if search performance is what you’re after.

That’s because Google views excessive guest post links as being manipulative toward its algorithms, specifically when they contain keyword-rich anchor text.

The lesson: Don’t include links with keyword-rich anchor text in any guest posts published on external sites.

6. Sitewide Links

Some unscrupulous site owners might think they can fool Google’s algorithms by embedding links in headers or footers that appear on every page, but the search engine’s algorithms are smarter than that.

These types of links are often referred to as sitewide links, since they can be found on every page of a site.

If such practices are discovered within the headers or footers of a site, Google is liable to penalize it and the site it’s linking to.

The lesson: Don’t embed sitewide links to your site in the headers or footers of other sites.

7. Links Included in Contracts

Google values authentic links above all others, so it’s no surprise that it doesn’t approve of contractually obligated links.

For instance, a site could add the inclusion of an outbound link to its terms of service and not allow the other party to qualify the link as they please.

The lesson: Never try to forcibly grow sites’ backlink profiles by including mandatory links in contractual agreements and not permitting them to be qualified.

8. Press Release Links

For many companies, press releases are a crucial part of their marketing strategy. Google knows this, so there’s nothing inherently wrong with publishing them.

But when press releases start including links that pass PageRank, Google doesn’t listen. As the company’s own John Mueller said in a 2018 office-hours stream:

As with all types of bad links, you typically don’t need to worry if you have a few links leading to your site from press releases. But if you have press releases widely distributed across many sites and each one is littered with keyword-optimized links, you should quickly remove those links before your site’s search performance suffers because of them.

The lesson: Don’t publish press releases with links that pass PageRank, especially at scale. Instead, just use nofollow links.

9. Links Embedded in Widgets

Much like sitewide links embedded in headers or footers, links embedded in widgets don’t stand a chance of fooling Google’s algorithms.

For instance, a spam site might try to gain lots of new backlinks by hiding links to itself within a helpful widget designed for other sites to use (such as a visitor counter or carousel). However, Google will at best ignore those links and at worst take manual actions against the site responsible.

The lesson: If you create widgets for other sites to use, let their quality speak for themselves and resist the urge to include inbound links.

10. Links from Private Blog Networks

If you’re not sure what a private blog network (PBN) is, just imagine a scaled up reciprocal link exchange. In other words, a PBN (also referred to as a link farm or link network) is a group of websites that includes mass amounts of outgoing links to each other.

As Semrush explains, PBNs often utilize expired domains with the goal of capitalizing on their already established authority. Disreputable SEOs who engage in PBNs will also attempt to hide their actions by:

• switching hosting providers;
• using different registrars; and
• using different domain extensions.

Such tactics never work for long, though, and can only end in penalization and plummeting rankings.

The lesson: Stay far, far away from PBNs (and avoid links from sites that belong to them) if you want to keep your reputation and rankings intact.

11. Links from Low-Quality Directories

Just as phone book listings once helped people find local plumbers or restaurants, online directories now allow users to discover businesses and sites of every kind. But ever since their inception, such directories have been plagued by spammers attempting to get an unfair advantage in the SERPs by adding their sites to as many as possible.

Directories which are primarily filled with links from such spammers are viewed as being low-quality, as are the sites they link to. So, it makes sense that Google doesn’t exactly favor sites whose link profile is full of spam links from low-quality directories.

The lesson: Don’t seek out link spam from low-quality directories, and instead stick to reputable ones like Yelp and Google Business Profile.

12. Links Created with Automatic Programs

Automation is fantastic for lots of SEO-related things, from analyzing metrics to diagnosing a site’s performance issues. But one thing it isn’t good for is generating high-quality backlinks.

These links can be placed in comments sections, forums, low-quality directories or other locations, and none of them will do your rankings any good.

So although many link-generating programs exist, Google is well aware of them and qualifies any external links created using such programs as link schemes.

The lesson: Avoid using automatic programs to generate backlinks to your site—Google will be quick to catch on.

13. Social Bookmarking Links

As Sprout Social puts it, social bookmarking is “the process of tagging a website page with a browser-based tool so that you can easily visit it again later.” As the web has grown, massively popular communities (think Reddit and Pinterest) have been created around this practice.

But when sites go overboard with posting their own links on social bookmarking sites (especially low-quality ones), they can actually harm rankings rather than help them.

This doesn’t mean you should avoid social bookmarking sites altogether—instead, it means you should brush up on your Pinterest SEO skills instead of creating hundreds of low-quality Pins linking to your site.

The lesson: Ensure your site’s presence on social bookmarking sites is genuine and centered around engagement, not spamming hundreds of links.

14. Excessive Guestbook Links

You might remember guestbooks as a relic of the early days of the internet, but they still exist in one form or another. For example, a site’s homepage might have its own comments section, or it might include a way for visitors to leave public feedback.

Whatever the case, Google knows that when a website has lots of spammy backlinks coming from such guestbooks they’re typically not high-quality links or worth counting toward its rankings.

The lesson: Only use guestbooks as they’re intended, and certainly don’t use them as a place to spam links.

15. Links from Unrelated Sites

If you know the basics of how Google’s algorithms work, then you also know that relevancy is a big deal. That applies to both paid and organic traffic, too.

Google doesn’t just evaluate relevance when matching search results to user queries, though—it also takes relevance into account when determining how backlinks will affect a site’s rankings.

For example, if a site about legal services gets many of its backlinks from sites selling off-brand electronics, Google will be quick to realize that those links likely aren’t legitimate votes of confidence.

The lesson: Don’t seek out backlinks from unrelated sites.

Bonus: Broken Links

While broken links might not fall under the category of spammy, they certainly qualify as being bad.

In short, a broken link is one which leads to a moved, non-functional or deleted page. In some cases, that means the user is presented with nothing more than a blank webpage. Or if you’ve taken the time to create a custom 404 page, visitors will see that instead.

But whether broken links lead readers to an empty page or a well-designed one, the truth is that they’re still broken, and they still have an inherently negative effect on the user experience. So if you’re committed to avoiding bad backlinks, then you should also be committed to eliminating broken links too.

Luckily, finding bad links is no big deal. With free tools like Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker, all you need to do is enter your URL and click “check broken links.”

Alternatively, you can use Google Analytics to find your site’s broken links — the process is a bit more involved, but it can also provide you with more details and context if you need them.

So if you truly want to rid your site of bad links, be sure to nix its broken links too.

In with the Good, Out with the Bad (Links)

Every SEO professional wants to master the art of advanced link building for better search engine rankings and more visitors, but low-quality links from low-quality sources aren’t the way to do it.

To truly refine your search engine optimization strategy, you’ll benefit from learning what bad links are and how to eliminate them, as well as what natural links are and how to earn them from relevant sites. Trust us, your rankings and domain authority will thank you in the end.

Image credits

Screenshots by author / July 2021
Semrush / May 2021

Unfortunately for SEO practitioners everywhere, learning how to perform effective keyword research is not a one-and-done ordeal. If you know how to do keyword research for a web page, for instance, that doesn’t mean you know how to do so for a YouTube video. After all, YouTube is a search engine in and of itself, and its unwavering focus on video content makes it a different beast entirely.

It’s not all bad news, though—with just three simple steps, you can identify the keywords that YouTube viewers are really searching for, drive more traffic to your channel, and earn more subscribers.

• 1. Choose the Right Tool
• 2. Analyze Your Competitors
• 3. Implement Keywords Like a Pro

1. Choose the Right Tool

If you’ve taken a peek at our guide to the best free keyword research tools, then you already know there’s a plethora of useful SEO tools to choose from. But when it comes to doing YouTube keyword research, you need to make sure that you’re using a keyword tool designed specifically for the video platform.

These are some of the top free tools for YouTube keyword research.

Ahrefs’ YouTube Keyword Tool

Ahrefs has some of the best free search engine optimization tools available, and their YouTube Keyword Tool is no exception. Just enter the keyword of your choice in the search bar and you’ll receive a list of 100 phrase match keyword ideas, all organized from the highest search volume to the lowest:

If you’re not located in the U.S., you’ll also be glad to know that this keyword tool can analyze YouTube search data for almost any country, region, or commonwealth in the world.

TubeRanker

No-nonsense and easy to use, TubeRanker is a simple but powerful keyword tool. Just enter your chosen keyword and watch the top and most relevant keywords appear.

And since the results TubeRanker generates aren’t limited to those that contain your entered keyword, you might just come across some entirely new ideas:

For added convenience, you can also print, copy, or export the tool’s results in the format of your choice.

TubeBuddy

If you’re looking for a YouTube keyword research tool that you can access anytime, anywhere, the browser extension TubeBuddy might be right for you.

After installing it, you can use its Keyword Explorer feature to see useful YouTube-specific information about any keyword of your choice:

For added ease, you can also view keyword data about any YouTube video directly from the YouTube search results page. This feature makes it a breeze to see which search queries your target keywords rank for.

With such a fantastic selection of powerful tools to choose from, you really can’t go wrong—what’s most important is that you pick the one that works best for you and your workflow.

2. Analyze Your Competitors

Now that you’ve got a tool in your arsenal to assist you in performing keyword research as effectively and efficiently as possible, it’s time to ensure that your YouTube videos have a competitive edge by analyzing your competitors’ keywords.

Doing so is helpful for a multitude of reasons, including:

• giving you an inside look at current and emerging YouTube SEO trends;
• providing inspiration for your own keyword strategy; and
• helping to identify the most effective (and ineffective) keywords in your vertical.

So how can you start digging into your competitors’ YouTube video keywords? First, you’ll need to identify who your competitors actually are. This can be accomplished with paid and full-featured tools like Semrush, or with free and more lightweight tools like Similarweb. And since YouTube is in many ways its own ecosystem of content, also remember to use its built-in search engine to make search queries for your channel’s primary video topic and find other content creators that rank for it.

Once you have a list of competitors’ channels, you can start zeroing in on their videos’ keywords. TubeBuddy is a fantastic tool for this, as it allows you to access a video’s keywords from multiple places.

Or if you want to do your research manually, simply enter any YouTube video URL in your web browser (not on a mobile device), view the page’s source code, open the finder tool (using Ctrl+F on PC or Command+F on Mac), and type the word keywords in the search box. You’ll immediately be taken to the portion of the video’s HTML code which contains its keywords.

Take for example the keywords from one of Google’s videos about how Search works:

There, you’ll be able to see exactly which keywords the video creators in question chose to add — in the example above, they include video, sharing, and camera phone (not the ones we would have gone with, but hey, when you’re Google you can use any keywords you like).

When you’re reviewing your competitors’ keywords, be sure to make a note of those that are relevant to the type of content you’re creating. Then when you upload your next video, you can use those same keywords to capture more traffic.

3. Implement Keywords Like a Pro

After performing YouTube keyword research and finding new, relevant and popular keywords for your videos, it’s finally time to start implementing them yourself. One way to do so is by adding tags to your channel’s videos.

Begin by logging into YouTube Studio.

If you’re uploading a new video, proceed by:

1. Clicking create and then upload videos in the upper right corner.
2. Selecting the video file you want to upload.
3. Clicking more options and adding your desired tags during the upload process.

If you’re adding tags to an already-uploaded video, proceed by:

1. Clicking the content section in the left-hand menu.
2. Selecting the video you want to add tags to.
3. Adding your tags.

You can also add tags to existing videos from YouTube’s mobile app by editing your video settings.

But believe it or not, adding tags isn’t necessarily the best way to implement keywords into your YouTube videos. If you really want to get your videos discovered by your target audience, you need to incorporate your most important and relevant keyword into the video descriptions, titles and even thumbnails.

For instance, if your video’s primary keyword is DIY, then don’t title it how to make Christmas decorations. Instead, use a title like how to make DIY Christmas decorations. In that way, you’ll be able to incorporate your most important target keywords while still sounding natural.

Don’t forget about long-tail keywords, either; those are perfect for sprinkling throughout your videos’ descriptions.

And to evaluate whether your keyword strategy is working, remember to look at your channel’s performance through YouTube Analytics on a regular basis. Performing an SEO Audit can also give you an eagle eye’s view into your keyword strategy.

At the end of the day, performing effective YouTube SEO and keyword research isn’t about using fancy techniques or filling out endless spreadsheets. Rather, it’s about using your time wisely to find the most relevant keywords to your channel and implementing them only where it makes sense.

And if you choose your keywords carefully and incorporate them with discretion, more video views are sure to follow.

Image credits

Screenshots by author / February 2022
TubeBuddy / Accessed February 2022

If you want to capture the attention of people who are interested in the products and services you have to offer, then you need to find out what keywords they’re searching for and add them to your content.

But to do that you’ll need to conduct keyword research, and no one wants to spend money analyzing keywords that won’t drive results. Luckily, you don’t have to. With the eighteen free keyword research tools discussed here, you can get valuable keyword insights without spending a dime.

Free Keyword Research Tools for 2022

1. WordStream Free Keyword Tool
2. Moz’s Keyword Explorer
3. Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator
4. SEO Scout’s Scout Suggest
5. Keyword Planner
6. Google Trends
7. AnswerThePublic
8. Wordtracker
9. Google Keyword Planner
10. Keyword Surfer
11. Keyworddit
12. QuestionDB
13. Ubersuggest
14. TubeBuddy
15. Hashtagify
16. Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
17. Soovle
18. AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator

1. WordStream Free Keyword Research Tool

First founded in 2007 by Larry Kim (who is now the CEO of MobileMonkey), WordStream is a Boston-based online advertising company that focuses on paid search and social media.

But WordStream doesn’t just offer paid software and consulting services—it also provides a robust suite of free tools designed to help users evaluate their digital marketing performance. One of those is their Free Keyword Tool which, as its name suggests, is a no-cost keyword tool.

The tool works for both Google and Bing (a handy bonus if you’re working on improving your Bing SEO), and features options to see keyword suggestions based on a specific URL, industry or location:

Type in the keyword of your choice (we chose SEO), set your desired parameters and click the find my keywords button to instantly see a list of 25 suggested keywords. You’ll also be shown the search volume, cost per click (CPC) and competition for each keyword on both Google and Bing:

Want to see more than 25 keywords? Don’t worry, you won’t have to pay—just click the orange email all my keywords button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Once you enter and submit your email address, you’ll receive a link to download an Excel file of all the tool’s suggested keywords.

Ours contained 501 keywords, arrived almost immediately and required no additional sign-up steps:

2. Moz’s Keyword Explorer – Both Paid and Free Keyword Research Tool

Moz was founded as SEOmoz in 2004 by long-time search engine gurus Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig. Today, Moz is an SEO powerhouse with a wealth of both paid and free software offerings.

For those of us looking to conduct some truly in-depth keyword research without breaking the bank, Keyword Explorer is undoubtedly the best keyword tool for the job. (You’ll get to make 10 queries per month with the free version, so be sure to choose them wisely.)

Keyword Explorer allows users to search for a keyword, root domain, subdomain or exact page, as well as to filter results by location:

Once you’ve entered your chosen keyword and picked a location, click analyze to see a variety of helpful metrics including monthly search volume, difficulty, organic click-through rate (CTR) and more:

To see an extensive list of keywords, click see all suggestions at the bottom of the Keyword Suggestions box. On the subsequent page, you’ll be able to customize your results using several filters:

Or if you want to see which pages are currently ranking for your chosen keyword, instead click see full analysis at the bottom of the SERP Analysis box. This will display a detailed breakdown of the first page of Google’s results:

3. Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator – Comprehensive Free Keyword Research Tool

Dmitry Gerasimenko founded Ahrefs in 2011, but his work on document search engines began much earlier. Perhaps that explains why Ahrefs’ index is so impressively exhaustive—it updates its catalog of backlinks every 15 minutes and processes up to eight billion pages per day.

But we’re not here to talk about Ahrefs’ backlink index. Instead, we’re here to discuss one of its many free SEO tools, specifically a keyword tool called Keyword Generator.

To use it, select the platform you’d like to view keywords for (Google, Bing, YouTube or Amazon), enter your keyword and choose your preferred region:

Hit the find keywords button and you’ll promptly see a long list of keywords. This list will include metrics such as each keyword’s difficulty and volume, as well as the last time they were updated in Ahrefs’ index:

You can also click the questions tab to see 50 questions people are asking about your chosen keyword:

If you’d like to see more than 100 keyword suggestions (or 50 questions), you’ll need to pay a small fee for a seven-day trial.

4. SEO Scout’s Scout Suggest Free Keyword Research Tool

SEO Scout is a relatively young UK-based SaaS company that was founded in 2019 by Jonny Platt. Its products include tools for researching keywords, topics and entities, split testing page copy, tracking Google rankings, identifying missing keyword opportunities and addressing keyword cannibalization issues.

The company also offers a generous selection of free tools such as Scout Suggest. This keyword tool allows you to customize results by language and location, and also gives you the ability to choose whether you want to see phrases, questions, research and more:

After entering your preferred keyword or phrase, click start to see the tool’s suggestions (we received more than 250 recommendations for the keyword phrase schema markup):

Notice that at the top of your results, you’re able to organize the tool’s suggestions by categories, groups, or a text list. Under the categories tab, you’re also able to sort by phrases, questions, comparisons, research and alphabetical order:

5. Keyword Planner Free Keyword Research Tool

Not to be confused with Google’s product of the same name (more on that below), Keyword Planner is a keyword tool that uses autocomplete application programming interfaces (APIs) to generate and provide data about long-tail keywords.

So how does Keyword Planner compare to Google’s keyword tool? According to Keyword Planner themselves, it has two benefits which Google lacks. Specifically, it allows you to:

• see different keywords than those generated by Google; and
• use the tool without creating an account.

To use Keyword Planner, simply choose your region, enter up to five keywords separated by commas and click the magnifying glass button. You can also select your preferred search level—the higher the level, the more keywords will be generated and the longer the search will take:

When we used a level one search to research three separate keywords, Keyword Planner returned a whopping 2,413 suggestions—that’s over 240 pages. The only catch is that you’ll need to sign up for a Keywords Everywhere API key if you also want to see each keyword’s monthly volume, Google Ads CPC, Google Ads competition and overall trend:

6. Google Trends Free Keyword Research Tool

The search giant might not have designed Google Trends to be a keyword research tool, but for many SEO professionals that’s exactly what it is.

Unlike the keyword research tools we’ve discussed so far, Google Trends doesn’t actually suggest keywords for you to target. Instead, it reveals Google users’ previous and current interest in your chosen search term or topic.

For instance, here we can see that interest in the Google algorithm is the highest it’s been in the last 12 months:

Scroll down and you’ll also see interest by subregion (in this case, U.S. states), as well as a small selection of related topics and queries:

So while Google Trends won’t provide you with an exhaustive potential keyword list, it will give you valuable insights about a keyword or topic you already know you want to target.

7. AnswerThePublic – A Question Based Keyword Tool

One of the best ways to determine the relevant keywords you should be focusing on is to examine the types of questions that search engine users are asking. AnswerThePublic, a tool developed by the team behind CoverageBook, will let you do just that for free.

There’s no need to sign up for an email list or create an account—simply enter a topic, brand or product, choose your region and language and click search:

You’ll then be greeted with a clear visualization of the questions people are asking about your search term:

Scroll down and you’ll see more visualizations of relevant prepositions, comparisons, alphabeticals and related queries.

If visual representations aren’t your thing, just click the data tab at the top of any graph to see its contents as a group of lists instead:

8. Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool

Founded in the late 1990s by brothers Mike and Andy Mindel, the London-based company Wordtracker has been around for as long as Google.

Although Wordtracker offers many paid SEO-related products, it may be best known for its free keyword tool.

To start using it, enter a seed keyword or phrase and click start:

On your results page you’ll see a list of keywords (50, to be exact) and their corresponding data, as well as the option to choose your preferred search engine and change your region:

After using up your limited number of free searches (as you can see in the screenshot above, we have 11 remaining), you’ll be able to unlock unlimited searches by signing up for a seven-day free trial. After that, the most basic Wordtracker membership plan will cost $27 per month.

While this is pushing the limits of the definition of a free keyword research tool, we think it’s worth including. That’s because Wordtracker boasts a number of features and capabilities that Google’s Keyword Planner doesn’t, such as:

• actual (i.e. not grouped) keywords;
• actual (i.e. not banded) results;
• competitor metrics;
• search engine results page (SERP) comparisons;
• live chat customer service;
• related and lateral search;
• Amazon and YouTube keywords; and
• negative keyword search.

So if you’re looking for a keyword tool that has all those features, Wordtracker’s free version is sure to please in the short-term and its paid version may also be an ideal long-term solution too.

9. Google Keyword Planner Free Keyword Research Tool

We would be remiss if we didn’t include the legendary Google Keyword Planner.

As a tool provided by the search giant itself, it’s a given that the insights you glean from Google Keyword Planner will be accurate and reliable. There is one major caveat, though: To start using Keyword Planner, you’ll need to create a Google Ads account. And to do that, you’ll need to provide an email address and business website.

Once you’ve set up a Google Ads account, you’ll be ready to go.

Like many of the other tools we’ve looked at so far, Google Keyword Planner suggests new keywords and provides valuable data about each one. What makes it unique is that it will also give you bid estimates for each keyword, and can even be used to create a fully-fledged plan.

In Google’s example, we can see that a plan includes the expected number of conversions, overall cost, CPC, conversion rate and more:

You might have to jump through a few hoops to use it, but Google Keyword Planner is an undeniably powerful tool for SEO practitioners who are running or planning on running a Google Ads campaign.

10. Keyword Surfer Free Keyword Research Tool

If you’re looking for a way to perform keyword research without even having to navigate to a new page, look no further than Keyword Surfer. This free browser extension comes courtesy of Surfer SEO, one of our favorite on-page optimization tools.

Once you add Keyword Surfer to Chrome (it’s unfortunately not compatible with any other browser as of July 2022), all you need to do is perform a Google search to see it in action:

The tool will instantly show you a selection of keyword ideas (along with their similarity percentage and overall volume) and correlation charts from top pages, so you can see exactly what the competition is like.

You can even use the extension’s Content Editor to get customized content guidelines designed to get you the most traffic possible from your chosen keyword.

Residing outside the United States? No problem—Keyword Surfer includes datasets from 70 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania so you’ll always see the SEO data that’s most relevant to you and your location.

11. Keyworddit – A Reddit Based Free Keyword Research Tool

If you’ve ever tried creating content for Reddit, then you already know what a unique platform it is. Simply put, the SEO tactics that work like a charm on other sites may very well be completely ineffective on Reddit.
That’s why tools like Keyworddit are so valuable: since they’re designed specifically for Reddit, you never have to wonder if the results it generates will benefit your Reddit SEO strategy.

To use it, simply enter the name of your target subreddit in the search bar and click get keywords:

The tool will then generate an extensive list of keywords from the subreddit, all organized from highest search volume to lowest. In the marketing subreddit, for example, the top keywords include entry level jobs, social media marketing, and best business schools:

To see the specific instances of Reddit users using a particular keyword, just click context and you’ll be taken to a Google results page showing just that. For instance, these are the results for the keyword entry level jobs:

With Keyworddit’s help, you can take the guesswork out of your content creation process and start using the keywords that Reddit users actually care about.

12. QuestionDB – Another Question Based Free Keyword Research Tool

Much like AnswerThePublic, QuestionDB goes beyond bare-bones keyword research by focusing on questions specifically. So if you want to see more results than AnswerThePublic can offer, QuestionDB will be right up your alley.

To use it, enter the broad keyword of your choice. For instance, you could enter recipes, artificial intelligence, or electric cars. Next, you’ll be presented with 50 examples of questions that real people are asking regarding your chosen topic (we went with recipes):

How does it work? As QuestionDB explains, “millions of questions have been asked on various websites over time.” When you search for a topic, the tool “finds these ideas in real-time and returns them to you in a convenient format.”

In other words, the questions it finds aren’t necessarily the most frequently asked ones, but they are the ones that people are asking right now.

13. Ubersuggest Free Keyword Research Tool

If you’re in the world of SEO, then you’ve probably already heard of Neil Patel. It’s thanks to him that we have Ubersuggest, a multifaceted tool that provides rankings comparisons, content ideas, backlink data, and more.

But for our purposes, we’re most interested in its ability to generate a wealth of valuable keyword-related information. To use it, simply enter your site’s URL (free users get three searches per day) and click search. Then open the keywords dropdown menu and you’ll be able to choose from a variety of options, including:

• keyword overview;
• keyword ideas;
• keywords by trafic;
• similar websites; and
• content ideas.

Each of those can be used to uncover different insights—for example, using the similar websites option we can view the top keywords driving traffic to any URL:

And if you want Ubersuggest to follow along wherever your browser takes you, you can also download the 100 percent free Chrome extension.

14. TubeBuddy – A YouTube-Based Free Keyword Research Tool

Because it revolves entirely around video content, YouTube SEO is very different from any other type of SEO. Thus, the tools you can use to perform in-depth keyword research are different as well.

The browser extension TubeBuddy is one such tool, and while it costs nothing, it might just be able to give your YouTube channel the competitive edge it needs.

To get insights about specific keywords, just type one in the search bar and you’ll see a great deal of data presented in an easy-to-understand format. That data includes your channel’s overall score for the given keyword, interest in the keyword over time, related searches, and more:

You can also reverse engineer an existing YouTube video. To do so, simply click on any of the video’s tags from within the TubeBuddy extension, or right on YouTube’s search results page.

15. Hashtagify – A Social Media Free Keyword Research Tool

If you’re looking to give your Twitter marketing strategy a boost, Hashtagify can help.

To start, all you need to do is type the Twitter hashtag of your choice and hit enter. Once you do, scroll down to see an impressive array of current data including current popularity, related hashtags, top accounts, popularity over time, and more. For this example, we chose #superbowl (who knew Justin Bieber was such a prolific football tweeter?):

To view more in-depth information, get custom-tailored suggestions, or perform research on Instagram hashtags, you’ll need to purchase a paid plan or find another tool to use instead.

But if you’re primarily interested in seeing the popularity of a given hashtag, finding out which accounts are creating the top tweets, or viewing interest by country, then Hashtagify’s free version will be more than adequate.

16. Semrush Keyword Magic Tool – Free Keyword Research Tool

Did you know that one of the all-time best keyword research tools also comes with a free version? It’s true — with the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, you can search for up to 10 keywords each month without needing to spend a dime.

After entering the keyword of your choice, Semrush will show you an extensive list of either broad match, exact match, phrase match or related keywords, depending on which option you select.

You’ll also be able to sort the tool’s results by monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, competitive density and more, so you can always find exactly the information you’re looking for.

17. Soovle – A Free Keyword Research Tool with Combined Sources

If you want to see the autofill suggestions from a variety of widely-used search engines at once, then Soovle is the best keyword research tool for you.

Enter any keyword you’d like — no account required — and the tool will simultaneously display the search queries suggested by the autofill algorithms of seven high-traffic sites. Those sites are Google, Amazon, YouTube, Bing, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, and Answers.com:

If those sites aren’t quite what you’re looking for, just click on “engines” in the top right corner to customize which search engines Soovle shows. You can choose from options like eBay, Baidu, Overstock and more to generate results that better suit your needs.

18. AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator – Another Free Keyword Research Tool

Ever wondered how many key phrases you could make out of an assortment of your target keywords? If you have, the AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator can tell you.

To use it, just enter three lists of keywords in the provided boxes, with one keyword per line. Each list can be as long or as short as you’d like. Next, click the button labeled generate permutations to see every possible permutation appear:

For added customization, you can also use the drop-down menu to choose whether you want the tool to generate broad match, phrase match or exact match results.

Free Keyword Research Tools Are Worth Their Weight in Gold

Although the tools we’ve covered might cost nothing to use, the information they can reveal has substantial value.

After all, keyword research forms the foundation of a well-informed SEO and content strategy. So if you want to better understand your audience, generate more conversions and reach the people who will be the most receptive to your message, use these free keyword research tools to pave the way.

Image credits

Screenshots by author / May 2021 – July 2022
Google / May 2019
TubeBuddy / Accessed February 2022

Ever wondered why you always end up buying five or more items from Amazon when you only intended to buy some batteries, or how IKEA manages to turn shopping for a bathroom cabinet into an all-day activity?

The answer is psychology, and its principles are used by some of the most successful retailers and websites around. Want to use psychology in your own advertising to turn indifferent visitors into paying customers? Here’s how.

Use Visual Appeal

You probably already know that visuals are important in the world of advertising and marketing, but do you know just how crucial they are?

Consider that according to various surveys and studies:

• nearly 93 percent of people put the most importance on visual factors when purchasing products;
• color boosts brand recognition by as much as 80 percent; and
• people have an easier time remembering full-color images than black and white ones.

And these statistics are only those having to do with color — throw shapes, fonts, and symbolism into the mix and you have nearly limitless marketing possibilities.

So instead of settling for imagery that looks just “okay,” invest in hiring a skilled graphic designer for your marketing and advertising campaigns. With so many designers offering their services on affordable marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork, there’s no reason not to.

Consider Emotion

With so many brands and public figures competing for people’s attention, it takes some extra effort to stand out from the crowd.

That’s why using emotion in your marketing and advertising campaigns can be so helpful: By encouraging your audience to feel something, you’re going beyond simply letting them know your brand exists.

For instance, ads can inspire action by invoking feelings such as:

• fear (“If I don’t buy this product, I won’t be protected from fraud”);
• comfort (“This product reminds me of my childhood”);
• anger (“I can’t believe they’re getting away with this, I’d better donate to make a difference”);
• happiness (“Everyone who uses this product seems so happy, maybe I should too”); and
• humor (“That brand’s ad was so much funnier than the competitor’s”).

And most importantly, for advertisers and marketing, emotional campaigns work: One analysis of 1,400 case studies found that primarily emotional ad campaigns are twice as effective as their primarily rational counterparts.

That’s not to say that you should abandon all sense of reason and start running over-emotional ads, though. Your audience will see right through it, and they’re more likely to be repelled than attracted to your brand as a result.

Rather, the lesson is to remember that emotion is a powerful tool in advertising, so you’d be wise to implement it carefully and precisely in order to get better results.

Create a Sense of Urgency

Your audience members aren’t in a rush to part with their money, but you want them to make a purchase now. The solution? Create a sense of urgency so they want to take action sooner.

To do so, you can try:

• offering discounts that end on a certain date and time;
• notifying people if an item they’ve been looking at is low in stock;
• reminding shoppers when they’ve abandoned items in the shopping cart;
• announcing when there’s a limited supply of any given product or service; and
• emphasizing the benefits your audience will enjoy by purchasing your product or service.

You might just find that by fostering a sense of urgency, you’re able to drive much better results much faster.

When In Doubt, A/B Test

Having a knowledge of human psychology is all well and good, but the fact remains that everyone is different, both in terms of individual people and larger groups.

After all, a product that appeals to middle-aged mothers probably won’t be all that attractive to teenage boys.

So to make sure that the ads and marketing campaigns you’re creating are well-suited to the preferences of your unique audience, use A/B testing to get on the right track.

A/B testing, also known as split testing or bucket testing, is a technique that measures an audience’s reaction to two different versions of the same thing. The first unchanged version is called the control, while the new version is called the variation (or challenger, depending on who you ask):

From landing pages to color schemes to layouts to images to entire ad campaigns, the number of things you can A/B test is unlimited.

And by doing so, you’ll be able to obtain concrete data about your audience’s preferences and behavior, no speculation required.

Commit to Personalization

The importance of personalization in marketing, sales and lead conversion simply cannot be overstated. Whether you’re using personalized subject lines to supercharge your email marketing campaigns or using software like HubSpot to create personalized calls-to-action (CTAs), there are plenty of ways to make personalization work for you and the site you’re optimizing.

But just how effective is personalization, anyway? Let’s take a look at some statistics to find out.

• Personalized CTAs perform 202 percent better than basic ones.
• Emails with personalized subject lines have a 26 percent higher open rate than non-personalized ones.
• Over 65 percent of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.
• A whopping 80 percent of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers personalized experiences.
• More than 90 percent of B2B marketers attribute revenue growth to personalization.

So no matter how you’re choosing to incorporate personalization into your marketing and advertising campaigns, just remember that in almost all cases, the more personalization, the better.

As long as you always respect your customers’ privacy and data sharing preferences, they’re sure to appreciate it (and make more purchases as a result).

Want to Boost Sales? Brush Up on Consumer Psychology

When we talk about using psychology to improve sales, it might sound like we’re suggesting you use magic to conjure money from thin air.

But in reality, psychology is a science, and science is all about understanding the world around us. So you don’t need to be Freud or Jung to understand that consumer psychology is far from hocus pocus — it’s simply taking the time to truly understand your audience and give them what they want. If you do, the results will surely speak for themselves.

Image sources

Optimizely / accessed July 2022

You might already be intimately familiar with Google Business Profile, the business listing platform formerly known as Google My Business. Or, you may have just created your first listing a few days ago.

Whatever the case, you may still need to make some strategic changes in order to grab users’ attention and get more customers in the door. Find out what those changes are so you can start getting more visitors to your brick and mortar business today.

• 1. Regularly Update Your Hours
• 2. Take Advantage of the Product Editor and Catalog
• 3. Get Visual
• 4. Use Google’s Insights
• 5. Post Answers to Common Questions

1. Regularly Update Your Hours

Including your business hours on Google Business Profile is helpful, but what’s even better is updating them on a regular basis.

By doing so, you’ll be able to reassure customers that the information they’re viewing is correct and they can feel free to stop by instead of taking the time to call first.

That’s because Google Business Profile actually shows users exactly how long it’s been since you updated or verified your business hours:

So when customers look up your business to see if it’s open and notice that your hours were updated recently (ideally within the last few weeks), they’ll be confident they’re viewing accurate information and can plan their trip to your location accordingly.

2. Take Advantage of the Product Editor and Catalog

There are two Google Business Profile features that can help convince viewers to become your paying customers, and they’re called the Product Editor and Product Catalog.

With their help, you can easily showcase your products to search engine users, complete with photos and prices.

Whether you’re optimizing the site of a diner or a hardware store, taking advantage of those features can make a big difference:

Upon clicking each product, users can even see a detailed description to entice them even more:

If you’re not using the Product Editor and Catalog to put your site’s offerings front and center, then you’re missing out on a significant selling opportunity.

3. Get Visual

Your Google Business Profile’s products section isn’t the only place where you can use appealing visuals to reel in customers.

In fact, photos are likely some of the first things Google users will see when searching for your business directly. Here, we see a store’s Google Business Profile as it’s displayed at the very top of the search results upon searching for it:

Notice that a photo (and its accompanying “see photos” button) appears even before the name of the store itself — it doesn’t get much more prominent than that.

To put that design element to work for your site, ensure that its Google Business Profile has plenty of high-quality photos. To take complete control over users’ first impressions, you can even choose which image Google will use for the listing’s cover photo.

4. Use Google’s Insights

Google Business Profile comes from the same company that gave us Google Analytics and Google Search Console, so it only makes sense that it includes robust analytics of its own.

You can use them to discover how users interacted with you, how they found your business listing and the like:

Using that information, you can determine which methods of communication users prefer most, identify the channels driving the most traffic and more.

5. Post Answers to Common Questions

One of Google Business Profile’s most unique and useful features is its ability to let users post questions and answers:

But if your Business Profile isn’t already full of user questions, you can fill it out yourself by asking common questions (from a personal Google account) and answering them (from the business’ Google account).

Google’s own example shows how business accounts can provide answers to frequently asked questions:

By doing so (even without waiting for another user to ask a question to begin with), you can provide potential customers with the information they’re after, no phone call required.

Do More Business with Google Business Profile

Whether it’s called Google Business Profile or Google My Business, Google’s business listing service is a boon to business owners everywhere.

With its unparalleled accessibility (users don’t even have to leave the SERPs!) and easy customization options, it’s a tool you can use to get more users out of their homes and into your store.

Image credits

Screenshots by author / July 2022
Google / accessed July 2022

We’ll cut to the chase: yes, page speed matters for SEO. In fact, it matters a lot. That’s because page speed isn’t just a ranking factor for Google and other major search engines — it’s also a crucial component of a great user experience.

So how can you make sure your site is lightning fast? We’ve gathered five surefire things you can do to improve your page speed.

• 1. Use PageSpeed Insights
• 2. Enable Compression
• 3. Minify Code
• 4. Employ a CDN
• 5. Use the Right Plugins

1. Use PageSpeed Insights

If you’ve never used Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool before, you’re in for a treat. And if you have, here’s a reminder of just how fantastic it is.

To use PSI, all you have to do is enter the URL of the page you want to analyze. Within seconds (or less, if you’re lucky enough to have fiber internet), Google will present you with a detailed report about the URL in question.

First up is a Core Web Vitals assessment, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS):

That’s not all, though — next is a section designed to help you diagnose performance issues, complete with an overall performance score (in eBay’s case, it’s 42):

Further down, you’ll find even more useful information. You’d be wise to pay particular attention to the section labeled “opportunities,” which outlines steps you can take to improve your page speed:

All in all, PSI is a one-stop shop for those looking to understand and improve their page speed. And with its detailed metrics and personalized recommendations, you won’t be left wondering what to do next.

2. Enable Compression

If you have large or high-resolution images and videos on your website, they’re likely affecting your page speed for the worse.

To remedy this, you don’t have to use smaller or lower-resolution versions when you don’t want to — instead, you can optimize your page speed by enabling compression.

Compression effectively reduces file sizes, ideally without affecting image or video quality to a noticeable or unacceptable degree.

Even lossy compression, a type of compression which works by throwing away portions of an image’s data, can be nearly undetectable if used sparingly:

Most image editing softwares, including Adobe Photoshop, GIMP and Affinity Photo, come with built-in compression tools. So, enabling compression may be as easy as learning how to activate it in the software you already use.

Or if you’d like to use compression on a case-by-case basis, an online tool like JPEGmini or TinyPNG will be right up your alley.

3. Minify Code

Your website’s code may not be visible to casual visitors, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there, silently sucking up valuable resources.

To make sure your code isn’t taking any more time to load than is absolutely necessary, one of the best (and easiest!) measures you can take is to minify it.

In short, code minification means removing everything extraneous. That includes:

• comments;
• unnecessary characters;
• empty space;
• bulky formatting; and
• needlessly long names.

Even to the untrained eye, it’s easy to see the difference between unaltered and minified code:

By minifying your site’s code, you can dramatically improve its page speed. And the best part of code minification? You don’t even need to know how to code in order to do it.

That’s thanks to the help of automated tools like Minify and HTML Minifier. To use them, you only need to know how to copy and paste.

4. Employ a CDN

A content delivery network, or CDN for short, can take your site’s page speed from sluggish to supercharged.

That’s because CDNs use a broad network of servers to deliver content to users via the server that’s closest to them:

So, for example, a user who’s located in Finland will load a site’s photos from a server in France, while a user located in Australia will load the same site’s photos from a server in New Zealand.

Since the two users in our example are so far apart from each other, it wouldn’t make sense for them to load files via the same server. And yet if you’re not using a CDN, that’s exactly what will happen, likely leading to much longer loading times for a measurable portion of your audience.

So if your budget allows you to, we recommend looking into a CDN for your site’s content.

5. Use the Right Plugins

If you use WordPress to host your site, then you’re probably already somewhat familiar with its vast library of plugins.

But what you might not know is that if you’re using sluggish, outdated or compromised plugins, then they may be slowing down your site considerably.

To make sure that doesn’t happen, make a habit of reviewing your installed plugins on a regular basis. Check that they’ve all been updated relatively recently and tested with the latest version of WordPress, and uninstall any that are unnecessary, outdated or otherwise unwanted.

You’d also be wise to keep your site as secure as possible by staying up-to-date on SEO news and keeping an eye out for reports about WordPress plugin vulnerabilities.

In October 2021, for instance, a vulnerability found in the plugin OptinMonster had the potential to affect one million sites. If you stay on top of such news, you might be able to save yourself a lot of trouble by simply uninstalling the plugin in question, until a security patch is released.

You might also want to consider using plugins that actively help to improve your page speed, too. Some highly-rated options include:

• W3 Total Cache;
• WP Fastest Cache;
• Smush;
• EWWW Image Optimizer;
• Hummingbird; and
• Autoptimize.

While installing every performance-boosting plugin you can find might backfire (more plugins = more server requests, after all), choosing one or two that align with your site’s needs can greatly improve your page speed.

Want More Traffic and Happier Visitors? Boost Your Page Speed

Any SEO pro worth their salt will tell you that page speed matters, and not just because Google uses it as a ranking factor. It’s also important because it directly affects the user experience, and improving it can be the difference between losing a visitor and gaining a customer.

So, if you want to not only rank better but also make your visitors happier (and who doesn’t?), use the five tips outlined here to take your page speed to the next level.

Image credits

Screenshots by author / June 2022
Bitmovin Inc., March 2020
KeyCDN, October 2018
DigitalOcean, August 2018