ISSUE 115

Topical Maps Unlocked; Featured Snippets Gone Wild; Index Backlinks; SEO ROI; Shortened Title Tags; Removing Product Carousels; and Much More!

Author

Yoyao
December 25, 2022 • Est. Learning Time: 12 minutes

Issue 2

FIRST…

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Almost the end of the year and lots to reflect on. This year has flown right by!

I'll make this nice and short since Santa and Mrs. Claus have to get the presents ready.

Have a great holiday season and end of the year!

SEO

Google's been doing a lot of testing with their Featured Snippets and PAAs. Brodie Clark covers some of the things that Google has been trying out:

  1. A second Featured Snippet lower on the page.

  2. A question to support the snippet.

  3. Additional labelling for a second featured snippet.

  4. Featured snippets as low as position #24.

Steve Paine from Sistrix has been sharing the early results that he's been seeing from sites that have been affected by the Link Spam Update by Google.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Want to learn how to create a comprehensive topical map to help guide your content plan and build topical authority?

My Topical Maps Unlocked course is now open for pre-sale!

I'm going to teach you how to create the same topical maps that I've been creating for clients the last 3 months. In this short time, I've already hit 5-figures in December alone because people understand how important a good topical map is.

There are currently 40 lessons scheduled that'll take you from start to finish. I'm also going to make it as simple as possible.

One of the things I'm most excited about will be taking a niche that's been suggested by the early bird students and creating a topical map. I'm not going to cherry-pick some easy niche/topic to create a topical map for that isn't practical. As a student, I want examples to be practical and helpful when I apply it to my own projects.

At the end of each module is a "Putting It All Together" where I go through all the steps. This will help students see how to apply all the lessons in a niche they helped choose.

The pre-sale price is $149 and is more than 50% what the final price will be. I'm aiming to launch the course on January 23, 2023.

The pre-sale is only valid until Dec. 31, 2022 at 11:59pm Eastern Standard Time. Next opportunity to buy the course is when it launches!

Danny Richman has a free tool that uses GPT-3 to identify and respond to press requests from journalists looking for sources for a story.

I've been wanting a way to do this myself for quite some time and haven't had time to look into it. So this is perfect and saves me a lot of time from trial and error.

Rank Math has added a Table of Contents Block function with their plugin. No more need for a separate TOC plugin. One less plugin that can cause slowness on your site.

CONTENT

Looking for author byline examples because you're stuck trying to write your own? Maia Ellis shares:

  • 9 Great Examples of Author Bylines

  • How to Write Your Own Author Byline

  • How to Include Authorship Signals in Structured Data

  • Make the Most Of Your Author Bio

LINK BUILDING

FATJOE shares 6 ways to help you index pages that contain backlinks to your site. If those pages aren't indexed, then you don't get the link juice that they should be providing to help you rank better.

  1. Add rich media to the article

  2. Add schema markup to the article

  3. Add a Self-Referencing Canonical

  4. Ensure the Content is High-Quality

  5. Link to other high authority sources within the article

  6. Share the article on social media or forums

EDUCATION

As we all start moving to other revenue channels and not relying just on display ads and affiliate sales, selling digital products has become a popular option to increase earnings.

Semrush shares a good way to track and measure the ROI of your SEO efforts.

This is a great analysis on the fitness tracker niche. Even if you're not interested in fitness trackers, it's more about the analysis and process that's great here.

Charlie Williams takes a look and the informational and commercial content to break down sites and content. Here are some of the key takeaways:

  • Even when Google identifies some keywords as having a more explicit ‘do‘ intent – someone looking to buy right now – they show a mixture of ecommerce stores and articles from trusted sources, most of which have affiliate links

  • Having a smart department and category structure can be a great strategy for ecommerce SEO. It allows you to take advantage of building a closely-related set of pages and to interlink up and down your shopping structure, taking advantage of the most powerful pages in your store.

  • ‘Best of‘ round-up reviews are a popular and powerful article format. However, as many authoritative sites are doing them well, they can be a very competitive angle to rank for

  • Following multiple rounds of core updates and product review updates from Google, there are now well-established ‘must-haves’ to rank for competitive search queries. A look at the ranking articles for many best queries will find patterns of these standards, all based on meeting E-A-T requirements

Moz has these great Whiteboard Friday episodes, ranging in topics from link building to content engines. In case you missed them, they recap their top 10 episodes from the year:

  1. Estimating Search Opportunity with Robin Lord

  2. Advanced On-Page SEO Optimizations with Chris Long

  3. Moneyball is the Future of SEO with Will Critchlow

  4. Top 4 Things to Know About GA4 with Dana DiTomaso

  5. A Content Engine that Drives Revenue with Ross Simmonds

  6. How to Find Your Real SEO Competitors with Lidia Infante

  7. How to Measure Content Engagement with Dana DiTomaso

  8. Metrics for Better Keyword Research with Tom Capper

  9. Visual Search Optimization with Crystal Carter

  10. The Authoritative Content Funnel with Amanda Milligan

CASE STUDY

How do you think removing the call-to-action/value proposition from the title tags on product pages will impact organic traffic?

66.7% of SplitSignal's Twitter poll said that it would decrease. Overwhelming negative. Here's an example of the change:

  • FROM: Patagonia Nano Puff Jacket - Men's | Price Match + 3-Year Warranty

  • TO: Patagonia Nano Puff Jacket - Men's | REI Co-op

What do you think happened?

The answer is at the end of the newsletter!

What do you think the impact on organic traffic is when a product carousel is removed from store pages?

The Twitter poll results were split with 27.8% saying there'd be a Positive result, 33.3% said Negative, and 38.9% who said the results would be inconclusive.

Answer in the end of the newsletter!

A data-led SEO analysis of the US garden supply industry from SALT.agency. Explore the most impactful factors influencing the market today and frame your market position.

This is a great look into how to assess the general market in an area of your niche/industry. Is the decline or increase in traffic and rankings a sign of something that's individual to your site or the market as a whole?

LIKE NICHE SURFER?

ISSUE 115

Have questions about building niche sites? Find me and others in the Niche Surfer Discord group.

I’d also love to know what you think and if you have any ideas for the newsletter. Reply or email me at [email protected].

I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.

Have a great week taking your niche sites to another level!

SEO Split Test Results

SplitSignal Results:
The shortened page title tags resulted in an estimated 6.6% increase in clicks!

Yes, completely the opposite of what Twitter polls said would happen.

SearchPilot Results:
Removing the product carousel increased organic traffic 29%!

They said that's because removing the carousel improved the website's load time, leading to a better user experience. It could have also given Google a freshness signal because not many other things change regularly on the store page.

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