- Digital Surfer
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- ISSUE 43
ISSUE 43
Income Reports; How To Silo; Google Changing Titles; SERP Position CTR; Zero Search Keywords; Crawl Budgets and More!
Yoyao
August 21, 2021 • Est. Learning Time: 17 minutes
FIRST…
How do you feel about some of these niche site analogies? True? False?
Niche sites have a unique personality that sets them apart from other sites.
Niche sites aren't for everyone. Some people will never understand them. But if you do, they'll change your life.
Niche sites take time to build, just as a home takes years to create. It may seem slow at first, but once you start getting traffic, you'll see that it's well worth the wait.
I was playing around with Frase's AI Templates, the "Metaphor/Analogy Template" in this case. I just wanted to see what each of the templates were about and how their AI was. I tried the analogy template with the topic niche surfers to see what came up and I got these:
Niche surfing is like a club. It's not for everyone, but if you're in, you'll never want to leave.
Niche Surfing is like a religion. It's not just a hobby or a way to relax. It's something that you do because you believe in it.
Niche surfers are like a secret society. They know each other and they share their knowledge with each other.
And just for fun, I tried my name Yoyao to see what Frase thought of me:
Yoyao is like a boyfriend. You may not always agree with everything he says but he'll never let you down.
Yoyao is like a cat in the dark. It's very hard to see him when he's sleeping, but once he wakes up, he will start purring loudly.
Yoyao makes you feel young again. It brings back the joy in life and makes you smile.
I'm enjoying AI content generators, and they are helpful with getting content up faster, but they aren't replacing good writers anytime soon. I still hire writers to write articles, because they are able to do research and distill it effectively for readers.
AI content generators aren't able to do that yet. You should already know that the statistics that any AI gives you needs to be researched, because they're incorrect 99.9% of the time. Even if it's a simple True or False statement, you might want to double-check it. The grammar will be off sometimes, but the spelling is good.
I have a joint site in the health niche and we hired Niche Website Builders to write 100K words (NWB coupons) for it, because it's a niche that requires good research to be useful to visitors. The most important thing for us is to put out well-researched, accurate information.
I find AI writers are great for short descriptions and to get the creative juices flowing if you have writer's block. The ones above are great to use as a jumping off point, but I wouldn't use any of them without changes...except for:
Yoyao makes you feel young again. It brings back the joy in life and makes you smile.
Well, I would change "it" to "he."
INCOME REPORTS
Niche Pursuits shares real-life examples of affiliate marketing websites and how much they're earning.
Take a look at their sites and posts to see how they're built. See what they're doing that's earning them that much each month. It's always good to check out other sites and see what they're doing.
Carl Broadbent reveals one of his sites that he started 11 months ago, but has lots of articles that haven't been indexed - exoticpetplace.com. He then goes through installing the Popcorn Theme to replace GeneratePress (he's one of the founders of Popcorn).
Hopefully revealing his site will start getting his site going and the pages indexed. There are other YouTubers who have had trouble with sites, but after revealing them to followers, the sites starting gaining traction because people start visiting the sites. Something about Google seeing the additional traffic and thinking "oh, maybe we were wrong about this site."
SEO
Great video to watch on structuring your site and creating silos. Matt Diggity explains a number of ways that silos can work.
I use the Priority Silo structure myself. He says it's an "Advanced" technique, but it's not that difficult as long as you keep track of all the interlinking. I haven't found a better tool than Google Sheets to keep track of interlinks.
I also use hard silos with page directory structures as it's easier to keep track of the site structure as well.
Brodie Clark writes about how Google has changed the way Titles are shown in the SERPs around August 17/18th. Google's now taking titles from header tags, internal links, image alt text, or even made up by Google.
One of the key findings the titles are shorter now, but not due to a pixel limit change. It's to provide a "better" view of the content.
Find out the click-through rate by position in the search results with the latest data. It's an interesting look at how data varies depending on the source, but in the end, it's still the goal to be on Page 1 and as high as possible.
Some interesting insights like this one on Featured Snippets:
The first ranking (with the featured snippet) has a click rate that is 5.3% percentage points below the average value for this position. The website from which the information in the featured snippet is created does not benefit from the featured snippet.
Interestingly, the websites at positions # 2 and # 3 benefit significantly: the second place winner gets almost five additional percentage points compared to the average (15.7% to 20.5%) and the third place site will also get an increase in CTR from 11% to 13.3%.
TOOLS AND RESOURCES
Internal linking is an important factor in growing a niche site. Link Whisper makes that task a lot easier - read these Link Whisper reviews!
Including this because I'm one of the seven niche site owners :)
Check out my podcast interview with Spencer a few months ago.
Rank Math Pro - Ends in ~2 days. The PRO & Business plans will have 2x the number of keywords you can track using Rank Math's built-in keyword rank tracker. I currently use the Pro plan myself. It's $59/yr for unlimited sites. I like their SEO tools as they give me analytics and keyword data without having to go searching in GA or GSC. Breaking down the cost by the number of sites I have and how much time I spent on GSC looking at the top keywords for each post, it's well worth the money.
Outranking - This is a content outliner and optimizer with AI writing throughout. I've seen a number of hardcore fans of it in some groups. See a walkthrough video of them using Concepts AI Writer/Summarizer to write an article about living in Italy. Their AI seems like it's worth a trial, especially with the 60-day refund policy here.
123RF Stock Images - Stock image deal that ends in ~3 days. Has over 170 million quality stock photos, illustrations, and vectors. I already have many credits on Deposit Photos, but this has been a nice backup for added variety. It's been good for my niches that are harder to find photos for.
LinkWhisper - They still might have their $20 Off sale going on by the time you read this. If you happened to miss it, don't worry. You can still get $15 Off by using the special coupon code: YOYAO.
Listnr - Listnr has improved their lifetime limits and it's a good deal now for a Talk-to-Speech tool that also creates a Podcast for you. You can also upload your own audio to create podcast episodes. I like a couple of the voices they have on it as it's not as robotic like the majority of AI voices out there.
CONTENT
Adam Riemer has a good article on creating good FAQs for your articles. Wondering why your copy is not getting picked up in Google's "People also ask" search results? These 5 questions will help you troubleshoot your FAQs:
Does it give a clear and direct answer without extra words or fluff?
Have you provided a solution without needing to use your company or services?
Is the response about the end user, or about how you or your brand are awesome?
Is the answer understandable by both robots and spiders?
Is the question and answer specific to the products or entire collection or content on the page, or is it general and should it be moved elsewhere because it can apply to a category of products or services?
LINK BUILDING
SEO Sherpa Agency goes through the most effective link-building strategies out there, from basic (but efficient) link-building tactics all the way to advanced link winning techniques for pro-level link builders.
Each of these techniques is tested and proven and working great right now for their clients. These come with instructions and templates on how to deploy the techniques.
A bookmark-worthy post.
EDUCATION
Google blog post that tells you everything you need to know to use and master Google Trends.
Google Trends is one of my top tools when I'm starting new niche sites. I also find it super useful when I'm considering the next topic silos on existing sites.
Crawl Budget is something most beginners don't consider when building out niche sites. I know I didn't early on. It's important to understand crawl budget and get Google to crawl your sites often and as many pages as possible each time.
What crawl budget is and why it matters
How you can find your top performing URLs
How you can measure URL performance
How to improve the importance of your URLs
Keyword tools and their monthly search volumes are often incorrect or lagging from actual search volumes. Only Google has the real numbers, so start using it.
Steve Toth's post covers how he uses Google Search Volume combined with other tools like KeywordsEverywhere to find zero search volume keywords.
Be sure to also check out Keyword Chef to more easily identify ZSV opportunities if you haven't already.
NEWS
Yoast got acquired by Newfold Digital. Does it mean anything for Yoast users? Doesn't appear to be any changes according to their announcement.
I used Yoast when I first started learning about SEO, because it was the most used SEO plugin out there that was free. I've since moved on to using Rank Math Pro because it has better features and feels more useful than Yoast was.
LIKE NICHE SURFER?
Let me know! Reply or email me at [email protected]. I’d love to know what you think and if you have any ideas.
I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.
Have a great week with taking your niche sites to another level!
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