ISSUE 67

2022 SEO Strategies; Canonical Tags; WordPress 5.9 Review; Bolded Text For SEO; 2021 SEO Winners & Losers; and Much More!

Author

Yoyao
January 29, 2022 • Est. Learning Time: 13 minutes

Issue 2

FIRST…

Thanks to all of you who took the survey the last couple of weeks! It helped me a lot with seeing what you're interested in and how I can provide more value to you.

Here are some interesting insights from the people who took the survey:

  • 50% have 2-3 niche sites or online businesses

  • 50% have been building sites for 5-10 years!

  • 37% have been building sites for 1-2 years

  • 50% are earning between $1k-5k every month! (That's great!)

For future newsletters, you also told me the top categories that people are most interested in are. I'll focus sharing more information in those areas in future newsletters. The top 3 are:

  • Case Studies / Income Reports

  • SEO

  • Creating and Optimizing Content

There was an overwhelming Yes with people who want to read interviews with people who are building their niche sites and online businesses. It would've been unanimous except one person said No with the reason being he/she wants it in a Podcast or YouTube format!

The other thing that I'm currently building are the private online communities for people based on different earning levels. 85% of people were interested in learning from and sharing with others in the same income levels as them.

I'm using Discord as the platform for it because I like the way that the chat is displayed, along with the ability to pin messages and search for the content that you want easily. I'm still learning how to manage Discord and going through the different options. There are many things to adjust.

For the different income levels, I think I'm going to need to manually verify that with people on a case-by-case basis. If anyone can think of a way to automate it, please let me know!

I do feel that there is a lot of share for people who are earning at similar income levels. People who are making $5-10k will not need much of the beginner SEO help as the people who are starting out. It keeps everyone in those groups focused on how to increase their income each month.

Until I've got a good grasp on Discord, I'll be running it in Beta mode for now.

If you're interested in getting in early, reply to this email and let me know. I'll send you an invite link!

SEO

ISSUE 67

Last year was an incredible year for core updates , and for changes to how SEOs improve page quality for users. Moving forward, we can expect to see increased diversification of SERPs and new features from tools like Google Lens. These developments will change how we manage our SEO now and in the future.

With the latest Gooogle algorithm MUM, Multitask Unified Model, it's processing images and videos in a way that's affecting SERPs. It's interesting to see how image composition will change how Google thinks the content is.

These are the top 10 SEO trends to pay attention to in 2022 to keep your traffic and keyword rankings trending upward according to WordStream.

  1. Check your Core Web Vitals and invest in improvements.

  2. Target long-tail question keywords for People also ask - Keyword Chef and Low Fruits are the best for this.

  3. Create keyword clusters to rank for more queries with one page.

  4. Use AI content tools, but as a supplement - Frase and Closers Copy

  5. Try out content optimization software - Frase

  6. Apply more structured data and rich snippets to your content.

  7. Write high-quality long-form content.

  8. Keep up with good ol’ boring SEO.

  9. Take advantage of the democratization of search.

  10. Keep an eye out for new search engines and experiences.

ISSUE 67

This is a summary of the most interesting questions and answers from the Google SEO Office Hours with John Mueller on January 14th and 21st, 2022.

  1. The size of the robots.txt file

  2. Migrating a product category to a new domain

  3. App redirecting

  4. Can Google assess the similarity of pages?

  5. Checking on spam backlinks

  6. Traffic drop vs. removing AMP pages

  7. Knowledge Panels

  8. The number of questions to include in an FAQ list

  9. The Index Coverage issues

  1. The value of internal links in different parts of the content

  2. Crawling issues

  3. Drop in the number of indexed pages

  4. Deindexed pages vs. special characters in URLs

  5. GSC properties and the non-trailing indexed pages

  6. Recovering from website’s downtime

  7. Website migration

  8. Internal linking and website structure

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Some of the AI tools out there for writing and optimizing content.

Bramework - Keyword research and AI content generator in one tool. Focuses on going from keyword research to a title generator to outline generator and to writing the blog post.

Blogely - Content optimizer tool along with a marketplace to purchase ready-to-publish content and find freelance writers for content you want.

Texta.ai - AI content generator for blogs, ads, emails, and social media.

WordHero - A popular AI content generator, but doesn't include the long-form editor for blogs in this deal. Need to pay an extra $59 inside the tool to get lifetime, unlimited access to it.

CONTENT

This is an interesting case study based on comments that Google's John Mueller made during a Nov. 12, 2021 Google SEO Office Hours where he said "bolding important pieces of text in your content can help your SEO performance."

They put it to the test on 489 blog pages for 28 days and in the end, they say a 1.5% increase in clicks with a confidence level of 81%. That means there was no statistical certainty that could be tied to the bolding of text.

I still like to bold important text for the user experience as it can be a mini-scroll stopper. That helps keep users stay on the page more to read what was bolded.

Whether you are looking to produce content for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, or St Patrick’s day, Annija Erdmane offers up some tips to apply to your holiday content strategy. This can be useful if your niche sites can take advantage of holidays.

  1. Predicting holiday search trends

  2. Keyword research for data-led holiday content strategy

  3. Getting holiday blog post ideas

  4. Various types of holiday blog content

  5. Have a goal in mind for all content

  6. Make your content visually appealing

LINK BUILDING

ISSUE 67

Whether you're trying to get a brand-new site off the ground or just looking for a little extra juice for your local SEO, broken link building is one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal. It's one of the link building strategies that offers a higher success rate.

This overview article covers various tools to find broken backlinks and how to approach the outreach emails.

EDUCATION

ISSUE 67

This is a good overview guide on canonical tags. Learn how to implement canonical tags and prevent duplicate content issues on your site. Lots of good information here for beginners, as well as people who have been building sites for some time. For example:

Are those all the same for a search engine crawler? Or the same? If you think they're the same, this will be a good refresher article for you to avoid issues like duplicate content.

ISSUE 67

Analysis by Lily Ray, who takes a look at selected domains from the list of 250 domains that lost search visibility in 2021. These saw the greatest declines in SEO visibility. The report covers:

  • International ccTLDs

  • YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) Publisher Sites

  • UGC (User-Generated Content)

  • Product Review Websites

  • Vacation & Travel Sites: Competitors to Google?

  • Educational Sites & Lessons for Kids

  • Ecommerce Sites

  • List of losing domains (Absolute and Percentage)

They also posted a report on the SEO Winners in 2021 to check out.

NEWS

ISSUE 67

WordPress 5.9 is coming out next week, and it brings with it huge changes that you want to make sure you are prepared for.

This is a good overview of what 5.9 brings and it definitely feels like it will eventually render page builders useless soon enough.

The major change here is it removes the Appearance Customizer and adds a Template Editor that's based on Blocks. If you never used the Customizer (under Appearance->Customize), it won't matter much, but if you do (like me), this will be a completely different way of adjusting things like global typography and colors.

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.

Also, be sure to Whitelist [email protected] and/or drag the email to the Primary Inbox to make sure you don't miss the emails!

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

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