- Digital Surfer
- Posts
- ISSUE 81
ISSUE 81
April Income Reports; SEO Fundamental Problems; Best Niches; Google Product Update Findings; Ahrefs Traffic Accuracy; Trust Signals; and Much More!
Yoyao
May 07, 2022 • Est. Learning Time: 17 minutes
FIRST…
There's a lot of good stuff this week on the interwebs, so I'll keep it short.
The 2 Niche Creators interviewed are very active on Twitter sharing their knowledge on how to make 5-figures every month from your niche sites.
Be sure to also join the Discord community if you're looking to share and learn from others. If you have any questions, ask in there!
Have a great weekend and week ahead! Keep publishing that content and making money!
NICHE CREATORS
This week's two Niche Creators are very active in sharing their knowledge. They share their journey on Twitter with loads of tips, while making 5-figures every month.
Check out their interviews:
INCOME REPORTS
These are the income reports I've found for April 2022:
The Affiliate School - $419 - He's also selling this site, a coffee affiliate site. There's an email to contact him in the video description.
SEO
Glenn Gabe of GSQi provides findings based on analyzing Google's March 2022 Product Reviews Update (PRU), the third PRU in the series.
He covers some interesting findings based on analyzing sites impacted by the March PRU (both surges and drops):
The types of content potentially helping sites win during the PRU
Some lower-quality reviews content slipping through the cracks
More about dueling machine learning algorithms (broad core updates and PRU)
The importance of review testing labs
The power of links (or not)
He also covers different things that are part of Google recommendations now and how to future proof your site, like linking to multiple sellers and the Wirecutter Standard when it comes to creating product reviews.
Knowing the fundamental problems in an industry helps you truly understand it. In this article, Kevin Indigs outlines what he sees as the 5 fundamental problems in SEO:
Competition
Shipping
Reverse engineering
Google’s direct answers
Technical limitations
It's a good overview for what he sees as problems in SEO. It will help you learn how to work around them or with them, as well as help to future proof your site.
TOOLS AND RESOURCES
Cool tool made by Massimiliano Geraci that will use Google's NLP API or TextRazor's API to obtain the entities from any URL.
CONTENT
Find out what conversational tone is, why you should use it and how, plus 30+ examples of conversational copywriting that works.
My sites range between conversational and slightly formal tones depending on the article and site. Look at your target audience and what tone they would expect.
From writers that I've tested and used, I've found that non-native speakers usually skew Formal. When it comes to native speakers, they will skew between Conversational and Really Conversational.
I always stay away from Really Conversational myself, no matter the target audience. It can sometimes be hard to read for non-native speakers, as well as search engine algorithms (I'm guessing).
Phoebe Corrigan at Salt Agency gives a nice intro to content hubs, different types of hubs, and how they're used.
I like her section on how the various Google Updates focused on topical authority and relevancy.
"In terms of content hubs, the [Google] updates have created an opportunity to rank for more search queries. By frequently publishing various in-depth, quality pieces of content, your website will naturally rank for more queries that users are searching for."
Ahrefs article on blog titles and how to create great ones. These are the 7 types of blog titles covered and how to choose the one that's a best fit for your article:
The list post title
The “how to” title
The what, why, or how title
The “versus” title
The ultimate guide title
The devil’s advocate title
The direct answer title
EDUCATION
In this SEO Case Study, Matt Diggity gives a step-by-step playbook on how to increase your website traffic by 800% in an extremely difficult YMYL niche - life insurance. He covers these topics:
E-A-T
Creating Authorship
Topical Authority
Quality Content
Optimization
Link Building
Outreach
Here is the written version of the video.
When your blog isn't earning as much as you want, or it's not getting the traffic you think it should, it can be hard to know what to do.
The Income School walks through a complete overhaul of one of their viewer's sites to show how they look at a site and the steps they take to improve its performance. These are some of the topics covered that you could apply to your blog to make it better:
Reviewing the site and making a plan
Topic Clusters and Topical Authority
Branding: Getting a logo CHEAP
Images for blog posts
Site Structure and Topical Authority
Adding affiliate links to informational blog posts
Designing the site with custom category pages
Fixing errors in content and headlines to improve SEO performance
Optimizing the site for Ad Revenue
Trust signals on websites can help to improve conversions, sell more products, attract more traffic, and even get better search rankings. But, how you go about this can determine just how effective your results are.
Creating a trustworthy site isn't just for search engine algorithms. It's especially important for your site visitors.
This is a good list of 53 different trust signals that will help build encourage visitors to trust your site more.
Website trust signals are essential for establishing trust with your site visitors. Check out our complete list to find out which ones to use.
Grab a sweet SERP spot by choosing the right topics for your videos.
Today, more and more videos find their way into the SERPs, especially on mobile. According to the statistics, 27.92% of mobile SERPs in the US contain a video. The numbers are even more impressive in the European markets: 32.03% in Germany, 32.97% in the UK, and a staggering 37.36% in Spain.
This SERanking article covers SEO for videos to increase your traffic and conversions:
Create videos for the keywords you already rank for
Find brand-new topics for your videos
Create powerful titles and descriptions
Optimize thumbnails for better CTR
Provide users with quality subtitles
Make viewers stick around
This is a good list of 12 things you can do to get more users from your website into your email newsletter list, and why email marketing and SEO work so well together.
Part 1: Attracting potential subscribers to your site
Part 2: Improving on-site newsletter conversion (CRO)
Part 3: Enhancing subscriber engagement
CASE STUDY
Ahrefs studied 1,635 websites to find out how accurate their own search traffic estimations are. I think we've all seen that Ahrefs traffic estimations are usually way off.
They do concede that Ahrefs can be off by a rather considerable amount when estimating traffic, but it's also highly consistent in how much they're off. That allows for a formula to calculate search traffic based on Ahrefs data.
This case study answered the question of whether removing social media icons on blog pages would positively or negatively impact organic traffic.
Twitterverse voted "No significant change."
After 21 days, the result was an increase in clicks and organic traffic after the social media links were removed. Read about some of the logic of why that is in the article.
BUSINESS IDEAS
Ahrefs looks at 6 niches where starting a site can offer an opportunity for you to be quickly competitive and profitable.
Vacuum cleaners
Hotels with jacuzzis
Travel car seats
Golf equipment
Headphones and earbuds
Zero waste
They base a lot of their research on their Keyword Difficulty (KD) metric. I'd just say that you still look into the keywords because KD isn't always accurate in my experience.
Launching and running a successful store on Amazon starts with finding a solid and profitable product. That was once a pretty easy job in the early days when you could sell just about anything and everything with next to zero competition, but the dynamics have changed a lot since then.
This Empire Flippers article is a good read if you've considered adding on a revenue stream of selling your own products. You can use many of these same techniques to see if selling products in your niche could be profitable.
This is a good overview of 31 highly successful lifestyle blogs. If you're thinking about a lifestyle blog or already have one, this is a good time to check out these blogs and get some ideas.
NEWS
Moz's homepage was de-indexed from Google due to a DMCA request for some time. Once Google was aware, it was reversed pretty quickly (it's nice to be known by Google).
The official DMCA filing's reason: "The following websites distribute modified, cracked and unauthorized versions of my app "Dr. Driving", which can only be found officially on Google Play." It listed 185 domains in the filing.
LIKE NICHE SURFER?
Be sure to also join others riding the passive income wave in the Niche Surfer Discord group.
Have questions? 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 taking your niche sites to another level!
Reply