Penguin is Google’s algorithm that targets toxic links. This action can result in a rank demotion or a manual penalty if the links are toxic enough.

You may wonder about the toxic links. These are the links that are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Whether you acquire these links without knowing their impact, or someone places your website URL in shady websites in a deliberate negative SEO attempt to bring you down, you have got a problem do deal with.

That’s where you have got to work on link mediation to help your website recover from a Penguin penalty.

A Penguin penalty is easy to diagnose. This algorithmic drop results in an instant drop in traffic. Another reason for the instant drop in traffic is that you have removed a page. You will have to be sure about the reason for the drop in the traffic.

Is it an algorithmic devaluation or a manual penalty?

Here is a set of actions that you can perform on Google Analytics to know whether you are experiencing an algorithmic devaluation or manual link penalty.

Click on acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

Then, click on Organic Search.

Click on Landing Page as the primary dimension.

It will give you a landing page as the specific driver on your site. Using this approach, you can figure what page has lost traffic. You can take steps to correct the problem.

What to do when you have been hit by a manual penalty?

To check whether you have been hit by a manual penalty you are going to have to open Google Search Console. You will see a notification there. This notification will explain manual actions taken against your site.

The good thing is Google Search Console provides instructions regarding what to do if you have been hit by a manual penalty. Work with the spam team on removing problematic links.

If there is a decent quantity of links that your website has, you may have to work a bit extensively to remove links before you can get back into Google’s good books.

The thing is, a manual penalty can be significantly troublesome. The best way is to avoid having one. You are going to have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines anyway, so it’s better to follow them to avoid a penalty rather than having to work the recovery.

It is worth mentioning here that the common goal of both these marketing strategies is to attract people to your website. By combining PPC and SEO, you can formulate a holistic marketing approach to gain a marketing edge. The benefits that you can get by combining PPC and SEO may help you share learnings, improve budget efficiency, and manage brands to have mutual growth.

Strategic data sharing across both channels

Integrated dashboards displaying SEO and PPC search performance data can help users to share learning across organic and paid search. This approach focuses on keyword-level trends.

You can build a dashboard using Google Data Studio. Keep in mind that you can use any other data management platform to achieve similar results. Building a dashboard can help you export and integrate organic performance metrics such as organic impressions, the average ranking position from Google Search Console, and organic CTR. Similarly, you can combine this data with PPC metrics such as CPC, CTR, and conversion data.

After this process, you can build out some useful charts to identify areas to improve both PPC and SEO. Using scatter graphs is one of the best ways to spot outliers.

Using this data in practice

Cutting budgets

You can cut budgets where you can sustain a downturn. Another way to cut the budget is to prop up performance using best SEO practices.

Here, you are going to have to identify PPC keywords that also perform well in organic results. You can simply stop pouring money to improve in PPC campaigns featuring those keywords. The best way is to put those campaigns on pause and monitor the overall impact on traffic and sales.

Saving more budget in the medium term

This one is a more radical method of saving the budget. The first thing that you are going to have to do is to identify opportunities. For this purpose, you have to identify keywords outside the top 3 organic results. You will also have to see if the average CPC is higher than the account average.

This method is going to increase the amount of workload that your content writers and other people involved in the organic search have to carry. That said, it will be a bad idea to stop paid campaigns immediately and shift to the organic search work as it can impact traffic and sales.

Bottom line

Remember, it will be a bad idea to quit working on either one of the PPC and SEO to focus on only one channel. Stopping working on SEO with hopes of outperforming your competitors through PPC will give your website nothing more than just a spike in traffic. Similarly, focusing only on SEO will make things out of reach for you in this fast-paced environment.

The ability of every piece of content work to its true potential is different, but that doesn’t mean you cannot do anything about an underperforming piece of content. In this article, we are going to talk about how to analyze the content’s performance, and also about the ways you can fix any content areas that are not up to the mark.

Using Google Analytics to identify underperforming content

The first step towards fixing something is to see where it underperforms. In case you need to identify content areas that need fixes and upgrades, you can consider using Google Analytics, which is a go-to solution for every digital marketer.

To check the content performance, you can use the Behavior reports in GA. This set of reports tells you what your visitors do when you reach your website.

First, you are going to have to take a top-level view of the web content. You can have this view when the analytics loads primary stats of your site in the Behavior reports. You can move to the page-level stats by clicking on Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. That is where you are going to see useful metrics such as sessions, users, and company values items, which may include goal completions.

The numbers against each factor of the content will let you know how well your content has been performing in a particular duration.

Steps to improve existing content

Now we are going to talk about the practical steps that you can work on to improving existing content on your website.

Refreshing the content

If the content has not been updated in a while, you need to see what upgrades or improvements you can make to bring it in the spotlight. Remember, Google gives preference to the content that is up-to-date and reliable. Updates that you can apply to the existing content may include:

• Adding new stats
• Adding fresh and relevant quotes

Do not stick to the same format throughout the length of the content

Many people generally add text content on a page without paying attention to the fact that other forms of content can remarkably benefit the text content. All you have to see what type of content appeals to your audience more. You can add images and, if possible, a video for a better explanation of your content.

Audio content

By adding audio files in the web pages, you can make the content consumable for a bigger audience. People who are on the move might not be willing to read the full text on your web pages. Audio files make it easy for them to understand the content on your website.

Give answers in your content

Another way to increase traffic and conversions is to see what people ask about the topic of your content. You can create content based on these questions, aiming to provide answers to the questions. Moreover, youwill need touse different header tags to make the content more understandable and organized.

Bottom line

These tips should help you improve your existing content in the most practical way. These guidelines are not limited to only improving the content. You can use them to create new content as well.

Relevant and engaging content

How well you can keep your audience glued to your webpages depends on the ability of your content on those pages. The key to the success of your content depends on the research that you perform before creating the content. You are going to have to learn about your audience. You will have to keep several dynamics into consideration to know about your audience’s preferences. For this purpose, you may have to invest your time and resources in conducting surveys and other ways to interact with your audience.

Landing pages

Along with the highly persuasive content, you are going to have to work on your landing pages. Landing pages complement the efforts that you make to create the content to convince your customers. Remember, an ideal landing page doesn’t contain long-form content. It is relatively short, with the primary focus on call-to-action elements. Here, you may have to learn a bit about the impact of design to create an urge to buy.

Reviews and testimonies

You may be paying enough attention to bring your audience on your product pages through content and SEO, and you may achieve success in that. However, if the reviews on your pages show a lack of people’s trust, all that effort to engage your audience will be for nothing. That’s why it is necessary to encourage your customers to leave a review of your products and services after the purchase. If you have worked well to maintain the high-quality of your product, you should be able to have happy customers. The testimony of their satisfaction on your site will serve as word-of-mouth marketing, which is an extremely effective way to convince potential customers to recurring customers.

Appealing opt-in Form

If you want to convert traffic into leads, you are going to have to build the email list, which you can use to convince your audience to engage with your content regularly. It is worth noticing that your one-time visitors are not likely to become your customers. You may have to encourage them to come to your site regularly if you want them to become your customers. Building an email list will serve this purpose nicely.

It is most crucial to be proactive. Unless you are as big company as Forbes, you are going to have to work considerably hard, aside from creating fresh content, to get links.

Link building research can be plenty helpful in building high-quality links in large quantities. Here is how you can do it.

Dig a little deeper into competitors’ profiles

The most obvious way of building links is to look at your competitors. But digging into their profiles might not always work. You might not find something out of the ordinary in terms of the number of links. That’s where you may need to dig a little deeper to see what sites are linking to them. You can leverage that information to get those sites linking your website. For this purpose, the most necessary thing to do is to create high-quality content.

Gather together links from contenders showing up in SERPs

Every site that ranks ahead of you in Google SERPs is your contender. It is a significant factor among several other factors that remain critical in site ranking.

To rank ahead of your competitors on Google, you at least need to get identical domain ratings and equally good content. And when it comes to links, you have to make sure that you are performing well. That should help you rank better than your contenders.

You can start by going to Google and typing in the keyword against which you rank on the second or first page. Compile a list of all URLs, including the ones that rank below you. Since you need to start small, it is necessary to look at what the companies, which rank below you, are doing. Also, they might have inferior content as compared to what’s on your site. That’s the reason they rank below you. What you can do is get a list of their backlinks, and try contacting sources of those backlinks. That will give you a further advantage over your competitors.

Establish alerts

There is not even a second that goes by without content publishers publishing new content. With the new content going live every second, there is a higher possibility for your brand being mentioned quite several times, given that you have a substantial online presence already. You can search for your mentions and ask the publishers to add a list of your site to those mentions. You can also do the topic research to find newly published pieces of content related to your topic. If your content has good value to offer, you can contact publishers of those sites to ask them to link back to you. You can set topic and keyword alerts to get to know about the newly published content as soon as it goes live on the web.

Modern-day local SEO

A business must have a prominent position in SERPs, as any good business, whether or not it is local, has its audience over the web. This makes that business doing well in Google search result pages. Hence, it should go without saying that if you are a new or small business, you are going to have to work on improving your Google rankings even if your primary goal is to get local customers only.

Avoid using a virtual office

The idea of setting up a virtual office sounds great. You get an office address with a valid phone number for much less than what you would pay for a physical office. Technically, it shouldn’t be of any concern as no client will visit that office without you knowing about it. But setting up a virtual office can prove to be counterproductive when you need to establish a Google My Business profile. Very few people know about a GMB guideline saying that you should not use virtual office locations as a part of your business strategy.

Make sure your business shows up in the knowledge panel

To achieve a knowledge panel about your business in the SERPs, you are going to have to use the local data structure. For this purpose, make sure that:

• You are adding structured data properly
• The data validates in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
• There are no issues when the data indexes

Keeping an eye on the market and your competition

You are going to have to perform proper competition research on local content and links to determine what you need to do. In this scenario, it is necessary to keep your budget limitations in mind. It means that if you do not have a budget big enough to fuel your marketing requirements on a bigger scale, you should avoid going into larger markets.

Linking strategy

SEO is incomplete without linking. In the case of local SEO, you are going to have to pay attention to getting links that can benefit your local rankings. It has always been this way, as evident from local directories that tend to bring local traffic to local businesses.

Content strategy

Content is as necessary as the SEO itself. Your local audience needs to have a deeper understanding of your business. And for that purpose, you need to have updated and valuable content on your web pages. Make sure that the content answers the questions your local audience may have about your business.

An equally important question that they must also ask is, “How do search engines rank pages or sites?”

Why do search engines rank web pages?

You may wonder why a search engine would use all those resources to rank pages against the queries it gets from you. After all, it would be easier and cheaper to only show a list of search results sorted by word count, freshness, or any other parameters.

The answer to this question is simple – you are not going to use a search engine that doesn’t have any ranking system in place.

So when you have the task of ranking a page, you need to keep in mind that the user you are trying to reach is not yours. You are loaning that user from search engines. That is why it is essential to adhere to the rules set by search engines.

That said, now we are going to talk about the steps involved in the ranking a web pages at the search engine’s end.

1. Classification

First, the search engine has to classify the query that comes in. All of the following steps that the search engine has to perform depend on this step. This classification involves the search engine attaching several labels to a query. Those labels may include:

• YMYL
• Local
• Unseen
• Question

1. Context

The second step in the ranking process is the context assignment. The search engine uses any relevant information it has about the query that the user is entering. For instance, you may have checked the weather on Google quite several times. You might remember that you only had to enter the word “weather” and Google displayed the weather of your locality only. It didn’t show you the weather of a different locality in a different part of the country or world. That is what assignment of a context to a search query is.

1. Weights

You may have heard a lot about RankBrain. This core algorithm allows Google to add weightage to the search queries it receives from users. A query can have more than one signal. That’s where it becomes essential for the engine to add weightage to the strongest of signals, and that’s where RankBrain comes into play. RankBrain is a machine learning system that perfects itself while doing what it does. It can learn from the previous search results created throughout its active time. It means that it is getting smarter every day in adding weightage to search queries.

1. Layout

The layout of a result page may change with the change of query. Search engines are smart enough to identify the intent behind a search query. They identify what particular layout suits well to a result page. With the search engine working on so many signals and applying too many parameters to apply weightage to a query, identifying which layout shows up is like hitting a moving target.

1. Ranking

Although ranking is the final and most sought after step, it is the easiest one in this entire process. It has to put together results from the process mentioned above and arrange ten blue links on one page.

Now we are going to talk about the small tweaks and updates that you need to work on if you want to make necessary optimizations to modernize a website.

Enable HTTPS

HTTPS was introduced back in 1995 but it took until 2015 for half of the websites to have this protocol deployed. It has now become the very basic security requirement for the websites that deal with the transfer of sensitive and confidential data.

If your website was developed before 2015, there is a chance you haven’t installed an SSL certificate to run your website over HTTPS. In 2017, Google started prioritizing websites with HTTPS. And in 2018, it became one of the major prerequisites. It is evident with the prominent markers being shown whenever you open a website using Google Chrome.

Stop showing Google Plus in social icons

Google Plus was discontinued in 2019. Before that time, websites owners would use it in social icons to encourage users to share their webpages over their Google Plus timelines. Yet there are many websites that still show Google Plus in their social icons. These social icons are usually present in the footer sections of the web pages. The best thing that you can do in this regard is to modify the code to remove this icon.

Configure ReCAPTCHA

The spam generated from contact forms is nothing less than a big annoyance. The insecure forms are being used quite aggressively by the bots that are programmed to fill the forms and enter links. This practice is even more common on the websites that are developed using WordPress.

Good thing is that you can work on some effective anti-spam measures to have your website guarded against the spam link building bots. One of the ways is to place a strong moderation system in place if you want to engage only in a meaningful discussion with your viewers through the contact forms and comment sections. And if you want to allow all of the users to contribute while making sure that bots are not able to make any entry, you can deploy Google’s RECAPTCHA security system.

Link rot is one of the threats that can subvert the links and rankings.You might not have heard much about it but the matter of fact is that it’s a problem which needs to be understood and addressed in a timely manner.

You may wonder what a link rot is. It tends to happen in two ways.

• One instance of link rot is when the links disappear. This usually happens as a result of a website update.
• Another case of link rot is associated with the gradual reduction of link power. It tends to happen when new pages push the older pages away from the home page.

In case you wonder who gets affected by link rot, no site is immune to this. Every link profile loses its power with the passage of time.

Link reclamation

One of the ways you can mitigate the harms of a link rot is link reclamation. As the name suggests, link reclamation is the process of reclaiming the link that is otherwise going to waste. You can do this by reviewing the 404 response codes and see if the web asset at the backend of the link is not present.

If the web asset has been moved or removed, you are going to have to create a 301-redirect to the new destination. This way, that link will lead your viewers exactly to the page that needs to be shown. But you are going to have to make sure that the new page, which the link has been redirected to, is substantially the same as the working version of the previous one.

Link to the wrong domain name

This is not technically a link rot because the link created as never made it to your site. Still, we can put it in the category of link rot because it has the similar effect. And what’s more challenging here is that this situation cannot be easily spotted because you are not going to get 404-error code.

A typical example of it is the entry of wrong link by the publisher. For instance, if the publisher adds an “S” at the end of the domain name, the link will not lead users to the destined page.

One of the ways you can check out for such errors is to see if other websites are using links to your website using misspelled domain names. After creating a list of such links, you can acquire those domains and redirect them.

That is the reason that SEOs and digital marketers need to be wary of hacking attempts. Hacking is an action carried out by an individual to gain access to a specific website or network without permission. These hacking attempts are made either to gain access to a private portion of the website or to redirect that website’s users to the hacker’s site.

Tools that are utilized by hackers

• The first tool that is widely used by hackers is the malware. The major purpose of a malware is to damage or disable a specific network with a goal being data breach.
• Another way of hacking is spamming. This method involves a hacker adding a hypertext in a website. When users click that hypertext, they are redirected to the hacker’s site. The purpose of this kind of hacking is to use a website’s traffic for the hacker’s site’s advantage.

Effects of hacking

A website might have to suffer significant and far-reaching consequences after it gets hacked. A few things that tend to happen when a website is hacked are worth talking about in this regard.

• According to a research by GoDaddy, about 73% of the hacked websites were hacked with SEO spam being the major reason. While utilization of an authoritative website’s reputation for an increase in traffic and ranking on other website may be one of the reasons, a hacking attempt may deliberately be made to scrape a website off from the higher ranks in SERPs. in many cases, these attempts tend to turn a website into a link farm where users and viewers are tricked into clicking malware links.
• If hacking result in the addition of a malware code in the website, the website becomes unsafe. And if it is identified by Google, it displays a warning when the website’s link is clicked. This warning is displayed for the purpose of keeping users alarmed about the risk. In some cases, the website is removed entirely.
• A high quality and authoritative website would never accept links from low quality websites. The owners of such website can make a hacking attempt to add their backlinks into the authoritative websites which normally have strict rules for the addition of links. The major disadvantage of getting your website hacked this way is that it will not remain trustworthy until you get a clearance after restoring your website and improving its security.

How to prevent getting hacked

There are a few things that you can do to prevent your site from getting hacked.

• First of all, you need to strictly avoid installing plugins from untrustworthy sources. Moreover, you are going to have to keep updating the existing plugins on regular basis to strengthen their security certificates.
• The security of your site is going to be at higher stake if you share a server. Before sharing a server, do proper research about the server security or simply buy a separated server space.
• Make sure that your website’s credentials are secure enough to make the hacking highly difficult. Always use secure passwords to secure your websites.