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.

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.

An ideal way to do the digital marketing is quite similar to that of yoga. It means that this approach needs to be flexible.

Finding purpose

An important purpose of yoga is to clear the thoughts and focus on the core values without paying attention to the external pressure. Using this very same approach in business and marketing process can help you get the best results. Example of Steve Jobs is quite prominent here. We all know about Apple Company being a trendsetter in the tech industry. And what’s more interesting is that they bring innovation that doesn’t seem risky. It is because of the fact that experts working in the company know the company’s value and they do not get obsessed with a wilder thought of introducing innovation.

Same thing can be done with the digital marketing.Focusing on your company’s core value and clearing the thoughts can help you think about the best digital marketing approach that is going to be extremely beneficial for your company.

Staying positive

The main purpose of clearing thoughts during yoga practice is to get rid of the negative thoughts and emotions. And then, what are going to fill in this ‘empty’ brain? Surely it is not going to be a negative thought.

As a marketer, you may be at the center of customer-driven activities in certain occasions. That’s where multiple conversations can delude your mind and make you do something which is not good for your business.In such scenarios, the best approach is to take a deep breath and focus on the desired outcome you are working for.

Developing empathy

The kind of marketing that involves crafting a pitch and then saying it in front of the masses without paying attention to the general and specific needs of audience is an easy and cruel approach. Even if you somehow manage to convince someone about buying a product based on some powerful words, it is not a long terms strategy because you are not paying attention to what your audience want.

The best thing to do here is to work on unique goals and motivations of the target market and provide them proper guidance through the marketing funnel. That is possible only if you do research to know about the specific requirements of your audience and focus those requirements during production and marketing procedures.

Things that are dependent on Meta description include click-through rate, perception about the quality results, and a perception about what is being offered in the web page.

Importance of Meta description for SEO

In the olden days of SEO, Meta description was perceived to be the factor helping in the SEO. You may wonder if it helped the websites to rank. Google states it categorically that neither Meta description was a part of ranking process in the past nor it is the case in the present. However, it is actually the primary description that helps your users understand what’s in the web page. If they like the description, they enter the website. And if the description is not convincing, they simply refer to other search results in the SERPs.

Given the function the Meta description has to perform, it becomes evident that it is the very first step that can help you in improving CTR, boosting traffic, increasing the chances of more conversions.

Difference between Meta Description and SERP Snippets

Many of the people mistake Meta description and search snippets to be the two names of one thing. It is not the case actually. Meta description is mainly an HTML tag which you can control. Its creation and optimization is entirely up to you.

On the other hand, search snippets are controlled by Google. Google creates them and show them on the SERPs. A search snippet may contain Meta description or the Google may choose to use any other part of description from the content body of the web page.

Now, we are going to discuss some tips to improve your Meta Descriptions.

The ideal or recommended length of Meta description

Over the years, the best SEO practice had been to keep Meta description no lengthier than 160-165 characters. However, Google changed it in the last year. Now, you can insert a Meta description of up to 300 characters. It means that you have got more space in which you can add an extra bit of details to the summary of what you want your users to see in the Meta description.

Research the SERPs

It is actually more of a manual approach to see what is going to be ideal for you. You can do a little SERP research to find out what is going on in the industry.

• First, you need to research the SERPs using your targeted keyword. The process can be a bit of time consuming but it is actually quite straightforward. And it is the way you can see where your competitors stand when people use the targeted query you are using at the moment.
• Then you are going to do a little research on what your competitors are doing. SERP research is helpful in this regard obviously.
• The data being displayed from the above two steps can be exported in the spreadsheet. This way, you can do an effective tracking.

Researching your clients

Another factor on which the success of your Meta description depends heavily is the description’s alignment with what your customers like at every phase of the buying journey.That’s where you are going to have to do an extensive research because the marketing funnel can be different for different audiences.

So, if you are sticking with the development of content only and not paying attention to the links, you are not going to get the important referral traffic which can help your website to rank higher. But one thing worth mentioning in this regard is that Google has put some strict guidelines regarding how to build links.

Thus, you are going to have to make sure that you are doing link building in a positive way. In this article, we are going to talk about the ethical ways to build links.

Be a journalistic source of information

The only way you can get high quality links is to offer high quality content to the important stakeholders in this trade.And for this purpose, you are going to have to be a journalistic source of information.

For instance, you can offer a quote, tip, or piece of information in exchange of a mention of your name, brand, or one of your blog posts.

If you want to make your content impactful, you are going to have to include expert interviews, quotes, or roundups in it.This way of content development is amazing.You can get different views around a specific topic. Your readers are going to find it very interesting going through those pieces of information.And this is how you are going to get links.

Link reclamation

The concept of broken link building is not new. This technique involves searching for the content which contains anchor texts you can target. And you find the content hoping for the links to be broken. The next thing you are going to have to do is to get your link inserted in place of the broken link.

While this way of link building is great, it is nothing less than a headache. You are going to have to scan hundreds of articles to find one link spot.

If you find this way of link building difficult, you can work on link reclamation. Link reclamation is the process that focuses mainly on brand mentions. If someone writes about you but doesn’t post a link back to your website, you can ask them to place a link there in the mention. The nicest way of doing so starts with thanking them about the mention. Then you will have to ask them for the link to your website to be placed. The best part is that this process allows you to build a connection with those people for further collaboration.

Guest posting

Guest posting is a pretty old method for link building; and it has been a topic of debate regarding if this way of link building really works. Well, the matter of fact is that guest posting really allows you to build high quality links which are going to benefit your website in a very nice way. All you have to do is to focus on quality. Make sure that you are writing high quality content for the high authority websites.

One thing that you need to keep in mind about link building is that it requires commitment because it takes time to deliver results. Moreover, you have to make sure that you have planned the link building strategy well.

In this article, we are going to talk about common roadblocks that can make your journey to link building success quite a struggling one. We will also talk about the ways to avoid them.

Not paying attention to the quality assets

Many people do not pay attention to quality assets on their sites. One of the assets to talk about is the high quality content that you need to create. High quality content helps you get more readers coming to your site. And so, you are going to have better chance at reaching and engaging key targets and strengthening your authority in the eyes of Google and users.

When it comes to creating content, one of the ideas is to create content for influencers and experts. Influencing the influencers can help you reach a wider domain of people without any major struggle.

Another way is to create content based on research, data and statistics. This type of content has been noticed outperforming other types of content.

Lack of on-site optimization

It has been noticed that many people pay attention to the off-page optimization (i.e. link building) more than on-site optimization. Remember, link building can be quite powerful if you pay attention to the on-site optimization. Bad shape of the website will only cause users abandoning your site before performing any action on your site.

On-page elements that you need to take into consideration here mainly include site and URL structure, desktop and mobile experience, page loading speed, redirects, broken pages and links, optimized page tagging elements, internal link building, and much more.

Insufficient research

It seems great getting links from Forbes, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and so on. But if you are focusing only on this aspect of link building, you are actually looking for shortcuts. The mindset required for link building should be based on a purpose of getting short and long term benefits from links.

In this scenario, you need to start with the competitive analysis. You need to see where your competitors are getting links from. And you also have to see the publications which are linking to your competitors’ sites. You will need to see what tactics they are following. And most importantly, you will have to analyze if any of those practices are applicable in your case.

Another aspect of research is the keyword research. That’s where you are actually looking at what users are searching for. The methods used in keyword research for on-page optimization are well-known. You are going to have to apply same methods to see what your audience wants to see; and then use this data to get links.

Poor tracking and automation

Link building is not game to just make the links and watch the traffic coming in. you are going to have to do effective organization to make sure that you are getting results.For this purpose, you need to maintain and organize data about the link building opportunities as well as information about the traffic which you are already getting from the existing links.