We are proud to announce that Squirrly SEO has recently made the list of FrontRunners for top SEO Platforms Software on Software Advice.
Software Advice’s FrontRunners list features the top products in a certain category, ranking tools based on usability and customer satisfaction (as rated by user reviews).
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This is our 8th Year since Squirrly SEO was launched on the market, and every single feedback we’ve received has contributed to improving Squirrly SEO a lot!
We love learning from our users’ experience. Your feedback and your ideas …they are extremely valuable to us and we’ve already implemented many of them.
The number of updates and fixes we’ve done in April and May now reached over 50, so I decided to highlight them with this article and show you what we’ve been doing for:
Here they are:
Yoast SEO Import tested and working:
– Posts / Pages / Products – Custom SEO Snippets in Yoast
– Patterns for Posts, Pages, Categories, Tags, Products, Custom Tax
– Custom Post Type – Custom SEO Snippet in Yoast
– Custom Post Type Taxonomy- Custom SEO Snippet in Yoast
– Custom Taxonomy – Custom SEO Snippet in Yoast
– Author Profiles – Custom SEO Snippet in Yoast
– Product Attributes MPN, ISBN, EAN (GTIN-13), UPC (GTIN-12), GTIN from Yoast E-Commerce plugin
– Main Category JSON-LD
– Organization/Personal name and logo for JSON-LD
– Social Media – Facebook Admin ID, Facebook App, Social Media Profiles
– Webmasters – GSC, Bing
This can now be found in All Snippets in the visibility section.
Snippets in All Snippet – Bulk SEO
Snippet when Editing Page
Snippet on the Front-End
It’s a new way of doing re-directs and complements our automatic redirect feature.
You can now decide when to redirect an existing page, custom post type, blog post, product, etc. to a new URL.
In the past, the SEO Live Assistant was the only feature from Squirrly SEO that wasn’t fully integrated with Divi and required the workaround of having to create the content on our Cloud App and then copy-paste parts of it into the design of the page.
This is NO longer required and it will be easier to optimize Divi content.
Improve the WooCommerce Product and Orders JSON-LD Schema with the required data.
Add default data for JSON-LD AggregateRating, Offers, SKU, MPN when they are missing from the product to avoid GSC errors.
Enable Squirrly to include additional metadata fields for WooCommerce Products Inventory Section:
MPN – Manufacturer Part Number (MPN)
ISBN – Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) for books
EAN (GTIN-13)– Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) for the major GTIN used outside of North America
UPC (GTIN-12) – Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) for North America
GTIN – Global Trade Item Number (GTIN)
Squirrly will also include additional metadata fields for product brands in the Product Advanced Section.
To avoid any errors in Google Search Console and Rich Snippet validation, Squirrly SEO will add default data for JSON-LD AggregateRating, Review, Offers, SKU, MPN.
Update – Add the option to import the SEO Snippets from All In One SEO (Patterns, SEO METAs, Open Graph, Twitter Card, Noindex, Nofollow)
Update – Add the option to import the SEO Snippets from SEO FrameWork (SEO METAs, Open Graph, Twitter Card, 301 Redirects, Noindex)
Update – Add the option to import the Settings from Rank Math (Social Media, JSON-LD, Webmasters)
Update – Add the option to import the SEO Snippets from Rank Math (Patterns, SEO METAs, Open Graph, Twitter Card, Noindex)
Update – Add the option to import the Settings from SEO Press (Social Media, JSON-LD, Webmasters)
Update – Add the option to import the SEO Snippets from SEO Press (Patterns, SEO METAs, Open Graph, Twitter Card, 301 Redirects, Noindex)
Why should you use Squirrly’s Live Assistant?
To answer this question, we need to look at what this feature from Squirrly SEO actually does.
The Live Assistant checks your article in real-time to make sure it’s optimized for SEO and therefore has the best chances to rank on Google.
So, basically, it acts like an evolved on-page SEO Checklist, checking your writing, and guiding your steps towards 100% Optimization.
So, why should you use it?
Here’s a pretty good reason to start with:
“On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67.60% of all the clicks.” (source)
If you want to be among those first results that get most of the clicks, you should make sure you are checking all the boxes that help you achieve that goal.
And optimizing your articles is one of those checkboxes.
We’re not the only ones stressing how important it is to optimize your content if you want to rank on Google.
Top SEO experts have their own SEO Checklists where they talk about essential things you should focus on to achieve better rankings. And content optimization is almost always at the top of their list.
Now, when they talk about content optimization, SEO experts will often break this process down into smaller actions, like adding the keyword in your titles, adding your keywords in the first part of your post, and so on.
The reason I’m telling you this is that the majority of those must-do tasks suggested by them are actually covered by Squirrly’s Live Assistant feature.
The rest of them are either covered by our Focus Pages feature or the Audit feature.
I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have a computer keep tabs of everything I need to do to rank higher on Google – than try to make sense of everything on my own.
So, without further ado, let’s see what today’s renowned SEO experts have included in their SEO Checklists when it comes to content optimization – and how all those checks are covered by Squirrly’s Live Assistant.
First, we will take a look at some statistics, as there is no better confirmation that you should be working on something than some good ol’ stats.
Here’s one that speaks volumes about the importance of keywords being present in the URL when it comes to ranking higher on Google:
A study of 1 Million Pages revealed that Webpages with their target keyword in their URL tend to rank higher in Google than pages that don’t have the keyword in the URL. (source)
“Write an SEO-friendly URL that includes the primary keyword.” – Alexa
“Before anything else, your URL has to be descriptive and meaningful (please avoid weird number and random letter combinations!). And of course the URL is a very good place for your keywords.” – SEMrush
“In all, both long and short, keyword-rich, generic URLs do well in the search engine results pages (SERPs), especially when the content is useful and easy to implement.” – Neil Patel
“Google likes URLs that contain your title and or keywords in the post, but shorter URLs are generally better.” – Kinsta
” …the URL is an opportunity to present a clean directory structure that includes keywords and context as to what the page is about.” – Search Engine Journal
” …another benefit of using descriptive URLs: They tend to include your target keyword.” – Ahrefs
“Your URL helps Google understand what your page is all about. And a keyword-rich URL can improve your organic CTR.” – Backlinko
As you can see, we are not the only ones that highlight the importance of having the keyword present in the URL.
We are now taking a look at the title. The title should be Google Friendly and should also contain the keyword. Just like before, we’ll check out some statistics first:
“It’s no secret that you should use your keyword in your title tag. But not as many people know that WHERE you put your keyword matters. Specifically, you want to put your keyword in the front of your title tag.” – Backlinko
“Be mindful of best practices for length and the keywords that are most relevant to the page topic and write and implement static tags or ensure that you have dynamic formulas in place to populate the title.” – Search Engine Journal
“It is important that you have your main “focus keyword” that you want to rank for in your blog post or page title tag.” – Kinsta
“Title tags: Title tags define the title of your web page or document. They’re mostly used to display preview snippets of your web pages. When you’re writing your title tag, it should be short, clear and descriptive but don’t duplicate content from the page content.” – Neil Patel
“Write a title that is appealing to both search engines and audiences. Serve search engines by including the primary keyword near the beginning of the headline, and serve audiences by writing a descriptive yet concise title that tells readers why the content is valuable.” – Alexa
“It is at the top of our on page SEO checklist and is critical for attracting the user’s attention and increasing the page CTR.” – SEMrush
“…it’s important to optimize for long-tail variations too.
Doing this is easy. Sprinkle them throughout your content wherever they make sense. Just don’t overdo it or shoehorn keywords where they don’t belong—the readability of your content should always take priority.” – Ahrefs
“While much of the old school focus on latent semantic indexing, keyword density, and formulas for how many times words need to appear in a page are obsolete, you can’t ignore the fact that body copy on the page often accounts for the biggest block of indexable content.” – Search Engine Journal
“And, over the years, Clark and his prolific team have produced some of the best blog posts and articles around. Through consistent and proper use of keyword phrase content marketing techniques, Brian Clark turned a blog (copyblogger.com) into a $7 million digital company.” – Neil Patel
See what renowned industry experts are saying about this.
“…don’t obsess over using a keyword 37 times. Do what’s natural and focus on the bigger picture and you’ll be in good shape.” – Search Engine Journal
“As a best practice, use the term two to three times per 100 words to create a 2-3% keyword density. Try to avoid going over this limit to avoid keyword stuffing issues.” – Alexa
Let’s hear it from praised SEO experts.
“Fail to convince readers that your page offers what they want within a few seconds and they’ll hit that back button faster than you can say “dwell time.”” – Ahrefs
“Even when you create SEO content for the purpose of ranking, always remember that your number one focus should be your readers. Create high-quality content that is valuable, useful, and well-written.” – Alexa
“But it is not just Google who decides if your content deserves a higher position – it is your readers as well. Google doesn’t read your work and grade you with an “A” for excellent wording or exclusiveness of insights; it estimates a level of interest for your article by taking into account users’ behavior and your text’s availability.” – SEMrush
“Be mindful of best practices for length and the keywords that are most relevant to the page topic and write and implement static tags or ensure that you have dynamic formulas in place to populate the title.” – Search Engine Journal
“…remember that title tags not only affect SEO but also your clickthrough rate (CTR). Some have reported seeing 20% increases in CTR simply by making small tweaks to their titles.” – Kinsta
“When you’re writing your title tag, it should be short, clear and descriptive but don’t duplicate content from the page content.” – Neil Patel
One of the first things a possible customer will see when searching for something on Google is the Title of a post.
You might be tired of hearing about keywords all the time.
But the reason we keep bringing them up is that they are extremely important to your SEO success. And we’re not the only ones who say it.
“Don’t skip out on including your focus keywords in the body copy as you need to tie into the context you’re building in the other areas up to this point.” – Search Engine Journal
“The first paragraph of your post and pages content in WordPress is very important! It is always recommended to add your focus keyword within the first paragraph if possible. The reason is that Google crawls content from top to bottom, and if it finds your keyword there it can help deem your article as more relevant to the topic.” – Kinsta
“You’ll also notice that when you start creating in-depth content, you’ll see a corresponding increase in traffic from long-tail searches, a very specific keyword phrase indicating buyer positioning and urgency.” – Neil Patel
“To provide users with the most relevant results for their particular search terms, use your target keywords within the first 100-150 words of your text and add some additional weight by placing semantically related words.” – SEMrush
Making sure that keywords are included not only in the URL and the title but also within the content can and will make the difference in terms of whether a page ranks on Google or not.
Make sure you don’t just include your keyword in the introduction but throughout the article/page as well.
Many SEO experts agree that bolding your keywords is a content optimization practice that can improve your chances of ranking.
“When you make pages easier to read, you’ll be raising the user’s level of expertise and so increasing the chance that many will be linking back to your page. This indirect technique will increase search engine rankings (SEO) and is the solely method I feel bold and italics can have an effect on your page.” – SEO Clerk
“But, that has changed (as all things do in SEO) and we are glad to report that bolding your primary keyword in article content does give a small bump. Pretty Cool huh!” – SEO Intelligence Agency
You should use your keywords in the headline as well but don’t overdo it. Don’t use your keyword in all your headlines, as it will not help you get better SEO results.
You can see what experts are saying about this as well:
“Make sure to include your keyword in H1, H2 or H3 tags.” – Backlinko
“Scannability. Having your keyword in the H1 helps to reinforce that the visitor is in the right place. It makes it clear that your content tackles the topic they likely Googled before arriving on your page.” – Ahrefs
“If you can use heading tags, do so in an organized fashion and make sure they use keywords that are relevant. Try to use just one H1 tag and have it be the first.” – Search Engine Journal
“The H1 tag is one of your most important header and should contain your focus keyword. Additional headers could also include your keyword or long-tail variations of your keyword.” – Kinsta
“H1, H2, and H3 header tags are still super important. You want to make sure that the title of your page is the H1 and so forth. But just to check on all of that would be good.” – Moz
“Tie your content back to the main keyword by using the primary keyword in at least one of your subheadings. Use it in more than one subheading if it is natural and makes sense.” – Alexa
“In technical SEO language – don’t forget to use H1…H6 tags for your subheads (and place your target keywords in the subheads, of course).” – SEMrush
Using images in your blog articles can help you get 94% more views.
However, it’s not only important that you use images in your content. You also need to make sure that you use keywords in the alt text of the image to help search engines better understand your content.
“The images you use say a lot about your content.
Unfortunately, Google is really bad at reading images.
So to help them understand your images, you want to optimize your image alt tags and filenames.” – Backlinko
“The purpose of alt tags is to offer some context to the reader should the image fail to load (or if the visitor is using a screen reader).
For that reason, you should make sure alt tags are descriptive—this will often result in the natural inclusion of your target keywords.
Alt text is also helpful for ranking in Google Images.” – Ahrefs
“One of the biggest red flags I get in results from accessibility and on-page auditing reporting tools is missing alt text. Alt text is helpful for the search engines to understand what an image is about.” – Search Engine Journal
“ALT tags are used by Google to see how relevant your image is to the content around it. […] You should always add ALT text to your images. And if you haven’t been, go back and do it now.” – Kinsta
“Make the content more interesting to readers and show search engines that the content is valuable by adding at least one image to the page.” – Ahrefs
“…add the primary keyword to the image alt tag for the graphic.” – Ahrefs
“Descriptive image file names and the use of ALT tags can help images from your page appear in Google image search results and help those that are visually impaired understand the page better.” – SEMrush
As you saw from this article, Squirrly’s Live Assistant makes it easy to follow expert-approved best practices for optimizing content – so that you can do SEO like a PRO and give your content the best chances to succeed out there.
How often do you use this feature from Squirrly?
When it comes to successful SEO, it’s not enough to do just a few things right.
There are many pieces in the SEO puzzle that need to fit together to create an image of success.
And considering that there are more than 200 ranking factors that Google takes into account to rank your pages, doing the work necessary to get every piece of the puzzle right can take up a lot of time and effort.
However, not all ranking factors are equal in Google’s eyes.
Certain factors might influence Google’s algorithm more, and some you can use to compensate for the ones you still haven’t checked off your list.
You can make up for the fact that you haven’t had time to build strength in certain “muscles” of your site by being smart with how you craft your strategy.
You can get Google’s attention even if you’re competing with bigger sites that have more authority than you.
You just need to know what to focus on.
To learn how to do this, you need to familiarize yourself with two main pillars of SEO:
By understanding these key concepts and how they influence your chances of ranking, you’ll be better equipped to come up with a ranking strategy. One that takes into consideration the level your site is at right now.In other words, you’ll know which path to take and what to focus on to achieve the best results.
Okay, so let’s get to it then and start with the first one from our list: Authority.
The best way to explain what Authority refers to in an SEO context is to use an example.
Let’s say you want to learn more about Impressionism, the famous 19th-century art movement. You could ask your next-door neighbor about it.
But unless your neighbor is a knowledgeable art teacher with years of experience, chances are that you are not going to learn much this way.
Another thing you could do is go to an art university.
You could talk to one of the professors there; someone who specializes in Impressionism and whose knowledge has been vetted by an authority in this domain (the art university which employs him).
Or you could go to the library and buy some books on this topic who have been recommended by other readers who are interested in this art movement.
Would you rather get your information from your next-door neighbor who doesn’t know much about art? Or from an authoritative source, like an art professor or an insightful book which many others have bought?
The answer is obvious – and authority plays a key role in how you’ve made your decision.
Search Engines also take Authority into account when figuring out which results to serve their users.
Remember, their top priority is to make their users happy (you can learn more about this in our Ultimate SEO Beginner’s Guide).
Therefore, search engines like Google want to provide the most authoritative (relevant) results that perfectly match their users’ search queries.
Now, the question is: how do search engines evaluate authority? We’ll answer that next.
There are several things that Search Engines look at to determine Authority, but the two main categories that take center stage are:
1. Content (which is also part of the relevance pillar)
2. Links
A search engine will read and analyze the content as well as other elements like the page language, the structure, and more to determine how well the page covers the topic – and how useful it might be to a visitor.
After the search engine understands the content of the page and indexes it, it will move to external signals to determine the level of authority of the page for its intended topic.
To do this, it will take a look at the links that pages have received from other websites.
It’s not just the number of links that counts, though.
The quality of those links matters as well.
Getting relevant, trustworthy sources to link to your content is what you want.
So, you shouldn’t just focus on link quantity to build the Authority of your site. If you are solely focusing on quantity with no regard for quality, you may be sabotaging your SEO efforts.
Why?
Google might penalize you if it looks like the links you got were obtained in an artificial way instead of an organic way.
It’s better to focus on quality and have relevant domains linking back to you.
For example:
Say you’ve published an ultimate guide on dog food, and you receive two backlinks, one from Bob’s Dog Training School website and one from Jay’s Nails and Bolts eCommerce store.
Which one of the two do you think is more valuable?
Ding!Ding!Ding!
You got it!
It’s the one from the dog training school, as it is more RELEVANT. It tells Google that your guide is pretty good, as others in this niche are recommending it by linking to it.
Remember that the relevance of the linking page and site impacts how valuable the link really is.
Now that you know more about what authority is, let’s move on to Relevance – the second pillar of SEO we’re talking about today.
There’s a whole lot of content being published every second. We’re talking millions of new pages every single day.
In fact, for every search query a user makes, Google has to choose from about 22 Million pages that it can display.
So, it needs a way to assess which websites in their index are best able to meet the user’s requirements.
It needs to figure out which of the pages it can display are actually relevant (when we talk about relevance, we talk about how appropriate a specific page is for a specific query).
The better a text or the content of a page matches a search query, the more likely it is that it will achieve a good ranking.
To sort the wheat from the chaff and provide relevant results to their users, search engines such as Google use complex algorithms that analyze the content on your page, how that content is structured, and more.
Optimizing your pages for keywords is the best tactic you can use to create search relevance. You can learn more about this here.
In the old days of SEO, it was often enough to just use the exact keyword as the search query in the body of the content numerous times to rank for that keyword.
Now, the algorithm is a lot more sophisticated.
You have to make sure you are using the right SEO keywords when optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions, as well as the content.
Then, you need to pay attention to the website architecture, inner linking, proper rendering, and indexability, among others.
As you can see, improving your website’s search relevance can take a bit of work. But if you’re using features from Squirrly such as the Live Assistant and the Focus Pages, it’s not that complicated.
Plus, the benefits are considerable.
Data from our study suggests that one can compensate for having pages with low authority by working on optimizing their content.
This is most evident for sites that are in the 40 to 49 SEO score segment in our study. (SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook).
In ContentLook, an SEO score of over 40 indicates that the sites which received it are investing a lot of time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.
That said, let’s get back to our 40 to 49 SEO segment.
To make it easier to see the relationship between Authority and SEO relevance:
If you take a look at the image above, you can see how the metric: SEO Score per article is influenced by the metric: Number of keywords Article is optimized for per 100 pages.
The metric: SEO Score per article is directly proportional to the: Number of keywords Article is optimized for per 100 pages.
What does this mean?
It means that the sites that are optimizing for more keywords are also paying closer attention to on-page SEO; making sure they are optimizing their content by incorporating keywords in strategic places across their pages.
Now, by looking at the Page Authority per article metric, we can see that the site that has optimized for the largest number of keywords has the lowest authority, but is still able to compete with the rest of the sites included in this study.
That’s because the owner of that site is focused on improving his page’s search relevance.
Of course, the pillars we talk about in this article are connected to one another. You can influence one by focusing on the other and vice versa.
By working on improving your search relevance, you also improve your chances of becoming an authoritative source of content.
Having a website full of well-researched and optimized content that is relevant to your niche will help Google see you as an expert in the industry.
This will help increase your authority and your chances of ranking among the top positions in Google.
Now you know more about two key pillars of SEO:
By optimizing using the SEO Live Assistant to create search relevance, you can compete with other domains with much bigger authority than yours. If you want to see how we managed to outrank Amazon (yes, the Amazon) using this method, you should read this.
That said, it’s also true that by being a more authoritative site, you have a better chance to rank for more keywords (without having to work as much to create search relevance as sites with lower authority).
Which of these two pillars of SEO are you focusing on right now?
Do you ever feel like SEO is too difficult – too difficult to even be worth the effort?
Let me tell you… you’re not the only one.
Look, the world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing.
HOWEVER, the basics of SEO are not that complicated. You can easily understand them, and even a small amount of SEO knowledge can make a big difference.
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Did Your Rankings Go Down?
Here’s why: Positions on Google fluctuate every single day. Today you might go up, tomorrow you might go down.
This is the way that search engines work and it’s not something that you should be afraid of.
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