All you Squirrly users out there have probably noticed that the WordPress SEO plugin by Squirrly is more powerful than ever.
This article will focus on the Live Assistant feature, and how it can help create human-friendly content every single time.
Your readers are not bots, so it’s paramount that your content is not only optimized for search engines, but for humans as well.
In this article, I will explain why we chose to incorporate the human-friendly aspect into Squirrly and how you can use it to your advantage.
A Few Words about the Premises of the Industry
Many businesses today are constantly increasing how much they spend on content marketing.
However, not all of them have a sky-rocketing budget they can invest. That’s why they need a WordPress SEO plugin to simplify their work.
But with all the algorithm updates Google is constantly making, creating content that is both human-friendly and search engine friendly might seem like a difficult task.
Needless to say, keyword stuffing and creating useless or duplicated information is not a good idea. But that is not what SEO is about.
WordPress SEO plugins are meant to make your content easier to find for people searching for topics related to your business.
The Live Assistant from Squirrly takes things even further and gives you actionable advice on how to write content visitors will enjoy.
This way, when visitors will come across your content, they will have the best reading experience possible.
Creating content for Humans is the first and most important task for your site. That’s why we wanted to include this into our plugin and really get into detail.
More about the Human-Friendly Option in the WordPress SEO Plugin by Squirrly
The earlier versions of the WordPress SEO plugin by Squirrly only checked that you didn’t do overstuffing throughout the article.
Since then, we realized that even if an article isn’t stuffed from our perspective, it might seem forced.
Why? Because if you repeat a word for too many times in a paragraph, that section becomes unpleasant to read.
Making sure that the Human-Friendly section is green before you hit Publish is an essential step in the content creation process.
The Easy Way to Create Human-Friendly Content
When adding a new post to your blog, you first need to choose the keyword you are targeting.
After you insert your title and start writing, some of your tasks will instantly become green.
The over-optimization task is the one that will alert you about stuffing keywords, something that’s not a good idea if you want to stay on Google’s good side.
Red means something requires your attention.
For the example below, I used the keyword “Human-Friendly content”. I used the word ‘content’ (not the whole keyword) 10 times in 139 words.
As you can see in the image below, The WordPress SEO plugin by Squirrly suggested I eliminate 4 of those words.
If you hover over the word ‘content’ that you see highlighted in yellow, all the words “content” in your text will be highlighted and counted.
If you go on to the second one, a list of synonyms you can use to substitute that word will appear.
Make sure you take the correct semantic interpretation of the word. The WordPress SEO plugin can not assume which is the right meaning of the word in that particular context.
Now that we’ve taken care of this problem either by eliminating or substituting the repeated words with synonyms, we can move on.
As you can see in the image below, my keywords were used too close together.
To solve this, I have to add more phrases in-between them or eliminate some. If I placed the cursor above the ‘2nd’, it would show me which of the keywords it is referring to.
For the other 3 red words which are part of my targeted keywords, Squirrly gives a list of synonyms for each of them.
The WordPress SEO plugin by Squirrly is giving you this specific information so that you can write better content that will rank higher on SERPs and ultimately convert better.
After I solved this problem, I kept on writing and totally forgot about my keyword. After a few lines, the plugin reminded me to add a keyword in the conclusion of the text.
Why does this aspect of the WordPress SEO plugin by Squirrly make your posts more human-friendly?
Because you should make a reference to the topic you are writing about – which is connected to the keyword – again in the end of the article, so as to state the main takeaway.
This will ensure that your post has a strong conclusion that is relevant to the rest of the article.
Time to Draw Some Conclusions!
Now you know why it is important to focus on your readers when creating content and then perfect it for Search.
I hope you now better understand how to use the information and tips the Live Assitant offers to create articles that are more enjoyable and convert more traffic.
Do you have any firing questions for us? Let me know in the comment section below!
As we let you know in a previous article, October comes with exciting news for us Squirrlyans – as well as for all those looking for a new social media management solution that covers all their needs.
A while back, we asked people in our community about what were the things they most struggle with when it comes to social media management. The response we got was tremendous.
The answers showed that despite the social media tools and software that are already available on the market, there are still many aspects that people would like to change and improve when it comes to how they post to social media.
The responses served as a great confirmation that Squirrly Social is a much-needed social media management solution. We think it’s a game changer, and we’re extremely happy that it’s going to help so many busy marketers, business owners, and social media professionals looking for a better way to manage their accounts.
You should know Squirrly Social has been released in BETA, so people have already had the chance to put it to the test. There are over 100 business owners and marketers who purchased a subscription in early pre-release.
That said, Squirrly Social is soon to be officially launched, making it the newest addition to the Squirrly Software Universe!
Given that it’s a special occasion, we wanted to properly introduce you to Squirrly Social, and share more details about all the amazing ways it can help you enhance your social media presence and grow your audience.
This is the change you’ve been waiting for.
Get Ready to Live Your Best Life as a Social Media Marketer
Remember when social media was exciting? When it actually felt meaningful – not just mandatory?
Nowadays, social media management seems a lot different, right? Somehow, it’s hectic yet dull at the same time.
It feels like you’re always stuck doing laundry in the basement and never getting a chance to mingle with the cool people at the rooftop party.
It’s like you never have time for the Social part of Social media anymore – it’s just endless clicking and tedious tasks you have to do day in, day out to keep a sort-of active presence across all your accounts. And with the number of social media networks continually expanding, it can get pretty crazy, pretty fast.
Squirrly Social was built to help you break that pattern by simply automating the tasks that eat up your time.
Whether you manage social media accounts for a single brand, 10, or 30, you can be successful without constant ‘hands-on’ work being required.
Squirrly Social significantly cuts your workload while helping you reach a bigger audience and boost traffic.
In other words, it helps you do your social media “laundry” a lot faster by giving you the BEST tools to speed up content curation, posts planning, scheduling, and posting for multiple accounts from a single dashboard.
How?
⇒ No more wasting time combing through curated posts struggling to find the right content to keep your audience engaged. You’ll have your very own Social Media Assistant working to discover fresh, relevant and interesting curated posts. How much time saved are we talking here? Well, how does 2 weeks’ worth of posts with hashtags and emojis in just 3 minutes sound like? It’s not just empty talk; it’s been tested and proven. It works.
⇒ Stay Active Minus the Hassle. You’ll be able to create a post and instantly share it on all your profiles. Or schedule it for later and see it in your Calendar. Also works the other way around: you can add a new Post right from your Calendar.
⇒ Automatically Adds the Best Hashtags to Posts for Maximum Exposure on Social Media (AI-based feature). This way, you can get to avoid the time drain of researching the best hashtags and adding them manually to each post.
⇒ Automatically Adds emojis to Posts. If you’re not using emojis to add visual interest and make your posts a lot more fun, you’re missing out on a whole lot of engagement. Emojis have become a natural part of the digital conversation. So if you want to truly speak the language of your customers, use emojis in most of your posts. Worried it might be too much of a bother? It doesn’t have to be. With one click, Squirrly Social adds relevant emojis to your posts, and it will be just like you were the one who did it. Go you!
⇒ Build up and Organize a Unified Social Media Calendar on Ninja Mode. With Post Planer, you can create, edit, schedule and publish all your social media posts with ease so that there’s always something going on across your profiles.
⇒ You Can Schedule Your Posts Based on Categories. For instance, you can create an Evergreen Category with posts that you know will be relevant to your audience even a few months from now. You can then easily schedule those posts for days when you have nothing to share- for as long as you need it – and make your Evergreen content work harder than ever before!
This Is Social Media Management that Feels Grown Up
If you only have a couple of minutes to get to know Squirrly Social, read this:
Social Media Assistant for Content Discovery
Keyword-based filter for advanced content curation to ensure you never run out of interesting things to share on your accounts
Pre-Plan your Social Media Calendar with ease
Schedule your posts based on Categories with Post Planner. Simple and Advanced Timings setups are available
Visual Calendar where You Can See All Posts in Your Queue
Automated Social Media Scheduling. Keep posts in rotation at selected times to fill in the gaps in your social media calendar
Boost Website and Blog Traffic through Evergreen Publishing
Connects with your favorite networks – Facebook Page, Facebook Group (via Buffer), Twitter Profile, Pinterest (via Buffer) LinkedIn Person, LinkedIn Page, Instagram (via Buffer)
A Few Extra Cool Features to Make Your Social Media Life More Convenient
Link shortening
No limit to how many posts you can schedule
Repeat publications
Stores all the media your brand has uploaded in a dedicated Library
Awesome for Teams and Multiple Brand Management
Team collaboration features that play perfectly into team workflows
A single place to create and Approve posts. Publish the right posts, every time.
Two Guarantees that Turn You into One Happy Customer
The Squirrly Guarantee for Excellent Customer Service for all plans. Don’t worry; we got you. 🙂
30-day money-back guarantee for all plans. You have 30 Days to change your mind. Yep, that’s how much we believe in the value Squirrly Social can provide.
Gain Back the Time to Focus on the Things that Only You Can Do
Look, so far, there’s no social media software who can fully perceive irony, make a witty comment, appreciate the value of a cat meme, or spot opportunities to engage in meaningful interactions online.
So, your time is better spent doing the things that no tool can do.
The things that require empathy, a sense of humor maybe, and clever comebacks that showcase the humanity and the charisma behind your brand.
With Squirrly Social, you can supercharge growing your accountsand be a part of the online conversations that matter. Remove the time-wastey parts from your workflow, and gain back the time you need to focus on building meaningful relationships and connecting with customers. Or watch cat videos (hey, that’s always on the table).
Be a Part of the Official Launch Event and Get Exclusive Details
The launch event is completely FREE, but it’s for those who register-only, so make sure to reserve a seat as soon as possible. We can’t wait to chat and share a few surprises as well.
Melissa Blevins is a Squirrly SEO user and likes to describe herself as a free-spirited nerd (we relate). She’s passionate about equipping women with practical tips and tools to stop the money struggle and start living their best life!
Like many aspiring bloggers and site owners, Melissa managed to turn her passion into profit via her site by reaching an audience who is genuinely interested in what she has to offer.
That’s a goal many of you reading this can probably relate to.
Recently, she shared an article on her site detailing some of the steps she took to make one of her posts rank on the first page of Google – and how Squirrly SEO PRO helped her climb that mountain.
After all, that’s the dream, right? Show up on the 1st Page of Google and get a significant boost in traffic to your site. But if it were easy, then everyone would do it.
Well, as you’ll see from this post, it’s possible to achieve amazing rankings, even if you’re not an SEO expert or a huge brand.
Here are some of Melissa’s amazing Results according to the information she shared with her audience; her SEO success story as it translates into numbers:
She managed to rank on the first Page of Google with her post about reasons to buy a mobile home. And she did it in 1.5 hours since publishing.
She currently has 8 posts on page one of Google with several on page 2 and 3 that are slowly moving up in the ranking
Impressive traffic volume. Up to 10,000 blog page views on her 4th month blogging.
We win by helping others win, so we’re always super excited when a Squirrly PRO user decides to share their success story and how using the plugin contributed to that success.
To us, it’s an ongoing confirmation of the kind of value people get when using the Squirrly PRO features. It’s undeniable evidence that Squirrly works when you are willing to do your part as well.
That being said, we like to treat every success story as a great learning opportunity because we firmly believe in the value of sharing experiences and growing world knowledge.
So read on to find out more about the strategies behind the success, and how you can leverage the same tactics and tools to shape your own SEO success story.
This article will focus on Keyword Research, a practice you’ll find at the heart of any SEO success story.
It’s a great day to grow your knowledge, so let’s get this party started!
Lesson 1: Search Volume and Picking the Right Keywords
The search volume is a metric that tells you how many people searched for your topic in the exact way that you wrote it.
If you’re a real estate agent and want to get people to work with you on their transactions, you’ll naturally want to write content that would genuinely interest them like What to Look for when Going Home Shopping or How to Sell a Property Faster.
But it goes deeper than that.
For instance, the majority of people may not look for how to sell a property faster. Instead, they may look for something like: “home selling tips.” Or it’s possible that they will use their location in the query to get specific results and thus type in: “how to sell a property in San Francisco.”
Let’s take another example and say you want to write an article about inexpensive dog food. Your first guess may be to use affordable dog food as your keyword.
But is it really the best keyword? With Squirrly SEO, you eliminate the guesswork.
As you see from the screenshot below, the keyword “affordable dog food” only has 100-500 Search Volume, compared to “affordable dog food brands” that has 1297 Search Volume and it’s easy to rank for, as far as Competition goes.
The keyword research was done using the Keyword Research tool from Squirrly SEO, and what it shows you- for this particular example – is that it will be more profitable for you, in the long run, to write about “affordable dog food brands” rather than “affordable dog food.”
You need to know these things before you start creating content and optimizing it for keywords you assume might work but probably won’t. If you don’t use the words that your audience is using, you are missing out on the potential to attract the right people to your site.
With Squirrly, it’s easy to pick keywords that your audience and potential customers will actually write down into Google search when looking for topics. That’s because the Keyword Research provides accurate, up-to-date Search Volume Data for the country you are targeting.
What’s more, you will get plenty of relevant suggestions for high-potential, long-tail keywords. One of the main reasons to target long-tail keywords is that they’re easier to rank for. In other words, you won’t be competing with industry-leading companies on these keywords.
So instead of targeting a head keyword like “dog food” that has lots of competition and that all the industry big fish out there are targeting, you could go for a long-tail keyword that is more specific, such as “dog food for large dogs.”
The search volume could be lower-but so will the competition.
And sometimes, you can strike gold and find incredible long-tail keywords with high search volume and low competition.
In the screenshot below, you can see some of the keyword suggestions Squirrly provided for the topic “dog food” and the associated data for each of them.
Always look at Search Volume in connection to the Competition data to find the best keywords to target. Read that again; it’s essential.
Lesson 2: Leverage Trend Data to Boost Traffic
The trend of a keyword shows you how popular the topic is over time. In other words, it lets you see the level of interest for a certain keyword. The best thing about knowing the trend of a keyword is that you can identify incredible opportunities to bring in traffic and increase your rankings.
It can also help you build a better timeline and tell you what is the best time to begin pushing a particular piece of content more aggressively.
These opportunities come around consistently and, usually, they are related to things like:
Seasonality. Search terms such as umbrellas or raincoats are obviously more popular during the rainy season.
Holidays, such as Mother’s Day.
Important events, like the World Cup.
An high-notoriety launch or release.
A significant change within a certain industry. GDPR, anyone?
Social Campaigns
As you may have seen from the screenshot above, you can turn to Squirrly’s keyword research to get information related to the Trend of a keyword as well. You’ll find it under the Trend section, in one of these forms:
Steady. We recommend that you target keywords that have a Steady trend. You don’t want to waste time creating content for falling topics.
Going Up. When you see the trend for a keyword “Going Up,” it could be a great indicator that it may be time to start creating and optimizing content for that topic. This will leave you enough time to prepare the actual content. If you create it now and rank it before anyone else, it means that there will be a lot more search volume in the future for your piece. It has the opportunity to give you a long-lasting free traffic source.
Failing. It shows you that people are beginning to lose interest in that particular topic, so it may be best to consider other options.
Sky-rocketing. Like “Going Up”, but like: way better. This is more like a “high risks; high rewards” type. Sometimes big media sites like INC and Forbes start targeting these and then you’ll have new competition which is pretty tough to beat. However if other don’t outrank you in time, then this is a great choice, because the search volume will get huge and you’ll be getting more and more readers as time goes by.
Now that you know how to find that data, the natural question is “So how can you make this information valuable to your business?”
Well, you can exploit that information to get inspired to create new blog posts that will bring traffic to your site. You can be among the first to write an in-depth resource about a trending topic – if it’s relevant to your audience.
For instance, if you run a blog about crafts and DIY, you could put together a fun guide about Best DIY Gift to Give Your Mom on Mother’s Day – and publish it a few days before.
Sometimes, the window of opportunity is small for these things, and you have to be quick to create the content.
Lesson 3: Build a Strategy around Your Keywords
It’s not important to only pick the best keywords. You have to build a strategy around them, and you have to do it in a way that allows you to stay focused and ensure consistency. Easier said than done, right?
Well, better done than skipped.
SEO results grow and expand over time. Your site is not static, it grows and moves at the pace of your goals and the work you put into it. Consistency is the name of the game here, so the more organized you are, the more chances you have to build a successful SEO strategy.
Keyword strategy is something that you need to continually tweak, re-calibrate, improve. You consistently have to add new keywords to your portfolio based on your active campaigns, goals, and needs.
Once you have a good list of keywords, it’s time to organize it. This was a need that several of our users have expressed, and the Briefcase feature is our solution to cover that need.
As you can see from the screenshot above, Briefcase offers a structured way to manage your keyword strategy and have a clear overview of your progress.
Notice that you can see the associated data for each Keyword you place in Briefcase. It also shows you how many times you’ve used that keyword to optimize articles or pages.
You can assign labels to keywords based on your current strategies and content marketing campaigns. Then, you can filter keywords based on labels.
Categorize keywords based on different stages in your Customer’s journey or any other criteria that help you stay organized, such “best opportunities”, “strong purchase intent.”
Ensure that everyone on your team of writers, if you have one, will know what keywords to focus on.
Lesson 4: The Tool You Use to Do Keyword Research Matters
In her article, Melissa Blevins said this: “There’s a specific system that new bloggers must follow to get their posts to rank on page one of Google. It starts with a great SEO plugin and keyword research. I can’t stand AdWords for keyword research as it’s clunky and not exactly accurate.”
Well, she’s right! Using AdWords’ Keyword Planner Tool (the kw planner from Google) to conduct Keyword Research so that you can rank in Organic Search Results is like buying a train ticket to Paris and expect the train to take you to Wakanda.
Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit for effect. Not that AdWords isn’t a valuable tool, it’s just that it’s not the right tool for the job, as AdWords is mostly linked to keyword competition for Paid Search.
Looking for the best keywords to rank for using AdWords may not show you ALL the valuable keyword phrases that have a high search volume connected to a word or phrase. It may show you some, but ‘some’ means you risk missing out.
If you don’t want to have to worry about that and know that you’ll be given the best keywords suggestions that your site can rank for, give Squirrly SEO a try today.
Lesson 5: Tracking Performance Is Essential to Future Performance
Your job is not over once you’ve published the article which you’ve optimized for a specific keyword. It’s important to track the Analytics and see how your article is performing.
This is yet another critical component of a healthy SEO strategy which Squirrly makes super easy to manage. In the Advanced Analytics section of the Squirrly Business Plan, you can access essential data, such as:
The Google Rank for a keyword you’ve targeted in an article or page,
Changes in ranking position for your articles and pages,
The Specific keyword your page ranked for,
Your Site’s overall ranking position,
The number of Social signals.
This way, you’ll know if the work you’ve done brought an improvement in the quality of your site and content or not, and go from there.
You Can Do It Too! Start Typing Your SEO Success Story
Like many other things in life, success in SEO boils down to mastering the basics.
And keyword research is for sure one of the essentials. Do keyword research, do it well, do it consistently, and results will come.
So, to recap; here are a few best practices inspired by Melissa’s success story that you can incorporate to keep ranking and reach the top positions in Google for queries that are relevant to your business and goals.
Look at Search Volume and competition data to find golden nugget keywords that have a high potential to bring targeted traffic to your site.
Identify top opportunities to bring in lots of traffic to your site by leveraging current trends.
Build a strategy around your keywords and be consistent with the content you publish.
Using Keyword Research Tools that show you results for Organic Search is paramount.
Do not underestimate the power of reliable Analytics. Tracking how your articles perform on Google is an essential component of any SEO Succes story.
Melissa’s success using Squirrly SEO is just one of many more.
300,000 Squirrly-surfaced keywords already ranked on Page 1 of Google.
In a single week, 6,200 new keywords researched and optimized with Squirrly SEO reached page 1 of Google.
You see, it’s possible to achieve exciting results even if you’re not an SEO expert or have massive resources. Take what you’ve learned today and use it to replicate this success story – or shape your own.
Give Squirrly PRO a try and start whipping up your SEO recipe for Success today!
Oftentimes, the art of online marketing seems to employ skills which rather resemble a flair for archery.
Designing campaigns, adjusting user experience or planning out a campaign budget – all these have something in common:
They HAVE to be well-aimed. Otherwise, you lose on marketing weaponry.
To avoid this, you need to shape up a local SEO strategy with solid local keyword research at its core.
Bottom line is that it’s costly not to set straightforward targets from the get-go.
As long as you follow the local path, your digital marketing efforts will no longer look like the GIF below. You’ll aim straight, fire off and win the game.
And the proper marketing projectiles you need throughout this process are, first and foremost, local keywords. In what follows,we’ll show how Squirrly SEO Plugin’s Keyword Research Tool helps you use them to move up the local rankings.
Discovering Searchers’ Intent
It’s a commonplace thing to say you have to know what customer segment you’re addressing.
Do they need your services to be delivered in 2 hours, 2 days or 2 weeks?
Do they need to carry out a thorough research before picking a provider for said needs?
Do they mainly use smartphone or desktop search?
Each one of these yields its specific importance in your local search strategy, so you need to craft and sort out keywords accordingly.
As a Hubspot research points out, 50% of smartphone users who searched for a local keyword have visited a local store within a day after.
That says a lot about purchase intent. Employ the proper local search strings and the intent will convert into actual customers flooding to your local store.
To understand local search intent, the best exercise is putting yourself in the searcher’s shoes.
When you’re looking for a local service, you will most likely:
Search for business hours
Directions to the local store
Local store address
Availability of product at local store
Which means you won’t surf the net just for the sake of it. You know you have to make up your mind as soon as possible.
This being the case, do you have time to analyze a dozen Google page results to see which is the most suitable to your needs?
Probably not.
The most probable scenario is you’ll pick a service provider from the first Google results page.
This thought process is a bit like reverse engineering, meaning you tried to reconstitute the local customer intent, so that you can use it to devise your own strategy.
Understanding Local SEO
With local optimization, you know your KPIs are well-defined – you’re looking for more customers, plain and simple.
However, as much as we’d like it, there’s no ultimate set of rules to follow when doing local keyword ch. It’s not an exact science.
Which means, rather than looking for an ultimate guide, you should strive to develop a framework which suits your needs.
For instance, not all local businesses which manage to get ahead of their competitors also convert better than them.
It’s about the local marketing prowess you manage to master.
Conducting several types of sustainable campaigns is more beneficial than focusing only on Adwords. It will ensure you also fare well from an organic ranking point of view.
Granted, the state of local SEO in 2017 is pretty much what it used to be last year. One mention, though: getting noticed on the first page is harder since Google displays 4 paid ads you have to fight with. Plus, there’s also the local competition you need to worry about.
Getting Started on a Smooth Local SEO Path
The natural move when you have local optimization in mind is having a look at the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Then, you need to answer these questions:
Who has the most visible websites for the topics and keywords you intend to use?
How optimized is your site for near me searches?
What competitors display Google Ads?
How do the high-ranking websites’ snippets look like?
Slight details, like optimized snippet content, may be decisive factors when you are vying for those valuable clicks which really convert.
Not to mention other criteria like the country you want to rank for. To give you an idea, let’s use Squirrly’s Keyword Research Tool and see the results for the same keyword aimed at different countries:
A Blueprint for Local SEO Best Practices
If you’re a newcomer to the world of local search engine optimization, you’ll most likely welcome a brief guide to this notion. And even if you’re not, Google’s constant algorithm changes almost force you to feel like one from time to time.
But this is a good thing, as you’ll be pushed to revise and reconsider your SEO practices on a regular basis.
That said, gaining more online visibility starts with paying attention to local ranking factors like:
Google My Business (GMB) signals. Make sure you complete your GMB profile with the latest information. A Local SEO Guide 2016 study ascertains that high-ranking websites in local searches present a common characteristic: their GMB signals – like Pictures, Owner Verified or Reviews – are all in check.
Links and website content. These are organic SEO aspects which seem to be a differentiating criteria for GMB rankings. It does matter what keywords you optimize for or how many words you have on a page.
Well-written location pages
Off-site local signals
Citations. Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP). Although they’re not quite high on the priority list, you shouldn’t neglect them.
Depending on your business niche and competition, the above factors can be prioritized to different degrees. In some cases, basic practices suffice, while in busier markets there are more local SEO efforts required of you.
All in all, local link building and optimized website content are – still! – the pillars of local rank-boosting.
To turn your site content into a Google Local magnet, make sure you start off with good old local keywords.
What a Local Keyword Research Has in Sight
Local keyword research is based on volume data. You have to make sense of what high vs low volume means in terms of local search intent.
Low volume can mean anything from zero volume to a few searches which are actually converted into purchases within a small perimeter.
To make sense of this, you’d normally have to compare the search volume for that keyword in larger surrounding areas. If in the latter case search volume is still reduced, you’ll know the “low” qualifier stands for a keyphrase people don’t type in a search engine bar.
This rationale, though, is based on a search psychology principle which states people in neighboring areas are likely to present a similar search behavior.
Another DIY technique here is letting Google Suggest offer you hints.
Start your phrase with a domain-related term, then add the name of the area you’re interested in. Google will retrieve a few phrases which post high volume search in the respective area.
Pay attention that results might show different items for mobile and desktop devices.
You can also look for related phrases which will be displayed in related SERPs. These are similar results, while what Google Suggest displays are similar topics. In both cases, you can gather useful keyword suggestions.
The only thing is, testing all the above for your local keyword research takes some time.
And, let’s face it, when you are delivering loads of content per week, you don’t have as much time as you’d like.
We’re excited to come up with some good news, though.
Squirrly SEO Plugin’s Improved Keyword Research Tool
A Squirrly SEO plugin user can optimize all the pages in their WordPress site by utilizing our keyword research tool.
The tool has been recently updated for finer insights.
What resulted was an uber powerful feature – we’ve heard it’s even more effective than some other keyword research tools out there. And to think this is only one of Squirrly SEO Plugin’s features (besides many others).
First, it retrieves 3 times more long-tail keywords, which increases the chances of getting the best local keyword to use in your pages.
Plus, Squirrly Keyword Research instantly analyzes your local competition and displays the likelihood you rank high.
Let’s see it in action now.
First, make sure you go to the right upper side of the tab to select the country you want to rank for – Squirrly now offers you 26 options:
When digging for local keywords, even the last minute details are important. Word order is one of them. It matters if you choose to optimize for “bookshop Atlanta” or “Atlanta bookshop” on Google.com.
Squirrly Keyword Research algorithm knows that and acts accordingly by displaying keyword insights which help you pick the best phrases:
Although this keyword is easy to rank for, you can see the exact search is low, which means people in Atlanta don’t search for books using the keyword we exemplified above. So, you should go further and explore other options.
Let’s try out “Atlanta bookstore”:
Voilà, it seems this is something which looks more like what you’d wish for. You get the number of exact matches, so that you know the volume that specific keyword has been searched for.
But how about going further with your research? Let’s reverse word order and we’ll get something better:
This time, you find out the trend is steady, so this phrase is more reliable long-term.
Let’s add more words to enter long-tail territory. For “bookstores in Atlanta” you get:
How about “best bookstores in Atlanta”?
Out of all the results we got above, the one to go for would be “bookstore Atlanta”, the one for which Squirrly Plugin’s research has retrieved the most specific data.
Not Your Average WordPress SEO Plugin
When you go for local SEO as a main rank-boosting strategy, the first impulse is to rely on a separate tool for keyword research.
But it turns out, your plan can be fulfilled in a more cost-effective and time-saving manner using Squirrly’s SEO plugin.
Ready to smarten up your local efforts and get your products seen by the right customers? Then try out the SEO features Squirrly has to offer and drop us a line in the comments section to let us know how it went.
As CEO of Squirrly I get this asked a lot: “Florin, make my business rank high in google. I’m using your Squirrly SEO Plugin. Can you do that for me?”
I’ve started writing more and more answers in our Knowledge Base, but I’ve also decided to write something about this on the blog.
When you say “make my business rank high in google” it’s amazingly easy for me to do that for you. Honestly. Ask me right now. I could make your business rank high in google in about 2 days. Maybe even faster.
You wanna know how?
Let’s say you have the business “Carpet Cleaners Industry” (that’s a funky name) and you tell me to rank your business. I’d look at your site first, to make sure you have a website for your business, otherwise what in the world am I going to rank …
Okay, so you have your site: carpetci.com (I do not know who owns this site in the real world).
I can now start ranking your business. Here’s what I will do:
Make My Business Rank High in Google – Start
1. Let’s see what you have under the hood:
a. I’d go to your WordPress Dashboard.
b. There, I would check that you have Squirrly SEO Installed. (you’d most probably have it, since you did ask me to do this for you)
c. I will look at your SEO Audit to see if all your SEO Settings are Okay. Hopefully, there’s a Green on all the SEO tab inside your Audit Suite from Squirrly. If it’s not, then this would create a delay in the process of ranking your page.
Awesome! Everything under the hood is now fine.
2. Since you have good SEO in your Audit from Squirrly, let’s move on to creating an optimized page.
a. I’d go to WordPress -> Add New Post
b. I’d place the keyword: “CarpetinioLocco” in the Optimize for Keyword section of the Squirrly SEO Live Assistant which loads up in your Add New Post interface.
c. I’d write a 500 words article that is fully optimized with the Squirrly SEO Live Assistant. (it can be a page or an article, whatever).
Of course, I could easily just use the Search Console from Google and ask them nicely to index one more URL from my site.
Oh, you know what? Don’t even bother with Step number 3, because if you have Squirrly SEO installed it will do this for you automatically. Just have this setting turned to YES.
Make My Business Rank High In Google – Job Done. In about 2 days
Yay! Your “amazing” business website called “carpetci.com” is now on position #1 on Google.com with the new page I’ve just created for you.
You had great SEO structure, as the Audit suggested, you now have a 100% optimized web page and you told the crawlers about it.
Congrats, you’re ranking #1 on Google for “CarpetinioLocco”. Are you excited?
NO !! You are not.
Happiness?
“Florin, when I said Make My Business Rank High In Google, this is not what I had in mind?”
– No? But that’s what you told me. Okay, we’re getting somewhere .. (Finally!)
– Yes, well I want to rank high in Google for “carpet cleaners”.
– Really? For “carpet cleaners”? With carpetci.com?
– Yes, can you do it or not?
– Dear friend, the reason we’ve created Squirrly SEO is to help you do that. What you immediately need to understand is that you need a solid strategy if you’re ever going to rank for that keyword.
Make My Business Rank High in Google – What You Should Do
Okay, so obviously anyone can rank things in Google.
The question is: What should they rank?
Well, a site that has 0 (zero) authority and it’s over 1 Million in Alexa will never ever ever rank high in google for “carpet cleaners”
Just use the Keyword Research tool from Squirrly. Find out if YOUR particular website can rank for it.
Here’s a video to help you figure out the keyword research tool and pick keywords that you can actually work with.
One easy answer for you:
– pick a keyword that is Easy to Rank for (with your site) and which is trending and has a good search volume.
Then, do the previous 3 steps that I’ve done in this blog post.
If that isn’t enough to rank your new keyword high in google, then start getting some white hat and clever links back to that post.
Or share it a lot on social media. Make the page shared a lot on different platforms.
After you do all this, you will finally have a page ranking high in Google for something that:
• Brings you traffic (because the trend is good and people keep searching for it)
• You can afford (you don’t have to build thousands of white hat links to it; the PR effort would cost too much)
• Makes sense for your business. Your offer and your page can match the intent of the person who searched on Google for that keyword.
I hope this post inspires you to do better. To be a better marketer and think a lot more about your strategies and the things you wish to achieve.
You need to have a really good picture in mind of what you’re trying to accomplish. Just saying stuff like “make my business rank high in Google” will not cut it.
If you have a blog that’s not yet popular enough to attract visitors as soon as you post a new article, then we’ll need to do some work to get the traffic you want.
Over the next few steps, I want you to start thinking about your blog as an SEO content machine.
Why? Because this perspective will help you get steady visitors from Search Engines, as well as Social Media networks.
If you think of your blog as a machine designed to draw visitors in, you’ll have a better chance of coming up with creative, compelling ideas.
That being said, here are 10 essential to-dos to put on your list if you’re serious about stepping up your content marketing game.
1. Ping Your Articles (whatever that means) to Search Engines
A tool that has proven to be very useful is googleping.com, which sends (“pings”) your article to search engines for indexing and forces the search engine bots to check out the article.
2. Submit Social Bookmarking and Social Media to Feed Your SEO Content Machine
Social bookmarking is a way to tag a web page with a web-based tool so you can easily access it later. Platforms like: Pocket, Delicious, Bitly and even Pinterest can be used for this.
Make sure to social bookmark your articles and also make sure you Share, Tweet, Pin all your content.
If you don’t have social media accounts yet, start building them and connect to people from your niche or people who you think would like to read your articles, because it makes sense for them to read your articles.
This will get your SEO content machine fired up!
3. Submit Your Feeds (RSS) to Relevant Sites
If you want to increase the chances of your articles spreading like wildfire, you need to submit your WordPress site’s feed to as many sites that collect information from feeds as possible.
You can find your feed (for your WordPress site) at the following location: http://domainname.com/feed/.
So if your site’s name is coolcakes.com, your feed can be found at www.coolcakes.com/feed/.Try visiting your site and adding “/feed/” to the end of the URL to get started.
4. Share Your Opinions (and links) in the Comments Section of other Blogs
A longer-term solution could be to look for articles from other blogs written about the same topics. Make sure they have a comments section.Make some remarks regarding the content, state your opinion and insert a link to the article where readers can find your detailed opinion or more information they will find useful.
5. Start Conversations around Your Article to Generate Traffic
Start conversations about your article on question-and-answer sites where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by their community of users.
6. Cater to People Who Use Their Mobile Devices to Read Articles
Try to find apps that distribute information on mobile devices (think iOS, Android) because there you will find a lot more readers.
We, for example, use Flipboard to read other blogs from mobile devices, and we’ve also made a version of the Squirrly Blog available on Newsstand.google.com.
If you can swing it, you can try promoting some of your articles or pages through AdWords from Google or social media ads.
At Squirrly, we use Boosted Posts on our Facebook page and it works really well. It’s something that we recommend if you already have a targeted following on Facebook.
8. Post as Often as You Can without Compromising Quality
If you manage to publish valuable articles often, you’ll build a loyal audience around your blog. In turn, the number of returning visitors will increase over time.
It’s not easy to put together an efficient content creation method that allows you to post fresh content constantly. But once you establish a clear editorial process, it won’t seem like such a hassle anymore.Plus, it’s an essential step that will get your SEO content machine running at full speed.
What’s more, it gives you relevant information so that you can understand why your article ranked the way it did.
For instance, if you get more visits than unique visitors, it means your visitors read more pages, or they returned to the site, both being good things for your blog and the way search engines see your site.
It basically means visitors think your content is relevant. This will place you higher in search rankings.
Besides traffic, Squirrly also monitors the impact of your articles on social media, which shows if your readers have shared your articles. The more shares your articles get, the better your search engine ranking will be.
Another thing that you should consider monitoring is the number of Inbound Links, which shows how many other websites have linked to your article.
The number of links is not the only thing that is important. The authority of the sites that linked back to you is also relevant.
Squirrly monitors the authority of your site, and you’ll be able to see if the sites that linked to your article have authority in their industries or not. The Authority should at least be over 30.Note: Squirrly Article Rank offers the info about links and authority through MOZ.com. The updates for this section are not made in real time, but on a weekly basis, thus giving you time to build more links to your blog.
10. Check Out Fiverr if You Need Help
If you need a little help in some areas (be it for content creation, link building, design, and so on) you can try using fiverr.com.
You’ll find freelancers eager to help you for as little as $5.
Key Takeaways:
After you publish each article, it’s important you make sure that it reaches your readers and even new readers. No matter how good a piece of content is, if nobody gets to see it, it’s useless.
Distributing articles via social media is an excellent way of getting your article to more readers, faster. Make a consistent effort to leverage it as much as possible.
Use Squirrly Performance Analytics to discover what are the weak points of your strategy and make informed decisions about further actions you can take to improve results.
We hope you found some useful information in this article and that you’ll start applying these tips right away!
Just like Steve Jobs is an epitome of innovation, our updated Keyword Research Tool is aiming at the same level of excellence and innovation.
That’s why it follows the overall slogan for Squirrly’s Steve version – think differently.
For our keyword tool, thinking differently means providing the same quality while constantly seeking to be more customer-centric. We want to help you optimize your writing workflow while also ranking higher.
Because the fewer time it takes you to research the keywords, the more time you can allocate to creating the finest content (which is another part Squirrly SEO helps you excel at with the improved 2018 Inspiration Box).
That said, let me introduce the upgrades that help you both with writing and SEO.
Time for A New Look
Right off the bat, you’ll notice a change in the visuals department.
This is how the tool looked like with the 2018 version.
And this is how it looks now with the Squirrly SEO 2018: Steve version:
The information was visible only when hovering over a specific item on the list – which some of the Squirrly SEO users did not notice. So we worked on the issue and came up with a more intuitive display of the research results.
As you can see with the Steve version, Squirrly now has a more user-friendly interface and displays the results in a neat table. You won’t have to hover over each keyword in order to get the data you’re looking for. The Squirrly SEO 2018: Steve keyword research tool saves you some effort and tries to make everything as straightforward as possible.
We gather the keyword data based on the same algorithm, but we introduced intervals for the search volume figures, to make it more relevant for values under 2000. SEMrush was our main provider for the search volume in the past, but they seem to have few keywords available (I mean.. they are a LOT, but still not enough for all our users. We’ve studied this). So for the ones that SEMrush doesn’t know about it we now have our own algorithm that shows the search volume.
To optimize your experience even more, we added the Options column, where you can press the Use Keyword button for the item you select. Once you do this, the keyword will be used in the “Optimize for Keyword” box.
Inside scoop: our next plugin update will let you create and manage your own space for keyword optimization across the entire website. But more on that towards the end of the year – until then, you can check what’s up with this version (called Squirrly Briefcase) on our public Trello board.
Fine-Tuning Your Keyword Research Experience
The Squirrly 2018 keyword research tool was a hit with our users, but we soon realized not all of them had the same needs when it comes to finding keywords.
This applies not only to the number of results retrieved but also to the amount of time different users are willing to spend within this stage of content creation.
So we sorted that out and added a button at the top of the keyword research box. What it displays is a list of 3 options:
Fast: retrieves up to 10 results in 20-50 seconds;
Normal: up to 20 results in one minute maximum;
Complex: up to 50 results in 300 seconds tops (this option analyzes more pages and the retrieval time depends on the type of keyword you enter. For a longtail or less common search query, our algorithm will naturally need more time to analyze the results.
Note: When you get the Squirrly Steve version, the keyword research will be set by default on the Normal mode. If you need fewer or more results, make sure you choose Fast or Complex.
From all our tests, we could see that the Complex search really does the work of an in-house SEO when it comes to researching keywords. It’s true that not everyone wants to spend so much time with the researches, but the results are really impressive. You can uncover many opportunities which would otherwise remain hidden.
Countries. All of Them
Okay, most of them would’ve been a bit more accurate. Read on to see just how many we have available for you now.
As proud as we were of the Squirrly SEO 2018 version, there still was something missing.
Namely, the Keyword Research Tool displayed 26 countries users could perform the research for.
But since our user base is global, we kept getting asked about this or that country, so it didn’t take long until we added the 114 countries more. This makes for a total of 140 countries you can check. Right inside your WordPress editor. No additional tool needed.
It will give you the search habits and search patterns of people in 140 countries. You can find out exactly how they search in their own country. Searches are way different sometimes even between the U.S. and Australia. Imagine the difference from google.com to google.com.br
And as always, everything that we feed into the algorithms for those 140 countries is un-biased (unaffected by any Google personalization which usually happens in browsers and apps)
SEO specialists or not, you can all rejoice: whichever part of the world you are from, you now get to carry out targeted keyword research. Something like this:
A Keyword Research Tool with A Twist
The thing with keyword research tools is that they grant you the opportunity to fine-tune your marketing skills.
But fine-tuning does not imply a better understanding of analytics only. It also requires strategic, long-term thinking. Being able to interpret past results and make informed decisions for the future.
Being well aware of this, we enriched our keyword tool by adding the icing on the cake – the Export List option. It is a button you can find at the bottom right of the Keyword Research Tool box :
Click on it and Squirrly will automatically generate a downloadable Excel document featuring all the keywords generated across a research session.
Now, all the information generated by the Squirrly Keyword Research Tool will be stored inside a separate folder that you can visit anytime you need.
Want to become a better marketer?
You can start by building a keyword research database. You can even compare how these insights changed over a period of time and then assess future changes in trends.
Bottom Line
The ultimate goal we have in mind with the Squirrly SEO 2018: Steve version is helping business owners and marketers turn website pages from ‘never found’ to ‘always found’ on Google SERPs. In this respect, our updated Keyword Research Tool is certainly a key feature in our plan. Remember that the competition data is incredibly important because it tells you what chances each of your sites have of getting ranked on any keyword.
Here’s a recap on how it will achieve that for you:
more control over your keyword research experience;
140 countries to research your keywords for;
relevant estimates for search volume data;
improved possibilities for local and longtail keywords research.
Once you’ve picked a keyword and created the content optimized for it, you can proceed to use the other Squirrly SEO Plugin settings. Mind you, we’ve got plenty of other feature updates for this version, so I’d say keep an eye on your inbox.
![19[1]](https://plugin.squirrly.co/storage/2019/02/3e408a85106cfba12c073450be3609ee.jpeg)
![21[1]](https://plugin.squirrly.co/storage/2019/02/826a557368872a345746bd84d1f23e5c.jpeg)
![21[1]](https://plugin.squirrly.co/storage/2019/02/1bead36a8beb2236ac36b7a3bb9ce652.jpeg)
