Soon there’s going to be a new Squirrly and we’re calling it Steve to pay homage to Steve Jobs for inspiring entire generations of product developers to think differently and create customer-centric products.
We’re working on massive new features that will make working on SEO a seamless experience.
It was a Personal Assistant, Mentor and Coach for Digital Marketing. Yes, here is where the SEO Live Assistant from Squirrly and also our Settings Assistant have their roots.
At Squirrly we don’t just want to create a software for SEO. We want you to have a personal assistant which guides you through everything you need to do to go from “Never Found” to “Always Found” on the first page of Google.
You see? I’m not very sure that just a simple seo plugin could ever help you with that.
We’ve joined the “Think Different” mentality and movement because I do not want our mind to be limited by virtual boundaries that would naturally be set within our minds if we were to pursue the path of just building simple SEO software.
It was September 2013 when we decided that. It was during that month that we switched our logo to the Squirrly SEO product logo that you know today. And we sure ain’t changing it.
This logo reminds us that we need to keep thinking differently if we are to offer you the best possible solution of getting your pages to always be found on the first page of Google.
Back in 2013, we were the only ones building a software where you got weekly SEO Audits and progress reports. But not just basic crawling errors. Like full audits, sent weekly, for: blogging activity, traffic, SEO site structure, Social Media (if we want to improve your visibility we need to improve your social game as well), Links, Authority.
We would have never reached a point where we would give you such a complex audit on a weekly basis if we had stuck to traditional features. Apparently we were right. We were doing great things, because nowadays most SEO software comes packed with similar audits.
By thinking differently about what we can offer you according to your needs, we have built the Performance Analytics of Squirrly SEO. There’s never been an SEO plugin to offer SERP data, social media data, optimization data, even though these are some of the most important things that you can analyze and act upon.
I admit. Thinking differently set us on a weird path that ended up with us creating over 160 features for WordPress SEO. To understand this number, one could compare it to just 15 basic features present in Yoast, All In One SEO, Ultimate SEO and the others.
Yes, there are over 160 features, and by the time we finish Steve I think there will be a bit more of them.
Isn’t Bigger simply another way of saying Slower?
No. Not when it comes to the way we build software at Squirrly.
We were already the fastest SEO Plugin on the market. This happened in spite of having 108 features as opposed to just 15. Now we have over 160 features and we’re even faster than before. Squirrly SEO: Steve is faster than Squirrly SEO 2018.
Our amazing CTO, Calin Vingan, just outdid himself (again!) and re-wrote most of Squirrly SEO. Everything works better and it will allow us to build amazing things in Squirrly SEO 2018: Steve.
Squirrly is bigger and faster.
My number ONE goal is to help you get everything you need to go from never found to always found.
Other than just providing the tools for this, I want to make sure that you have an amazingly seamless experience with getting to that front page of Google.
That’s why in Steve you will see that it’s easier than ever to do any SEO optimization that you might want to do.
One of the great things you’ll see in Squirrly SEO: Steve is something that you (our amazing community) have told us we need to improve: the Quick SEO Plugin. It will no longer exist as a separate entity, because it has completely become a part of the basic Squirrly SEO offering.
This is not something that we wanted to do. But we do not care about that so much, because it’s important for us to offer you the best experience. An excellent experience, if you will.
Being customer centric is important to us. Being customer centric is more important than building whatever everyone else is building just to satisfy the status quo.
I mean… who’d name their company Squirrly? Well.. someone who IS squirrly. Super, super squirrly about being customer centric.
Does that mean we don’t build these things for us as well? Be 100% certain that we do.
We are also customers and we use Squirrly SEO non-stop. One of the big reasons why it keeps improving so often.
I think we’re managing to keep a really healthy balance in all of this. Also, we really can admit when our ideas weren’t the best. (and keeping QSS separate really wasn’t the best, I can now admit).
Thank you very much for reading this. And also a big thank you to Steve Jobs, the legend who inspired us to go down this path of thinking differently and designing for the best customer experience.
Oh, yes. And we’re having a Youtube LIVE event soon.
When you play the game of product development, win or lose, you keep improving. At all costs.
There’s no other way you can survive the massive amount of competition coming your way, and that’s particularly true in the case of a WordPress SEO plugin; 2018 shapes up to be a highly busy year for the WordPress SEO plugins on the market.
Having learned this throughout the years, we knew we had to develop an ever-heedful mindset and work continuously on exciting updates to keep our users engaged and up there among the top SERPs. After all, we know we only win by helping you win.
But enough inspirational talk.
It’s time we disclose some factual details and tell everyone how, why and what we worked on throughout the last year to make Squirrly SEO Plugin a bigger, faster, strongerSEO tool for the non-SEO experts out there.
You’ll learn how Squirrly improved in 2017and what are the upcoming features to keep you steamed up for an SEO-fruitful 2018.
Squirrly SEO 2017 – The Current State of Affairs
Squirrly 2017 has been built to comply with the current Google elements. You can easily identify these upgrades through the green G17 badges in the plugin section:
In 2017, our main accomplishment for the Squirrly SEO Plugin was perfecting the Keyword Research Feature. Not only has its algorithms been significantly fine-tuned for better accuracy and analysis, but it also proved to be a solid alternative to popular tools like Google Keyword Planner.
If you try out the Squirrly 2017 Keyword Research Tool, you’ll get 3 times more long-tail keywords than you got with the 2016 version. You can now increase the precision of your SEO efforts (especially if you want to improve your position in local SERPs).
Other major features that are fully compliant with the G17 requirements – and will continue to be improved upon – are:
The Inspiration Box that helps content writers stay focused on the post they’re editing while also performing the needed research within the space of the same post (I guess it’s needless to point out what a priceless skill focus is nowadays, isn’t it? 🙂 ).
In 2017, this feature saw an essential improvement with a button that allows you to inner link to other pages on your website without leaving the editing mode on the current article. Actually, my colleague Irina wrote an awesome piece on the Inspiration Box here. Make sure you check it for a complete tour of this well-rounded feature that I hope will change your writing life.
The possibility to request an SEO Audit hourly.
New Google subdomains you can find keywords to rank for (the count of countries we’re currently supporting is at 26 – more to come in 2018).
The Google Rank Checker
Extra support channels: we can now assist you via our Facebook, Twitter and YouTube profiles.
Open Graph major update that enables video content in your shared articles to be viewed by your users directly from their Facebook or social networks feed. Talk about user engagement strategies! This one is pretty powerful – and no other WordPress SEO Plugin does that, really.
Integrations with many other WordPress themes and plugins. This means that you won’t need to worry about Squirrly not working with other plugins. In other words, all your plugins will ‘collaborate’ better and will not behave like squabbling siblings anymore.
Change The Game – with Squirrly
The dedication to continuous product development and improvement is not just empty, boastful speech. We got so caught up in the process that we actually found ourselves having too many ideas. We further nurtured these ideas into completely new updates for the Squirrly SEO Plugin 2018.
And because we were such overachievers, we launched Squirrly SEO Plugin 2018 at the end of April 2017. How about that? 😀
Now, before proceeding any further, I need to make a clear breakdown of what the 2018 version is comprised of (because we’re not just talking upgrades here, it’s a full suite of improvements; a multi-lane lot, if you want):
Quick SEO Plugin and Facebook Pixel Integration are separate features that are already part of the Squirrly SEO Plugin family. But they are going to be the stars of our SEO suite next year, so watch out for that.
We’ll shortly come up with a Q.S.S. (Quick SEO by Squirrly) focused article, but until then, here are the main benefits of using it:
controlling how your website listing looks like in search engine SERPs
quick access to social network listings settings
preview of how your website listing will look like
handy settings for post patterns with several post types
indexation options
metadata settings
OG (Open Graph) settings for Facebook and Twitter
In fact, how about you take a look at how Quick SEO by Squirrly actually works? Learn more with the video of the launch event:
Squirrly 2018 gives you absolute control over your site and what Google shows or doesn’t. But next year, there’ll be even more of that.
Because we’re working on a No index feature where you can manage any URL that you don’t want to be indexed.
For next year’s version, Squirrly will also introduce an update on the SEO Audit by giving you the option to include your Google Analytics account so the Audit will be based on exact data not on estimates of traffic.
Within the Business Plan, you’ll have the possibility to check your Google Rank. To improve this experience, wewill use our servers rather than your sites.
Control Facebook Marketing to the Finest of Details
Facebook has made it easier for eCommerce sites to track their performance and analyze their audiences for better targeting. That’s why they developed the Facebook Pixel tool.
If you have a Facebook business page, you’ll want to use this tool for monitoring:
lead conversions
Facebook campaigns analytics
fine-tuned Facebook audience targeting
proficient user segmentation
To integrate these tracking goodies into your WordPress site, you’d need to insert some lines of code.
But who has time – and resources – for that, right?
Luckily, Squirrly 2018 already has a Facebook Pixel integration in place, so you get all the benefits just by inserting your Pixel code. Here’s how you can do this from your WordPress dashboard:
2018 brings some more exciting news: we’re preparing an even more proficient integration, where your eCommerce will track its Facebook campaigns by getting specific user behavior insights. You’ll learn who likes, shares or clicks on your products, for instance.
Can you imagine how much better targeted will your Facebook marketing – AND remarketing – campaigns be? You’ll get advanced insights and analytics right inside your dashboard. Remember, that’s without having to write a single line of code.
Something like this would do, am I right?
2018 Is Also about Learning More
At Squirrly – as you may have noticed – we’re quite big on empowering and passing on knowledge. So we needed to make sure we were providing our users with handy and complex resources that’ll both teach and inspire them to learn more about SEO.
[sqcta text=”Because, at the end of the day, what is a hard-worked, complex tool without knowledgeable users who make the most out of it?” type=”background” bcolor=”white” bbcolor=”gray”]
So we soon realized we needed to improve the informational products that serve as props to maximize the impact Squirrly SEO Plugin users get, irrespective of their previous SEO expertise. These products can be found:
Right inside your dashboard, if you go to my.squirrly.co. Best think of it as your personal space for Squirrly SEO Plugin-related issues where you can sign in with your Squirrly account access data.
On a dedicated platform – howto.squirrly.co, where you have unlimited access to the Squirrly Knowledge Base.
On the Education Cloud, where users get content marketing lessons organized in 6 modules (for now, more to come in 2018).
In the plugin sections, by clicking on the links provided in the description of each section.
But there’s more!
Because too many educational resources never hurt anybody, did they? So apart from the GetGrowth YouTube channel, Florin and Alexandra came up with yet another idea that empowers everyone to get better at SEO stuff.
I’m talking about the new Home SEO series – specially designed for those who want to take matters into their own hands and DIY their SEO quickly and effectively.
Pro tip: you can find some of the SEO tips and tricks included in the resources above if you follow our Twitter account where we post brief lessons each Monday and Tuesday. Maybe you prefer this way of learning.
eCommerce SEO Done Right
At the end of 2016, smartinsights.com revealed the top sources driving sales and traffic for eCommerce sites. Turns out, search-driven traffic made for a solid 34%. This means that out of 100 people landing on your eCommerce website, 34 learned about your business by performing search engine inquiries based on keywords.
Here’s where SEO is instrumental.
Having it in place means:
Prospective clients DO find you among those first Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Your website listing in said SERPs gives enough information for people to identify you as a trustworthy brand.
The page snippet of the content you’re sharing is displayed in the search results as a rich object (customized written and media content that really conveys an accurate and also polished idea of what your company has to offer). This is valid both for content featured on social networks and on search engines listings.
For each of the above SEO essentials eCommerce sites have to take care of, Squirrly WordPress SEO Plugin 2018 comes up with a suite of powerful settings that have been upgraded in 2017 and are to be further developed in 2018.
While working on all the features above and all the ideas we had for 2018, we soon came to the realization we were actually building maybe the strongest WordPress SEO suite for online businesses.
Of course, every website owner needs to have these SEO settings all set-up, online retailers even more so. With so many product pages, their website architecture is more complex and thus is prone to generating more duplicates that eventually pile up and determine Google to tax their ranking.
You can avoid being one of them – if you start using Squirrly SEO Plugin to the maximum.
108.
That’s the count for current Squirrly features that help eCommerce websites work hand in hand with Google bots – and we’re definitely not planning to stop here.
I mean, why stop if it already goes in the right direction? At Squirrly, we understand the phrase ‘room for growth’ differently. The room is actually a gym with a springboard in it – all in service of your eCommerce. We’re rooting for you and we’re working to prove that we can catapult your sales with solid ongoing content marketing efforts.
Proof: 2018 will bring your eCommerce site some fancy integrations with Squarespace, Shopify, and other CMSs. Stay tuned for more info, we’re pretty excited about how all this will turn out! 😀
By now, it must be pretty straightforward that we’re thinking about growth in terms of contributing to others’ evolution. Maybe it seems a bit counterintuitive, but we value our users as our partners, so we have this policy wherein we make it easy for them to take a peek into the work we’re investing into coming up with fresh, useful stuff.
So here’s the catch: type ‘seoplugin.xyz’ into your browser and you’ll land on this public Trello board where we document all our current and incoming updates and ideas.
This is basically us spilling the beans on what happens behind the scenes. What do we have to gain by doing so?
Oh well, just a strong belief that by letting you know what’s behind the product development process of a WordPress SEO plugin 2018, you understand the real work put into offering you the best experience. Maybe, one day, you’ll follow in our footsteps, who knows?
Oh, and one more thing.
You can actually be featured on this board and contribute to improvements that will help you in the first place. Just visit the Squirrly homepage and a chat box asking for your feedback will pop up. Type in whatever your SEO heart desires and we could actually turn it into a feature on the SEO Settings panel. We can’t wait to find out what you need!
Squirrly – A WordPress SEO Plugin 2018 Can’t Come Soon Enough For
And now, story time!
Once upon a time, there was a squirrel that wanted to store its stash of resources in a safe place, so it found a tree that looked solid enough to face whatever incoming storms. It saw a hollow that served its needs, but soon that was not enough. The squirrel needed more items in the shelter and this is how a tree in the house was built, then new strategic places popped up.
But it was all in vain without other squirrels that could share the benefits of that whole setup. So our squirrel brought in some fellow forest creatures. Hooray! Now there was a happy bunch working together towards growing a strong community.
The squirrel whose story I’ve just revealed is – you may have guessed – our own company, Squirrly. We started small and expanded with an ambitious goal in mind. This is what’s driving us, day in, day out: building the means that prop fellow WordPress website owners to become better marketers.
Irrespective of the kind of Squirrly user you are, 2018 is bound to grant you lots of extra SEO intelligence from your WordPress dashboard.
eCommerce sites
Bloggers
non-SEO experts
SEO professionals
All of you are about to improve in the content creation department. Ease of access and workflow improvements will contribute to a major change in the dynamics of your writing life. I mean, even Neil Patel has recently professed his appreciation (again!) for our SEO Plugin and his words are all out there for everyone to read.
And remember: when you buy Squirrly SEO Plugin, you’re not just purchasing a plugin.
You’re actually getting a suite of SEO tools that’ll not only boost your rankings, but also create the premises for you to become not just a better writer, but a better marketer and online retailer as well.
Staging Your Content will play a major role in the way you create and publish online pages. It doesn’t matter if they are regular pages, blog posts or e-commerce products.
What do I mean by Staging?
By Staging, I’m talking about treating your content as actors who need to practice their play, before they show it to the audience.
It would be embarrassing for them to perform in front of a large audience, only to fail. Without testing their play first, they would go out there and they would babble out some words, without having a clear idea on what they are supposed to do or say.
The same goes for your content.
Imagine Ranking in TOP 10 – Being on the Front Page of Google.
Imagine being on the front page. Being among the first pages in the SERPs. Imagine all that exposure. The huge opportunity of getting people to see you…
Only to show them this:
Of course, you would get away with it if your brand were the Huffington Post.
Most probably, though, it’s not.
So you really need to make sure that you have a good looking description over there.
This is also to illustrate the fact that even big sites fail because they are not staging their content and they’re not paying attention to this.
Staging Your Content
In the old days, SEO people looked at the META description, which is basically that area of the Huffington Posts’s listing up there (that I have highlighted), only as a ranking factor.
The latest things that have come after the roll-out of Json-LD would indicate that it’s still useful for ranking, but nowadays this is not the thing that truly matters:
I keep saying that content should be optimized for Humans, not only for Search Bots.
This is a perfect example of an area of content marketing where you should optimize for Humans.
If finally get to rank for a couple of keywords, people will get to see the title of your page. They will not stop there. Before clicking on your listing (which is the only thing you actually want), people will try to find out if your page is worth their time or not.
A good description and a description that looks really good will make them click and enter your website.
A bad one will make them look at the other listings and choose those instead. You could be number #2 on Google and have all the search traffic go to #3 if you fail to have a good META description.
Great copywriters these days provide great text, filled with calls to action, that people will just NEED to click.
The thing is that most of the times when you are in WordPress, you only think of the text that goes into the page, but you don’t think about how your listing will look like on the Google Search Engine.
Here’s where staging your content comes in.
After you have an idea of what the content of the page will be about, you can think of a great text for the listing that your post will have.
Look again at the Huffington Post example. That’s a very bad example of a listing.
Squirrly SEO Loves you. That’s why our software always makes sure that you will NOT fail at this by having a horrible listing like the one from the example. We also make sure that you will not have an empty listing, which happens a lot more than you’d think.
Squirrly does this in ninja mode. You don’t even need to worry about it, in case you have to simply hit publish.
Here’s the great part. As I’m currently writing this piece, Squirrly SEO has generated the listing for this article, automatically in order to save me from any of the cases mentioned above.
Staging Your Content with Squirrly SEO will ensure that what you see in your WordPress “Edit Post” section is 100% exactly what people will see when they find your listing on the Google SERPs.
Most of the other WordPress SEO Plugins only pretend to do this, but we’ve engineered a few things to make sure that what YOU see here is exactly what Humans will see when they find your listing on Google.
So you have 100% control over your content and how it’s displayed.
This is super important. If you didn’t have this, all your efforts of ranking could go down the drain due to a bad looking listing.
While all of these may sound really good, it just gets better. In order to help Non-SEO experts become SEO Superstars, we went ahead and did even more:
You can customize your Google listing and view it in real time in your Edit Post section, without having to ruin your page versions and draft version by continuously clicking “Save Draft”
Just click that “Customize Meta” button to get started.
And you can now edit those text fields.
After you’re done, click “Save Changes” and you’ll automatically get an image of how it will look like on Google, without having to take any extra actions.
There you have it.
We’ve also created a few slides that show you more in-depth how to use this feature.
It’s no secret that Google’s top concern is to make sure users find the best answers for their search queries. And by best answers, we mean answers which are:
Relevant
Accurate
Up-to-date
Engaging
With structured data, you can help Google find the right information about you and your organization. Google is supporting the use of structured data and JSON-LD generator – which is why it’s included it in their ranking algorithm.
When information on your site is structured, search engines like Google can easily organize and display it in ways that will appeal to users.
It’s a win-win type of situation.
You help Google see the right info, Google helps you by displaying details about you or your organization in search results in a beautiful way that makes it easy for users to learn more about you.
The image above shows how your site could look like once you make the JSON-LD settings inside Squirrly (no coding skills needed).
Include Your Site’s Name, Logo, and Social Links
With the Squirrly SEO Plugin for WordPress, it’s incredibly simple to make the required settings to activate Squirrly’s JSON-LD generator for your site.
Also, you can easily customize and provide essential details about you or your organization so that they show up for users in Search results.
Name: Specify the preferred name you want Google to display in Organic Search results.
Logo: Set up the image you want Google to use in association with you or your organization in Organic Search results.
Social Media Profiles. Use this markup to indicate which are the social media accounts associated with you or your organization that you want Google to display in Organic Search results.
Note!! Squirrly will automatically add the requested JSON-LD meta to your home page, as well as your articles and Author Pages.
Now You Know How A JSON-LD Generator Benefits Your Site
Major search engines like Google reward websites that cater to their human audience.
Using structured data, you can make sure the correct information about you or your organization reaches users and enhances your site’s presence online.
⇒ Increase brand awareness.
⇒ Enhance brand recognition.
⇒ Promote your social media accounts and possibly get more followers.
Also, you get on Google’s good side, which is always in your site’s favor. Put JSON-LD generator to use using Squirrly SEO Plugin for WordPress and build a stronger website.
When you play the game of product development, win or lose, you keep improving. At all costs.
