The new Squirrly has its own way of telling you the most probable chances of ranking according to everything the system studies from our databases. According to how 600,000 sites and all their (tracked) pages evolved within different search results for different keywords.
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I once had a dream of giving every business owner and freelancer their own private always-on, always-there SEO Consultant. I have accomplished that dream. It’s created and it’s ready for you. Private SEO Consultant. In a Plugin. Powered by Machine Learning and Cloud Services.
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We’re always excited to share tips with you that help you make the most out of using Squirrly SEO, our top SEO plugin for WordPress! And this tip is particularly interesting because it comes straight from one of our Squirrly users.
Cristina is part of a team of talented marketers who run the site called Servicii.app (a business directory for Romanians living in the United Kingdom, which aims to make their life abroad easier).
And she has an awesome hack for leveraging some of the information provided within Squirrly to create multiple streams of traffic from a single piece of content and boost online visibility for a WordPress site.
More specifically, Cristina was able to nearly double the number of keywords for which her site ranked on the 1st page of Google, basically overnight – and without creating any new content.
Curious to know how she did?
Here’s the whole story, written in Cristina’s own words.
As a marketer for Servicii.app, I am obsessed with constantly checking the rankings of our site, especially since that’s so easy to do using the Squirrly SEO Plugin.
While I was checking the Rankings, I decided to try something new to see what would happen.
But before I dive into it, here’s some background information about our site.
So, on December 10, 2019, our site was on the first page of Google with 18 keywords (it’s important to mention that this is a new site, so we were extremely pleased with these metrics).
It’s also worth noting that all of these amazing rankings were achieved by following the guidance provided by Squirrly’s Focus Pages system.
Here’s a snapshot of our Rankings for the site Servicii.app (as they were on December 10, 2019):
Pretty cool, right?
In order to further increase our success, our team of writers worked on writing some new articles. The result?
We’ve managed to increase online visibility for our site on Google Search, which was on the 1st page of Google with 20 keywords back then.
Below, you can a snapshot of our site’s Rankings from December 16.
We could definitely see an increase in our success but the improvement was not as significant as we would have liked it to be.
So, here’s the approach we took next.
Wanting to further advance our SEO efforts, I decided to do something that I don’t know how many other Squirrly users do.
And that is to click on that blue button you see in the Rankings Section (the one pictured below; if you’re a Squirrly user, you’ve probably already seen it).
I was curious to see what kind of information will be revealed by clicking the button and syncronizing keywords with Google Search Console.
As it turns out, just by doing this small thing, you get access to all kinds of interesting data. For example:
Okay, so here’s what we did next:
We looked at the keywords revealed in the report and tried to find some relevant keywords that made sense for our SEO strategy.
Note! If you decide to do this yourself, expect to also find a couple of keywords that don’t make much sense (simply ignore those).
Once I found a keyword that I thought represented a strong keyword opportunity, I simply clicked on those 3 bullets to add them to my Squirrly Briefcase (as shown in the image above).
Using the Briefcase feature makes it super easy to organize everything and simply add the keywords you find to your articles.
Personally, I like my Briefcase to be very well organized so that I can see what are the keywords I found and which are the keywords discovered by my teammates.
I use labels for this, as well as for grouping keywords based on different topics that I want to cover with the content posted on our site.
Here’s how our Squirrly Briefcase looks like:
Once I added the keywords to Briefcase, I made sure to assign them a label by clicking the 3 bullets (as shown below).
The easiest way to find the keywords you’ve just added from the Syncronize Keywords panel is to look at the associated data.
The keywords for which you see the No research data text instead of the keyword info button are the keywords you’re looking for.
Once you’ve identified the keywords, you can click on the 3 bullets and then on Refresh Research to see all the info Squirrly SEO plugin offers you for each particular keyword.
I recommend doing this so that you have a clear understanding of each keyword’s potential, in terms of how much traffic it can bring to your site and how easy it will be to rank for.
That’s what I did and whenever I found a keyword I was pleased with, I added it as a secondary keyword in an article that made sense.
For example, I had an article about the most popular Christmas markets that one can visit in London. My primary keyword for that article was Christmas Markets.
I decided to keep that keyword as my primary keyword because I previously researched it and decided it was a valuable one. However, I also added Christmas markets London 2019 as my secondary keyword and optimized my article for that keyword as well using the Live Assistant.
That’s the keyword that I found by syncronizing keywords to Search Console in step 1 (well, its English translation, since all the content on our site is written in Romanian).
What I like is that you access the keywords extra easy – right from the Edit article dashboard.
All you have to do is go to the Edit version of the article where you want to add the keyword and click on the Briefcase icon (above the Squirrly Live Assistant).
And there they are – all the keywords you saved to Briefcase.
Then, you can either:
And that’s all there is to it. Yup, it’s that easy.
On December 17, 2019, we had no less than 36 keywords on the 1st Page of Google.
That means we’ve nearly doubled the number of keywords for which our site ranks for on the 1st Page of Google Search. And it happened literally overnight.
All without having to invest additional time and resources into creating any new articles from scratch.
The metrics speak for themselves, but if I were to spell it out, I’d strongly encourage you to give this tactic a try as well, especially since it won’t take very much of your time.
Work smarter, not harder; that’s what I say. 🙂
The tactic Cristina so kindly presented in this post is all about leveraging low-hanging fruit and getting maximum impact with a minimum of effort invested.
As you saw, this simple and quick hack can help give your SEO efforts a considerable boost by increasing the number of keywords for which your website ranks on Google.
Plus, by ranking for multiple keywords with one piece of content and increasing the topical authority of your article, you can increase your ranking for your main keyword as well.
The benefits of using the method presented in this post are significant, and the best part is that you can start putting it into action right away.
You just need to make sure you have Squirrly SEO installed on your WordPress site.
Then, simply follow the steps below:
In this article, there will be very little talk, and mostly just screenshots of guided steps. From Basic Account to Trial of the Business Plan.
Then, I’ll show you examples from real sites, with hints and ideas.
We begin by going to WordPress -> Squirrly -> Rankings. If you have a basic account, this is what you will see.
This will take you to a page where you’ll see more details about all Squirrly Plans.
Look at the Business Plan, what it includes and what makes it different from the other plans that we offer. The business plan works awesome with the new Squirrly SEO.
I’ll show you all about it in this guided tour.
You’ll get to see details about the benefits and features. Remember: Just like the PRO plan, the Business plan covers 7 WordPress sites.
Scroll down until you see the Start 7 Days Trial button
Click on Start 7 Days Trial. After the trial is over, everything in your account goes 100% back to normal.
Click Ok, and your 7-days Trial will begin. You can check to see how many days of the trial period you have left here.
You can see that you’ve activated the Business trial in your Account info where you have access to other useful information about your current plan as well.
Squirrly will identify keywords that you’ve used in your articles.
As opposed to OTHER solutions, Squirrly SEO will know exactly what you’ve already used and place data in automatically. You’ll not waste any more time with manual labor for this part of SERP checking.
In the Rankings section, click on Add Keywords/Add Briefcase Keywords.
You are now in the Research section of the plugin, the Briefcase panel. From here, you can add keywords and start keeping track of how they rank.
Click on the three dots next to keyword info. Click on Send to Rank Checker. This will automatically let Squirrly know it should begin tracking the ranking for that keyword.
Once you’ve added keywords, you will start to see your TRUE Google position for those keywords in the Rankings section.
You can also choose to remove keywords. Once you do that, Squirrly will no longer monitor the Google Rankings of that keyword. You’re basically telling Squirrly NOT to waste precious Business Level queries on useless keywords.
Click on Rank details to see powerful performance analytics.
Squirrly updates the best ranks for each keyword daily and also shows you the Average Ranking of your site for that particular day. You can see that the site I’ve used for this tour ranks #14 on average with pages and keywords.
Squirrly also shows you the total number of SERP changes, meaning you can see how many pages have had changes in their ranking that day. For the site used for this example, there are 17 ranking changes that happened recently.
If you click on that arrow, Squirrly will only show you the pages and keywords that either went up or down in SERPs.
Green means UP. Red means DOWN. And Squirrly also shows you how many positions it went up or down.
Plus, you can compare the Current Rank with the best Rank achieved.
Then, once you’ve studied the changes, choose to see all ranks again by clicking on Show All.
Squirrly also lets you refresh the Ranking information on demand by clicking on Check Ranking again. Keep in mind that refreshing the information uses up your available queries for the SERP checker.
Now, I want to show you one more thing here.
If you look at the bottom of the screenshot below, you’ll see 97 items that could be ranked. If I click on 14, however, it will show me only the keywords that this site currently ranks for now.
In the Ranking section, click on Settings
Here, you can select the country for which you want Squirrly to check the Google Rank. If you choose Google.de, for instance, Squirrly will only check you ranks for Germany.
By default, this is set to Google.com. You can leave it as is if most of your audience uses Google.com (Global Search). If you run a local business, however, customizing this section can be particularly useful.
Click on Save Settings to save your desired setup (you can come back and change your preferences later on).
Better options and more customizations will appear once you pay for the Business Plan.
During the Business Plan trial mode, Squirrly API will bring your ranking information for a limited number of Queries/day. Many more when you buy. You get a lot of options to customize how you want them used.
There’s a lot of stuff you can control.
Pam Pam!
Before you head out, though, here’s a look at the Squirrly Dashboard (which you can access by clicking on Overview).
As you can see from the screenshot below, Squirrly also offers you precious stats about your Google ranks – right in your Dashboard.
To see detailed Information about your Rankings evolution, simply click on See Rankings (takes you to the main Rankings panel).
Thanks for taking this guided tour. Try Business Today.
A few reasons come to mind:
let’s be honest: we’ve been blogging since 2012 at the Squirrly Company.
You’d think that some of our older blog posts are just begging for a thin content SEO penalty!
We’re Squirrly. We have a very good way for dealing with it, and because we love you, we’re making it available to you, for the first time ever, even if you’re not part of our exclusive and invite-only community: DMSuperstars. (<< even though I’ve basically just extended an invitation via that special link)
In the lines that follow you’ll see:
Thin content SEO penalties have been happening for quite a while now. According to Google algorithm updates, the penalty can be harsher or softer.
If you want to make sure you’ll never run into trouble, just use the Squirrly SEO plugin in WordPress and make your thin content invisible to Google!
1) In Bulk SEO Settings -> Select the pages you consider to be Thin Content.
Here’s what my Bulk SEO Settings panel looks like after I’ve done that.
You can see from the titles and the URLs that these pages are mostly gibberish.
They would provide no value to people searching on the Google search engine.
Therefore:
2) Make sure these Thin Content pages are set to RED Dot on their Visibility column
That means these pages are invisible to Google.
(technical: Google will listen to your guidelines and ignore those pages. These pages will not be considered at all when indexing and ranking your site.)
This makes us avoid any kind of thin content SEO penalty or issue.
As easy as that.
Now if you want to look deeper, this is exactly what we do:
3) No Index, No Follow, Remove from Sitemap
Why?
No Index: Hey, Google. Make sure you don’t index this page. It’s not to be found on search engines.
No Follow (Don’t pass Link Juice): Hey Google, keep all the SEO Authority of any page from my site linking to this page 100% INTACT. Don’t try to pass authority from those legit SEO pages to this piece of content.
Remove from Sitemap: Hey WordPress, let’s make sure that we generate a sitemap where this page doesn’t show. Since this is only useful for ephemeral feeds, it’s not worth adding to an evergreen sitemap. It won’t be useful soon.
Because with Squirrly SEO we easily avoid any type of SEO problem that could appear! We do love our tech.
Some of the reasons have already been shortly highlighted above. However, we do this:
If you’ve seen our Core Values, then you know that Excellent Customer Service is a must for us!
We take Service very seriously. Our purpose is to serve our audience.
You’ve always helped us grow. We’ve always helped you grow.
It must be the reason why we have people paying subscriptions without interruptions for 6 years (and going!). Read about that here in this thin piece of content.
Over 7 Years of running this company.
Our Journey was fueled by thin content. It helped us build a very personal, very intimate relationship with our audience. It’s like they were really part of our family. Just as we are whispering in their ear (via the SEO Live Assistant) while they’re typing their blog posts, they are reading our feeds and then voicing their opinions via our support channels.
We’ve always been open to communication. << It’s the #1 reason for our success. Listening to all the amazing feedback (don’t think the feedback was always good; dude: even, bad feedback is amazing. I talk about this at conferences) we could make Squirrly SEO evolve, we could push all of the boundaries, explore new horizons and reach new heights.
The fact that the Squirrly company keeps publishing all of these “Developer Updates” and “News about the Company” blog posts, our audience also opens up to us and becomes a hugely important part of our DNA.
There you have it. That’s why we keep publishing thin content.
Even before Squirrly received the initial Angel Investment… before we had a product created.. our audience loved the content we were producing, even though it had no SEO value.
This has always been clear for us.
For a while, in our history, because Squirrly SEO didn’t have the capacity to do what I’ve just shown you in this article today, I had to go and manually delete (and make 301 re-directions) older posts that meant so much for our company.
It was good for SEO.
It was bad for:
At that time, I didn’t really think we had such big fans. Turns out I was wrong.
It took me a lot of time to do content audits, to keep clear lists of changes made, to work with the “trash” functions and to redirect everything, so we don’t get no broken links.
Some of the posts were linked-to in some of our special emails, so we were now sending our audience to broken links.
We’ll never do that again.
We’ll keep pushing thin content. Because Squirrly SEO can handle everything awesomely now.
That’s what I decided. Little did I know that we would end up generating huge demand for our partnership programs by publishing this kind of content!
For the win: people in our audience kept reading all that we wrote throughout 2018 and seeing how far we’ve come along and how many new products were being added to our line-up, they could no longer stand aside.
They had to team up with us and become partners.
Some became affiliates, the others became members of our Web Dev Kits programs.
This big win for our company would have never been possible if we just stopped publishing the kinds of content that our audience loved.
Just because someone tells you: “Don’t do thin content.” it doesn’t mean you have to listen. Not 100% anyway.
There are work-arounds. You need to figure out what’s good for your company.
I think I’ve already convinced you that for Squirrly thin content is super helpful.
We deal with it our own way.
And we keep our SEO-oriented pages and content away from our feeds-oriented content in the eyes of Google.
It’s a big help for our SEO Strategies. The squirrly.co website is not the only place where we apply this.
Now that you know the full story, it’s time for you to decide on your own strategy.
Will you go with the elegant Squirrly SEO way of dealing with such content?
Or will you ruthlessly delete content from your site (with the risk of doing many wrongs and wasting lots of time)?
You decide!
I just wanted to show you that there’s a really good way for you to handle thin content SEO.
If your company doesn’t usually communicate and stays away from public launches, public events, public comments, then you don’t even really need to create thin content as part of your communication strategy. In that case you don’t need to create such content.
However, keep in mind that you’ll still have to use a clever system to make certain URLs invisible on your site. In some cases attachment pages (not in all cases, though), in some cases some custom post types, or custom taxonomies. You can still have URLs that could be deemed thin content. It’s good to prepare a strategy for dealing with it.
Keep Ranking! (both on Search Engines, and in Blog and Social Media Feeds!)
There’s been a lot going on at the Squirrly HQ this year already. I know 2019 is still just in the beginning, but we’ve already done plenty of new great things.
However, most of these great things have only been communicated via email until now. We spend a lot of time crafting our emails and most of the precious content goes to people within our community.
While we haven’t posted on the blog since 12 Dec 2018, there have been many great and important emails sent to our subscribers about our latest releases and also many new and amazing Lessons for digital marketing.
Subscribe today. << press the yellow button from that page.
You’ve missed a couple of amazing Free Gifts from Squirrly if you haven’t been on our email lists.
You’ve also missed access to the Squirrly Vault. We’ve opened its gates for the first time last week.
Being on our email lists gives you access to a lot of cool stuff.
This is what I posted to my Facebook feed on the 29th January 2019:
Wow, next month there will be a couple of customers renewing their subscriptions for their 6th Year with Squirrly.
Squirrly SEO was launched officially 6 years ago (stable version, out of beta).
I am amazed by this. And I am truly grateful.
And yes, it did happen. And it’s pretty much amazing.
Many of you have asked us on all our support channels and even personal channels about the release of Squirrly SEO 2019.
The fact remains: it’s ground breaking.
Squirrly SEO 2019 is a complete redesign of our system.
It completely exceeded all of the expectation we’ve had when we released the Alpha version video on 20th December 2018.
It became so much more than that. The amount of detail and the sophistication of it blows me away.
However, the best part is that for NON-SEO Experts everything is awesome and clear. Squirrly handles hundreds of things for them in the background. All that NON-SEOs will have to do is turn tasks from Red to Green.
For experts, developers and SEOs, however, there is a complete ExpertBox inside of it, available in the Advanced settings.
We’re very serious about this. And we’re not stopping until we’re 100% certain this is the best product you’ll ever lay your hands on.
When we started working on this, I never thought we could take it this far. Most of the things we did, I couldn’t even imagine back then.
The SEO Strategy Assistant that I’ve worked on last year has been completely absorbed by the Focus Pages feature of the new Squirrly SEO 2019, and I thought: this is it! This is great innovation right here. It didn’t stop us from going after new innovations, though.
You’re soon going to see why. I’m creating a series of videos that will go into detail about the cool stuff that you’ll soon find inside your Squirrly SEO plugin and cloud app.
Of course, being on our email lists will grant you faster access to everything.
