search engine Archives - MIU Your Creative Digital Agency

Search engine optimization (SEO) has pretty much gone mainstream at this point and every business knows they need it to stay competitive. But what a lot of people don’t know is there’s an opposite side of the spectrum called negative SEO or negative reputation.

This can catch companies by surprise and that’s the exact situation our client found themselves in this project:

They tasked us to help them out of the hole they found themselves in. The success of this project helped us move up the rankings of the company listing site The Manifest. While we can’t talk about the specifics of this project, we can share what business can do to get themselves out of similar situations.

What is negative SEO?

Before you can slay the beast, you need to know what it is. Negative SEO is basically a series of black hat tactics that can either be the result of malicious external attacks or the website owners trying to cheat the algorithm.

It makes the site look extremely suspicious in the eyes of the crawlers and push them down the rankings and into oblivion. Negative SEO is a definite threat to the viability of a website and every step should be taken to prevent it.

Disavow Tools

If a site finds itself already in the midst of a negative SEO hole there are ways to beat it. Google itself has provided webmasters with one such method called the disavow tool.

The disavow tool basically allows websites to upload a list of links connecting to their site and tell Google “Please ignore all of these links”. You can even tell Google to ignore an entire website that’s linking to you.

Watch Your Backlinks

An old but gold method of monitoring the quality of the links connecting to your site. Spam links are the main weapons that malicious entities use to bring websites down. This makes sense because good links bring sites up the rankings, so terrible ones have the opposite effect.

Similar to Google’s disavow, there are tools available online that will help this process and even make it easier.

Purge Duplicate Content

This item is a bit special because not only is it a favourite method of attack by spammers, website owners can actually do it to themselves if they’re not careful. This most commonly happens with big companies that necessarily have dozens of web pages.

Fortunately, the answer to this problem is quite simple. Delete it, or if the content is really something you need, rewrite it. Solving duplicate content is easy, finding it is another story. Once again, there are tools that can help with this, but you’ll need to isolate the content you think is copied first.

Social Media Spam

The social media age brings another wrinkle to this equation. Accounts with the same or close enough name as the website will be put into the same boat by the search engine crawlers. This means anything those accounts do will affect your website for better or worse.

Just like Disavow, there are tools that will alert a website owner of this situation and solve the problem in the same way. Tell Google that those accounts are not your company and separate them from you.

It will take some time before website owners will notice any effects these methods will have, which means they need to get done sooner. Negative SEO is a reality every online business must face. But with our help, you can rest easy knowing there’s someone looking out for you.

With more and more brands going digital everyday, it’s extremely important to maintain your online presence amidst the hundreds of other brands out there offering the same service or product to the same consumers.

That’s why it’s not enough to just have a simple marketing strategy. Whatever content you put out online should also be optimised for search engines to get yourself the exposure you seek. Search engine optimisation (SEO) allows you to show up in more results when consumers look for certain keywords, therefore increasing the chances of them clicking into your content.

There are plenty of SEO tools out there to help you get started. We know it may seem overwhelming to decide amongst the numerous tools — therefore we’ve put down a list of free SEO tools that you can try out before you decide to commit to a paid one, if at all. Here are the SEO tools we think are not only helpful, but great for beginners.

1. Google Analytics

Before you can even plan out an SEO strategy, you need to know what are the areas you should improve on. Google Analytics helps you figure out where the traffic flow to your website is coming from so that you can capitalise on it. Furthermore, you can also look at where traffic flow is in a lull so that you can work harder on the SEO for that particular platform.

With Google Analytics, you would be able to gather in-depth details about your website visitors such as the bounce rate, the amount of time they spend on your website, which page content attracts more visitors, and more. These real-time data can also tell you whether your SEO strategy is effective or not, even as you’re optimising it.

All you need is a Google account to sign in to Google Analytics and connect it to your webpage. You can even pair it with Google Search Console, which helps you understand how Google indexes your site. When you use Google Analytics together with Google Console, you can find out information such as the ranking of the content of your webpage, the keywords consumers are using to find your website, as well as the click-through rate for those keywords. You can even diagnose what, if any, technical errors there are on your website!

2. SEM Rush

SEM Rush assists webpage owners with keyword research, content optimisation, SEO audits, rank tracking, and many more. All their functions are accessible with just an account, which is free to create. Features such as their backlink analysis and link building tool can help by giving you an insight into your backlink profile on your webpages.

Although the free version only allows up to 100 domains in the link building tool, you can still use the data to figure out which are the domains and backlinks that have the highest referral score. This enables you to find out the areas in which you need to improve your link building efforts. With time, you can decide if you want to upgrade to the paid version if you find their features extremely helpful.

3. Ubersuggest

Just as its name suggests (no pun intended), Ubersuggest helps users generate content ideas and keywords for you to employ on your website. This is extremely useful for when you’re running out of content ideas for your website and need some fresh suggestions to fill your content calendar.

Ubersuggest also has a feature that can give you an overview of the keyword you’re focusing on. It will not only suggest content ideas based on your keyword, but also show you related keywords that you can use in your content.

4. Rank Math Plugin

If your website uses WordPress to publish its content, Rank Math is a great add-on to have. It allows you to add meta titles and descriptions to your URLs so that people can see the concise version of your web page before clicking in. It also helps you optimise your content and structure your data more efficiently.

To use Rank Math, you simply need to install the plugin to your WordPress website and let it do the work for you. If you indicate which keyword you’re targeting, Rank Math not only suggests ways for you to improve the keyword ranking, but also gives your content an SEO score. Win-win! You can even identify dead links on your site and redirect URLs to new pages with this add-on.

5. Google Trends

Similar to Ubersuggest, Google Trends can help you generate new content ideas by showing you what are the current trends and topics in your industry. Using this knowledge of popular market trends, you can better craft a content marketing strategy and optimise it based on what would draw the crowd.

In fact, Google Trends can also show you how trends change over time and the search patterns involved around it. All you need to do is enter a keyword, and the tool will show you how much interest was generated around that topic, which regions showed the most interest, as well as other related keywords consumers were using. With Google Trends, you can easily compare various trends over an extended period of time.

6. Ahrefs

Ahrefs offer plenty of free tools, from Content Explorer, to Rank Tracker, to Backlink Checker and more. Ahrefs Backlink Checker works in a way that it analyses a website and shows you the top 100 backlinks of that particular website just by entering an URL into their search bar. You can also view additional information such as the number of backlinks, the domain rating, and the number of referring domains.

They also have a Keyword Explorer and Keyword Generator tool which helps you analyse the ranking difficulty of a particular keyword and calculate their traffic potential. Similar to the Backlink Checker, the Keyword Generator will show you the top 100 related keywords or ideas when you put in a particular keyword that you wish to target. You can also find out their search volume as well as the keyword difficulties for the first 10 keywords on that list, and the top 50 questions related to said keyword.

If you find Ahrefs tools helpful, you can even upgrade to the paid version to unlock more features. However, the free version is a great start to understanding the industry trends and SEO for your own strategy.

Having a great SEO strategy not only increases the discoverability of your brand, but also helps you gain more visibility online. After all, it has been found that 88% of consumers research a brand online before making a purchase. Consumers are now getting smarter and more wise about their purchases, and many are increasingly doing their research online. Therefore, it is vital for a brand to keep their online presence strong with an effective SEO strategy so they can reach a wider audience.

Planning and implementing SEO strategies are but one of the services that MIU provides. If these free SEO tools are not cutting it for you, you can also contact us for a free consultation to see how we can help your business. From digital strategies, to branding, to design, we offer a plethora of services that suit your needs. Click here for more information on what we do and the services we provide.

Tag: search engine

How to Avoid and Deal with Negative SEO