Category: SEO

Using the exact backlink analysis I’m about to show you, you’ll be able to create a backlink strategy that gets you to the number one spot for your target keywords just like our clients:

Exclusively Hybrid and “toyota prius battery replacement”

And Fitness Mentors and “best personal trainer certification”

If you want to learn how many backlinks your competitors are using to outrank you and the link building factors you need to consider to outrank them, you’ll be happy to know that, with a little practice, you can execute this process in a few minutes.

All other things being equal — content quality, depth, and user experience — having more links than your competitors should help you to outrank them.

Here is the exact 7 step research process we use to determine the quantity of links you’ll need to take over the SERPs.

Before we begin, I want to emphasize that we focus on the competitor backlink analysis from a URL basis, as knowing how many links are needed to rank a specific URL is really what a competitor backlink analysis is all about. 

If you want me to do a video analyzing all the backlinks your competitors have for link prospecting, let me know in the comments.

Step 1: Identify primary keyword and volume

The primary keyword will provide the basis of your backlink analysis as it will showcase who ranks for your target keyword. It will also let you know the volume of this keyword and reveal how valuable it is to your SEO campaign and business goals. In short, it will help you triage your link building efforts based on competition and benefits.

For this example, let’s use a previously published post from Guitar.com on the best acoustic guitar amplifiers to buy, with a primary keyword of “best acoustic guitar amp.”

• How to: There are several ways to pull keyword volume but I’ll break down a free way and a way that uses premium software. The free way is to use Google Keyword Planner. Simply login, select “Get Search Volume and Forecasts,” and insert your keyword for data.

• Google Keyword Planner is good enough for many people, but it does have its flaws. Let’s use the example of “best acoustic guitar amp” to showcase why.

For example, the keyword volume here shows a really wide range — 1,000 to 10,000 per month — and an arbitrary Competition value of “High.”

Compare that to a premium keyword research tool like Ahrefs and you have much more granular data.

Using their Keyword Explorer tool and doing the same search we can see that Ahrefs provides data on Keyword difficulty, and in high contrast to Google Keyword Planner, says this search is easy to rank for. It also provides two volume estimates, one for my native country (USA) and one for Global volume. I find this data to be much more accurate, and telling, of how difficult it is to rank for a keyword based on my link building efforts.

Step 2: Note current rankings

your current ranking will provide an indication of how many more links you have to build, and gives you a benchmark for how the other factors in this process will influence your link building efforts. More on that later.

How to:

Noting current rankings is fairly straightforward. You can perform a search for your primary keyword in the SERPs and keep clicking until you see where you rank. If it’s a newly published blog, you might be clicking for a while.

An additional way is to use the Site Explorer feature in Ahrefs, using the Exact URL feature to review rankings.

Step 3: Note your site’s domain rating

The Domain Rating, or DR, of your website is defined by Ahrefs as “the strength of a website’s backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale.” In short, the higher a site’s DR, the more weight it carries and therefore the easier it is to rank. Why is this important? Well, if you are going after a keyword and trying to decide how many links you need to build and your research tells you that all the sites that rank for that keyword have high DRs, it might mean they inherently can rank without a lot of links while your site may not carry the same weight. Basically, a site with higher DR has more trust than a site that does not.   

How to:

To find a site’s DR, you can use the Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs, using the Overview option on the left sidebar. 

Step 4: Note your URLs Referring Domains

You’ll also want to know how many referring domains your site has as we’ll be comparing this metric to the top ranking sites.

How to:

Again using Site Explorer, mark the number of Referring domains you’ve earned. 

Step 5: Note lowest Referring Domains of top three competitors

If you want to earn any respectable amount of traffic from your keywords, you’ll want to strive for the top three positions in the SERPs. This does not dismiss the fact that you can earn a lot of long-tail traffic before you rank in the top three for your primary keyword, but since we are basing these link metrics on your competitors, you’ll want to know which of the top three competitors has the lowest number of referring domains.

How to:

Ahrefs makes it really easy to find this, and the next metric (Domain Rating) within their Keyword Explorer tool. After entering your keyword into the tool, scroll to the bottom of the page to get these metrics. 

Step 6: Note lowest Domain Rating of top three competitors

Just like it is important to know your own DR, it is important to know the DRs of your competitors.

How to:

We already have the data from an easily accessible area on the Keyword Explorer tool, so we’ll make a note of that.

Step 7: Note suggested Referring Domains from Ahrefs

You may have seen that this metric was already revealed when we referenced that Ahrefs said this keyword was “Easy” to rank for. Now you may be saying, “why did we go through all this trouble of pulling all this data when we could have just looked at this one metric to get an idea of how many links we need to build?” Good question. The fact is you need to dig a little deeper than this general metric using the other information we’ve pulled to determine how competitive a keyword really is to rank for.  

Interpret Backlink Analysis Data

Now that you have gone through the process of pulling all this data you should have a spreadsheet that looks like this. 

In our Guitar.com example, things to note for our second page ranking for “best acoustic guitar amp” are the following:

• Currently rank 11 for target keyword
• Domain rating of 69
• Referring domains 12
• Lowest Domain Rating of top three competitors 44
• Lowest amount of referring domains of top three competitors 8
• Suggested referring domains from Ahrefs 8

Upon analyzing this data alone, we can conclude that we should have enough links to be within the top three ranking positions. One of the top three spots have a smaller Domain Rating (44) and fewer referring domains (8) than Guitar.com and we have satisfied more backlinks than what Ahrefs is telling us are needed to rank in the top 10 (we have 12 to their recommended 8). 

So what do we do now? Quit SEO?

This is an important SEO lesson in that sometimes data alone will not tell the whole story. Rather than go through all the scenarios surrounding why the Guitar.com site might not rank better, I think I’ll chalk it up to their title tag “The best guitar amplifiers to buy in 2020: 10 best acoustic amps.” The top three results all reference 2021, the current year.

Perhaps updating the title to the current year (and even the gear reviews) would allow Guitar.com to take its rightful position near the top of the rankings. For now, they have a good understanding of how they stand from a competitive backlink standpoint and what to do for other posts they want to evaluate and so do you.

If content is king, search engine optimization (SEO) is the key to getting your content seen by the right audience. Marketers are constantly exploring new ways to enhance their SEO strategies, the latest and most explosive trend being the use of AI-generated content. But what do the top SEO experts think about this trend?

In this article, we dive into the opinions of five top SEO experts on the use of the AI tool GPT-3. Let’s get started!

What is GPT-3?

GPT-3 stands for generative pre-trained transformer 3. It is an artificial intelligence language learning model developed by the Silicon Valley wunderkind OpenAI. With over 175 billion parameters, GPT-3 is considered one of the most advanced language models to date. It uses ‘deep learning’ (a machine learning technique) to create human-like text, write poetry and movie scripts, chat, translate, and perhaps the most fascinating of all – answer abstract questions!

Predictably, GPT-3 has generated tremendous buzz in the tech industry for its ability to produce high-quality, coherent text. Many developers and companies are exploring how GPT-3 can be integrated into various applications, including chatbots and content creation tools.

But is the buzz all hoopla or is there credibility behind its use for SEO. I looked to five leading thought leaders in the space for insights.

Related: GPT-4 launch

What 5 SEO Experts Think About AI-generated Content

SEO experts have varying opinions about AI-generated content in general, and GPT-3 in particular. Those who view it favorably believe AI-generated content can save businesses time and resources and be a valuable supplement to human-written content. 

Those who disagree with this view argue that AI-generated content lacks both originality and creativity, because of which it can never be as unique or engaging as human-developed content.

Let’s take a closer look at what five top SEO experts have to say on the matter.

Lily Ray

Senior Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital

Lily Ray raises significant concerns about the quality of AI-generated content. “There are shortcomings with ChatGPT and all AI content generation tools in their current form,” she says. 

Content-generation tools such as ChatGPT have been known to return wildly incorrect information and biased opinions. While the technology allows users to create content quickly and cost-effectively, the output generated often lacks expert-level or unique insights. This is not in line with Google’s emphasis on E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness), which is why she believes AI-generated content can negatively impact search engine rankings.

However, Lily does advocate for the use of AI in specific situations, such as creating summaries of your content or generating product descriptions. 

Matt Diggity

SEO entrepreneur

Matt Diggity has a largely positive view about using AI for generating content. He is pumped about how tools like ChatGPT can be used to write large volumes of content and conduct keyword research quickly and easily. “Even if AI isn’t your jam, your competitors are using it, so you should know what you’re up against,” he cautions. 

However, he does think it necessary to recheck all AI-generated content for grammatical and factual accuracy and proofread it before uploading. 

Gael Breton

Co-Founder, Authority Hacker

Gael Breton has somewhat of a balanced, if not neutral sentiment toward AI-generated content. However, he believes all web publishers have to deal with it in 2023, regardless of their personal views on the topic. 

Gael believes that most of the time, AI content is bland and can be identified accurately. However, it is possible to tweak the content to evade the tools that detect whether a particular piece of content is human-written or AI-generated. Moreover, Gael also explores how websites like CNET openly state that they are using AI engines to generate content that is then reviewed by humans.

Another interesting insight he shares is Google does not reduce organic traffic to a piece if you use more or less AI to help write it. According to Gael, “factors like keyword selection, competition, and other traditional SEO factors matter much more than the use of AI.”

Sam Oh

VP of Marketing, Ahrefs

Sam Oh explores the different use cases of ChatGPT for SEO and finds most of the ways people are using it will have negative results. However, he is bullish on AI for SEO, just not for writing blog posts.

He believes AI-driven keyword research is unreliable as its results have no search demand. “ChatGPT is insanely cool, but most of the use cases you’ve seen in Twitter or LinkedIn threads or YouTube videos are mostly hyped up for engagement bait,” he reveals. 

However, Sam thinks using ChatGPT to generate titles for blog posts is promising. According to him, the best use case of ChatGPT is creating outlines for your blog posts. This can help you organize your thoughts and get your creative juices flowing, helping you create better content.

Daniel Lofaso

Founder & CEO, Digital Elevator

Daniel Lofaso brings a reasoned judgment to the discussion, insisting that Google will do what Google has always done. He believes it will continue to reward content that is novel, written by subject matter experts (SMEs), and backed by references, examples, or unique takeaways. An article written by GPT-3 is no more than a simple regurgitating of what is already on the web, he says. It is often no different from what you’ll get by outsourcing it to a writer with no real subject matter expertise.

Daniel believes SEOs and content marketers need to step up their game and create systems and processes to make content valuable from an E-E-A-T point of view, conduct interviews with SMEs, and develop content with legitimate value to readers. “I do see the value in utilizing GPT-3 for SEO in many areas (the title of this blog was helpful with GPT-3), but the lazy use of having it rewrite what’s already out there is just not going to rank. Period,” he puts it. 

How is GPT-3 Used in SEO?

GPT-3 has widespread applications across the SEO domain. Whether they are effective or potentially harmful are still up for debate. However, the below are some of the primary applications of using AI-content that some SEOs testing.

They include:

1. Creating Content: You can use GPT-3 to generate content at scale. With its advanced natural language processing capabilities, GPT-3 generates engaging content for websites that can boost search engine rankings. Businesses in any sector can use the technology to create blog posts, meta descriptions, and other content for their web properties.
   • Pros: 
     • Content can be created at scale
     • Helps with writers block
     • Often is surprisingly well-formulated
   • Cons:
     • Content risks being the same as everyone else
     • GPT-3 doesn’t provide references
     • GPT-3 can often be highly inaccurate
2. Conducting Keyword Research: Apart from writing content, GPT-3 can also be used to identify and analyze relevant keywords and search terms for your company. This can help you optimize your content and rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
   • Pros:
     • Can get interesting, logically sound keywords
   • Cons:
     • The volume of these keywords is not provided 
3. Creating content calendars: GPT-3 is actually surprisingly good at putting together topically relevant content when prompted to do so. If you suffer from writers block, this can help plan the next sequence of blogs.
   • Pros:
     • The topics provided by GPT-3 are often great and sound interesting.
   • Cons:
     • Again, GPT-3 does not use keyword research so you’d want to layer in anything they propose with actual keyword research and targeting.

What’s the takeaway on AI-generated content?

The debate over AI-generated content is no doubt going to rage on for some time, particularly in the realm of SEO. The takeaway so far is that while AI offers the potential for increased efficiency, it also raises concerns about authenticity and quality, which are primary points of emphasis with Google.

Whether you are a marketer with decades of experience or an SEO newbie, there is but one consensus about AI-generated content so far – be open to change but always prioritize quality over quantity.

If the biggest SEO trend last year was optimizing for internal links, then this year, I’ve got to give the nod to refreshing old blog content.

Why? Because Google uses freshness within its ranking algorithm (section 18.0) and because yesterday’s underwear just plain stinks.

Check out this content refresh we did for a Digital Elevator blog to see how a content refresh helped the blog pageviews increase 533% just a couple months later!

We’ll dive into how to refresh content and give an example of exactly how to go about it.

Here are the steps to take to refresh your blogs for SEO:

1. Determine which content you want to refresh first
2. Use a keyword software to review current rankings
3. Use Google Search Console to find new content ideas
4. Review “People also ask” for content ideas
5. Utilize “Related searches” for additional sub-topics

As we explain above, we’ll use an existing blog on our site as an example, How to Find Non-Copyrighted Music for Your YouTube Videos, so you can see how to use these exact steps to get big gains with just a little leg work.

1. Determine which content you want to refresh first

There are several ways you can determine what content is underperforming and how to decide if it deserves a refresh.

• Use Google Analytics to review historical traffic data from the previous year. If it has been waning substantially, then it may deserve a refresh.
• Review keyword rankings history in a keyword software tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush or within Google Search Console. If keyword rankings are waning, it may be time for a refresh.
• Highlight blogs related to recurring events, current information queries, or product queries AND are more than a year old. For example, don’t you think a visitor would prefer a review post from the current year rather than one from previous years?

As a general rule of thumb, look for posts that are at least a year old (unless the data suggests otherwise).

For example, our post on how to find non-copyright music is over four years old, and in all likelihood, the resources inside the post are dated.

2. Use a keyword software to review current rankings

This is where you want to look at keyword rankings for opportunistic opportunities that might suggest content needs to be refreshed, where some low-hanging fruit exists, or where to get some more topic ideas.

For example, I will check out my non-copyrighted music blog in Ahrefs Organic keywords Site Explorer section.

That post ranks for 100s of keywords, and at first glance, many of them look to be synonym keywords of the primary keyword. 

I’ll then note the keywords that have the volume that I want to beef up my content.

If these keywords are not really helpful in helping me tackle this, I’ll want to actively look for more question-type content. To do this I filter my keywords with “what, how to, where” words to get better results. Make sure you use the “any” keyword filter here to get any keywords that include these terms.

Now that I have a much smaller list of keywords to sort through, I can review them to see if any are valuable to use to update my content. A few keywords that stand out to me from my initial search and my filtered search include the below:

• how to know if a song is copyrighted on youtube 100/monthly searches
• how to legally use copyrighted music on youtube 150/monthly searches
• popular songs that aren’t copyrighted 100/monthly searches

Because these are mostly question topics, a great way to include them in my blog refresh is to have a FAQ section with these exact questions and some answers. Google, and visitors, will love that.

3. Use Google Search Console to find new content ideas

Another way to do something similar to our keyword research tool (albeit with less filtering capabilities and actual keyword metric data) is to use Google Search Console.

After logging into your site portal, you’ll want to:

1. Click on “Search results” under Performance on the left sidebar
2. Click “New” and then “Page” in the dropdown
3. Enter your URL and confirm the filter is set
4. Click on the “Average position” box as well

Now that we have our Search Console filter set to the specific page we want to review, we need to filter it down a bit more.

Slightly down on the page, click the filter button on the far right and click “Position.”

Next, sort down a little farther so that you can select “Smaller than” and set the Position to 20 to see rankings positions below 20. Make sure to click “Done” when finished to initiate the sort.

Now you’ll see queries that are low-hanging fruit in the sense that they are on page one or two in the SERPs.

You can now look at these keywords to see if any specific topics deserve a section on the site.

The sweet spot here is really keywords ranked 10-20 that don’t have a specific mention in your existing blog. For example, the keywords “non copyrighted artists” looks like a good topic to include in my blog refresh.

4. Review “People also ask” for content ideas

For additional keyword ideas that you may not have in your blog post, type in your target keyword into Google and review the “People also ask” results. The more results you expand, the more questions Google will reveal to you.

These are some additional questions I may want to include in my FAQ section to address exactly what Google is telling me is related to my topic.

In this instance, I like the latter two questions.

Note: You may need to use variations of your target keyword here to get better results.

5. Utilize “Related searches” for additional sub-topics

Along with the People also ask section, you’ll also want to scroll to the bottom of the SERP results for even more topics.

None of these topics resonate with my blog topic that I haven’t already covered for my particular search, so I’ll dismiss them. For other topics, this can be a treasure trove of ideas, though.

Bonus Tips for Refreshing Blog Content

Here are some additional tips for maximizing your content refresh efforts.

Implement a last updated timestamp on your blogs. 

This timestamp tells Google and your visitors the last time your post was updated and sends important freshness and user experience queues. 

If you use WordPress, check out the WP Last Modified Info plugin.

Update your title tag to include the current year

Give Google and your viewers a nice signal that indicates your content is up to date. Just make sure to leave your URL as was.

Update your internal links

If you are actively blogging, it may behoove you to link to your freshly updated blog post from some of your new blog posts and vice versa. Spread some of the link juice around on your site with this tactic.

Over to You! Update Your Content

Updating your content with your new keyword research is a qualitative effort. If you have new topics to write, it should be fairly self-explanatory where they fit into your existing content. 

However, the best use of these keywords is as subsections with dedicated headings (H2s, H3s, etc.) or as part of a FAQ section. 

Updates to content need not be massive endeavors; sometimes all you need to refresh your content is a few new links or a new paragraph or two. Other times updates can be more substantial. Your data on keyword opportunities should spell this out for you, and if you make an effort to provide value to the reader in your updates, you’ll be enjoying traffic increases in no time. 

The marriage of your blog’s layout and design may be one of the most critical factors in keeping your visitors engaged with your content.  

With over 6+ million blog posts published each day globally, you’ll need to take advantage of every opportunity you have to evoke as much credibility and trust from your blog as possible.

As a company that has driven millions of dollars of traffic value to our clients through our blogging efforts, I wanted to share the secret sauce to winning blog layout and design that we’ve learned from working on sites for over a decade.

Below you’ll find our exact processes for layout and design for the following:

• Blog hub page
• Blog category page
• Author page
• Blog post

Blog Hub Page Layout & Design

The blog hub page is probably the most overlooked blog design aspect. Most sites simply use the default WordPress settings of displaying blogs in reverse chronological order. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that approach, we like to set up blog hub pages to cater to interests, or defined in a different way, to cater to buyer personas. 

A good example of this blog hub page layout in action is the Exclusively Hybrid blog. The blog caters to several different buyer personas, all largely related to hybrid batteries: Recommended blogs (to emphasize the most popular blogs on the site); most recent posts (for timely content); and categorial sections around topics such as Hybrid Maintenance, Technology, and specific brands of hybrids. 

When readers are in what is called “content consumption mode,” this blog hub layout gives them the best opportunity to digest a specific topic in its entirety, lending credibility to the brand, educating, and pushing toward sales.

When designing a blog hub this way, you’ll see a lot of thought go into content curation. When you logically think about the specific topics you want to delve into repeatedly, it is easy to create these curated sections that appeal to specific buyers.

Another company that does this well is Segment. They provide a sub-menu of the types of content they create right up top, offering a different approach to categorical navigation than the example above.

I also like that they have blog newsletter CTAs throughout the page to encourage signups.

Blog Hub Page Design SEO Best Practices

1. Ideate primary categories based on content marketing
   • Recommended – 3-6 blogs
   • Include blog email opt-in or relevant CTA (ex. demo)
   • Recent – 3-6 blogs
   • Category A – 3-4 blogs
   • Category B -3-4 blogs
   • etc
2. All categories need a View More button to jump to the category URL
3. Decide on Featured Image art direction (also serves as hero)
   • Standard corporate images?
   • Custom images?

Blog Category Page Layout & Design

For blogs that have a decent amount of content for each category, dedicated category pages are recommended to capitalize on specific categorical interests. 

For Segment, this means creating a page around something like Engineering:

https://segment.com/blog/engineering/

This serves the Engineering buyer persona well since they would be unlikely to have interest in Segment’s Growth & Marketing content or vice versa. 

The blog category pages should also follow Segment’s approach of providing some contextually relevant content, as the page does with a keyword-researched blurb that talks about what the page is promoting.

Blog Category Page Design SEO Best Practices

1. Create categories driven by keyword research
2. Include category description: 1-2 sentences of copy that describes the category
3. Recommended section of curated content
4. Recent content

Author Page Layout & Design

While I will admit not every website requires as much emphasis on the credibility of its authors as those in YMYL industries, Google has made it clear that its recent core updates do put a lot of emphasis on authorship, credibility, and trust.

With these E-A-T benchmarks in place, we feel that most blogs benefit from author pages that showcase Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

These pages don’t have to be massive productions, but they are an opportunity to brag about one’s prowess in an industry. We find that Google (and visitors) find credibility in third-party, trustworthy websites. For example, medical doctors who other medical sites have featured, authors who appear on the sites of popular conferences with links to their blogs, etc.

This article from Search Engine Journal provides a great author bio page for E-A-T and references this particularly amazing bio of Dr. Gayathri Perera, a dermatologist in London.

Check out the aforementioned SEJ link for more details and some of our best practices below.

Author Page Design SEO Best Practices

1. Assign all posts to the author, not generic company posts
2. Include bios even with single author sites
   1. Include information in bio such as: education, group membership, publications, certifications, other media mentions, etc – anything that qualifies them to be an authority in their field
3. Headshots
4. Links to social accounts
5. Reviews
6. Links to third-party websites that reference the author
7. Schema markup 

Blog Post Layout & Design

The layout and design of your blog post are really where the meat and potatoes of your efforts are likely to go. And this is probably where the bulk of your website traffic comes from if done correctly.

The following recommendations are by no means a blog post design bible, as every brand will have slightly different style guidelines, personal preferences, and artistic direction. However, these recommendations are provided with SEO in mind, so take what you’d like and leave what you don’t.

To delve into this, it’s nice to start with an example, and SEMRush blog post design comes through as a winner in this department. 

1. Blog sub-menu: Playing with our categorization on the blog hub page, the blog sub-menu is specific to the blog and allows visitors to browse topics by category, further emphasizing content consumption mode. Note that if you want to create a blog sub-menu like this, the blog has to be big enough to justify enough categories, which is likely in the 30+ blogs range. 
2. Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs also help with navigation as well as internal links, which have a nice SEO benefit.
3. Featured images match hub page: Continuity is vital in blog hub page and blog post design. Here, we will find that SEMRush’s featured image matches that of their blog hub page.

4. Author, Publish Date, Read time: These attributes play along nicely with what we spoke about before with the trustworthiness and credibility aspect of the site. The author’s name is clickable and takes you to the author bio page, which showcases the author’s other content. The blog published date (or last modified date) provides insight into how relevant the content is. If the content is evergreen, there may be a case to not showcase the publish date. Finally, the read time may be an attractive piece of information that we are seeing used more in blogs. Not shown in the screenshot, but used on the SEMRush blog, is progress reading bar. This is a subtle bar that moves across the page to show you how much more content you have left to complete which may increase completion of reading and decrease bounce rate.  
5. Table of contents: We know that today’s readers tend to skim articles for the contents they want. A table of contents encourages readers to jump to where they want to read, and provides a nice overview of all the content that is provided in the post. We like SEMRush’s table of contents because it floats as you scroll, but there are other options available such as this one from LuckyWP.
6. Leading paragraph needs to be above the fold: A good rule of thumb is not to make readers have to scroll to read the first paragraph of content. Thus, we recommend designing your post page so that the leading paragraph is above the fold.

Additional Blog Post Layout SEO Best Practices

Create a style guide around video placements

Because many blogs also include video, it makes sense to create a style guide on how your blog post will display them. Some ideas are:

In-body with thumbnail

Lightbox with CTA box 

In the featured image overlay 

(ex. guy on cliff in the SEMRush screenshot replaced with thumbnail with embed)

Place social media sharing buttons according to sharing prominence

The degree to which you emphasize social media sharing greatly depends on the nature of your industry. In some industries, social sharing is very popular (think recipes) while in others, like engineering, it is less prevalent. 

Depending on the degree of which social sharing is used within your industry should drive the prominence of your social sharing icons. 

For example, for Segment and their engineering content, these subtle, right sidebar, non-scrolling social sharing icons suffice.

You can also consider putting them at the end of your post, or towards the top. 

Breakup text for increased readability with HTML elements

No one likes to look at a bunch of text with no end in sight. Besides the obvious use of visuals to breakup lines of text, utilize unique HTML elements such as the following:

• block quotes 
• tables
• custom icons for bullets/checkmarks
• encapsulate important elements (ex. branded box with paragraph text)

Encourage content consumption with 3-4 related posts at bottom of post

You’ve probably seen HubSpot do this with their blog posts really well. Why? Because HubSpot knows that once people make it to the bottom of a post they are likely in content consumption mode.

If you want Cookie Monster to hang out with you, what do you do? Give him more cookies!

Rather than the general “Additional Reading” add-on to the bottom of your post that often features your most popular, but potentially unrelated posts, curate some related posts by category or tag so that readers can continue their journey of knowledge. 

Here’s an example of an article on YouTube Comments that ends with three related articles on HubSpot’s site:

Include a CTA at the bottom of each post

Again, this is a space that HubSpot is well-known for, particularly as it applies to very specific CTAs.

Not only do they put this CTA at the end of the post, but they also have CTAs in-body and as slide-ins. All these CTAs may be a bit overkill for most brands, but if the name of the game is list building, then there is definitely a lesson to be learned here. 

If you have an existing CTA in your footer as a global setting, make sure the CTAs don’t conflict.

Include an abbreviated clickable author bio at the bottom of the post

Like SEMRush, you can include a clickable author bio at the bottom of the post as well as the top of the post, or just at the top, or just at the bottom. It’s really a matter of preference. 

Here, just include two or three sentences about the author that showcase their credibility as well as some social links or a company email link. It’s important to make the author bio clickable and linked to their full, dedicated bio page.

Blog comments should be considered on a site-by-site basis

There seems to be a trend with many blogs to not include the option to leave comments at the bottom of blog posts. For anyone who has ever managed a blog, handling spam is an obvious reason to do away with this type of social engagement. 

However, there are some research studies that show that comments can drive traffic, provided the community is highly active. 

The bottom line from this research is that comments can be nice to have, but are not an absolute necessity for SEO gains.

If you are thinking about including comments on your blog posts, consider the following first:

1. Do you have someone in-house who can spend time moderating, replying, and managing comments in a meaningful way?
2. Will your blog justify enough comments to include this type of engagement?
3. Will the comments actually provide value to the blogs?

Another consideration for blog comments is to push comments to a membership-based community, such as verified subscribers, or a Facebook group.

Cite your references

Last but not least, make sure to cite your references. Here’s what Google has to say about that:

It should go without saying that scientific articles and authoritative sites are very important for credibility for YMYL websites, but not as much with general information sites. Still, credibility is a factor for readers as much as it is for Google, so if you can cite credible sources, your readers, and Google, will appreciate your efforts.

Working With Your Dev Team to Make Changes

If you have made the smart decision to implement the above changes to your blog you may be wondering where to start or be concerned about the work involved.

The good news, if you are on WordPress, is that the page builders – Brizy, Elementor, Divi, Muffin Builder, etc. – all come with templates. When you approach blog hub pages, category pages, or blog post pages, a template can be used to create the design and layout that matches your brand.

Since this is more of an SEO guide to blog layout and design we won’t go into detail about how to go about this as any decent developer can carry this out. That said, it does provide an opportunity for a shameless plug to use Digital Elevator to design, plan, and carry out these changes for you with our touch of SEO expertise.

If you need help carrying out the recommendations of this post, reach out to us today.