alexa news

Hi Guys,

I just wanted to take the time to thank our customers for their support in 2015 and wish you all a happy and prosperous 2016.

With the New Year upon us, we’re off to great start introducing upgrades to our service. Many of you have taken the time to respond to our emails and surveys, and have let us know where you find value in our service and where you would like us to make improvements.

Our service has come a long way since the inception of the Alexa Rank and we look forward to applying the feedback and continuing our evolution. Much of our focus will be giving you more reasons to use our service on a regular basis and we aspire to become a part of your daily routine.

To start the year, we’ve introduced an overhauled dashboard interface to provide a more informative place to land as a new or existing customer.

The card interface enables us to deliver more informative, at-a-glance summaries. And it also improves access to your site metrics and tools.

We also have several new tools on the horizon, including a solution to find and qualify organic keyword opportunities. Many of you have told us about your commitment to getting your site’s SEO in order and these tools intend to simplify and facilitate your work in improving your site’s ability to rank for search.

In addition, we will continue to optimize our tools that help you to understand your competitors, potential partners, and the audiences you are vying for. All these tools are fueled by our data panel, which also will continue growing and diversifying in 2016.

I hope your year is shaping up in an equally exciting manner. Please feel free to let us know how you’re doing, or share your feedback in the Idea. I look forward to hearing about your successes and your biggest challenges over the coming year.

Cheers,

Hiro
Head of Product
Alexa

Hiro Shimozato

With over 10 years of consumer tech product management experience, and a portfolio of name brands like Dolby, Jawbone, and Mattel, Hiro is the eyes and ears of the customer. Now this Seattle, WA native is bringing that same customer advocacy to Alexa, helping shape its next generation of workflow oriented analytics tools.

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SEO isn’t about gaming Google. It’s simply about creating content that people want and that satisfies their search intent.

Looking at SEO from this perspective can make it easier to understand and easier to execute white hat SEO techniques. By putting aside the spammy tactics of yesteryear, you can produce and publish customer-focused content without that scammy vibe.

Now let’s talk about how to know what content topics people want.

White Hat SEO Technique #1: Use Keyword Research to Discover Content Demand

A little keyword research can go a long way in helping you understand what your audience wants.

Not only will you find topics that are frequently searched, you’re also likely to stumble on search language they are using that you might not have anticipated. One reason for this–your knowledge and expertise in your industry is deeper than theirs. The language you use is probably industry jargon that your audience doesn’t use. This is a great opportunity for you to find long tail keywords that your audience can understand, and create content that speaks to them.

Creating content using language your customers use is as white hat as it comes. Forget stuffing your content with a single keyword over and over again. This is about meeting customers on their turf, speaking to them naturally and in terms they understand.

White hat do’s:

Do — choose to target keywords that are fairly popular. The ease of ranking for those keywords will depend on the competitive strength of your site. Be realistic in how high of a competition level you can take on and still get results.

Do — include the target keywords in all the right places–URL, title tag, alt images, body content, etc.

Do — use other keywords that are related to your target keyword within the body of your content.

Example: If you’re writing a post about doing a competitive analysis, you should also include related terms like competitive analysis report or competitive analysis example.

Do — use the target keyword in the anchor text of inteal links to the new content.

Black hat don’ts:

Don’t — aim for quantity over quality. With all the searches Google receives every day, you can be certain its algorithms understand synonymous phrases. Instead of repeating the same keyword phrase as often as possible, use like-keywords to reinforce what your content is about.

Now that you know what your audience is searching for, let’s talk about what they want to find.

White Hat SEO Technique #2: Create SEO Content That Answers The Search Intent

You don’t need to be a technical genius to do SEO right. Like most marketing disciplines, a little bit of empathy for the user searching can go a long way to getting results in SEO.

Think from the perspective of the searcher.

• What are they looking for?
• What are the problems they are seeking advice or solutions to?
• Are they looking for advice, or are they looking to buy something?

Search intent tends to fall into one of these categories:

• Lea something
• Find solution to a problem
• Purchase something

When evaluating your list of keyword opportunities, think about whether a person searching that phrase is hoping to lea something, find a solution to a problem, or make a purchase.

The phrase they’ve entered reveals a lot about their intention.

When you create your SEO content be sure to give users what they are looking for. If they are looking for an educational “how to” article, don’t create content that pushes a sale.

White hat do’s

Do — think of your content as a Q & A. The keyword query is the question. Your content is the answer.

Do — be a useful resource by giving the searcher what they want.

Do — be clear in your title tag and meta description about what your content promises.

Black hat don’ts

Don’t — bait and switch the searcher with misleading click-bait titles. Your title should always tie directly to your content. If it doesn’t, the visitor is more likely to bounce, sending Google a signal that your content didn’t serve their search interest. As a result, Google will drop your position in the SERPs like a hot potato.

White Hat SEO Technique #3: Help Google Know What Your Content is About by Getting Votes of Confidence

Google needs to know what your content is about in order to place it in the right SERPs for the right search terms.

One way it does this is through on-page signals–things like the inclusion of keywords in the URL, title, body content, etc.

Another way is through on-site signals–inteal links from related pages on your site using anchor text that is descriptive of the content (i.e. it includes the target keyword).

And then there are off-site signals–inbound links from 3^rd party trust-worthy sites that have related content linking to your content. A 3^rd party citation of your content tells Google that a real, live person who created it thinks your content truly is about “xyz” (aka your keyword).

This is the origin of SEO’s spammy reputation. Bad-actors manipulated off-site signals by fabricating inbound links with things like link farms–clearly not living, breathing humans giving a vote of confidence that the content is indeed about what you claim it to be.

As a result, Google has put great effort into knowing when an inbound link is from a quality, trust-worthy site, versus a fabricated link purely for manipulative gain. The former helps you. The latter hurts you.

So when you hear the term “link building,” forget those old school black hat tactics. The game has changed. When done right, link building can be an extremely powerful way to boost search rankings. As a bonus, it could drive referral traffic too.

The key here is in building relationships and reaching out to bloggers and joualists to let them know about your awesome content. We’ll need to write a whole other post on white hat link building.

But the point is–

If you followed #1, you’ll have content that’s in demand–and the bloggers you reach out to will know their audience enough to know that.

If you followed #2, bloggers will appreciate the resourcefulness of your content and be more likely to cite it when it is relevant and complimentary to the content they are creating.

White hat do’s:

Do — reach out to influencers to let them know about your content, pointing out why it might add value to their content.

Do – personalize your outreach in a genuine, one-on-one way that shows you know the blogger.

Do — be patient. Building mutually beneficial relationships takes time.

Black hat don’ts:

Don’t — send mass emails to influencers with no personalization. It won’t be effective. It won’t get you to the top of Google. And you’ll bu bridges in the process.

Summary of a White Hat SEO Strategy

In sum, you can practice good SEO without feeling like a spammer if you follow white hat SEO strategies. In fact, the more you focus on serving the searcher’s needs, the more you’ll benefit. It’s a win-win for everybody involved.

• The searcher gets what they want–an answer to their search
• Google gets what they want–satisfied searchers (aka happy customers)
• You get what you want–top rankings on Google and “free” organic traffic

Kim Cooper

Kim has 12 years experience in demand generation, content marketing, and campaign management. Her expertise has helped grow user bases by as much as 7x year over year, and a startup from nothing to $1.2 million in revenue in just 3 years.

Latest posts by Kim Cooper (see all)

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Not all sites are created equal in the eyes of Google.

Some sites have a harder time ranking than others.

So how do you find the best keywords for your website, given its unique ability to rank?

You’ve probably heard the common advice to target low competition keywords. But the real question is, how low should you go? The answer depends on your site’s Competitive Power—a new metric by Alexa that benchmarks the level of keyword competition your site can target with more confidence of getting results.

Now you can find easy-to-rank keywords for your site with Alexa’s new keyword difficulty tool.

It’s literally as easy as 1-2-3.

In this post, we’ll help you answer these questions:

• How do I find the best keywords for my website?
• How can I be confident I’ll rank for the keywords I choose?
• How can I save time when doing keyword research?

How to find easy-to-rank keywords

To find the best keywords for SEO that your site will actually be able to rank for, you must first understand your site’s strength, a.k.a. your Competitive Power.

Focusing your efforts on low competition keywords that are within your site’s Competitive Power will save you time and effort on fruitless pursuits.

In other words, you won’t waste time creating content for keywords that are too competitive for you to rank for.

Step 1 – Get to know your site’s Competitive Power

Your site’s Competitive Power is a measure of your site’s ability to compete in SERPs (search engine results pages).

You can increase your chances of ranking by choosing keywords with a competition score that is at or below your site’s Competitive Power.

Step 2 – Start your search for SEO keywords

Do you already have an idea for content you’d like to create? Is there a site in your industry that represents the audience you aspire to attract? Think—competitors, industry publications, bloggers in your niche, etc.

Create a list of highly relevant keyword ideas by using Alexa’s keyword generator tool.

You can start your search in 2 ways:

The first is by entering a seed phrase that represents the topic you’d like to create content for. For example, marketing automation.

The resulting list of keywords will be generated based on related phrases that people often search for in addition to the seed phrase you entered. Think of Amazon’s “customers who bought this item also bought” recommendations. This means that your list of keyword opportunities will be highly relevant to the audience who tends to search the phrase you entered.

The second way to start your search is by entering a site that represents the content you’d like to create or the audience you’d like to attract. For example, marketo.com.

Searching by site will generate a list of SEO keyword ideas based on phrases that are similar to those currently driving traffic to that site. Again, these related phrases are based on real people’s search pattes and will help you create highly relevant content for your target audience.

PRO TIP: Enter your own site to find untapped opportunities related to keywords already driving traffic to your site. We’ll use the keywords that are working well for your site to find other keyword ideas you might not have thought of.

Step 3 – Find the best keywords for your site

Now that you’ve got a great list of keyword ideas that are relevant to your site, you can sort and filter to narrow it down to the keywords you want to create SEO content for.

Unlike other SEO keyword tools, this list was generated based on relevance so you won’t need to waste time sifting through thousands of keywords removing the ones that don’t make sense for you.

And because you know the Competitive Power of your site, you also know where to focus your efforts with greater confidence that you’ll get results.

Use the Competition filter to refine the results to those you have the highest chance of ranking for—at or below your Competitive Power.

Continue filtering and sorting based on what is important to your goals, in terms of relevance, popularity, and competition. You can also filter the list to show only keywords that contain a specific phrase.

As you find keywords you like, save them for later by adding them to your Favorites. We’ll keep them tucked away until you’re ready to use them.

That’s it! Now all you need to do is create killer content and start driving traffic.

Find the best keyword opportunities in less time, and with more confidence

Sign up for a free trial of Alexa’s Advanced plan today to get access to the new keyword tool.

Kim Cooper

Kim has 12 years experience in demand generation, content marketing, and campaign management. Her expertise has helped grow user bases by as much as 7x year over year, and a startup from nothing to $1.2 million in revenue in just 3 years.

Latest posts by Kim Cooper (see all)

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