Newbie Question(s) so dumb, you're afraid to even ask!

[JOoa0ky]

And how many visitors does the blog have per month?
How much does the blog make per month?
What is the business profit per customer/client?

1) Last 30 days analytics were 185,235 users / 215,871 sessions / 451,776 pageviews
- Approximately 2% of that traffic goes to actual local business while 98% is "blog" traffic

2) Well, I only recently got onboarded with Monumetric... numbers are still steadily going up but its hovering around $70~ a day
- I got rejected from mediavine and adthrive back around late July which I thought was due to healthcare niche and being in YMYL
- However I did find some older domains doing something similar so I don't think thats the case. Probably because I had less than 3 months of traffic data at the time of application with top 2 posts bringing in more than 50% of the traffic. I still surpassed their requirements at the time though.
- Going to reapply around late October / early November and see what happens after traffic has matured.

3) Not sure what you're asking about here. The "blog" income is as is from above. If you're asking about the local business itself, it was already grossing well over 7 figures / year before I even started creating content.


Why I'm doing it and how I'm doing it is a rather unpopular opinion but that doesn't really matter... I see an opportunity and I will go for it (healthline and webMD are ripe for picking). That's simply it.

Anyway, this has gone pretty far off topic. My search query was about best practices for structuring internal linking with hub pages / pillar posts / and subposts.

 

[Balkans]

Hey Buds,
I'm in the Insurance Biz (boring but pays the bills Until i hit the Power-ball).
I ran across a guy who is a PPC expert who's now doing instagram marketing to sell tangible goods (Mugs, Pens, Amazon items, etc).

• Would Instagram Marketing work in a business like mine?
• Good for Models; YES
• Other Biz Types: I Don't know ?

Thoughts / Comments ?

thanks for your input ~

~B

 

[DunderMannen]

What are some go-to's for launching new site in a semi-competitive niche? There are about 15-20 other pages competing for the exact same keywords (all niche sites, no true authority sites).

1. How should I structure it? It will have about 10 reviews of different services in the field. ~5 pillar pages & about 25 pages targeting different local areas.
2. Backlinking strategy? To launch it, should I use a pressrelease service? After PR, how many links per month (brand new domain).

Budget is about 2000-3000€ not counting content, the theme I program myself

 

[CCarter]

Do you see other insurance businesses advertising there? I see dentists advertising there. I see plastic surgeons, I see car insurance. First do a search for your industry and see what people are doing on that platform within your industry.

You can simple education people about insurance and what to do in certain situations through video.

Writing off a platform doesn't make sense unless you've done the testing to see whether it's a waste of time like a place like Reddit.

 

[Balkans]

Do you see other insurance businesses advertising there? I see dentists advertising there. I see plastic surgeons, I see car insurance. First do a search for your industry and see what people are doing on that platform within your industry.

You can simple education people about insurance and what to do in certain situations through video.

Writing off a platform doesn't make sense unless you've done the testing to see whether it's a waste of time like a place like Reddit.

I see lots of INSTAGRAM messages...with VERY FEW 'likes' or even acknowledgement of the Message. LOTS of Failures on Instagram (which is what i thought since the public views Instagram as a kinda 'Show-off' Site for aspiring models looking to promote 'an image.').

NOW THAT i think of it, not sure How this guy sells Coffee Mugs on Instagram?

 

[CCarter]

VERY FEW 'likes

Likes does not equal money. Some kid goes viral for a tiktok dance and get a million likes, how much money did he make? $0.

It's about exposing your brand to an audience that may not know you exist. I follow this one dentist and never like any of their photos, but I've learn some interesting things from their posts that when someone needs a dentist I recommend them.

The social platform's metrics are meaningless. Getting your brand in front of an audience and then converting them directly or indirectly to paying customers should be the only metric you concern yourself with.

Look at it from a brand exposure standpoint.

 

[Balkans]

Likes does not equal money. Some kid goes viral for a tiktok dance and get a million likes, how much money did he make? $0.

It's about exposing your brand to an audience that may not know you exist. I follow this one dentist and never like any of their photos, but I've learn some interesting things from their posts that when someone needs a dentist I recommend them.

The social platform's metrics are meaningless. Getting your brand in front of an audience and then converting them directly or indirectly to paying customers should be the only metric you concern yourself with.

Look at it from a brand exposure standpoint.

That's the thing... there's no way to track how many 'Looks' you are getting.
-Is my audience really on Instagram?
-Time is a precious resource...only so many hours in the day. You have to MAKE IT COUNT (not waste it).
-Its a free advertising platform... not sure how effective it is.

 

[CCarter]

'Looks' you are getting.

How many "looks" did people advertising in the yellowpages, or in physical newsletters like church bulletins. What about bus stop benches or billboards along the highway. What about mailers to residential homes? You are constantly bombarded with advertisements when you go outside, and you THINK it may not work on you, yet you still ask for that Coca-Cola at a restaurant.

Without that digital "look" metric people/companies still do all those things.

That how brand exposure works, constant reminding the audience that the brand exists.

You have to MAKE IT COUNT

Do paid social media to test out the waters on each platform. If after a certain budget you can't get it to work, move on to a different platform or tactic. Test, test, and do some more testing. Welcome to marketing. There is no Holy Grail. Lots of grinding until you get someone to click.

 

[Zoro]

Ok so i got 3 articles that are cross stealing keywords aka cannibalising.
One of the articles have like 90% of the trafic but it feels like im missing out on trafic because of the missleading title. Should I try to rewrite those 3 with better keyword intent? I probably should shouldnt I? Damnit answered it myself.

Ok im back, sorry for the spam. (you can delete my previous post)

I've spent most of the day analysing my early article mistakes.

So the thing with my site is that I have been "learning" as I go with making articles, keyword research, backlinking and everything. So the things I did 3-4 months ago are crap compared to what I do now.

But I have like 10 articles giving me some impressions but its targeting the wrong keywords so the URL +H1+H2s are wrong. You could say I wrote a good guide on the things I wanted to write about but targeted the wrong keywords when I first started. I also got backlinkgs pointed to these posts. (but backlinks are fiverr backlinks.)

I know I fucked up the fiverr backlinks stuff now when I learned so could probably just skipp those right? Cheap links cuz I was a fool.

So I'Il guess I have 2-3 options but I dont know what to do.

1. Rewrite the articles alittle and change keywords so I can redirect it. Problem is URL will be wrong.

2. Copy articles, rewrite them alittle and target specific correct keywords and create new urls and direct old post to new.

3. Delete them and just repost them with new intent, f*ck the backlinks.

So what to do ʕʘ̅͜ʘ̅ʔ

 

[Ryuzaki]

1. Rewrite the articles alittle and change keywords so I can redirect it. Problem is URL will be wrong.

It's probably the case that, based on what you're saying, you can simply change the keywords you're targeting with minimal rewriting at all. Tweak the title, H1, H2's, and usages in the article. 5 minute ordeal probably.

Then, if you're using Wordpress, you can just change the slug so the URL changes to what you want it to be, and Wordpress will track the previous slug and redirect it to your new one, which means you won't lose all of your Fiverr backlinks, if you feel you want to keep them. If you don't, then you can just copy and paste the article into a new post with a new slug so Wordpress doesn't do the redirection.

 

[vortex]

@Ryuzaki any input on my question? It was basically if I should invest in Links and push commercial pages that rank on page 2/3 to page 1 to generate some cash flow, or if to invest into KGR content (I have limited budget)

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Ryuzaki any input on my question? It was basically if I should invest in Links and push commercial pages that rank on page 2/3 to page 1 to generate some cash flow, or if to invest into KGR content (I have limited budget)

Your choices are 1) buy the links and write the content yourself, 2) build the links yourself and buy the content, or 3) buy a bit of both.

Nobody can guarantee the success of any of those paths but I can tell you that since your budget is limited you need to roll up your sleeves and get to work regardless. It’s not and either/or situation. Get it all done using your money and your time and effort.

Sounds like, if your posts are landing on page 2 & 3 that you definitely could benefit from a stronger backlink profile in general. Links to the pages will help, and if you do manage to get them in the top 3 this will be a path to revenue. The KGR posts might if you're in a position to monetize them, but what if they land on page 2 & 3 again?

You simply have to go through this process over and over to strengthen your site. You need more links for sitewide domain strength. You need more content to build topical authority and relevance. Rinse and repeat.

We don't know which is better or worse for you because we don't know anything about your situation, your site, etc. But I can tell you that whenever you think "should it be this or that?" the answer is usually right up the middle: "both in some amount". And if the question is "should I use my money to do it rather than my effort?" the answer is usually right up the middle: "both in some amount".

 

[vortex]

I don't think that issue is related to what you're experiencing. The days of being indexed and starting to rank immediately are slowly leaving us. It's more and more rare for that to happen, unless you're a giant, trusted site. Even then every page has to become trusted too. I think the move is to hit publish and then not look at that new page's performance for 3 months. That keeps your mind in the mode of always planting seeds rather than stopping and making sure each seed starts growing. Just keep planting. People do this with links, too, and gone are the days of links always providing a reaction immediately. 3 months is a good bare minimum before you start to worry about it.

You can help remove those hacked pages by making them show a 410 error instead of 404. But even with a 404 error, a good move is to use Search Console's Coverage Report to gather up all those remaining URLs in the index and shoving them in a new XML sitemap (search "generate XML sitemap" to find easy tools to do this).

You can then upload that sitemap for a month, which prompts Google to crawl those pages. They'll drop a good half of them in about a month. Then you can repeat the process with the remaining URLs. In about 6 months you'll have the number of indexed pages very low, then just let the rest get gone naturally.

Thats good to know - I will just keep grinding out content and links. Somewhen there must be results. Site is not penalized whatsoever so they should rank at one point. Im also trying to start a second site slowly - as having only one site is much riskier than having at least 2.

 

[Sutra]

In Google Search Console, for some reason one of our Wordpress admin edit URLs is showing as Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt. The actual article itself is good and want to keep it indexed but obviously don't want the WPadmin URL indexed.

Example WPadmin URL:
https://domain.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=123&action=edit

1. How to remove the WPadmin URL from the index?
2. How did it get indexed in the first place?

 

[vortex]

Your choices are 1) buy the links and write the content yourself, 2) build the links yourself and buy the content, or 3) buy a bit of both.

Nobody can guarantee the success of any of those paths but I can tell you that since your budget is limited you need to roll up your sleeves and get to work regardless. It’s not and either/or situation. Get it all done using your money and your time and effort.

Sounds like, if your posts are landing on page 2 & 3 that you definitely could benefit from a stronger backlink profile in general. Links to the pages will help, and if you do manage to get them in the top 3 this will be a path to revenue. The KGR posts might if you're in a position to monetize them, but what if they land on page 2 & 3 again?

You simply have to go through this process over and over to strengthen your site. You need more links for sitewide domain strength. You need more content to build topical authority and relevance. Rinse and repeat.

We don't know which is better or worse for you because we don't know anything about your situation, your site, etc. But I can tell you that whenever you think "should it be this or that?" the answer is usually right up the middle: "both in some amount". And if the question is "should I use my money to do it rather than my effort?" the answer is usually right up the middle: "both in some amount".

Btw, regarding backlinks, I'm trying to get them by outreach but most webmasters in my country want 300€+ per Link. Its abit hard so usually i try to offer them a longer article in exchange for a smaller price.

Another trick I wanted to do is buy english links linking to my site in french as a start - im not sure how good of an idea this is - but this would save alot of costs if this method works. I am thinking on using english niche edits on my money pages to get some cash flow going..

 

[Ryuzaki]

In Google Search Console, for some reason one of our Wordpress admin edit URLs is showing as Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt. The actual article itself is good and want to keep it indexed but obviously don't want the WPadmin URL indexed.

Example WPadmin URL:
https://domain.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=123&action=edit

1. How to remove the WPadmin URL from the index?
2. How did it get indexed in the first place?

Sounds to me like someone was interlinking and accidentally grabbed the "Edit" link instead of the "View" link, where the View link would be the actual URL and the Edit one would be that wp-admin one.

That's the only way that would leak to the front-end, and if you're linking to it without nofollow, even if you request Google not to crawl the page, they'll still index it.

I've described it before as Google walking down a hallway. Part of their job is to go into every room they come across and index what's inside of it. But if one of the doors is locked, they'll still add to their index that a door is there, with a note that they don't know what's inside the room. They'll literally say that in the SERPs, like "Page content blocked by robots.txt" and then the title tag will be whatever anchor text you used.

So even if they can't crawl the page, they'll index it's existence with all the information they can get about it (anchor text, mainly). They do this because you're the authority of the website and you linked to it, assumingely on purpose. They don't know if human visitors can reach it, they just know they can't.

To get it removed, you'll want to find where you linked to it (I'm assuming this is the case here) and remove the link. From there, Google will eventually drop it out of the index on their own, but in the mean time you can go to Search Console and request that the URL not be shown in the SERPs. I think this lasts 3 or 6 months tops before you'd need to do it again if the URL didn't drop from the index by then.

 

[freshpeppermint]

Yo, I basically have images after every h2 and sometimes h3. I don't do this to help the user nor does it enhance the reader's experience. I do it mainly for SEO, you think having an image under every h2 with a related image along with the same h2 text along with alt text including h2 helping me get more traffic or is this hurting me?

Now I know that having useful/informational images and videos always enhances the experience and that's good. But normally you'd expect by having more images your article is more likely to rank in the past but these last updates by google stating helpful content only make me realize that I should remove this so people can get to their information much quicker. But I am just wondering if it would hurt me to not have more images overall than competitors?

 

[thisishatred]

Yo, I basically have images after every h2 and sometimes h3. I don't do this to help the user nor does it enhance the reader's experience. I do it mainly for SEO, you think having an image under every h2 with a related image along with the same h2 text along with alt text including h2 helping me get more traffic or is this hurting me?

Now I know that having useful/informational images and videos always enhances the experience and that's good. But normally you'd expect by having more images your article is more likely to rank in the past but these last updates by google stating helpful content only make me realize that I should remove this so people can get to their information much quicker. But I am just wondering if it would hurt me to not have more images overall than competitors?

Let's breakdown your post:

I don't do this to help the user nor does it enhance the reader's experience. I do it mainly for SEO.

Now I know that having useful/informational images and videos always enhances the experience and that's good.

These last updates by google stating helpful content only make me realize that I should remove this so people can get to their information much quicker.

Man wut?

You've asked these same questions before and they've been replied to here:
https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/how-many-images-should-i-use-per-1k-words.6504/#post-67360

Your initial reply in that thread above says:

For the rest, you can just add stock photos underneath each h2 or maybe even h3's...

Sounds like you haven't changed your thoughts in 4 months.

Your posts on BuSo always sound like someone who gets into this analysis paralysis for seemingly no reason. I mean above in your quote you contradict yourself in 3-4 sentences of each other.

I do it mainly for SEO -- Useful images enhance the experience.

Every single comment in my reply to you still stands, 4 months later.

As I said before: "You keep plugging and chugging though homie; Whatever works for you."

 

[OnlineDopamine]

I want to do Digital PR campaigns sometime next year as well. Is there a cheaper way to get journalist emails at scale to pitch them? The tool in the video costs 500 pounds.

 

[dimasahmad111]

Hi, Buso.

i want to ask, why most of the time, Google not displaying meta description as expected, i already write meta description, but when the content is ranking, it is not showing what i just write for it.

if this keep happening, how can we know or working on something like "improving ctr" for meta A and B, if google showing random meta description.

 

[Ryuzaki]

i want to ask, why most of the time, Google not displaying meta description as expected, i already write meta description, but when the content is ranking, it is not showing what i just write for it.

if this keep happening, how can we know or working on something like "improving ctr" for meta A and B, if google showing random meta description.

Google rewrites our meta descriptions more often than not. There is nothing we can do about it. They will use snippets of content related to specific chunk of text in the article that is most tightly related to the search query. They've determined this is better for the user and creates more click-throughs. Again, there is nothing we can do about it. They haven't provided an option to say "no" to it.

 

[zak]

if this keep happening, how can we know or working on something like "improving ctr" for meta A and B, if google showing random meta description.

When you change a meta description, you can still measure the impact on CTR directly.
However, the mechanism becomes a mixture of:
1. (CTR of new meta) - (CTR of old meta)
2. Change in likelihood that Google will rewrite the meta (and the CTR of their changed meta).

For a simple A/B test where you just care about the impact on this one article, the mechanism doesn't matter. If the new meta has a higher CTR, use it. If not, don't.

In almost any A/B test, we are ignoring dozens or hundreds of variables that get tied up in the mechanism; this is just one more.

The problem comes in when you want to extrapolate the result to additional pages.

E.g., maybe you swapped the word 'amazing' for 'awesome' in one meta, and the CTR doubled. Now, you want to know if you should swap it out in all of your metas.
If both metas had the same chance of being changed by Google, this is an easy problem.
But if Google is more (or less) likely to change metas with 'awesome' than those with 'amazing', you have a problem. Maybe the change you made was good, but maybe the real impact you are seeing is that Google is much better (or much worse) at writing metas than you are.
Tbh, the only way that I can think of to solve that is to run the test, check the SERPs periodically to see whether its your meta or Google's, and adjust your conclusions accordingly.

 

[dimasahmad111]

we are ignoring dozens

thank you for the reply, any a/b testing courses that you know that's provide "real case/data"? i want to learn about it, i've been trying it, but i think i am on wrong how to execute it, so i need to learn more about it, but most of the time, they are just how-to without real case step by step to do it or just theory. spent some money for nothing, pffft.

 

[Zoro]

I know I read about this somewhere but my retarded mind dont remember so I need enlightment again.

Lets say I find a good keyword like "can you fish with fishrod" and it have decent search volume but it says 2 people have that in their H1 so I feel like I cant compete with that.

But then I spot "can you fish with a fishing rod" and noone have that in their h1.

Do google value those 2 keywords different or is it the same?

Because I meet quite a few of these variations when I search and its starting to confuse me again.

 

[bernard]

What is the best practice for this?

What is the competition doing?

What I have done, and which is surprisingly old school, is to have a section at the bottom with stuff like "Do you need help with your clogged toilet in:" and then a list of cities and link to their subpages from there.

It is very close to keyword stuffing, but imo, I haven't seen any issues with this.

I think your strategy seems good otherwise.