The complete Guide to Google My Business

Local SEO

7 min read

The complete Guide to Google My Business

The complete Guide to…

SEO Tester Online

15 January 2020

The complete Guide to Google My Business

In this article, we will dive into Google My Business, a great ally to your local SEO. You will discover what it is, how does it work, and how to set-up and optimize your business’s listing.

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a free tool for local businesses. Thanks to it, people searching for products or services in your area can find your shop, organization or business, comprised of all the information they need.

In other words, it is the tool to manage your online presence on Google and a great way to interact with your customers.

How does Google My Business work?

On your side, you’ll have to set up an account, verify it, and add as much information you can about your business (location, opening hours, contacts, photos.)

The user, instead, will see the information you added – plus things like reviews by other users – in a listing. The listing is that portion of the SERP on the right side.

It appears when someone performs a local search, something like “San Francisco gyms”

Google My Business SERP example

How to create a listing on Google My Business

First, you have to add your business’s profile on Google My Business.

Google My Business first page

Insert the name, then the industry. You can choose whether adding a physical location or not. Whatever the nature of your business, we advise you to do it, it will boost your SEO. So, add the address.

Google My Business second page

Finally, tell people how to contact you. You can add both a phone number and the URL of your website.

Google My Business third page

Choose whether you want to get Google My Business’s newsletter or not, and you’re all set. Click on “Done”.

Now you must let Google verify that the contact information you put is correct and you’re the real owner of the business.

How to verify a location on Google My Business

Based on the nature of your business, you can choose among a variable number of choices. Please notice that you may not have all the options. You can also have only one.

By mail

You can decide to receive a postcard to your address.

It contains a confirmation code.

Check if the address you inserted is correct;
Add the (optional) contact name and click on the send button;
Once you got it in your mailbox, go to the Google My Business homepage or open the mobile app;
Click on verify location and then on verify now;
On the code field, insert the five-digits code and click on the send

By phone

You can also use your phone for faster verification. You’ll receive an automated phone call to the number you used when you created your business’s profile. Of course, you need to keep your phone close. Log in to Google My Business or use the app, then click on the Verify now button;

Select verify by phone, or call me now if you’re using the app;
Wait for the call, then enter the code you hear.

By email

If your business typology allows it, you can choose to verify your location via email.

Log in to Google My Business or use the app, then click on the Verify now button;
Choose email among the options, or tap on the Send Email button if you’re using the app;
Check your email and take note of the code;
Click on the Verify button in the email message. If you’re doing this using the mobile app, tap on the Enter code button, enter the code and then tap on Submit.

Instant verification

This option is available only for a few businesses. You need to verify your website on Google Search Console first. If you used the same email address to sign into Google My Business and Search Console, go to Google My Business and do the verification.

What if you lost your code?

Just log in and select Request another code on the top of the page.

How to optimize your Google My Business listing

Once you’ve finished setting up the account and asking for verification, it is time to build your listing and add as much information as you can.

Even if you haven’t verified the listing already, you could begin adding all the information. Of course, the much information you add, the more you optimize your listing, and the more your local SEO will benefit.

The information you add will appear both on the SERP (on your listing) and on Google Maps.

On the home page, you have an overview of the information you can add, manage the users’ reviews and photos, create a post and other things. On the left menu, you can access specific sections. We will dive into the most important ones for the optimization of your listing:

Posts

Regular posting is a great way to tell Google that your business is active and up to date. Also, it is perfect to interact with your customers. To create a post, click on the corresponding item on the menu, then choose the type you want to create:

Update: Tell your users what’s new with a post. You can also add a call to action button for more engagement.
Product: You can highlight a new or a popular product, add pictures, price and description.
Offer: you can tell your customers about a special sale, add an image, set the start and end dates, price, coupons and terms and conditions.
Event: let people know about events regarding your business or your products. Add a picture, start and end dates and a description. You can also add an optional call to action button.

Info

You can add more information about your business or edit the pieces you entered when you set up the account.

The additional information you can enter comprises:

Service area: the geographical locations you can reach with your products or services;
Opening hours;
A description: be extra careful with it. Make it very accurate and add the most relevant keywords.
Other information: you can also put additional pieces of information by selecting the corresponding item on the left menu. These are:

Reviews

You should know how crucial it is for Google the usefulness of content. So, SEO-wise, reviews are essential. On Reviews, you can see what people have to say about you and answer them. Dealing with a negative review can make a difference with the crawler and other people, too.

Questions

The easier you are to reach, the better it is for SEO and your business. You can enable a live chat service for your customers. You will receive the messages on the app installed on your phone.

Products

Click on Get started. You can add photos, prices, a description, and a call to action button so your customers can discover and buy them directly from the SERP.

Services

Here you can be more specific about your business does. In addition to the more general industry, you can write about your activities in detail. To add a new service, click on + add another service. You can also add a price and a description of your services. Click on the pencil on the right of every item.

Questions and Answers

Once your listing is up and running, people can ask questions to you from the SERP by clicking on the Ask a question button. You can answer them, showing that you are active and attentive with your customers. Also, you can choose the most relevant question to show as firsts on the listing.

Photos

Images are the first things that strike your customer’s attention. You can add your logo, pictures of your products, and your shop, both inside and outside.

Also, you can choose to show some pictures taken by your customers.

Insights

Unlike other items, this is for your eyes only. Here you can discover who the people that interact with your listing are and get valuable information about your target.

What are some alternatives to Google My Business?

Being easy to find on Google with detailed information on your business is vital because Google is the most used platform to find information. But it is not the only one.

We advise you to have a look at tools that are similar to Google My Business. These are:

Bing Places for Business, the Microsoft counterpart;
Yahoo listings for small businesses: The Yahoo!’s equivalent.
Facebook Pages. Why? Think about it: On Google My Business, you can add information and opening hours, add events, locations, products, photos, manage reviews. You can do these things on your Facebook Page, too. Facebook is another immensely used and populated platform, and having a Facebook Page helps your Google ranking, also. So, why don’t you take advantage of it?

Do you want to learn more about Local SEO?

Local SEO can produce a great competitive advantage for your business. If you wanna get deep on this topic, we suggest you to read our Introductive Guide to Local SEO.

Local SEO Ranking Factors: how to rank your Business

Ranking in the top positions of the SERP for local keywords may be easier than competing for national or international ones.

However, it is not simple. It is essential to know how to move to avoid mistakes.

There are many elements to consider. For this reason, we put together the main ranking factors for local SEO.

Do you want to know which ranking factors are essential to succeed on search engines with your local business?

Google My Business

Google My Business itself is not a positioning factor, but it is a significant part of the optimization work for local SEO.

First of all, make sure you’ve registered your business profile on Google My Business (it’s free!).

Homepage Google My Business

After completing the sign-up process, all you have to do is add the information your customers may need (opening hours, address, contacts, etc.).

Also, Gooogle takes three factors into account when placing a local business in the SERP.

Learn how to create a Google My Business account and bring your local business on top with our free guide.

Relevance

Google determines how relevant a particular Google My Business tab is thanks to the user’s search intent. First of all, make sure you provided as much information as possible about your local business.

Distance

Google takes into account the distance between the user and the business’s location (through geolocation or the Phone’s I.P. address), and the local activities related to the search.
Of course, if a user were to search for “plumber in Milan”, Google will show the results only for the city of Milan (regardless of geolocation and I.P. address).

Prominence

Google tries to identify the importance of a business. The more the local company in question is known and trusted, the more Google will reward it with a good ranking within the SERP.

In this case, good reviews and ratings play a crucial role, as well as links and mentions.

Check our free Guide to Google My Business to learn how to create and optimize your listing and get more customers.

Links

Links play a crucial role in the placement of a website, also in local SEO.

You should try to get backlinks from relevant websites, as always. But you may want to get links from websites of other local businesses.

As always, you also must make sure that these websites address users’ needs and are relevant to the topics you are covering.

Do you want to learn more? Read our guide to link building for local SEO.

On-Page

Working on the on-page optimization allows you to provide a better user experience. Also, il helps the search engine understand your pages’ content and the services you offer.

Optimize your pages with the keywords you have chosen. Put the keywords in the title and inside the headings. In this way, you define both humans and crawlers the topic you are addressing.

Also, make sure that you use schema.org structured data. In this way, you can add useful information on a rich snippet that appears on Google’s SERP.

Tips:
Put NAP (name, address, phone number) information in the footer and at the top of each page.
In your contact page, embed Google’s map of your location.

Check the On-Page optimization of your Local Business’ website for free with our SEO Checker.

User experience

Google’s latest updates made the user experience is one of the most vital aspects of SEO. So, before thinking about positioning, you must think about providing users with an outstanding user experience.
And the same goes for local SEO. Here we outline the UX-related elements that Google considers.

CTR (Click-through rate)

This metric indicates how many clicks your website has received compared to the number of impressions.
A page that has a high CTR is probably considered more relevant by users.

To increase the CTR, you should work primarily on the title and meta description tags. In this way, you can entice the user to click on your snippet.

Bounce rate

The bounce frequency represents the number of users who, once they have landed on our page, abandon it (returning to Google’s SERP).
It is a score that you should keep as low as possible. Otherwise, it could mean that the users don’t find your content consistent with their search intent.

Speed

The loading speed of your pages is one of the most crucial positioning factors in local SEO, too.

If your page takes too long to load, the user could decide to leave it, increasing your bounce rate.

Navigability

Navigability is, in fact, the basis of the user experience. Make sure you have an organized website that’s easy for both users and search engines to understand.

Use categories, tags, and breadcrumbs to help your users quickly navigate from one page to another.

Also, make sure that each page leads the user to take a specific action: take advantage of the call to action and always keep in mind the need the user wants to meet.

Social signals

Having the right presence on social networks has an indirect positive effect on the positioning of your website.

In addition to providing greater visibility and reliability to your brand in the eyes of the potential customer, curating social profiles will give you an additional traffic source.

Learn more about Local SEO

Are you moving your first steps in the world of Local SEO? Read our introductive guide to Local SEO to learn everything you should know to bring your business in the first position of Google and the other Search Engines.

How to do Link Building for Local SEO

Among the many activities an SEO professional performs, the Link Building is one of the most important and sensitive.

Excellent link building is vital to gain authority in the eyes of the Search Engines and makes the difference between success and failure.

The same goes for Local SEO: if you have a business and you want to improve your online presence, Link Building can help you make substantial progress.

In this article, we are going to tackle some of the best tactics to make an effective Link Building and climb the SERP.

Guest Blogging

Publishing articles on third-party blogs can be an excellent investment from the Link Building point of view.

However, Search Engines don’t like this strategy very much. They might consider it as an attempt to manipulate search results. Nevertheless, guest blogging can give you excellent results.

First, choose the host blogs according to these two criteria:

Relevance: Does the host blog deal with topics relevant to your activity?
Authoritative: Is the host blog considered authoritative by search engines and users?

Also, the content you are going to offer them must be original and useful for the reader.
So, don’t think about advertising your business. Instead, ask yourself if you can provide your readers with useful information.

Obviously, don’t forget to ask the blog owner to include a backlink to your website in the article.

The work of guest blogging, when done with a strategy, can yield remarkable results.

Now, let’s assume you have an article ready to go online as a guest post, but you’re not sure if it’s okay.

You can use the free Copy Metrics tool to analyze content and discover useful metrics such as:

Text difficulty.
Purchase intent.
Target Potential.
Reading time and other statistics.

Homepage Copy Metrics

Try copy metrics for free.

Create helpful resources

Invest some of your time and budget in creating useful resources for users.

Any examples? Videos, PDFs, infographics, e-books.
Creating valuable content can encourage your reader to share your articles.

Before you start creating content, make sure you’ve done your research.

What interest the users in your niche? Find out what queries they search, what keywords they use, what is the problem they want to solve.

After you have done your keyword research and discovered what your competitors are doing, you can start writing.

Tips:
Content such as a PDF or e-book can also be a powerful lead magnet to offer in exchange for the user’s email.

Be sure to include references to your brand and website within the content. In this way, your brand visibility increases every time someone shares the content even if they didn’t add a link to your site.

Take part in local events

“Wait… What do local events have to do with SEO?!”

SEO is not a computer-only job. If you thought otherwise, you would have overlooked many strategies that could boost your ranking.

Imagine taking part in a contest for the best pastry shop in the city. As a result, your website gets a backlink on the event organizers’ website.

Participating in events, prize competitions or performances gives much visibility to your business. But it can also have beneficial effects SEO-wise.

Agreements with local websites

Another effective way to get backlinks is to establish collaborations with local websites.

You might want to contact:

Local news sites and blogs.
Business similar to yours.
Associations of your city.

In the case of non-profit associations operating in your city, you could propose yourself as a sponsor. You can also donate to support their activities (of course, you must consider how much you want to invest). In exchange, you can ask for advertising and – of course – your much-desired backlink.

What you’ve seen are just a few link building’s main tactics for local SEO, but they can give a significant boost to your website’s positioning.

Make Local SEO the right way

Do you want to learn more about Local SEO?

Give a look to our Guide to Local SEO and boost your business rankings on Google!

What are EAT guidelines?

In August 2018, many websites took a dramatic hit in their ranking. Most of those sites belonged to the YMYL category. The reason? An update of Google’s guidelines for quality raters concerning the EAT score and beneficial purpose.

Wait. What? You’re right. Let’s sort these concepts.

What are Google’s guidelines for quality raters?

We begin with the guidelines because they introduce all the other terms. Their official name is Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Google made them circulate in 2015.

The document contains instructions for quality raters. They are a team of people dedicated to perform searches and verify that the highest-ranked websites provide quality content. If what they find is quality, the algorithm works.

The guidelines provide quality raters with the criteria that make excellent content. For this scope, they introduce three key concepts:

EAT
YMYL
Beneficial purpose

What is EAT rating?

EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These are the three main factors that determine page quality.

EAT guidelines outline the principles content creators must stick to if they want to get a good ranking.

Expertise

It refers to the content creator. It means you are an expert of the topic you are dealing with and you have the credentials to prove it.

Authoritativeness

It refers to the content creator, the content itself, and the website on which the content appears. It means that the readers recognize you as an authority in your industry. As a consequence, your production is considered quality content, published on a quality website.

Trustworthiness

It refers to the content creator, the content itself, and the website on which the content appears, too. It means that people trust your content to be accurate and with solid bases.

What does YMYL mean?

YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life. It refers to content (and websites) that deal with sensible topics for both Google and its users.

Things like:

Medical information;
Financial, legal and fiscal advice;
News;
Science.

With Google’s EAT algorithm update in June 2018 (nicknamed the medic update because it affected websites with medical content), the YMYM websites experienced dramatic changes in their ratings.

What happened? Google started to apply to them stricter quality criteria, based on the EAT guidelines.

What is Google’s Beneficial purpose?

The key concept behind this update is Beneficial Purpose. It means that Google intends to protect its users from low-quality information that could have a negative impact to their life. To do that, it judges content not only by quality but also by correctness.

How to improve your EAT score

How to increase your expertise to improve your EAT Score

The first thing you should work on is your reputation as an author. Here are a few things you can do.

Find out what people want

To be recognized as an expert, you must know your stuff, sure. But you must also know what people want to know. Make a keyword search. Then, you must know how to make your content engaging.

Update your content

Another thing you can do is to update your content. Older content can undermine your image as an expert. It can be outdated, or you were not that good when you wrote it. Refresh it with new information, or consider deleting it (but remember to work on redirects!)

Focus on quality

To improve your EAT score from the Expertise point of view keep on producing quality content. And we are sure you were already doing that. If you weren’t, your problem isn’t EAT score. It’s SEO.

Work on your image as an author

If you want readers to recognize you as an expert, you should act like one. Work on your about page, fill it with information like awards you got, the experience you have, your titles, press that writes about you.

Also, create an author snippet on WordPress and use the structured data so that Google can extract information about you to show to the users right on the SERP.

How to increase your authoritativeness to improve your EAT Score

Building your authority is not a thing you can do alone. You need people to recognize you. You can work on offsite SEO to increase your authoritativeness.

Get good inbound links

Make people talk about you, and your work, getting inbound links from other sites. Of course, they must have proper domain authority.

Get mentions

A more effective way to increase your authoritativeness is to get mentions. In this way, Google can recognize you as an expert in your industry.

Shares on social media

Build up the buzz around you by producing content that is shareable on social media. In this way, you’ll get a lot of inbound links and many mentions.

Guest posts

Try to end up on valuable blogs as a guest author. It helps building your image as a leader in your industry with inspiring things to say.

How to increase your trustworthiness to improve your EAT Score

Forget inspirational quotes. You should pay attention to what people have to say about you if you want them to trust you.

Deal with negative reviews

Reviews could be your best ally in building your trustworthiness. But also your worst enemy. Deal with negative reviews as soon as they come. Both on your website and review platforms such as Tripadvisor.

Other tips

Also, there are a few other things you can do:

Be easy to get in touch with;
Add a physical location of your business;
Update your privacy and Terms & Conditions pages;
Buy an HTTPS certificate.

Guide to file Robots.txt: what it is and why it is so important

In this article, we will explore the role of robots.txt, a small file that can make the difference between scoring a high ranking and languishing on the lowest deeps of the SERP.

What is robots.txt

Robots.txt’s role is to tell the crawler which pages it can require from your site. Beware, the spider can still see them. It just does not scan them. If you want to hide a page, you should rely on noindex instructions, as specified by Google’s Search Console Guide.

So, why do you need a robots.txt file? Because you can make crawling faster and smoother, saving your server from too many crawler requests. You can exclude duplicate or not essential pages from the scanning that can hurt your ranking.

Where to put robots.txt

You have to put the robots.txt file inside your website’s main directory so that its URL is http://www.mywebsite.com/robots.txt.

Do not put it elsewhere, or it won’t work.

How to create robots.txt file

Create a .txt file in your website’s main directory and call it “robots”. Remember that you can have only one robots.txt file per site.

Create a group

Create your first group. A robots.txt file can have one or more groups.

Each group has one or more instructions (also called rules). Remember to use only one instruction for each line.

Robots.txt istructions

Instructions can be of three types:

user-agent: the crawler to which the rule applies.
allow: all the files or directories to which the user-agent can access.
disallow: all the files or directories to which the user-agent cannot access.

A rule must include one or more (or all!) user agents, and at least an allow or disallow instruction (or both).

Robots.txt examples

For example, to prevent Googlebot to scan your entire website, you must write in your robots.txt file something like:

#Prevent GoogleBot from scanning. (this is a comment. You can write what you want)

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

If you want instead to exclude more than a directory for all crawlers:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory 1
Disallow:/ directory 2

(the asterisk means “all”)
Or maybe exclude all directories but one to a specific crawler:

User-agent: specific-crawler
Allow: /directory1 User-agent: * Allow: /

In this way, you’re stating that every other crawler can access to the entire website.

Finally, we can prevent the scanning of a specific file format, for example, jpg images.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.jpg$

The $ character establish a rule valid for all strings that end with .jpg.

To see more examples, visit the Google’s Search Console guide.

Learn more about Technical SEO

Technical SEO is not easy. But it’s fundamental to make SEO the right way.

Learn it reading our Guide for Beginners to Technical SEO.

How to create SEO-friendly URLs

You probably know that the URL (Unique Resource Locator) is the home address of your site. It’s the one we type on our browser address bar when we want to access a website.

A thing you may not know is that the URLs affect SEO, too.

In this article, you will find out how to optimize URLs for SEO and turn them into allies for your ranking.

The importance of an SEO-Friendly URL

An SEO-Friendly URL is a web address that helps the user to remember the address and understand its logic. The latter is essential also for the crawler.

A proper SEO URL helps the crawler to understand what the user can find on that page. In this way, it can make the page available for the right query.

The structure of an SEO URL

A right SEO URL must be descriptive of the path of the page and the site structure. Besides, it must tell the user (and the spider) what it is going to find there.

Something like:

http:///www.mywebsite.com/category/keyword.html

An example of a properly optimized URL

Take the URL to our SEO Checker:

https://www.seotesteronline.com/seo-checker/

See? Pretty straightforward: there are our name and the tool you’re going to find.

Another example comes from our knowledge base.

Our subdomain (help) tells you that there you can find help. Where? On seotesteronline.com.

What follows tells you that you are inside the knowledge base, on the section dedicated to the keyword explorer.

And what are you going to find there? You can get from the last bit!

What is the slug and how to make it SEO-friendly

The last fragment of the URL (what-is-keyword-explorer) is called slug. It is the element that describes the page. Our advice is to use, for the slug, the main keyword you chose for that page.

Check your SEO-friendly URL

To summarize, here is a handy checklist to create perfect SEO-friendly URLs:

Make them descriptive of the content and the site structure;
Use pertinent keywords, especially on the slug;
Use subdomains responsibly: the crawler can consider subdomains as separate websites, watering down your SEO efforts;

URLs must be easy to read for both users and crawlers. So keep them short, without too many subfolders or special characters (like the ones in dynamic URLs).

Guide to HTTP Status Codes

HTTP status codes are standard messages that occur between the client and the server when they communicate through the HTTP (that stands for hypertext transfer protocol).

For example, when you (the client) click on a link or type a URL on the address bar, you are sending a request to the server. You’re asking it to let you view a webpage. The “language” of this request is the HTTP. The response you get from the server is a three-figures code.

In this article, we’ll sort the most common HTTP status codes.

The codes consist of five classes:

informational responses;
successful responses;
redirect information;
client error responses;
server error responses.

100 HTTP status codes (informational responses)

These codes tell us that the server received the request, and it is processing it. The answer can be:

100 (continue): the server received the request header (the information about the request). The client can go on sending the request body (the actual data payload);
101 (switching protocols): the server received the client’s request to switch protocol.
102 (processing): the server got the request, but it cannot respond yet. It’s a response given to keep the connection from going timeout.

200 HTTP status codes (successful responses)

Successful responses begin with number two. They mean that the server received the request and has accepted it:

200 (OK): it is the generic success response;
201 (Created): The server created the requested resource ;
202 (Accepted): The server accepted the request, but it is still working to return the response.
203 (Non-Authoritative Information): same as 200. A transforming proxy has received the request. On its turn, it returns a modified response.
204 (No Content): The server has successfully processed the request and returned no content.
205 (Reset Content): Same as 204. Also, the response requires the reset of the document view by the requester.
206 (Partial Content): The server is returning only a part of the resource requested by the client. The range header causes this. The client sends the range header. Its role is to fraction a large download into many smaller, simultaneous ones.
207 (Multi-Status): this is a response to multiple requests. It indicates that the body includes the former response codes.
208 (Already reported): Used in DAV responses. It suggests that a previous 207 code reports the responses.

300 HTTP Status codes (Redirections)

These status codes indicate that the server needs to take additional action to complete the request, such as redirection.

Redirection is essential in SEO. We can set this function to tell the browser that the resource is not in the original URL anymore. It is useful when we delete a page, and we want to redirect the user to a 404 page.

Another reason could be the change of the URL structure or the domain.

300 (Multiple Choices): the client has multiple options, for example, regarding the format in which download the requested resource.
301 (Moved Permanently): the client must direct the request (and all future requests) to another URI.
302 (Found): can be used to indicate a temporary redirection, or to tell the client to look for another URL.
303 (See Other): the client can find the requested resource at another URI.
304 (Not Modified): the client already possesses the requested resource. The server cannot provide a more updated version.
305 (Use Proxy): The requested resource is available through a proxy.
307 (Temporary Redirect): Same as 302.
308 (Permanent Redirect): Same as 301.

400 HTTP Status codes (Client errors)

This code means an error that concerns the client.

It can be a bad request, a not found requested resource or a lack of privileges to access it.

The response must include in its body an explanation of the error and whether it is temporary or permanent.

400 (Bad Request): the server is not able to process the request. It could be because of an error in syntax, a too-large request size, or an invalid request.
401 (Unauthorized): The client cannot access the resource it requested. It failed to authenticate, or there is no authentication possible.
403 (Forbidden): Unlike 401, the client authenticated itself, but the server refuses to process it, nonetheless.
404 (Not found): the most famous response code. The server has not found the requested resource. However, it could be available in the future.
405 (Method Not Allowed): the client sent the request using an invalid method. For example, when you use a GET when you should have used a POST. Want to learn more about HTTP methods?
406 (Not Acceptable): the server can generate the resource requested, but its format is not among those accepted in the request header.
407 (Proxy authentication): The client must authenticate itself with the proxy.
408 (Request timeout): The server timed out while waiting for the request.
409 (Conflict): the request cannot be processed because there is a conflict ongoing between different versions of the same resource. It can happen when the server receives more than one edit request for the same resource at the same time.
410 (Gone): The requested resource is not available. Unlike 404, the resource in question won’t be available again.
411 (Length required): The request does not contain an indication of the length of its content as required by the resource.
412 (Precondition Failed): The server cannot process the requests. The reason is that it does not possess one of the preconditions specified in the request.
413 (Request Entity Too Large): The request is too large for the server, and it cannot manage it.
414 (URI Too Long): The URI contained in the request is too large to be processed by the server.
415 (Unsupported Media Type): The client requested a resource in a format the server doesn’t support.
416 (Range Not Satisfiable): The client requested a file fragment, but the server cannot satisfy the request.
417 (Expectation Failed): The server cannot comply with the requirements contained in the request header.
418 (I’m a teapot): It’s a joke-code by the IETF.
420 (Enhance your calm): Used by the Twitter APIs to indicate that the client made too many requests in a short time.
421 (Misdirected request): the server that received the request cannot process it.
422 (Unprocessable Entity): A semantic error prevents the server from processing the request.
423 (Locked): The client cannot access the resource because it is locked.
426 (Upgrade required): The client should use a better security protocol.
429 (Too many requests): The client sent too many requests too fast.
451 (Unavailable for Legal Reasons): The client requested a resource whose access is limited by censorship or government request. It could be a reference to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

500 HTTP Status codes

500 status codes indicate server errors. It means that the client request is correct, but the server cannot perform it.

500 (Internal Server Error): generic error message, unexpected error.
501 (Not Implemented): the server cannot recognize the request method or is unable to perform the request at the moment.
502 (Bad Gateway): the server is acting as a proxy. The upstream server sent an invalid response.
503 (Server Unavailable): the server cannot fulfill the request at the moment because it is down. For example, because it is undergoing maintenance.

Which codes are essential for SEO

Some codes are more important than others in SEO because they can influence the ranking.

We can sort them into three groups.

Found

It includes only the code 200. It indicates that the page has been found at the indicated URL, as expected.

Redirects

It includes the codes 301,302, 303. They indicate that the resource is elsewhere, either temporarily or permanently. Their correct implementation is critical to not incur into penalizations.

Not found

A 404 HTTP status code causes a not smooth crawling, and then the ranking of the whole website can suffer.

Find out which codes your website returns

To discover what codes the pages within a website returns, scan it with the SEO Spider.

SEO Spider screen

Just enter the URL you want to analyze. Then navigate the menu on the left. Under Structure, select Status. You can also filter them by the groups mentioned above.

Guide to SEO Copywriting

So, you have decided to become a Copywriter. An SEO Copywriter no less.

Good for you! Are you ready to work on editorial plans, on keyword search? Are you prepared to make your way through title tags, headings, and editing?

Excellent. But read this article first, you may learn a thing or two about the craft.

A definition of SEO copywriting

SEO copywriting is the activity of writing content for both humans and search engines. No, not just search engines. We said both. If you write for humans and provide them with useful information – you’re already writing for search engines, too. You only need to pay a little more attention to some details.

But you may ask: what makes my articles optimized SEO-wise?

Well, ask no more! We’ll parse through all phases of a good SEO copywriting. Let’s begin with the things you must do before starting to write.

What to do before writing

So, are you thriving about writing your first blog post? Hold your horses a little bit longer.

Before starting to write, you should do a little bit of research about what you should write.

You should ask yourself a few questions.

What your public could find exciting reading?
What are the hottest topics in your industry?
What are your competitors writing about, and how?
What is your uniqueness?

We don’t have the answers for you, but we can teach you how to find them yourself. And that’s what we’re going to do. Ready? You’re about to learn how to:

prepare the brief;
do the keyword search and create the editorial plan;
choose the right tone;
build the structure.

How to do the brief

Whether you’re working for a customer or your brand, there’re a few questions you should ask your client (or yourself). These questions make the brief, a document that will guide you in creating the editorial plan:

In which industry you’re working?
What is your target?
Why should someone choose you over a competitor?
Who are your competitors?
What are your business goals? (increasing leads, conquer another market share, rebranding.)
What goals do you want to hit through the blog?
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
What are the unique features of your product or service?

If you work for someone else, it could be quite a task to get information, because some companies have no idea of what they are and where they want to go.

Then you have to choose what do you want to write. Once having decided on the general theme, you need to find the topics for single articles. In brief, you need an editorial plan.

What is the editorial plan?

The editorial plan is the list of the topics and the articles that are going to tackle them. It is an essential tool for your SEO copywriting job. It is a reminder of who you are, who is your audience, and how you are going to keep it close and interested in your content.

How to create it

The most common way to create an editorial plan is to open a new spreadsheet. There, you put the primary and secondary topics of each blog post.

How to find the topics?

First of all, keep in mind who your audience is. What could interest your target? Now you have an idea of the general topic. How to get more specific?

Then, ask yourself the search intent you want to intercept.

Also, keep in mind the pros and cons of broad, middle-tail, and long-tail keywords.

Now you’re ready for keyword research!

How to do keyword research

SEO copywriters can count on a good number of useful, free tools to do their keyword research.

Google Search and related search: start with writing the topic you’re interested in on Google’s bar. The search suggestions can give you a hint of the long tail keyword you may want to use. Also, the related searches can provide you with a good number of secondary keywords.
Ubersuggest: can tell you how much volume and competition a keyword has.
Answer the public: can provide you with new keyword ideas, in the shape of questions.
Google Trends: with this tool, you can discover the interest of a given topic or keyword over time. In this way, you can determine if the blog post you are about to write tackles a hot topic or not.

Use the Keyword Explorer!

You can use all the tools mentioned above, and that’s great.

Or, you can use SEO Tester Online’s Keyword Explorer.

SEO Copywriting keyword research explorer tool

It brings the functions of these tools in one place. With it, you can discover your primary and secondary keywords in a fraction of the time.

Write with taste: choose the format

Now you have to decide the very nature of the article you are about to write. What is its format? Is it going to be long and full of information? Or is it going to brief? Hubspot’s Rick Burnes has the perfect recipe.

🥣 Raisin bran posts: useful, brief posts with high engagement and a daily publication, like recipes. Be sure they’re useful and engaging;
🥬 Spinach posts: articles that make you an opinion leader. Most of the times are thoughts about the changes in your industry;
🍖 Roast posts: very long posts filled with information. They take much time to write and read, like this one. They can boost your reputation and get you much traction.
🌶 Tabasco posts: they spice up the conversation by launching controversial and often divisive messages. They have, most of the time, a bold, incendiary title.
🍫 Chocolate cake posts: light-hearted articles. It consists of funny stuff with videos and cartoons. They aim to entertain the reader and add some levity to your editorial plan.

So, what kind of articles you should write? Our advice is a bit of each; only you know the right quantity for each ingredient. Be careful with all that tabasco, however.

You can also update your spinach and roast posts with new information instead of writing new ones. In this way, you have your pillar articles.

Structure

There is the last thing to do before starting to write. That is, to prepare the structure of your article. It may seem a waste of time, but it helps to save a lot of it.

The structure is a simple text document where you outline what you are going to write.

Start with the Call to Action if you have one. It’s an excellent way to put your writing in the right direction.
Make a list of paragraphs. Use the titles you want to use in your article. Since we are talking about SEO Copywriting, specify the heading tag you are going to use.
Outline the topics you want to deal with under each paragraph title.

Here’s the structure of the article you are reading:

What to do when writing

If you didn’t give up with the preliminary work, we have good news: it’s time to write.

In this paragraph, you are going to discover what makes excellent SEO copywriting, from titles to the right use of keywords.

Anatomy of an SEO-friendly title

We already write about titles and headings in SEO. Here is a quick reminder.

Ask first: “what is my goal?” “Who are my readers?” “What are they looking for?”.
Heading tags should include your main keyword or related ones. They must make sense to humans, too.
Avoid keyword stuffing. It is the excessive repetition of the same keyword.
Heading tags follow a decreasing order: start with an H1 tag, and go on with H2, H3.
Use just one H1 tag.
Always consider keyword prominence and keyword proximity.
The SEO title must be less than 70 characters and 12 words long.

Also, some characteristics make titles more compelling.

Benefit promise («Increase your income with this one simple rule»);
How-tos;
Numbers («the ten rules to…»);
Questions («Do you want to become rich while sleeping?»);
Empathy/a shared problem («I know how it feels when you are single and broke»);
Promise pleasure («Try not to laugh!»)
Avoid pain («You don’t have to get stuck in a job you hate»).

Avoid keyword stuffing

SEO Copywriting is not just a matter of writing the right keywords as much as possible.

SEO Copywriting is about writing well. And use keywords, sure.

But you must focus on producing something useful and easy to read. Search engines prize this. Not the repetition of the same phrases again and again.

Instead of doing keyword stuffing, use synonyms. Google recognizes them. And it penalizes keyword stuffing, by the way.

Language!

We hope we stressed enough the importance of writing well. But what can you do? Here are some tips by Stephen King himself in his book “On Writing.”

Use simple vocabulary

There is no reason to dress up your language with pompous, pretentious words. Whatever you are writing, your goal is to communicate, after all. And it’s easier to do it when you use words that anyone can understand.

Use simple grammar

The same goes for grammar. Whatever is your confidence (and your reader’s) with it, it’s probably too late to make significant improvements.

So, stick with simple grammar. You can write most of the blog posts with simple tenses and using straightforward phrases.

All you need is two things: a subject that performs and action. The verb expresses the action. That’s it.

It worked for Hemingway, and he won a Nobel prize. It can work for you, too.

Write short sentences

You can also write longer sentences, of course, but try to keep them short. Every clause must contain just one piece of information.

Break your text into paragraphs.

And keep them well separated. Try to look a block of text without any white space between paragraphs. You don’t even need to read it to know it is going to be quite a challenge.

Use the active form to give your sentence more action.

Mr. King writes: «Two pages of passive voice […] make me want to scream. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently torturous, as well».

Avoid adverbs

As well as passive voice; they make your language weak. Also, they’re often unnecessary and make the reader think you’re not sure about what you’re writing.

Try to rule out all the adverbs from any text. There is a good chance that the meaning would not have suffered any loss.

Ordered lists

they make the reading more comfortable, and Google likes them a lot. Think about how featured snippets look.

Circularity

You can use a metaphor or any other image at the beginning of your article. Then use it all through your blog post: a bit in the middle and especially at the end. It works as a theme and makes reading engaging.

What to do after writing

Now you’ve finished writing. Ready to publish? Assuming you’ve done excellent proofreading, there are still a few things left.

Create an optimized snippet, with a good SEO title and a good, self-explanatory meta description with the right call to action;
Optimize the Open Graph;
Use images that are coherent with the topic and use alt texts to describe what they show
Share your article on your social networks;

Use SEO Editor

While Keyword Explorer is your companion on the pre-writing stage, SEO Tester Online’s SEO Editor is perfect for the writing and post-writing stages. It has everything you need from a word processor, plus many tools for SEO copywriters.

You can select primary and secondary keywords;
check how much your text is SEO-friendly in real-time;
Edit snippets and Open Graphs;
Check the keyword density.

Rich Snippets: what they are and how they work

Over time, SERP evolved to become one of the most important battlefields for businesses competing for customers’ attention. To obtain it, the sole optimization of elements such as title and meta description is not enough anymore. You need to optimize more.

What are Rich Snippets?

Rich snippets are elements that add more components to search results on SERP.

Here are some examples:

Product review, price field, author name: they all can be components of a single rich snippet.

Rich snippet example typing apple pie

Maybe now you’re wondering… what is the use of rich snippets?

On average, rich snippets have a better click-through rate than standard snippets, because they make the user act.

Taking care of your rich snippets can boost your presence on Google, so it is crucial for SEO.

Websites with good, well-organized structured data make the crawling easier and more accurate.

As a result, Google features a rich snippet for your pages, increasing your CTR.

Structured Data

Structured data is designed to help search engines better interpret information. For this reason, its correct implementation is critical to obtain a rich snippet.

Where can we find structured data?

Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex built a basic vocabulary for structured data, valid for every kind of information we want to add to our webpage.

Here are some examples of structured data:

Creative works: such as books, movies, songs, or TV series.

Non-textual: audio files, images, and videos.

Events: help users find the most exciting events in their area through search results and Google Maps.

Health: information about medications, pathologies, symptoms, publications; or advice about therapies.

Organizations: schools, NGOs, or clubs.

People: they may be living, dead, or fictional. It contains information such as the name, date of birth, gender, height, and much more.

Local businesses: can provide a rich snippet with address, opening hours, phone, and busiest hours.

Products: adds the “Product” badge on the images on Google’s images research page for mobile devices.

Reviews: they show the average rating of a product or business. They help users to find reviews and encourage them to visit your website to read the full review.

Actions: are microdata used to identify specific actions performed by an agent to an object.

Testing tools for rich snippets

If you want to know if your website has a good internal structure, you can check the presence of markups through a rich snippet test.

How to perform it? With Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Just open the testing page and enter the URL or the code snippet you want to test.

Once you entered the address, you land on the report page. On the left, you can see an HTML document; on the right, the tool shows errors and alerts.

Try Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Besides, you can also check your rich snippets with two other testing tools:

The Structured data Report: You can access it on Google Search Console. It checks the markups on your website and highlights errors.

Data Highlighter: It helps search engines to understand and process structured data. With it, you can highlight and tag data fields.

Work on featured snippets and conquer the zero position!

Besides working on markups, you also should optimize your content. The content optimization can make you conquer the zero position within the SERP.

In this position, your content appears not as a usual result, but as a featured snippet.

What Google’s featured snippets are?

Let’s see what Google has to say about them:

“Google’s search results sometimes show listings where the snippet describing a page comes before a link to a page, not after as with our standard format. Results displayed this way are called “featured snippets. We display featured snippets when our systems determine this format will help people more easily discover what they’re seeking, both from the description about the page and when they click on the link to read the page itself.”

Now you can understand how crucial it is to provide your readers with quality content that can answer their questions.

Featured snippets aren’t paid adverts. Right after Google understood that the query is a question, it scans the pages that could have the answer and shows the most poignant one on the “zero position”.

Why there aren’t rich snippets on my result?

In some cases, the structured data you’ve inserted could not appear on search results.

Here’s why:

It’s not automatic: like most outcomes in SEO, markups are not a guarantee of a rich snippet on the SERP, whether you’ve inserted the code or not.
The markups don’t respect the quality standards: if they don’t, Google won’t show your featured snippets on the SERP.
They don’t reflect the page content: this can hinder the user experience, and you know what happens when Google finds out things like that.
Vulgar language: your markups don’t appear if they contain rude or unrespectful messages.
Data entered incorrectly: this is the most common reason for rich snippets not showing. It happens, most of the time, on pages with a product or recipe section. Usually, the reason is a code section closed prematurely.
Domain not authentic: if Google thinks that your domain is not so reliable, it doesn’t feature the rich snippet on the SERP.
Not enough time passed: give time to the crawler: it doesn’t discover your web pages instantly, and the same goes for markups. Have a little patience and wait for your rich snippets to show up.

Do you have a Blog on WordPress?

If you have a Blog on WordPress, you can easily set up structured data using one of the hundreds of plugins available. Great news: most of them are free!

Check our list of the best WordPress Plugins for Structured Data.