Your 14 Days Journey To Better Ranking – Day 10
Goal for today:
- Inner Links. Satellite Pages. Google Search Console (force re-index).
Check your site for SEO errors again. If you find anything, fix it.
Make sure that the visibility settings are all Green for your Focus Page.
Start building the Inner Links
Your whole WordPress site should have at least 10 pages – if you want SEO. And I’d say at least 20 if you want SEO performance. If you don’t have them, it’s important to start creating them. Make sure you index them via Google Search Console.
Start building links from existing pages on your website to your Focus Page.
Again, if you don’t have existing pages that make sense to send a link from, then you’ll need to start creating them and getting them indexed via Search Console, the same way you did for your Focus Page.
To sum things up:
- if you have 20 pages: GOOD!
- If not: start working on this today.
a) Get each page to ALL Greens in the SEO Live Assistant
b) Get each page to ALL Greens in Bulk SEO Settings
c) Re-index (or index) them in Google Search Console
These pages can be:
- website pages
- blog posts
- e-commerce products
- product pages/landing pages
- service pages/landing pages
- company pages: contact / about us / leadership / management / vision, etc.
- event pages, listing pages, and so on. ( according to different custom post types that your WordPress might have)
It would be good to create them with a nice website architecture – if you DO have to build the pages. You can ask about URL and Website Architecture on the JourneyTeam group on Facebook.
Awesome! Let’s assume that, by now, you have enough pages. Next Steps:
Main Menu
You can add your Focus Page to your website’s main menu and even to the website’s footer.
^^ this will tell Google that you consider this Focus Page to be a really important page on your website.
However, just doing that will not be enough.
Context
You also need to find pages on your site where the SEO Context is right and add a link to your Focus Page.
What do I mean?
Well… if you have a page about Formula 1, you can add an Inner Link (which in this case means a link from a page owned by the website to another page owned by the website) from it to a page you’ve created about Lewis Hamilton.
Not sure how to find pages with good SEO context from your own WordPress site?
Use the Blogging Assistant from Squirrly SEO
This is especially helpful for those of you with many pages.
The Blogging Assistant has an inner links option.
You can find it in Step 2: Enhance (when editing a page or a post, as shown in the screenshot below). It has buttons for adding images, tweets, and more. One of the buttons is for adding links from your own site.
You can click the “Not Relevant?” text. It will allow you to insert a keyword.
You can insert a keyword there that you think could be related to the current page you’re working on.
The Blogging Assistant will then give you a list of pages from your site that could be relevant.
Add links if relevant.
Course Correction
Of course, if you’re editing your Focus Page right now – while performing this part of the recipe – you’ll basically find other pages on your site to which you could link FROM your Focus Page.
See what those pages are.
Then go and edit those pages.
Add a link from THOSE pages to your focus page.
Get 5 Contextual Inner Links
Try to build at least 5 such inner links from relevant pages of your WP site -> to -> your focus page.
Great! Now you know how to build inner links.
Force Re-Index
You’ve built those inner links, but Google doesn’t know about this yet, so you need to go and tell it right away.
Go to Google Search Console. Make Google re-index the pages from which you’ve sent links to the focus page.
Also, at least on one of them, allow Google to go and index other pages from the site (it gives an option for this in the interface).
A Fresh index means Google has the best data about your website and since you keep improving during these 14 days, it’s the only way to get it to place you higher. Otherwise, if you do all the work and it doesn’t know, it can’t really make decisions in your favor.
Satellite Content and Core Content
Now the theory around satellite content was specifically designed for blogging strategies and content marketing strategies. However, I and other marketers I know have applied the satellite content strategy to anything from event listing pages to e-commerce product pages.
And it works. It keeps working. Day in and day out.
Even though the theory itself is old. Mint.com had applied it sometime around 2010. I have applied it (first time) in 2010-2011 after learning about it from an ex-Mint.com employee (who made tens of thousands of dollars selling the playbook he used to get this done while with the company).
When I applied it, it helped me bring 5,000 new users in just 4 months to my tech startup which I was managing back then. And this is after I’d struggled for 18 months to bring the first 5,000. So basically I’ve doubled the number in 4.5x less time.
How? By using the core content and satellite content theory.
I’ll show you exactly how I did it.
Step 1
I would create a really long page on the website or a really long blog post that targeted one of the Direct 1, Direct 2 or Direct 3 keywords from my own strategy. I’d do SEO for it (optimize content; manually back then :)) because the SEO Live Assistant from Squirrly was not around; optimize snippet, etc.).
Step 2
Then, I’d create 5 satellite pages which all linked to it in very obvious places. This was to ensure that people visiting the satellites would end up visiting the Core Page itself.
Some of the satellite pages were created to be related to current trends, current world events, celebrities, etc. Anything that would help the satellites generate buzz and tons of traffic from “novelty stuff”. It had that novelty appeal.
The buzz, the traffic, the links, the social media signals, and everything would go to those satellite pages.
These satellite pages then led people to the Core Page.
You probably guessed it by now: the Core Page was basically a Focus Page. The focus page, of course, had nothing to do with novelty. It was important for it to be evergreen (to appeal to audiences time and time again for years to come).
The way everything was orchestrated was to make Google see that the Focus Page itself was the point in the user’s journey that had the highest value, NOT the initial piece of content (the satellites) on which people landed.
Also, the Focus Page didn’t have links back to those satellites. Nor to other pages, for that matter. And if sometimes they did, then those links had “no-follow” attributes attached.
This was made to ensure that the Focus Page kept all the Authority locked in.
The Outcome
All of this created massive SEO boosts for my focus pages back then.
Google saw: good SEO, relevant content, social media interest, blogosphere interest (because of the many links) to 5 different pages AND that all these 5 different pages considered that the Focus page was the ultimate resource.
Therefore, Google thought, all the Authority should be given to the focus page itself.
This story was to help you see that you can become extremely creative with the way you create those 5 satellite pages which will link to your Focus Page.
At one point, I’ve had 2,500 visits in two hours to one of the satellite pages because Paulo Coelho tweeted about it. Most of the people who came this way also visited the Focus Page.
The Road So Far:
Until now on your Journey:
- You’ve started building social signals, backlinks, and inner links;
- You’ve begun fixing outbound links so that you no longer lose authority;
- You’ve fixed Google Analytics readings and you’ve made sure Search Console has a good idea about what your site pages are.
These are all things that go beyond on-page SEO. They help your Focus Page AND your entire WordPress site to build Authority, which is a very important thing you’ll need if you really want to compete on search engines.
Just a few days left on your Journey! You’re learning a lot; so keep at it! You can do this.