Wave Issue 26

First...

The Google Product Review Update is now officially over. Did you get hit?

As I mentioned in last week's Wave, I got hit. The position rankings haven't dropped any further. I've been making tweaks to the site and planning for more updates for the next time Google does a refresh.

It's definitely surprising the traffic loss by going down a few positions here and there. Collectively, it was enough to take Site 1 down from 600-700 visitors per day to ~250 visitors.

With the traffic loss, looks like my future income reports won't be as happy. And with that, finally finished the March income report. I started writing it and when the Update hit, my focus turned there.

One thing I did do on April 18th was to buy an expired domain and 301 redirected it to Site 1. I saw it in one the expired domain newsletters I follow and It was a perfect fit for Site 1. I wasn't planning to do anything like this, but it was too good of a fit for Site 1.

I performed the 301 on 4/19 and the Ahrefs Domain Rating has already gone from DR 9 to 18 in 4 days as the backlinks get redirected to Site 1. For reference, the expired domain was a DR 25 previously.

Good to see that Ahrefs likes the 301. Your move, Google.

SEO

Google Postpones Page Experience Update Rollout

In case you missed it, the page experience update will now gradually rollout in mid-June and won't be fully live until the end of August.

Not surprising as most of these announced updates by Google are often delayed. I'd rather they keep working on their new algorithms than to put out something that's buggy (which does seem to happen occasionally).

Google also pushed out a new Page Experience tool in Google Search Console, so you'll want to check that out. It'll tell you how many pages are giving visitors a Good Page Experience vs. Bad. Read more about it on Google's announcement.

Google product reviews algorithm update was big but not like a core update, say data providers

The latest Google Product Reviews Update was milder than regular Core Updates, like the one in December 2020. But this was still a big update according to data from several data companies.

Long Tail SEO in 2021: How You Can Have It All or Die Trying

"Ask a dozen SEOs what keywords qualify as “long-tail” and you’ll get 13 opinions and 17 fistfights. What we can agree on is that — due to Google’s advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) — the long tail of search has exploded. "

A good look by Dr. Peter J. Meyers at Google's NLP and how the targeting "exact" long-tail keywords is kind of pointless. Google understands differences between word variations and will show results that they think are relevant. With 15% of searches everyday being new, Google has to adapt.

How does this help us? For those using the Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR), trying to stay "true" to the exact long-tail keyword isn't necessary.

I use the KGR as a data point, but not as the driver for my keyword research. The most important driver is search intent. Google knows that these 3 phrases are saying the exact same thing:

best dog food for puppies vs. puppy vs. a puppy

If you were to write articles for all 3, you've just cannibalized your own articles. If you're having trouble with figuring out what articles to write because keywords are similar, I cover figuring out keyword cannibalization and search intent in my keyword research article.

202 Top SEO Experts You Should Be Following

For those who like to get into the SEO weeds, this is a huge list of the top SEO experts according to Search Engine Journal - all 202 of them...

If you were to follow all of them on Twitter, how long do you think it'd take you to read the daily tweets from the 202?

Tools and Resources

Conversion.ai + Surfer SEO in Bed Together

ConversionAI worked with SurferSEO to integrate content optimization while Jarvis writes. Read more about it on SurferSEO's announcement

One drawback is there's no style formatting in Conversion, so you can't add formatting like h2, h3, bold, and italics. You'll still have to copy/paste the text elsewhere to format. But they're supposed to be adding the styling very soon.

I’ve actually been getting a lot of use out of Conversion with writing guest posts for backlinks. Definitely saves me lots of time from outsourcing articles to writers. No need to wait for writers to turn the article around. If someone’s interested in my guest post proposal, I’ll get an article out in Conversion rather quickly as long as I'm knowledgeable on the topic, because I'm able to edit as Jarvis writes.

I can find a lot of usefulness with this integration. You do need to have both SurferSEO and ConversionAI plans to take advantage of the integration. ConversionAI prices will go up on May 1st, so you'll want to at least try it out for free and see if it's for you.

Watch a demo of the integration.

Grow Keywords

Grow Keywords is a Free keyword research tool that's similar to Keyword Chef.

Enter your seed keywords and it'll go off to find different types of keywords: questions, comparisons, commercial, etc.

It will also grab search volume for keywords one at a time, but each grab takes a really long time. BUT it's still Free. There's also a leaf icon to grow from keywords and it'll pull up more keywords related to that one keyword.

One thing I've noticed is you'll want to refresh the page when searching a new keyword. The results from previous searches seem to still be cached there.

Since it's free, it's worth a try to see if it gives you the results you're looking for. Keyword tools like this and Keyword Chef depend on the filters they use for crawling Google. See if those filters are what you need.

Content

Income School's Best Niches in 2021

The Income School guys, Jim and Ricky, discuss 8 niche ideas. They're asking viewers to pick one for them to create a new niche site on.

Good ideas to work from if you're looking to start a new niche. Although, a few of them are pretty competitive in my eyes and will take a lot longer to rank higher. They come up with ideas individually and present together, so they happen to overlap on #6 and 7.

Alternative Housing Options
Bidets
Home Renovation
Bike Racks
Freelance Entrepreneurship
Working from Home
Home Office / Remote Work (Same as 6)
Dadding

They give some good insights to be unique and stand out from the rest of what's out there. Worth a quick watch.

Link Building

The Sky Garden Method: Discover Evergreen Link Building Opportunities

Darren Kingman writes about his Sky Garden method as an add-on to Brian Dean's Skyscraper link building method.

Darren goes through how he creates data-driven articles that are link-worthy and have the statistics that others will want, especially journalists. And you can let these articles sit there to build links by themselves.

He goes through the steps of how to do the keyword research to find the opportunities where research data and statistics are lacking.

Get your Website Unstuck by Avoiding the Black Sheep Effect

Matt Diggity held a webinar on the Black Sheep Effect and why you want to avoid it.

Whether it's backlinks or content, standing out too much to become the Black Sheep isn't a good thing.

So don't go building 10 backlinks to a page you're trying to rank if your competitors only have 2-3 links.

How to do Hub and Spoke Internal Linking

Steve Toth at SEO Notebook has a short video on how he organizes his internal links for Hub and Spokes (aka Topic Clusters).

It's a good look at how to prioritize links with all the articles based on importance and which articles you want Google to carry more weight to.

5 Popular Link Building Services Field Tested.. It's Bad.

Great study by Authority Hacker with 5 different link building vendors: Fiverr, Love to Link, SERP Logic, The Hoth, and FatJoe. I've never used any of the 5 and never actually considered them.

They get into how they assessed whether the backlinks were any good. I'd say that with all the link farms and PBNs out there, it's more important than ever to know how to assess links.

Buying bad backlinks will harm your site more than site.

Education

How to make Google Web Stories

Carl Broadbent made a useful tutorial on how to make web stories. I haven't started using web stories on my sites, but looking at how easy it is to make them, I may do that.

It'll still take some time to make these, so I can understand why he outsources it.

$100,000 Flippa Scam Analysis: How a Spam Site is Making Huge Profit

If you've ever looked on Flippa for sites, you know you need to be careful of sites listed there.

Shane K. walks through how he assessed a site listed for $100,000 to see whether it was a scam or not.

I've seen the seller of that site before on Flippa, because I was looking into one of his other sites for sale. If you want to learn more about finding things to avoid when buying a site, this seller might be a good example. Check out his other sites and you might notice certain patterns.

5 Affiliate Niche Sites Earning $40,000 Per Month

Leon Angus looks at 5 different affiliate sites that're earning a bunch of money.

Always good to learn from how others are monetizing and generating that revenue. See if there are any methods and tips that you can borrow to help build up your sites.

Case Study

How to Grow a Blog (from 0 to 15k Monthly Visitors) Tactics, No Fluff and Other Stuff

Samuel Schmitt writes about how he grew his SEO blog and built links. It wasn't the Skyscraper technique. He tried it and it didn't work. He went the social media route and Got Involved with others in the space.

Even though he talks about his experience of growing his personal blog on SEO, this is applicable to growing all niche sites. Look for opportunities in your niche and in the online platforms where others in the niche are hanging out. Get involved there.

All of his blog articles are long, but packed with great information. Remember his Topic Cluster article?

Like Niche Surfer?

Let me know! Reply or email me at [email protected]. I’d love to know what you think.

I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.

Have a great week with taking your niche sites to another level!