Wave Issue 62

First...

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

This is the last newsletter of 2021 and I hope that you've gotten a lot of Niche Surfer this year!

I'm planning to do some different things in 2022 too to help everyone with niche sites and passive income journey.

Keeping it short, so we can spend more time with family and friends during the holidays.

Have a great rest of 2021 and talk to you in the new year!

SEO

Free SEO Templates from the SEO Community: Kickoff & Improve SEO Work

A good collection of curated SEO templates from the SEO community. Lots of options, including:

SEO Reporting Templates
SEO Technical Audit Templates
Content Marketing Templates
Keyword Research & Matrix Templates
Content Brief Templates
Content Calendar Templates
Content Audit Templates
Competition Analysis Templates
Link Building Templates
SEO Maintenance Templates

SEO Office Hours, December 17th, 2021

The Onely team shares their summary of the Dec. 17th Google Office Hours covering these interesting topics:

Font file causing Cumulative Layout Shift
503 can cause URLs to drop out of the index
Wrong language version shown to users
Translating only part of your website
Google can figure out a simpler version of URLs
Google doesn’t penalize adult sites
Mentions of your brand don’t affect your website’s ranking

Google's December 2021 Product Reviews Update – Analysis and Findings Based On An Extended And Volatile Holiday Rollout

Glenn Gabe of GSQi covers Google's December Product Reviews Update (PRU), including the extended rollout, volatility across sites, recoveries from the April PRU, content that is being rewarded, rich snippets impact, and more.

Google Forgets About URLs in the Indexing Queue

Been having problems with indexing? Onely said they republished "Discovered" posts with a new url and was able to get those posts indexed.

I've had issues with a handful of posts too, but with my posts they were initially indexed, but became just "Discovered." Weird. I'm going to try republishing and see if that helps.

Tools and Resources

Great Deals Out There for Niche Site and Content Creators

Mutant Mail - Funny name aside, this is a great email service that will allow you to collect all your emails into one inbox, and be able to reply to emails as-if you're sending from the different emails. It's like Gmail's "Send as" feature, but this works on all email applications and not just Gmail. If you have many affiliate sites and build personas/email addresses for them, this will save you many hours. No more forwarding emails and logging into different email accounts to reply, so the recipient doesn't see your personal email addresses.

Typli.ai - AI writer and SEO assistant that lets you generate original, high-ranking copy wherever you work. A nice plus is their WordPress plugin, so you can generate content directly inside WP. I can't think of another SaaS that does this.

Thundercontent - Another AI writer to quickly generate SEO-friendly blog posts, articles, production descriptions, and web copy on any topic

Content

How to Create a Topical Map

One of the primary goals of a semantic SEO strategy is to create a well-structured network of content that covers a topic completely. Rank Ranger shows how to structure your content by creating a topical map.

The process is the same as what you'd be doing when looking at site structure and how different sub-topics will break down.

Link Building

Link Building for SEO: How to Do It Right

This is a pretty much a complete nuts and bolts guide to link building. It includes all kinds of tactics, along with explanations of everything about link building.

You may want to save this for when you have more time as it's ~10K words.

Education

Which site is crushing it in SEO?

Kevin Indig took a look at 3,000 sites over the last 12 months to figure out which ones crushed it in organic traffic growth and which ones didn't.

SEO Split Test Result: Does Adding the Category Name to Product Page Titles Make a Difference?

Semrush tests whether putting the Category Names in the Page Title will have a positive or negative effect. Take a look at the image and the part circled in red is the Category Name that was added.

What do you think was the result? Did the extra category name help Google understand the page more clearly and rank it higher? Or was it a case of potential keyword stuffing and negatively affect the page?

THIS is Keeping Your Website From Ranking (Post Roast)

Ricky from Income School discusses Search Analysis, aka Keyword Research, by going through a blog post example. Here are some of the topics that he goes through as he analyzes the page and how he'd fix things:

The #1 Google Ranking Factor
Search Analysis vs Keyword Research
Too many Ads can Hurt SEO
Subheadings...? Headlines
YMYL and Authority
Search Analysis
Related Searches
Topical Authority through More Content
People Also Ask
Win Google Snippets for Multiple Queries
Breaking a Topic into Multiple Posts
The Plan to Fix This Post
Our Approach to Search Analysis

News

Google Search News (Dec ‘21) - Google ranking algorithms updates, interactive Schecklist, and more!

In this December episode of Google Search News, John Mueller goes over recent developments in the Google Search world:

Search Central documentation (including an interactive checklist)
Updates to Google ranking algorithms (November & December)
Log4j vulnerability & how to pause your website in Google Search
Web Almanac 2021 by HTTP Archive
Google Search Console updates
Mobile-first indexing update

Like Niche Surfer?

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

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

Also, be sure to Whitelist [email protected] and/or drag the email to the Primary Inbox to make sure you don't miss the emails!

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