Wave Issue 68

First...

After testing Discord this past week with some people, it looks like the Niche Surfer community is ready to go on the Discord Platform! Here's the link to join:

Niche Surfer Community on Discord

You'll need a Discord account to join, but you might have one already. Many communities have migrated over to Discord to host their communities.

There will probably still be some growing pains as I get used to the platform and the features, but the most important feature of chatting on it is working great.

I'll be on there regularly, so feel free to ask questions you might have on there!

The Private Monthly Income Clubs are broken down by how much you're earning each month, so you'll need to send me a message on Discord for me to add you to your specific income level. This will allow people to communicate most effectively with each other.

As you level up to higher monthly earnings on your niche site journey, it makes sense to have chats with people on similar paths with you. If you're earning $1k-5k per month, you don't need the beginner topics anymore. You want to learn from others who are facing similar obstacles.

Online communities like big Facebook groups are great, but 99% of the content isn't really relevant or they're focused on basic, niche site 101 topics.

Masterminds are popular because everyone in the group is in the same boat (or at least they should be), so you're able to learn and share with others.

The goal with the Private Monthly Income Clubs is for niche site owners to be able to most effectively communicate with others who are in similar positions and experience levels.

So get in now to start talking! It's FREE too!

Join the Niche Surfer Community

SEO

12 Essential SEO Tips for Beginners to Boost Traffic

For those just starting out with niche sites, this is a good broad strokes look at the things that niche site builders need to focus on.

Target Relevant Primary and Secondary Keywords
Write Quality Original Content
Format Your Content for Search Engines & Target Featured Snippets
Optimize Your Page Title and Meta Description
Remove Anything That Loads Slowly
Use a Mix of Internal and External Links
Optimize Your Graphics
Conduct Regular Site Audits
Study Your Competitors
Continue Learning About SEO

How To Check the Indexing Status of a Large Website

I've noticed that a couple of my sites have been having indexing issues in the last couple months, even though there were no issues before. I've been wondering what the best way to keep track of pages and if they're indexed.

If you have a large website and you're struggling to find a reliable method to check its indexing status for many pages, you may want to check this out. They mention a tool called ZipTie, but it's not actually released yet.

SEO Office Hours, January 28th, 2022

Onely's summary of Google's SEO Office Hours with John Mueller.

The value of internal links
Dealing with unwanted pages in SERPs after a malware attack
How to index valid URLs faster?
Do emojis in titles and meta descriptions affect SEO?
FAQs not showing in SERPs
Dealing with seasonal content
CLS vs. ranking
Core Web Vitals vs. crawling and indexing
Geo redirects vs. news websites

Kyle Roof DEEP Interview [His BEST SEO Tactics]

Two of the top SEOs out there - Kyle Roof and Matt Diggity - go head-to-head in this great chat. When either of these two do an interview, it's always good to listen in. There are always plenty of knowledge bombs.

They get into these topics:

What SEO looks like for Kyle today
Compound SEO
Siloing Technique
Onsite Optimization
Technical SEO Issues
Link Building
SEO Testing
Benefits of Networking

The Compound SEO is is good to listen to because I do this myself when building sites, rather than do a scattershot of low-competition keywords across many topics. This is a big part of topical authority that will lessen your site's risk of getting hit by Google Updates.

Tools and Resources

Great Tools for Niche Site Owners and Content Creators

Streamlit - Upload a list of keywords to find the search volumes for. Uses Keyword Surfer (Free) or Semrush's API (Paid). Keyword Surfer's search numbers aren't that accurate from past experience (not that other tools are much more accurate), but it's better than nothing.

TrueRanker - Discover and track relevant keywords to improve SEO visibility and traffic. Inexpensive way to track many keywords. Lifetime deal ends in 6 days.

Melon - Set up, launch, and record high-quality livestreams on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, and more, with easy guest invites for collaborators. Lifetime deal ends in 6 days.

Ezoic vs Mediavine + AdThrive Features

Ezoic put out a couple of short videos comparing Ezoic to Mediavine and AdThrive.

Comparison of Features
Comparison of Earnings of sites that moved to Ezoic.

Sign up for Ezoic if you're not using it yet.

Link Building

5 Quality Checks For Buying Backlinks!

Shaun Marrs goes through how he checks sites that he's interested in buying backlinks from.

Checking Domain History - using Wayback Machine
Ranking Keywords In Google
Linking Domain Traffic Levels
Content Quality
Backlink Pricing
AI Content Detection

Remember, it's not just about the DA or DR of the site you're looking at a backlink from. Those metrics can be manipulated and are also at the mercy of Moz, Semrush, and Ahrefs' algorithms, which can change on a whim.

What's in your check list of how to check for backlink sites?

Why Domain Authority (Moz), Authority Score (Semrush) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) can lead to wrong decisions

This blog post is about why Domain Authority (Moz), Authority Score (Semrush) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) can be misleading and encourage incorrect decisions.

When looking for backlink opportunities, many people focus only on these numbers and not other things like relevancy. This can cause you issues and headaches when those backlinks aren't providing the boost you thought it would. Or maybe when you're looking at aged domains not providing a boost either.

I'm in the midst of selling one of my sites and have gotten questions about why the Ahrefs DR was so low for the site, it's around DR3. I usually reply that it's an Ahrefs algo change because it was consistently in the mid-20's until Nov. 2021 when it dropped to 3 suddenly. But there was no change in Moz's DA low-mid 20's, nor Semrush's Authority Score low 40's.

The domain ratings don't mean as much to me as the quality and relevancy of the sites. It takes more time to research, but it's worth the time, especially before you spend money. Imagine if you only did keyword research using "Keyword Difficulty" and Search Volume numbers...or only Keyword Golden Ratio numbers.

Education

A beginner's guide to Headless CMS

Dan Taylor's beginner's guide to Headless CMS will help you understand what it's all about. I don't feel Headless CMS is really for beginners who haven't built a niche site before. Headless CMS has advantages like fast speeds and flexbility, but some technical knowledge is needed or at least have a developer familiar with headless CMS systems.

I've checked out the Ghost CMS in the past and it was blistering fast, but it was also a steep learning curve. My workflow slowed down and I couldn't easily do everything I was doing in WordPress.

Ghost has a paid hosted version like Wordpress.com, but I was testing the self-hosted Ghost version. If I had a full-time developer, I would consider using Ghost for its speed alone. But WordPress is much larger and it's easier to find support on the web and in forums for it.

What Is the Buyer's Journey? How to Create Content for Every Stage

Si Quan Ong at Ahrefs takes a look at the Buyer's Journey. If your niche sites are monetized with affiliate sales, it's important to understand the Buyer's Journey and how it influences customers' buying decisions.

The article uses Ahrefs as the product example, but you can relate it to most products. Affiliate sales and digital products are the quickest way to increase your site's earnings and the way to get to 5-6 figures a month in revenue, so understanding how a buyer thinks and finally decides on buying products is important.

70 Blogging Statistics for 2022

Ahrefs has collated a list of the most interesting blogging stats from various reports. Some examples that can help you understand the competition out there, but also how to work on your sites:

Long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short articles (Backlinko).
There are more than 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites in the world (Hosting Tribunal).
Bloggers who include 10+ images per post are the most likely to report “strong results” (Orbit Media).
There is a moderate positive correlation between content length and organic traffic, but only up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic (Ahrefs).
There is a strong positive correlation between word count and backlinks, but only up to 1,000 words. For posts longer than 1,000 words, there is a strong negative correlation between word count and backlinks (Ahrefs).
33% of bloggers don’t earn any money at all (TechJury).
The most popular monetization method for bloggers is Google AdSense, followed by affiliate marketing. However, for high-income bloggers, AdSense ranks third; bloggers are 2.5 times more likely to sell their own product or service than use AdSense (GrowthBadger).
45% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year sell their own product or service, while only 8% of lower-income bloggers do that (GrowthBadger).
72% of bloggers making $2,000+/month use either Mediavine or Adthrive as their ad management company (RankIQ). This makes sense because of their 50,000 and 100,000 pageviews requirement.
The most profitable niche is the food blog niche. Food bloggers have the highest median monthly income ($9,169) as compared to bloggers from all major niches (RankIQ).
The niches that have the highest percentage of blogs with over 50,000 monthly sessions are food (42.8%), lifestyle (13.3%), and travel (10%) (RankIQ).
Only 5.7% of pages will rank in the top 10 search results within a year of publication (Ahrefs).
The average page in the top 10 is 2+ years old (Ahrefs).

How Much is An Aged Domain Worth? Valuation Metrics

The Website Flip analyzed over 313 aged domains to calculate average metrics across three marketplaces: 48 from Odys, 98 SerpDomains, and 167 SerpNames. The high-level metrics of the domains:

An average of $2,186.15 for an aged domain
An average of $177.45 per year of domain age
An average of $15.08 per referring domain (dofollow)

There are more and more people interested in using aged domains to try and grow sites faster, but not many people are able to assess whether a domain is worth the cost. These are the 5 key metrics to consider when valuing an aged domain recommended by TWF:

Number of years old
Number of unique referring domains
Domain index status
Domain character length
Domain TLD

My 2021 SEO Case Studies: Averaging 104% Up - Sam Underwood

This is a good look by Sam Underwood, a top SEO consultant, at what he did to improve the SEO and traffic on various client sites. Even though not everything is relevant to purely content sites, there are still many things that are good to know.

Redirecting attachments
Reorganizing content into clusters
Structured internal linking and breadcrumbs
Reconfiguring site structure

Google's Broad Core Updates And The Difference Between Relevancy Adjustments, Intent Shifts, And Overall Site Quality Problems

Glenn Gabe covers how drops during Google's broad core updates could be due to relevancy adjustments, intent shifts, or overall site quality problems.

Many people default to "site and content quality," but that's not the only reason for sites to drop in rankings and traffic. It’s extremely important for site owners to understand the differences between those three scenarios, and to understand which one (or which combination) is impacting their site.

Like Niche Surfer?

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