Wave Issue 69

First...

I'm excited to pre-announce a new section of the Niche Surfer newsletter - Niche Creators!

I don't want to get into the details yet, but it will be very useful for many of you - including me!

I wanted to get it up for this week, but I underestimated the work/reconfiguring that I need to do to get everything up on the nichesurfer.com domain, while also keeping the newsletter archives easily accessible. I hope to have it up by next week.

Until then, do check out some of the tools shared below this week. There are some great tools that take advantage of the Google Search Console URL Inspection API. They've already saved me a lot of time with the GSC tasks that I found myself doing more and more with indexing issues.

Don't forget to join the Niche Surfer Community with others riding the passive income wave!

Good discussions are already going on in the group, so be sure to stop by!

Income Reports

Income Reports - Jan. 2022

The January 2022 monthly income reports I've found:

Carl Broadbent - $10,376.77
Passive Income Unlocked - $26,333
Kevinstats - $2,055.88
Tortoise Cash Flow - ~$1,900-2,000
Leon Angus
WP Eagle
Ron Stefanski - $31,123
Earning Financial Freedom - $5,072.84

For the ones I didn't give the numbers for, they didn't provide the Totals (or I missed it) and I didn't do the manual calculations.

SEO

Google tests Buying Guides in mobile search results

Google is testing “Buying Guides,” a new mobile search results feature that presents users with various drop-down menu options to learn more about the product they’re searching for, the company has confirmed to Search Engine Land.

Looks like Google is trying even more to keep users on the SERPs and away from clicking through to sites. It's still in testing phases with some mixed results.

Google SEO Office Hours Summary, February 4th, 2022

This is a summary of the most interesting questions and answers from the Google SEO Office Hours with John Mueller on February 4th, 2022.

Changing the number values in titles on a daily basis
Does having a comment section affect SEO?
Adding dates to page titles
Crawling and indexing issues
Text vs. images in href tags
Domain migration vs. page authority and ranking
Indexed filters vs. robots.txt and canonical tags

For #4 and indexing issues that many people, including me, have been experiencing in the last couple months, John Mueller does mention this when asked about social media posts linking to non-indexed pages and if those help:

“If we find external links to those pages, then chances are we might crawl and index that page are a little bit higher. It depends a little bit on what external links there are. Links from social media directly usually have nofollow attached, so we don’t forward any signals there. And if […] we can recognize these are maybe problematic links or not that useful links, maybe we will ignore those too. But obviously, if we can tell that something is seen as being important, we’ll probably go off and crawl and index that page more likely."

Can rearranging the layout on a page impact SEO?

SearchPilot tested out what would happen if a travel website moved a travel deals block above the informational content. Like they usually do, they go to Twitter with a poll and 57% of respondents said the organic traffic impact would be Positive.

Unfortunately, it was a negative impact, losing about -10% in organic traffic. Looks like moving the informational content further down the page wasn't good.

So make sure to consider your page layout when designing your webpages, because it does seem to have a big effect on organic traffic.

Pogo-Sticking in SEO: What It Is & What to Do About It

This is a good article covering pogo-sticking and how/if it affects rankings for sites.

Pogo-sticking is when a user enters a site from a SERP and quickly leaves it to go back to the SERP. It's different from the bounce rate. Bounce rate is when a user enters a site from any source and doesn’t perform any action on it (e.g., clicking a link, filling a form, or putting an item in a cart). So if someone opens an article, reads it entirely, and doesn’t do anything else before leaving—that counts as a bounce.

The conclusion is that pogo-sticking isn't a ranking factor, but it's still good to take a look at the tips in this article to make your content more engaging.

Tools and Resources

Great Deals Out There for Niche Site and Content Creators

TrueRanker - Low-priced rank tracker with SEO keyword discovery features. SerpRobot is $5/month for 300 keywords, while this deal is $118/lifetime for 2,000 keywords. Last Chance - Deal ends in 2 days, but you need to be a Plus member that also gives you 10% Off.

Instantly - Automate and scale B2B cold email outreach with the power of AI. Also offers email warm-up functionality. Good option if you want to do your own link building outreach.

utobo - Create courses, teach live, and sell content online using just one simple tool. Easily create online courses and digital products to sell on an ecommerce site with Stripe integration.

8 SEO tools to get Google Search Console URL Inspection API insights

Discover some free tools, SEO crawler integrations, and scripts to leverage with Google Search Console's URL Inspection API:

Crawlability and indexability status
Last crawling time
Sitemaps inclusion
Google selected canonical URL
Identified structured data for rich results eligibility
Mobile usability status

The first tool listed, Google Bulk Inspect URLs by Valentin Pletzer is a super easy way to check a list of URLs to see if they're indexed.

Rank Math Instant Indexing Plugin - UPDATE - YouTube

Carl Broadbent tried out Rank Math's Instant Indexing Plugin to index hundreds of pages that Google hasn't wanted to index for a year. This plugin helped many of those pages get ranked. There's a bit of a setup with the plugin though, because you also need to create a Project in Google Cloud Platform and set up an API key for the plugin.

Google recommends that you use the Indexing API ONLY for Job Posting and Live Streaming websites. Sites that provide up-to-date, real-time information. However, it works on any type of website and many of our users have seen great results already. Please proceed with caution.

I tested out the Free Instant Indexing Plugin on 2 sites with 39 articles that were 3-7 weeks old and weren't indexed. All 39 articles were indexed within 3 hours!

Even though it's a 100% success rate, I'm still going to keep my eye on the indexing and see if any de-index. I'm also not going to use the Instant Indexing tool on any new articles I write, only the old ones that Google stubbornly won't index. I don't want to get into Google's crosshairs for using the API on any non-Job Posting or Live Streaming sites.

Content

Frase Content Templates - FREE!

Frase has a page of templates for different types of content pages. Pretty good roundup that you can use as a base to work off of as content briefs for writers and to produce SEO-optimized content faster.

Content Audit: The Step-by-Step Guide for the Ultimate Strategy

Semrush discusses how to audit your content. Regular, well-conducted content audits can help you identify content that needs to be improved, or can be repurposed into other formats. They talk about analyzing your current content and drawing up an action plan that includes steps like:

Reuse your content
Rewrite your content
Expand your content
Refresh your content
Structure your content
Update your CTAs
Add videos and/or images
Optimize metadata
Optimize internal linking

Education

What is a Good Click-Through Rate?

This is a nice overview of Click-Through Rates for various scenarios:

SEO Campaigns
Google PPC Campaigns
Email
Social Media
Banner Ads

In the article, they said the Top 5 results in the SERPs gets 67.6% of all clicks, while spots 6-10 only get 3.73%. Shows why it's even more important to get to the Top 5 if you want the traffic to ride the passive income wave.

TheWebsiteFlip.com Audit by Charles Floate

Mushfiq tweeted a SEO audit of TheWebsiteFlip.com that Charles Floate did. It's a good watch because I think you may have similar issues that you may not realize.

Mushfiq listed the main takeaways:

Over optimized internal linking
Too many question-related articles
Clean up homepage hero
Try to rank for "blog" related keywords
Add a business address
Get direct backlinks (not 301s) from brands in my niche
Disavow/remove link farm backlinks

Blogger vs Online Publisher

Chris at Niche Safari put out a good video that takes a look at the comparison between being a Blogger vs. an Online Publisher with many writers. If you're thinking about scaling up your business, take a look at this video for the Pros and Cons of each.

I also have a nice surprise next week with Chris here at Niche Surfer!

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.

Be sure to also join others riding the passive income wave:

Join the Niche Surfer Community

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

Don't forget 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!