Wave Issue 70

First...

A couple of exciting things going on right now. One is Niche Creators (below) and the other is selling a site on Empire Flippers for the first time.

The site is in a sub-niche of the general culinary niche. It's a popular cooking method that's been growing in the last many years. There's a consistency to the niche and a nice bump during the holidays when the cooking appliances are being given as gifts.

The site is well-monetized with Amazon Associates and Ezoic ads. It's averaging $0.18 of revenue visitor ($180 per 1,000) in the last 12 months. The majority of earnings comes from affiliate sales.

It's currently priced mid-five figures and would be a great bolt-on for someone who has a site in the general kitchen culinary niche. If you're interested in seeing it, here's the Empire Flippers Listing.

It was a lot of work to prep the materials for EF during the vetting process, but not too bad because I already have my own P&L sheet I work off of.

The biggest pain was getting screenshots of Amazon Associates for all the countries that I have sales in. They wanted individual screenshots of each month...but at least buyers can be confident that EF did their due diligence.

I'll report back to let you know what the experience is like with selling on EF.

Have a great week ahead with building your sites and online businesses.

Niche Creators

Niche Creators Launched

Excited to announce that Niche Creators has officially launched!

This new section of Niche Surfer is where I ask other Content Creators 20 questions about their niche sites, creating content, running their online business, and more. They also spill on the biggest mistakes they've made to help us avoid them.

The first 2 Creators featured:

Have a read and let me know if there are other questions that we should ask in these Q&A interviews.

You can also jump into the Niche Surfer Discord Community where many other Creators are. Learn from and share with others on the same journey.

SEO

SEO Experiments - 28 ideas to move stuck rankings

Nick Swan offers up 28 ways to try and improve your rankings. Many of these are common SEO best practices, so you should be doing them anyways. Some of the ideas he lists:

Check search intent
Internal linking
Link from homepage
URL slug
Page structure
Optimize content using tools such as Surfer, Frase.io, Market Muse, Clearscope
Deoptimize content
Add video content
Create a topic cluster
Add Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT)
Structured data
Link to external resources
Image alt text
Image optimization
Add lead magnet download

Tools and Resources

13 Free Tools to Test and Measure the Core Web Vitals

Samuel Schmitt curated a list of 13 free tools to check your site's Core Web Vitals. Many of them have been shared before, but there are a couple new ones I didn't know about. The Layout Shift GIF Generator and Waterfaller.

The GIF Generator checks to see if your page shifts for the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metric and if it does, it'll create a GIF to show you what's shifting. The Waterfaller will look at the errors, offer reasons why the issues occur, and offer potential solutions. They also offer formatting of the text for you to copy and paste it into your project management tool, so you can create a task for your developers with all the information.

12 Best Unlimited Graphic Design Sites in 2022 to Save Time & Money!

Do you need graphic design but don't want to hire a full-time artist? Use these 12 sites for unlimited graphic design to save time and money.

These sites have a variety of plans that often depends on how many projects you them to work on at one time. If you're constantly in need of graphic designs, these types of platforms can be a good option, especially if just for short-term needs.

Content

16 Content Brief Templates

MarketMuse shares 16 different content briefs from a variety of sources. If you're looking for content briefs that you can share with your writers, check this list out.

Compare those to Frase's own content templates that were shared last week.

What's The Best Info To Commercial Content Ratio For Affiliate SEO? [Data-Backed Study]

Matt Diggity digs into the Informational to Money Content Ratio to find out what's best for affiliate websites after the December 2020 Google Core Update.

He and his team collected data on 1517 affiliate sites across 32 industries to come up with the ratio:

Informationa Content: 62% - 75%
Commercial Content: 24% – 35%

He breaks things down into different niches and specific ratios, but that's the general range across all industries.

Link Building

Anchor Text Ratio Optimization (SEO Distribution for Backlinks)

Stephen Hockman discusses how to Anchor Text Ratio and how to optimize them for backlinks. He explains the differences between Branded, Exact Match, Mixed Keywords, Natural, and URL anchor text. It's an important factor when building backlinks because over-optimization can have a significant effect negatively.

Stephen has published many articles on backlinks recently, so you should check out some other backlink articles. He talks about toxic backlinks, how to remove bad backlinks, how to get Wikipedia backlinks, 55 ways to build backlinks for free, and more.

Education

100 Things to know about Google Core Updates

Marie Haynes goes over 100 things related to Google Core Updates. These are some of the things covered:

What a traffic loss due to a Google update looks like (#10)
The difference between core updates and spam updates (#30)
Google’s advice on recovery from a core update hit (#33)
Google’s use of machine learning (#40)
Improving EAT (#44)
Why links matter (#47)
Entities (#51)
Creating content that meets the searcher’s needs (#62)
Understand how searchers skim (#67)
Citing references (#72)

SEO Split Test Result: Should You Sentence Case or Title Case Your Title Tags?

Semrush tests whether sentence casing will positively or negatively affect rankings and CTR.

Sentence case is the capitalization of (only) the first letter of the first word (for example, “SEO ranking factors: does page experience matter?”). The title case is the capitalization of the first letter of most words (e.g., “SEO Ranking Factors: Does Page Experience Matter?”).

They hypothesized that sentence casing would have a negative effect on organic traffic to the variant pages, as it makes page titles harder to read and harder to scan.

And that's what the results turned out to be. There was no change in rankings, but organic traffic dropped -2.4% due to worse CTR.

Google Penalties: The Newbie-Friendly Guide

This is a good overview article on how to identify, recover from, and avoid Google penalties. It's an interesting read to see the different manual actions your website can get besides unnatural/spammy links. Here are some:

Site abused with third-party spam
User-generated spam
Spammy free host
Structured data issue
Thin content with little or no added value
Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects

Stop Giving Ahrefs Your Search Console Data

Shawna Newman discusses why it's not a good idea to connect your Google Search Console to Ahrefs. It's also what I said when Ahrefs offered their free Webmasters Tool. I don't want to offer up my data to competitors to use, so always steer away from connecting my GSC and Google Analytics to any SEO Tools.

Case Study

SEO Case Study: From Google Penalty To 5x Search Traffic

Matthew Woodward shows how he and his team recovered their client's coupon site after it was destroyed by Google’s May 2020 core algorithm update.

Before the penalty traffic was at 37,724 per month
When we started work traffic had dropped to 1,298 per month
Traffic is now at 52,396 per month

These were the major fixes in their action plan:

Cleaning up what pages were and were not indexed by Google.
Optimizing content on the coupon pages to improve conversion rates.
Improving keyword visibility with supplementary topically related content hubs.
Increasing link velocity with a link building strategy that targets the newly optimized coupon pages and newly created travel content.

LowFruits Case Study Site, Month 4 - LowFruits

Dim is on Month 4 of his case study using only keywords from LowFruits.io, a low-competition keyword finder like Keyword Chef. It's still early, so he hasn't monetized it yet, but you can see the steady growth with low-competition keywords.

He's written 35 posts, but only has 15 articles indexed. Seems like he has the same indexing issues from that time (~Dec. 8th) that I mentioned in a previous newsletter issue.

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!