Wave Issue 76

First...

A little over a week after the latest Google Product Reviews Update was released, and it seems that I have 1 site that's received a positive effect that started on March 25th, the day after the update.

The site went from about 200 organic sessions a day to about 300 sessions for a good 50% increase.

This is a mostly informational site too, probably 90%. I looked into the pages that got a bump and it was informational articles that had increased traffic.

A big part of the traffic increase came from one topic cluster that's all informational. Many of the keywords were already ranking in the top 10, but then they started ranking in the top 5 starting March 25th.

Even though the update was for Product Reviews, it was the informational articles that were affected in my case. Maybe the update took down half of the sites above me on that particular topic, so my site got moved up.

I'll see how the rest of the Google update plays out for my sites, but this one had a nice increase.

Other than that, I haven't been hearing much of big increases or decreases of site traffic. Were you affected?

Niche Creators

Niche Creators - Brandon and Ted

This week's 2 Niche Creators are very active on Twitter sharing their knowledge.

They have both built many niche sites with 6-figure exits and have great info to help other niche site builders. Check out their interviews:

Brandon also shared a YouTube video recently (shared down below) discussing his thoughts on the future of niche sites as well.

SEO

SEO Office Hours, March 18th, 2022

Check out the most interesting questions and answers from Google SEO Office Hours with John Mueller on March 18th, 2022 curated by Onely. These are the topics covered:

Google changing page titles and description
What to do when your articles are considered duplicate content
Ranking on international markets
How to deal with subdomains
When should you use alt tags
When should the last modified date be updated?
Getting background image indexed

They also published ones from the March 11th Office Hours this week with these topics:

1 Can a single page influence the whole domain? 2 Too many internal links can hurt your website? 3 Diagnosing crawling issues for small websites 4 Why synonyms make a difference in ranking 5 Combining multiple rich results types on a page 6 How to ensure a paywall won’t trigger a cloaking penalty 7 Are links within certain sections of a page more important to Google? 8 Does mobile-first indexing help you rank higher?

Tools and Resources

Great Deals Out There for Niche Site and Content Creators

Acumbamail - Build email marketing campaigns, automated digital workflows, and responsive landing pages within a single platform. Starts at 20k emails/month.

Riku.AI - AI tool that allows you to use different AI models - GPT-J, OpenAI, AI21, Cohere, or your own AI models.

Robot.alp - Monitor all your online services to be the first to know about downtime and other issues. I use Better Uptime myself to monitor downtime on my sites, but this one seems like a good alternative with more features.

Link Building

How Many 301 Redirects Is Too Many?

In this episode of Aged Domain Tuesday Mark and Adam review another Aged Domain and discuss the question "How Many 301 Redirects Is Too Many?"

There isn't really an answer to this question, but they show you some examples with sites who have 20+ aged domains redirected to a domain.

The most I've redirected so far is 4 aged domains to a fresh domain. It's a test site that I'm trying various things on to see if/how things work.

They also analyze an aged domain that'd be good to look at. I get asked questions about how I analyze aged domains and it's very similar to what they do. So take a look at their process and it'll help you analyze domains too.

NWB also offers a number of services to help you with Aged Domains, so be sure to check them out if you're interested.

Education

The Best Beginner Keyword Research Method For Blog Post SEO?

Shaun Marrs goes over his keyword research tutorial that makes it quick and easy for people new to blogging to find low competition keywords that have sites like Quora, Reddit, and forums already ranking on the first page of Google for the target keyword.

You don't need a traditional keyword research tool for this method to work either making it budget friendly for people new to blogging who are looking to get quick and easy traffic to their blogs fast. He uses Keywords Everywhere and SEO Minion to get the additional People Also Ask (PAA) keywords.

There are some tools that will automate the task of harvesting the PAA keywords and even cluster them based on the SERPs. Shaun's method might be the cheapest option to get the keywords since Keywords Everywhere is inexpensive, but there's a lot of manual work involved.

There are other tools that automate the work plus some. The two main tools to find low competition keywords are LowFruits and Keyword Chef.

What Is The Future Of Niche Websites In 5 - 10 Years?

Brandon Saltalamacchia discusses the future of niche websites over the next 5 - 10 years and how to prepare now for some of the updates he thinks will eventually come to fruition.

He says it's all about: Trust - Author Authority (EAT) and Community

Seed Keywords: What Are They & 7 Actionable Ways to Find Them

Seed keywords are words or phrases that you can use as the starting point in a keyword research process to unlock more keywords. Think of them as the building blocks of keyword research.

For example, if you sell coffee online, then you can use seed keywords like coffee, espresso, cappuccino, French press, percolator, etc.

This uses Ahrefs as the main tool, but there are also other non-Ahrefs tools they cover in their 7 actionable research methods:

Brainstorm variations of your target keyword
Reverse engineer competitors with Site Explorer
Look at the SERPs (like PAA boxes and related searches)
Review communities and forums
List out products/services/brands associated with your keywords
Look at website navigation menus
Review terms in Google Search Console

The 11 Best Free Website Graders for SEO (& Much More!)

Improve your website's rank, traffic, and performance with these 11 website graders, for SEO, content, accessibility, and more. Includes these tools:

SEO website graders - Google PageSpeed Insights, LOCALiQ Free Website Grader, WebFX SEO Checker
Website content graders - VT Writer, Hemingway Editor
Accessibility website graders - Accessibility Test, SortSite
Other stellar website graders - Nibbler, DareBoost, HubSpot Website Grader, W3C Validator

Case Study

Title Tag Rewrites: 7 Months Later

Back in August, Moz analyzed 10,000 SERPs and found that Google was rewriting 58% of the title tags we were able to track. In September, after some serious objections from the SEO community, Google made changes so that “title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before” .

This immediately raised two questions they looked into:

First, has the situation improved?
Second, why the huge mismatch between Moz numbers (and similar numbers by others in the community)?

They cover various ways that titles are rewritten including:

Simple, Midstream, and Excerpt Truncation
Title Additions (Brand & Local)
Maximum and Minimum Verbosity, Excessive Superlatives, Miscellaneous

Business Ideas

Top 10 Blog Niche Ideas for 2022

Picking a great niche for your blog is critical to its success. In this video, Ricky from Income School reveals his 10 favorite niches for 2022, including:

DIY Fashion/Style
Sewing
Local Business
Location-Based
Real Estate (Local)

Interesting that he brings up 3 localized niches, but he does get back to broader niches for the next 5.

How To Make Money With 5000 Dollars: 12 PROVEN Ways In 2022

Niche Pursuits gives 12 ways to make money with 5000 dollars? The list includes many that involves creating content.

Build a Niche Site
Buy and Sell on Ebay
Create an Ecommerce Store
Build an Online Course
Flip Websites
Start a Podcast
Create and Sell an eBook
Start a Content Agency
Blogancing (Freelance Writing and Blogging Simultaneously)
Affiliate Marketing (Clickbank)
Become a Coach for Less Than 5000 Dollars
Invest in Your 401K

News

The WordPress.org Pattern Creator Now Open to the Public

The WordPress.org Pattern Creator was recently opened to the public. There's already well over a hundred different blocks created by the public that you can use on your sites.

Google Search Central Virtual Unconference 2022

Google's third edition of our interactive virtual event is happening on April 27, 2022 and registation opens on March 30, 2022.

Meet the community, exchange ideas, and have fun together! Check it out to learn more.

Interplanetary SEO services announced

Technical SEO agency, SALT.agency, has announced interplanetary SEO services as part of a broadened package to prepare its clients for the online world of tomorrow.

With space travel only years away, the agency has taken the first step in intergalactic digital marketing by launching a range of stellar interplanetary services, including:

HREFPLANG troubleshooting & mapping
Interplanetary CDN configurations
Cross-planet session tracking in AG4
Galactic content translations
Klingon SEO services

One of the coolest parts of their services is the number of galactic languages they can translate from: Galactic Basic Standard, Binary (Droidspeak), Bocce, Bothese, Catharese, Cheunh, Dosh, Ewokese, Gamorrese, Yorkshire, Geonosian, Hapan, High Galactic, Huttese, Jawaese, Kaleesh, Kaminoan, Mando’a, Old Corellian, Pak Pak, Rodese, Sullustese, Tarc, Torguti, Twi’leki, Tusken, and Yuuzhan Vong.

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Have questions? 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.

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