Wave Issue 94

First...

Niche Site Failure vs Success

Will your niche site succeed or fail?

I look at the different factors when starting and building niche sites that can lead to Success or Failure.

This is something I shared on Twitter after thinking about some of the mistakes I've made in the past and/or seen others make. These are only 6 of the many mistakes.

Disclaimer: These are lessons learned from my experiences with my sites and others I have access to. Nothing is ever 100%.

1. Niche Selection

Failure: Choosing a niche that you love as the only factor.

Success: Choosing a niche where you can define what the audience loves and wants to know about (and you can love it too).

2. Keywords

Failure: Going after low-competition keywords with no plan of how they tie together.

Success: Going after low-competition keywords with a cluster plan for topical authority.

3. Content

Failure: High-quality content stuffed with keywords.

Success: High-quality content that's SEO-optimized and addresses search intent.

4. Internal Linking

Failure: Using a plugin, tool, or VA to interlink based on specific keywords. And using those keywords as anchors repeatedly, leading to over-optimization.

Success: Only interlinking based on relevancy using varied anchor text.

5. Website Design

Failure: Using Elementor, Divi, or Brizy to make beautiful, but bloated sites.

Success: Using GeneratePress or Astra to make above-average-looking, speedy sites.

6. Mindset When Reviewing Your Own Site

Failure: It's a perfect niche site with great content.

Success: It's a good niche site, but what can be improved? Ability to be objective about your own site.

What are some others you can think of?

Niche Creators

Niche Creators - Q&A Interviews

This week's two Niche Creators - VictoriaSEO and Denis - are very active in sharing their knowledge on Twitter while staying anonymous. Both share great tips and positive messages.

Check out their interviews:

Income Reports

Income Reports for July 2022

There are income reports and case study monthly updates I've found.

Passive Incomve Unlocked - $39,430
Mike Donovan, Niche Twins - $30,100
Ron Stefanski, One Hour Professor - $42,785
Paul, Display Ads Info - $17,609
Chris, Niche Safari, Case Study Month 13
Shaun Marrs, Case Study Month 7
Below Average Blogger, Aged Domain Case Study Month 2
Jason Mills, The Affiliate School, Aged Domain Case Study, Month 3

SEO

How to Create SEO SOPs to Scale Organic Traffic

One of the most important things in scaling up your online business and niche sites is to create SEO SOPs for your VA and team members to follow. Bill Widmer shares 5 SOP examples too for you to use as a base:

Content creation and on-page SEO.
Internal linking procedures.
Image optimization.
Email outreach for link building.
Tracking your rankings and making updates.

Google Search Central Updates

Lots of updates from Google this week, so I've consolidated them here.

1. Google July 2022 Product Reviews Update Completed

The rollout started July 27th and was complete August 2nd. This was a quick rollout of an update. Not even a week. No tweet saying the update was complete, so many people missed it. All Google did was update the "Google Updates" page and saying it was complete on Aug. 2nd.

2. New in structured data: Pros and cons

You can now tell Google about your pros and cons by supplying pros and cons structured data on product review pages.

When you're adding structured data to your web pages, you can use Rich Results Test to make sure it's correct and valid for Google Search. The tool has been recently extended to check for pros and cons structured data in addition to all the other structured data types supported by Google Search.

3. Google Improving How Quotes Work in Search Results

Now we’re making quoted searches better. The snippets we display for search results (meaning the text you see describing web content) will be formed around where a quoted word or phrase occurs in a web document. That means you can more easily identify where to find them after you click the link and visit the content. On desktop, we’ll also bold the quoted material.

4. Google Search Console Task Validation Disabled for About 2 Weeks

Google is preparing to migrate all Search Console properties to the updated item classification in approximately 2 weeks. In order to do it smoothly, they are going to disable task validation of index coverage issues until the migration is finished.

5. John Mueller Getting Salty on Twitter

"You want to rank better again? Then do better again."
"Dump the crap. Dump the filler. Get to the point. Don't rehash. Make useful things that you're proud of. Use affiliate links if you want, but don't be an affiliate: be real, be yourself."

Tools and Resources

17 SEO Content Writing Services That'll Help Boost Your Rankings in 2022

A roundup of 17 SEO content writing services can help boost your site rank and increase your organic traffic potential.

I have my own writers and like to write myself, so I haven't used many content writing services. The only one on the list I've used is Niche Website Builders. I've ordered 100K+ words from them and they provided a nice hands-off service with quality content.

I've also tried Rocket Content because I wanted to see what kind of AI content they'd deliver with human editing. The writing was bad and would have duplicate paragraphs in the same article. It was a regular occurrence in the 100 articles. Constant delivery delays with no notice. After publishing, Google slowly started to rank some articles, but the May Core Update tanked all of them.

I wanted to test it and use it as a case study, and it was a successful test for me. Google will eventually catch up to your AI content, even with human editors. But of course, if your editor edits so much that it no longer resembles the original AI article, would it have been faster and cheaper to just have a writer?

Content

How To Optimize Duplicate Content for SEO

As I talk to more people who are getting into programmatic SEO and brand swapping (popularized by Mike Donovan), duplicate content is something to keep an eye on.

Duplicate content is the same or similar content that exists on multiple pages, on one domain, or across different websites. Duplicate content is problematic for search engines because, when seeing the same content in multiple locations, they don’t know which URL should be indexed and ranked for certain keywords.

This is a good article covering pretty much everything to know about duplicate content and best practices to deal with and avoid them.

Link Building

Guest Posting: Should it be Part of Your Link Building Strategy?

David Farkas discusses guest posting and many of the Do's and Don'ts of guest posting. It's a good, in-depth article about guest posts.

Some of the key don'ts mentioned include:

Guest posting on sites with no quality control.
Using spun content across the same article.
Publishing the same article across multiple sites.
Guest posting as part of a reciprocal link exchange.

Education

2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines - Big YMYL Updates

The first Google Quality Rater Guidelines update of 2022, and like usual, it is bringing some pretty significant changes. Google has stressed a lot of focus on YMYL and E-A-T in these changes, which shows how they continue to use both of these as a major powerhouse in how they want raters to evaluate contents and how they want their search algos to be able to process and evaluate them.

This is one of the more in-depth articles I've seen on the changes that were made.

Marie Haynes also covers a lot in her July 2022 QRG update and includes screenshots in her recap.

How to build a Knowledge Panel for your name or brand

Gus Pelogia discusses Knowledge Graphs and how to get them to present your brand. People might know you, but a more complete SERP certainly strengthens your name – more exposure to your brand, logo, social channels and, one could say, less visibility for competitors’ ads.

Digital PR: The Beginner’s Guide to Making Your Brand Unmissable

Jenny Abouobaia talks about Digital PR on the Ahrefs blog, saying that Digital PR and SEO go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Public relations has always been a critical factor in building a brand, and it is no different in today’s digital society. Times have simply moved from billboards and press comments outside office buildings to creative digital campaigns and quotes in key online publications.

Digital PR is not only beneficial to your website in its own right, but it can also seriously boost your SEO efforts and is the truest form of “white hat” link building.

Case Study

Is Parasite SEO Destroying Google?

Authority Hackers discuss the latest tactic taking the marketing world by storm: parasite SEO.

This method sees companies using the power and authority of large sites to push their own content and rank high with it. Basically purchasing sponsored posts on large sites like sfgate.com.

Are Exact Numbers or Approximations in Title Tags Better for SEO?

For this A/B SEO split test, they ask the question: Are Exact Numbers or Approximations in Title Tags Better for SEO?

For A: 29 Best Works for Hire in January 2019 - Company Name For B: 11+ Best Workers for Hire in January 2019 - Company Name

We hypothesized that for pages greater than 27 results, we would improve the clickthrough rate on these listings by updating the count to ‘11+’ instead, because the plus sign would stand out better in the search results because it may entice more curiosity than a fixed number. The variant SERP listing title tag would appear like the following:

For me, it doesn't quite make sense why they'd test it, because I'd imagine a negative impact right off the bat.

They tested for 7 days and saw no detectable impact at the 95% confidence level, but at a lower level of confidence, it was a negative impact. They also ended it early, because they thought it'd likely be negative.

Business Ideas

What’s It Like To Own a Kindle Book Business? - Empire Flippers

A great revenue stream for niche sites is selling digital products, like ebooks. Selling on Amazon is one of the easiest ways to get your ebook out there with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

KDP is Amazon's publishing platform for authors and content creators to publish and sell their own books.

How to Sell SEO: Improve Your Pitch to Close More Sales

Fraser McCulloch discusses how to sell SEO services and get more SEO clients. Even if you're not looking to sell SEO services, this is still a good article to read through.

It'll help to show you a different way of thinking and how beneficial SEO is for businesses and niche sites. It also highlights what's important for SEO and to drive higher traffic. Are you focusing on the same things with your sites?

News

Recession! What will Happen to the Online Industry?

Matt Diggity discusses what a recession means for the online industry and how to take advantage of the new opportunities that will arise.

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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.

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