One of the most challenging aspects of providing SEO services is proving the value of your work to clients. 

To address this problem, SE Ranking sat down with representatives of both digital agencies and businesses from the US, UK and Australia to discuss the main issues that occur in the communication between agencies and their clients and to find reasonable solutions for them. 

This article highlights actionable insights and useful advice shared during the discussion.

The agency side was represented by Jen Cornwell, Harry Sanders, and Lidia Infante, while Dave Lavinsky and Hayley Keith voiced their opinions as business representatives. 

“Why does it take so much time for SEO to show palpable results?!”

Clients often don’t fully understand all of the nuances and value of SEO. As a result, you will have a hard time finding an SEO contractor who hasn’t been asked multiple times why it takes so long to produce results.

Here are a few things you can do to relieve the anxiety of your clients and build trust from day one. 

1. Set clear expectations. As soon as you start working with a client, let them know what results you can help them achieve. Give them a clear idea of what’s ahead by providing projections on what results they can see in 3, 6, 9, and 12 months.

2. Communicate with and educate clients. Make sure to spend enough time explaining to clients that SEO is a massive field with many moving parts where each part needs a different amount of time and effort to produce results. Besides talking to clients, build a good rapport with their in-house teams too, and make sure they’re also on the same page.

3. Provide interim results. Your clients must be able to see actual progress as soon as possible. Alleviate their concerns by showing specific progress that’s been made since you started optimizing their website.

For example, let’s take tech SEO. You can audit the website of your client using website audit tools, such as SE Ranking, to let them know how healthy their website is from a technical perspective.

Then, you can explain what issues and why are to focus in, say, the first month as well as during the first three months. That way, your clients will have a better picture of what to expect.

Plus, the Website Audit also contains detailed information on each issue in terms of why it’s important for SEO and how it can be fixed, allowing your clients to learn everything they need to better understand the urgency of fixing particular errors. 

And as for providing interim results, you can compare several audit reports to show clients an overview of the progress that’s been made. 

The feeling of having control over the situation is very important for your clients. That is why a bit of education supported by clear self-explanatory reports will help you explain the key things that matter for SEO and show the progress of your work. 

“I don’t think these changes are necessary. We have more important things to do!”

Another issue that agencies often come across is that clients don’t implement all the necessary changes. For example, your client doesn’t see the need to create new content, update their landing pages, or build backlinks. So, what do you do?

1. Find a common point of agreement. Make your clients feel that you are on their side and want to achieve the same things they do. While it’s okay for SEO and business reps to see things differently on occasion, it’s important to articulate what the common objective is.

2. Provide stats and case studies to prove the validity of your point when it comes to dealing with big changes and investments. Your clients probably want to take the beaten path to success instead of being trailblazers. 

3. Prove the value of suggested changes by providing examples from competitor websites. With a Competitive Research tool, you can gather the necessary data to show your clients how their website needs to be optimized in order to catch up or even outrank the competition. 

Depending on your task, you can point out the keywords that competitors use, the amount of optimized content, the quality of their links, the technical performance of their websites, and so on. 

4. Prioritize what clients need to implement. Clients are often too busy with their business and need your help to set their SEO priorities straight. To do this, score everything you need a client to do by its potential effectiveness and urgency, plus point out how much time each issue can take. 

“I don’t understand what I am paying you for!”

Sometimes, clients don’t really understand or haven’t the slightest idea of what their SEO agency is currently working on. What this means is that they don’t know what they’re paying for, which can end up being harmful to both clients and agencies. 

Here’s the advice our experts shared that will help your clients avoid having any question marks.
 

1. Be extra transparent and honest. Make sure to be as open as possible in your communication with clients. Present them with a detailed plan of action and hold regular sync-up meetings to report on what’s been done and what you are planning to do next. Communicating KPI progress reports also helps achieve this. 

2. Talk about your own mistakes. If the strategy you’ve opted for didn’t work, don’t try to cover it up with some vague conclusions. Instead, be open and frank, and have a plan of recovery ready to make up for the losses in the future. 

To avoid your clients guessing what they are paying you for, take advantage of a  Report Builder tool to send out regular reports to your clients. Depending on how often they want reports, you can send out reports on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis or on-demand.

Sit with your client and agree on the data points that must be included in the report and how often they want to get such reports. You can design and personalize the report however you want and add all the necessary data points to make sure the client understands exactly where you are and where you are going. 

“I’m overwhelmed with the technical details you are sharing with me and don’t understand why it matters for my business!”

In addition to providing SEO reports full of easy-to-read charts and tables, you must make sure your clients, as well as their teammates, understand all of the data they see. So, besides focusing on SEO progress, provide additional information to let your clients know how each aspect of your work correlates to the business goals of your clients.

Let’s take a look at some actionable tips you can benefit from.

1. Set up tracking straight away. Don’t delay getting access to your clients’ analytics and verify that you are tracking every part of the client website. That way, you will be able to make data-informed decisions along the way. Keep in mind that linking SEO deliverables to business parameters is key. 

If you want to give your clients the opportunity to check in on specific aspects of your work whenever they choose to, you can also share a guest link with them. Sharing a guest link facilitates the work of SEO agencies. 

2. Provide context to your reports. Don’t just throw raw SEO data at your clients, but provide detailed explanations on what exactly you’ve been working on, why it’s important, what were the objectives, and which parameters indicate the results. Adding comments to each report section and tailoring your reports to each specific client can go a long way.

3. Know who you’re talking to. Prepare different reports for the CEO of a client company and for that company’s SEO or marketing team. After all, they have different levels of engagement in the actual SEO process and need different levels of digitalization in the information you can provide. So, before putting together a report, find out whose table it’s going to end up on. 

Remember that smart reporting is not just about sending out visually stunning graphs to your clients, but about providing enough relevant data along with all of the necessary context. 

Final thoughts

It’s absolutely critical that you and your clients realize that you are playing for the same team and that you are both invested in the growth of the client’s business. So keeping your clients as well-informed as possible is key. 

Dedicate the time to make sure your clients understand what you are planning to do or are already doing to their website. That way, you won’t have any unpleasant surprises further down the road. Also, be transparent and honest in your communication so that the client doesn’t just know when everything is going according to plan but when things fall through as well.

While there are multiple ways of communicating with your clients, it’s best to manage it all from one central location like SE Ranking which gives you all of the SEO data you need to carry out your work as well as the tools you need to keep your clients fully informed.

The post How to effectively deliver the results of your work to clients appeared first on Search Engine Land.

When Google’s Page Experience update finished rolling out in early September, it changed how the search engine evaluates websites — namely, a new emphasis on user experience signals. In his session at SMX Next, Patrick Stox, product advisor for technical SEO and brand ambassador at Ahrefs, noted some important alterations to this update that took place in the months following, which continue to leave many SEOs confused.

“Safe browsing is already out,” he said, “And cumulative layout shift has changed a bit. It’s the five seconds where the most shifting occurs. Google has also removed AMP from Top stories requirements and many news sites are looking at dropping it.”

One of the key pieces of the Page Experience update — Core Web Vitals — is also one of the most hotly debated. SEOs and agencies have questioned how big of a difference these metrics make in terms of rankings, leading many, such as Stox, to take a deeper look at the data.

“We looked at about 5.2 million individual pages, which I think is the largest data set that’s been studied now,” he said. His study found that only 11.4% of them met the recommended standards for Core Web Vitals.

This begs the question: Is Core Web Vitals optimization necessary?

“Maybe these are small ranking factors,” said Stox, “But I think if you argue this from an SEO standpoint, you’re going to fail. Many Google employees have now said these are small factors, that these are tiebreakers signals.”

“It’s going to be hard to get any prioritization when it’s not going to have a huge impact for SEO,” he added.

Still, Core Web Vitals point to some key principles of page experience. Even if they fail to provide the ranking boosts SEOs hope for, these signals point to aspects of user experience that are necessary if marketers want to convert more visitors. And, as Google continues to add these kinds of signals to its algorithms, your site’s visibility is that much more likely to improve.

Stox offered five concepts marketers should understand and prioritize when optimizing with the Page Experience update in mind.

Smaller is faster

The largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures perceived load speed and it’s an important user-centric metric. This is the point where the main content on a page has loaded.

It’s no surprise that users want their content loaded as quickly as possible. But to do so, marketers must work with their development teams to cut down resource sizes — the smaller the resource, the faster the page will load and the higher LCP score the page will receive.

“If you don’t need something, don’t load it,” said Stox. “A smaller site is faster, so that means you need to zip your JavaScript files, CSS and HTML — make everything as small as possible. Get rid of things you don’t need.”

Server location matters

The location of your site’s servers has a direct impact on its page experience. That’s why Stox recommends marketers and site owners use a content delivery network (CDN). These geographically distributed server networks can work together to enhance user experience.

“Pretty much every article will tell you to use a CDN,” said Stox. “Simply, location matters. The connection time that it takes, the amount of time that it takes to get things from a server.”

He added, “If you have copies of your site all over the world, that time is cut out.”

CDNs can be particularly effective for large sites because they enable them to draw in resources from locations across the globe. That, in turn, can help ensure your content gets to searchers when they need it.

Use the same server

Stox noted that marketers should opt to use a single server if possible when improving page experience signals. Each additional server connected adds further delay in rendering, which could end up causing slow load times on pages.

“Keep as much as you want or as much as you can on the same server,” he said. “Every connection to a different location takes additional time, additional roundtrips.”

“If you are going to use additional servers, you need DNS-prefetch and preconnect,” he added.

Adding preconnect and DNS-prefetch code can serve as an alternative. These can help sites establish early connections between servers.

Ensure caching is set up correctly

Setting up effective caching can help provide a good page experience over the long run, Stox argues. He recommends SEOs and site owners use this function regularly to put less strain on servers — even if the first page takes slightly longer to load.

“Cache as much as possible,” Stox said. “Your first load may take longer, but then every other page after that — they’ve already got your CSS downloaded, your JavaScript downloaded, your fonts downloaded. They’re in their browser. They’re stored locally at that point, which means it’s going to be super fast.”

Prioritize items in page resource loading

Web pages need to load many resources before users can view and engage with them. But some resources are more important than others.

“In the browser, you have fonts, CSS, HTML and JavaScript — they [the servers] have to figure out what to prioritize,” Stox said. “You need to load things that are going to make up the initial viewport — the things that people are going to see first — and then everything else comes later.”

The goal should be to load the things people see first, then load secondary resources. Structuring your resource loading with inline coding this way can help you deliver your most important content to users faster.

“When I say ‘inline’ CSS, what I mean is taking part of the CSS file and putting it in the HTML,” he said. “So when the HTML is being downloaded, I get the CSS that I need for the visible page. I don’t have to wait for another CSS file to download for that to be processed and the render to start.”

“We’re going to be prioritizing things that are needed and the render can just happen a little earlier this way,” he added.

Ultimately, as Stox notes, platforms like Google will become advanced enough that SEOs won’t have to worry too much about these technical aspects of page experience: “I think the platforms are going to solve a lot of these speed issues for you so that people won’t have to worry about this as much. SEO’s won’t have to bother devs and devs won’t necessarily have to focus on it.”

But that future is still a long way off. Optimizing for Core Web Vitals — even if they’re just a tiebreaker — can bring audiences to your site instead of a competitor’s.

Watch the full SMX Next presentation here (free registration required).

The post How marketers can prepare for what’s next in page experience appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Over the weekend an internal Google issue caused Google to send out Search Console notifications about redirect errors. Google confirmed those emails were sent due to an internal Google issue and the notifications were not sent due to any website issue.

Bug confirmed. Google confirmed the issue on the Search Console Twitter account:

The email. Here is a sample of what the email looks like, it read “Coverage issues detected on domain. Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 1 Coverage issues: Top Errors. Errors can prevent your page or feature from appearing in Search results. The following errors were found on your site: Redirect error. We recommend that you fix these issues when possible to enable the best experience and coverage in Google Search.”

When you clicked on fix coverage issues, Google would take you into the Search Console Coverage report, directly drilled down into the Redirect error statuses page:

More screenshots of this issue. Here are some more screenshots of this issue shared on Twitter:

Why we care. Just to be clear, if you received this notification, you do not need to take action. Google will fix the coverage report in Search Console and the redirect errors should go away. Google will likely notify us when the report is fixed.

If you receive this error in the future, you probably want to address it. But if you received this notification over the past weekend, you can likely safely ignore the notification.

The post Google issue sent Search Console redirect error notifications; Google will fix issue appeared first on Search Engine Land.

For a couple of years, SEO PowerSuite has been working on enhancing its backlink index, used by the SEO PowerSuite backlink API and the SEO SpyGlass backlink tool. In June 2021, a huge infrastructure update went live, increasing our crawling speed by three times.

To better understand our progress and see where we stand, we’ve decided to run an in-house analysis of the top backlink database providers — Ahrefs, SEO PowerSuite, Semrush, and Majestic.

We’ve described all the major findings of the comparison here, but more details can be found on this page.

Disclaimer: For this study, we’d purchased the API keys from each of the compared providers ($6,200 worth in total). In this report, SEO PowerSuite enclosed the raw data files for your reference. To verify that the data hasn’t been modified in any way, you can reach out to the mentioned companies and purchase similar stats from them to run your own comparison.

The methodology

To run this analysis, we decided to use the Majestic Million dataset.

Why this dataset? The Majestic Million is a list of the top million sites on the web, based on the number of citations (aka links) from other websites. That’s why each of these domains should have sufficient backlinks to make the comparison statistically significant.

So, we have taken this dataset and analyzed the results from the following backlink index providers:

SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite backlink index counts 3.6 trillion external backlinks and 264 million indexed domains.

The cost of checking backlink stats for 1M domains: $899.

Ahrefs

According to the official website, Ahrefs has 3.2 trillion external backlinks and 193 million indexed domains.

The cost of checking backlink stats for 1M domains: $2,000.

Semrush

Semrush contends to have over 43 trillion backlinks and 1.6 billion domains in its index. 

The cost of checking backlink stats for 1M domains: $2,500.

Majestic

We haven’t found any information on the number of backlinks and referring domains in the Majestic backlink index. The only stats that are available on the official website are that the Fresh backlink index has 434 billion URLs crawled and over 1 trillion URLs found.

The cost of checking backlink stats for 1M domains: $800.

After setting up the accounts and checking the data for one million domains, we then calculated

• the total wins by referring domains;
• the total wins by backlinks;
• how often each of the vendors occupied the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th position in the comparison (for links and referring domains);
• and a few more metrics covered on this page.

The study was conducted in autumn 2021.

Findings                                  

Who wins by the number of referring domains?

First off, we looked at the number of referring domains returned by every provider, the metric that lets us evaluate the backlink index coverage.

When it came to the largest number of reported backlink domains, SEO PowerSuite led the way with 44.4% wins:

The backlink index by Semrush took second place with over 36.3% wins. Ahrefs received 14% wins, and Majestic – 5.3%.

Please keep in mind that the graph above highlights the number of wins. Here’s how the quantity of reported referring domains looked in absolute numbers:

What’s the difference between wins and absolute numbers?  Here’s a simple example – let’s imagine we’ve checked how many referring domains each of the analyzed databases reported for the same URL:

• SEO PowerSuite: 100 referring domains
• Ahrefs: 101 referring domains
• Semrush: 99 referring domains
• Majestic: 100 referring domains

In this case, Ahrefs would receive the “point” for their “win.” And then, we repeat the process for the remaining 999,999 domains.

The winner in the referring domains category: SEO PowerSuite

Who wins by the number of backlinks?

For the total number of backlinks, Semrush came out on top with 47.65% wins. It was followed by SEO PowerSuite (21.38% wins) and Ahrefs (16.25% wins). Majestic showed the lowest number of backlinks in this run and gained 14.73% wins.

Total backlinks in absolute numbers:

The winner in the referring backlinks category: Semrush

How positions in the comparison were distributed

Additionally, we have calculated how often each of the vendors occupied the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th position in the comparison.

This is how the positions were distributed for referring domains:

And this is how the vendors scored for backlinks:

Important factors to keep in mind

All tests have limitations, and this one’s no exception. It’s quite challenging to run research of backlink databases and draw a totally unbiased conclusion.

Below, we’ve outlined a few important aspects that you should keep in mind when you read any backlink index study.

Different types of backlink indexes

Every backlink index is unique since every company uses a different approach to crawl, store and count backlink data. So, with any backlink index comparison, you have this big flaw of analyzing databases that are inherently not equal.

In our research, we’ve accessed the data via APIs that allegedly return the results from the following indexes:

• Ahrefs Live index (all links that are currently live, a link is considered live until recrawled and found otherwise)
• Semrush Fresh index (all links crawled in the last six months)
• Majestic Fresh index (all links crawled in the last four months)
• SEO PowerSuite backlink index includes all live links (similarly to Ahrefs, a link in our index is considered live until we recrawl it and see otherwise).

Unlike Ahrefs and SEO PowerSuite, Semrush and Majestic return both live and dead backlinks, and in most cases, it can make a huge difference in the backlink numbers.

For example, if you check the backlink profile of Amazon.com in Semrush, you’ll see that this domain has a total of over 18 billion backlinks (that’s what you get via the API as well). But if you switch to the Active links mode, you’ll see only seven million links:

Although Ahrefs index includes links that are currently live, you can still spot some inconsistencies. Ahrefs API returns 114 million backlinks for Ahrefs.com, this is close to the number we see in the Summary dashboard, but if we switch to the backlinks report, we’ll see just 35 million links.

There’s probably a good explanation behind this mismatch (low-quality or lost backlinks filtered out?), but it brings us to two important conclusions:

1. We can’t be 100% certain about the type of backlink index used by APIs.
2. We can’t eliminate this type of discrepancy from our research.

Different ways to count links

Yet another problem you’ll face when comparing the backlink indexes is that links are counted differently. For instance, you may calculate duplicate links on a page as a single link or as multiple links. The same’s true for redirects, canonicals, etc. All these things will affect the total calculation, and that’s why we have to take every backlink index comparison with a grain of salt.

Different ways to record IPs

Similarly, there’s a question of how backlink API providers record IP data. Most providers count only the most recent IP they’ve found for the backlink, which means they have one IP recorded per domain. But Semrush seems to record every IP they’ve detected in the last six months; thus, they may have a few dozen IPs recorded for the same domain.

The IP/subnet stats are included in the raw data file, and initially, we planned to use these numbers in the report. However, when we noticed this crucial difference in IP calculation, we considered that these stats could not be used to draw meaningful conclusions.

Different understanding of referring domains

A domain is a domain, right? Our analysis shows that things are a bit more complicated when we talk about backlink indexes.

According to Verisign, “the second quarter of 2021 closed with 367.3 million domains across all top-level domains.”

And while many data providers have a matching number of domains indexed (Ahrefs – 193.4 million referring domains, SEO PowerSuite – 264 million domains), Semrush claims to have a very dubious 1.6 billion referring domains.

Hence, what Semrush counts as a unique domain seem to be different from the widely accepted notion.

To sum it up, there’s probably no winner or loser in this type of comparison, due to all the mentioned factors and varying approaches.

But we believe that the more experiments we run, the more transparent backlink index providers will become about their data in the long run. And that means that enterprise and API users will better understand what they are paying for.

If you’re interested in testing our backlink API for your SEO services and apps (or running your own independent analysis), please drop us a note to api@link-assistant.com, and we’ll set you up with a free trial.

The post Top 4 backlink API vendors compared (1 million domain study) appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google Ads is rolling out a new user interface for custom columns as well as new metrics, a Google spokesperson has confirmed to Search Engine Land. “The update will be rolling out to all advertisers in the next few weeks,” a Google spokesperson said.

Tip of the hat to PPCGreg on Twitter for first bringing this to our attention.

Why we care. Custom columns add flexibility by enabling advertisers to compare the metrics that are most important for their particular needs. The new metrics make this feature even more useful by, for example, enabling advertisers to monitor their Search impression share alongside other campaign metrics.

The new metrics coming to custom columns. With this update, the following metrics will be available for custom columns:

• Spreadsheet functions.
• Calculate/compare metrics across date ranges (example).
• Non-metric columns (like Campaign name or Budget).
• Reference other custom columns.
• Search, Click and Display impression share.
• Three phone call metrics, and others.

What Google said. “We’ve updated custom columns to make it more flexible for advertisers to use,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land, “With the new UI, advertisers can more easily see their data and work with it to derive new insights by comparing different metrics. We’ve also added additional features based on advertiser feedback. We’re looking forward to bringing these new features to all advertisers in the next few weeks.”

The post Google Ads refreshes custom columns UI and adds new metrics appeared first on Search Engine Land.