Timothy Carter

Are you confused as to why your website is failing to rank in Google search, particularly local search? When local search works in your favor, you’ll see your company sitting atop the search results for many a local phrase. But if you’re not ranking high in local search, or not appearing at all, it can seriously impact your business. If people can’t find you, how can they buy what you’re selling? It’s a big problem with a multitude of solutions. For some, it’s as simple as getting listed in Google My Business (GMB) and on Google Maps. For others, it’s a bit more complicated. Though local search has specific requirements, it’s still search and requires SEO. Bearing that in mind, let’s look at some reasons a company might fail to appear in Google local search results and what can be done from a local SEO perspective to remedy the situation. You’re Not Listed in Google My Business (GMB) This is by far the simplest reason you’re not appearing in local search results but not always the easiest to fix. Getting listed can be a bit of process. Google is very stringent in its listing guidelines so you absolutely must do your best follow them to the letter if you want to see progress. Your first step is to create a local business on Google. You only qualify for this option if: Your business as a mailing address You follow Google’s quality guidelines So long as you follow instructions, set up isn’t all that difficult. But this is actually where a lot of people get tripped up. You Didn’t Follow the Quality Guidelines for Local SEO As Local University puts it, Google’s quality guidelines for business listings shouldn’t be called guidelines at all — they should be called rules. Because if you don’t follow them precisely, the result is more often than not a failure to be listed or a failure to have your listing appear as you’d like it to. The guidelines are pretty detailed. For instance, if your business has a mail box or suite number, you need to include that information in Address Line 2, and under no circumstances should it appear in Address Line 1. It’s a bit persnickety, to be honest.  You should definitely take the time to review them on your own. But let’s take a look at a few aspects here just so you’re clear on some of the bigger requirements: Only a business owner (or someone authorized by the business owner) can verify a business listing. Try to use an email address attached to your company’s domain name to add trust to your verification request The business name in your listing should be what it’s actually called, though you can use one word to clarify what your company does. You can also use a “single descriptor” to better identify your company’s location, which can actually be made up of more than one word. See what I mean about these guidelines being very precise? Use your company’s real physical address Only one account can be created for a business location unless you’re an individual practitioner within a larger business (like a doctor or lawyer) or the page is for a department that acts individually within an organization like a university or hospital. Use a local phone number. Select a category based on what the business is “not what it does.” You would say “Hospital” not “Vaccinations,” according to Google. Fraudulent or illegal businesses aren’t allowed to create listings, let alone multiple listings. Google does have some country restrictions. Some business models are ineligible for a listing including those that: Don’t make in-person contact with customers Aren’t open yet or who have very restricted business hours Consist of a class or event held at a location you don’t own Stock your products but you don’t own the retail store I realize that’s a lot to wrap your mind around and it will take some serious time to familiarize yourself with all of these rules before you can get a handle on it. But it’s worth the effort if you want to see your business rank higher. Your Business Isn’t Verified If you’ve gone to all the effort to do the above, it would be a real shame to forget to verify your listing, now wouldn’t it? But that’s often a reason why people fail to see their businesses in the local search results. They just never got around to this step. So take this opportunity, while you’re thinking about it, to verify your page. When logged into Google and navigate to your page then hover on the “Unverified” button at the top. Click on “Verify Now” and follow the instructions. Typically, you just need to input your mailing address and click on “Request Postcard.” You’ll have to wait a few days to get your postcard but this is your ticket to verification. Seems sort of low-tech, I know, but it’s Google’s way for business owners to prove they are who they say they are. Just follow the instructions on the card to complete the verification process. Your site should be listed and ranking in no time after that. You Didn’t Fill Out All of Your Business Details (Name, Address, Phone, etc.) Once you’ve got the basics taken care of, you need to populate your listing with some real information. That means filling out your business introduction as fully as possible. Really take this opportunity to introduce yourself to your potential customers. What is your business all about? Why did you start it? What are you passionate about? What separates you from your competition? Don’t go all salesman mode in your introduction but you should definitely make the effort to demonstrate what makes you stand out by writing a compelling business description. Another thing you need to remember to include is photos. As with anything online, photos add character and life. Without them, your listing will look incomplete and is less likely to engage potential customers. Plus, even if it does appear in the search results, it’s going

Guest blogging used to be the primary means of generating more organic website traffic. But gone are the days of the one-trick guest blogging pony. Paid guest posts, while unfortunately not a thing of the past, have been a massively overused tactic for establishing online brands.  And search engines are getting better at determining a pattern from websites that accept guest posts and subsequently discounting their impact and relevance in passing authority. That means that not all high-authority backlinks via relevant websites are created equal. Instead we focus on traffic (first and foremost), relevance and quality. For those looking to scale up their link building and find guest blogging opportunities, you have come to the right place. How to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities I’m going to show you how to find guest posting opportunities by using one of my favorite internet marketing tools: Scrapebox. Other alternatives include Pitchbox and Mailshake. In some cases, you can find the opportunities themselves in Scrapebox and then use a tool like Mailshake to perform the automated outreach. What You’ll Need: Scrapebox (download it here for a one-time fee of $57. TOTALLY worth it.) Private proxies (Get them from Proxybonanza for a small monthly fee. I recommend going for the “Bonanza” package from the “Exclusive Proxies” section.) Note: That Proxybonanza link is an affiliate link. I’d really appreciate if you’d buy through my link! How are We Going to Use Scrapebox to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities? Scrapebox will execute multiple search queries simultaneously in Google and Bing, automatically harvest all the results, and allow us to manipulate, augment, and export the data. For example, let’s say you want to find good guest blogging opportunities for your website about canine epilepsy. To find other websites that rank well for the term (and similar terms) which might be good targets for a guest blog post, you’d want to examine the top 100 search results for the following search queries: Dog seizures Canine epilepsy Canine seizures Seizures in dogs Without Scrapebox, you’d have to perform each of those searches manually (via Google.com), manually click through each of the top 10 pages, and copy/paste each URL into a spreadsheet for future follow-up. This process would easily take you at least an hour. With Scrapebox, you supply the search queries, and it will perform the searches, collect the URLs of the top 100 results, and supply them to you in an Excel spreadsheet. Additionally, you can use Scrapebox to automatically find the PageRank of the domain of each search result, allowing you to filter out low-PR domains without having to manually visit them. Scrapebox also offers lots of other filtering options, such as the ability to ignore results from domains that would never accept a guest blog post, such as facebook.com, amazon.com, etc. All of the above processes can easily be completed in under 60 seconds. Ready to take your link prospecting capabilities to a whole new level? Let’s get started. Step 1: Load your proxies into Scrapebox After obtaining your proxies, load them into a .txt file on your desktop in the following format: IP:port:username:password IP:port:username:password IP:port:username:password Here’s an example: 123.456.789.012:01234:jayson:awesomepassword 123.478.759.032:01234:jayson:awesomepassword 123.446.899.012:05274:jayson:awesomepassword 129.486.749.012:01234:jayson:awesomepassword 176.495.989.016:01637:jayson:awesomepassword In Scrapebox, click “Load” under the “Select Engines & Proxies” area. Select the text file containing your proxies. Scrapebox should load them immediately, and look something like this: Click “Manage” and then “Test Proxies” to test your proxies and ensure Scrapebox can successfully activate and use them.   Be sure that “Google” and “Use Proxies” are both checked. Step 2: Choose a keyword that best represents your niche or vertical For example, let’s say I’m trying to find guest blogging opportunities for my website about canine epilepsy. I would select “dogs” as my keyword. I could go for a more targeted approach and try “canine epilepsy” or “dog seizures” as my keyword, but I’m likely to find much less (albeit more targeted) prospects. Step 3: Define your search queries. Copy and paste the following search queries into a .txt document on your desktop and replace each instance of [keyword] with your chosen keyword from Step 2. Note: The following is my personal list of search queries that I use to identify guest blogging opportunities. Google limits queries to 32 words, which is why these are broken down into many chunks rather than one long query. Enjoy! “submit blog post” OR “add blog post” OR “submit an article” OR “suggest a guest post” OR “send a guest post” “[keyword]” “guest bloggers wanted” OR “contribute to our site” OR “become a contributor” OR “become * guest writer” “[keyword]” “guest blogger” OR “blog for us” OR “write for us” OR “submit guest post” OR “submit a guest post” “[keyword]” “become a guest blogger” OR “become a guest writer” OR “become guest writer” OR “become a contributor” “[keyword]” “submit a guest post” OR “submit post” OR “write for us” OR “become an author” OR “guest column” OR “guest post” “[keyword]” inurl:”submit” OR inurl:”write” OR inurl:”guest” OR inurl:”blog” OR inurl:”suggest” OR inurl:”contribute” “[keyword]” inurl:”contributor” OR inurl:”writer” OR inurl:”become” OR inurl:”author” OR inurl:”post” “[keyword]” site:twitter.com [keyword] “guest post” OR “guest blog” OR “guest author” Step 4: Load Search Queries into Scrapebox. In the “Harvester” section in Scrapebox, click “Import,” then “Import from file.” Select the file containing the search queries that you just created in Step 3. Scrapebox should then populate with the search queries, looking something like this: Step 5: Update your blacklist. Scrapebox has a “blacklist” which allows you to automatically filter out undesired search results. For example, I know that Facebook.com and Amazon.com will never accept a guest blog post, so I don’t want results from those domains appearing in my list. To edit your blacklist, click “Blacklist” from the top navigation, then click “Edit local blacklist.” After you start using Scrapebox and receiving output lists, you’ll begin to notice undesirable domains that often appear in search results. As you notice these, add them to your local SEO blacklist so they never appear again. Here are

A common question I hear from customers is: “How many links will it take for me to reach the number one position in the search engines?” While this question is common, it’s impossible to answer without knowing a bunch of variables that are extremely difficult to ascertain. However, I think what the customer really wants to know is, “How much will it cost my company before I rank and start making money?” Know Your Competition Before you can estimate how many backlinks that’ll take, you really need to understand and analyze your competition inner plates or both inner & outer plates. As most of us know, keyword competition can make the difference between ranking in a few weeks or years (or possibly, never). You can find out the strength of your competition by auditing their inbound link profile. To start the process of determining how many backlinks it will take to rank on Google, do a quick search and take note of the top 10 websites ranking for that keyword. Once you have the list, use a tool like ahrefs.com to determine the quantity and quality of their backlinks. Tip: Acquire their Best Links! While you are working on your backlink analysis, take note of any particularly high-quality backlinks that you can obtain as well. For instance, if your competitor acquired a link from VentureBeat.com by doing a guest blog post, that tells you that VentureBeat may be willing to entertain offers from guest bloggers. Reach out and see if you can become a contributor there as well. But, in most cases, acquiring backlinks without investing heavily in content is difficult or even nigh-to-impossible! Now that we’ve discussed great ways to get a few extra high-quality backlinks, why not round it out by looking at cheaper, easier alternatives? What about $50 Link Packages? Many of us have seen cheap backlink packages on certain forums. There are a number of different packages, but most of them have a set number of backlinks of various types for a price. How good of a deal are these backlinks? When researching this article, I took a close look at some of the popular link packages that you can buy off of well-known forum software. Many of them offered similar deals. Some examples included tiered backlink packages, while others claimed to be “high PR” backlinks. Here are the results of my analysis: Package #1 – Tiered Backlinks In package number 1, you have a multi-tiered backlink package. The first tier had 2,000 article directory backlinks, 50 social bookmarks, and 50 web 2.0 links. For the second tier, they create 10,000 blog comments that point to the first tier. To avoid duplicate content and save money, all content is spun. You can have all of this for less than $50. But what are you really getting when you buy these packages? Let’s assume for a moment that the vendors are legitimate and give you several hundred article backlinks all spun from the same text. I know from testing and experience that only a small percentage of those backlinks will actually get and stay indexed (links don’t benefit you if they aren’t indexed). Furthermore, these types of more links are exactly what Google targets with its link spam updates; buying these types of links is like setting ticking time bombs on the foundation of your SEO initiative. And it’s no longer about a handful of web pages on your site. Automated link spam penalties are often given sitewide. Package #2 – High PR network links In package number 2, I found a different approach. This package claims to allow you to purchase backlinks on the homepage of a website. These types of backlinks are typically more expensive and start at $130 per month. The demise of link networks should teach us that these types of new links are dangerous, and untrustworthy and should be avoided. In April 2012, Google deindexed almost every site on the BMR network and continued to deindex entire new networks as well. Now you may be thinking, “How could they possibly know about this network when there are so many?” The answer is fairly simple when you consider the new Google Disavow Tool. Every time a webmaster gets scared and disavows all purchased links, what happens to that list of sites? It’s possible that if enough people disavow purchased links then maybe they will be next on the deindex list. Even if that doesn’t happen, with Google’s stance on web spam, these backlinks are more likely to cause harm than good, at least in the long run. Link Velocity While we’re talking about buying link packages and dumping tons of backlinks over a short period, let’s discuss link velocity. Link velocity is the speed at which your website is gaining (or losing) backlinks. Many SEOs believe it to be a major factor that Google uses to determine web spam. If the search engines see that your link velocity is going up and down because you’re buying link packages and getting 5,000 links one day and then none the rest of the month, it’s going to look very suspicious. The Risk of Link Spam Google is working diligently to deny the value of link spam. They are working on ways to “go upstream” and deny the value of spam links. They are also using new and different ways of performing link analysis to uncover these link schemes. While some methods of link spam may still work today, it’s obvious from Google’s comments that their search engine is working diligently to remove any benefit. The recent barrage of link spam updates is only one indication that underscores your need for quality links vs. quantity: Give Google What It Wants If you’re like most people who have done SEO for any period of time, you’re sick of hearing the old ‘quality over quantity’ argument when it comes to backlinks. Even so, many of us have seen that the right types of contextual links can prove

If you’re building high-quality links, then every link you build should have some benefit for your domain authority and ranking for SEO purposes. Therefore, building multiple links from the same domain can be a worthwhile strategy, if properly executed. Pro Tip: If you build links continuously from the same external source domain(s), you’ll get far less value than by link building across a variety of diversified link sources to a variety of internal pages on your site. Building links that point to different internal pages is also important so you can maximize the number of internal pages that rank for various keywords on their own. In addition, building too many links from a single or small group of sources, can also make you look like a link spammer. Here we discuss the following: What constitutes a quality source, worthy of multiple references and links to your site? Root linking vs. deep linking from the same source, frequency and best practices Best practices for building multiple links from the same site Diminishing returns in using the same source for link building Should you have multiple links from the same page (not just the same site)? While diversifying your links, using multiple sources and links to multiple internal pages, can improve your standing, there are–as always–ways to screw it up.  We hope this guide clarifies how beneficial it might be to have multiple backlinks from the same site. Anatomy of a Quality Backlink First, you have to understand the function of a backlink, and what elements of a backlink contribute to its SEO value. Remember, not all link building services are created equal. Google looks at a number of factors when it comes to judging your strategy for multiple backlinks, including: The root domain of the backlink (this will always be the same if you’re posting links back to your own site). The individual page of the backlink (posting too many links to one page can be seen as spam, whereas using a plethora of different internal pages can be beneficial). The quality of the source (authoritative sites carry more weight than low-quality sites). The appropriateness of the source (in terms of its relevance to your industry). Anchor text (while anchoring your links with keywords was once beneficial, but doing so excessively can earn you a Google penalty). Context clues (a judge of whether your link is helpful and beneficial to the conversation or just there to promote your rank). Frequency (which we’ll cover in more detail shortly). All of these factors, working together, are what comprise the overall “authoritativeness” of your individual backlinks. Pro Tip: Use our SEO tool to check your backlinks. External Links and Root Links For the purposes of determining the authority and “value” of a given backlink, it’s important to distinguish between individual links and what’s become known as “root links.” Root links refer to the number of referring domains that link to your domain, while traditional external links refer to individual instances of links to your domain. For example, if you have 1,000 links split between four different external websites, you would have 1,000 external links, but only four root links. Google and other search engines tend to place more value on root links than it does on external links. So, if you have 1,000 different links on four different sources, you’ll get significantly less authority than if you have 1,000 different links on 1,000 different sources. In a recent study conducted by Neil Patel Digital, they tested the theory as to whether multiple backlinks from the same referring domains would help or hurt SEO rankings. Here is the data from the control group: They also ran a study that showed the impact of multiple (in this case 3 links) coming from the same site from different linked pages: While one could state there is cleared a boost, we cannot consider this 100% conclusive due to the following factors: The sample size is very small and not random, which could introduce lurking variables into the study and skew the data. There was no R-squared regression run to indicate that the change in data had a statistical correlation between the multiple links and the rankings boost. However, at face value the data is fairly conclusive: there does appear to be a benefit to building multiple links from the same site. Frequency and Diminishing Returns When considering the number of your external links, and the frequency with which you post them on an external site, it’s important to understand Google’s law of diminishing returns. Posting a link on a new domain will earn you a new root link, which is greatly beneficial to your authority. Posting another link will not grant you a new root link, and will not pass as much page rank as your first link, but will still pass a significant amount. Your third link will post slightly less authority, and so on. The more links you post on a given source, the less authority you’ll get from each link. Let’s say you have two cases with an identical number and type of root links and referring domains; in one case, you have 100 external links split amongst those sources, and in the other case, you have 1,000 split amongst those same sources. In the second case, you will have a higher total authority coming from those sources, but the average individual value of your links will be lower. However, this analysis does not take into account the idea that each of your links can point to a separate internal page. Pointing to multiple internal pages can increase the individual page rank of those pages, in addition to whatever domain authority increases you receive. For example, if you have 1,000 links pointing to your home page, you will receive X amount of increased overall domain authority, but the only page more likely to show up in search results will be your home page. However, if you have 1,000 links pointing to 100 different internal pages,

Backlinks are a big deal in the world of SEO. Most backlinks pass authority, causing Google to evaluate your site as being more trustworthy. And of course, more trustworthy sites are more likely to rank higher in search results. But what about nofollow links? What are nofollow links, exactly, and are they important for your SEO strategy? Nofollow Links: The Basics By default, Google bots crawl the web on a constant basis, following links and using them to determine how PageRank is passed. This is also an opportunity to evaluate “bad” backlinks and penalize the sites they point to. As you might suspect, a nofollow link prevents Google from following the link as usual. Nofollow links are established with a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag, which instructs Google to ignore the link. In the backend code of your site, this is the only distinguishing feature of a nofollow link. When live, a nofollow link is indistinguishable from a standard dofollow link. It looks the same, it can be clicked the same way, and there’s no immediate clue to a user that the link is nofollow. Why is this important? For starters, most search optimizers are heavily focused on improving their authority with PageRank. They employ link building strategies to establish more links to earn more authority and eventually rank higher. Because nofollow links don’t pass PageRank, they can’t help your rankings directly. Note the importance of the word “directly” here. Google has verified this directly: “Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.” Why Do Nofollow Links Exist? You may be wondering why nofollow links exist, and why they’re used by various websites, if they’re not so different from standard links. Originally, nofollow links were conceived as an idea to fight back against link spam. In the early days of SEO, practitioners would take any opportunity they could to build a dofollow link back to their website. They would spam blog comments, issue meaningless press releases, and post actively on forums to get more links to their site. The nofollow tag allowed blog owners and other webmasters to fight back against this tendency by making certain types of links nofollow by default. They could also issue the nofollow tag to reduce the impact of a dofollow link they deemed questionable in the body of a guest post. This is useful for nearly everyone involved. The blog gets to preserve its reputation by ensuring it isn’t used for spammy backlinks. Google gets to fight link spam and calculate better search engine results. Web users encounter less spam. And webmasters are incentivized to find better linking tactics. Nofollow links are also recommended for use with paid links. Generally speaking, Google frowns upon paid links. But this is mostly because paid links are considered to be a form of ranking manipulation. If you use a nofollow link, there can be no direct ranking manipulation, since nofollow links don’t pass authority. Problem solved! You can even find a reference to this in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It states, “Make a reasonable effort to ensure that advertisement links on your pages do not affect search engine rankings.” It then recommends using a nofollow tag for this purpose. How to Tell If a Link Is Nofollow     You can apply nofollow tags to links on your own site, but how can you tell if a link on an external site is nofollow? Sometimes, publishers and external sites will inform you directly about their nofollow policies. But it’s much more reliable to simply check your backlinks yourself. Right click anywhere on the page you’re inspecting and click “View Page Source” or simply click CTRL + U. The code might look somewhat incomprehensible to you if you’re not used to it. But don’t worry. Use CTRL + F to find the link you’re looking for, and see if it has a rel=”nofollow” tag. The Non-SEO Value of a Nofollow Link When people hear that a nofollow link doesn’t pass PageRank, they immediately get turned off. After all, isn’t the whole point of link building to earn PageRank and rank up? Yes, for the most part. But it’s important to understand that nofollow links have a lot of value that has nothing to do with SEO. For example: Referral traffic. This is the big one, so it deserves to be mentioned first. Nofollow links have the power to generate referral traffic to your site. When someone clicks on a link in a blog post they’re reading, they don’t care whether Google is using it to pass PageRank or not. All they care about is reading the content on the other side. Depending on the publisher, the context of the link, and other variables, you may be able to generate thousands of new visitors this way. Brand visibility. Simply including dofollow links, with a named reference to your brand, is enough to increase your brand visibility and raise brand awareness. This is especially powerful as you build your reputation as an author and reach bigger audiences through bigger publishers. Increased attention for your content. Referral links also serve to promote your content. In some cases, just mentioning your content (such as calling out statistics in original research you conducted) can serve your brand well. Otherwise, the traffic you generate for the content will make it more popular. In some cases, a single nofollow link can help make a piece of powerful content go viral. The Value of Nofollow Links for SEO No PageRank, no SEO benefit, right? Wrong. In fact, in addition to all their non-SEO related benefits, nofollow links can have significant value for your SEO strategy. Importantly, Google says this about nofollow links: “In general, we don’t follow them.” If this is the case, it implies that Google occasionally does follow nofollow links. That may sound like a conspiracy theory, but there’s some real evidence to support this. For

Search engine optimization (SEO) and content go hand-in-hand. It’s almost impossible to make progress in SEO without a solid content strategy serving as your foundation, and any reasonable pillar content strategy should at least give you some SEO benefit. However, several factors are making it increasingly difficult for amateur content developers to see the SEO results they want. For starters, Google search is introducing updates that refine its algorithm and allow it to evaluate the quality of content more stringently. Hummingbird, from 2013, introduced semantic search, which practically eliminated exact match keyword consideration in favor of considering context and meaning. Since then, synonyms and contextually relevant phrases greatly increased in importance when optimizing for strategic keywords. Additionally, the SEO industry has become incredibly competitive, with millions of websites often fighting over the same groups of keywords and phrases. This makes it increasingly hard to stand out, and nearly impossible to rank for the most hotly contested phrases in an industry. How can you combat these effects and improve your SEO results? One solution is using topic clusters, a content-focused strategy that can help you rank for highly competitive head keywords and accessible long-tail keyword phrases simultaneously. If you want to remain competitive and maximize your SEO results, you need to include some variation of the topic clustering strategy. What Are Topic Clusters? We’ll start with a high-level overview. What are topic clusters, and how can you use them for SEO? A topic cluster is an assortment of individual pieces of content that are all relevant to the same overarching key themes or topics. Working together with an anchoring piece of content, usually called “pillar content,” your topic cluster will yield much better search engine ranking results than a conventional content strategy. Your pillar content for a given cluster will work as a functional overview of a broad topic. You can think of it as the center of a wheel, with each piece of topic cluster content serving as a spoke in that wheel. The pillar content is meant to provide a comprehensive overview of your chosen topic, with each of the “spokes” covering some aspect of that topic in much greater detail. For example, let’s say you’re a digital marketing firm. You might create content pillars covering the topic of “onsite SEO.” This article covers all the important aspects of onsite optimization, from a somewhat high level. It also links to a variety of other pieces, which cover more specific aspects of onsite SEO in greater detail. For example, you might link to pieces on topics like “how to audit your current onsite SEO,” “how to increase your site speed,” “technical onsite SEO for beginners,” and “how to write better onsite content.” Each piece of cluster content should attempt to target a long-tail keyword phrase, while your content pillars target a more competitive head keyword. Each of these keyword terms should be at least somewhat relevant to the others. By the end of your strategy, each of your cluster content pillars should rank highly for their low-competition, “low hanging fruit” keywords, all while lending support to lift your content pillars beyond where it could rank on its own. Google will come to see you as an authority on this central topic because of your work throughout the cluster, and you’ll likely earn more backlinks as a result as well. The Benefits of Topic Clusters and Content Pillars for SEO So what are the benefits of using topic clusters for SEO? These are some of the best advantages: Head and long-tail keyword optimization. This strategy allows you to take advantage of both head keywords and long-tail keyword phrases simultaneously. Head keywords tend to be short and broad; they have the benefit of offering very high search volume, but they’re also incredibly competitive. By contrast, long-tail keywords tend to be longer and more specific; they’re not competitive, so they’re easy to rank for, but they also have a lower search volume. Head keywords require a lot of time, effort, and patience, as well as a huge volume of relevant content. Long-tail keyword phrases are easy and convenient, but individually, they can never be as powerful as a head keyword. With pillar pieces and your entire topic cluster, you can get the best of both worlds. Feeding high search volume results. The most lucrative positions in SEO are the top-ranking positions for highly searched keywords and phrases. The downside is that it’s incredibly difficult to attain these positions. With topic clusters, you can optimize your entire pillar page content strategy to “feed into” the pieces most likely to achieve these feats. In other words, you’ll be pumping up your best content and greatly increasing your chances of getting to those sought-after high-ranking positions. Internal linking and user retention. Creating content pillars and clusters allows you to foster better internal link building and optimize for user retention. Readers who peruse your pillar content will naturally want to follow links to your complementary, more detailed subtopics. Conversely, readers who stumble upon your niche content will naturally want to read more about the “big picture” of the topic. Ultimately, this strategy helps you keep users on your website, which is valuable for increasing conversions; it’s also useful for lowering your bounce rate and positively affecting other important onsite behavior metrics. Authority and reputation. Writing pillar page content in the form of a topic cluster will increase your authority—both in the subjective sense, and in terms of domain authority as considered by Google. In the former case, readers who follow your pillar page will quickly learn that you’re an expert in this field; they’ll have high-level and low-level content to review, and given enough time, will think of you as the thought leader in this area. In the latter case, your pillar page will be much more likely to attract links and social media posts and shares, ultimately increasing your domain- and page-level authority. Development flexibility. While there are some best practices that everyone should follow,