Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 37 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Highlights from Friday’s updates:
Meta is Killing Instant Articles
TikTok Planned To Use App To Track U.S. Citizens
Rich People Pay for News, Young People Don’t Trust It
Contents
Tip: How To Search by Website on Google
Analysis: Which Keywords Drive Search Traffic to Your Site?
Tip: How To Search by Website on Google
Did you know that if you use the “site:website.com” in a Google search, you will only see results for that particular website?
(As you can see from the first and fourth result, this also includes subdomains.)
Why would you want to use this function?
1) To see all the particular content that’s indexed on Google for a particular site.
Just because content exists, doesn’t mean it’s indexed on Google (i.e. in its database of web pages from which it draws search results).
For bigger websites, though, that might not be very useful.
2) See all the indexed content for a site on a particular subject.
If you want to rank for “chicken pot pie recipe,” but none of your content appears high on the SERP for that keyword, you’re going to want to know who does as part of your competitive analysis.
First, search for the term with no filters:
Now that we know that allrecipes.com has the first featured spot on Google for this term, we want to see all their CPP recipe content:
Turns out they have more than 100 indexed CPP recipes.
Here are some things to analyze from the page 1 results:
<title> tags
Article structure
Photos
Keywords you’re not using
There are others, but that’s a good place to start.
The idea is not to find out who’s doing well and copy their content. Rather, look for common best practices that can be applied at a high level to your content.
So if you see “delicious chicken pot pot recipe” consistently used in their top articles, don’t copy their sentences/paragraphs. Write a completely original and authentic recipe post that naturally incorporates that phrase.
Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.
Analysis: Which Keywords Drive Search Traffic to Your Site?
By connecting Google Search Console to Google Analytics 4, you can see which keywords users are searching to reach your site.
I’m going to show you how to set this up, how to activate the queries report in GA4, and why this is important to know.
Next week we’ll set up an even more in-depth organic search report in a GA4 Exploration.
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