When working on SEO for a client’s website for the first time, it often becomes apparent that not all web pages are indexed in Google.

As a refresher, if the page isn’t indexed in Google (or another search engine), then it can’t show up in the search results.

Addressing a lack of indexed pages is one of the most basic and critical tasks of SEO.

On several occasions, I’ve experienced the same issue when taking on new SEO work for a client.

The website below, which is more than 10 months old, was professionally built. It has a valid sitemap and robots.txt yet still was only partially indexed in Google.

There are various reasons why not all pages are indexed in Google. These reasons include, but are not limited to:

• Robots.txt file is inadvertently blocking Googlebot’s access to some of your pages
• Meta tags such as “nofollow” instructs Google not to follow links to other pages
• Incomplete sitemap or orphaned pages meaning Googlebot can’t reach all pages
• Crawl budget insufficient- due to the site’s relatively low page rank
• No incoming links to the pages, indicating low importance
• Duplicate content that Google thinks isn’t worthwhile crawling

As a result of one, or a combination of the above factors, Google may just haven’t fully indexed your site. That is the case I’ve experienced with this 10 month old website.

I also have a suspicion (but can’t prove it!) that sites that haven’t had their ownership claimed aren’t fully indexed. Claiming ownership by being added to Google’s webmaster console seems to be a factor in crawling, or lack thereof.

How to investigate the cause of missing pages

To investigate this issue, I first of all check Google Webmaster Tools. I look to ensure there are none of the issues mentioned above stopping Google from indexing the website. This includes any manual actions or crawl errors identified by Google.

In this particular case, there were no crawl errors detected.

The difficulty most SEOs face here, is that Google only supplies a count of those pages submitted and those that are indexed. Trying to find out which of your web pages are indexed in Google, and which aren’t is difficult.

You could run the site:www.example.com command in Google search and get a list of those pages indexed by Google.

From past experience, I find the results aren’t very reliable. It often misses pages that I know are indexed and getting hits, it omits duplicate/similar results also.

I also find that varying the search terms slightly to site:www.example.com products would return different indexed results than without the products kewyword.

I’ve always thought; there has to be a better way!

Then recently everything changed, when I stumbled upon Greenlane Google Indexation Tester! This tool is what i have been searching for!

The tool let’s you enter up to 100 URLs and systematically checks them against Google’s index to see if the pages are indeed stored in Google’s index.

Using the tool,  which is a Google docs spreadsheet is extremely simple. You just copy the URLs into the spreadsheet and click run. The output is very clear. It provides a simple Yes, or No as to whether the pages are indexed in Google.

The tool can also import/read your xml sitemap file, which makes things even easier.

The URLs that weren’t indexed, I simply copied the pages from the Google Indexation tester and submitted them into Google’s webmaster tools.

This was achieved by clicking the “Crawl” menu and then “Fetch as Google”. Simply enter the URL of the page you want crawled, click Desktop or Smartphone and then “Fetch and Render”

We can see from the Crawl Stats in Google Webmaster Tools that before April, there was very little crawl activity on this website:

What caused the crawl activity to increase after April, is the fact that I manually submitted the pages to Google that weren’t indexed, as just described.

If you’ve done everything properly, you’ll start to see the number of pages indexed gradually increase over the next few days. It does take a few days (or weeks) for Google to index the missing pages that were originally identified.

The speed is dependent on your “crawl budget” and how many pages google needs to crawl. You should check to ensure your robots.txt is correct and set the canonicalisation of your website to reduce google’s crawl effort.

What I’ve realised, is that un-indexed web pages is a surprisingly common occurrence. It should be one of the first things checked when beginning a SEO campaign on a website, as overlooking this check can be disastrous.

Whilst on the topic, there may be a reason your web pages are indexed and then de-indexed again. Ensure your content is meaningful, unique and linked (internally and externally) to ensure your pages remain indexed in Google.

Thanks to Greenlane for creating this tool!  I plan to use it periodically to identify which pages are dropped from an index and when taking on new SEO work. It’s an extremely useful tool and I’m glad i found it!

Do you agree with my approach for identifying any pages not contained in Google’s index? Leave a comment below if you have a better method.

Click the link to read more about the on-page SEO mistakes that are common.

For any assistance with SEO for your website, contact Evolocity.

A simple analogy is that backlinks are similar to votes. The sites that have the highest number of quality backlinks (votes) will rank the highest. All other things being equal.

Latest SEO research says that links make up around 20% of your site’s overall ranking factor. Quite simply, to rank well in 2017, you need quality backlinks.

The primary reason sites will link to you, is your ability to create high quality, useful content.

In this blog, I’ll break down how and why you need to create backlinks and provide an overview of how SEO PowerSuite tools can assist your link building efforts.

What are backlinks?

In the simplest form, backlinks are links from other websites to yours.

Backlinks can come from many different forms, including blog posts, directory listings, forum comments that allow a website URL to be entered and many more categories.

The text that is used to create the link is known as “anchor text”.  An example is Sydney SEO. The anchor text in this example is “Sydney SEO”. Anchor text information sends important link signals to Google, and it’s important to consider the wording of your anchor text when undertaking link building.

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are Google’s way of determining the relative authority of your website.

If you have a plethora of quality websites linking to your content, Google determines that your website must be of a high quality. It makes sense. Why else would any reputable sites want to link to you?

I realise I used a vote analogy before, but I have another one that’s fitting also! Job candidates when referred by a colleague or friend tend to be higher quality and more reliable employees.

Your friend or colleague wouldn’t put their reputation on the line for a candidate that’s of a low calibre.

The same applies for links. Reputable websites won’t tarnish their reputation by linking to low quality or questionable websites.

Hence the reason why credible links are important for Google’s algorithm that determines your site ranking.

Why would a website want to link to me? 

That’s an interesting question! The answer is mostly “content”. If you create great content, on a regular basis, the link building process will become relatively painless.

If you blog regularly, create videos, infographics etc. you’ll start to see websites linking to your content organically, without you needing to ask for a link.

Of course, it takes months for websites to find your content after google indexes it and it begins to rank organically.

The steps below which are referred to as “link building” fast track this activity and proactively inform websites of your content, without webmasters needing to find it themselves.

As mentioned previously, there are many link building activities. By far, the highest quality link building activities will come from creating great content. This is the main method you should focus on when link building and trying to increase the domain authority of your website.

How should I start link building?

For link prospecting, I recommend SEO PowerSuite. This comprehensive SEO suite of tools contains two modules that are extremely helpful for link building. Namely, SEO Spyglass and Link Assistant tools.

SEO Spyglass is a very powerful tool for analysing the current link situation on your website. It provides a comprehensive overview of the progress of your backlinking efforts over time and has much more information than that! Much of the detailed information you probably will never use, but it’s nice to know it’s there in case you need it!

The great feature of SEO PowerSuite is that it uses it’s own LinkExplorer database to determine links to your website. In addition, it collates data from Google Analytics and Google’s search console links.

The end result is, you get a more comprehensive and up-to-date link information than using just the Google search console alone.

Below is an easy to read graph of my Backlink progress over time.

The first graph displays total links, whereas the second graph only displays the linking domains. The difference being one domain can provide several links.

If you click on “linking domains”, you get an easy to read (configurable) dashboard. This dashboard displays the linking domain, estimated risk of penalty, inlink rank of the linking domain etc.

This view gives you an efficient interface to see the number and quality of links to your website. You can drill down further and include anchor text details also.

In some respects, there’s an overlap between SEO Spyglass and Link Assistant tools. They both provide core information about existing links, but this isn’t Link Assistant’s main purpose.

Link Assistant is designed primarily for link building activities.

To start a search for link building prospects, you can click “Look for prospects” and pick one of the link building categories below.

I’d almost always begin by searching competitor backlinks. It’s usually the fastest way to find relevant and effective backlinks for your website.

After you’ve exhausted this category, you can move on to others categories such as directories, forums, commenting etc.

There’s always pros and cons to acquiring links and it’s important to look closely at Link Assistant’s results of InLink rank. InLink rank, I’d say is crucial to ensure the proposed links are of an acceptable quality, so they won’t cause your site a Google penalty.

Once you’ve analysed the suggested links in detail, Link Assistant has a nice feature that let’s you email directly from the tool.

There are several pre-formatted email templates to reach out for link building.

Personally, I don’t recommend using templates for emailing. You’ll have a much higher response rate if you customise each email individually.

Having said that, the templates (and categories of link outreach) are a great starting point to begin your link building activities.

As mentioned previously, there are several ways to acquire backlinks. I recommend content generation to aim for quality backlinks over quantity.

Therefore, guest posting, product review templates are the most relevant outreach strategies for link building with this approach.

That’s not to say that reciprocal links, forums and directories don’t have a place in link building. They do, they’re just slightly controversial and need thorough analysis to ensure the sources are credible and relevant. Else your site may be penalised by Google.

Link building, like SEO is a long term, time consuming process that’s critical to SEO in 2017.

As always, you don’t need to buy tools such as SEO PowerSuite. You can use a plethora of free tools out there on the Internet. However, I’d recommend you’d buy SEO PowerSuite (that’s what I did!).

Quite simply, time is money, and the time saved having SEO PowerSuite do much of the hard work for you is well worth the cost in my opinion.

The speed and accuracy of SEO PowerSuite to analyse data is priceless. I find it simply makes better decisions, based on it’s InLink quality algorithm. Better than I can do, unless I spent many hours trawling through the raw data myself.

If you’re still not sold, or don’t have the budget, you can use the free version of SEO PowerSuite. It’s also very good. Missing are the ability to save projects and export data, but even the free version is still an immensely powerful suite of SEO tools.

For other  blog articles on keyword research or common mistakes for WordPress SEO, check out my SEO blog.

If you need help with your SEO in Sydney or Australia, including link building services, contact us today for your free consultation.

* Disclaimer

I was provided a free trial of SEO PowerSuite Enterprise for this review. I was so impressed with the product, I purchased an Enterprise licence (at my own expense) within 48 hours. Contact me, if you’d like anymore information as to why.

The Limousine industry in Australia is sizable, with revenue estimated at over 6 billion dollars annually. That revenue is fragmented, being shared by over 12,000 limousine companies.

Limousine providers are increasingly facing competition from ride sharing companies such as Uber with their “Black” or “Lux” services. It goes without saying that there’s pressure on the limousine industry in Australia as a whole.

Annual year on year growth in the Australian limousine industry is just shy of 2%. That’s real growth and it shows there’s money to be made in the limo industry. This is despite the competition limousine operators are facing.

In Australia, there are relatively low barriers to entry in the limousine industry. As a result, there are many providers in each city. This competition often makes it difficult to generate consistent and increasing revenue.

To survive, your business needs to constantly attract new clients and it’s crucial to ensure you have repeat business.

 The answer to the growth you’re searching for is Limousine SEO

 What is SEO?

Limousine SEO involves tuning your website’s “on-page” factors which comprises content, including page copy, blogs, headings etc to organically boost your search engine rankings.

Off page factors such as link building and social media strategies are also required. These factors help your website to rank well in a search engine and draw more customers to your website.

 Why Limousine SEO?

1.  Most web searches end in organic results

Google processes around 3.5 billion searches per day. Visibility in a search engine results page depends almost entirely on SEO. Research has demonstrated that over 70% of searches end in the organic search results of page 1 of google.

Quite simply, if your business isn’t listed on the first page of Google, most customers will be unable to find your website.

2.  SEO is cost effective

In competitive markets, with paid advertising many business can only afford to run an Ad campaign for a few weeks. After this time, they usually blow their advertising budget for the year due to high Cost Per Click rates.

Unless you are a business with large advertising budget, or in a relatively un-competitive market (low Pay Per Click costs), Pay Per Click advertising often isn’t sustainable for small businesses long-term.

SEO costs on the other hand are predictable and sustainable. Realistically, SEO is the only way small limousine companies can afford to compete with the big players on a (relatively) level playing field.

 3. SEO is organic

There’s something fulfilling about organically ranking for keywords, without relying on paid advertising to ensure your website is displayed in the search engine.

If you rank organically, it means Google values your website and it’s judged a credible and authoritative resource on it’s own merits. No tricks or advertising are required.

Local SEO (via Google maps) which is based on searches by location is also becoming increasingly important to gain local clients. This fast growing Google search mechanism displays your business by proximity to the search location and is a great way to rank in Google, even if you don’t have a website.

4. SEO improves user experience

SEO in 2017 isn’t about manipulating search engines via tricks. SEO is about creating a great user experience through meaningful content and great design. This will increase the “click through” rate of website users.

SEO, content generation, social media and website design go hand in hand to improve the user experience holistically.

 5. Your competitors are investing in Limousine SEO

SEO is a constantly evolving “battle” between your competitors, the search engine and your website. Website rankings float up and down each month based on your competitors’ SEO efforts, new websites being launched as well as Google’s algorithm updates.

If your competitors invest in SEO (most do!) and you don’t, you’ll be left behind in the search engine results space and slide down the rankings.

In summary, the Limousine industry in Australia is extremely competitive, with new players entering the market relatively easily. Add high class ride sharing platforms and it’s even more challenging. There’s still significant year on year growth of the industry. SEO is becoming critical for limousine business to stand out from the competition to generate consistent and increasing revenues.

Enjoy this blog? Read some others such as Why you need to invest in SEO or SEO content pitfalls.

Contact us to find out more about our SEO and Online Marketing services

Many website owners might be familiar with WordPress SEO, but feel overwhelmed when attempting to SEO their Shopify site for the first time. As a result, I’ve written this blog for those new to the Shopify platform.

Why do i need Shopify SEO?

Search engines are used more in online purchases than any other source of traffic such as social networks, apps, or deal websites.

Shopify SEO is becoming increasingly important to boost e-commerce sales.

If your Shopify site isn’t listed on the first page of Google, you’re losing sales to your competitors. Simple as that.

If you are new to the Shopify platform, or setting up your Shopify store for the first time, this guide will get you on your way to SEO success! In the interests of brevity, this blog only covers on-site SEO. Off-site SEO, https, minification etc are not covered.

WordPress SEO vs Shopify SEO

Shopify, in many ways is very similar to WordPress from a SEO perspective.

Replace the term “Plugin” with “App” and there’s only minor differences in SEO between the WordPress and Shopify platform. Sure, the SEO plugins are different, but the concepts and approach to SEO is very similar.

Personally, it’s also somewhat refreshing working on the Shopify platform again. In many ways Shopify is simpler and more intuitive than WordPress.

As always, there’s downsides, as it’s not as easy to configure the platform as WordPress. There’s also fewer free apps than the vast array of free plugins in WordPress.

I liken the comparison to iOS with it’s intuitive interface and ease of use vs Android which offers more customisation and flexibility.…

How to setup your Shopify SEO

The first step is to Install a SEO app in your Shopify site. Many apps in the Shopify app store (including SEO apps) need to be bought via a paid subscription on a monthly basis.

After significant testing, I recommend Plug in SEO,  as it’s free and simple to setup and use.

Install Plug in SEO

The app installation in Shopify is extremely simple.

Start configuring your on-page SEO

Once the Plug in SEO app is installed, go to each page or blog in the Shopify store and click “Edit website SEO”

You’ll then see the screen below that lets you configure your page title/URL and meta description:

You’ll see a live preview of your SERP snippet at the top also.

Page headings

Unlike WordPress and the fabulous Yoast plugin, there’s no focus keyword as such in the plug in SEO app (or live SEO analysis in the free version). The reason is the focus keyword is embedded in the page title (which kind of makes sense).

So, for Shopify, you need to include your SEO keywords in the names of your products, pages, or blog posts. The names are often used as a web page’s H1 heading tag also.

For example, if you are selling recovery compression devices, you’d set Compression Therapy for Athletes – Company Name. This will make your page more likely to show up in Google when people use any combination of those search phrases.

The other difference is that the closer to the start the keyword is, the higher the term will rank in search engines. The first word in the title tag ultimately becomes the most important.

Meta descriptions

As with WordPress, ensure the meta descriptions encourage searchers to click your links in the search engine results page to graduate from an impression to a click. Ensure you keep the meta descriptions clear and don’t stick with the default text truncation that many websites use.

Image ALT Text

Ensure you set this field on your images, so they are indexed accurately by Google. These tags are becoming increasingly important. For visually impaired users and those running popup blockers. Without ALT Text, the computer doesn’t know what the image is.

Once you’re finished setting your SEO properties, use the Apps drop down to “Check for SEO problems”. This provides an overview of any serious SEO issues and recommendations on how to correct them.

Unfortunately the “Check for Keywords” option isn’t available in the free edition of Plug in SEO, so you’ll need to use another tool to check your on-page focus keywords. For this, I’d suggest using the awesome Website Auditor from SEO power suite.

Create a new project by entering the URL you wish to analyse.

After Analysis has completed, click content audit -> Page audit

You then have the ability to tune your SEO until you get a great on-page ranking (similar to Yoast’s traffic lights).

Other

Plug In SEO is also missing flesch reading score which I find useful. You can check your ease of reading copy here, or keep in the back of your mind to write your text at the reading level applicable for an eighth grade student. Short sentences and simple wording. You get the idea.

Summary

In this blog, I’ve touched on the differences between WordPress SEO and Shopify SEO, for those that are new to the Shopify platform.

In summary, Shopify is easy to use, fast to setup and a robust platform. The downside is the lack of customisation/flexibility and the reduced quality of free SEO apps available in the Shopify store.

Both platforms have their pros and cons and I enjoy working on both! Do you agree? Let me know in the comments below.

You can read more of my blogs: content pitfalls for SEO, keyword research for SEO and the common WordPress mistakes for SEO.

Feel free to click the links to find out more information about our Shopify SEO or WordPress SEO services, or contact us to find more.

Did they, or didn’t they?

In case you haven’t read, in the last couple of weeks, it’s assumed that Google released another major search engine algorithm update unimaginably named “Fred’. There are some geek jokes around the name Fred, but supposedly Fred’s aim was to down rank those websites that bought links, or are linked to by dubious sites.

Whether Fred is real, or not the message is clear- Fred highlights the dangers of Black Hat SEO. Sooner or later you will be penalized for having questionable backlinks.

What does this mean?

One of the major off-site SEO activities to improve a website’s credibility is increasing back links. The more credible back links you have (say from Wikipedia or legitimate news sites), the greater you’ll rank; all other things being equal.

Many budget/unscrupulous SEO Agencies try to take shortcuts to increase your ranking by adding thousands of farmed links from web directories in India, Pakistan, Russia and other countries. These directories often advertise vice goods/services and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that they’re not genuine backlinks related to your business.

What to do if I’ve got dodgy back links to my site?

Contact the webmaster
In the first instance, contact the directory and ask nicely for them to remove the link. Some webmasters might not reply or ask for a fee to remove the links. Don’t pay a fee, but follow-up after a week or two for removal.

Remove your affected pages
Remove the bad linked/low ranked pages with a 404 link to disavow the target pages. This is not ideal, and is a somewhat extreme measure, only to be actioned if there’s an obvious down ranking of those pages.

Lesson learned?

There are no shortcuts to ranking well. SEO is a slow process, and there are real dangers of Black Hat SEO. Shortcuts hurt too much in the long term and don’t offset the benefits in the short term.

Produce good content and you’ll organically grow your back links. Link building is also useful, just make sure the backlinks make sense and are genuine.

At Evolocity, we only use and recommend “White Hat” techniques to SEO. Contact us to find out more about our services.