Negative Results Course: Leapfrogging With Content You Control
Script from the lesson The Negative Results Course
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Drowning negative and imperfect results. Doing SEO for yourself on your own content. What’s the situation? Here’s a bad result you want to leapfrog with content you publish that’s more positive for your brand. In your list of leapfrogger content to work on, that’s a page you control. What can you do to push your content up your Brand SERP, leapfrog the negative content, and push that down?
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Content you own is great on page one of your Brand SERPs. Since you are the source, it’s on your site and you control it, but it also brings multiple wins. It will rank on your Brand SERP and make your brand look much better. But since you’re improving the SEO and your content, you’re also improving it for all other keywords.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â It will rank better for those and maybe even some more, and that will widen your reach, improve your visibility and give you some additional organic traffic. However, as I mentioned in the previous lesson, content on your own site brings a big disadvantage. Two results from one site is not generally what Google wants.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Google has specifically said so and even released updates aimed at reducing the number of SERPs with multiple results from the same site. Your homepage is a given, so that’s one result from your site right at the top. So, leapfrogger content that resides on your site needs to bring additional information, information that the homepage doesn’t bring.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â If Google is to put that content on your Brand SERP, it needs to bring extra special value to the user. It can be done. And if you can do it, it’s a big win. Since you don’t have control over two elements on your Brand SERP. The easier candidates are those on other sites you own. These are often really easy wins. Because the two websites are different entities, Google won’t consider them as being another result from your main brand site. Plus, they’re very relevant to your audience bringing valuable related information. For example, Disney has multiple sites for its different companies, assets, departments, and so on. Multiple Disney sites rank on Disney’s Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â So, leverage content on other sites your brand owns and runs that are about your brand, of course. It almost certainly isn’t a good idea to move your blog or client system to a separate domain just to get an additional result you control on page one of your Brand SERP. The cost is very likely to outweigh the benefits. And it certainly isn’t a good idea to create a spammy blog with thin content just to have another domain. It almost certainly won’t rank. And even if it does, it will reflect badly on your brand in the eyes of your users. A quick note on sub domains, they are a part of your main site and they will tend to appear in sitelinks and they’re not generally good candidates for leapfrogging. There are exceptions of course, but don’t bet on yours being one of those exceptions. I’ll use the term leapfrogger for your quality content that you’re optimizing and trying to push up and leapfroggy for the negative content you’re trying to push down.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â So, how do you leapfrog with your own content? Bear in mind that content that appears on page one of your SERP is the content that Google considers the most relevant and brings the most value to people searching your brand name. In order to leapfrog, you need to convince Google that the leapfrogger content is more relevant and brings more value to that user.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Right, we’re going to do some traditional SEO. All of this applies whether the content is on your main site or on another site you control directly. If it isn’t on your main site, you might need to liaise with the people who run the site and help them to implement the changes. If that’s the case, help them by preparing the work for them as far as possible, reasonable, and tactful. Firstly, on-page SEO. To push this leapfrogger content up, you want to do all the typical things that you would do for your normal SEO. If you haven’t watched the SEO episode in the Foundation course, then please do so. The techniques in that will be super helpful.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Here are the relatively easy wins. If you know SEO, don’t hold back from using your own optimisations too. When working on the SEO for your content, remember that there are page and block level considerations. At page level, you need to make sure it’s really fast and make sure it’s truly mobile-friendly. The aim is to make sure that Google bot, which crawls your site using mobile, understands that the user experience on mobile is great for this page.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Use these tools to see how Google perceives your page speed and mobile friendliness. This is the metric you need to use. It doesn’t matter what you think about your own page speed and mobile friendliness. Google is making the rules, so Google’s decision is final. Other tools aren’t the metric either. Use them to help you improve your speed and your mobile friendliness of course, but the last word still goes to Google’s tools.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â You definitely want to add Schema.org markup. The type of Schema markup depends on the type of page. Webpage markup is the place to start, but use a more specific type if possible. Then, look further and see if more markup is appropriate. Examples will be product, service, collection, series, place, person, event.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â You need to identify what markup will best help Google understand and digest the leapfrogger content that you are trying to promote. And don’t be lazy and think you can skip this. You can always write at least some Schema markup on any type of content. Just find the most appropriate type for the leapfrogger content. Adding Schema markup is particularly powerful in helping your content to perform in other areas of your wider SEO strategy especially with winning places in Rich Elements.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â So, this step really is worth spending the time to do right. If appropriate, you can put some of the content in HTML tables or lists. This gives the content more structure and that makes it much easier for Google to digest and understand, which helps your SEO for that content globally. However, don’t put things in HTML tables or lists if it’s not appropriate to do so. That actually has the opposite effect and confuses Google.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Next, improve your linking. Add multiple links in your main site and the other own sites to point to this content. Make sure the links are from relevant related content. You might want to think about linking to it from the main copy of your homepage.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â That sends a strong signal to Google that this content is important. By the way, a link in the footer is the easy, lazy option, but it’s very unlikely to have any effect. If
the leapfrogger content isn’t in your main site, make sure you also add links from it to the relevant content on your main site so that Google clearly sees the relationship.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Try and add some multimedia, images or video. Google is especially keen on video and make sure that any multimedia files you add are optimized. Images need appropriate file names, small file size, Alt tags, captions, and use the figure HTML tag. Videos need to be appropriate file names, small file size, captions using the figure, HTML tag, and a bespoke thumbnail.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â I strongly advise looking at video. It will help the content rank and as long as it’s relevant, useful, and interesting for your audience, it will also engage your audience and help move your content for strategy forwards. Look at the meta title and the H1.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â If you want this content to rank for your brand name, then it must appear prominently in the meta title and the H1. Make sure your brand name is at the start of the meta title.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â If it’s at the end, it will look like it’s just been tagged onto the end and it probably has. Add user generated content if appropriate. Include user comments or reviews. They send a very strong signal to Google that this content is of interest to your audience, which is especially important for ranking on Brand SERPs.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â As long as these are legitimate and positive, this user-generated content is also powerful in SEO in general, but especially in the context of SEO for your Brand SERP. It’s direct engagement from the target audience and that indicates very clearly that the content is relevant and valuable to people who are searching your brand name. If people add comments or reviews regularly, then it also keeps the content fresh, which is great for Google.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Next, simplify your writing style. Tweak the content to make it simpler to consume. Keep sentences reasonably short, keep sentence structure simple, avoid ambiguity, and avoid colloquialisms. It’s great for Google, but it’s also great for your users. And while you’re doing that, add relevant entities, words of co-occurrence, and make sure you have created a context cloud that is highly focused and relevant to your brand.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Next, avoid I, me, mine as far as possible. This doesn’t help SEO directly, but it will help the page stay on page one once it gets there. So, minimize the use of the first person in your text about yourself. The page is about you and you were the star of
your own film as it were, but we’re all the stars of our own films and content that does not address the reader and the reader’s needs is rarely engaging. Too many sentences that contain I, we, us, our is very off-putting and most sentences that start, we have blah, blah, blah, blah, can be rephrased to address either the user you can see blah, blah, blah, blah or the users needs, Brick lives the world over blah, blah, blah, blah. You’ll probably be surprised both at how much you use I, me, mine, but also how well a text that keeps references to the first person to a minimum is more pleasant to read even for you. In all of these content related tasks, be super self-critical. Take a step back and look at what you’re writing from the user’s point of view.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Now, Google appreciates fresh content and it seems you’ve updated the page. That will tend to push the content higher up the Brand SERP. Show the last update to date on the page if that’s reasonable. Eye if it’s an article or a product or something like that, obviously not if it’s the homepage. But for any type of page, make sure you have the webpage Schema markup and that the markup includes the last modified attribute.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Next, off page. Get links to the leapfrogger content. This is really effective. Here were a selection of link-building suggestions. By no means is this complete since there are so many ways to approach link-building. If you’re a link-building guru, don’t hold back from using your own tactics, of course. Just make sure they’re white hat. Watch the Tactics to Avoid and the Mistakes not to Make in the Foundation course if you’re still tempted to use link farms and PBMs.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Broken link opportunities. At its simplest, this technique is finding broken links to other very similar content, contacting the website, and suggesting the leapfrogger page as a good replacement. Platforms such as Semrush, Majestic, or Ahrefs have got great tools to help you to do this.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Now, additional resource opportunities. Find relevant articles, then reach out to the author and suggest the leapfrogger content as a good candidate as an additional resource for the article they’ve written, with the link of course, but make sure the link would truly be useful to their readers who should also be your audience by the way.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Next, add links to relevant business knowledge bases such as Crunchbase and generalist knowledge bases such as Wikidata. Pushing that further, you could add links to specialist niche knowledge bases such as IMDB if the leapfrogger content is about films or the Registry of American Dentists if the leapfrogger content is relevant to dentistry.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Search on Google to see which ones it trusts. Rich results like this indicate clearly that Google trusts these directories, so they’re great candidates. Don’t be tempted to add links to low quality or irrelevant directories. That will do more harm than good. Overall, pay attention to detail. One small thing can tip the balance in your favor and push that page up onto page one. Be patient and persevere. If the first thing you do doesn’t work, keep making those small improvements one-by-one.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â They all add up little by little and bit by bit. But even if you fail to get that leapfrogger content up onto page one, all is not lost. It’s your site. You really haven’t wasted your time and resources. There are wins for you on the optimisation you’ve done.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â If the pages on your main site, it will become a candidate for Rich Sitelinks, so even if it doesn’t come up onto page one itself, it could very well appear in the sitelinks. Quality, well-optimized content on your site is always going to be a strong candidate for Rich Sitelinks. And the better the content in the Rich Sitelinks, the better your brand looks to people searching for it, and make your brand look better especially when you consider how much real estate they cover and how much information they convey. Watch the sitelinks episode in the Fundamentals course for more on those.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â The other bonus is that the page will almost certainly rise in the rankings for other search terms. And that means you expand your audience, get more visibility for your brand in Google, and more traffic. And that’s great. If the page is on another site you aren’t, then you’ve improved the chances of that page ranking on other SERPs, which is always a good thing too. And you might also have brought some valuable knowledge to other members of your team.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Thank you.
