Welcome back to Theory of Content! This week, Joshua Unseth is joined by Nora Schlesinger to answer even more of your Face bag questions, and of course, do some obligatory TOC Beanie Babies talk. 

Nora starts the episode off strong, talking about some COVID prevention theories. The two discuss the effectiveness of glasses all the way to the effectiveness of bunkers to prevent the virus. Joshua and Nora compare their swearing habits before getting to the down and dirty topic of… you guessed it: Beanie Babies. Joshua recounts how he would sell them as a kid, and (spoiler alert!) he made $600.

The Face bag section of today’s episode begins with a bit of feedback. Tamara emailed in about some comments made in previous episodes about blogging during the pandemic. She points out that while Joshua had said that the stay-at-home orders gave bloggers a lot of time to optimize their blogs, some blogs are not very easily able to flourish during COVID. For example, travel blogs took a substantial traffic hit last year. The hosts point out that this is very true, and that not all the advice given on this podcast can apply to each and every blogger. What is important to remember though is that bloggers must find ways to bring people to their site no matter the state of the world. Joshua advises to put out content that is about COVID and traveling. For instance, you could make a post about how to fly safely during the pandemic. Overall, what to take from this section is that TOC offers advice to the blanket profession of blogging. However, some niche content varies in audiences and advertisers, so take the advice given but adapt it to your needs.

Speaking of adapting, Nora begins talking about how to adapt your site for different social media sites. This all starts when the two get into the hot topic of the Clubhouse app. They talk about how they’ve noticed it pulling people away from daily life, but they also point out the benefits it can have for podcasters. Nora suggests that if you have the time, sure, check out new social media platforms for your site. However, if you don’t have the time, you have to plan out your business goals and see if a certain platform will truly benefit your business. Don’t just follow trends to follow them, make them work for you!

Lastly, Joshua and Nora take a question about mislinked pages. Nora outlines what high-intensity link building is, and Joshua talks how he is not a big fan of it. However, how he touches on reasonable ways to link building. Some of these involve reaching out to a site owner to change a mislinked page, just like Jessica did!

Thank you for tuning into Theory of Content this week! Be on the lookout for new episodes coming soon, and in the meantime check out last week’s episode with even more Face bag questions.

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Tamara of we3travel.com

Welcome back, I was glad to see Theory of Content pop up in my podcast player this week. However, I have to provide a little feedback. I know Mediavine and Theory of Content have both been very focused on food and lifestyle blogs, but the discussion about how great 2020 was for bloggers was really tone deaf for other types of publishers. As a travel blogger, I have seen my traffic demolished in Spring 2020 and then slowly claw its way back to 40-50% of what it was pre-COVID. Revenue took additional hits with most travel sponsored campaigns drying up due to lack of budget and affiliate programs being shut down even for the few tours and hotels our visitors are booking.

And while Q4 is great for ad RPMs, not everyone sees a traffic surge in Q4. Most travel bloggers I know see an uptick in traffic that begins on December 26 and steadily increases to peak in July before it then dips dramatically. In a typical year I’ll make more in July than December, even with the difference in RPM, because of the significantly higher traffic in July. 

I also don’t know how many people are really unemployed and saving money because they are making so much from their unemployment checks. People I know who have been impacted by COVID are struggling to find work and taking a serious hit to their income. 

Your audience isn’t monolithic and it would be nice to hear you acknowledge that fact in these types of discussions.

==================================

Hi TOC team!

So glad the episodes are back!

I have a request for you. My blog was mentioned on episode 59. In the show notes, the link to my blog goes through Facebook first. Is there anyway to update that to my direct blog link and change the anchor text?

So I’m requesting A Utah Lifestyle Motherhood Blog…. be changed to loveloveloveblog.com.

Thank you so much!

Jessica

The post Ep 070 – FaceBag with Special Guest Nora Schlesinger appeared first on Theory of Content.

Welcome back to Theory of Content! Continuing on from last week, Joshua and Rebecca are still tackling all your facebag questions. Well… actually they’re tackling all of loyal listener Ellen’s questions today. The two hosts tackle Ellen’s mega email on today’s episode to uncover just why bloggers might experience substantial dips in traffic. 

Before they spill all their SEO wisdom, Joshua has to air out what he hates about Rebecca’s site. What does he hate so much? The fact that he is actually maddened by the outrageous millennial content that Rebecca posts just to showcase the outrageousness. Next, he talks about how Rebecca used the Gamestop stock phenomenon to boost traffic on her site. After Rebecca posted a link on the Wall Street Bets reddit to an article she wrote about the event, she noticed a surge in traffic. Joshua points out how Reddit can be used to boost traffic. However, redditors aren’t a good source of monetization, because many of them turn ad blockers on. 

Moving into the focus on this episode, the two hosts begin to make their way through Ellen’s email. The subject of Ellen’s email is about a substantial drop she experiences in her content annually. Joshua points out that this is not out of the usual for holiday-centric content. It is important to not only produce seasonal content. If you dig into your site analytics and see that your top performing posts are seasonal specific, that’s great, but you want to make sure you have content that will draw traffic all year long. 

Next, Joshua and Rebecca answer Ellen’s question about when to create mega posts. Joshua recognizes that mega posts are great and can do exceptionally well SEO wise. However, if you have a newer blog you may want to focus on the quantity of posts. If you split a mega post into a bunch of smaller posts, each individual post will be less likely to drastically bump your site around on Google rankings. Of course, this is all site specific, so analyze your pages to see whether a mega post or numerous smaller posts are best for you.

Some tools the hosts offer to help analyze your site are Semrush and Webmaster Tools. These two resources will allow you to see what you’re ranking for that you might not even have explicit content for yet. This can help you create a content plan about which topics you want to cover in your future posts. Rebecca adds that the posts she created using this content strategy are some of the best ranking pages at Let’s Eat Cake. 

==================================

Ellen from https://artsyprettyplants.com/      Start of ep 69

First in Facebook she said: This makes me very happy to hear. This podcast has been the best SEO education. I was so afraid it wasn’t coming back. I’ll be emailing a bunch of questions.

• First, i want to talk about email for this one. Let’s discuss the process of using a domain email, and how to set it up. It’s easy.
•  

Hi guys,

I’m soooo, glad you have returned. I just want you to know that I started listening to your podcasts late summer and at the same time as I started taking a highly recommended SEO course which is very good, but I have learned even more from you!

I love utilizing Search Console to help plan my future content as well as for updating old content, so thank you for all the podcasts you have done on that. Sorry for this long email- I am more than happy to come on the show if it’s easier to go through, than answering it in the Facebag.

Please help. In recent months, I worked on a robust content plan that extends from now through June. I really need to be ahead of the game, because my content is seasonal, seeing the highest traffic numbers and growth in the spring. I would really love some reassurance that I’m on the right path before I waste my opportunity during my best traffic growth period. 

I’m a DIY blogger who focuses on concrete crafts and outdoor decor/yard projects. The website is 3 years old, so there’s not tons of year over year data, plus the first 2 years I was only able to work on it part-time. 

However, the data that I do have has been consistent in that it has that dramatic increase in spring, with a noticeable drop right after Memorial day and then a continued decline, though moderated, through the rest of the year. 

This past fall, when I started digging into SEO, my organic growth grew to its highest level ever, but then on 10/27, I had a loss of more than half my organic traffic that didn’t recover. 

This month is getting better because my organic traffic is showing a slow but steady increase, but this is what I would start expecting now seasonally.

I’d like to know if this drastic drop is something I did. This has me concerned that I’m not applying what I’ve learned about SEO properly, or that I may be misinterpreting the data. 

My method for developing a content plan has been to find keywords/queries in Google Search Console that have high impressions and are a recurring theme. I then use those keywords to create cluster content with. 

For the queries Google seems to want to rank me for, I am doing one of two things. Some of those queries are for my existing, what I call mega-posts (nucleus of the cluster). So I’m either updating those posts with even more information (answering People Also Ask questions, etc.) and then creating posts that will be supporting content. 

Or if a mega-post doesn’t already exist, then I’m writing one for that keyword and create more supporting clusters and then do some mad linking between all of them. I hope I’m making sense.

For instance, my DIY concrete stepping stones post gets tons of impressions but relatively low clicks compared to impressions. It is a tutorial on making concrete stepping stones that look like natural stone, the post also has a YouTube video tutorial that goes along with it. 

I have a high discrepancy between impressions and clicks and believe the main reason is because of searcher intent. This is something I feel like I run into a lot with concrete-related posts.

So for the stepping stones, I believe the search intent is to find out how much they cost to buy and have installed, what types of stone options there are, etc. 

With this, my strategy was to write a mega post on stepping stones with all of that type of information- buying vs selling, costs, labor difficulty, types, colors, etc.

My next step is to create the rest of the cluster by writing a couple of other types of stepping stone tutorials. And then do some mad linking between them to support both my initial tutorial, as well as the mega-informational one.

By the way, since both posts are quite robust, can I make these both cornerstone posts? Right now, only the informational one is.

I’m using the same cluster method for a handful of recurring/high impression queries- ie; cinder block planters, driftwood planters, bird baths, large concrete planters, lightweight concrete planters and making silicone molds for concrete. 

Am I interpreting my keywords correctly? (Yes, I know about the Dollar Tree keywords too-which is unrelated to my niche, but I am also doing some more of those).

Am I headed in the right direction, or do I need to rework my whole content plan? Should I be worried about what happened to my traffic this fall? 

I so appreciate your help with this.

FYI- I can provide more information on the traffic drop, reports, or anything else. Just let me know what you need.

Best, 

Ellen

Thank you so much for tuning into Theory of Content this week. Be on the lookout for new episodes coming soon. In the meantime, make sure you didn’t miss last week’s episode where Joshua and Rebecca also answered listeners’ questions.

The post Ep 069 One Question, Many Answers appeared first on Theory of Content.

Welcome back to Theory of Content! Rebecca Swanner joins Joshua Unseth once again this week. The two are here to answer some of the many questions you listeners submitted over the weeks about all your SEO and content inquiries. 

The pair begin the episode with a debate on who the best TOC host is/has been, and they’re really all competing for second place because we already know Amber is #1. Joshua discusses the new phenomenon that is the Clubhouse app. He explains how it might be useful for the Theory of Content community, but he just can’t see himself putting it together. Rebecca lets listeners in on her experience with the Gamestop stock world, and assures everyone that she did not get scathed too badly. 

Rebecca’s love of vintage cakes takes the hosts into a conversation about social media usage for businesses. Joshua explains how businesses don’t need to be present on every social media platform, only the ones that fit their needs. Rebecca adds on about how it is hard for lifestyle brands to establish themselves amongst more niche content on social media sites. 

Starting with the listener questions, Rebecca and Joshua answer a question about making Youtube videos for blogs. Joshua reminds listeners that he has not forgotten about the promise he made to make a whole episode on Youtube content. However, in the meantime, he gives a few tips on how to push into the Youtube sphere. First, he suggests assessing your content and seeing whether it fits a video platform (DIYs and teaching content are especially great). Next, he suggests just giving it a go if your content is not deemed potentially controversial. 

The next question gives Rebecca her time to shine. To answer the question, about core web vitals and how they can lead to poor scores, Rebecca has to explain a few things first. She defines the largest contentful paint as the amount of time it takes a user to see the largest content on the first screen load of a site. Next, she defines first input delay as the amount of time it takes a user to interact with a site. Easy ways to improve these two core web vitals are to optimize images and use her suggested programs to up site speed. However, the last core web vital is the trickiest to fix. Cumulative layout shift (CLS) is when a site moves without user interaction. This is often due to issues with ads, and many of the solutions mean removing ads and therefore removing monetization. Rebecca hopes that there will be more information coming out soon on how to fix this issue, but in the meantime, she suggests focusing on optimizing the other two web vitals. 

To finish off the episode, the hosts take a question about category pages. Joshua stresses that category pages should be unique and the same recipes should not be following into the same categories. This could make Google think you have duplicate pages when you really don’t. To prevent this issue, Rebecca suggests to not create a ton of categories right at the start of your blog. Instead, start with a few and as those become too saturated, create appropriate break off categories.

The post Ep 068 Video and Vintage Cakes appeared first on Theory of Content.

Welcome back to Theory of Content! This week is a bit different and Joshua Unseth is joined by Eric Hochberger, the CEO of Mediavine. Eric is here to take the SEO conversation away from COVID and towards the future by discussing Mediavine’s upcoming projects. 

Eric starts off the episode by explaining the new importance of web stories on Google. These may not seem that important to IOS users, but that is because they are only seen on Google and Android mobile devices. These web stories allow bloggers to pop up in Google Discover, which is curated to users’ preferences, instead of leaving bloggers to solely rely on rankings in Google search. Next, Eric offers some tips on how to optimize SEO for Google web stories. He suggests that bloggers make a regular companion post for each story, but to also create a landing page with all the stories, so web crawlers can easily crawl the stories. Eric finishes off the topic of stories, by giving an overview of their cons. For instance, stories don’t monetize as well.

Joshua prompts a switch in the conversation to focus on the future of Mediavine. Eric begins by talking about Trellis. Trellis is a tool designed to optimize WordPress sites, and Joshua describes it as the most important thing going on for bloggers right now. Eric jumps to the next project that Mediavine has going on which is their change in adtech. Their new server to server program will source information to the newly built Mediavine exchange server. This switch will increase the speed of ads on Mediavine sites which will in turn increase viewability of ads.

The last topic the duo cover is the death of the 3rd party cookie. This current hot topic in the ad world has to do with the push to a privacy centered world. Web users now can consent to getting specialized ads and in turn having their information shared around. The issue with this is that as personalized ads decrease so does the monetization of ads.

Joshua closes off the episode by assuring bloggers that Mediavine has their back. It can be scary when Google changes the means of monetization without bloggers’ consent, but Mediavine is there to optimize ads and monetization through whatever Google throws at the algorithm. 

The post ep 067 Hanging out with Mediavine CEO Eric Hochberger appeared first on Theory of Content.

After a long – and we mean LONG – hiatus (sorry loyal listeners), Theory of Content is back and better than ever! Joshua Unseth is joined once again by Rebecca Swanner, the owner of Let’s Eat Cake, to answer all your burning mailbag questions.

Joshua begins the episode with an apology and an explanation. 2020 was a wild year and life got in the way of creating new TOC content after August. Joshua walks Rebecca through his hectic year. He begins with his fast-planned wedding that was organized in September and took place in October. Next, he recounts the many times he found himself having to quarantine due to COVID exposure, and how frustrating all of that was. 

This conversation leads the hosts to talk about blogging in the age of COVID. They explain why it presents a good opportunity to focus on building traffic for the site instead of focusing on revenue gains. Ad revenue is at a low right now (COVID + Q1 payouts = no good). Bloggers should focus their attention on building traffic, so that when COVID is hopefully over by Q3 or Q4 of 2021, they can monetize their newly grown audience. This is a good practice in general, building traffic before monetization, because advertising can anger the audience and it won’t lead to substantial profit until there is a substantial audience.

Mailbag begins with a question about using the same video clips in multiple videos on Youtube. Joshua instantly recommends the tool Tube Buddy. Tube Buddy is essentially an SEO tool that specifically helps with Youtube video rankings on Google and within the app itself. The hosts also point out that if you enable closed captioning, Google will be able to crawl a Youtube video as though it were a blog post. This can help push your videos to the top of Google, if they are SEO optimized. This also allows bloggers to reuse video clips in multiple videos. As long as you change the audio and closed captioning over the clip, Google will read the video as new content. 

The last mailbag question is about what to do when an alternate dev page blocks Google from indexing cornerstone content from your site. Joshua offers a tip to help bloggers identify issues like this. If you perform a Google search query on your site, you will be able to tell every place in the domain that a certain word or phrase is used. Rebecca adds that this can be beneficial for internal linking. The fix to the initial issue lies in the robots.txt file, which can easily be accessed on WordPress sites. This file tells web crawlers which pages to crawl and which not to crawl. If the dev site is marked as “uncrawlable” in the robots.txt file, the page you wish to be crawled should take priority. Expanding on SEO optimization, Joshua makes one last closing statement. He tells listeners to not get caught up in diagnostic tools and trying to fix every page on your site. Like Rebecca says, focus on making new content.

Thank you for tuning into Theory of Content in the new year! Be on the lookout for new episodes soon, 2021 is the year to make your blogs the best they can be!

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Facebage 1: Ellen McLean – artsyprettyplants.com

I’ve become pretty addicted to this great podcast. I didn’t hear anything about the podcast being on hiatus. Does anyone know when we can expect it to come back? I think the last episode they have is late August.

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Facebag: Jessica Anderson – www.cutesycrafts.com

Hi Theory of Content!

Just finished listening episode 51, where you asked for YouTube questions.  You’ve inspired me to start putting my face in videos and not just my hands.  I think the combination of having to change up camera angles and do my hair and makeup for the day as been the drawback for me (boys have it so easy!)

Anyway… I make craft and embroidery tutorials on my blog and YouTube channel, Cutesy Crafts.  I really started having success on YouTube when I posted embroidery stitch-alongs, where I would show each step of how to do an embroidery project in a separate video and compile them into playlists.  In each video, I show the finished piece, talk about which part we’re working on, and then show how to do the stitch.  I have moved away from these, as I feel they aren’t very good for SEO.  There are only so many embroidery stitches that make up each project, and I was teaching the same stitches over and over again.  In fact, when it got to the stitching part in a couple videos, I just stated cutting in old video footage of me doing that stitch (example: https://youtu.be/wm9MXRaoQ4k).  I’ve had a few subscribers ask for more like those, but I’m wondering if it would hurt me to have several videos with similar titles and content, especially if they have old video footage cut in.  New, different kinds of content do MUCH better in search, but I want to keep my subscribers happy too. 

Also, I went to a YouTube class about a year ago, and the presenter said that YouTube looks at how many views you get immediately after uploading a video, so you should never upload a video unless you are ready to publish immediately.  Along the same lines, she said if you ever change the title or words in the description of a video, that ranking kind of resets and you lose any momentum that the video had.  This seemed kind of like superstition to me, but I wanted to see if there was any truth to it.  I’m planning on going back and adding more information and links to my video descriptions.  I won’t be changing titles or words in the first paragraphs of my successful videos, just adding more information below.  I’m guessing that it’s the same as a blog post and if it’s ranking well, I shouldn’t try to fix it.

Thank you for all of the work you do!  I’ve seen tremendous success implementing your strategies on my blog.

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Facebook 2: Jim from http://destination-bbq.com/

New ToC listener. Binging now…great show. Has me looking at GSC. Noticed a page which I consider “cornerstone content” that is not indexed by Google. (https://destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash). Initially, the error mentioned it wasn’t indexed because of a page redirect. I requested indexing. Today, it is not indexed not because of an error, but because of “Alternate page with proper canonical tag.” I don’t know where an alternate page would be and the page doesn’t seem to rank. Looking further, I see that 12k posts are excluded for similar reason. I assume most of them are appropriately marked? However, what do you do for those like this which should not be excluded?

He followed up a few days later with the following email:

Follow up:

So, it looks like https://destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash/ is the indexed page…with the / at the end. Not without. 

Guess I didn’t realize there was a distinction. 

Also, testing in Moz, I got this message, which confirms the original “page redirect” message: 

You entered the URL https://destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash which redirects to destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash/. Click here to analyze destination-bbq.com/sc-bbq-hash/instead. 

So, 1) why the redirect in the first place, and 2) why is such a comprehensive piece on the subject not in — at least — the first 11 pages of Google using sc bbq hash as the search term?

TIA

The post Ep 066 We Are Back appeared first on Theory of Content.

Welcome back to Theory of Content! This week Joshua Unseth is joined by the new guest host Sherry Smothermon-Short. Sherry is the founder of the blog Cub Scout Ideas. On her blog, Sherry posts about all things Cub Scouts. She teaches parents proper uniform care, teaches kids fun snacks they can concoct, and teaches the troops how to enjoy the outdoors when Cub Scouts is not in session. 

Sherry begins the episode by telling Josh about her blog’s founding. She goes over her past as a den leader for her son’s Cub Scout troop. She explains how her blog has grown to accommodate posts that are not strictly Cub Scout related, but to also include more general outdoor activities. And despite the change, she still garners a large amount of traffic across her website. 

Next, Josh asks Sherry to share some of her wisdom with the listeners. Sherry’s top tip that she’s acquired through years of SEO research and observation is to not forget about your smaller pages. She accredits a lot of power to Facebook to change the traffic on a page. She advises bloggers to pay attention to which type of content benefits most from a Facebook post. Knowing this, if there are some old posts that have died out but were well received by social media, maybe give them a second post.

The advice continues with Sherry telling Josh about some of her blogging mistakes, and the mistakes she sees other bloggers making. Her biggest mistake was investing two much money in an endeavour that she could have realized sooner would have less payoff than she expected. The mistake she sees other blogging making is not using Google Search Console enough. What she says next may be a bit controversial in the SEO world (brace yourself!)… Sherry does not think the main thing bloggers should focus on is producing new content. She wants other bloggers to better understand what search console is telling them, and use it to their advantage. Is there old content that could perform much better if it was spruced up a bit? Or is all your old content polished and new content is the best option at the moment? Josh adds onto this by instructing bloggers to use keyword research to help guide the content of new posts.

Lastly, Josh and Sherry give some final advice to reach your desired audience. Sherry tells listeners to pay attention to the intention behind searches, because even if you can rank very well, if your page does not fulfill the desire of the user, it might be to divert your time to another page on your blog. Josh finishes off the episode by asking Sherry about the future of her blog. She explains how she plans to keep it going even though her boys are out of the program, and how eventually she hopes to sell the blog, but that won’t be for a while. 

Thank you so much for tuning into Theory of Content this week. Be on the lookout for new episodes coming soon, and in the meantime make sure you catch last week’s episode (where Amber returns) if you haven’t already.

The post Ep 065 – With Special Guest Sherry Smothermon-Short appeared first on Theory of Content.

Welcome back to Theory of Content. After our brief hiatus we have some exciting news… Amber Bracegirdle is back and joining Joshua Unseth for this week’s episode! The two have a lot to catch up on both in and outside of the SEO realm. 

Amber tells Joshua all about her pandemic experience, and her worries for the upcoming school year. She fills Joshua in on all her pandemic baking endeavours, and offers him some tips on how to make the best banana bread (basically lots of butter and bananas). The last few non-SEO topics the pair cover are their experiences of getting fire when they were younger, and they take a dive into the different architecture of their homes.

Moving onto some SEO news from the past few months, Amber shares about what new projects Mediavine has on the horizons. She explains how and why the company is moving into WordPress plug-ins and a few roadblocks they have experienced in the process. Amber then goes into detail about Trellis. Joshua mentioned it a bit in the last episode, but Amber shares what Trellis can be used for and what the benefits of utilizing it are. Lastly, before Facebag, Joshua and Amber examine which type of sites are performing particularly well during the pandemic. 

Next up is Facebag! Amber and Joshua start by answering a question about competing with a site that has lots of backlinks. Joshua suggests investigating the backlinks, because having too many backlinks is a tad suspicious and it might be worth looking into their validity. Amber follows up by telling listeners to reach out to the valid backlinks and request the site to link back to your, better content instead. The next question is about whether subheadings should include big keywords or smaller, less popular ones. Joshua points out that the more content on a site the better. With that in mind, if you are able to write a full thousand-word page about each popular keyword, then the big keywords should each be their own page and not a subsection within another post. However, if you can’t go into too much detail about a big keyword, it might be better to include it under a different post. Lastly, the pair take one last question about Google Search Console info not translating to the actual search results. Joshua explains how Search Console averages its results, and Amber offers ways to improve your rankings regardless of what Search Console is telling you. 

Thank you so much for tuning into Theory of Content this week! Stay tuned for future episodes with new co-hosts!

Facebag

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Hi   I’m not sure if anyone will know the answer to this but I thought it was worth asking anyway…

I’m starting a second site and my main competition will be tour agency setting themselves up to look like a blog.  They aren’t mobile first and their content is thin, but since they were the only one addressing the topic up until now, they have tens out thousands of back links. 

So, do you think I have a fighting chance?

• Elissa Moss

=======================

Keyword question (I seem to read differing things)… If post title (H1), SEO title, and the keyword in paragraph 1 are important for ranking, then I should be going after smaller keywords, correct? My blog is mainly focused on gardening, so instead of How to Grow Dill, which would contain sub headings on “how to harvest dill,” “how to prune dill,” “how to save dill seed,” etc. , I should instead make each of these individual posts? They would be interlinked. Any thoughts on this would be welcome! (My site is https://thekitchengarten.com)

–Courtnie Perkins Johnson

=======================

Has anyone optimized their category pages before? If so, can I see what it looks like? I’m just struggling to figure out what type of content or blurb to put at the top.

Also – did it help your rankings or traffic anywhere?

Example of a non-optimized one lol:

• Kalee Sorey Dillard (soreyfitness.com)

=====================

I have a question about rankings, as reported in Google search console. I have a post that GSC reports as being in position 6 for a particular KW but when I do a Google search for that KW, my post is on the third page. Can anyone explain that discrepancy?  Note: I’m using the same time period (eg. last 90 days.) Thanks!

• Dan Zher

The post Ep 064 – Amber is Back for FaceBag appeared first on Theory of Content.

Theory of Content is back this week. Joshua Unseth is joined yet again by Rebecca Swanner of Let’s Eat Cake for a mailbag filled episode!

Joshua and Rebecca begin by hashing out the best breakfast food. It quickly turns into a fast food debate, and the differences between the Los Angeles and Florida dining experience soon become clear. 

There’s a lot of Mailbag covered today so get ready! Rebecca and Joshua begin by taking a question about website speed. Joshua dishes about an upcoming Mediavine project named Trellis. Although not available yet, it soon will be in open beta and ready to optimize your site speed. Also, we hope to get more information on this service very soon, so stay tuned in the coming months for an episode covering even more ways to use Trellis on your blog. This topic leads to your hosts examining how important site speed is to SEO, because as Rebecca points out, there are many high ranking website with terrible speeds. 

The next question from mailbag is about keyword competition. One listener struggled with ranking due to a poorly designed website that had a backlink coming from the New York Times. This can be frustrating because it is apparent the site is not ranking well because of its content. Joshua lends advice on how to use the competitor website to your advantage, and analyze how it is doing so well. In this specific case, the listener is starting a travel blog, so Rebecca and Joshua create hypothetical travel blog posts to beat out the competitor.

Lastly, your hosts take a question about SEO traffic drops. While there are ways to improve SEO rankings after a drop, Joshua stresses the importance of paying attention to the seasonal nature of some keywords. These types of keywords have both pros and cons. While they can guarantee traffic to your site at certain times of the year, how do you maintain traffic in the off-season periods? That is what Rebecca and Joshua examine at the end of this episode. 

Thank you so much for joining us at Theory of Content this week. Be on the lookout for new episodes coming soon with even more new co-hosts, and in the meantime make sure to catch our last few episodes if you haven’t already.

Mailbag

===========================

Dear Theory of Content,

I need a little help. This isn’t for the podcast or the facebook page. I’m looking for a website troubleshooting tech referral. 

My site ain’t broke, but it’s got flat tires I don’t know how to repair.  I’m looking for someone to comb through the code to repair my mobile site speed.

I rebuilt my art site using Elementor/Astra over the Fall and Winter, and launched in February. I pulled archived posts in from 2005-2019. I did it myself, so perhaps therein lies the trouble?

I’ve reduced plugins to 16, tried using a CDN (made things worse, so I removed it), WP Rocket to cache the site, Imagify to serve images in next generation formats, Lazy Loading offscreen images, added breadcrumbs, disabled emojis, alt tagged images, and used keyword research to write better posts and titles. Traffic is improving ever so slowly. (My goal, like so many others, is to qualify for Mediavine some day.)

In google, I consistently get a red score of 12-19 out of 100 on mobile site speed.  https://www.belindadelpesco.com

The mystery to me is that the list of recommendations to increase load time from Google Site Speed Test, GTMetrix and Pingdom includes all the stuff I’ve already done.  They recommend Lazy Loading (showing images that are already lazy loading), serving images in next gen formats (examples cited are already re-formatted), deploying a cache (I’m using one, and I clear it often), etc.  I’m completely flummoxed.

Could either of you refer me to someone I can hire to help me fix the molasses mobile speed? 

I realize that emails like this take up your already overcooked time, so may I send each of you an 8×10 print on paper from my art as compensation? (Take a look at the archives for some ideas ) Just let me know what you want and where I should mail it. 

You two are the only peeps I know who are fluent website-mystery-solvers. You’ve held my hand through the entire rebuild process via the podcast and Mediavine’s youtube channel, and I felt so much more confident about what should be prioritized in the site design and new content creation.  I’m very grateful for everything I’ve learned from the podcast. It’s been a game changer. Cupcakes to each of you.

Thank you for your time –

Belinda

=========================================

Hi!

I’m new listener to your podcast but I’ve listened to half your episodes in the past two weeks. 

Needless to say I love your show!  You’ve given me a whole new way of looking at content and how to repurpose and build on older content.  I went from posting once a week to 17 posts in the last 2 weeks and 5+ more expecting to be completed and go out next week.

Until now, I was holding back because a digital SEO site checker once gave me error reports for my content being too similar (i.e. banana bread, banana nut bread, and banana chocolate chip bread) and I heard that posting more than once a week is a waste of time and will only lead to burnout.  So, thank you for giving me perspective and permission to do what made sense in the first place.

I’m sorry if you address this in an episode I haven’t heard yet but this question has been nagging at me.

I have a food blog with Mediavine and am starting a travel blog.  I live in a popular tourist destination with shockingly little written on it. The only site that has focused on the area is tour guiding company making themselves look like a blog to promote their tours. 

At first glance, the side didn’t seem like it would be hard to beat. It has short posts that aren’t that helpful, it isn’t mobile friendly, and doesn’t look like it’s been updated or add new content in years.  However, after a closer look, I’m pretty sure they’ve been linked to by the New York Times and big names.

I plan on joining Help a Reporter Out but I’m not expecting to get any great link backs for a while, if ever.  So, is there any hope for me to outrank them by writing better content with lost of supporting content?

In some of your episodes you say you like as much info as you can get so here is an example of my content strategy but please don’t share the actual locations if you choose to read this on air.

I have a post about Jerusalem, then I have posts about Old City section with the holy and ancient sites and the modern section with things to do.  These posts are/will be supported by in-depth posts about each attraction, and those may in tern be sported by posts such as shopping and dining guides where relevant.  In addition, I plan on publishing posts like best cafes in Jerusalem, best restaurants in Jerusalem, Jerusalem style guide, what to know before visiting, etc.  Of course, everything is/will be interlinked.

I’m sorry this email is so long.  Please let me know if you received this email so I know it didn’t get sucked into a blackhole in cyber space.

Thank you so much for your time and your wonderful podcast!

=====================================

Hi friends, your podcast is still the BEST!   I didn’t want to put all this in FB group, feel free to use on air if it would help others.

Where would you go with this?  I am trying to research the question you always get, “why did my SEO volume drop?”  Our SEO traffic has dropped by almost 60% since beginning of year.   As one example, look at this pic for one keyword group – ugh.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

1. Used SC to pull the same view for 2 different time periods:
   1. Keywords with Impressions and Clicks back at beginning of year when our SEO traffic was higher (Q1) – for all keywords not just the “Wings” example above.
   2. Keywords with Impressions & Clicks since we’ve tanked (Q2 so far)
2. Sorted the Jan-Mar of keywords by performance, then compared the 2 lists.  I was looking for keywords that performed well in Jan-Mar but had a dramatic drop in last 2 months. 
   1. The majority of that drop seems to be based on about 10 keywords
   2. Base on how those keywords grouped, I can attribute that to about 5 specific blog posts.
3. Next I drilled into one of those blog posts that had lost so much SEO traffic: Garlic Parm Instant Pot Wings.
   1. I focused on the ~5 keywords that have high volume of search, where we used to rank well   – you can see these keywords in the pic above.
   2. I used SEMRush and SC to see what keywords it’s ranking for now
   3. I checked out the sites that are now ranking above us for each of those keywords.  I didn’t see that they were doing anything magical.  (Don’t say this part on air:  I see that they have more inbound links than we do so I traced those back in SEMRush and at least one of them has a ton of links from junk sites – not authentic link building.  #shade).

                                                               i.      https://amindfullmom.com/instant-pot-wings/

                                                             ii.      https://sweetandsavorymeals.com/best-instant-pot-chicken-wings-from-fresh-or-frozen/

                                                           iii.      https://gooddinnermom.com/instant-pot-easy-chicken-wings-bbq-or-buffalo-style/

1. To make improvements here’s what I’ve done:
   1. Ensured all the keywords we’re targeting are actually in the post
   2. Confirmed good Alt Text on all images in the post
   3. Added more internal links from other posts, using these keywords as anchor text.
   4. Submitted the post to about 10 content syndication “food sharing” sites to try to build up external links.
   5. Didn’t yet but will switch the recipe card from WPRM to Create Card (we’re using Create for all new posts but haven’t migrated old)

The post Ep 063 – Face-Bag with Guest Host Rebecca Swanner appeared first on Theory of Content.

Welcome back to Theory of Content! Joining Joshua Unseth this week is Rebecca Swanner. Rebecca is the owner of the blog, Let’s Eat Cake. Let’s Eat Cake is a lifestyle humor blog that dabbles in baking as well.

Joshua and Rebecca start the episode by hashing out details about their favorite video games and Rebecca’s past as a video game editor. The conversation turns into a discussion of Let’s Eat Cake’s content and how it came to be. Rebecca retells her story of how she initially got into blogging, but how her demographic shifted as her interests changed. 

Next up, Rebecca explains the logistics of her blog. More specifically, how she gets comedians to draft posts for her. She explains the challenges of letting outsiders create content for the blog, since they may not fully understand the brand or it’s target audience. Joshua and her go over how to craft the perfect style guide for hired writers to maintain a uniform brand image across the entire site. More logistics Rebecca discusses deal with making comedic content translate to Google search bots. Being a humor blog, with lots of sarcastic posts, there were many times that Google could not decipher the true meaning of a Let’s Eat Cake blog post like a human could. Rebecca explains how she uses Dtelmu Demo to check if Google can understand the subject of a post before it goes live. 

Finally, Joshua and Rebecca dive into Facebag to answer your guys’ questions. The first question they take is about optimizing monetization across two separate blog sites with different content types. Is it better to combine them? Or leave them separate? Joshua points out that there are more types of monetization than just adsense. Some blogs may be better equipped to garner affiliate links (especially if they have niche content), while others are more likely to profit greatly off ads. If two content types are not compatible with the same monetization strategy, it may not be the best to combine them. Next, they answer a slew of questions regarding when it is okay to delete old content. The conclusion they reach is to pay attention to the traffic they’re getting, if they’re still ranking, and yourself (if you really want the post gone, delete it to ease your mind). Lastly, they answer a question about taking a break from blogging (everyone congratulate Morgan!). 

Thank you so much for tuning in this week to Theory of Content. Be on the lookout for an all new episode next Thursday. In the meantime, if you didn’t catch last week’s episode with Rizwan Asad go give it a listen!

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Hi Theory of Content!  I love the podcast and have learned so much from it!  I have a question regarding combing two sites due to the change in MV 2nd site. (I’m not complaining about the change, I totally understand it and how it will help my main blog!  I LOVE MV and all the support I’ve gotten over the years!!)

I started a second site in January, for something different to do and also to give my teenage kids jobs! They research and write the articles for most of the posts on intheChristmasspirit.com. 

My main goal was really just to get a little bit of ad money, enough for their payroll, and I thought I could get that site to 10K by Q4. But with a seasonal niche blog, I really don’t think I can get the sessions up to what I’ll need to apply to MV now. 

My main site that I earn a full-time salary from is a crafting/DIY site, leapoffaithcrafting.com.  My kids don’t craft and I don’t really want them writing posts for this site anyway;)

I have been working on SEO for my crafting site a lot over the past two years and now actually get 50% of my traffic from organic and 50% from Pinterest  (used to be 20/80).  Google has liked me over the last few updates so I’m a little scared to change anything.

The articles on the Christmas site we have are mostly factual based (history of everything Christmas) and some food and printable posts (only about 40 posts total).  On my crafting site (400 posts), I do have a ton of Christmas craft and DIY posts that bring me a lot of traffic in Q4, but they are all tutorials (not factual based).

So question… Would it hurt my crafting SEO to move the Christmas posts over to my main blog and keep building that line of posts over there?  Either copy and paste (and shut down the 2nd site) or redirect the posts?  Or is it worth keeping the two different sites because of SEO??  Or fire my kids, lol!!??

I would love any advice from anyone here or as a mailbag question.  I hope all this makes sense!  Thank you for all you do!

===========================

I have a few questions about different scenarios for deleting posts after hearing a lot of people recommend deleting useless/junk posts to clean up a site. Mine has been around since 2008, so quite a bit of clean up potential.

-duplicate recipe posts (somehow this happened years ago in a site redesign for a few recipes): should I delete one of the posts and redirect it to the other? How do I know which to delete, just choose the one that gets the least traffic?

-old giveaways: should I delete them? Any other action needed such as redirecting to category page? What is best here?

-I used to do a bit of freelance and would periodically do roundups of my work. These seem useless now and better in a press/about page. Should I delete them and consolidate the info on my existing pages that are better suited?

-complete and utter garbage posts? Wordless Wednesday, rambling, link ups: what do you do here?

-multiple recipe roundups in nearly or identical topics. I used to do this years ago before I knew about editing a post and republishing it. Should I do anything with this or leave as is other than optimizing by putting the info in Create lists?

Or is it not recommended to delete them at all and just no index or something else I’m unaware of?

Many thanks!

• Katie Kick

==========================

Would it kill our blog to not post for 2 months?

We post 3x a week at least and have thousands of old posts published. I’m having our second baby mid-August and we will be moving when I am about 38 weeks pregnant.

Last maternity leave I pre-wrote and took guest posts for two months of content. Now, with our move being stretched out due to covid, we are scraping for content.

Would it kill our google juice to take a six week break and post nothing? We will drive traffic to old content via our newsletter and social media. I am thinking a true break will allow us to not put out crappy fluff content and come back strong october 1. But don’t want google to stop crawling my site? Thanks! Morgan from Charleston Crafted.com

==========================

The post ep 062 Special Guest Host Rebecca Swanner appeared first on Theory of Content.

Theory of Content is back this week after a short hiatus (We missed you!). Going forward, the plan is to rotate in new co-hosts every few episodes to join Joshua Unseth. That begins today, as we welcome Rizwan Asad as a new co-host for the podcast. Rizwan is currently living in Canada and started his blog, Chocolates and Chai, back in 2013. He founded his blog to share recipes with friends and family all around the world, and before he knew it he was getting lots of traffic to his site.

Rizwan starts off the episode with a little backstory for himself. He explains how and why he founded his blog and what the state of it was at the beginning. At the start, he didn’t pay much attention to keywords and SEO, but he discusses how his blog grew to where it is today (boasting an impressive 80,000+ hits a month). After hearing the past and present of Chocolates and Chai, Joshua takes the opportunity to examine the future of the blog. He suggests a few actions that Rizwan can take to grow his already big site into something even bigger. 

After the analysis of Rizwan’s blog your hosts move onto the facebag questions! Joshua and Rizwan answer a question about how to title recipe posts if the traditional name is not in English. They conclude that it depends on who your wanted demographic is as well as who your likely demographic is, but Joshua elaborates on how you can honor the tradition of the dish while not comprising clicks. Lastly, your hosts answer a question about how keyword position rankings translate to click throughs, and how to optimize your position rankings.

Thank you for tuning into Theory of Content this week! Be on the lookout for an all new episode next Thursday, but in the meantime make sure to listen to the last few episodes if you missed them!

Facebag

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#facebag question. My mom and I have a recipe blog of Asian recipes. Some of the recipe names are Asian names translated roughly into English. The blog is entirely in English, but the recipe names are both the English translation and HOW it sounds in English. Like Carmelized Pork and Eggs are “Thom Khem” but Laos has a different written script. There are a ton of phonetic spellings and in the blog post I mention that. Is there a best practice for titles, headers, and meta descriptions for them? Do I include both or the phonetic spelling? Or just the translation? Or something else? Joshua and Amber. Thanks!!!

-Seng Nickerson

I clicked on Seng’s facebook picture and at the top of her profile are these 4 adorable children. Seng if those are your kids, you have an absolutely adorable little family there. Congratulations.

Sarah Cook said to Seng: my two cents: I would make the title the English version. And within the post I would include the Laos version and phonetic spellings.

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Theory of Content  – looking for some advice/help here!

I have been binging Theory of Content over the last month and have taken the recommendation to focus on expanding some existing content I currently have on the site by looking through Search Console.

I went to Search Console and ordered the results by number of impressions. It seems that there are some queries that have tens of thousands of impressions and very few clicks, which didn’t make much sense to me.

One example of this is the screenshot attached, for the search term “Takayama”. It has 7 clicks, 31K impressions, and a 8.7 position ranking. After digging into this a bit more, it seems like in the image results I have a photo that pops up in the top 10, however in the search results, I don’t show up until page 3 (website: TripTins.com).

On Search Console I have made sure that the small filter box says “Search Type: Web”, which I would assume only looks at web results and not image results. I have seen this issue across many other search terms and cant figure out why it is happening.

Any insight here would be greatly appreciated!

• Charles Breitbart

The post Ep. 061 – FaceBag with Guest Host Rizwan Asad appeared first on Theory of Content.

Theory of Content is back this week with Joshua Unseth and our new co-host Nora Schlesinger. Joshua and Nora kick off the episode by sharing their past SEO woes. They tell listeners about their old blogs and the biggest mistakes they made, and (spoiler alert!) Nora proves she’s wiser than Joshua because she does not have nearly as many big mess-ups. 

Joshua and Nora then tell each other about their weekly food cravings/recipes/etc. Joshua shares how he has become a master pasta carbonara-er, and also spills about his illegal COVID dinner parties. This brings the hosts to dish out some advice on how to make the most out of your blog while at home. They explain how to tailor content to fit the current social climate and give some good information about what search terms have been trending well since the stay-at-home orders have been put in place.

Next up is Facebag! Nora and Joshua answer questions about how to maximize revenue from videos, whether Youtube is a good resource or not, and how to craft the perfect video content for your blog or channel. Then they get into the topic of internal linking. How much is too much? Is there such a thing as too little? Nora wants to make sure the listeners know that internal linking more than once is not the worst thing, but make sure the linking makes sense. Finally, the episode wraps up with a final question about syndicating multiple sites. Joshua and Nora leave listeners with the advice to take authority over a specific topic, having too many blogs might make you go crazy instead of boosting readership.

Thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of Theory of Content. Remember to come back next week for even more information on how to perfect your online content strategy.

Upload Direct or Just Embed?

For my videos that are between 3 – 6 minutes long and also on YouTube, is it better to upload them directly to my blog or just embed the YouTube video with HTML? I am not currently a Mediavine member but would this answer change if I was part of an advertising network? Thanks!

Is it OK to link to the same external link twice in a post?

For instance, I have an old round up of 9 recipes that I’m updating. All the links to the recipes are in paragraphs in conversation style. My thought was to make a list of those 9 recipes and add the list to the bottom of the post so that they stand out more but that means each recipe will be linked twice. I don’t really care if it will help SEO, I just don’t want it to be negative SEO affect. If that makes sense.

Curious about syndicating our own content.

I’ve read that some bloggers will republish their own content on Medium or LinkedIn with a canonical link. And that both the original and syndicated posts can rank. And from what I understand, Google only cares about duplicate content on the same domain.

We have a network of sites across that cover travel and outdoor topics. And we’re considering syndicating all of this content (with a canonical link) to a hub domain (that we own), with the goal of ranking both pieces of content. I think we’ll reach a larger audience – and help readers discover our other content on related topics.

Have you done this? I’m interested in studies and data to confirm or refute this idea. Curious about your opinion / experience.

The post Ep – 060 The One Where Nora is Back appeared first on Theory of Content.