Rank Ranger Blog

Robots.txt files are elements on your websites that you don’t want to throw out. They allow and block entrance to unwanted bot visitors trying to "snoop" through your website content.

This is more or less a simple way to define robots.txt files.

In this post, I'll get into the robots.txt for SEO basics.

You'll learn:

• When you should use them
• How to implement them
• Mistakes to avoid

Have you ever been confident in the SEO results that you're delivering for a client but actually find out when you've spoken to them, that they're not quite that satisfied with you?

In this episode, Mindy Gofton will explain Six Steps to Managing an SEO Client's Expectations.

The steps are:

1. Understanding Your Client's Pain Points
2. Understanding What to Reasonably Expect
3. Understanding What Will Delight Your Clients
4. Make Sure Your Clients Understand What They Are Getting for Their Money
5. Make Sure Your Clients Understand Their Given Timeframe
6. Make Sure Your Clients Fully Understand What You're Doing for Them

Getting off-page SEO right is crucial to your site rankings.

In other words, what happens after you publish your latest blog post is almost as important as the blog post itself.

The problem is, to effectively write, publish, and promote content, you must see to a seemingly endless list of tasks.

To help you stay focused, in this post, I’ll be sharing a comprehensive off-page SEO checklist designed to get your content in front of your intended audience.

Customer data is one of your most valuable metrics.

Because...

The goal of SEO is to generate sales.

And...

Speaking to actual customers is the best way to work out how to get more sales.

What's more, most SEOs start the SEO process by looking at keyword data. The problem with this approach is it assumes you'll be able to predict how your potential customers think about your product or service. This is making a big assumption.

The better way to do SEO is to research how actual potential customers relate to your product and then build your SEO strategy around that.

In this episode, Eli Schwartz explains three ways to use customer data to build SEO strategies.

Understanding your audience will boost your effectiveness exponentially.

This applies to every marketer, whether you are an SEO, PPC expert, or even marketing via snail mail. (Even my son who sells gum to his classmates when the teacher isn’t looking can benefit from this lesson!)

Everything starts there.

The reason is simple. Once you know what makes your audience tick, you can design a sales funnel that’s personalized to their needs.

What’s more, understanding your audience applies to every aspect of your marketing.

In this post, I’ll be getting into how to find your target audience and do better marketing.

How do you pick the right SEO KPIs? With so many tools and so many metrics, what should you be tracking? In this episode, Crystal Carter shares five metrics that actually make a difference to your clients.

Track these five SEO KPIs:

1. Conversions and your benchmark
2. Revenue and transactions
3. Target keywords and what you are actually ranking for
4. Ranking position changes
5. Traffic that brings conversions

What is site architecture? How does it affect SEO?

Site architecture is one of those best practices that makes sense on so many levels. It not only helps search engines crawl and categorize your content, but it also helps your users find exactly what they're looking for.

And...

At the end of the day, your content exists for your users.

In this post, I’ll get into:

• What site architecture is
• What the two main benefits are
• The relationship between site architecture and semantic SEO

It used to be that SEO was the antithesis of brand. Brand is the thing that you couldn't measure and SEO brought the free traffic. But nowadays, both can do so much more if they work together.

In this episode, Jason Barnard discusses:

• How social media can amplify your brand image
• How is social media used for SEO

As an SEO or digital marketer, I’m sure you’ve heard about sales funnels.

Ever wonder what a sales funnel is or how they affect your SEO?

Sales funnels are at the heart of your marketing and sales and this means as an SEO you should be focused on far more than just rankings and visibility.

SEO is a form of marketing.

And by building funnels into your SEO, you are creating a true SEO strategy. Without funnels, SEO is just a tactic to drive traffic, nothing more.

I mean, you wouldn’t spend your client’s money setting up paid ads without thinking about where that traffic is going to, so why should your client pay you month after month to generate organic traffic that has no chance of converting?

In this episode, Laura Hogan shares three channels that you can leverage to improve your SEO strategy.

Discover:

• How to find targeted queries your audience is searching for using Google Ads
• How you can set up enhanced free listings in Merchant Center to drive traffic to your products
• How to find blog content that your customers are desperately searching for by talking to your customer service team

Nowadays SEO is seeing the rise of concepts such as semantic SEO, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and programming languages. Speaking of which, Python is a huge help for optimization and most of the boring tasks you may want to carry out while working. Don’t worry, coding can seem daunting at first but it’s way more straightforward than you think thanks to some specialized libraries.

We have already discussed semantic search, as well as topical authority, and Python is a good solution to explore new insights and for faster calculations, compared to the usual Excel workflow.

It’s no secret that Google relies a lot on NLP to retrieve results and that is the main reason why we are interested in exploring natural language to get more clues about how we can improve our content.

In this post I clarify:

• The main semantic SEO tasks you can carry out in Python
• Code snippets on how to implement them
• Short practical examples to get you started
• Use cases and motivations behind
• Pitfalls and traps of blindly copy-pasting code for decision making

How do you pick the right keywords that are easy to rank for in Google?

Although one of the tried and tested ways to find keyword opportunities is to focus on keywords that your content is ranking for on page two, in this episode, Lukasz Zelezny has a counterintuitive keyword strategy.

Look for keywords that your content is ranking for on position 50 or more.

In this episode, discover why it works and how to implement it.