#also not necessarily who’s your fav- more who’s core to the series and what it represents

[raeathnos]

Something I’ve been wondering about lately! There’s a lot of characters who are very dear to me, but I’ve always considered Takua to be the heart and soul of Bionicle and the fandom.

I wanna know if that’s something the fandom agrees upon or if it’s a different character/group o:

[the-way-astray]

how about a break from some strieefe asks?

here are some questions to answer! (if you feel comfortable ofc)

1: what's your zodiac?

2: how tall are you?

3: what is your fav kotlc ship besides aldella

4: how long have you been part of the kotlc fandom for? (not necessarily keepblr)

5: what is your favourite hc in kotlc?

6: have you read shadowhunters? (i need more kotlc + shadowhunter fans 😔)

7: do you have any pets?

8: who is your favourite kotlc character?

9: what is/are your favourite song/s

10: keefitz; yes or no? (this determines my opinion on you ;D)

11: sophitz or sokeeefe? or keefitz

12: do you hc any of the characters in kotlc as aro/ace? if so, who?

13: do you like potatoes?

i didn't know what a zodiac was, so i searched it up, and it appears to go by birthday. i'm not comfortable revealing anything about my birthday/age whatsoever, so instead, you'll get the one that has a description that i feel fits me the best: virgo.

i'm 5'8" . . . towering over you all for real (i hope)

KEEFITZ. two most thirsted after boys in the school are actually into each other! it's an exercise in wanting and being wanted. also a tad bit tiana and a tad bit stinex.

i've been here since 2020, and only on keepblr. i only started posting in 2023, though. i'm not actually sure what prompted me to start posting, but there was a reason.

that not long after the pyrokinesis ban, banning abilities was a hot topic. it had never been done before, and questions like "should the council have the right to take away someone's right to use their ability?" were very controversial. this resulted in a group of councillors trying to ban the shade ability. it was eventually overturned, and eventually a law was signed into effect that banned banning abilities, deeming it a violation of the core principles of elvin society. this means that if pyrokinesis were to be unbanned, banning it again would be illegal under the new law. but since the ban was put into place before the law was signed, it's not actually a violation of the law. several people have pointed out the hypocrisy of this, but it continues to remain unresolved to this day.

yep. i did not like it (i'm sure you can guess what my feelings toward jace are . . . ). favorite trilogy was last hours, though, cassie definitely got her shit together a bit there. and i'm going to read the new one when it comes out, the one about kit and ty. what's it called again? can't remember. something something no series goes unfinished. but i haven't read these in a LONG time and i sped through them when i read them first so i remember almost nothing.

nope.

i actually don't have one. closest you can get is probably fitz vacker.

this changes every day. but currently . . . probably eight by iu (and bts's suga). it's just so sad . . .

YES

keefitz trumps all. i don't ship sophitz and i definitely don't like sokeefe. if you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one of the two, it's sophitz. but i don't particularly ship that either, though i used to.

hmm . . . i kinda flip flop between seeing fitz as gay for keefe and seeing fitz as aroace. but not really other than that.

YES

[musclesandhammering]

Every Single Issue I Have With S*lki (It’s Not Just The Selfcest)

Here goes. I threatened to post this a few days ago and never did, but I just saw a s*lki stan Twitter account claim that Loki caring about Sylvie more than the whole multiverse was a Good And Romantic thing and it pushed me over the fucking edge, so now you all have to read this. I’ve divided it into categories cause there’s just THAT much.

OOC Bullshit

• First and foremost, no amount of mental gymnastics you do will ever make me believe that this specific Loki- the one that just invaded New York, that just came off a year of Thanos Torture, that just got done being influenced by the sceptre, that was literally in the middle of a crisis already, and then on top of that went through all the trauma of Ep 1- would even be worried about a romantic relationship. That would be the furthest thing from his mind. Go back and watch how he acted in Avengers- you think that guy would abandon his previous mission to become a snivelling simp for a girl he’d just met 3 days prior? Yeah, there’s no universe in which that makes sense.

• “It’s very in character for Loki to fall in love with himself lololol-“ NO, it’s literally not. Out of all the characters in the mcu, I don’t think I can think of anyone that genuinely hates themselves more than Loki. He even referred to all his other male variants as “monsters” and said meeting them was “a nightmare” in this series. He’s got so much self-loathing, plus the fact that he genuinely thinks himself to be an evil backstabbing scourge- so there’s no evidence at all suggesting that he would ever develop a fondness for, or even be inclined to trust, another version of himself, after only knowing them for 3 days.

• Building on that, the whole concept of Loki falling in love with a version of himself just feeds into the annoying ass misconception that he’s a narcissist. No matter which way you stack it, he’s not. If you’re referring to NPD, he doesn’t fit the criteria, and if you’re saying “narcissist” just as a slang term meaning “selfish and arrogant”, that still doesn’t accurately describe him. But when creators like Waldron and Herron do things like having him fall in love with himself, it makes it so much easier for casual viewers to think that he is.

Shitty LGBT Rep

• It’s kinda sus that Loki’s are allegedly genderfluid and yet the only female-presenting variant we see (and apparently the only female-presenting variant there is, cause the male Loki’s all seemed unfamiliar with the concept) is treated as some kind of mind-bogglingly special paradox. Also very sus that, out of all the Loki variants, the one our Loki falls in love with just so happens to be the only female one. What a coincidence.

• The fact that the creators of the show went around bragging about Loki’s bisexuality and Marvel purposefully (lbr) allowed stories about Loki possibly having a male love interest to circulate, specifically enticing queer viewers to watch the show (you know, the definition of queerbaiting), and then instead of having a male love interest (Loki was the first queer main character, so it was the perfect opportunity) they gave us *gestures to this dumpster fire* this… it’s just a middle finger to LGBT fans. The fact that they would rather have this relationship with all its myriad of problems than have a gay relationship is just……. Very telling.

• While him being with a woman obviously doesn’t refute his bisexuality, the fact that they showed/talked about him being interested in 3 different women (flight attendant, Sylvie, Sif) and never even hinted at him being attracted to a man, definitely makes it seem like they were trying to cover up his bisexuality to smooth things over with the more homophobic viewers. You know? It’s like “I know you’re pissed that we sorta confirmed Loki as bi, so we promise we’ll never mention it again! Or even hint at it! As a matter of fact, we’ll give him lots of female lovies and make him seem as straight as possible! That’ll take your mind off of that horrible crumb of queer rep, right? Please please please keep giving us your money!!!”

• Aside from all the other issues, at its core, the biggest reason why I think I’m so irritated with s*lki is that it took one of the most interesting, complex, and diverse characters in cinema atm and squished him into a tired ass unnecessary heteronormative subplot…. Like literally every. single. other. protagonist. ever. Loki is such a unique character, and it’s so so so incredibly disappointing that they stuck him into that same boring cookie cutter romance that happens to every other character in every other movie I’ve ever seen. It’s a disservice, and it’s honestly just not compelling or entertaining at all.

Thematic Issues Galore

• His arc didn’t need a romance. With anyone. It was unnecessary and it didn’t make sense plot-wise. In fact, one of the reasons he was my fav prior to this was because he was the only big-name mcu character whose story wasn’t muddied-up by a romance that didn’t need to be there. So much for that.

• He wasn’t emotionally ready for a romantic relationship with anyone. Hell, just a genuine friendship would’ve been pushing it for him at this point. He was in such a bad state that any relationship he got into would’ve been toxic and unhealthy for both him and the other person, and it doesn’t make sense why the writers would want to put him in one when there were so many cons and essentially no pros (other than “Uwu aren’t they cute together”).

• Sylvie’s character in general was unnecessary and Loki’s character was robbed just by her being there. The whole show became about her post-Ep 2. They spent most of the time giving her backstory, building her up, telling us how awesome she is, trying to convince us to like her, etc when what they really needed to be doing was building Loki up- cause I gotta say, if I had to describe TVA!Loki in a few words, they would be Flat, Boring, and Weak.

• The romance overtakes the plot. They spend time portraying their supposed connection that could’ve been spent adding depth and complexity to literally any of the characters. They make the big Nexus Event them giving each other googly eyes on Lamentis when it could’ve been so many other way more profound things that speak to the fundamental nature of Loki’s. They have the climax of the finale be “oh no she betrayed him to kill He Who Remains” when it could’ve been something way more compelling (Loki having a moral crisis over whether or not to kill HWR, Loki contemplating the state of the multiverse and weighing the pros and cons of freedom vs order, Loki looking into some What If situations and getting emotional about what could’ve been regarding his family, Loki realising the gravity of HWR’s offer and finally coming to terms with how important he is to the universal cycle, etc etc). The entire plot suffered in favour of a romance that half of us didn’t even want.

• It essentially reduced all of Loki’s potential character growth down to “He did it for his crush.” He seemed to at least have some motivations of his own in Ep 1-2 (feeble as they were) but after Sylvie showed up in Ep 3, literally every action he took was just him being a simp for her. Why did he lie in the interrogation? To try to protect Sylvie. Why did he fight the minutemen and Timekeepers? To survive kinda, but mostly cause it was important to Sylvie. Why did he get pruned? Cause he got distracted trying to confess his crush to Sylvie. Why did he try to get out of The Void? Cause he thought Sylvie needed him. Why did he stay in The Void? Cause Sylvie was staying. Why did he try to enchant Alioth? Cause Sylvie told him to. Why did the multiverse get cracked open, leading to an infinite number of Kangs waging war on all of existence? Cause Loki didn’t wanna hurt Sylvie in their fight at the Citadel and then get distracted by her kissing him. It’s uninteresting and honestly pretty embarrassing.

• Throughout their “relationship arc” the writers do their absolute damndest to convince us that we should like Sylvie more than Loki. And you know what? It’s the most hypocritical shit I’ve ever seen. They preach and preach about how Sylvie’s life has been so difficult/we should feel bad for her/she had it so bad/poor poor sylvie/she had it SO much worse than pampered prince Loki…. But then they never even touch on any of Loki’s trauma of hardships (the ones that have been ignored for literally 3 movies now). They frame Sylvie as a good person and a Freedom Fighter after she spent literal decades/centuries mass-murdering brainwashed TVA agents and showing exactly zero remorse for it….. but then they make it their mission to constantly remind us that Loki is a terrible person and constantly put him in situations where he’s forced to acknowledge his wrongdoings/show remorse/admit to how “evil” he is for being a mass murderer for like 2 years. They show him on-screen having a wider range of powers than her, and perpetuate his whole shtick of being a “master manipulator” or whatever….. But then they make Sylvie “the brawn” more competent, intelligent, and physically capable than him. Tell me how it’s a good thing for a ship to be so narratively biased toward one character.

Missed Opportunities

• If they absolutely had to have a romance subplot, then they could’ve paired Loki with one of the characters that have already been established OR one of the characters that were a big part of the whole TVA storyline anyway. It would’ve been so interesting if they’d revealed that Loki had a history with some of the players from previous films (Sif and Fandral both come to mind). It also would’ve been really interesting if they’d given Loki a love interest that actually had some allegiance to the TVA as a whole (Mobius maybe, but not necessarily. It also could’ve been Renslayer or B-15). Hell, imo it would’ve been cool if they’d followed through with that “See you again someday” line that he said to the flight attendant in Ep 1. ALL of these characters have way more chemistry with him than Sylvie, and they were also already relevant to the plot without wasting half the show to give background info on them.

• If they absolutely had to have a hetero-presenting love story involving an enchantress-type figure, then there’s a whole Enchantress (Amora) that was actually Loki’s love interest in the comics. Plus, fans have been screaming for Amora to appear in the mcu for years. Plus, Tom literally pitched an Amora/Loki storyline way back in 2012-13. Also, Lorelei (another enchantress) is also one of Loki’s love interests in the comics, and she already exists in the mcu (she was on Agents of SHIELD). There were several different established characters for them to choose from. Creating a whole knew amalgamation of a character and going with the “she’s a Loki variant” storyline was just completely unnecessary and made no sense.

• They completely robbed us of a Chaos Twins dynamic. Had they handled Sylvie better and not forced her and Loki to smooch, the two of them could’ve had a really really complex and interesting sibling relationship. Loki could’ve stepped into Thor’s shoes and sort of used that new role to gain some self importance, and Sylvie could’ve finally had somebody to look out for her/teach her magic/be there for her. It would’ve been very aesthetically pleasing, the vibes would’ve been out of this world, it would’ve been way more profound than this bs, and frankly it would’ve been much more entertaining to watch.

• Loki’s relationship (read: obsession) with Sylvie completely overshadows all Loki’s other relationships in the show. Loki and Mobius were literally the focal point of the series in Ep 1-2, but after Sylvie showed up in Ep 3, they barely had any interactions with each other, and Mobius pretty much faded to the background entirely. Loki had the beginnings of a pretty interesting antagonistic relationship with Renslayer (with her wanting him pruned, then arguing with Mobius that he couldn’t be trusted), but after Sylvie showed up the dynamic shifted to focus on the history between her and Ravonna. Loki and B-15 started off very badly and openly disliked each other throughout Ep 1-2, and then in the end of Ep 2, Loki showed a little bit of concern for her when she was possessed, hinting that they might be inching toward a reconciliation- especially considering how obvious it was that Loki was gonna uncover the TVA’s sins eventually. There was so much potential for him to be the one to give her her memories back and convince her to change sides, but no, of course that honor went to Sylvie. In fact, after Sylvie showed up, Loki and B-15 never even spoke to each other again.

Various S*lki Fails

• If they were trying to convince us that this affection was mutual, they completely failed. There’s nothing I’ve seen that even hints at Sylvie feeling the same way about Loki that he does about her. At most, I’d say she has a slight endearment to him. She finds him likeable and she’s grudgingly fond of him, but she definitely isn’t in love with the guy. Maybe she thinks he’s cute and hopes that he gets out of this mess alright, but her mission obviously comes before him- whereas, it’s been confirmed multiple times that Loki cares about her above anything else. She doesn’t trust him, she looks at him like he’s an incompetent fool half the time, she shows little to no reaction during most of his confession moments, and she kissed him as a means to distract him so that she could get him out of her way. Look, all I’m saying is, when you get into a relationship where one of you is way more invested than the other, it never ends well.

• This goes without saying for a lot of us, but the selfcest is just straight up odd and cringey. If you’re cool with that sort of thing, fine! People can ship what they want! But don’t pretend it’s not at least a little bit uncomfortable. Yes, I know they’re not technically siblings so it’s not technically incest, and they’re also not technically the exact same person, but they’re similar enough that it makes things weird. And yes I know selfcest can’t happen in real life, so there’s no way to judge it morally, but neither can most of the other stuff that happens in these shows/movies (the Snap, Loki destroying jotunheim, superhero with powers being held accountable, mind control) and yet we still find ways to judge their morality, because they all mirror real-world events. (The snap= genocide; Loki destroying Jotunheim= bombing other countries; superhero accountability= weapons accountability; mind control= grooming and coercion). And lbr the closest real-world mirror to two versions of the same person (who may or may not share DNA, family, backgrounds, physical and emotion characteristics) being romantically involved with one another is incest. And you can be ok with that if you want- that’s your prerogative- but don’t get pissy just cause a lot of us are squicked out by it.

• The whole mirror metaphor (learning self love via each other) thing just fell completely flat. First of all, having Loki learn to love himself by looking at someone who mirrors him did not, in any way shape or form, require them to be romantically involved. But they were. Of course. Secondly, the creators have contradicted themselves so many times on whether Loki and Sylvie are the same or not, that it doesn’t even really register to the viewer that the mirroring thing was what they were going for. Finally, Loki and Sylvie are shown to have so little in common- and to have only the most bare minimum of similarities personality-wise- that it doesn’t even make sense that Loki would “learn to love himself through loving her”. Like? They’re nothing alike. So how would he make the connection that he himself is actually pretty cool, based on her alone? There’s virtually nothing in her that reflects him.

• I know the objective of the entire show was to convince us of how awesome and unique Sylvie is, but honestly her relationship with Loki just did the opposite. A hallmark of a Mary Sue is having her constantly upstage the male lead, and then having him instantly fall madly in love with her anyway. And that’s.. exactly what happened here. Everything they’re doing to try to force her character to be more stan-able is really just forcing her to look more like their self-insert OC. Which is exactly what she is. It would’ve been so much more satisfying if she didn’t have to try so hard to look cool, if they didn’t have to try so hard to make her backstory tear-inducing, if they didn’t have to turn our protagonist into a snivelling simp just to prove how incredible she supposedly is. Very much #GirlBoss energy and we all know how performative and cheap that is.

• The entire thing was too rushed, there was too little build-up, and it was nowhere near believable. As stated above, it’s ridiculously unlikely that Loki would canonically even be interested in Sylvie, and this show did nothing to explain why he was. He just suddenly was. There was nothing they showed us as viewers that would justify a guy as closed-off and preoccupied as Loki falling head-over-heels for a girl he just met. Their was no explanation, no big revelation, no reasoning, it just… kinda happened. And I’m also severely skeptical of any love story that has the characters go in this deep after only 3 45-minute episodes of exposition.

I’m sure there’s other stuff, so if anyone thinks of anything, let me know and I’ll be more than happy to add it. Tagging @janetsnakehole02 @raifenlf @natures-marvel and @brightredsunset800 for expressing interest. This is all your faults.

[cosmicangst]

hi! May I ask u if you watch kdramas and if u have any favs? I honestly love reading your thoughts on games/series so I was really curious. Hope u have a great day💕

hi hi! yes i do! mostly on netflix and not a whole lot bc kdramas are a hefty investment and im a creature of habit who rewatches my old shows until im sick and desensitized 😌 no particular order here…

crash landing on you: baby’s first kdrama during the pandemic that really started it all for me and my mom. which made me appreciate it less as a show and more as a great bonding experience as she swoons over hyun bin and i swoon over son ye jin. im in the minority who likes the ending. it was a nice realistic touch that grounded the usual third act melodrama level of heightened emotions in kdramas

it’s okay to not be okay: idk what else hasn’t been said but the style, the artistry, the performances, the soundtrack, the family dynamics, how well the fairy tales serve as a thematic basis for each episode 👌👌👌 i love love the individual character developments more than the romance. sometimes they infantilized the heroine at the second half but she’s still one of my favorite kdrama characters

vincenzo: i can take or leave the romance but regardless the leads’ “this is my worse half” dynamic makes the show. their rapport w their plaza neighbors is also hilarious. vincenzo as a character is fun but too cool for me to be attached. cha young though belongs to my list of favorite kdrama characters (you can see a common theme here that im partial to female characters who are assertive w varying levels of unhinged and/or moral grayness)

her private life: fake dating’s not my absolute favorite but no one has topped the chemistry of these actors. the first time they kissed i felt like i needed to turn off the tv to give them privacy lmao what really sells their relationship is how obviously they’re delighted by each other, how they establish intimacy based on their work, and the fact that he loves fangirling over her fangirling. i wasn’t a fan of the third act twist but they still reign as the best romance here

age of youth: technically my first kdrama (i just didn’t finish the second season) and i invested heavily into the narrative when i watched as a college student. i can take or leave the romances but the friend group is unmatched and the only reason to watch. season one >>>> season two all the way

run on: the second couple are EVERYTHING. i didn’t fully appreciate during my first watch until i finished and learned that this kind of slice of life, slow paced and character-driven stuff is my vibe exactly. any time im doing chores i pull up a random ep in the bg bc it feels like im just casually doing parallel play w a friend

hotel del luna: love the premise, love the ending except for the very last moment, didn’t love the romance or the hero necessarily, but i love the heroine so much i couldn’t leave it out. her backstory and relationship with the not!second lead compelled me to finish and tbh they’re the emotional core of the whole thing

my liberation notes: my friend calls this a depression simulator kdrama 😂 but this had as much heart as a ghibli film to me. best part was the ensemble who had very real flaws and emotional relatability supported by a script w depth more human than pretentious. this rly was a show that you had to earn but when you did, it was well worth it

hometown cha cha cha: small town slice of life basically the ultimate comfort food kdrama 💖 save for like two eps each one hits so well. has the second best romance and the best ensemble here although it does dip too much in sentimentality for my taste at times. but it wouldn’t be what it is without it

special mention to cheese in the trap…which i didn’t finish lol so i can’t speak on the quality of that but lil closelyknit lore facts the webtoon it was based on featured in my blog for a good number of tumblr years some time ago

[sneakydraws]

Well, here it is - a lengthy explanation of each card in my mdzs major arcana deck and what I meant to convey/what i would have changed in retrospect/what alternatives i considered! It’s a bit messy and my typing style is lazy but hopefully it will be an interesting read to some of you :)

And so you don’t say I didn’t warn you - jiang cheng’s section (11 justice) is absurdly long lmao

0 the fool  I elaborated on this in the post itself but yeah basically jin ling is kind of representative of all the damage and trauma caused by the past, and there’s a kind of danger there of him falling victim to the same vices as the older characters and repeating the same mistakes and perpetuating the cycle of war and misery (the cycle that we already see with how the jin sect became the new wen sect, and later with how jgy became the new wwx) and he has a lot of room to grow! He grows so much over the course of the novel, comes to realise the complexities of the past and gets a harsh life lesson in how nothing is as black and white as it seems. But ill save talking about his progress for the end, for now whats important is that he has room to grow and also a dog. I don’t really have a justification for the sun, i mostly just thought it looked sick? It made its way to the next card as well, where it makes a bit more sense, but then i realised it was a dumb motif to include 1 the magician I still very much like wwx for the role, and that illustration would have probably had him raising a corpse on his left and pointing threateningly to the sun on his right. I considered including the table as well, with some mdzs relevant items replacing the card suits. Anyway, like i said wwx got a few cards to himself already so i went with the alternative wq design, since i think she fits the card as well. Both she and wwx are highly skilled people, extremely driven once they set their mind to something. The card to me symbolises the creative mind as well as a general drive for action, which fits them both - wwx was famously a prolific inventor, and wq came up with a previously unheard of surgery, after all. This card strays pretty far from the rider-waite deck design, largely because i was still figuring out how i wanted to approach this series, but you can still see the influence. 2 the high priestess I was actually going to skip this card at first because I couldn’t think of a fitting character, but once i considered a qings character post death, it all fit pretty well. She was already a highly intuitive person in life, and in sharing her memories with wwx she is, in a way, relaying a kind of secret knowledge. Anyway she’s one of my fav characters so im glad i got a chance to include her. The coffins could be interpreted to be xxc and sl or xxc and xy 3 the empress Theres other mother figures in mdzs who got to be mothers for a longer time, but jyl definitely embodies the positive aspects of this card the best. She’s nurturing, kind, emotionally supportive, she already mothered wwx and jc quite a bit when she was young. Plus i liked that the rw card had both water and flowers, making an easy lotus connection. In retrospect the stars look kind of out of place and i should have replaced them with something more relevant... Also, i should have had her hold a lotus seed pod instead of a flower, haha 4 the emperor Like i said I considered jc for the role but hoching bullied me into admitting that nmj was better… they’re both more of an inverted emperor than an upright one but then again theres hardly any character in mdzs who would fit upright emperor so. Jgs was also considered but he’s even uglier than nmj so i couldn’t bear to draw him 5 the hierophant It was pointed out to me that lqr would have fit this card better and the truth if that statement haunts me to this day. Unfortunately I have no space in my brain for lqr so lxc got the role instead. My main reason was his role during the wen destruction of gusu lan, when he ran away with the contents of the library - this is why there’s bookshelves behind him. The keys, take, from the rider-waite deck, are meant to represent the gusu pendants that allow you to enter 6 the lovers Im sure many people would have chosen wangxian here but I uhh don’t really care abt wangxian personally? And also their love story is so convoluted that jyl and jzx seem idyllic by comparison lol. Also i didnt really have an idea for who to put in the angel’s place for wangxian… mme jin certainly did not get these two together in the end but undeniably she and mme yu did initially give them a chance to fall for each other so. Thats something i guess. Anyway the trees became their sects’ flowers and the mountain became the burial grounds - an omen of their tragic fate, basically 7 the chariot There might have been other characters who fit this card better but i couldn’t really think of another card for lwj and i thought it would be weird to not include him… anyway i don’t really care for current timeline lwj BUT i do like that he was clearly influenced by wwx to walk his own path in life based on his moral convictions rather than follow his sect’s rules blindly. The chariot is to me a card of self control, self determination and focused action, so it seemed fitting. The composition felt kind of empty without the actual chariot so i padded it out with the guqin, the cloud recess in the bg (it doesn’t look great but i tried to replicate the drama design….) and the bunnies which conveniently fit the colour scheme of the sphinxes in the rider-waite design 8 strength Like i said before, my interpretation of this card is more… morally ambiguous than the quote unquote official meaning, so i thought about manipulative or duplicitous characters more than kind characters whose strength is expressed through gentleness (though i did consider jyl briefly for the latter interpretation). As such, i considered both jgy and nhs, but ended up going with jgy largely because i couldn’t pass up the opportunity to put the nie sect’s beast as the lion. 9 the hermit My thoughts immediately went to bssr lol. It may be an overly literal interpretation but whatever, i like it just fine. And i like that i managed to echo the rider-waite silhouette in the mountain and the tree (and even in bssr herself) 10 wheel of fortune God i love the parallels between these 2… this card to me is about how you cant trust your current situation, good or bad, to last forever, and these 2 embody that perfectly imo. Wwx went from son of a well off servant and a powerful cultivator, to street rat orphan, to adopted son of sect leader jiang, to double orphan, to MIA, to terrifying but admired warrior, to terrifying and despised traitor, to dead, to, at the very end, suddenly respected and trusted again. The dishonesty and cheapness of whatever the public’s current opinion of him is is portrayed beautifully as far as im concerned. And jgy of course claws his way up to power only to instantaneously become public enemy number one, to the point that he’s probably blamed for stuff there’s no reason to believe he had a hand in. Wei wuxian’s silent astonishment at how quickly the cultivation world turns against jgy and towards him again is a delicious moment of thematic resonance.  11 justice I settled on this card for jc after he got booted from the emperor seat but i do think it fits, in a somewhat convoluted way. I turned both the sword and the scales into visual representations of the golden core transfer (can you tell im obsessed with it). According to biddy tarot, the justice card is partly about searching for the truth, and the scene where jc finds out about the transfer is of course a big deal. I was also very influenced by the reversed meaning again - which is about being reluctant or unwilling to face or accept the consequences of your actions. I feel on an intuitive level that this fits jc but I’m not sure how well i can explain it - it’s something about how he’s a little too comfortable scapegoating wwx for things that were also, if much less so, influenced by his actions, and also something about the way he keeps wwx at an arm’s length emotionally but still leans on him and accepts his support when he really needs it, and somewhat hypocritically expects wwx to put the needs of him and the jiang sect before the needs of others. And also something about the core exchange is the consequence and proof of wwx’s deep - terrifyingly deep, even - love and care for him, which is something jc doesn’t seem to let himself acknowledge. Maybe even something about how you could argue that the way all of the jiangs acted around wwx - jfm’s favouritism that left him with the feeling of a debt he needs to repay, mme yus insistence that he be a servant more than a brother to jc, prepared to give his life for jc, and jc’s own unwillingness - or inability, he was a child after all - to clearly acknowledge wwx as an equal to himself, enabling wwx’s self sacrificial and protective tendencies - that all of this was what caused wwx’s complete and unquestioning willingness to do whatever it took to protect jc, and therefore paved the way to the golden core transfer. And i don’t mean this to be scapegoating jc - especially considering how young he was when this all went down, it wouldn’t be fair to expect this level of emotional perceptiveness, awareness and maturity of him - but i think adult jc has to grapple with the fact that the chain of cause and effect was not as simple as wwx fucking everyone’s lives up to be a martyr, and that both jc and his parents had a role in that story as well. I don’t even necessarily think this is something that jc only realised in the current timeline - i think it’s something he felt on some level this whole time, and it probably led to a lot of feelings of guilt - but the suibian reveal definitely puts it in sharp focus, and i think he’s now better equipped to handle this introspection than he was as a recently orphaned, traumatised teenager, lol. ANYWAY the window with the fabric is both a nod to the rider-waite design and a reference to the destruction of lanling - i actually did some basic ass research for this, and it seems that in ancient china fabric would indeed be hanged in a window if the normally used paper was damaged. The design of the window, as well as the very idea to use it to imply the reconstruction of lanling, was taken from this great piece of jc angst by my pal moroll1! Oh yeah also the covered window kind of works as a denial of forgiveness for jc because it’s like a halo but covered up... Also I completely forgot to put a blindfold over his eyes which would be perfectttt because blind justice and the core exchange......... ok moving on 12 the hanged man I always have issues with this card because i cant find a satisfactory summary of what it’s really about. Best i can tell it symbolises a need to hit pause, surrender or let go of something… ive also seen it tied to sacrifice? So mo xuanyu doesn’t fit perfectly, but sacrifice is definitely there in a surface level reading kind of way, and the idea that you have to surrender or let go in order to achieve your goal does fit the whole deal of getting revenge but giving up your life in exchange and not being there to see it 13 death This is probably one of my favourite cards, definitely not because I have huge issues with change or anything…. I see this card as signalling the necessity of change or putting an end to something / leaving something in the past in order to start anew? At first i considered putting past wwx, mxy and current wwx here as a kind of transformation and one cycle flowing into the next... But firstly, I’d already used mxy in the very previous card, so putting him in again would feel like overkill, and secondly, the longer I thought about it the less convinced I was that this would even fit with the card’s meaning? Because coming back from the dead doesn’t like... trigger an internal transformation within wwx or anything? Anyway, fun fact: the design I ended up going with was actually originally intended for judgement! I thought I was being very clever with the whole “figure plays an instrument and the dead rise” parallel, but apparently I’d just completely forgotten that the judgement card had a completely different composition... Truly I was boo boo the fool... But yeah anyway at the end of the day I figured the design would kind of work for death as well, with Wen Ning and the theme of transformation, (since in his case coming back as a fierce corpse does actually mark a certain transformation in behaviour) and Wei Wuxian’s protection of the Wen people essentially signifying an attempt to break the cycle of oppression if that makes any sense? Like, wwx is trying to revolutionise the way the world works a bit, if you catch my drift 14 temperance  The centrist card! Again this is probably going off track from the “official” interpretation, but to me this card has a certain “don’t commit fully; do everything in moderation; don’t take either side” flavour to it that i personally find infuriating irl and that i very much assign to lxc. It’s entirely possible that I’m misinterpreting his character because i didn’t really pay him (and the 3zun in general) much mind while reading, but hell, I’m allowed to pick favourites and choose who i want to interpret deeply vs shallowly. Again, i wish id chosen lqr for hierophant because its so annoying for a character i don’t care about to get two cards…. But oh well 15 the devil My alternative idea for this was jgy as the devil and lxc plus nmj as the figures, but since all three had been featured already (multiple times, even!) i figured I’d go with xy instead, especially since he’s among my faves lol. I think the devil signifies something along the lines of unhealthy attachment, obsession or addiction, which isn’t 100% accurate in the case of xxc and a-qing, but if i stretch it a bit to cover toxic relationships in general, and especially manipulation or negative influence, i don’t think it’s half bad. My main struggle here was to choose who amongst the xxc/sl/aq trio to choose for the human figures. 16 the tower Arguably jin zixuans death and the following massacre of nightless city were the final and most direct reason for the siege of burial mounds, and the tiger seal is good shorthand for wwx’s loss of control over his powers, which led to the deaths of jzx and jyl. When reimagining major arcana i like to feature some kind of building in this card (spoilers for a possible future project but in my rose of versailles major arcana set the tower is bastille) and even if it’s not a tower, the image of wwx looming over the gathered crowd from atop a rooftop is so good i couldn’t resist 17 the star Struggled with this one - considered both jin ling and lsz for it, as symbolising a hope for the future, but that was kind of covered by the world so it wouldn’t make sense to include here as well... As usual when I struggle with interpreting a card (as opposed to understanding it but struggling with matching a character to it, like with death or moon) I went to biddy tarot and read all the details about its meaning. What i got was that this card signifies an incoming period of introspection and inner peace following a time of turmoil, as well as a general moving on into a new, better phase of one’s life or finding new meaning and purpose. The figure also suggests someone vulnerable, but possessing a keen sense of intuition as well as a good degree of practicality and common sense. Given all those, I settled for mianmian because IM LOVE HER..... I also kind of see her as a prelude to the “just one person is enough” theme present in tgcf!! And i think her decision to abandon her sect because she saw the toxicity and corruption in it is a very inspiring action - even if it didn’t make a large visible impact, i think the appearance of her and her idyllic family at the very end of the novel - paralleling and mirroring wangxian - implies that at the end of the day, it was a meaningful one 18 the moon Another card i ALWAYS fuxking struggle with - this time less because i can’t grasp its meaning and more because I can never find a character that fits it well. I usually get fixated on the “dreams and subconscious” part, but if i lean more on the “disguise, deceit, anxiety and fear” part, i eventually figured the whole yi city arc wouldn’t be a bad fit. I say the entire arc because it really does encompass all those themes if you include both the past and the present - xue yang’s disguise, his tricks with the villagers, a-qing’s lies and even xxc’s reluctance to talk about his past as well as xue yang pretending to be xxc all fit the disguise and deceit angle, and the general mystery and creepiness of the current timeline yi city work well with the anxiety and fear - the mist, the slow uncovering of the past, even a-qing being revealed to be an ally after scaring the shit out of the protags. I definitely struggled with including all the elements and characters, and even moreso with making them vaguely fit the rider-waite composition, but i think it ended up okay ish. OH and i completely forgot to draw mist swirling around them :( 19 the sun I was considering mianmian’s family for this one, but since I used her for star, I ended up with wwx and his parents instead. Once again I’m reinterpreting the card a bit - normally I think it symbolises incoming times of pure happiness and abundance, as well as a connection with the inner child, but I gave it more of a nostalgic or sentimental twist - wwx looking back at the brief glimpse of his happy childhood. 20 judgement another card that i struggle to interpret a bit... Here i actually used the tgcf tarot zine as a reference! In it judgement is summarised as “rebirth, following duty, absolution” SO i figured that nhs, mxy and wwx all together would fit pretty neatly... wwx achieving (public) absolution through clearing his own name after being reborn, and nhs sort of calling on wwx to expose jgy’s crimes... It’s a bit messy but not bad I think! 21 the world This ties very closely to my read on mdzs as a story - which is that it’s, at the end of the day, largely about cycles, and about how hard it is to break them, but how we gotta keep trying and have hope anyway. Or maybe more precisely, that the people directly involved with and influenced by the trauma of the past might not be able to get over said trauma and that the hope for healing from it will be shouldered by the new generation. Or something like that… Basically what i mean is that jc and wwx and lwj and lxc and nhs and jgy and all these people who were in the thick of the sunshot campaign and the siege are so profoundly affected by it that it genuinely feels by the end of the story like there is little hope for them to ever truly overcome that trauma and build a better future without repeating the same old mistakes - but there is a glimmer of hope in the new generation, specifically in jl and lsz. And it’s a bit paradoxical, because they have also been directly impacted by the past tragedies - lsz having his entire clan wiped out after wwx failed to protect them, jl losing both his parents to wwx’s mistakes - but despite that loss, and despite coming from arguably the two opposing sides of the past conflicts, they are both, in the end, capable of moving past that tragedy, of recognising the complicated nature of those conflicts (jl’s moment of clarity at the end is both heartbreaking and hopeful) and forging friendships between clans in the process. I honestly think that the extra where jl is struggling to assert his authority as sect leader, to treat his subjects well and to cooperate with other sects in a truly amicable way is the single hopeful ending note for the larger themes of the novel - it allows us to imagine that maybe these kids can learn from the mistakes of their elders rather than getting sucked in by resentment at those mistakes, and actually build a brighter future for the cultivation world. And sidenote, this is also why i have a soft spot for jin ling and lan sizhui as a ship... speaking of which their poses were directly referenced from the lovers card ehehe

Looking back, I’d like to add some symbol of jin ling’s trauma so that it mirrors baby wen yuan in the tree stump... maybe his father’s sword? 

[quidfree]

hi! hope you're well and that you're having a good day:) I absolutely adore LMV - I genuinely think it's the best fic I've ever read. anyway, the point of this ask was that I was wondering whether you had any thoughts about sirius as a godfather? like, was he suited for the job, did he actually do a good job... idk, maybe you've answered that question before, in that case, sorry! and ofc don't stress abt answering:))

this is so nice of you ty!!!

ive never talked about dogfather sirius, actually!! what an interesting pair of questions.... i would have to say a qualified yes to both?

was sirius suited for the job: personality-wise, maybe not entirely (raising a child alone in the event of jily deaths would have been Rough, and he’s not exactly a stable parental unit, not to mention he would have spoiled harry rotten), BUT he has the most important prerequisite, which is undying love and loyalty for the potters and for harry, and that means he would have done everything in his power to be a good parent figure to him, which is what really matters, so. not to mention that jily realistically weren’t contemplating he would have to be godfather alone for the majority of harry’s life- with jily around he could have been just The Coolest Godfather Ever instead of harry’s first living parental figure who didn’t treat him like shit.

did he actually do a good job? i would say a resounding yes. bearing in mind he was stuck in azkaban for twelve years (let’s not get into that), we only actively see him godparent harry for three years (plus when he was a baby). obviously baby harry was spoilt v much by his dogfather; what we see of sirius + teen harry also speaks favourably of him, i think. ok, little bit of a rough start what with the unhinged prisoner vibe, but the FIRST thing sirius does when free is go check up on harry- and he keeps tabs via crookshanks etc once at school, knows his interests well enough to send him the firebolt, and he values harry’s opinions enough to not murder peter on the spot despite his thirteen year revenge vendetta. obviously, the fact harry is the spitting image of someone sirius hasnt seen except for in his nightmares for over a decade doesn’t hurt, but he’s just so awkwardly sweet to harry afterwards- when he offers harry to come live with him, expecting him to refuse and completely understanding of it, it’s so endearing (and it always broke my heart how excited they both were about it- i bet sirius was thinking about another time a potter asked to live together). and from the start sirius ALWAYS speaks to harry like a whole person, not a child to be kept in the dark (which, if everyone else had done, looking at you dumbledore...)- the speech he gives him before he escapes is so important for harry to hear, especially from someone who knew his parents. sirius is always so careful to tell harry things about james and lily. now, it’s not that sirius treating harry like an adult would be ideal on its own, and i do think in part the issue is that he skipped his entire childhood and harry looks so much like james, but i also don’t think sirius actually treats harry too much like a grown man, apart from slipups- just like a grown teen. he advises him against threats, tells him the edgy backstories harry SHOULD know (and no other adult ever wants to tell him), looks after him as best he can (HE LIVES IN A CAVE EATING BONES TO LOOK OUT FOR HIM), listens to his teen melodrama. even when he’s fucking up by encouraging harry’s risk-taking i don’t think he’s treating him like an adult- he’s treating him like a *marauder*, because at that age, that’s what he or james would have done; being able to make informed choices is what sirius would have wanted at his age. i don’t think molly or sirius necessarily have the better argument- both make good points; sirius gets what harry wants and molly gets what harry might need even if he doesn’t want it, but that makes perfect sense- molly is an older woman who’s raised seven children, and sirius is in his early thirties and lived with kids for (1) year. james and sirius were order members by age /eighteen/ and sirius was in azkaban at /twenty-one/- he was basically a kid HIMSELF before he got put in the torture prison. i always found it so unfair that literally none of the other adults ever mention the debilitating mental issues he must be suffering from- remember the lifelong PTSD hagrid got from a MONTH there???- and that’s without even mentioning dumbledore’s purposeful exacerbating of them. not to say that mental health excuses poor parenting, but sirius both /isn’t a parent/ and really does very well at filling that role anyways, on the whole, so i think he can be cut some slack for once in his life. harry loves sirius SO MUCH and sirius loves him right back- and sirius teaches him some of the most important lessons in the whole series, even if he himself never managed to learn them- lessons that i really think shape the adult harry becomes, and the kind of lessons his parents might have taught him. so overall i’d give him kudos- and considering the absolute bullshit he’s living through, with james and lily dead, azkaban sucking the light out of him for over a decade, peter running free, and dumbledore QUARANTINING HIM IN THE HOUSE WHERE HIS ABUSIVE DEAD MOTHER IS (?!?!), i would say he does a stellar fucking job.

anyways harry & sirius’ relationship is so important to the series- even the GP was upset when sirius dies in OOTP, largely because everyone could see how bad it hit harry. that scene in dumbledore’s office? oof. they just care about each other so v much and we were robbed of a lifetime of sirius as harry’s absolute fav adult. if sirius had held onto harry that day- if dumbledore hadn’t decided to place him with abusive bigots for a plan which would only pay off by OOTP- i honestly think sirius would have outlived the series. because with harry he’d have been less unhinged by grief, able to testify properly, gotten support from other order members, not gone to azkaban- and with harry he would have had a reason to live. thirteen years of raising harry would have made harry the snarky little fucker he is at his core by age eleven, confident and happy and very good at quidditch indeed; thirteen years would have made sirius as whole as he can get. they would have patched things up with remus. there’d be no OOTP tragedy of errors. sirius would have punched dumbledore at some point. harry would have sent a pic of him and his new friends over week 1 of hogwarts and sirius would have punched through a wall and then calmly strolled over to hogwarts and taken ron’s pet rat over to minerva mcgonnagal, where unspeakable things happened to it. he would have gently butted heads with hermione (but won her over via crookshanks if nothing else) and gotten on very well with ron; snape would barely have been able to be such a dick to him because sirius would have gleefully sent him howlers for every minute of his day until he cracked. lucius on the school board terrorizing the other parents? not on sirius “billionaire heir to the toujours pur line” black’s watch- he’d happily invest even more obnoxious wealth into the school fund to get first call, not to mention lucius’ imperius excuse would not get very far with sirius around. “who’s nicholas flamel? we can’t ask adults- we’d get in trouble with the teachers and our parents are either muggles or wouldn’t know- oh wait nevermind, sirius, who’s nicholas flamel?” no more expelliarmus-ing for four years; harry Trained Duellist By Age 11 more like. dobby the house-elf? oi dobby sirius is family too- now spit it all out, won’t you? chamber of secrets? yeah, sirius knows what that is. parseltongue? yeah, sirius is familiar, and fuck those other kids for being weird to harry about it, does he want to come home for the holidays? weird creepy diary? oh, sirius’ family will have Magicke Moste Evile around somewhere. book 3 is just Harry’s Holiday: The Book because there’s no sirius subplot. you think snape would have dared treat remus the way he does with sirius hovering around paying half his checks? i think the fuck not. you bet your ass they had box seats for the whole of gryffindor house at the Quidditch World Cup. barty crouch? yeah, sirius knows THAT asshole- and remembers his son. catch harry whizzing through all the challenges minus the nerves ahead of time while sirius and remus do half the investigating for him. yule ball? no sweat, just go with ron; that’s what james and sirius would have done. if the maze went the way it goes in the books, “moody” wouldn’t even have been able to drag harry off without sirius intervening. and sirius “ptsd” black would have been The One Person who Got harry’s feelings in OOTP- not to mention sirius Skilled Legilimens black could have coopted that shit from snape and gotten harry up to scratch. sirius-raised-harry would have given umbridge twice as much shit. no kreacher lying here- and harry has sirius’ mirror anyways. so no massive drama in the ministry, and no suicidal recklessness / desperate first taste of freedom on sirius’ part means no veil incident even if they got there. hence book six through seven going Quite Differently. sirius shows up book six to be DADA teacher, why not. him and remus think it’d be funny, and besides he’s petty enough to steal the job from snape. move over firenze, new hot teacher in town. half the books are avoidable.

[epackingvietnam]

How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[localwebmgmt]

How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[nutrifami]

How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[daynamartinez22]

How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

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How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[ductrungnguyen87]

How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[camerasieunhovn]

How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[gamebazu]

How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/3498ThI

[kjt-lawyers]

How to Detect and Improve Underperforming Content: A Guide to Optimization

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

Content, content, and more content! That’s what SEO is all about nowadays, right? Compared to when I started working in SEO (2014), today, content is consistently one of the most popular topics covered at digital marketing conferences, there are way more tools that focus on content analysis and optimization, and overall it seems to dominate most of SEO news.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a nice Google Trends graph that may change your mind:

Google Trends screenshot for “content marketing” as a topic, set for worldwide interest.

But why is it that content is now dominating the SEO scene? How vital is content for your SEO strategy, actually? And most importantly: how can you be content with your site’s content? Puns aside, this post aims to help you figure out potential causes of your underperforming content and how to improve it.

Why content is key in SEO in 2020

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. Just by paying close attention to what Google has been communicating to webmasters in the last few years, it’s clear that they’ve put a strong emphasis on “content” as a decisive ranking factor.

For instance, let’s have a look at this post, from August 2019, which talks about Google’s regular updates and what webmasters should focus on:

“Focus on content: pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

The article goes on, listing a series of questions that may help webmasters when self-assessing their own content (I strongly recommend reading the entire post).

That said, content alone cannot and should not be enough for a website to rank well, but it is a pretty great starting point!

Underperforming content: theory first

What is underperforming content?

When I say “underperforming content”, I’m referring to content, either on transactional/commercial pages or editorial ones, that does not perform up to its potential. This could be content that either used to attract a good level of organic traffic and now doesn’t, or content that never did generate any organic traffic despite the efforts you might have put in.

Over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ninety bloody percent! This means that nine pages out of 10 are likely not to receive any organic traffic at all — food for thought.

What are the causes of underperforming content?

There could be many reasons why your content is not doing well, but the brutal truth is often simple: in most cases, your content is simply not good enough and does not deserve to rank in the top organic positions.

Having said that, here are the most common reasons why your content may be underperforming: they are in no particular order and I will highlight the most important, in my opinion.

Your content does not match the user intent

Based on my experience, this is a very important thing that even experienced marketers still get wrong. It may be the case that your content is good and relevant to your users, but does not match the intent that Google is showcasing in the SERP for the keywords of focus.

As SEOs, our aim should be to match user intent, which means we first need to understand the what and the who before defining the how. Whose intent we are targeting and what is represented in the SERP will define the strategy we use to get there.

Example: webmasters who hope to rank for a “navigational or informational” keyword with a transactional, page or vice versa.

Your content isn’t in the ideal format Google is prioritizing

Google may be favoring a certain type of format which your content doesn’t conform to, hence it isn’t receiving the expected visibility.

Example: you hope to rank with a text-heavy blog post for a “how to” keyword where Google is prioritizing video content.

Your content is way too “thin” compared to what is ranking

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of content length (there is no proven content length formula out there, trust me) but more relevance and comprehensiveness. It may be the case that your content is simply not as compelling as other sites out there, hence Google prioritizing those over you.

Example: you hope to rank for heavily competitive informational keywords with a 200-words blog post.

Your content isn’t as up-to-date

If your content is very topical, and such a topic heavily depends on information which may change with time, then Google will reward sites that put effort into keeping the content fresh and up-to-date. Apart from search engines themselves, users really care about fresh content — no one wants to read an “SEO guide to improve underperforming content” that was created in 2015!

Example: certain subjects/verticals tend to be more prone to this issue, but generally anything related to regulations/laws/guidelines which tend to change often.

Your content is heavily seasonal or tied to a past event/experience

Self-explanatory: if your content is about something that occurred in the past, generally the interest for that particular subject will gradually decrease over time. There are exceptions, of course (god save the 90s and my fav Netflix show “The Last Dance”), but you get the gist.

Example: topics such as dated events or experiences (Olympics 2016, past editions of Black Friday, and so on) or newsworthy content (2016 US election, Kanye running for president — no wait that is still happening...).

Your tech directives have changed the page’s indexation status

If something happens to your page that makes it fall out of Google’s index. The most common issues could be: unexpected no-index tag, canonical tag, incorrect hreflang tags, page status changes, page removed with Google Search Console’s remove tool, and so on.

Example: after some SEO recommendations, your devs mistakenly put a no-index tag on your page without you realizing.

Your page is victim of duplication or cannibalization

If you happen to cover the same or similar keyword topic with multiple pages, this may trigger duplication and/or cannibalization, which ultimately will result in a loss of organic visibility.

Example: you launch a new service page alongside your current offerings, but the on-page focus (metadata, content, linking structure) isn’t different or unique enough and it ends up cannibalizing your existing visibility.

Your page has been subject to JavaScript changes that make the content hard to index for Google

Let’s not go into a JavaScript (JS) rabbit hole and keep it simple: if some JS stuff is happening on your page and it’s dynamically changing some on-page SEO elements, this may impact how Google indexes your content.

Example: fictitious case where your site goes through a redesign, heavy JS is now happening on your browser and changing a key part of your content that now Google cannot render easily — that is a problem!

Your page has lost visibility following drastic SERP changes

The SERP has changed extensively in the last few years, which means many more new features that are now present weren’t there before. This may cause disruption to previous rankings (hence to your previous CTR), or make your pages fall out of Google’s precious page one.

Also, don’t forget to consider that the competition might have gotten stronger with time, so that could be another reason why you lose significant visibility.

Example: some verticals have been impacted more than others (jobs, flights, and hotels, for instance) where Google’s own snippets and tools are now getting the top of the SERP. If you are as obsessed with SERP chances, and in particular PAA, as I am and want more details, have a read here.

Your content doesn’t have any backlinks

Without going into too much detail on this point — it could be a separate blog post — for very competitive commercial terms, not having any/too few backlinks (and what backlinks represent for your site in Google’s eyes) can hold you back, even if your page content is compelling on its own. This is particularly true for new websites operating in a competitive environment.

Example: for a challenging vertical like fashion, for instance, it is extremely difficult to rank for key head terms without a good amount of quality (and naturally gained) backlinks to support your transactional pages.

How to find the issues affecting your content

We’ve covered the why above, let’s now address the how: how to determine what issue affects your page/content. This part is especially dedicated to a not-too savvy SEO audience (skip this part and go straight to next if you are after the how-to recommendations).

I’ll go through a list of checks that can help you detect the issues listed above.

Technical checks

Google Search Console

Use the URL inspection tool to analyze the status of the page: it can help you answer questions such as:

Has my page been crawled? Are we even allowing Google to crawl the page?

Has my page been indexed? Are we even allowing Google to index the page?

By assessing the Coverage feature, Google will share information about the crawlability and indexability of the page.

Pay particular attention to the Indexing section, where they mention user-declared canonical vs google-selected canonical. If the two differ, it’s definitely worth investigating the reason, as this means Google isn’t respecting the canonical directives placed on the page — check official resources to learn more about this.

Chrome extensions

I love Chrome extensions and I objectively have way too many on my browser…

Some Chrome extensions can give you lots of info on the indexability status of the page with a simple click, checking things like canonical tags and meta robots tags.

My favorite extensions for this matter are:

Portent's SEO Page Review

SEO minion

SEO META in 1 CLICK

JavaScript check

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

Mobile friendly test

Rich snippet results

URL Inspection tool

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

Is the core part of my content visible?

Quick way to do so: find a sentence in your content, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Are internal links visible to Google?

Quick way to do so: find an internal link on the page, use the search function or click CTRL + F with that sentence to see if it’s present in the rendered version of the page.

Can Google access other key elements of the page?

Check for things such as headers (example below with a Brainlabs article), products, pagination, reviews, comments, etc.

Intent and SERP analysis

By analyzing the SERP for key terms of focus, you’ll be able to identify a series of questions that relate to your content in relation to intent, competition, and relevance. All major SEO tools nowadays provide you with tons of great information about what the SERP looks like for whatever keyword you’re analyzing.

For the sake of our example, let’s use Ahrefs and the sample keyword below is “evergreen content”:

Based on this example, these are a few things I can notice:

This keyword triggers a lot of interesting SERP features (Featured Snippet, Top Stories, People also ask)

The top organic spots are owned by very established and authoritative sources (Ahrefs blog, Hubspot, Wordstream etc), which makes this keyword quite difficult to compete for

Here are quick suggestions on what types of checks I recommend:

Understand and classify the keyword of analysis, based on the type of results Google is showing in the SERP: any ads showing, or organic snippets? Are the competing pages mainly transactional or informational?

Check the quality of the sites that are ranking in page one: indicative metrics that can help you gather insights on the quality of each domain (DA/DR) are helpful, the number of keywords those pages are visible for, the estimated traffic per page, and so on.

Do a quick crawl of these pages to bulk check the comprehensiveness of their content and metadata, or manually check some if you prefer that way.

By doing most of these checks, you’ll be able to see if your content is underperforming for any of the reasons previously mentioned:

Content not compelling enough compared to what is ranking on page one

Content in the wrong format compared to what Google is prioritizing

Content is timely or seasonal

Content is being overshadowed by SERP features

Duplication and cannibalization issues

Check out my 2019 post on this subject, which goes into a lot more detail. The quick version of the post is below.

Use compelling SEO tools to understand the following:

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs have been flip-flopping. That is a clear sign that search engines are confused and cannot “easily decide” on what URL to rank for a certain keyword.

whether, for tracked keywords of interest, two or more ranking URLs are appearing at the same time (not necessarily on page one of the SERP). That is a clear signal of duplication/cannibalization.

check your SEO visibility by landing page: if different URLs that rank for very similar keyword permutations, chances are there is a risk there.

last but not least: do a simple site search for keywords of interest in order to get an initial idea of how many pages (that cover a certain topic) have been indexed by Google. This is an insightful preliminary exercise and also useful to validate your worries.

How to fix underperforming content

We’ve covered the most common cases of underperforming content and how to detect such issues — now let’s talk about ways to fix them.

Below is a list of suggested actions to take when improving your underperforming content, with some very valuable links to other resources (mostly from Moz or Google) that can help you expand on individual concepts.

Make sure your page can be crawled and indexed “properly”

Ensure that your page does not fall under any path of blocked resources in Robots.txt

Ensure your page is not provided with a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere (a self-referencing canonical tag is something you may want to consider but not compulsory at all).

Check whether other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL of focus. Irrelevant or poorly-done canonical tags tend to get ignored by Google — you can check if that is the case in the URL Inspection tool.

Ensure your site (not just your page) is free from any non-SEO friendly JavaScript that can alter key on-page elements (such as headers, body content, internal links, etc.).

Ensure your page is linked internally on the site and present in your XML sitemap.

Understand search intent

Search intent is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and there are a lot of great resources on the subject if you want to delve deeper into it.

Put simply, you should always research what the SERP looks like for the topic of interest: by analyzing the SERP and all its features (organic and non), you can get a much better understanding of what search engines are looking for in order to match intent.

By auditing the SERP, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of content is Google favoring here: transactional, navigational, informational?

How competitive are the keywords of focus and how authoritative are those competitors ranking highly for them?

What content format is Google showcasing in the SERP?

How comprehensive should my content be to get a chance to rank in page one?

What keywords are used in the competitor’s metadata?

What organic features should I consider addressing with my content (things like featured snippets, people also ask, top images, etc.)?

Hopefully all the questions above will also give you a realistic view of your chances of ranking on Google’s first page. Don’t be afraid to switch your focus to PPC for some very competitive keywords where your real possibility of organic rankings are slim.

Map your pages against the right keywords

This is a necessary step to make sure you have a clear understanding of not only what keywords you want to rank for, but also what keywords you are eligible to rank for.

Don’t overdo it and be realistic about your ranking possibilities: mapping your page against several keywords variations, all of which show very different SERPs and intents, is not realistic.

My suggestion is to pick two or three primary keyword variations and focus on getting your content as relevant as possible to those terms.

Write great metadata

Title tags are still an incredibly important on-page ranking factor, so dedicate the right time when writing unique and keyword-rich titles.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor anymore, but they still play a part in enticing the user to click on a search result. So from a CTR perspective, they still matter.

SEO keyword research is the obvious choice to write compelling metadata, but don’t forget about PPC ad copies — check what PPC ad copies work best for your site and take learnings from them.

Don’t change metadata too often, though: make sure you do your homework and give enough time to properly test new metadata, once implemented.

Make the right content amends

Based on the intent audit and keyword mapping insights, you’re now ready to work on your actual page content.

By now, you’ve done your homework, so you just need to focus on writing great content for the user (and not for Google).

Readability is a very important part of a page. Tricks that I’ve learned from colleagues over the years are the following:

Read the content out loud and try to objectively assess how interesting it is for your target audience.

Make sure to use enough spacing between lines and paragraphs. People’s attention span these days is very short, and chances are people will skim through your content rather than dedicating 100% of their attention to it (I’m sure some of YOU readers are doing it right now!).

Make sure your tone of voice and language match your target audience (if you can write things in plain English vs. highly technical jargon, do so and don’t over-complicate your life).

Make sure you’ve thought about all internal linking possibilities across the site. Not only for the same type of page (transactional page to transactional page, for instance) but also across different types (transactional page to video/blog post, if that helps people make a decision, for example).

Optional step: once everything is ready, request indexing of your page in Google Search Console with the URL inspection tool.

Final thoughts

Underperforming content is a very common issue and should not take you by surprise, especially considering that content is considered among (if not the) most important ranking factors in 2020. With the right tools and process in place, solving this issue is something everyone can learn: SEO is not black magic, the answer tends to be logical.

First, understand the cause(s) for your underperforming content. Once you’re certain you’re compliant with Google’s technical guidelines, move on to determining what intent you’re trying to satisfy. Your research on intent should be comprehensive: this is what’s going to decide what changes you’ll need to make to your content. At that point, you’ll be ready to make the necessary SEO and content changes to best match your findings.

I hope this article is useful! Feel free to chat about any questions you may have in the comments or via Twitter or LinkedIn.

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