Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, and today we're on to part 22 of our SEO A to Z, where we're going to cover SEO testing to snippet. So let's talk about SEO testing.

Seo testing involves making changes to your site and testing what the effects of these are on your SEO. Now, this can be hard to work out if changes you've made have caused the changes in traffic levels that you detect, or whether it was just changes that would have occurred anyway because of ranking algorithm updates or other outside factors. That could have also happened. Now you can do more scientific SEO testing if you've got large numbers of very similar pages, such as, if you're an e-commerce site, you have a large number of product pages are the same core template, design and page features. In this case, what you can do is you can create a new product page designs and content, but only apply them to a subset of your pages and keep the rest the same as the original. Then you can monitor the two sets of pages over time and see how they perform in the SERPs and in terms of how much traffic they receive, and this can then give you data that is much more statistically significant as to how well these changes you've tried have performed. And there are platforms out there that will help you do this. If you're like enterprise level, you might want to look at search pilot, founded by Will Critchlow, who are very, very good and can provide an awful lot of help and consultancy in terms of using their software and sort of sorting it out. If you want to do more sort of do it yourself if your budget isn't in the multiple thousands per month then seotestingcom. They offer a whole range of services that and tools that might help you do this. But even if you don't do that, always experiment, do, do tests. You'll learn more by trying things out and just seeing what works and what doesn't work than anything else you can try. So, whether it's at the scientific level or whether you're just learning yourself, then just do give it a go.

Next up, we've got SERP, s-e-r-p, the SERP. People talk about the SERPs a lot but it's just short for search engine results pages. So you know any search engine result page from google is called the SERPs. And now we've got another SERP SERP clustering. So SERP clustering is a method of keyword clustering that clusters keywords based on them having organic search engine results in common. So the basic process is to search Google for every keyword you want to cluster in a list of keywords. You record all the web pages that each keyword ranks for on the first page of the results and after you've got the ranking data for every keyword, you compare each keyword against every other keyword and see how many ranking web pages they have in common. So it's a big comparison exercise and if two keywords of, say, X or more keywords in common and three is usually a good number for X then you can consider them to be clustered.

Now, because we've actually do keyword clustering as part of the tools that we have accused people use, so you can use keywords. People find a whole load of questions, a whole load of keywords, and then cluster them together. Where we'll do this process for you? Where we'll go? We'll do all the searches for all the different keywords, record all the URLs that rank for them and then do that comparison process for you and work out the clusters. It's a really, really excellent way of finding what questions, what keywords, should be answered together on the same clustered pages, rather than creating individual pages for each one, because a lot of the time google wants to um, you know, wants to rank pages which have got very tightly related keywords and questions together. So that's keyword clustering and SERP clustering in particular. There are other types of keyword clustering which aren't as effective in my opinion. You know NLP clustering and a whole bunch of other ones, but they don't tend to work as well as SERP clustering. Just just try them, compare the results, you'll be amazed.

Next, we've got server logs. So server logs refer to the logs that your web server will keep on the physical server, and they're usually access logs and error logs. So access logs record all the requests made to your web server and error logs record any time your web server encountered an error. Now, access logs are a great source to see how and where users and crawlers like Googlebot are accessing and exploring your website and you'll see things don't get picked up in many analytics packages by looking at your access logs. And also error logs are good Just to keep on top and make sure that your site's performing right. Anything that's going wrong in the error logs you want to make sure to get actioned because you might have an issue with your site. So server logs are a really valuable source of information.

Share of voice is the next we've got. So share of voice is a metric that looks how visible your website is in the organic search results compared to your competitors, and this can be used in conjunction with a content gap analysis to see what opportunities are. Opportunities are to increase share of voice. Now, keywords people use. If you've done a clustering process, we have a thing called a topical authority score, because this is a kind of a similar metric that we have, because, obviously, when we do a clustering process that we just just discussed when we talked about circ clustering that gets all this information about all the different sites and all the different pages that are ranking across the topic area that you've given a load of keywords for, and this is where you can see who, which sites, have the greatest share of voice for the topic that you're aiming at. So it's a really good place to see, actually, who are the competitors, who are the people I'm trying to beat here, and you can also go there and see, get further inspiration and further ideas of where you can take your content, um and and where you can go next with your content when you see what other competitors are doing and this is something that happens quite a lot enterprise level companies will be interested in their share of voice because if they can compare themselves with their competitors, they're looking for that a how much of the the search market in their area are they capturing and what areas are they not capturing so well? So, yeah, that's what share a voice is.

Next up, we have short tail, which is the opposite of the long tail, when it comes to keywords, also known as head terms, and these are keywords which have a huge amount of volume, but they're usually very broad in terms of intent. So example head terms and these are keywords which have a huge amount of volume, but they're usually very broad in terms of intent. So example head terms will be broadband, laptops, history. They're named head terms because they're at the head of a graph of short of search volume and at the opposite end of the graph to the long tail queries. So that's why opposite of long tail, short tail really means head term.

Next we've got site links now. Site links, these are the additional links to other pages on a site which appear under some search results. So if you are considered a real, real big authority for the, for the term that you're searching for, google might show as well as the, the main link that it shows. It might also show some site links for you as well. So these are the alternative links to other sections of your site. Happens quite frequently If you search for an exact domain name, it will give you those site links for a site, but it can appear under other ones. There were times when broadbandcouk, where we had site links for the term broadband and reviews as well. I think we also at one point had site links for. You seem to see them a little less nowadays, just anecdotally, when it comes to non-domain specific or non-brand specific terms. But if you want to see them in action, you just search for a domain or a brand and you quite often get them there.

Next we have sitemapxml. So sitemapxml is a list, formatted in xml format, of all the pages on your website that you'd like Google to index. You typically will be fired a link to your sitemapxml in your robotstxt file, but you can also submit it directly to Google via the Google Search Console. Most CMS systems like WordPress can create and update sitemapxml files for you, or you can create them by hand. If you really really want to, or if you're building a site from scratch programmatically, you might use um, a programmatic means, to generate a sitemapxml. It's really valuable to make sure that you get google to see all the pages that you want indexing, so I would suggest you're looking to get in a sitemapxml setup, if you haven't already.

Next, we've got a sitewide link. A site-wide link is an identical link on every page of a website that points to a third-party site. Google doesn't like this. If they're paid for or if there's payment in any kind, such as a web developer putting a designed-by-style link in the footer of every page of their client's site Unless there's a very genuine reason for the link, then they're usually best avoided because they can be problematic like that. I still see some people using them and hopefully for them that it's working well for them, but just be careful with site-wide links.

Finally, today we've got snippet. Now, a snippet in google is a description or short summary that google uses anywhere. It lists your site in the search engine results pages, so sometimes google will use your page meta description for the snippet. Other times it will make its own snippet, most often from page content that it's deemed is more relevant than the meta description you've used. Or if you haven't used a meta description, then it will create this snippet for you.

And yeah, that's it for today. That's everything we're going to cover today, as always. I hope it's useful. Let me know if you think there's anything I've missed. It would be really fantastic, if you've got this far, if you've enjoyed it, that you could leave us a review on the podcast platform that you are downloading this from, if you could subscribe again. That also helps. These kind of metrics help the podcast platforms decide whether we're worth promoting for the people or not, and it's great if we can increase the reach of the podcast because it I'm here. I'm here to make content for listeners. So if you can help in any way by doing that subscribing and leaving a review I would really appreciate it. So, yeah, anyway, thanks again for listening and I'll see you next time.

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that, you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeoplesusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

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