Ask An SEO: How To Repair & Recover Negative Brand Mentions In SERPs via @sejournal, @MordyOberstein

This time on Ask An SEO, we’re diving into a branding question from someone dealing with negative SERP results:

I have a client that recently had some financial issues and the SERP for their brand has many negative listings.

Do you have any ideas for a strategy that could help to remove those listings and improve their brand status?

There are two ways to approach this. There’s the practical things in your immediate control and there’s the wider brand relationship that needs mending. I’ve very much been here before.

Folks will tend to lean into the changes you can make that are in your immediate locus of control.

For example, start posting on X (Twitter), and you’ll get a carousel for your posts on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This carousel can push “negative” results off page one.

The problem with this sort of approach is that it’s not entirely effective.

For starters, it has limited reach (yes, your posts will appear in a carousel, but not on every SERP related to your brand).

Also, it doesn’t deal with the very top of the SERP, and who knows what actual result you’re pushing to page two – maybe it’s one that is favorable to your brand?

While I’m not saying you should not do whatever you can do in the immediate, I would caution you about getting too caught up in it.

What you need to be doing is thinking about how you repair your relationship with your niche.

Brands fail here all the time. I’ve seen it firsthand. So, I have a few pieces of key advice you need to follow if you want to fix your brand’s SERP for real.

1. You Have To Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone

The main reason brands fail at this is because it’s uncomfortable.

The biggest piece of advice I can offer you is to be ready and willing to get out of your comfort zone.

You’re going to have to eat crow in some way, shape, or form. You can’t wrong someone and then not apologize. You may feel you did nothing wrong or that it was out of your control or whatever.

I warn you not to get hung up on this. Your audience feels hurt – that is all that matters.

You need to somehow repair that hurt, and it’s going to mean eating some form of humble pie. And everyone loves pie, so it’s OK.

2. You Have To Diagnose The Root Cause Of The Negative Sentiment

Often, the knee-jerk reaction brands have is to “market their way” out of a problem. They launch campaigns or initiatives that aim to create new buzz and new chatter that is more positive. This doesn’t work.

You can’t do any of that until you diagnose the root cause. What you’re looking for here is (among other things):

• What event (or series of happenings) triggered the negative response?
• How did this trigger impact the audience? (You need to be extremely specific and explicit here. Generalizations are not helpful).
• Why did this trigger the industry to such an extent? (Again, be explicit here).
• How toxic is the relationship? You need to know how damaged the relationship is, and you have to be consciously aware of it.

3. You Have To Be Transparent

This speaks a bit to my earlier point about getting out of your comfort zone. You are rebuilding trust. That’s hard. It takes time, and it takes substance (so my fourth tip would be: actually change, just don’t say you did). It’s a process.

You need to reinforce to your audience that you are constantly engaging in that process and that you don’t take their trust for granted.

If this sounds like some sort of Dr. Phil episode, it’s because it is. Humans are humans. The relationships that brands have with their audience work just the way our personal relationships do.

If you violated someone’s trust on a personal level, you would need to show you’re doing the work to earn their trust back.

That means a new level of transparency and vulnerability is needed.

Same for your brand. There is zero difference.

Changing The Narrative Sets Everything Else In Motion

The end result of this process, if you do the work to create engagement and audience interest (which is a whole other conversation about how you do that), is exactly what you’re looking for.

What you really want is not to have a result change or an article rewritten. What you want is for the narrative to shift.

Once the narrative shifts, the rest falls into place. People start talking about you in a positive way (even referencing how amazing it is you turned it all around). They’ll even start writing articles about you or mentioning you, etc.

At that point, once the narrative has shifted and the industry has clearly reassociated how they think and feel about you, you can pick up the stragglers.

Then, you can reach out to those sites that still have not updated their content to reflect the “new you.”

You now have the capital and the inertia to put an unspoken pressure on sites to change their content.

If everyone else is thinking about you a certain way and talking about you a certain way, and if you’ve gained a bit of popularity, those stragglers are not going to want to be left behind (or, at a minimum, running against the grain and consensus).

Now, you have the real power to change the listings on the SERP, no matter who is ranking or what the query is.

Change narratives, not organic listings.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ask An SEO: How Long Does It Take For Schema To Rank? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from Mariya from Irinjalakuda, India, who asks:

“How much time does it take for schema to go live on a SERP?”

Great question Mariya, and an easy one to answer.

Schema “goes live” on a search engine ranking position immediately once the search engine has refreshed its current version of the page which includes a crawl and the index updating with the new code. Once this happens the new code with the schema deployed is shown.

For authoritative pages that get crawled and refreshed regularly, it could be a few hours. With newer sites, it could be a week or two. But schema does not help you rank. The job of schema is to help search engines know what the page is about, what is in each section of the page, and in some cases, why the page should be trusted.

A common misconception about schema is that it is a ranking signal or a magic bullet that helps you gain positions algorithmically.

It does not, adding FAQ schema (which was deprecated and is no longer used by Google at least) did not help you get featured in people also ask results. Instead, it would help search engines know when to add relevant questions under your site’s listing in the SERP which extended the depth of a listing.

If your pages are not already ranking, and the content quality is not good, schema isn’t going to help you. If you do have rankings, deploying proper schema may give you more visibility via featured snippets and rich results.

When FAQ schema did exist, the questions nested to your search result would help you stand out from the pack, so some users may click on your listing vs. the one above you because you were more visible.

Schema can also help recipe sites that have high trust and a great UX to get their recipes shown in a carousel.

If you have a page where the video is the predominant content on the page, and the video matches the topic including the title and H1, using video object schema will signal to the search engine that you have a video about that topic. That video may start to show up at the top of the search results, inside a “people also ask”, “things to know”, or videos search result.

That is where schema can help with SEO, but increased rankings from schema on its own are unlikely.

Schema isn’t there to help you rank, it is there to help search engines know:

• What your page is about.
• Who created the content or information within the page.
• Which queries to show your pages for include informational, service and leads, ecommerce shopping, comparisons, and reviews, as well as music, images, videos, sounds, and media.
• The types of visitors may have the best experience with that specific page or a section of the page.
• Where you offer services, the times you offer them, and who they’re best for.

If you’re a local business, you can deploy area served schema to show the area you offer services for. If you operate during specific hours, and modify them for the holidays, this can be shown through schema.

Organization schema lets you associate your brand with your social media channels, reference third parties like wiki data to build associations with what your company or publication offers topically, and allow authors, executives, and others to show credibility if they’re known and notable.

But if your website is not a trusted resource, and your pages do not already rank, schema is not going to help you much. When you do have trust for your website, you still have to hope that the search engine will pay attention to the code and consider it. Knowledge panels for example could be influenced by schema, but also by third-party sites.

One thing I look for, after updating a page is the refresh and discover report in Google Search Console. Discover is when Google is looking to discover new pages, and refresh is when it is looking to see if you’ve updated the content of the page. The report contains a date, which is helpful.

Once it has been refreshed, look to see if any changes are currently showing up in search results. If you modified the title tag, for example, you could see when the new one begins showing, assuming Google doesn’t write its own for you. The same goes for the meta description. I also use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to show when featured snippets and rich results start to populate.

By paying attention to crawl data including discover and refresh, and making sure your site has a good user experience on every page, not just a few, chances are your schema is going to be picked up regularly, and even same day.

I hope this helps answer your question, and thank you for reading.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal 

Ask An SEO: What To Do When Your SEO Formula Doesn’t Work? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This month’s Ask an SEO question comes from Heather, who asks:

“Do you find that, sometimes, even your best formula to rank doesn’t make sense? I advise employment lawyers on how to write. However, I find the “formula” doesn’t seem to work. Have you found you can’t even to get it to work? Loaded question, but I hope you know what I mean.”

Great question, Heather, and it’s not as loaded as it originally sounds. It’s an easy one to resolve when you don’t overthink it.

When you use the same approach for law firm SEO or any niche SEO, you’re creating the same experience for the search engines.

Search engines need the best experience – not the same. That’s why using similar strategies doesn’t work.

Look how each law firm is unique and use that as a strength.

Identify who in the practice can become part of the brand (including any partners with media potential), what their specialties are, and how to approach each law firm’s strategy differently.

The answer below also applies to ecommerce, service providers like your clients, and publishers, so this post benefits all readers.

But I will stick to lawyers since that is the example our inquirer mentioned. If someone wants ecommerce or another topic, feel free to submit it, and I’ll be happy to respond.

Why SEO Formulas Fall Short For Law Firms

The reason the same SEO formula does not work, even if they’re the same type of lawyers is because each firm is unique.

Unique in this sense is having licensed attorneys nationally and providing full coverage.

Some could be multi-location vs. single location in a city or state, and others can be a boutique law shop specializing in one niche. Each will have different needs and different abilities, so the formula has to change.

If you’re not creating original and unique strategies for each and every law firm client, you’re not giving search engines like Google a reason to show them. That is why the formula doesn’t work, and your clients are at a disadvantage.

Larger law firms have extra people to talk to the media; they can go out and litigate and get backlinks from the cases.

Firms with multiple locations have more Google Business Profile opportunities and more abilities to do community work and gain exposure.

They’ll also need individual location pages vs. a single location, providing them with more localized content for city-based queries. And firms that have won cases that go viral in their space may get media attention.

This results in an increase in branded searches and backlinks, which leads to easier SEO for competitive terms.

The clientele is also different. If the employment firm handles small business or personal injury vs. enterprise corporations and big four accounting, the language levels and terminology need to change because you’re writing for people using different jargon and language levels.

If it is an NGO vs. for-profit, there are other phrases and rules they need to follow. This means the writing levels, types of sourcing, and information they’re providing have to be different as the clientele and type of audience they want are different.

Going for huge corporate accounts means having content for the assistants that meet their needs when they research, and the executives where you have summaries that make sense as to why they’re searching for a law firm.

They have a general counsel that will review your casework and look for something completely different.

If it’s a small business, it’s easier to adjust to a single page that talks to the owner and builds their confidence. Same niche, different target audience, different site experience need a unique strategy.

Here are some of the ways I’d tweak the SEO strategy for law firms, if I only worked in one specific niche. Then, I’d implement unique strategies on top of it based on attracting their specific target clients, not in general.

Build Digital PR And Trust

I’m not talking about link building here; I’m talking about building a brand. When the lawyers and partners are known entities, it carries over and can help build brand trust.

Larger cities like New York, Chicago, or Dallas have more opportunities than smaller towns, but each region has media opportunities.

Build a list of media companies, bloggers, and community resources, including city and town-run government forums, and see who talks about employment and employment law.

Now, look at the topics they cover. It could be anything from discrimination to hiring, job loss and layoffs, or employee and employer rights.

These are hot topics year-round and opportunities to get your clients featured. Once they go through media training, get them on TV, in columns as experts, and on stage at community forums as experts.

This results in natural backlinks when done correctly, and it leads to people searching for them by name and brand, which may signal to the search engines there is something to it.

If your client wins a case that is relevant to the topic the journalist covers, feature it as a recent blog post or PR article so the journalist has extra incentive to use it as a subject matter expert.

Once your client is a known entity and the leader in their area, their profile on the law firm’s website will become a place that attracts links, maybe a knowledge panel, and there may be markup available to help with this.

Enhance Visibility With Schema

You’ll want an organization schema with legal service (it also applies to local businesses) and area served. For single locations, cover their city, state, or where they’re licensed and provide services.

If multi-location, deploy service area schema on each location page. And don’t forget there is attorney schema, too.

Because you work with employment law firms, you may want to add references to this page on Wiki data or the matching one on Wikipedia from the additional type to build relevance to the type of legal services offered.

Optimize Google Business Profile

If they have physical locations, create Business Profile pages and do your best to get customers to leave reviews and feedback.

You want to fill out all pages just like normal, and if clients want to know if you want them to say anything, emphasize specific tasks and common situations you resolved for them.

And if others have asked questions about their law firms, your clients can answer questions based on their experiences.

Make sure to fill out all the services offered and fields. The more you give the search engine accurate and updated information, the better it can do to show your clients.

Develop Distinctive Copy

The content should not be the same strategy for each client even if they have the same types of customers.

You, as an SEO, need to create a completely unique content plan and ensure that others are not doing the same thing.

Google only needs one resource, so the same strategy for two similar law firms means only one can win, or neither will if both are the same because a third firm is going to be unique and take over.

It is easy to develop strategies for a unique experience.

Have the law firms publish their success stories as informational guides and in the reading and writing level of the customer.

Both will have unique brands and voices, and use those to cater to their potential customers.

Do not have them say what they did for their clients; have them talk about the issue the client had and the steps taken to resolve it.

By sharing the issue that was being faced and using the words their customers use, the law firm is speaking their client’s language.

This helps create a resource that potential leads will find when they’re searching for solutions to their current situation.

By providing a resource that includes common misconceptions, pitfalls to avoid, and the ways the happy client reached a solution, the law firm is building trust and can generate a lead when the person finishes reading.

Ensure Testimonial Relevance

One of the largest oversights I see with law firm SEO and conversion optimization is outdated and irrelevant testimonials.

This can also be a unique copy and a trust builder. Make sure all testimonials are:

• Matched to the theme or topic of the page they are on and not sitewide.
• Are from similar customers to the clients the firm wants by name, company size, and job type.
• Explain the success of the specific legal situation that matches the call to action so the potential client knows you have experience resolving legal issues for their needs.
• Each one is up-to-date and accurate. You don’t want potential clients to think your law firm hasn’t won a case in years or isn’t familiar with current employment law best practices.

The bottom line is that you cannot use the same strategy for each practice as each is unique, and search engines only need one of the same experiences.

All of your law firm clients will need title tags, schema, and content, but the PR work, copy on the pages, and authority building have to be original and play to their strengths so the pages meet the needs of their future clients.

If you’re not creating original and unique strategies for each and every law firm client, you’re not giving search engines like Google a reason to show them.

That is why the same SEO formula doesn’t work when applied to multiple clients. I hope this helps.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal 

Ask An SEO: Should I Point Guest Post Backlinks To Homepages Or Individual Ones? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Nazim from Islamabad, who asks:

“I have a price comparison/aggregator website with my country’s domain. I want to ask what type of backlinks/guests posts should I have (local/international).

Also, I should build backlinks to my homepage or category/individual pages, too? Besides are (name removed) and (name removed) authentic platforms for backlinks building?”

Great question, Nazim, and happy to help.

I’m breaking the answer into three sections: The first is guest posting in general, then the homepage or category and individual pages, and the last is where to get quality links.

The first two have a TL;DR if you’re short on time. Otherwise, there’s a longer explanation if you want the thoughts or SEO theory behind it.

I’d like to emphasize where to get backlinks before going into the rest of the post.

Where To Get Backlinks

If you want backlinks that can move the needle and build stability, it comes down to quality and natural backlinks. This means the website should:

• Not list that they allow guest posting or advertorials anywhere (except in the case of mass media as advertorials are clearly marked).
• Only allow vetted and knowledgeable contributors who are invited to write columns.
• Have quality control policies in place, including using proper link attributes like “sponsored, nofollow, etc.”
• Not link to topically irrelevant sites externally, and definitely not the big P’s (porn, payday, pills, personal loans, etc.) unless you’re in those industries.
• Make it hard to get an actual link (social media, forums, and blog comments allow anyone to post, and many allow links, so they are not earned or hard to get).

You can get quality links from:

• Local media sites and blogs for local businesses.
• Industry and trade publications.
• Niche websites and content creators.
• National media in directly relevant and non-affiliate sections.
• PR stunts and events that have direct tie-ins (not scholarships or grants) to your actual products and services (don’t do a surfboarding scholarship and expect to rank long-term).

Guest Posting For Backlinks

TL;DR: Guest posting has its place, but it should not be used to build backlinks because guest posts are not earned.

Guest posting can build trust in you as an expert or brand authority and drive an audience to your website who is interested in the content you produce, the products you sell, or the services you offer.

Guest posting should only be done on topically relevant websites with an active audience, where audience acquisition – not backlinks – is the goal.

When Not To Do Guest Posting

The first thing is that guest posting and link database providers, based on my experience, are red flags SEO-wise and should not be used.

That doesn’t mean good ones don’t exist. Think about it this way.

If you’re using the same systems as everyone else, and it’s the same sites, or there’s a low cost to entry, your links are likely going to be part of a PBN (private blog network, also known as link farms, link wheels, link exchange networks, etc.) or easily mapped network.

The search engines will ignore these links, and you will waste your time and money.  Other times, they could lead to an action against your website because they are not natural.

More importantly, if you can get into or see a list of them, do you think search engines cannot access them?

There are third-party tools like Majestic SEO that database and map these all the time.

If they’re able to find PBNs and guest posting rings as an independent company, Google, Bing, and giant corporations can likely do it at a much larger scale.

If these sites allow themselves to be listed in databases and actively allow guest posting or link selling because they make money from it, they’re likely going to be ignored or eventually cause a manual action for unnatural link building.

Instead, focus on links other sites do not have and that are not part of these systems or platforms.

Getting the links nobody else has from topically relevant websites and genuine non-pay-to-play websites helps move the needle, especially if the site is a trusted authority in your niche.

When To Guest Post

If you decide guest posting is part of your business plan, focus on websites that are topically relevant to your industry and have your users as subscribers.

The website should also have a readership base that comes back at least once a week to read new content that has been published.

Search Engine Journal is a good example.

I do not use it to build backlinks to my blog, but I do contribute because one of the services my marketing agency offers is SEO.

Marketers engage with SEJ’s webinars, podcasts, newsletter blasts, social media, and they check back for new content.

By contributing via the columns, I’m reaching an audience of marketers, which is my target audience.

Some of you also write and ask how to subscribe and get access as I publish new content (thank you, by the way; I let the editorial staff know).

Being a columnist allows me to build trust with the readership who checks back. I don’t do it for backlinks, and I don’t think I’ve ever sourced my site from one of my articles.

If there is a link, it was added by its editors because they thought my resource was high enough quality, and they didn’t have one of their own.

Linking To The Homepage Or A Category Page

TL;DR: Link to your homepage and not a category page.

Categories do not provide more information or value; category page links are used to game the system and work against you. Categories will rank naturally when the rest of the website is trustworthy.

For guest posts and backlinks to feel natural, you should be referencing your own brand and homepage.

The alternate is if you have a resource, and the site you’re pitching does not have an equal one, get the link to your resource as it is original and the only one available.

Longer Explanation

I always recommend homepage links off of the brand when it comes to link building, especially with guest posting.

Being a brand that people search sends a very strong signal you’re an authority to algorithms.

When people search for your site by name, they’ll likely also add modifiers to the query, such as colors, sizes, adjectives, brands, etc.

These modifiers signal why people go to your website.

It could be the best recipe for brownies for health conditions like diabetes, which color of paint makes sense for a contemporary living room, or the right brand of servers and racks are needed for a data center.

These modifiers with your brand let the search engines know that if they want the person searching to keep using their engine, they need to crawl and index more of your website to find the specific page or category their searcher was looking for.

If the search engine only had your homepage indexed, but the person wants a specific product line, the search engine makes their user work harder than other search engines by having users search for the pages.

Here’s an example. If you sell wall paint, and the search engines only had your homepage, they would give that result as people search for your company by name.

Suddenly, the color you developed became the color of the year; now, people are searching for your brand plus the name of the color or the numeric mix to find it.

By not crawling and indexing your site, it cannot surface that specific page, but other search engines do.

If other search engines surface that specific color, they win the user. When more users search because the engine has better results, the search engine can show more ads.

The more ads they show, the more money they make. So, build your brand + modifiers.

When someone adds your brand plus “blue,” “washable,” “kitchen,” and other modifiers, the search engine will know it needs to explore further to keep the searcher coming back.

In the above scenario, winning the award or recognition will naturally build backlinks because your product or service won something of value. The same with the photograph of the year, holiday toy of the year, etc.

There’s a lot more to it, and this is where branding comes into play.

Once you’re a known brand or destination site that consumers trust, there’s a better chance that bloggers, journalists, and others will link to your category, review, blog posts, and comparison pages naturally.

If you do it from a guest post, it may count for a while, but it will also likely backfire, as you are giving yourself a backlink, not something earned.

Linking off of your brand gets that branded search going.

Search engines make their money by selling ad space. They can only sell ad space if users are searching. If they give bad results, fewer people will continue using their search engines, which is why they need to focus on quality.

Guest posting for backlinks is a bad idea.

Yes, it works until you get caught, so if you’re doing it for backlinks, always have a second and third strategy to offset the guest posting links.

If you want to do a churn and burn site where you grow it to sell fast, guest posting and PBNs can be a great strategy for you, but it is at the buyer’s expense who will pay the price.

When you want a website that makes money and generates steady revenue, go with evergreen and quality links instead of gimmicks and easy-to-trace techniques like guest posting.

I hope this helps.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal 

Ask An SEO: Why Are My Pages Discovered But Not Indexed? via @sejournal, @HelenPollitt1

Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Mandeep, who is having trouble with indexing on their site.

Mandeep asks:

“We have redesigned a website and we had added a few new pages. Some pages were indexed successfully and some were not.

I tried multiple times on Google but that is not working. Now, while I submit the URL to index, it is showing this error via Google Search Console: Discovered – currently not indexed […]

I have tried everything but nothing is working. Please help me resolve this issue.”

This warning is coming from the “Pages” section of the “Indexing” report in Google Search Console. This report gives users insight into what pages Google has crawled and indexed and the problems it may have encountered doing so.

The report will give details of pages that have been successfully crawled and indexed. It also lists reasons why the pages on the site have not been indexed.

Is It A Problem If A Page Isn’t Indexed?

Most sites have pages that are not indexed. These are oftentimes at the request of the website owner.

For example, a page might be deliberately excluded from the search engine indexes by way of an HTML “noindex” tag on the page, or perhaps it is being blocked from crawling in the robots.txt file.

URLs that have been purposely excluded from indexing will appear within this report, as well as pages with problematic indexing issues.

In general, it can take some time for a new page on a website to be crawled and indexed. A new page taking time to show up among the “indexed” pages on the report is not always a sign of an issue.

Not every reason within the “Why pages aren’t indexed” report needs to be addressed.

Indexing Issues

Google will not crawl and index every URL it finds. Your main concern as a website manager is that the pages that you wish to be available as a search result are indexed.

Essentially, if they are not indexed, they will not be eligible to be a search result.

There are several reasons within the “Why pages aren’t indexed” report that do suggest an issue on the site that should be investigated. For example, “Server error (500)” and “Soft 404.”

These flags may not necessarily be a problem for the individual URLs if they aren’t ones you want to have indexed, but they can indicate a wider issue with the site.

What Is “Discovered – Currently Not Indexed”?

“Discovered – currently not indexed” is an error that Google flags for URLs that it knows about but has not indexed.

What is important to remember is that URLs will not appear in this bucket if they can fit within another in the report.

For example, a page with a noindex tag may technically have been discovered by Google and not indexed, but it would appear in the “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” bucket, so pages within the “Discovered – currently not indexed” bucket are there for another reason.

The explanation Google gives for a URL appearing as “Discovered – currently not indexed” is:

“The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report.”

Google tries to make its bots crawl conscientiously.

That is, as Googlebot is not the only visitor to a site, and maybe one among many bots crawling it, it doesn’t want to crash the site by sending too many “requests” to the server.

What Might Be Causing A URL To Be “Discovered – Currently Not Indexed”?

There are two main reasons a page is known to Google but not indexed. John Muller gave details about these in 2023.

Essentially, alongside the concerns around the server’s capacity to withstand crawling, page quality is also considered.

Now, if a page has not been crawled, how can Google know its quality? Well, it can’t. What it can do is make assumptions based on the quality of the pages elsewhere on the site.

That’s right – thin, duplicate, low-value pages elsewhere on your website can affect the indexation of your core pages.

How To Fix The Issue

There is no quick fix to move a page from “Discovered – currently not indexed” to “Indexed,” but there are several solutions you can try.

Check If The Page Is Actually Indexed

The first port of call is to determine if the Google Search Console report is accurate and up to date.

In the top right-hand corner of the report, you will see the “Last updated” date. This gives you an idea of whether the report might be outdated.

Next, go to Google and perform a site:[yourwebsitedomain] inurl:[the URL slug of the page you want to index] search.

If the page is returned as a search result, then you know it is actually indexed.

Give the report some time to get updated, and it will start appearing under the “Indexed” section and not in the “Discovered – currently not indexed” report.

Check Your Site’s Page Quality

Next, you may want to consider the overall quality of your website, as this could be the reason why Google is not indexing your page.

Remember, quality is not just a measure of the words on your site, their relevance to search queries, and the overall “E-E-A-T” displayed. Instead, Google’s John Muller described it as:

“When it comes to the quality of the content, we don’t mean like just the text of your articles.

It’s really the quality of your overall website.

And that includes everything from the layout to the design.

Like, how you have things presented on your pages, how you integrate images, how you work with speed, all of those factors they kind of come into play there.”

So, review your website with these criteria in mind. How does the quality of your website compare to that of your competitors?

A thorough website audit is a good place to start.

Check For Duplicate Pages

Sometimes, a website might have low-quality or duplicate pages that the website manager has no knowledge of.

For example, a page might be reached via multiple URLs. You might have a “Contact Us” page that exists on both exampledomain.com/contact-us and exampledomain.com/contact-us/.

The URL with and the URL without the “trailing slash” are considered separate pages by Googlebot if it can reach them both, and the server returns a 200 status code. That is, they are both live pages.

There is a possibility that all of your pages may be duplicated in this same way.

You might also have a lot of URL parameters on your website that you are unaware of. These are URLs that contain “query strings,” such as exampledomain.com/dress?colour=red.

They are usually caused by filtering and sorting options on your website. In an ecommerce website, this might look like a product category page that is filtered down by criteria such as color, and able to be sorted by price.

As a result, the main features of the page do not change with this filtering and sorting, just the products listed. These are technically separate, crawlable pages and may be causing a lot of duplicates on your site.

You may think your website only has 100 high-quality pages on it. However, a Googlebot may see hundreds of thousands of near-duplicate pages as a result of these technical issues.

Ways To Fix “Discovered – Currently Not Indexed”

Once you have identified the likely causes of your URL not being indexed, you can attempt to fix it.

If your website has duplicate pages, low-quality, scraped content, or other quality issues, that is where to begin.

As a side benefit, you are likely to see your rankings improve across your pages as you work to fix these issues.

Signify The Page’s Importance

In the example of our opening question, there is a specific page that Mandeep is struggling to get indexed.

In this scenario, I would suggest trying to bolster the page’s importance in the eyes of the search engines. Give them a reason to crawl it.

Add The Page To The Website’s XML Sitemap

One way of showing Google that it is an important page that deserves to be crawled and indexed is by adding it to your website’s XML sitemap.

This is essentially a signpost to all of the URLs that you believe search bots should crawl.

Remember, Googlebot already knows that the page exists; it just doesn’t believe it is beneficial to crawl and index it.

If it is already in the XML sitemap, do not stop there. Consider these next steps.

Add Internal Links To The Page

Another way to show a page’s importance is by linking to it from internal pages on the site.

For example, adding the page to your primary navigation system, like the main menu.

Or add contextual links to it from within the copy on other pages on your website. These will signify to Googlebot that it is a significant page on your website.

Add External Links To The Page

Backlinks – they are a fundamental part of SEO. We’ve known for a while that Google will use links from other websites to determine a page’s relevance and authority to a subject.

If you struggle to show Google that your page is of enough quality to index, then having external links from reputable, relevant websites pointing to it can give additional reassurance of the page’s value.

For example, if the page you are struggling to get indexed is a specific red dress’s product detail page, then having that dress’s page featured in some fashion blogs may give Google the signal that it is a high-quality page.

Submit It To Be Crawled

Once you have made changes to your website, try resubmitting the page to be crawled via Google Search Console.

If you notice in the Google Search Console “Indexing” report that the URL is still within the “Discovered – currently not crawled” bucket after some time (it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for Google to crawl a submitted page), then you know that you potentially still have some issues with the page.

In Summary

Optimize your website for crawling and indexing. If you do this, you are likely to see those pages move from “Discovered – currently not indexed” to “Indexed.”

Optimizing your particular website will require an in-depth analysis of the overall quality of the site and identifying how to convey the importance of the “Discovered – currently not indexed” pages to Googlebot.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ask An SEO: How Can I Make Myself Stand Out As A Strong Candidate For My First Full-time Marketing Role? via @sejournal, @HelenPollitt1

Our question this week is an excellent one for anyone who is looking to start their career in marketing: “How can I make myself stand out as a strong candidate for my first full-time marketing role?”

The job market is tough at the moment. It can be hard to stand out amongst other candidates. It’s even more difficult if you are looking for your first role in the industry.

I’m going to walk through a few ways that you can identify the right role for you, increase your chances of being invited to interview, and demonstrate your suitability for the role to hiring managers.

Finding The Right Opportunities To Apply For

One of the most important steps in standing out amongst a sea of other applicants is making sure you are applying for the right roles.

When you are looking through the job boards or speaking with recruiters, it’s critical that you consider the following:

Do I Want To Be A Specialist Or A Generalist Marketer?

Marketing is an extremely broad industry. It covers online and offline, acquisition and retention, creative and technical – email, paid, organic, CRM, and social.

There are many types of work that can be carried out under the “marketing” umbrella. You may have a clear idea of what type of marketing interests you, or you might still be unsure.

If you are unsure, then it may be a good idea to look at a more generalist role for your first one. This would be one that gives you exposure to different types of marketing. For example, a role that means you’ll be working on a paid ad campaign one day and an email campaign another.

This way, after a few years in the role you’ll have solid experience in a range of disciplines and can make a more informed decision about the direction you want your career to go in.

Having a broad experience also makes it easier for you to work collaboratively with other marketers in the future, as you’ll have an understanding of what their work entails.

In-house Or Agency?

Speak to any marketer, and they will tell you that there are some big differences between working in-house for a brand and working for clients in an agency.

It is worth considering these when looking for your first role. For example, when working as an in-house marketer, you will likely get to really dig deep into marketing for that one industry.

You may be working with other industry specialists and will have the opportunity to learn a lot about how to market to that particular audience.

However, there’s a risk that you may not have many other marketers to learn from. You may be in a team of one or two other marketers, and you may not benefit from the wisdom of a wide range of experienced colleagues. Your stakeholders will be the business’s decision-makers, potentially very senior members of staff.

However, working for an agency gives you exposure to many more industries, businesses and types of activities.

If you are looking to focus on SEO, for example, your likelihood of being involved in complicated SEO processes like migrations and technical audits will increase.

Your stakeholders will mainly be clients, other agencies, and perhaps your agency’s development team. However, you will always be one step removed from the business you are marketing for and the decisions made about it.

Do I Need To Research Marketing Channels Further?

You may need to pause your search for your new role to do some more research. Spend some time looking into the different marketing channels and the skills needed for them.

If you have any connections who are marketers, spend some time speaking to them about what they enjoy about their roles and what their favorite marketing activities are. This way, you can start to get a feel for what roles you might thrive in.

Applying For Roles

Once you have identified the jobs that you are interested in, it’s time to start applying. This is your opportunity for first impressions. There are many guides available on how to structure your resume to show off your skills.

For your first role in the marketing industry, you need to pay attention to the skills listed in the job adverts and make sure you include and demonstrate them in your resume.

That’s tricky to do, though, if this is your first marketing job. So how do you evidence your suitability through your application?

Transferrable Skills

Look at the skills involved in the marketing activities the role would require you to carry out. Read through the job description and pick out any specific behavior traits it mentions. Think back through your recent work or voluntary experience and pick out where those skills overlap with the job requirements.

For example, if you have worked in retail or customer service, you will have likely developed excellent stakeholder management skills. These are always useful for marketing roles. Working as an administrator in an office will have given you experience in meeting tight timelines. Your prize-winning art school submission evidences your creativity!

Whatever your previous experience is, there will most likely be aspects from which you can draw parallels to the requirements of the role you are applying for.

Remember, if you are applying for entry-level marketing roles, the hiring team should be expecting you to have little to no formal work experience within the industry.

Demonstrating that you are aware of what the role entails, and that you have already begun cultivating the skills needed for it will set you apart from a vast number of other candidates.

Voluntary Experience

Voluntary work experience in marketing will help you stand out. It will further demonstrate that you understand different marketing techniques and job requirements. Many charities will be grateful for assistance with their marketing.

If you do this, just make sure that you feel confident enough in your knowledge that you are not going to make serious mistakes or that you will be given a supervisor who can help guide you.

If you can’t find suitable voluntary experience you could try approaching local marketing agencies and seeing if they offer work experience placements.

Even a week of work will give you experience you can include on a resume and, perhaps more importantly, will help you create a network of other marketers.

Get A Resume Check From A Marketing Recruitment Specialist

Finally, if you are unsure that your resume is showcasing all of your transferrable skills and marketing knowledge in a way that is attractive to hiring managers, consider a resume review.

Many recruiters will offer you the opportunity to have your resume reviewed by them for free. Look for ones that specialize in recruiting for marketing roles.

You benefit from their years of experience working with candidates. They may even forward you for any appropriate roles they are recruiting for.

Nailing The Interviews

Remember, if you are applying for the right types of roles, no one is going to expect you to have all the answers during your interview. They will know that you are looking to break into the industry.

I have a lot of experience in hiring marketing interns and early-career colleagues. The candidates who have impressed me the most for these roles are those who have shown that they understand what it entails and can demonstrate a passion for marketing.

These roles have been designed to train new marketers, so the emphasis isn’t on their experience but on their ability to learn and their interest in doing so.

So when you get to your interviews, think about the following.

What Excites You About The Role?

Research each company that you are interviewing with and be ready to talk about why that role interests you.

For example, if you are applying to an agency, you can look at its website and social media accounts to identify some of the clients and industries it works with.

Perhaps its focus on charities appeals to you, or you feel that the opportunity to work with a broad range of companies will help grow your marketing skills quickly.

Take a look at some of the campaigns the agency has carried out or the work it has done to win awards. Speak to the team about specific examples and why you feel that is the sort of work you want to be involved with.

If you are applying to in-house roles, still take a look at their social media and websites. Sign up for their email newsletters.

This will give you an understanding of what sort of marketing they are doing. Perhaps you like the tone of voice they use with their audience or think their most recent email campaign was particularly effective.

Discussing these aspects shows you are interested in their company, but more importantly, that you understand the different marketing levers they are already using.

Where You Have Learned Marketing

Be ready to discuss where you have learned about marketing. This may be through formal education like a degree, or it might be that you have taken on your own personal studies.

Interviewers will be interested to know what you already understand about marketing theory but also that you are still trying to stay up to date. Remind yourself of the conferences you’ve attended, podcasts you’ve listened to, and articles you’ve read. This can demonstrate both a passion for marketing but also a strong grounding in its principles.

Perhaps your knowledge has come about through some side projects you’ve worked on at your previous jobs.

You may not have been the company’s full-time marketer, but you may have assisted in putting together an ad campaign or carrying out marketing surveys.

This is all relevant experience and knowledge that you should highlight at the interview to stand out from the crowd.

Show Your Continued Interest In Marketing

Another way to stand out as a candidate who is genuinely interested in the marketing industry is to talk about news, trends, and campaigns that you have recently seen.

For example, keeping up-to-date via publications like Search Engine Journal means you can talk about the latest advancements regarding AI in marketing – or you can discuss recent Google system updates and changes to social media platforms. All of this will show that you are embedding yourself in the industry and keeping abreast of important changes in it.

Have a look at some recent marketing campaigns that have stood out to you – both successful and not. Think about what they got right in terms of audience, messaging, and channels. Think about what you would recommend they change.

Also, note some companies that you think are leading the charge within the marketing channels you are looking to work with.

Or perhaps even research some of the competitors for the company you are applying to. You can have a look at what they are doing well or poorly at in regards to their marketing.

This will demonstrate that you are already thinking about how to critique and improve campaigns. It also shows that you understand the importance of competitor analysis and monitoring.

Get Advice From People Already In The Industry

A lot of what goes into landing a good job in marketing, especially if it is your first one, is who you know.

The marketing industry, especially among channel specialists, can be very tight-knit. This means that you should try to take full advantage of the communities and conferences available to you.

Ask people already doing the type of marketing you’re hoping to work in what they would be looking for when hiring a junior – what skills they are looking for and what sort of behaviors they would want to see demonstrated in interviews.

You might be able to arrange for a mentor through one of these communities. That way you are getting to know someone more senior than you who will be able to connect you with other marketers and potentially even provide a reference for you.

Have Examples

Finally, a great way to stand out from the crowd is to start doing the work that you want to end up doing.

By that, I mean create some draft Facebook adverts or sketch out some ideas for a digital PR campaign. You can talk about these at an interview, or if you share them more widely, it might even help you get an interview.

Sharing your ideas and asking for feedback on social media is a great way to learn. It also helps to get your name out there to potential employers.

If you are looking to specialize in something like SEO, digital PR, or content creation, start your own website or channel. Practice the skills you are learning, and you’ll be ready with some examples of what you’ve learned when you get to interviews.

It’s Not Just About Making Yourself Stand Out

In essence, it can feel overwhelming when trying to break into the marketing industry.

In reality, though, there are ways you can start to learn and practice skills way in advance of getting your first interview. Any voluntary experience you have can help to demonstrate your aptitude and interest in marketing.

Most critically, though, if this is a career that you see yourself in for a while, it is good to take some time to find the right first job.

Look for a company that is going to support you as you grow in confidence and give you the opportunities you need to become an expert marketer.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal