If you want to make a sale, then you need to know your customer better than they know themselves.

Pushing a product onto someone rarely works. We exist in a time when consumers feel bombarded by hundreds of solicitations a week about a new good or service. They're likely to avoid you because, more importantly, you don't know them.

To increase your returns, your brand needs to know the customer down to the individual. This is what we call a buyer persona.

In this article, we're going to clearly define buyer persona, the benefits of creating one, and how to research yours effectively.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a profile based on all of the attributes that would make the ideal customer for your business.

The buyer persona contains all of the demographic data that distinguishes one social group from another. It should include details such as age, gender, occupation, location, and income.

In addition to personal or career attributes, buyer personas also highlight customer needs, wants, and pain points. In short, your brand should be able to imagine a somewhat-real idea of what this customer experiences on a daily basis. With this knowledge, you can posture your marketing and sales efforts to have a greater impact.

Buyer Persona Examples

Finding the right buyer persona for your brand is critical for creating successful sales. Everyone has a unique profile, but your brand needs to be able to meet their needs and pain points effectively. Let's take a look at a few examples of imagined buyer personas for a digital marketing agency targeting automotive companies.

Buyer Persona Example 1

Buyer Persona Example 2

Buyer Persona Example 3

Buyer Persona Example Analysis

Based on these three example profiles, we can already uncover commonalities that will be vital in guiding our marketing and sales processes.

First, we see that our target customers at these automotive brands are not gender or race-specific. There isn't enough data to suggest that leaders in these automotive brands favor one gender over another. Therefore, our attention rightly focuses more on their occupation within the company and their ability to implement our services.

Second, the age group appears to have a pattern of including individuals anywhere from 30-40. Because leadership positions tend to trend toward older individuals, we may want to continue research to either extend our range or make it more precise.

The responsibilities of these personas differ within their companies. However, there is a common thread in that these leads play a role in helping the company close sales with the right customers. Employing effective marketing tactics and managing leads effectively is the challenge they face regularly.

Finally, we benefit from knowing how these individuals spend their time online at work and at home. Some seem to be more social-savvy than others, but there is a throughline in using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in both scenarios.

With this data, our buyer persona starts to look like this:

While our example individuals had their differences, there are enough shared attributes for us to begin realizing a more effective pitch for our agency's services. We know who to target, where to reach them online, and what problems they face.

Now, we use this data to position our services as the solution to those pain points.

Benefits of Targeting Buyer Personas

Targeting carefully-crafted buyer personas is key to improving your marketing efforts.

Customers now demand a personalized experience when shopping or receiving advertisements. A survey study by Segment featuring 1,006 respondents concluded that an overwhelming 71% feel frustrated by impersonal experiences with brands.

When you deploy personalized content to audiences, you're doing what is now expected of companies to remain competitive in the industry. Buyer personas are your ticket to achieving this.

Here is a list of everything you can benefit from by targeting buyer personas with your marketing campaigns and content creation efforts.

1. Improved Targeting

It helps to know who you're talking to before you initiate the conversation.

Without understanding your buyer persona, you find yourself talking to everyone, and, therefore, no one at the same time. Compare this to blindly approaching every customer that comes by on the sales floor. Not everyone has the same needs, and you'll never know who will be receptive based on a blind guess.

When you begin compiling important qualifiers regarding your customers, you become more efficient in your sales approach. You spend less time and money going after those with zero interest and focusing your efforts on those that matter more to your company.

2. Improved Content Creation

If you know who you're targeting, you immediately gain a better understanding of how to approach the conversation.

This applies to not only in-person or phone conversations but should influence your website copy, blogs, paid ads, landing pages, and more. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping for the best, you're now prepared to tailor your offers and messaging to those who are most likely to engage with you.

Furthermore, improving your buyer personas and creating new ones offers compounding benefits. When you're creating the right kinds of content for your audience, the performance data becomes even more meaningful. You'll know what works, what doesn't, and what you can do to get consistent results moving forward.

3. Improved ROI

The positive benefits continue to snowball into what matters most - your bottom line.

When you create buyer personas, you know who to speak with and how to speak with them. Now, you can start pushing toward closing more successful deals and boosting your ROI.

Businesses and marketers alike don't want nonqualified customers entering their doors. It costs time and money for a person's attention, and attracting the wrong leads is a poor investment. Instead, you'll now focus heavily on the audiences with the strongest interest and purchase intent, even if it means less traffic overall.

You'll spend less time chasing vanity metrics like overall clicks or daily traffic to make your agency look better. Your brand will benefit more from closing more deals with qualified leads that align with your buyer persona.

4. Better Consumer Feedback

Finally, interacting with your buyer persona gives way to more actionable feedback. In our always-online world, everyone has an opinion. But, which opinions about your brand really make a difference?

Opinions and feedback from engaged and paying customers are critical for growth and success. They've already committed to interacting with your brand, but now you can discover how to make your offerings even better.

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You can get better feedback and improve your shopping experience by doing your research ahead of time. Let's dive into how to do buyer persona research so that you can start finding better leads today.

How to Do Buyer Persona Research?

If you're a currently operating business, you likely already have data on hand that's valuable for building buyer personas. However, more information will only further improve your efforts.

Your marketing efforts might prove rough at first. But, by employing these tactics, you can use your buyer persona research to create better customer profiles.

1. Evaluate Your Brand

This should be the first step in creating any type of business. It's the reason why companies typically state their mission, vision, or goal by existing.

A successful business does not exist simply to sell a product or service but to provide actionable solutions to customer pain points. In the process of defining these goals, you should naturally begin to consider who will benefit from your offerings.

As a white label digital marketing agency, we know that our mission is to serve other agencies and entrepreneurs. We strive to complement their business efforts and provide fulfillment services to cover any gaps in their own business offerings. For these reasons, we know we want to focus on B2B buyer personas that work in the digital marketing field.

You should apply the same thought process when establishing your buyer persona. Understand who you want to reach, but leave an open mind for the various audience segments that make up that broad spectrum of potential clients.

2. Survey Your Existing Customers

Unless you're a brand-new agency with no clients, you already have research options available.

Brands of any size will benefit from interviewing their customers directly. Your audience interaction shouldn't always be entirely focused on a sale. Building rapport with your existing customers and maintaining their satisfaction is crucial for growth and scaling.

Check-in on your customers and ask how your product or service is treating them. This not only shows that you care but invites them to speak honestly about your strengths and weaknesses. You might discover concerns about price, quality, or customer service, all of which speak to customer needs and pain points.

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You can also obtain information by sending our customer surveys. Take the opportunity to curate a series of questions for your newsletter subscribers or your previous customer list. If you're an e-commerce brand, invite them to leave reviews on any products they purchase shortly after they complete their transaction.

Brand questionnaires need not only apply to the actual transaction and experience with the service. Ask your customers what type of content they like to see, where they spend their time browsing, and how you can improve their browsing experience. Any feedback you receive simultaneously builds out your buyer persona and helps you improve your marketing efforts.

3. Collect Information from Your Prospects

Many marketers, particularly in PPC areas, leverage their content to collect lead data.

These initial campaigns are known as discovery campaigns and exist to help with lead segmentation. While boosting sales should always be a focus, taking the time to learn more about your audience is beneficial for long-term results.

Your ads and landing pages for these types of campaigns should reflect this. However, this is still a transaction and your average web user is not going to relinquish their data for free. You can offer incentives, otherwise known as lead magnets, to encourage users to provide some personal data.

Lead collection forms on your landing page can give you the attributes you need to qualify who's reading your content. You can ask for as many qualifiers as you want. Just be mindful that many users are hesitant to give out anything too personal, nor do they wish to spend too much of their free time helping you out.

Finally, the paid platform you're using likely offers a tracking pixel to assist with collecting some of this data automatically. You can install a Facebook or TikTok Pixel on your site to track users that click on your ads on those platforms. Then, you have information about who they are, how they found your content, and how they spend their time on social before they reach your form.

4. Create a Negative Buyer Persona

If your buyer persona is your ideal customer, then the negative buyer persona is the individual that you do not wish to attract.

While scaling and growing your sales is the goal, some people will never be the right for your product or services. You can give yourself an edge in crafting your buyer persona by defining criteria that would rule out a potential lead.

For example, a business that sells garage door repair services is interested in home or business owners. Individuals that do not fit those categories, like apartment renters or those that live at home, are not ideal for their company. They do not have a garage door and cannot benefit from their service in any way.

Other negative criteria might not be so clear without research. Price is often a tricky factor to consider as you need to balance the cost of business, build quality, and accessibility to customers. Once you decide on a firm price point, you'll want to rule out customers outside of a certain income level as they likely cannot afford your premium product.

Knowing what to avoid is just as essential as knowing whom you wish to target. Take the time to evaluate your brand, consider your customer base, and define the attributes that make up your negative buyer persona.

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How to Create a Buyer Persona?

Armed with a library of research, we can now begin the process of creating a buyer persona.

Let's start by reviewing our research.

1. Analyze and Segment Your Data

In our earlier example, we created three basic customer profiles. After performing your research, you likely have information from dozens, if not hundreds, of customers that you need to consider.

We recommend compiling your audience data in spreadsheet software like Excel. You can also utilize form builder and tracking software like DashClicks to quickly organize your information. Then, you can download all of your collected data in a CSV sheet to use in other applications.

Segment your data for easier browsing. Some categories you may want to implement include:

• Sex
• Age
• Location
• Occupation
• Income Level
• Interests
• Social media profiles
• Housing

Your criteria will differ based on your brand’s unique needs and requirements.

Then, start to highlight the most consistent attributes shared across all of your surveyed leads and customers. Add each of these qualifiers to your buyer persona profile until you start to form a clear picture of your average ideal customer.

Do not necessarily rule out any qualifiers that aren't ranked at number one. There may be a significant enough number of customers that can benefit from your brand to consider making additional buyer personas.

2. Rule Out Any Negative Buyer Persona Qualifiers

Our earlier process of creating a negative buyer persona will help us in eliminating unuseful information. Some of your surveyed leads might have tangential interest in your brand, but do not make for worthwhile prospects based on your previously established reasoning.

You'll now have a list of buyer persona attributes shared among your viable audience. You've eliminated any unworthwhile prospects and can now move forward in building and sharing your buyer persona with your team.

Note that ruling out certain leads now does not necessarily mean you should forget them for good. Some of your most interested leads might only have one or two factors going against them right now. Oftentimes, you can use this data to consider proposing new goals that can help you extend your offerings to new audiences when it comes time to scale.

3. Start Implementing Changes to Your Strategy

With your initial buyer persona(s) created, it's time to start utilizing them in your marketing efforts.

Buyer persona-focused content should not apply only to new efforts. You should communicate with your SEO, content, and social media teams to revisit existing plans and previous content. Revisit your work and consider how effective it is in addressing your new ideal buyer persona.

This process should prove educational. Take the opportunity to tweak content as necessary to begin addressing your ideal customer. Use a daily task tracker to write daily notes and provide feedback to your team as you come up with new ideas for better content moving forward.

Your entire team must be on the same page in understanding your buyer persona. Consistency in your message is key to building trust. With persistence, you can begin to establish your brand as a household name with your new target audience.

Buyer Personas Lead to Better Marketing

Creating a buyer persona is essential for improving business efficiency.

Your company needs to be aware of its audience and important customer pain points. Simultaneously, those prospects are demanding personalized content from brands that want their business.

The buyer persona helps aid both in meaningful content creation and accurate campaign targeting. Your team focuses on how to deliver the right message while ensuring that those words reach the most ideal ears.

Finally, it will provide you with meaningful, actionable feedback. You'll interact with genuine customers and learn how you can improve your experience from discovery to the final sale.

Keywords are the bedrock of search engine optimization.

They are the tools that people use to find the perfect content online for their needs. With that known, how does Google help match the ideal page with a person’s actual search intent?

This article will explain how keyword clustering attacks this problem directly. We’ll help you gain an understanding of the strategy, its myriad SEO benefits, and how you can perform keyword clustering for your website.

What is Keyword Clustering?

Keyword clustering is an SEO strategy in which website owners group, or cluster, related keywords based on their implied intention. Google is able to better understand your content based on these relationships, and, therefore, helps your page gain visibility with the correct audience.

For example, let’s use a car dealership as an example for our business website. Our main focus is “automobiles.” However, this keyword is too vague and can apply to a wide variety of related queries that include that keyword. Therefore, we need to examine that list of terms and cluster them into related groups.

From there, we might ask what is important about the automobile business. It provides both automobile sales and automobile repairs. These can serve as the pillar pages for other keywords that end up looking something like this with “automobile as our pillar”.

From there, you can then begin to choose which keywords are important for your business. You’ll also want to be mindful of the keyword’s search intent before including it in the cluster.

In the above example, certain keywords like “automobile definition,” and “automobile insurance” do not fit into our grouping. While our auto dealer can certainly speak about either topic, the cluster is focusing on “automobile sales,” a transactional keyword.

“Automobile definition” is likely unnecessary, while we would only be able to speak about auto insurance from an informational perspective, which would be better suited as a different pillar within a blog.

Be aware that clusters themselves can become pillars for other clusters as your website expands. “Automobile parts” alone can bring up a slew of related terms that would direct users to content that helps them either purchase specific parts or learn more about their vehicle. Both of which present new content options for your site and new opportunities to boost your SEO.

The Benefits of Keyword Clustering

Keyword clustering is the best way to boost the overall SEO benefits of your website. When you build your website, you should plan all of your content around using related terms that support similar search intent.

When you do so, your website will benefit in the following ways:

1. You’re More Likely to Rank Higher Overall

Google is no longer necessarily interested in the volume of a particular keyword on a page. SEOs and content creators used to look for as many opportunities to cram a word or phrase onto a page to boost their rankings.

Now, Google’s crawler is able to understand the bigger picture. Instead of simply matching a keyword with a query, it wants to find different, but related terms that help solidify the true intention. In other words, Google wants to help users who want to buy a product do so. Likewise, it wants to provide unbiased information to a user just looking to browse.

By working with Google's needs in this way, you help ensure that all of your content gets a visibility boost. When the search engine is confident that your content will satisfy a user's full needs, the more likely it is to recommend your brand.

2. It Helps Attract Better-Qualified Traffic

This is an inevitability when using keyword clustering and gaining more visibility overall.

When it comes to your bottom line, what matters is your return on investment. If your optimized webpage gets 1,000 clicks, but only 10 purchases, it's underperforming. If it receives 100 unique visitors but converts 100 sales, it's a success.

Keyword clustering helps website owners avoid the mistake of chasing vanity numbers like impressions or clicks. While it's important to boost your traffic, it's more important to make sure your content gets seen by the people that are most likely to engage with it.

When you take the time to keyword cluster, you naturally begin to segregate your keywords by the user's search intent. By prioritizing that ahead of time, you can plan content topics that focus on the keyword AND intention to maximize your performance.

3. Boosted Rankings for Additional Search Terms

Including related terms on your pillar page will help that main keyword rank higher in search results.

The added benefit is that the high-ranking page can also help your site get additional clicks for the related terms. This is most common with long-tail keywords that typically net a lower search volume, thus leading many to avoid them.

The truth is that long-tail keywords are a hidden SEO superpower as they tend to exhibit better engagement due to the strong search intent. Because we already value user intent when clustering our content, we have an easier time getting those important clicks from our secondary or tertiary terms.

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4. It Will Boost Vital SEO Metrics

A higher engagement rate with your website content will also boost your most-tracked SEO metrics across the board.

As Google is better able to match the right visitors with your content, your bounce rate will decrease. These qualified leads want to explore your offerings making them less likely to leave. Meanwhile, your average session duration, page clicks, and custom goals will see a boost as they spend more time on a page.

You can leverage even more of an SEO boost by using the best techniques like internal linking. Take advantage of these clusters and their intent to show new customers around your brand while you already have their attention.

5. It Futureproofs Your Website

By structuring your website around pillars and clusters, you'll have an easier time adding new pages and content in the future.

Many site owners will make the mistake of creating new pages to help rank for certain keywords as time passes and the site grows. This makes sense as new information, techniques, and guides become available every day. The newest, latest information will benefit from the highest rankings.

The issue arises whenever you already have a page ranking for that keyword. By adding new pages that rank for the same keyword, you end up suffering from what's known as keyword cannibalization. Two of your pages are fighting for the same authority as opposed to having one super page that could outrank your competitors.

With keyword clustering, everything is better organized for future content additions. Similarly, you'll have an easier time referencing existing content and simply making the necessary updates to those pages. In short, keyword clustering sets you up to make smarter choices for your website's SEO.

How to Perform Keyword Clustering?

Keyword clustering is not necessarily a difficult process as much as it can be a time-consuming one. This will vary depending on how specific your niche is and how many industry-related terms are actually relevant to your brand.

To get started with your keyword clustering strategy, follow these important steps:

1. Start Compiling a List of Keywords

No matter what your strategy is, SEO content creation begins here.

The best strategy is to take advantage of whichever SEO tool or keyword finder you're most accustomed to using. We make frequent use of SEMRush, but tools like Moz or Ahrefs are excellent alternatives.

Don't forget about any existing keyword data you have on hand. You'll want to consider how you'll organize any existing content into your clusters to avoid common errors like keyword cannibalization.

Next, follow the tried-and-true SEO strategy of directly examining your closest competitors. You're not necessarily looking at the top of the ranks, but the websites that are closest to your actual position. Determine what keywords they're using, how they group their content, and what type of content they provide to support their efforts. Then, differentiate yourself and determine how you can do it better.

You'll also want to save time by pruning out any unnecessary keywords. Many of the keywords yielded may have tangential relations to your industry, but many will not have anything immediately to do with your core offerings. Avoid adding queries like this to your clusters to avoid confusing search intent.

2. Identify the Core Term to Create Your Groups

After you compile your list of terms, you'll want to begin the process of grouping or clustering your keywords.

You do this by looking for the words or phrases that appear most frequently throughout the list. This can turn into a tremendous time-sink, making it much more reasonable to seek out a service that specifically offers clustering assistance. Thankfully, all of the tools we recommended above offer clustering and segmentation tools to help you identify the most commonly-appearing terms.

When you observe your keywords by frequency, you should naturally begin to see similarities. The constant term in each is your core, allowing you then further segment your keywords into distinct clusters.

Going back to our first example in this article, “automobile” was our core, while we went on to create cluster pages for “automobile sales” and “automobile repairs.” Both are extensions of automobiles and relate, but ultimately serve two distinct purposes for our audience.

3. Plan and Create Pages for Each Cluster

With your groups made and the search intent identified, you can begin the process of creating the actual content. We started with the grouped content as it will play a significant role in building up your central pillar page.

These cluster pages are crucial for content marketing as it allows your writers to explore topics in greater depth. They should aim to fully understand the user's search intent while satisfying every need they have.

You'll want every cluster page to expound on precise topics with at least 1,000 words, if not more. Do your best to keep unrelated topics to their own page, while internally linking to those topics whenever relevant. This not only helps create a beautiful network of information but helps you maximize your SEO benefits for each website URL.

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4. Assemble the Pillar

Finally, you can begin creating a pillar page that helps deliver all of the information available on your core topic.

Many sites already have pages that serve as a pillar, whether it be the home page, a product categories page, or a service page. The mistake many make is failing to provide it with any meaningful content outside of linking to the cluster pages.

Instead, the pillar page ought to be the go-to page that someone can use to find any answer on the core topic. You should create content that effectively walks readers through the subject while taking every effort to link out to your clustered content when relevant. Then, the user has the opportunity to open the new link or bookmark your different site pages for later viewing.

Repeat the process of creating a pillar page for every cluster group you made during step two. Double-check to make sure all of your clustered content helps to support your pillar.

Common Keyword Clustering Mistakes

While keyword clustering is an important SEO strategy, it doesn't grant automatic results. Critical mistakes may prevent your site from seeing any rank increase.

Be mindful of these everyday SEO mistakes when planning your website's pillars and clusters.

1. Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword clustering generally helps to avoid this particular issue. Nevertheless, it's not uncommon for site owners to inadvertently cannibalize their keyword rankings, especially as your page number count and content library grow.

It makes sense for you to add content when you want to improve your rankings for that keyword. The problem with creating two unique pages is that Google's crawler wants to index one page per domain as this is the ideal practice. When it sees the request to index two pages for the same keyword, it's unable to pick the rightā  one. You end up hurting your ranking efforts rather than helping them.

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Instead of creating a new page, consider adding new sections of content to the existing page. As long as the old information is still relevant, it can remain while benefitting from the updated data.

Likewise, if the older page has outdated, irrelevant content, consider replacing all of the content or deleting the page entirely. There is no one correct option and your strategy should be based on your current keyword rankings.

Keep a map of all the content and keywords used throughout your site. Before creating a new page for your SEO, look back to your map and act accordingly to avoid cannibalizing your progress.

2. Keeping Your Pages Static

Another mistake website owners make is believing that creating a web page is a one-and-done endeavor. Injecting updates of new content to your site is the best way to keep your pages modern and eligible for higher rankings.

Most site owners will try to do this by creating new pages weekly with strategies like creating a blog. While this is highly recommended, your pillar and cluster pages also need regular updates.

The reason for this is that Google's crawler is always looking for the most reliable, up-to-date data. The crawler is likely to favor a brand-new page with accurate data as opposed to a page that was last edited three months prior.

It's best practice to check in on your website pages at least every few months. Of course, this frequency can change depending upon how often your industry goes through changes that could affect your content and the accuracy of the information within.

Even if your core content is still valuable, it's healthy to check in on your site and see if changes can be made to improve or merge content. You should also honestly reassess your old content for readability, grammar mistakes, or general structure errors. Completing these quick fixes is a great way to refresh the page for crawlers.

3. Failure to Implement Internal Linking Strategies

This critical mistake causes many site owners to lose out on easy boosts to their overall site performance.

When we create our keyword clusters, we are laying the template for how all of our ranked keywords relate to one another. They all feed into the core topic, the pillar, but their shared nature also allows for countless internal linking opportunities that should come naturally.

For example, when a user looks up our example website for automobile sales, there's room to explore that intention. While the core intent is to find a vehicle to purchase, you may be able to leverage that intent to explore your related content. You might want to show off different types of vehicles, vehicle parts, or specific vehicle brands.

You should ensure that each page focuses on the topic at hand. However, capitalize on natural opportunities to share your additional content with the reader as it pertains to their immediate interest. You're simply presenting them with an option to engage with more content and making it easy for them to do so.

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4. Your Pillar Page Contains the Bare Minimum

This is another common mistake that is a result of misunderstanding the pillar page's purpose.

Because the pillar page is the foundation that links out to cluster pages, site owners mistakenly think the pillar page requires little content. After all, it's the cluster pages that delve into the deep minutiae of specific products or services that your brand offers.

However, your pillage page still requires content for crawlers to understand its purpose and how it relates to other content. While you should leave the fine details for cluster pages, the pillar page is ultimately meant to provide the user with all the information they need about the core topic. The cluster pages are there if they want to expand their knowledge on the related topics.

Ideally, your pillar page should have enough content to satisfy users and crawlers, but leave enough intrigue to motivate additional clicks. By providing quality content even on your pillar page, you solidify a cornerstone of your site's foundation, hence the name pillar.ā

Structure Your Site Around Keyword Clustering

The old manner of mapping your keywords isn't enough to keep up with Google's changing algorithm.

By implementing keyword clustering, you get to put a greater emphasis on delivering high-quality content without placing as much stress on keyword frequency. Instead, you bolster your content by smartly segmenting keywords into clusters to explain their relationship.

Not only will clustering help you rank higher, but it will also help you boost your key SEO metrics across the board. Be sure to cluster intelligently, avoid cannibalizing your keywords, and make use of smart internal linking whenever possible to take your results further.

Search engine optimization is crucial for developing your brand’s online presence. It bleeds into every marketing channel and can drastically boost your returns as you increase your visibility to audiences.

The problem is that SEO is challenging work and the results are not guaranteed. With so many brands vying for the same attention using the same best practices, it’s tempting to take shortcuts to get ahead.

As a result, the internet has seen countless “black-hat” SEO tactics including common cloaking techniques.

In this article, we’re going to help you understand how cloaking is utilized in SEO, and why it’s harmful to your long-term SEO efforts.

What is Cloaking in SEO?

Cloaking is a deceptive SEO practice that uses one set of content for crawling and ranking purposes while displaying different content to actual visitors. By its nature, cloaking in SEO is a malicious tactic that aims to take advantage of search engines and their users to further their own goals.

This leads to two problems.

First, the visiting user is going to see content that is, at best, irrelevant to their search query. Because cloaking is unnecessary and harmful, it’s also likely that a cloaked site may be trying to phish users for information or expose them to negative content that would otherwise be flagged immediately by a Google search crawler.

Second, cloaking is particularly problematic for search engine algorithms. If not detected, that domain begins to skew legitimate search results. This pushes other deserving sites down the ranks and can confuse crawlers about the relevancy of the content being shown.

Rankings are never static as the algorithm is constantly learning. When cloaked sites are allowed to exist, they can negatively impact organic results for everyone else using the internet.

How to Use Cloaking in SEO?

First and foremost, cloaking is a strictly prohibited black-hat SEO practice that is highly punishable according to Google guidelines. There is never a legitimate reason to cloak as there are countless other legitimate strategies to manage content distribution to different audiences. To attempt to cloak for any other reason is to do so maliciously.

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However, it's useful to know what cloaking in SEO looks like to identify it and avoid it. Here are some common SEO cloaking examples still used today:

SEO Cloaking Examples

A. IP Cloaking, or Search Engine Cloaking

IP cloaking is the act of presenting a page that's well optimized for high ranking while yielding a different page when the user is not a crawler.

The idea is to skip the hurdles of building up your SEO. The webmaster takes a page they own that already gets organic results, but funnels new visitors into the page they want to rank. This is a violation of guidelines as it purposely misrepresents the content, coercing users to click on something irrelevant or potentially threatening.

More malicious individuals such as hackers may utilize IP cloaking techniques to distribute malware, keyloggers, or other harmful software. The creator may not be concerned with the repercussions, but simply be looking to the net for as much personal information as they can from potential victims.

B. Intentionally Disguised Text

This method of cloaking is less technical and can be done with any modern CMS. The goal is to store more text on the page than what is shown to the visitor. That hidden content may be optimized to help boost efforts on the page or to trick engines into ranking the URL for something entirely unrelated.

Because users cannot interact with design elements, web designers can easily hide text on the page by simplifying and matching it to the background color. On a white background, the hidden text would be present in white, while the text they want readers to see is in black. However, you can also achieve similar results by formatting sections using your custom style sheets.

It's relatively simple to identify hidden text and is unlikely to get past many crawling attempts. If you need to improve your ranking efforts for that page, invest the resources into creating high-quality content that's relevant to the ranking keyword.

C. Images vs Text

Webmasters may want to include a page with images exclusively for some sites. This can be relevant for industries that wish to show a gallery of their work or their portfolio to earn new clients.

However, ranking a page without any text is highly difficult. Google's crawler responds well to text-rich pages with relevant content and supporting images. As a result, some black-hat SEOs may try to hide text on the page, while showing purely images to visitors.

Again, it is against guidelines to actively attempt to fool search engine crawlers. The content being indexed must match what is being shown to users to be properly ranked.

Instead of hiding text, create a healthy amount of text-based content to support your image gallery. You might include important details such as the type of work performed, the location, the client, or facts about the experience. Doing so may further the result you want by helping leads get a better understanding of what you do along with your level of expertise.

D. Hiding Flash-Based Pages

Adobe Flash is an outdated software that was once commonly used to present media content on a page. Today, Google prefers and recommends tools like HTML5 which loads content faster and optimizes it for various device speeds and screen sizes.

If you continue to use Flash on your site, you're going to see an impact on your SEO scores. For this reason, some SEOs may try to fool the system by detecting whether or not the visitor is a crawler or a real person. The crawler will see a lightweight page with some text or compressed images, while the real person sees the original Flash page.

Why You Should Avoid Cloaking in SEO?

Though some may try to justify its use, the guidelines are clear. You may not utilize cloaking in SEO if you want your website to rank organically. Even for mistakes, Google will act swiftly and dish out penalties to any domain that violates one of its policies.

Here is why you need to stop and reconsider if you're looking to use cloaking to skip ahead of the pack.

1. You're Going to Receive a Google Penalty

Receiving a Google penalty is akin to having a black mark on your domain's record. If your site has a history of penalties, improving your search engine rankings will prove difficult if not impossible, even if your current and future SEO actions are by the book.

If you rack up multiple penalties, Google will view you as a habitual offender. If you find yourself in this scenario, you'll likely need to abandon your domain as any future work will do little to undo the damage caused by cloaking penalties.

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Remember - you will receive a penalty. Even if you are fortunate enough to dodge crawlers for some time, Google is acutely aware of the deceptive practices some SEOs use to skip the hard work. It's just a matter of time and not worth sacrificing your investment.

2. People Will Avoid Your Site

Even if you continue to receive visitors while cloaking, the damage comes from more than Google.

If John Doe is looking up “financial advice,” but lands on your completely unrelated page, they’re likely to be annoyed. No one enjoys having their time wasted, much less being purposely deceived. In the internet world where users demand instant results and gratification, don’t be surprised to find your user count plummet as they continue to have a bad experience.

In addition to this, the act of tricking a user implies cause for further distrust. If a brand lies about one thing, it's only natural for consumers to question its legitimacy. Internet-savvy users may even fear picking up malware from your site and advocate against using it for themselves and their peers.

Reputation matters, and it will follow you forever online. Be good to the people you want to do business with or else you'll cost yourself more than a temporary boost in visitors.

3. Permanent Bans Are Irrecoverable

If you continuously engage in shady behaviors, or if you're a habitual offender, a Google employee can decide to ban your domain outright.

That means that there is no opportunity to plead your case. There is no opportunity to fix it and submit a reconsideration request. Your pages will no longer be indexed, meaning they have zero chance to show up in an organic search.

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That leaves you only with the ability to say goodbye to your hard work and start completely from scratch. If you talk to any brand starting online today, you'll realize how foolish it is to sabotage months or years of SEO work to beat the system. The repercussions aren't worth the risk.

How to Determine If a Site is Cloaking?

Being able to identify cloaking in action is valuable knowledge for everyone's security online. It can prevent you from picking up malware or having sensitive data stolen from your work or home devices.

From a marketing perspective, you'll want to keep tabs on which sites are using black-hat tactics so that you don't risk linking to them or having them backlink to your domain. You may not get to the root of the cloaking techniques used, but there are enough tell-tale signs that should tell you when to skip the click or get out as soon as possible.

1. Compare the Preview Text to the Page

Have you ever read an excerpt in a search result only to find that content missing from the page once you clicked the link?

This is a major red flag that some type of cloaking is in effect. The indexed page is showing a portion of content from one page, while the page you are visiting is different. This likely means that any number of the above cloaking examples are in effect which might include hidden text or using a bot to detect the user type.

If you find yourself in this situation, leave the domain without taking any action. Do not click on any additional links and run a scan using your anti-malware or anti-virus software if you want to take additional precautions. This type of cloaking does not necessarily mean the webmaster is hacking, but one shady action may be a warning sign for others.

2. Submit the URL to a Cloaking Checker

There are several free checkers available online that can examine any given URL for cloaking techniques. You can try out sites like DupliChecker or SiteChecker as examples.

These will automatically check the domain with the internet's most popular search engines and display any other URLs involved that might indicate stealthy redirects or other cloaking practices.

Cloaking Alternatives That Are Allowed

There are scenarios in which webmasters are legitimately making an effort to show different pages of prepared content to distinct audiences. This is understandable as effective marketing means speaking to different groups effectively to drive clicks and sales. For this reason, we understand why less informed individuals may see cloaking as necessary.

Thankfully, there are plenty of valid SEO alternatives that negate the need for cloaking.

1. Geolocation and IP Address Detection

Google provides webmasters with the ability to prepare different content to display to users based on their IP addresses around the globe. This means that while one page has high SEO value, Google can detect the user IP and show the content you curated for that region.

With this, you don't need to set up any shady redirect techniques that Google will likely interpret as malicious cloaking. Effectively, you're clueing Google in on your strategy, and they are doing what they can to accommodate your content delivery efforts.

This technique can apply to international marketing or more local efforts restricted to different areas of a particular state. It's up to you to create the content pages and designate the target geolocation area.

You can enhance your results by optimizing the content to reflect that area. For example, if you want a specific page to show to Miami customers, be sure to make notes about your Miami location when discussing the product or service with your readers.

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2. Set Up the Appropriate Redirect

In some cases, webmasters may be using cloaking to preserve the SEO value of a page when having to make site changes. Instead of cloaking, users would be wise to implement the correct redirect protocol based on whether the move is permanent or temporary.

A 301 redirect is for permanent changes, while 302 should be used for temporary changes such as a site redesign. This helps Google understand the type of change as well as which page to recognize as the canonical one. In addition, the SEO value of the original page is passed on to the new page.

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Similar to using the above technique, this SEO tactic clues Google in on what your goal is with the content. As long as crawlers identify that your intentions are fair and deliberate, they will work with you to preserve your SEO throughout your site.

3. Fix the Core Problem, Even If It Takes Time

Most of the time, well-meaning site owners that use cloaking are trying to find a cheap, easier way around a more complicated SEO issue. Like most shortcuts in life, they only get you so far and the consequences can be detrimental.

There are countless free tools available for site owners to use to diagnose health errors with their sites. It costs nothing to utilize Google Analytics and Google Search Console, both of which provide step-by-step solutions to overcome detected site errors.

Even if you need to turn to an expert, the cost is worth it when compared to throwing away your brand's visibility and branding online. Invest in your website and it will continue to give back to you in the long term.

Avoid Cloaking in SEO

Any perceived benefit you could achieve by cloaking in SEO is quickly undermined by the lasting damage it will do to your site and reputation.

If you want your site to earn a high rank in Google SERPs, you need to play by their rules and guidelines. If there were any quick hacks to skip the line, your average SEO would be the first to know. Instead, it takes a great strategy, regular testing, and persistence to steadily climb the ladder.

Your company does not have to handle tricky SEO problems alone. DashClicks helps to boost your brand's visibility by providing optimized content, regular performance audits, and technical SEO expertise. If you need help with your SEO, be sure to check out our services today to get started.

The DashClicks platform comes equipped with two fantastic applications that assist with offering brand new custom-made websites for both you and your clients. These websites automatically update with all of the information found in your business profile to present a unique personalized user experience.

This article explains the purpose of DashClicks' white label software and how you can use these tools in liaison to assist with your website development needs.

Here is the complete video -

The account used in the screenshots below is a demo account, so some of the features you see on the screen may differ from what you see when accessing your real account, especially for the first time.

So, first, let's start with the Sites App.

What Is the Sites App?

The Sites app is a tool that allows you to preview your custom website monitor and website analytics.

It utilizes a drag-and-drop editor to edit your website any time you want.

Who Has Access to the Sites App?

The Sites App is available to both the main account and the subaccount users. However, the process of purchasing a website to use in the Sites App differs depending on your account type.

The primary account users accessing the sites first would see a list of templates at the bottom of the screen. You can select a template and preview it.

After choosing a template, you'll see a purchase button on the top.

Once you successfully purchase and activate your new site, The Sites App will update to look like this.

Now, you can use every feature of the tool to browse your analytics and make edits at any time. A sub-account can also access the Sites App. However, when you log in for the first time, you will see a notification that looks something like this.

If you are looking for a new website, you can reach out to our support team, so we can get you set up for success.

The process of purchasing and activating a site for a sub-account is different and requires the use of our second app ā InstaSites.

What Is the InstaSites App?

The InstaSites App is one of DashClicks' premier prospecting tools, allowing you to instantly generate brand new websites for your clients. We currently have hundreds of templates created specifically for 200+ industries.

This app enables you to select templates, add a business contact record, and instantly generate a brand-new website with a single click. You can then share a link to the website automatically or manually with your potential client or sub-account for preview and purchase.

Who Has Access to the InstaSites App?

InstaSites is the main account exclusive application. Sub-accounts will never be able to access or see anything related to this InstaSites App on their dashboard.

How Are the Sites and InstaSites Apps Related?

The tools we utilize to build your main account agency website in the Sites App are the same tools we use to develop these websites here in InstaSites.

The importance of this relationship primarily applies to activating a new website for your sub-accounts, as alluded to earlier.

To activate a new website for a sub-account within their Sites App, you must first come to InstaSites and build your clients an InstaSite. Then you can go to the My InstaSites tab, locate the website, click the button next to it and click purchase in the drop-down menu.

You can then follow the checkout process to purchase this website for the sub-account. After your client agrees to buy the website, you can complete this process to help it activate within their account.

Once the purchase is complete, the new InstaSite built will appear for your client within their Sites App.

At this time, you would instruct the sub-account user to click on the Sites App, where they can view their new website.

The same monthly fees will apply to the subaccount website for hosting the SSL certificate and the drag-and-drop editor.

Be sure to discuss this with your client before making a purchase.

Here are some more support articles that will help you set up a website for your main account as well as sub-accounts -

Sites

• How to Activate a Website – Main Account
• How to Activate a Website – Sub-Account

InstaSites

• Building a Single InstaSite
• Editing Your Website
• Pricing for InstaSites
• Purchasing an InstaSite

"The key metric of whether you've succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard every day."

Keith Rabois

An SEO report serves two purposes. First, it helps your client know their position regarding keyword rankings, traffic, and revenue generation. Second, it boosts your branding. The first look at an SEO report speaks volumes about your agency's professionalism and brand.

Nobody likes to see a torrent of data on standard documents without any logo and your agency's branding. So, if you want to build trust and authority, send an SEO report that includes your agency's name, address, contact details, logo, and brand colors.

Usually, it takes an entire day to generate a powerful SEO report with a dedicated employee completely immersed in fetching data from dozens of channels. Apart from that, manual processes are also prone to errors.

You can effectively address all these problems and save valuable time and person-hours by using white label SEO reports. Imagine generating a detailed report using data from 70+ third-party channels and with all your branding stuff on every page using automated tools. What if you can generate this report with a single click of a button? Yes, using DashClicks' dashboard is that simple!

So, if you want your agency to stand out and save productive hours, white labeling your marketing dashboards is the best solution.

The power of white-labeling your marketing lies in scalable personalization.

This article discusses the best ways to leverage DashClicks' white label dashboard to streamline and automate your agency processes.

A Robust White-Labeled Reporting Software for Agencies

Marketing is no longer a cakewalk; you're pitted against hundreds of freelancers and independent agencies ready to trigger a price war in the market every day.

The only way to deal with such competition is to ride the value ladder and differentiate your agency from the pack.

"DashClicks makes everything a complete breeze to setup and optimize your marketing agency so you can focus all of your time on income-generating activities it is beyond genius and I have 0 experience in digital marketing and now I know plenty to begin my agency and start scaling up as much as I can thank DashClicks team. I am in the process of prospecting now.. with confidence! Only a matter of time until I get clients!"

Eileen Escobar, (Source Google Reviews.)

To build your trust and authority, you need years of experience, tools, and standard processes in your agency. Since most digital marketing is data-driven, automation tools give your agency an edge over others.

Manual processes are not only time-consuming but can also be tedious and inaccurate, as digging data from 50 different marketing channels and tools can be a nightmare for a human.

White-label tools for agencies eliminate most of your woes, especially when it's supported by world-class fulfillment services. It enables you to run your agency on an auto-pilot mode, where scaling becomes easier. It also highlights your agency's brand, so it stays top of mind.

DashClicks dashboard software and fulfillment services are created with a specific objective ā helping agencies grow, adding more clients, managing several projects with automation tools, and scaling.

Fulfillment services enable you to accept multiple projects without worrying about your agency's existing workforce.

"This software has enabled us to reach out to our clients and customers in the most professional way. We have achieved a certain high productivity value in engaging our customers towards our services. We can easily perform email marketing with efficient analytics and reporting systems. We can also gather user insights with custom-made surveys which allow us to be more interactive and fully professionally engaged with our user market. We can also easily view all the analytics or can even customize the tool according to our requirements."

eGlobal Client Center, (Source Google Reviews)

How to Use DashClicks White-Label Software?

DashClicks' white-label platform offers many features that are no less than a blessing for agencies. Watch the entire video for a walk-through of the platform.

Major Benefits of Using a White-Label Reporting Software

Here are some chief benefits of using white-label reporting software that is crucial to a marketing agency's success.

1. Saves Your Time Pulling Data to a Centralized Dashboard

DashClicks' marketing agency reporting software is the one source of all your data. So, it prevents a lot of back and forth and time wasted in digging up and arranging data to prepare reports.

It happens through dozens of pre-built widgets across all your apps that help pull and integrate your data into one unified client dashboard software.

See, how you can manage and view all your campaigns on a single dashboard in the following screenshot.

2. Helps Boost Your Brand Awareness

You cherish your brand and keep it near to your heart. You work hard to build a brand that your clients recognize, trust, and love. It makes investing in brand continuity mandatory, especially in the reports you share with your clients.

DashClicks allows you to customize everything and connect to numerous data sources with 65+ integrations and APIs. So, you generate reports that are highly useful, data-driven, and rich with your branding.

3. Gives You Full Control Over Your Reports

Apart from enabling you with 100% branding ability, white label analytics and reporting dashboards allow you to change the look and feel of your reports the way you want. These reports are irresistible because they enable you to deliver trailblazing insights and almost real-time visibility on your campaigns' key performance indicators.

4. Allows You to Scale Your Business

The custom reports generated by digital marketing analytics software make you stand out, adding value to your current offerings and allowing you to scale hassle-free.

So, by using with DashClicks platform, you can add and serve more and more clients and keep them happy. Moreover, it enables you to do scalable personalization, which is crucial.

5. Helps You Maintain Brand Consistency

The unmatched ability to infuse your branding in your reports, especially your logo, brand colors, palettes, domain name, lingo, headers & footers, and custom email, helps you maintain brand consistency throughout your communications with the client. It further strengthens your brand and enables you to make it top of mind.

6. Helps You Improve Customer Support

Since your DashClicks Dashboard can send real-time reports, it helps you offer top-notch customer support with everything at your clients' fingertips. So, if they wish to get the current status of the KPIs or see the impact of a tactic they have recently implemented, instant reports (InstaReports) are your go-to option.

7. Builds Custom Dashboards

Your DashClicks software enables you to build custom dashboards for SEO, SEM, social media, email, and paid campaign reports fetching data from numerous resources. A custom dashboard allows your client to see different kinds of campaigns you're handling for them. Custom dashboards can display the crucial KPIs and metrics on the home screen, saving you enormous time going deeper into the platform.

Access Your Dashboards With Single-Sign-on

The best thing about using DashClicks white-label software is that you can access it seamlessly with a Single Sign-On. You can have a bird's eye view of the campaigns, fetch and share reports and instantly know the KPIs. No need to re-authenticate for different clients or campaigns.

So, working with a centralized Dashboard makes your projects easy to manage. It also makes sending reports a pleasant experience.

The Dashboard app acts as the home page for your entire platform experience. What makes it unique is that you can fully customize the page according to your preferences, so you'll get the updates that matter most on the home page itself.

Final Words

With increasing competition and improved quality standards, agencies can't survive without using a robust reporting and analytics platform that can integrate with hundreds of third-party software applications and data sources.

DashClicks white label reporting software also helps you boost your brand and help you maintain brand consistency. It helps you improve your customer support and enables you to scale with a high degree of certainty. If you combine it with our fulfillment services, scaling would feel like a cakewalk, and you'll be able to focus more on business development and marketing.

SEO is critical for elevating your brand's online presence.

It determines how users discover your site, what types of audiences you'll attract, and where you rank among your competitors.

There are a variety of digital tools available to assist with elevating your SEO strategy. Among these is Google Search Console, a free service for monitoring your website and generating expert reports.

Learning how to take advantage of this gift from Google will help you climb the rankings. After reading this guide, you'll be able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the top brands in your field online.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free service that helps brands and site owners diagnose technical SEO issues to improve search visibility.

You'll be able to watch your site performance 24/7, while also having the ability to instantly generate reports regarding keyword performance, technical SEO errors, and site security.

Anything that can have an impact on your domain's SEO value can be found by using Google's suite of tools. While it can take some time to get savvy with the service, it has zero barriers to entry making it a necessity for any online brand.

Why is Google Search Console Important for SEO?

Google Search Console is available for free as it actively helps Google to better understand the content found on your website.

While the company is not working to help your brand specifically, they do want to ensure that your content finds the ideal audience. This will help you generate more qualified leads while allowing Google to offer a superior search engine experience for users around the globe.

When you actively take advantage of Google Search Console, you’ll gain instant feedback for the following aspects of your site’s SEO:

• Checking SEO performance for chosen keywords (ranking, search volume, etc.)
• Diagnosing technical SEO issues like loading speeds or navigation errors
• Gathering reports on backlinks pointing to your domain
• Scanning for mobile website usability errors

Furthermore, you can actively help Google by creating your sitemap for navigation, or by submitting new crawl requests when completing major website changes.

You should be monitoring all of the above weekly or monthly to continuously improve your domain authority and avoid falling further down in the rankings. Without Search Console, you rely on automated, periodic check-ins that may inaccurately index your pages, while remaining oblivious to easily fixable site health errors.

How to Create a Google Search Console Account?

Creating your own Google Search Console account is a straightforward process. You can access the setup process on Google’s site here.

To get started, you will require:

• A Google Analytics account
• A domain with DNS verification
• Access to your domain name provider account (GoDaddy, Bluehost, Dreamhost, etc.)

Then, follow these steps:

Step – 1: Enter your website by either using the Domain property or the URL prefix. You’ll see examples of both auto-filled in either field.

Step - 2: It will then check to determine if site ownership has been verified by Google. Since we are creating a new account, you will see the domain ownership verification instructions next.

Step - 3: Choose a TXT or CNAME record type (the former is recommended). You'll then need to copy the contents of that record into your domain's DNS configuration on your domain name provider's site. Be sure to save those changes.

Step - 4: Head back to Google Search Console setup and click Verify.

With this, Google will be able to recognize you as the owner of the domain. After the verification is complete, you'll be able to access the Google Search Console tool at any time from the website or your Google Analytics account.

Note that you'll be identified as the Owner of the Search Console account. However, you can add Full Users and Restricted Users by adding one at:

Search Console > Settings > Users and Permissions > Add User

How to Use Google Search Console for SEO?

Once you reach your Google Search Console overview, you'll have access to a variety of powerful SEO tools and features. We recommend getting acquainted with one tool at a time so that you can eventually make full use of this incredible, free service.

Below, we’ll go through the service’s top features:

• Submitting a Sitemap
• Website Performance
• URL Inspection Tool
• Index Report
• Security Report
• Links Report
• Manual Actions

A. Submitting a Sitemap

A sitemap is a map of your website that you create manually to assist with the indexing process.

By default, Google's crawler will follow the links on your website and index the pages naturally. However, by submitting a sitemap, you can tell Google which pages to crawl and which to avoid for several reasons.

The necessity for a sitemap usually is determined by the website size. If you are using a basic website with just a few pages, the navigation is likely very simple allowing the Crawler to index the pages without issue. As your website size grows, especially if you begin to make use of internal linking and redirects, submitting a sitemap is considered best practice.

Your website's CMS likely has a future to create a sitemap for you automatically. This functionality is present on sites like WordPress or Wix. However, you can also create your sitemap file manually as you gain more experience.

You can find detailed instructions on how to set up your sitemap from Google here.

To submit the sitemap file:

1. Click on Property and select the appropriate website.
2. Under Index, click on Sitemaps.
3. Enter the sitemap URL into the required field. Then click Submit.

You can also delete and replace your sitemap at any time by revisiting this section.

B. Website Performance

Your Google Search Console account will feature a Performance tab that shows off key insights about your SEO performance in real-time.

Among these include total clicks, total impressions, clickthrough rates, and average ranking position based on all of your keyword rankings.

You can also filter this traffic data by the source (web, mobile) as well as by period. You can utilize this information to focus on particular periods of high or low clicks to diagnose your SEO strategy and make the necessary improvements.

The lower half of this tab allows you to gather more specific data for several key SEO areas.

1. Queries shows the phrases or keywords users are typing to find your website as a result. In some cases, the query might contain a keyword that matches your industry but shows an overall mismatch in search intent. Reviewing your queries will help you understand how you can pivot your content to better communicate your business offerings online.

2. Pages allows you to review the traffic by the individual web page. Because you are ranking each page for a specific keyword, you can review what queries people are using to find a specific page on your domain. Trends in your performance are direct indicators of the type of action necessary to improve your SEO for that page.

3. Countries will show user metrics based on where those visitors are around the globe. If you're making efforts to market to people in different countries, you can segment your data and monitor your performance in real time by location.

4. Devices offers similar features in that you can monitor user activity based on their chosen search device. This can include PCs, tablets, smartphones, and other technology.

Performance data is critical for any marketing channel. Use Google Search Console to monitor your website performance daily and adjust your strategy as necessary to pursue continuous improvements.

C. URL Inspection Tool

The URL Inspection Tool is a popular feature that allows site owners to diagnose a specific web page.

By entering a URL into the tool, you can gain access to a report of how a Google Crawler will view this your URL. It provides reports on two key areas including Index Coverage and AMP enhancements.

Index Coverage shows whether or not the page is crawlable and if it is currently indexed. It will also display any relevant indexing data such as whether or not this URL is included in the domain sitemap. If you are utilizing any advanced SEO techniques such as placing canonical tags on this URL, those will also appear in the report.

Likewise, any issues that are preventing this page from being indexed will appear here. You can take this actionable data and apply it to the URL so that normal indexing can resume and allow you to continue ranking.

Enhancements will first list out any notable issues with mobile browsing health. Google places a high priority on a smooth mobile experience, so you should use this data to speed things up and present your content more clearly.

You can also check in on any advanced SEO tactics like schema markup here to determine if you are implementing it correctly.

D. Index Report

The Index Report function works much like the Coverage tab in the URL inspection tool. However, instead of diagnosing one page, the Index Report shows the status of every URL found on your domain.

On the top level, this report will show which pages were indexed and which were not. You'll want to focus on the non-indexed pages and review the errors preventing the crawler from doing its job correctly. If Google cannot crawl the URL, it will not appear in search rankings nor will it recognize any SEO or content changes.

However, the report also shows more useful data as to how you can further improve pages even if they were able to be indexed. The crawler may technically be able to index the URL, but there are warning signs indicating that it may not fully understand your content and which audience it relates to.

Google provides a full list of its indexing errors as well as the actions you should take to eliminate the issue here.

E. Security Report

Unless you have security in order, you'll likely experience a hack at some point as a website owner. Even the top brands in the world face security issues that must be dealt with swiftly to protect the brand and its customers.

Google Search Console attempts to monitor and flag malicious activity by tracking actions taken on the website. The tool primarily scans for these three items:

• Hacked Content – Any unusual injections of content, back-end code, or fishy URLs pointing to untrustworthy sites
• Unknown/Unwanted Software – This applies to anything such as malware or malicious software that can trigger unwanted actions or phish for user information
• Social Engineering – Any content that deceptively coerces users into taking action is social engineering. New content may describe one thing, but lead users to download something else entirely like software or a virus

To protect users, a flag will prevent this page from being indexed and appearing in search results. You should run a security report to review the issue and take the suggested action to resolve the problem.

After you resolve the issue, or if there was an unusual misunderstanding that led to an incorrect flag, you can file a reconsideration review. Google will manually review the URL, but the process can take several weeks to complete.

Security issues are imperative to diagnose as you are held accountable. Even if you are the victim of hacking, it is your responsibility to provide a solution as soon as possible. Failure to do so can get you permanently marked by Google as an offender, making it all but impossible to rank your domain.

F. Links Report

Any time another domain links back to a page on your site, you acquire a backlink.

Backlinks provide powerful SEO benefits, particularly when they come from other high-ranking, reputable sources of information. Part of any successful SEO strategy is to deliver excellent content that's worthy of sharing across the web.

However, the inverse can occur when unreputable or malicious sites begin linking to your pages. In those scenarios, you want to know which sites are referring to your content, so that you can have control over which sites are trying to build a relationship with your domain.

The Links report will generate a list of every backlink pointing to your site. You can check out the top referral sources, see how much traffic you receive, and determine which pages get the most referral traffic.

You can use this data for positive results to try and earn more backlinks on other pages that are lagging in performance. Similarly, you'll want to continue supporting valuable pages with lots of backlinks to maximize the organic benefits that your hard work is providing.

For toxic backlinks, you'll now have a list of webmasters to contact. If that link is causing problems for your SEO efforts, you have the right to ask other site owners to remove the link. Google recommends doing this before attempting to take any further action.

If you're unable to get a result, you can use Google Search Console to submit a disavow request. You will need to collect any specific URLs or domains in a list to upload to this page here.

G. Manual Actions

Finally, a Google employee always can take manual action against your domain if they find any violations of their policies. All webmasters have a responsibility to ensure that every page adheres to a set of guidelines that are listed here.

Such actions that would fall under this category might include:

• Implementing deceptive, sneaky redirects
• Scraping high-ranking content from other URLs
• Spamming keywords in an attempt to trick crawlers
• Adding pages with no real content or discernible purpose

Many of these actions are exclusively exploitative, though it is possible to find yourself flagged for issues you did not intend to cause. For instance, using a google search scraper can help you gather relevant search data efficiently, but if not used carefully, it could potentially lead to unintended issues that violate Google’s guidelines.

In either case, you can find any notifications about Manual Actions within your Google Search Console account. As with the other features, you should find a description of the problem as well as suggested actions you should take to resolve the issue.

After you resolve the problem, you'll need to manually request a reviewal of the updated page. Be sure to explain the problem, why it occurred, and what you did to correct it and prevent it from occurring in the future.

Optimize Your Website SEO with DashClicks

Improving your website's SEO is possible thanks to an abundance of free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. However, the process requires dedicated effort and knowledge of the services to obtain worthwhile results. As a site or business owner, that's not always a reality.

DashClicks provides simplified ways to improve and optimize your SEO. Our dedicated Analytics software allows users to track set numbers of keywords along with important snapshots from Search Console like daily traffic, clickthrough rate, search rankings, and much more.

If that's not enough, our dedicated SEO fulfillment team has the trained personnel and resources to ensure your domain gets the love and care it needs to perfect its SEO strategy.

Start with DashClicks today by signing up for your free account and discover a new way to optimize your SEO strategy.