Mike Friedman

Indexing is not as hard as people make it out to be. This is after about 60 days with limited resources.

Feel free to introduce yourself in this thread. Tell us about who you are and how you got here.

I am often asked about what tools I use for SEO. There have been some changes over the past year, so it was time for an update. This is my SEO tech stack heading into 2024. There are a lot and some of them are situation based, but this is a quick list of the tools I use frequently on basically every project. Semrush – This is one of only two tools that I log into every single day. I use this for assisting with site audits, competitor organic and paid research, keyword research, and content generation/marketing. I’ve shown many examples of how I use Semrush. Here are a few: Using Semrush to Uncover New Niches Using Semrush to Quickly Find Featured Snippet Opportunities 2 Quick Ways to Boost Traffic With Semrush Semrush’s Topic Research Tool Semrush’s Keyword Clustering Tool I cannot say enough about how valuable this tool is to me. Then there are the Google Tools: Google Analytics – Yes, I use Google Analytics 4, warts and all. Google Search Console Google Tag Manager Google Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio)- I just want to mention that this is one I think is underutilized and under appreciated. With Looker Studio you can pull data from Analytics, Search Console, and Google Ads and combine and present it how you want. You can also much more easily segment the data. If you are working with clients, you can make all that data more appealing to the eye and emphasize what you want them to focus on as well (like leads, sales, etc.). I’ve also shared a few Looker Studio Dashboards I created, but this one might be the most popular: Search Console Opportunities Auditing / Monitoring Tools: Screaming Frog – I know a lot of people like SiteBulb instead. They do pretty much the same thing, but Screaming Frog does it faster and is less resource intensive. ContentKing App – It has great monitoring features, but also lets me easily dig through and segment pages. It’s kind of like Screaming Frog, but it is online and crawls the site every day. It will notify you of major changes to the site, like if a title tag or heading changed on a page. I recently shared how I use ContentKing to find internal link opportunities. Keyword.com – I try to avoid sending clients keyword ranking reports or getting too hung up on specific rankings, but this is a great rank tracker that does what it is supposed to do. It makes tagging keywords into clusters and viewing those clusters easy. Optimization / Content Generation Tools Frase – Love this for generating [[Content Briefs]] for writers and picking apart data, headings, questions, etc. used in top ranking sites for queries. Great tool for writing content. Very similar to Surfer SEO, but I like it better. You can watch my video here about how I build content briefs in Frase. I probably spend almost as much time in this tool as any other right now. I love using it for optimizing existing content and doing entity gap analyses versus top ranking competitors. It’s been one of my secret weapons the past few years and has resulted in huge gains for clients. They currently are offering a trial for $1. If you have never tried Frase, this is a great opportunity. Keyword Cupid – Have you ever generated a list of 400, 500, 1,000+ keywords and then had no idea what the heck to do with them? Feed them to Keyword Cupid. Keyword Cupid “uses state-of-the-art neural network models to reverse engineer Google’s knowledge graph, in real time!” In other words, it takes that collection of keywords you generated and organizes them into silos or topic clusters for you. It saves a ton of time, and honestly might be one of the best values on the market. It is very inexpensive for what it does. I love using this in conjunction with Semrush’s clustering tool and comparing results. ChatGPT Pro – There are plenty of AI writing tools out there and it seems like new ones popping up each day now, but frankly with the right prompts ChatGPT does the best job on its own. I use it to boost our content generation. Everything generally gets edited first, but it really speeds things up versus writing from scratch. I mostly use it to help in generating ideas to include in outlines for content briefs as well as ad copy and headlines. I use it to help generate title tags and H tags in articles. I rarely use something it generates for these directly, but I will have it write 20-25 variations of a title tag, and use those to create something myself. I’m constantly finding new ways to use this. SEOPress – I’m not a fan of Yoast and anyone using it is doing so at their own peril, or the peril of their clients. Yoast has a long history of releasing updates with bugs in it, sometimes site and SEO crippling ones. SEOPress basically does everything Yoast does, but is less bloated and has never F’d up one of my sites. Productivity / Knowledge Management Tools Monday.com – Although not directly an SEO tool, this is the other tool I log into every single day. I often get asked how I keep on top of everything and manage clients without anything falling through the cracks. This is how. There are plenty of similar tools out there, and even if you are working solo, I would recommend using one. I cannot imagine working without this one. If you sign up for Monday and want to chat about ways I am using it and some general strategies for using it, feel free to reach out. Taskade and Asana would be my next choices. I would actively avoid Trello, ClickUp, and Notion. Akiflow – This one I just started using a few months ago. I use this for managing my calendar and daily task lists. It has a feature where at any time I can hit CTRL+Spacebar and it brings up a box for me to add a new task. This may seem highly simplistic, but it is a great feature when I’m on client calls and action items come up. It is more efficient than adding them to something like Monday. I can quickly create a list of tasks from our calls and then decide which ones need to go into Monday as part of a project to track and which need to get done, but don’t necessarily belong inside of our Monday project. You can then drag things from your to-do list directly into your calendar and schedule when you will work on them. If you like to do calendar blocking, Akiflow is awesome and has every feature you would need to do that effectively. They just released a mobile app, which was the one thing it was missing.

Opening up this new forum for all. Signup for free and join the conversations.

I packed in about 280 pages of knowledge about entities and semantic SEO into this GPT. Have a question about entities and how best to use them? Ask the SEO Entity Wizard. https://chat.openai.com/g/g-AfaR6LZTx-seo-entity-wizard

Looks like there may have been another Google update this week...

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My vision for the The SEO Pub Community is To Become the largest, most well-respected SEO community on the planet. Obviously, as I write this, we are a long way from that goal. It’s a big goal. I believe that in order for one to succeed in business you first must help others to succeed. I hope that comes across in my contributions both in the public and private areas of the community. For this place to become what I envision it becoming, it cannot just be me that feels that way. We need other marketers contributing their knowledge and experiences to help the membership too. I have always found that by helping others it keeps me thinking about what I am doing in my own business, and it grows as a result. Our membership is always going to be full of marketers of different levels of experience and skills. There will always be members brand new to internet marketing and members who have been doing this for 10+ years. All are welcome here, and I hope that all participate in the community. The type of member that I hope to attract and foster here are ones that are really serious about building, growing, and maintaining an online business. I hope you read the Being a Better Member thread and take it to heart. Sometimes being an internet marketer can be a bit lonely. Often times it is just you and your computer. It does not have to be that way. Here we will have a TEAM of marketers pulling in the same direction, helping one another to achieve their dreams and success. T-ogether E-veryone A-cheives M-ore Welcome to our community.

As the community of The SEO Pub grows, we are always going to have, and always going to welcome, members of different degrees of marketing experience and skills. In order to grow this community into what I envision it becoming, and for you yourself to get the most out of it, I ask that you take a moment to read this and think about how you can be a better member of the community. Questions are always going to be asked. This is an open forum of course. I would ask that before starting a new thread, you use the forum’s search function to see if there are threads that already exist which answer your question(s). If you have a variation on the question, just quickly ask yourself if it makes sense to start a new thread or would it be better to just revive the old thread. Belittling members for asking questions will never be tolerated by the staff here. At the same time, if the question can be answered by a simple Google search, think about whether you are really contributing to the community in a positive way by posting the thread. Some examples would be as follows: versus versus In other words, ask specific and more in depth questions when appropriate. This will create more interesting and beneficial discussions both for yourself and other members as well. This is especially true when asking questions about your specific marketing campaigns. Too many times in other forums I have seen posts like these: My site is not ranking on page one of Google. Can someone tell me why? I have a high bounce rate. Why? I only made $0.17 off of AdSense last month. What am I doing wrong? If you want useful answers with actionable ideas that you can implement, then provide some information about your situation. What have you done to try to rank your site so far? What kind of traffic are you targeting? Where is your traffic coming from? How long has your site been active? What kind of content is on your site? What are you doing to try to capture your visitors information and bring them back to your site? How are you trying to engage your traffic? These are examples of the kind of information that will help experienced members to assist you in diagnosing ways to improve your results. Refrain from turning disagreements personal. There are tons of different ways to make money online. Your way is not the only way, nor is it the “right” way. Be open to other points of view and new ideas. That being said, there are always going to be disagreements and arguments over marketing ideas and techniques. Keep those arguments to the points at hand. Fight for your point of view as strong and as hard as you want, but do not cross the line of attacking the person on the other end of the argument. Some of the most useful forum threads I have ever come across and/or participated in were very heated arguments. What came out of those threads were some incredible nuggets for those smart enough to identify them. Brag. I have never met a successful internet marketer without at least a little bit of an ego or who did not enjoy a pat on the back for a job well done. Brag about your online successes when they happen. Do not just post Woohoo! I made $5,000 last month. Tell us how you did it. You do not have to go into every detail or provide your niche, but share what you are doing that is working. Do not worry if it is not something super advanced. Sometimes being reminded that the basics of marketing are still effective is a good thing. It can also breed competition. You may find someone that reads your post, and it motivates them to do even better. Success breeds success. Help out where you can. If you see a member struggling with something that you can assist with, help out when you can. Maybe you shared the same experience and can point them in the right direction. If you are new to online marketing and feel you do not have much to offer (you are probably wrong), help the community in other ways. For example, there is a 'Report' link at the bottom of each post. If you see some posting spam or something that is inappropriate, help us to clean it up by hitting that link. Use the 'UpVote' button. At the bottom right of each post you will find a button labeled 'UpVote'. If you want to thank someone for a post they made, hit the button. If you want to go into more detail thanking them and discussing which points you liked, by all means do so, but lets try to keep from clogging up the forum with a bunch of "Thanks for this" or "Great post" type of one line messages.

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