SEO News

Posted by TheMozTeam

This post was originally published on the STAT blog.

If you’re familiar with hreflang, you’ll know just how essential this teensy bit of code is to a successful international campaign. You’ll also know that it comes with a boatload of moving parts — multiple pages, sections, and subdomains per country.

That’s a lot of data to track. And if you aren’t hyper-organized, it’s easy to miss out on some big time insights.

Lucky for you, there’s a handy way to track your hreflang campaigns: all you need are a few dynamic tags in STAT. And even luckier for you, Dan Nutter, Technical SEO Specialist at twentysix, agreed to share his wisdom on this very subject.

Below, you’ll learn how to set up your own dynamic tags in STAT, monitor all your pages, and even visualize all that data to impress your team, boss, and clients.

The origins of hreflang 

The hreflang attribute, for those unfamiliar, tells Google which language you are using on a specific page. Introduced back in 2011, it essentially allows us to speak to our target audience in different countries in their languages.

Developing it, though, has been described by Google’s John Mueller as one of the most difficult sides to SEO:

While certainly complex, hreflang has been immensely helpful for companies looking to increase their site (or, in our case, our client’s sites) visibility and grow their audience. This is because: when searchers see the right language of content, it helps decrease bounce rate and increase conversions.

Since hreflang requires such a significant amount of time and effort from both SEO and development teams, clients (rightly) want to see tangible benefits post-deployment.

Monitoring hreflang (the standard way) 

To show the benefits of such a massive change to the technical architecture of a site, SEOs can do one of two things — either highlight the increase in the number of hreflang tags or point out the reduction in the number of errors being detected in Google Search Console.

The problem is that telling a valuable story about complex code, one that will resonate with clients, is no easy feat, particularly when the information is being communicated to the C-suite.

This is why dynamic tags in STAT are an incredible tool for SEOs and are invaluable to our team.

Monitoring hreflang with dynamic tags (the easier way) 

For those of you running international SEO campaigns, I highly recommend using STAT’s dynamic tags to monitor changes of ranking URLs after new hreflang deployments.

Not only do dynamic tags allow for a fast diagnosis of potential issues with the hreflang mark-up, they also provide a tangible way to tell a compelling, positive story for our team or a client of twentysix.

In STAT, dynamic tags are automatically populated by a pre-determined criterion — you select them with the filtering options in the Keywords tab at the site level. For instance, you could filter the SERP Features column to see all keywords that generate “People also ask” boxes.

All your tags are then at the ready in the Tags tab, so you can get quick snapshots of how your data is performing.

Creating your hreflang tags in STAT 

To track your new hreflang mark-up with dynamic tags in STAT, your international content must be delivered via either sub-folders or sub-domains on a site using a gTLD (E.g. www.sitename.com/fr-fr/ or fr.sitename.com).

If your international content is served on ccTLDs (i.e. www.sitename.fr), dynamic tags won’t be able to track any incorrectly ranking URLs, as they will be attributed to a different domain.

First, you’ll need to separate the sites in your project for all relevant country and language combinations. To enable this, you simply filter ranking URLs for a specific text string. This will generate tags that can track all the ranking keywords for a particular sub-folder — or even a specific URL — and monitor their performance.

Under the URL column, apply the Wildcard Search and/or Exclusion Search functions. This will allow you to detect any changes in your ranking URLs.

Applying Wildcard Search and Exclusion Search helps to surface any changes in your URLs.

The Wildcard Search filter can locate URLs that include the text string for the correct region, thereby tracking the improvement in the number of correctly ranking URLs.

Sites using sub-folders will require filtering for all URLs, which includes the country and language combination you want to track, such as “/fr-fr/” when tracking URLs for the country France and the language of French.

For sites using sub-domains, you’ll need to filter for the sub-domain and root domain combined, such as “fr.sitename.com.” To track sub-domains, you’ll need to select Ignore “www.” prefix when matching in the site settings.

To track subdomains, you need to select Ignore ‘www.’ prefix when matching in the site settings.

Once you have filtered the URL column for your chosen country, select Tag All Filtered Keywords and create a dynamic tag called “Correct URL.”

If you opt to track the decrease in the number of incorrectly ranking URLs, you’ll need to create a dynamic tag using the exact same steps as above, only this time with the Exclusion Search functionality.

Telling a positive story

When you track the performance of your ranking URLs, it’s easier to demonstrate the value of the changes being implemented to the technical architecture of the site.

In addition, when that value is visually represented — like in a graph — it provides clients with a clear idea of just how effective a technical change is, and that can be communicated clearly throughout all levels of their business.This shows the increase in any correctly ranking URLs.

After your tags have been created, you can monitor the increase in correctly ranking URLs using the Dashboard tab.

The bonus round 

An unexpected benefit of tracking the success of a hreflang deployment? It highlights any changes made to the technical setup of a site, which can prevent the hreflang from functioning correctly.

For instance, during a recent campaign, our team noticed an increase in the number of incorrectly ranking URLs, indicating that a site-level change had negatively impacted the hreflang markup.

At the time, Google Search Console was experiencing a number of time-lag errors, which meant that if we weren’t keeping a close eye on things, we would have missed the issue entirely. With our dynamic tags set up in STAT, we were able to pick up on these changes before Google Search Console.

Using STAT’s dynamic tags, Dan was able to catch the error before Google Search Console.

By leveraging STAT’s dynamic tags, we were able to catch the increase and our team rectified the issue before any long-term damage was done.

Liked what you read?

Want to know your best and worst-performing tags? Keen to compare all their metrics side-by-side?

If you answered yes to both and you’re a STAT client, then check out our Tags tab to see what kinds of insights you can uncover for your international (and national) campaigns.

Not a STAT client (yet)? Book a demo to get a customized walkthrough. You can also chat with our team at MozCon to see it up close and personal! 

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

Posted by randfish

Focused on new link acquisition for your clients or company? Link building is always a slog, but Rand has a PR-focused tip that makes it much easier to find people and publications that’ll cover and amplify you. Check it out in this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday!

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are talking about the easiest link building tip in the book. It is PR-focused, meaning press and public relations focused, and I’ll dive right in.

If you are trying to get some new links for your new client, for your website, or for your company, start with this process. 

Step 1: Identify some of your site’s or your business’ unique attributes

• The type of company that you are. Are you a startup or a scale-up? Are you mid-stage? Are you a small business? Are you a family-owned business?
• What’s the background of your founders? Do they come from a special place, something that is unique? Almost certainly the answer is yes. But in what kinds of ways?
• What type of financing do you have? 
• What is your customer focus, your customer target? 
• What is your purpose, values, culture? 
• Geography. Sector or market. 
• Other attributes, like accessibility. Maybe you do a great job of serving differently-abled folks. Maybe you are a very sustainable business, a super green business. Maybe you have a very high bar of ethics. Or your facilities are absolutely outstanding and super Instagram-worthy.

Step 2: Find 5–10 others that share these attributes

Whatever it is, some combination of these, you’re going to take and you’re going to find other people who share those attributes, other businesses, some other businesses that share some of those attributes or some combination of them. For example, I’ve taken a type of business, a startup, and a geography — startups in San Diego. Or a type of financing, angel-financed, but a type of business that is unusually angel-financed, a physical, retail location business. That’s fairly atypical. B corps, a benefit corp that is in the healthcare space. Again, somewhat atypical, somewhat unique. A black-owned business that’s in tech. Tragically, also unusual.

Step 3: Find publications and people that have covered/amplified others like you

Now Step 3, I’m going to find publications and people that have covered or amplified other people like you, some combination of other people like you. So we’ll start with my first example here — startups in San Diego. If I am a startup in San Diego, I will plug in several other startups in San Diego.

So I did a search “startups in San Diego” in Google. I found Cloudbeds and Hire A Helper, two startups that are in San Diego, and I find a bunch of coverage opportunities by searching for the combination of the two of them. Cloudbeds and Hire A Helper leads me to ProgrammableWeb has a page that lists both of them because they both have APIs. San Diego Startup Week lists both of them because they were both panelists or speakers there. Snip2Code has a machine learning directory because they both had some interesting uses for machine learning that they applied. Tampa Bay Times covered both of them because of a data content piece. These are your link opportunities, your press, PR coverage opportunities.

You can repeat this again and again with combinations like this. The best part is you are using just your brain and Google search. Super, super simple. Of course, you could take this and you could apply this, you could plug in the websites for Cloudbeds and Hire A Helper to Moz’s Link Explorer, and you could get a bunch of other link opportunities. You could plug those two in and you could plug in your own website, and then you could say, “Show me sites that link to these two, but not to me,” through the Link Intersect function.

Find new link opportunities!

So there are ways to advance this with tools, but this is some of the simplest, best ways to launch to get coverage, to get people to know you and like you and start to have heard of your brand, and to get those links that Google is going to need to rank your website higher.

All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this. Look forward to some of your tips and advice around easy, PR-focused link building tips. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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