Ahrefs - Ahrefs' Weekly Digest #73

Hey there,

This week, we released our new “Ads Position History” feature in Keywords Explorer

This new feature allows you to get a visual overview of PPC competition for a given keyword, see how it changed over time, and what the copy for each ad was.

See a short video of how it works here

Moving on to this week’s newsletter, where Michal has written about two distinct roles in SEO: SEO manager and SEO consultant. As always, click through to read each post. Or if you’re busy, read the tl;dr below each link:

✍️ New on our blog


Google Penalties: The Newbie-Friendly Guide by Nick Churick

If your organic rankings and traffic suddenly drop while your website has no downtimes or technical SEO issues, you may be facing one of two things:
  1. Your website was reviewed by a human and got a manual action.
  2. A Google update resulted in an algorithmic action demoting your website.
If you receive a manual action, you’ll be able to see the issue under Security and Manual actions in your Google Search Console. It’ll tell you what the issue is so you can address it directly. 

For algorithmic actions, the best way to identify them is to look at your Google organic traffic and see if you have a drop that coincides with a known or suspected algorithm update. You can also search through webmaster forums or Twitter to see if other webmasters are facing similar issues.



SEO Manager Role & Skills (Explained by SEO Managers) by Michal Pecánek

SEO is a multidisciplinary field. Thus, SEO managers are required to make everything work like a well-oiled machine. But what do they do exactly? Michal reached out to a few SEOs to find out. 

Here’s what they do on a daily basis:
  1. Management – Meetings with clients and team members, coordinating tasks, taking care of team education and training, working with stakeholders
  2. Strategy – Plan SEO campaigns and make sure they’re executed properly
  3. Tactics – Less so for larger teams, but an SEO manager can be more hands-on if they’re managing a small team
  4. Reporting – A frequent activity for SEO managers who work in an agency

Michal also asked the contributors what skills an individual needs to become a great SEO manager. Here are the top five:
  • Communication skills 
  • Data-driven mindset and critical thinking
  • Curiosity and constant learning
  • Time management, prioritization, and delegation skills
  • Technical skills, such as a basic understanding of HTML, being familiar with Core Web Vitals, knowing schema markup, etc.


The Insanely Simple One-Page Marketing Plan Template by Joshua Hardwick

Creating a marketing plan can get really complicated

To help you get started quickly, we created a simple one-page marketing plan you can follow. Get the template here and answer these four questions:
  1. Who are you targeting? 
  2. What are your objectives? Make sure your objectives follow the SMART criteria
  3. How will you achieve your objectives? Get specific and think about the tactics you’ll use to achieve your marketing objectives and how much it’ll cost to execute said tactics. 
  4. When will you do everything? If you’re creating a 12-month marketing plan, then the tactics you’ve outlined have to be done in that time frame. However, having a list of things to do over the course of a year isn’t very actionable. So we recommend breaking things down into manageable chunks. A quarterly plan is a good starting point.


Hiring an SEO Consultant? Ask These 9 Important Questions by Michal Pecánek

If you’re hiring an SEO consultant, ask your candidates these nine questions:
  1. What’s your track record of success?
  2. What do you do best?
  3. How much can your work impact my business?
  4. Do you guarantee the results of your SEO work? (If they do, run!)
  5. What’s your approach to Google’s SEO guidelines?
  6. What SEO tools do you use, and how do you use them?
  7. What does your SEO reporting look like?
  8. How much do you cost?
  9. How do you hand over the work when we part ways?

📚 What we’re reading


Content Marketing Resources [Resource Collection]

Not much to tl;dr here. This is a collection of resources for learning how to create SEO content people actually want to read and Google wants to rank. The collection is created by Jake Sheridan, the creator of Sheets For Marketers. 
Till next time. ;)

Cheers,
Si Quan
Content Marketing @ Ahrefs

P.S. We’re experimenting with adding more content to our newsletter. What do you think? What should we improve? What should we add? Let me know by replying to this email.
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Older messages

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