Finally, I can announce on the launch of a new feature, that was long being in the making. Paid blog posts. Why?! Because blog posts are one of the best ways to get a back link. They are natural looking links, embedded into relevant text, and if you choose correctly, within a blog that relates to your niche. If the blog is good, and the post, it is almost impossible for Google to differentiate a paid blog post from a natural (real) blog post. That makes it so appealing to SEO, that you just can’t resist it.

We assimilated about 10,000 blogs, in multiple niches, that could serve you. All those blog post provide a do-follow link with an anchor text and target URL of your choice.  Not only that, but you have all the blogs, come with the score for the blog from Majestic SEO, which includes Trust Flow and Citation Flow (scores for the reliability &  popularity of the blog) , so it makes it easier to pick the right blogs. Then, you just need to pay, and we’ll take care of the writing of the post and the communication/payment to the blog owner/admin. So, the entire process is easy and reliable. Good link building never been so easy!

Let’s go over the steps for creating a paid blog posts order:

1. Go to the “Paid Blog Post” screen
   
2. Select the category or use the free searchNote that the number you see in parentheses is the amount of blogs in the category. The directory icon links to sub categories under this category.
3. Once you select the category, just click it and press the “select category” button.
   You’ll then see the blogs under this category, like here:
   As you can see above, you can see for each blog, the price, citation flow, trust flow and Alexa scores. You can also sort the list by each of those fields. To add a blog to your order, use the “add” button next to it. It will then be added to the lower table (see below) of chosen blogs.
4. Once you’ve finished selecting the blogs, scroll down to the lower table and have a look at your chosen blogs. If you don’t like any of them, just remove it from the order using the “delete” button next to it.
5. For each selected blog, you need to set the target URL, which is where the link will point to within your website. Also, you’ll have to set the anchor text, this is the text that will appear on the link to your website. It is a vital part of SEO, so you should try to provide the keyword you want to promote. Once you’re ready, just press the “submit blogs order” button. That will forward you to the payment screen.
6. Once the order is paid for, you’ll get an email once the post is ready. You can also check the progress and find the post in the “previous orders” tab of the “Paid Blog Posts” screen.

I’m happy to announce on a new feature for link building, Paid Directories.

Up until now we offered a list of free web directories you could submit to. The problem was that the response time from those directories was horrible, and many times they would ignore the submission. The recent problem is that those directories are not supporting https websites, and now this is the standard with many websites. It was hard to explain to so many site owners why their submissions were failing on the free directories, so the conclusion is that we now offer paid web directories.

You could argue that their influence on rankings are not high these days. That might be true, but you pay a very small price for a link that may benefit, even little. So, the price reflects the benefit you get from it. Probably, it would be much better to have a blogger in your niche write about your website and provide a dofollow link in a natural and relevant text, but that is so HARD to get, and might cost you a lot more. So, with the web directories, you get what you pay for. Small/moderate benefit for small cost and very little effort.

Anyway, lets cover the new feature. As you can see in the image above. We got some of the best web directories out there for you to use. Just select the directories you want and you’ll be able to submit to them. We got good prices for all of them and we’re saving you time and effort in submitting to them. Just define your submission profile once and use that to all directories you want. No need to go through the tedious submission process and entering your payment details to each of them.

All directories come with some information like, their price, the duration of the listing, alexa rank, and citation flow (equivalent to PageRank).

Remember, those are paid directories, so we will need to collect money from your card on file or PayPal.

Just finished uploading our revised groups screen.

Here is how it looks like:
Hope you like it. The old screen got a lot of complaints over the years.

One of our clients suggested this report. I hope you’ll find it useful as he does.

Let’s start with a picture to ease up the explanations:

SEO rankings progress

As you can see in the example above, we show here the average rank per week for each keyword. The actual average rank is shown, plus a color that helps to mark the progress made. Each color marks a different range of rank. 1-3: dark green, 4-10: green, 11-20: lime, 21-100: yellow, 101-200 pink, >200: red.

Hope you find this useful. You can export this report using the pdf link at the bottom of the screen or add it to your reports from the reports section.

Here is where you can find this new screen:

rank progress menu

Since we realize that PDF/CSV reports are still important, specially for SEO agencies. We made an upgrade to our reports section.

First, we changed the former screen name from “mailed reports” to simply “reports”, and moved this screen from the settings section to the main left menu.

Second, we added the option to add a cover page to the report. Once you set the report to add cover page, it will be added to any merged report.

Third, You can now add a report that is manual, so it isn’t sent through mailed reports, just on demand. To do that just choose the “never” option on the “mail every” selection box in the “add new report” form.

Just moved our site to https.

The trend is to use https for all pages in websites, even ones that don’t handle any private/sensitive information. So, we moved all our pages to https. Up until now, only our ordering pages were secured. Google are pushing this, because their officials say they give more credit to secured sites. Also, chrome displays “not secure” on the URL bar, for pages that are not secured. So, there is definitely a strong push from Google towards using only https.

White label sites still operate on http since our certificate will not work for them. In the future, we will allow certain white label sites to work with https if they inform us their site’s certificate is valid for the sub domain used for the white label version of sheerseo.com.

We now added an PDF export to the dashboard.
For all the SEOs out there – this allows you to send much more impressive PDF to your clients. Not just the usual boring rankings table, but a comprehensive graphical data about their website.
To just export the dashboard, use the export button on the bottom of the dashboard screen.

If you want to have this new PDF report sent to the client by email, you can add that in settings>domain settings>mailed reports screen.
The same screen also allows to create a merged report with both the dashboard and the rankings in the same PDF file.

We’ve just added a new dashboard to the domain accounts.

Here is how it looks like:

You can find it in the menu, just above the rankings.

The dashboard has 3 main sections:

Many times I get customers saying that our rankings are not correct. While our system may have errors, that is rare.

A more probable cause you see different results in Google than what are system is giving is:

1. Localization – Google gives a different results based on your location. The country is the most critical in this respect, even if you use google.com, your results are not US if you’re outside US. For some keywords, also the city or even the zip code within the city influence the results. Those would usually be keywords that make sense to localize per city, like “plumber”, “lawyer”, etc.

2. Personalization – Google is  trying to fit the results to your previous browsing history. Thus, usually your site, which you visit often, will appear high in the results. The way to avoid this is to sign out of any Google account you use (Gmail, G. Analytics, etc.).

3. Low search volume keywords – Google is pretty consistent when it comes to keywords that are valuable, which are keywords that have high search volume. But when it comes to low search volume keywords, you might get different results depending on which Google server you hit.

We know for some time that Google started hiding much of their organic search data from monitoring applications. When we come to see the keywords that originated the searches we see “not provided” most of the time. There is nothing new here, but lately it has become so extreme that Google Analytics information regarding organic search is completely useless.

Here is a quick example:

As you can see, 99% of our searches are not provided.

Thus, I strongly suggest on not using Google Analytics integration in sheerseo. If you can, choose the Google search console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) instead.