About The Website →
Invention-patent-drawings is a patent drawing service provider mainly for the US. The target audience is patent attorneys and inventors who are looking for drawing solutions to their idea/ patent.
Patent drawing: “A patent application or patent may contain drawings, also called patent drawings, illustrating the invention, some of its embodiments, or the prior art” – Wikipedia.
Some important stats of the website:
Since last year, the organic traffic of Invention-patent-drawings has been decreasing continuously. Also, another important point is that most of the backlinks are coming from directory sites or irrelevant sites that will hardly be beneficial from an SEO standpoint.
Table of Contents
Here’s What I’d Do to Grow Invention-patent-drawings →
Let’s break down the key implementations that I’d do to grow the website.
1. Lack of EAT information
Even if your website doesn’t fall under the health and finance-related categories, you still need to consider the importance of building EAT of your website/ online brand.
Here’s a visual representation to help you understand the importance of EAT:
In this case, the website lacks EAT information. For example, by looking at the about us page, it will be difficult to say who is the person/ team behind this website.
Quality raters guidelines mention that an Unsatisfying amount of information about the website or creator of the main content is a characteristic of low-quality pages.
Likewise, there is no clear information about the author or the expertise of the content creator.
Things to do:
1/ Start adding EAT information about us and the contact us page. The goal will be to showcase the expertise and authority in the patent drawing field.
2/ Highlighting the author’s expertise for articles (even if the article is written by a freelance writer, I’d recommend getting an expert to review the articles. This way, we can use structured data to tell Google that the content is written by an expert.)
Another issue in the blog articles is using author details without adding structured data.
Here are some screenshots:
The above information can be useful for a human eye to understand the author’s expertise, but the bot will also treat this information as a part of the main page content.
This is why I always prefer to use structured data (adding properties → name, URL, image) for each author.
3/ I will also perform an EAT audit for the website to find a scope of improvements. Please check out the EAT guide series to understand the process.
2/ Focus on third-party reviews:
If you’re not sure why having a good number of client reviews or expert reviews about your brand and product is important, read this from QRG:
“Use reputation research to find out what real users, as well as experts, think about a website. Look for reviews, references, recommendations by experts, news articles, and other credible information created/written by individuals about the website.
User reviews are often helpful sources for brand reputation for websites that offer products or services.
You may consider a large number of detailed, trustworthy positive user reviews as evidence of positive reputation.” – Google.
This is why brands also need to focus on getting reviews from customers and other expert individuals as well.
Currently, the brand doesn’t have reviews on third-party platforms (GMB, Glassdoor, Comparably, etc.)
Things you can try:
- Ask your existing customers to share product/ service reviews on third-party platforms like GMB, Glassdoor, etc.
- If you’re a SaaS or product-based company, you can reach out to relevant bloggers and journalists to write reviews about the product.
3. Noindex pages
Currently, the website has added a no-index tag on two important pages such as:
- Patent drawings portfolio
- Utility drawings portfolio
Most of all, these two pages are added in the navigation but with no-follow and no-index tags. Two key issues with this approach:
- Nofollow internal links
- It is preferred to add important pages on the home page or navigation. But in this case, the pages have no-follow and no-index tags.
Once the technical SEO audit is done, I will get to see other SEO issues that might affect the growth in search. I use the Ahrefs webmaster tool and Screaming frog to perform technical site audits.
4. Disavow links
The website has links from dozens of irrelevant sites and low-quality directory sites.
So, my preferred way would be to disavow those links.
5. Home page optimization for internal linking
Currently, the home page has links to the contact us and a patent drawing page within the main content. I’d prefer to create two content sections and add links to the service pages with descriptive anchor text.
Here’s the visual illustration:
Generally, the home page is the most authoritative page of a website (as it tends to receive more links naturally).
And avoiding generic anchor text (learn more, click here, etc.) will give Google the context and content of the linked pages.
6. Blog Categorization
Currently, the website has 50+ blog posts published. But if you visit the blog page, you’ll only get to see the latest four blog articles.
Also, the only way to access the older articles is by pagination links like this:
This might seem okay from a reader’s point of view. But it will be a complicated scenario for a crawler (especially for a larger site).
“When content is buried hundreds of links deep, it sends a strong message to the search engines that you don’t think the content is important.
The pages will probably be crawled less often, if at all, and they probably will not rank very well.
If just one page in that long-chain returns an error (e.g., because of a temporary server hiccup), the crawler won’t be able to discover any of the other pages downstream.” – Matthew Henry (SEO tool developer at Portent).
Issues with this approach:
- Hard to find articles by topic or date
- The crawler needs to follow lots of links to get older blog archive pages
Better approach:
First, we need to add blog categories so that a user can sort articles by topic or date, or format.
An example:
Second, the approach will be adding midpoint links for pagination to make the older articles a few clicks away from the home page. An example:
Image source: Portent.com
According to the study of portent, adding mid-point links is one of the most effective ways to reduce the crawl depth for deepest pages.
This might not be needed right now but will be useful when the site publishes more articles in the future.
7. Optimizing existing blog posts
By looking at many blog articles, it seems like most of these articles are not keyword-focused.
Here’s what I’d do first here:
1/ Check Google search console data for the last 3 months/ 6 months report.
2/ Export the data and make a list of blog articles along with impressions, clicks, and CTR columns.
3/ Find content pieces with very low CTR and high impressions
This way, I will get a list of blog articles that need a content update.
Here, you’ll find my step-by-step process of content audit using GSC.
(Note: I’d recommend you create detailed briefs for the writer, breaking down the content structure with secondary keywords.)
8. Audience research for blog
Now, it is time for the research to find content topics to write about. Here, instead of relying on keyword research tools, I’d prefer to dive deep into people’s real problems.
The key reason:
The search demand for patent drawings is relatively low. So you may skip many important keywords just because they have 0 or low search volume.
We can take help from tools, but in this case, it is the real problems that will be helpful for high conversion and organic traffic.
Things to do:
Start with problems (aka questions) instead of keyword research.
Step 1. Identify Problems
The goal is to build a list of questions that your audience often asks.
Some of the ways to find relevant questions are:
- Any premium SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, etc.)
- Online communities or forums (Social media groups, Quora, Reddit, etc.)
- MarketMuse
- Answerthepublic tool, and so on.
This way, you’ll get a list of questions that you can turn into content opportunities in the next step.
Step 2. Prioritize Questions
Prioritize questions to find winning content topics
To refine the question list, you can prioritize by difficulty, volume, and searcher intent.
Here’s an example:
Step 3. Study The Searcher’s Intent
Before creating any content, study the top 10 pages, not copy them but understand the searchers’ query’s intent.
Try to figure out:
- What does the searcher want to accomplish?
- Is it buying/informational or navigational intent?
- The common pattern in the search results (are most of the pages listicle/ how-to articles/videos/ etc.)
This way, you’ll have a much more reliable keyword list that drives traffic and solves real challenges for the audience.
9. Link building
Since the website has a weak backlink profile (as compared to competitors), it is also necessary to work on acquiring backlinks.
Initially, guest posting is good enough to get some backlinks from medium to high authority websites.
Simply follow the traditional approach to find websites for guest articles:
1/ Search “write for us” patent drawings (also try other variations)
2/ Make a list of websites that actively publish guest articles.
3/ Filter the list by relevance, traffic opportunity, quality, and quantity of website links.
Note: Give high priority to relevance and traffic opportunities. Otherwise, it is not worth it enough to spend your time.
4/ Write the content considering the guidelines of the website.
Note: If you’re allowed to place a link within your content, then strategically find which web pages need backlinks.
One simple way is to check the high-intent pages that are ranking on the second and third pages. If these pages (ranking on the 2nd or 3rd page) match the search intent, consider creating backlinks for those pages first.
Backlink flywheel
Guest articles or any other manual link-building effort is hard to scale. Therefore, you need to create content good enough that gets backlinks organically.
For the long term, you should have a plan to acquire backlinks organically.
In this case, I’d prefer to create data-driven articles as there are many statistics available on the official website of USPTO which can be used with storytelling.
Other ideas to consider in building a link-building flywheel:
- Creating a glossary hub explaining all the technical concepts and jargon
- Building a tool to measure patent drawing cost
- Publishing research-driven content on trending topics
Recommended reading: Learn how to execute data-driven content (be the original source)
