Social Media Strategy is a guide to marketing, advertising, and branding in a world of social media-empowered consumers. Keith Quesenberry introduces readers to the steps of building a complete social media plan.
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Want to improve your share of audience attention? Since attention can't be bought, use the power of consistent content to ensure that your audience actively seeks your content.
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Owning a Google MyBusiness page can be a great way to get your business listed multiple times on Google. It is an essential asset for any local business owner, but sometimes it can get confusing.
If you’re the only business in town, you’re always going to show up first. However, if there are hundreds of similar businesses nearby, it can get quite frustrating, especially if you’re new in the game.
Some people pay marketing agencies a lot of money to get their listings to the top. What they don’t know is that companies often times can’t do much for a listing other than using unorthodox techniques which can lead to future problems, like hard suspension (which means you’ll lose everything, including photos and reviews).
Whether you do things yourself or ask an agency to do them for you, make sure your read this list of do’s and don’ts to make sure your listing is safe.
The information you provide is the most important thing. It’s often the client’s first contact with your business and most of time time people are looking for basic information, such as your phone number, address/location or opening and closing hours.
Therefore, you should make sure you spend enough time crafting this section.
Add accurate information: The first step is to have a Google My Business listing, of course. If you don’t have one, head on to https://www.google.com/business/ and get one.
Sometimes, the listings might already be there, so make sure you do a search on Google maps for your business. If it’s already there, you can claim it.
After you create your business, Google will ask you to edit important information, such as Name, Address, Phone number, Website, Working hours, Categories and many more.
One of they key criteria for ranking business listings is relevancy. This relevancy is represented partially by the information found in the listing, so make sure you fill out everything correctly!
Add main keyword in your title: The title is very important and it should always contain the name of your business. However, it’s also a good idea to add some main, very important keywords in your title, such as the main service and the location.
For example, if my business were simply called Arcadia LTD and it were in the hotel industry, I would put the title like this: “Arcadia: Hotel & Restaurant in London”
Verify your listing: An unverified listing is like buying a car without any documents. Not only that you risk someone taking it away from you, but you will also not be able to edit certain sections of the business.
However, getting your listing verified is pretty easy. Google will ask you to do it. Just look for the “Get your page verified” message. It should pop-up at the top of the screen, or near the name of your business.
After you verify it, you should see the representative shield icon near your listing name:
Stuff only keywords in the title: Don’t take the advice above badly. If you have multiple keywords, just focus on the main one and keep the secondary ones for your website’s pages.
A good example of keyword stuffing which you should avoid is the following: “Arcadia: Hotel, Motel, Bed and Breakfast, B&B, Restaurant in London.”
Google doesn’t like that and will often hard suspend pages that do this, so avoid it.
List outdated information: I see this issue way too often. I search for a location on Google to find some information and I find the phone number, but it’s either out of order or nobody ever answers it. This is very frustrating!
It’s even worse when the brand has multiple locations with outdated information.
Although the phone number is the most common, imagine the frustration felt when Google MyBusiness says that a shop opens at 8 AM only to get there and find out that you have to wait for one more hour.
Google doesn’t want its users to end up having bad experiences from using its site, so that’s why it’s possible to suggest changes. However, do you really want other people to suggest changes on your schedule, or do you want to manage it yourself?
If you’re a marketing professional, prepare an e-mail to ask your clients if they have any unverified listings on Google. If they do, then they (or you) should manage them.
Create fake locations: In order to rank in multiple cities, companies that offer online services often create multiple listings. This goes against Google’s TOS (terms of service), unless you have a real physical location in those cities.
I mentioned above the frustration about a business’s hours being wrong, now imagine someone going there and not finding what they were looking for at all!
If you have a digital store or run a company from home, you can always just select the Service-area option from the edit address section. There you’ll be able to select locations that you serve. Make sure you uncheck the “I also serve customers at my business address” box. This will prevent people from knocking on your door.
Reviews are a critical part of your MyBusiness listing success. Not only do they most probably affect a listing position, but it most definitely affects your potential clients’ opinion about the business.
When managing your reviews, do the following things:
Ask friends and clients for reviews:
When you’re first starting, it’s pretty hard to get reviews. It could be because you don’t have many clients or it could be that you’re a beginner and you might take some wrong steps in your journey as an entrepreneur.
Either way, a surefire way to get some early reviews is to ask your friends and family to review your business. Your friends probably know something about your business, so they can say a thing or two.
Just make sure they’re not all leaving the reviews from the same computer. Google might think it’s only one person trying some sort of sketchy thing. Two or three accounts are fine though.
It’s almost guaranteed for customers to leave a review if their experience is bad. To compensate for that, try to get your happy customers to leave positive reviews. This can be achieved by asking them to do it once they make a purchase in your store or via e-mail, if it’s eCommerce. You can add incentives like discounts for the next purchase in the menu, if they leave a review.
Get renowned local guides to review your place: Local guides reviews have a lot more weight into Google’s and potential customers’ eyes. They are known for visiting and reviewing places and do this on a regular basis. The higher their Google Guide Level, the better.
Getting a high level local guide to review your business can help your listing get a boost.
But how do you find these local guides? Well, the best way is to become a guide yourself. You don’t necessarily have to take this as a business opportunity. I’m sure you often visit places, so just take a couple of pictures and say 2-3 phrases about that location.
Then, you can meet other guides at Local Guides Connect. It’s probably a bad idea to pay them to review you. Some might accept, but others might leave you a negative review instead. However, if you invite them to your restaurant to check it out or tell them about your business when you chat you’re most probably going to get a review.
Try to make some new friends.
Incentivise clients to share photos: Most of the time, people leave only short, text reviews. However, if you can get them to take a picture of the product or service they acquired, then they will probably write a little bit more.
This is pretty common in restaurants, but nobody says you can’t ask your clients to review the new T-shirt they bought by publishing a photo with them wearing it.
The photos will also add to the MyBusiness photo collection. Keep in mind that people can also publish photos with bad reviews, such as flies in their soup or bad quality products!
Answer questions and reviews: So many people ignore their questions and reviews; it’s almost shocking! Not even big businesses with hundreds or thousands of reviews can afford to ignore these, especially the questions.
When someone reviews you positively, engaging with them through a reply will increase the chances of that customer returning.
Learn from your negative reviews: As for negative reviews, try and settle the issue first. Even if the customer decides to keep the rating 1 star, at least other people will be able to read your side of the story and make up their mind.
Negative reviews can be a great way of learning how customers act and what makes them angry. Try to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
When managing your reviews, don’t do the following things:
Ignore clients or argue with them: Ignoring the reviews is a really bad thing. Even if the review is short, try to respond to it with at least a “Thanks!”.
Never ignore the negative reviews! Always answer them and try to turn that negative review into a happy customer. You can offer a discount for their purchase.
It’s a small price to pay because this will prove to other potential customers who are researching your business that you are active and care about your customers’ thoughts.
Add fake reviews: If you add fake reviews, you can either get dropped down from the results or even banned by Google.
However, there’s a third option. People will figure it out! Today, people’s BS detector is so advanced that they will smell the fake reviews, even if they have no experience with marketing.
This is even more dangerous, as they will most probably leave a review saying all other reviews are fake, which can greatly impact your business!
Also, keep in mind that people are more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one. You can create only so many accounts to keep reviewing your business 5 stars, but if your services aren’t up to the task, you’ll soon get outnumbered by the negative ones anyway.
Add negative reviews to competitors: If you’re that kind of person, there’s not much I can say. But I’ll say this. You’re wasting your time. You could invest it in making your business better instead.
You can also get into trouble if people find out. You’ll ruin your business’s reputation.
Photos and videos are a very important part of your listing. People often want to see where they are going, especially if it’s a restaurant or hotel. The photos can also help users figure out where your business is located.
Put images in every category: When you create your listing, if you go into the Photos & Videos section, you’ll notice multiple tabs. Interior, Exterior, Products, Menu, Team, etc. Try to add some relevant photos in every category.
The Team section interests me the most. It shows transparency. Happy employees usually means happy customers, so let them know you treat your team well.
It’s easy to get photos done. Everyone has a smartphone these days.
Add videos: Videos are a great asset to your page. People will be able to make a better impression of the surroundings and events.
If you’re a store, you can always make a video showing the entrance. Maybe it’s a little bit hidden and not really into the view. Help them out. You can also add videos of products, even say a word or two about those products. Invite them to the store. People like to be told what to do!
Again… it’s easy to get videos done. Everyone has a smartphone these days.
Go crazy, you’re on Google’s servers: When you post images and videos on your website, you have to be careful and optimize them. They take up a lot of space and can make a website load very slow.
However, with Google MyBusiness you’re using the best servers on Planet Earth: Google’s servers. So go crazy. Smartphones these days have pretty good quality cameras. Upload your images as high definition as possible.
If Google has a problem with it, they will optimize them/resize them themselves.
Add fake images: Don’t put images that aren’t really from your business. Don’t even put products from other sites. You can get into copyright issues and people will get suspicious if they find the same picture somewhere else.
If you sell Nike shoes, instead of copying the photo from Nike’s official website, go and take a couple of pictures of the pair in your store.
Post pictures of clients without approval: Many people tag themselves at your location. Some photos might show there, so you might think it’s ok to add others. However, it can be dangerous! Try to add photos of your location without clients there if you don’t have their approval!
I’ll share a story: there was this guy speeding on a highway. The static camera got him, so he received a ticket at home about 2 weeks later. However, his wife received the ticket first. She didn’t have any problems with the ticket, but with the location of the car. Turns out that the husband had lied about where he was going and, apparently, in the passenger seat a very pretty blonde woman could be spotted. The woman filed for divorce so the man sued the police and won the trial for them ruining his life.
I consider the man ruined his own life, but if you don’t want to take any part in ruined marriages and get yourself in a hell of a lawsuit, you’d better not post any pictures with clients in them without their approval!
Whether you like it or not, Google+ is there and Google automatically creates an account for you when you sign up for Google MyBusiness. If you want a small advantage, try to use it.
Regarding your Google+ Account, do the following things:
Keep the account active: Google likes Google+. Although it never got to get big, a lot of people know about it and use it without even knowing when they use any Google service.
Post from time to time on it to show Google that your Business page is active. Maybe follow some other active accounts and share some of their posts as well, if they are relevant. Treat it as a business social media profile.
When managing your reviews, don’t do the following things:
Waste time creating unique posts: Google+ is a graveyard. Nobody really uses it. There are a few professionals that do, but probably for the sole purpose that not so many people do. They want silence.
Instead of creating really unique posts, you can simply reshare some of your posts from Facebook, Twitter, or even copy sections from your website and post them with a link back to your site.
This way you’ll save tons of time but still keep the account active.
NAPW stands for Name, Address, Phone and Website. It’s commonly known as NAP, but I’ve seen it as NAPW somewhere and thought it was relevant to add the site there.
List the information on your website: It’s a really good idea to have the same information that you have on your business listing on your website as well, especially the 3 things mentioned before (Name, Address, Phone).
You can add those in your footer as they don’t take up much space, but on your contact page you should also add your company’s real name, opening hours and other relevant information.
Build citations: Citations are sort of like backlinks, but for Google MyBusiness. Yeah, Google doesn’t necessarily need a backlink to figure out if you business is popular. In fact, if you’re curious to find out when your business is mentioned, you can try BrandMentions.
If you can find websites that list businesses, make sure to put this information there. Make it accurate. You could research the citations of your competition with the tool mentioned above.
Be inconsistent: If your citations and info around the web aren’t consistent, Google will get confused. Don’t list some opening hours on Google MyBusiness, and other opening hours on your website.
Same thing goes with your citations. Make them consistent. If you have multiple locations, it’s fine, but make sure you also use the city name in your Google MyBusiness title so that Google can correctly differentiate between listings.
Having your business at the top of Google Maps might take some time. This is normal for any new business. First, you’ll net noticed by the nearest people searching for you, but then your area will expand as you keep your customers satisfied.
Improving your listing is relatively simple. Don’t try any tricks. Just stick with the basic, common sense things, focus on improving your business, services and products and soon you’ll see your business at the top anyway.
Do you have a listing up and running for your business or your clients? What’s your experience with Google Mybusiness? Have you run into any issues? Leave a comment, maybe we or some other readers can help!
The post DO’s and DON’Ts on Google My Business | How to Get Your Listing to the Top appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Ranking high takes both time and effort. But there are some SEO techniques out there that are easy to implement and will definitely bring some results. The best part? You can probably do everything yourself.
Spoiler alert, though: many of them include basics. During the years we have observed something rather shocking. Many clients that I’ve picked up had paid big time for search engine optimization services in the past. To my surprise, however, basic things like keywords in titles were missing.
Now before you start, you can always perform an audit. It’s not actually something easy to do, depending on the size of your website, but it will help you prioritize your actions in order to save time. Depending on each individual situation, different actions in the list below might not be useful or might not apply to your case.
As mentioned in the introduction, I was often surprised to see that although some of my clients had paid big money for SEO services in the past, basic optimization things like keyword research and title optimization were not performed.
These being said, make sure your pages are targeting the proper keywords. The title tag has the most weight in search engine optimization, so make sure your keyword is there. The closer the most important keyword is to the beginning, the better. After that, you need to add the proper keywords to your Headings as well. The H1 is the most important heading so it should be the first thing on a page. In many cases, it’s the same as the title, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.
If you have a PPC campaign running, you can inspire yourself from those titles. Many people think that PPC titles are unfit for SEO, but the truth is that the PPC titles are focused on conversion, which will benefit SEO greatly.
Same thing goes for the meta descriptions. Optimize the meta descriptions to convince people to click your link. Make sure you have your keywords there as well, otherwise the chances of it showing up are much lower.
Once you get a hold of it, you can start targeting multiple keywords with one page. Although this article doesn’t really target multiple keywords, we could say that this title is optimized for “effective seo techniques”, “seo techniques” and “seo techniques 2019”.
This is a great thing, because you can focus on writing bigger pieces of content instead of many smaller ones. Google loves longer content.
Navigation is the most important structure element on your entire website. Why? Well, because it’s the first thing linking to your ‘other’ pages and it’s usually at the very top of the page, giving those links a lot of weight.
You can see, for example, that pages optimized for some of our most important keywords are linked to right from the navigation menu. These links are found on every page on the website, making those pages look very important in Google’s eyes.
That’s actually one of the reasons the Homepage has such high authority on all sites. It’s because, usually, the logo on every page links to it.
Adding breadcrumbs can be very beneficial to your website, especially if it’s an eCommerce one. This is due to the fact that they create structure within your site.
Most, if not all online stores, link their products from their category pages. This means that the category pages send some equity to the product pages, making them stronger. Not a bad thing, overall.
However, I’m pretty sure though that you want your category pages to rank high, because those are the ones optimized for the keywords with the most search volume. With Breadcrumbs, you will consolidate the strength of your Category pages by linking to them with all your subcategories and related products.
If you’re using a CMS, things are pretty easy. Most templates already come with breadcrumbs, so make sure you check the template’s settings first. If not, you can search the web for “Your CMS Platform” + “breadcrumbs plugin/extension/module”. I’m sure there’s something out there for you.
On a custom platform you might not be able to do it yourself without coding knowledge. However, a programmer should be able to do it pretty quick, so it won’t be a big expense.
Tracking is extremely important. If you don’t track your rankings and traffic, you can’t spot the issues with your website.
What pages do the users leave quickly? You know you can improve those first, especially if the search volume for them is high!
Also, if you don’t monitor your organic search traffic you can’t know if you’re making any progress and, worse, you won’t know if the search engines penalized you or your rankings have dropped.
You can use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to monitor your organic search traffic and issues with your pages. They’re fairly easy to install as long as you have access to your server. You might even be able to install them via a plugin for your CMS. I recommend using Google Tag Manager to implement all tracking codes. They will be easier to manage afterwards.
If you want to go to the next level, you can try things like HotJar, which creates a heatmap of where your users click most on a page. However, that’s a lot harder to understand and improve correctly, so an experienced person is required.
SSL has become a ranking factor since 2014. If you’re wondering why, the answer is pretty simple. Because of security. Cybercrime has been on the rise constantly and more and more people share more and more sensitive data on the web.
Installing an SSL should be pretty easy. Most of the time, your hosting provider can help you. However, there is a simpler solution which is also free: CloudFlare. You simply have to change your domain’s nameservers to point out to CloudFlare and then CloudFlare will act as a filter, blocking spam and bad IPs from reaching your server.
Beware, though! Migrating to HTTPS can cause some serious SEO issues!
If you want to know more, you can read this detailed guide about migrating from HTTP to HTTPS.
This isn’t something that people will be able to ‘steal’ from you very easily, but it will provide your website with great value. Using Google MyBusiness you can get your website listed multiple times on Google.
Not only that, but it will also link back to your website. People will be able to find your website a lot easier if it’s not already ranking very well.
Once you create your listing or claim ownership of it, make sure you fill out all the required details correctly. You should also add nice pictures of your location, products and team. This helps building trust with your clients.
Images take up the most physical space on your server. That means they also take the most physical space on your user’s device, which means they also take the most time to load.
Slow loading times greatly impact your conversions and images really take the longest to load.
There are two ways an image takes up too much space. First, it’s not compressed in its physical size on the disk. So you can have two images that look the same, but one has 1MB and the other has one fifth of a MB.
How is this possible? Well, I’m not sure how image compression works, but it makes images smaller in size on the disk without reducing their size or quality on the screen. You can use plugins such as Smush for WordPress, or image compression tools like ShortPixel which have APIs. You can also compress your images every time you upload them using TinyPNG. If you can’t connect a tool, just download batches of images (if you don’t have thousands) compress them and then reupload them to your server.
Then, of course, you have the size on the screen. A 2000 by 2000 pixels image will take up more physical disk space than a 500 by 500 pixels image. Therefore, don’t load a 2000x2000px image and shrink it to 500x500px using CSS. The browser will have to download an image 4 times larger than it needs.
To make this work with responsive designs, you can research the “srcset” HTML attribute. You can use it to only download specific images on specific screen sizes.
Although images have the most impact, there are other elements that can affect your site’s loading speed. Most of the time it’s related to files, but other times it can be because of PHP conflicts or database queries taking very long to load.
To avoid conflicts and slow database loading times, you can try and limit your plugin use to the very minimal. Do you have a lot of unnecessary plugins and extensions? Get rid of them. Do you think something looks nice on your site, but you rarely every use it or it provides little value? Get rid of it.
You can start by removing your slider plugin, for example. Replace the slider with a static image and a CTA button. Why? Well, it turns out that sliders kinda suck! People rarely click on those offers, they take up a lot of space and resources and they can be very annoying when you’re reading something and the image shifts automatically.
Some other things you can do to increase your site’s speed include having a great hosting provider and minimizing the resources needed to load a page. You can use PageSpeed Insights and GT Metrix to monitor these issues.
Some are easy to fix and some are not. For example, a caching and file minification plugin like W3 Total Cache (for WordPress) can be useful. You can use this guide to set it up properly. However, beware of possible CSS and JS issues and conflicts that might mess up your design and functionality. Usually, disabling minification will fix the issue, but have a backup of your files and database before you change anything!
In Page Speed Insights check your server’s response time. If multiple tests show that the response time is over 2.5 seconds, you can consider switching to a better hosting provider.
You should also take a look at this Technical OnPage SEO Guide. Not everything there is easy to implement, but considering that it’s OnPage SEO, you have complete control over it, so it’s worth doing!
Interlinking is one of the most effective SEO techniques out there. You can use it to link to important pages using specific anchor texts. This has a lower risk than building backlinks on keyword rich anchor texts and, more importantly, you have absolute control over it.
Whenever you add new content, make sure you link to other relevant pages within your website. Vice-versa, go edit some old pages from your site and add links to your new content, if relevant.
If you have thousands of pages, it can be hard to interlink, but you can use plugins such as Interlink Manager. Make sure you also check out this guide about interlinking.
I know you’d rather prefer other websites linking to you, but just as with the social media example, you’ll have to share other people’s content in order to get linked to yourself.
This can actually improve your SEO. Why? Well, it’s because Google works on backlinks! That’s how it finds good content and figures out which content is worth ranking at the top. That’s why Google encourages webmasters to link to great content
Although you’ll only probably use one or two of them, it’s a good idea to secure as many as possible. Social Media profiles are a great way of getting some initial backlinks to your website. Sometimes you might even lose the name if someone else (like a competitor) registers it before you.
The most popular ones are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn. However, depending on your niche, you can consider Reddit or any other niche oriented social media platform, such as SoundCloud or Yelp.
However, for the links on the social media profiles to be effective, you’ll need to get shares, retweets, pins, etc.
If you want to get more traffic to your website, you have to use social media to get viral. Even if people read your content and like it a lot, they might not bother sharing it if you don’t facilitate the process.
Add share and like buttons on your pages. Focus on the platforms most relevant to your site instead of adding as many as possible. Again, if you have a CMS, there’s a plugin there for you!
You can also add CTAs within your content. There’s a nice SEO strategy called locked content. You can unlock that with a share. While locking the content you said you’d provide in the title is a very bad idea (bad user experience), locking some extra PDFs or tips can definitely increase the number of shares/ tweets about your site.
Also, make sure you share interesting content, even if it’s not from your own website. If you want other people to share your content, you’ll have to share theirs.
It’s better if you get shares from other pages instead of people, because personal profiles aren’t usually indexed. This means that Google won’t be able to see the backlinks created from those shares.
Now that you have your Google MyBusiness listing secured, it’s time to get some reviews. Many people ignore this and I never understand why. It’s something so easy to do!
Although reviews are a local SEO ranking factor, the higher your listing ranks, the more value it will provide to your website and business.
Getting good reviews is fairly easy, considering you offer quality products/services. Users are more likely to leave a negative review, so you have to work a little more. However, asking your friends to review your page on Google MyBusiness (and Facebook as well) isn’t hard. Also, everytime you have a satisfied customer, ask them to review you. You’ll be surprised, but many will do.
Depending on how big your site is, you might get a lot of 404s (an error message displayed by a browser indicating that an Internet address cannot be found). If people land on those 404 pages, they will inevitably leave, costing you a lot of money. One way to fix this issue is to create a custom design for you 404 page, with a Call to action in it.
Take a look at ours, for example:
If you have an eCommerce store, you can even add some categories, an offer, or hell, even a discount code! Now that’s going to heavily reduce the bounce rate.
Here’s a link where you can read more about how 404 pages affect SEO.
It’s no secret and no rocket science. The more (quality) content you post, the more traffic you will get. However, I still see a lot of new websites that want results with SEO lacking a blog. If you only have 5 pages that list your products, chances are you won’t outrank Amazon and Walmart for “Diapers”, even if your diapers change themselves. You need to post blog posts regularly to show Google that your website is active. It’s also a great way of earning new backlinks, as people will be more likely to share those rather than your services pages.
Countless times I’ve noticed that whenever I post new blog posts on a website, all the pages gain a little boost in their rankings, especially if the pages aren’t on the first page of Google.
This proves (to me at least) that Google trusts websites that post regularly more. After you get to page 1, you might see what’s called the Google dance, where Google sometimes puts your page up to see how users react to it and then uses machine learning to figure out if it’s good. If they like it, you will rank higher. If they don’t and your bounce rate is very high, you’ll drop back to lower positions. Search engines are all about user experience these days.
The secret to always coming up with new ideas and topics for content and blog posts is to try and answer customer questions. Answering questions is also a great idea to target keywords introduced through voice searches. If you haven’t answered all your customers’ questions, you should start with that!
You’ll see that content can be written in any niche, even the shitty ones! Just take my example above… do you imagine how many parents search for “how to change a diaper” on the internet? If you don’t have a guide yet, well, you should have one! Especially if your diaper changes itself, because you can then say “ignore all this and buy my product!”.
If you already have content on your website that’s targeting a specific keyword, don’t start writing something else on the same topic. You’ll get into keyword cannibalization, when multiple pages will be competing for the same keyword (and probably none will be ranking).
Simply improve the existing article by adding new content to it. The simple way to do it is to use CognitiveSEO’s Content Tool. Just search for the keyword you wish to target, add your title and content and hit optimize. The tool will provide you with a bunch of relevant topics and keywords you should add to your article in order to rank higher.
Whenever you find out something new related to an article you already have on your website, make sure to write it down. You can update your article from time to time to keep it fresh.
You can also add things like “Updated dd/mm/yyyy” to let users know that the information is not outdated.
You can easily obtain new search traffic by repurposing existing content. You can turn it into a PDF and use it to build your e-mail list, or you can turn it into a video or a podcast.
You could even use that content to share it directly on social media as a story. It’s known that a longer text without links gets more reach on platforms such as Facebook.
Different audiences prefer different types of content format, so expanding to more than just text is a smart move, especially considering that video content demand is on the rise!
This is part of those SEO tactics that aren’t really easy to do. Considering how old your website is, it might require and entire redesign, or even rebuilding from scratch.
However, it’s worth it, since Google has recently moved to a mobile first indexing process. This means that Google will rank your pages depending on how they’re viewed by users on mobile devices.
You can fix everything on a CMS by simple installing a responsive template. However, depending on the plugins you have installed, some functionalities might suffer from the change. It’s not really a low effort change, but it’s definitely high result!
“But Adrian, isn’t buying backlinks dangerous?Is this white hat SEO?”
Well, yes. But things are different when it comes to nofollow links. The dofollow purchased links are the ones that bring trouble. Those you should earn, not pay for.
Theoretical, search engines are aware that websites and the internet work with advertising and links. However, it does not want websites to take advantage of its organic search algorithm.
Nofollow links remove all the risks. You no longer have to hide yourself under “informative content” and can directly promote your business through the content and advertising texts you purchase. Just make sure the content is still valuable to the reader. Don’t just buy it for the link. The more traffic it gets, the more it will benefit your site as well, so invest in quality.
Backlinks are very hard to get, but also very effective. Link building opportunities are not easy to found. However, there are some easy OffPage SEO strategies that allow you to acquire high quality backlinks that are proven to work.
How?
By using cognitiveSEO’s competitive backlink research tool. Once you analyze your website and your top competitors, you can easily identify common referring domains between the websites using our tool.
This helps you identify websites that are prone to share content in your niche. Even if the links are purchased, you know they work if your competitors are ranking with them. Sign up for a free trial and get a list of your competitors’ best backlinks.
Conclusion
You’ve probably heard these SEO tips before, but the real question is have you truly tried them?
Not all these SEO strategies might be easy to implement, but you will definitely be able to improve your rankings with them. Everything listed above doesn’t require an expert and won’t put your website in any risk of getting penalized.
If you have any questions, I will gladly reply in the comments section. Also, I’m curious: which SEO technique above have you already used? Was it effective? Did I miss anything? Share it with us and let’s help each other!
The post 21 Effective Low Effort & High Return SEO Techniques for 2019 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Use the Content Distribution TIP Method to continually deliver and improve your content marketing over time.
The post Content Distribution TIP Method That Will Make You A Marketing Success appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
I was recently faced with the problem of creating a series of automated product feeds for a retail client. The requirement – deliver a feed in .csv format that contains updated stock and pricing information from 3rd party sites. In this case, from a group of supplier websites for items that aren’t held in the […]
The post Prototyping automated product feeds for retailers appeared first on Builtvisible.
In an AI world, where technology evolves so fast, it’s mandatory to be on a wave to get noticed, to find new ways of tracking our performances. And ROI is undeniably required.
Pay per lead emerged following a need to evaluate results that could not be followed through traditional forms. In theory, a lead is generated through a signup form which includes contact information and, in some cases, demographic information, too. It is usually is a non-cash event for those who sign-up because no payment is included.
Clients will always be important, but until a user gets there, a lot of steps should be completed. And today, it is even harder to do that when the user is “attacked” with information on every channel, at once. So, leads become a crucial segment.
Are the days when leads were left in the hands of a sales team long gone> Or does it really work in the present? Is PPL the past or the future of search engine optimization? You’ll find out through today’s discussion points:
If you don’t have a strategy to nurture leads along the consumer journey, then you’re missing out on a wealth of business.
Pay per lead or cost per lead (PPL) is a marketing model, a form of partnership between an advertiser and a business owner. The advertiser undertakes to bring leads to the partner-company and get paid by a commission.
This marketing model appeared with the need to evaluate this segment of users – leads – and motivate third-parties to get incentified by bringing more and more leads.
A lot of leads are lost due to multiple reasons. Qualified leads will stay on the sales funnel until the end by becoming future clients. It is also apt for the company to value them and ease their way to the payment step.
Now more than ever, it is important to develop a lead nurturing strategy to monetize leads. Studies have shown that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales and those nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
So that’s why lead generation becomes crucial for a business owner.
Pay per lead is a form of paying per performance, similar to PCC. Pay per click is a marketing model for advertising, where an advertiser pays the publisher when the ad is clicked on.
Pay per lead appeared as a form of affiliate marketing.
Comparing PPC with PPL, we can say that the latter is focusing on a ”hint” and can be more efficient than the former.
Leads are like an unexplored path, full of goodies due to lots of reasons. Using a pay per lead model brings lots of benefits to the detriment of PPC and that is because:
You’re not selecting clients blindfoldedly, you have guidelines to help you find your future clients on the map. Just like in a treasure hunt.
If we look at the SEO as it is nowadays we can see with certainty that an evolution is noticeable and some parts of SEO are the same, while others are obsolete.
| SEO will only get harder! | |
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MaTT cutts |
| Former head of the webspam team at Google | |
It is our duty to make it work. The same applies to PPL. There are some bad mouths that say the PPL model is not an advantage, but rather a prejudice, and can make you lose more money than you’ve gained. That can be true for lots of other digital marketing strategies if you don’t know how to implement them and don’t understand your niche.
Leads are a segment that shows potential and interest in your business. Even though it is a hard-to-get segment, it is one that’s worth your attention because it can bring you lots of benefits. Leads mean more clients, qualified users and brand new ambassadors for your brand.
The beauty of digital marketing lies in the fact that nearly everything can be tracked, as Alberto Garcia acknowledges himself:
| While these KPIs are useful in tracking progress and proving the effectiveness of your digital campaigns, they are essentially useless if you don’t use them to make educated decisions about your goals, strategies, and tactics. You must learn which factors will influence each of these metrics so that you can continue to optimize and improve your site. | |
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Alberto Garcia |
| Founder Red Bamboo Marketing | |
PPL has a high influence on traditional SEO. It is more an inter-influencing relationship. In today’s internet era, good SEO for websites means good UX, on a broad view. Traditional SEO has a few main points:
PPL can make the last one work very well and propel the revenue with to a lead-generation option.
The higher advantage carried by PPL is the fact that it generates leads quickly in a world where traditional results take time. SEO specialists are also judged for their lack of power in influencing search engines to hurry up and show the company in the top search results (it is practically impossible to push a website in the first positions in a short period of time). But some of them have been fooled in the past by shady, so-called experts, and they don’t have so much trust anymore.
SEO can take more time, and often times business owners don’t want or have the time to wait for the outcome. They want quick results and revenue. In that case, they look for shortcuts. Some of their intentions are bad, summarized in black hat SEO techniques, but some of them are good, and focus on improving leads through quality/organic traffic.
DemandWave made a research where it showed that email marketing has the highest chance for boosting conversion rates and driving more leads. In the screenshot below you can see that email ranks as the top channel for driving leads (73% of respondents say it does so), followed by organic search (70%).
SEO will evolve as it has until now, trying to focus more on the user. I am picturing the future of SEO quite differently. We’ve witnessed contextual search, local search, object image detection and the ups and downs of paid advertising with AdWords, so my vision of the future turns in the favor of high-tech technology.
A new fusion between the two terms can give birth to a new business model – pay per lead SEO. It can change the traditions of agency fees for the future. SEO will continue to be used because it has some strong points.
As long as Google exists, SEO will continue to exist in some manner. Imagine you can also use alternate sources of traffic, like SEO, to increase the volume of leads. It wouldn’t be such a bad idea because not all leads are created equally.
| In other words, SEO is an asset. It’s like buying real estate and investing to remodel your kitchen and bath. That work will increase the value of your home so that you can sell it in the future for a profit. | |
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Michael Cianciulli |
| Digital Marketing Analyst at Main Street ROI | |
PPL SEO might sound like a code, but it will carry a high weight on the future of online marketing. Pay per lead will definitely overtake some part of traditional SEO sooner or later. For sure, it will have a higher impact on online advertising.
SEO as we know it will definitely change, as we’ve experienced along the years, but PPL might not be the single answer. For sure, it will continue to rise and bring lots of benefits. But, in terms of future unpaid/free “advertising” for your website, SEO will lead the way. It might have a high lifetime value. So the frank answer to the question – Can or Will PPL Overtake Traditional SEO? – will be: not really, but it can generate new types of businesses.
My guess is that AI content can be the future of traditional SEO. That’s my personal and branded point of view. I suppose Google will make amendments in trying to offer more and more personalized content. So figuring out what the customers searched on Google and based on the websites visited and other historical data, it might offer different types of content.
We’re positive on believing that a fusion between traditional methods and modern techniques is a good strategy to drive leads and monetary results.
The post Pay per Lead – A Practice of the 90’s or the New Age of SEO? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Google Updates. We’ve all heard about them and, to some extent, we all fear them. Even if you’re 100% clean and always follow the Google guidelines, you can still suffer from the dirty work of others.
But what do you do when a new Google Update arises? How do you know it’s the cause of a traffic drop on your website? What are the steps you need to take in order to determine that?
Well, keep reading, because in this article we’ll discuss the steps you should take when a new Google Update is announced.
As soon as a new Google Update kicks in, thousands of bloggers start writing about it. Not all resources, however, are trustworthy.
I’m not saying that people have bad intentions, but they might be uninformed or might have ran the wrong tests to determine the effects of the update.
Just a couple of weeks ago, someone in an SEO Facebook group ‘analyzed’ the last August Google Update and pulled out some pretty sketchy conclusions.
Luckily, people figured it out pretty quick and started complaining in the comments. It wasn’t necessarily bad advice, but it didn’t really have anything to do with the update.
Ok, you’re probably wondering what sources you should follow by now. Well, they’re a handful, to be honest.
There are four main sources where usually all the news come from:
First, we have Google’s Official Webmaster Blog. Here is where Google officials will compile an official statement when they want to publicly announce something. You can also follow them on Twitter at @googlewmc and on their YouTube Channel. However, Google will rarely share any specifics about any update, other than the fact that it has been implemented.
Then, there are the three big news portals in the Search Engine industry which are Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable. This is where journalists and experts in the industry post the freshest news about Google and search engines in general, which means it includes Bing, Yandex and others.
Obviously, sources don’t stop here. You can also follow blogs such as Moz and Backlinko. Blogs such as these will provide the information with a delay but will also often compile it into step by step, very actionable advice and guides.
Last but not least, you should obviously follow our blog. Subscribe to cognitiveSEO and follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get the lastest news regarding what’s happening in the SEO field.
There are also some very interesting people on Twitter that you can follow which will always share the fresh stuff as soon as they find out about it.
Here are their names and Twitter profiles: Barry Schwartz, Bill Slawski, Gary Illyes, Aleyda Solis, Cyrus Shepard, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan and probably many others, but I don’t want to fill your Twitter feed too much. Following these people will guarantee you’ll hear the news pretty soon.
The fastest way to know if you’ve been penalized (and probably the only one as well) is to check your traffic.
You can also take a look at the Search Visibility widget from the cognitiveSEO Tool. If you see a drop there, that could be the sign of a penalty. In some cases, it can also be more relevant than other analytic tools.
For example, if most of your affected pages are on position 40+, you might not see a big change in traffic, as those pages rarely get any traffic. However, if the positions decrease, you should notice a drop in the Search Visibility metric.
You can also use the Rank Tracker to monitor your most important keywords. You can even set notifications that will let you know via e-mail anytime there are changes in the positions of your keywords.
Make sure you’re checking only the organic traffic and not the general traffic. Google Update penalties apply only to organic search results, so PPC and Social Media traffic must be excluded.
You can also check the Google Search Console for the average position of keywords instead of using the Rank Tracker. If it has dropped dramatically, you might have been penalized.
However, if you’ve dropped only a couple of positions, it’s possible that the update just pushed up other competitors. And this takes us to the next step, which isn’t very different…
Haste makes waste. We’ve all experienced it. No matter how dramatic things might look, make sure you do a thorough analysis before you proceed with any action.
A big rule of thumb is to check the traffic again after some time. It could be one week, it could be one month, but make sure you keep an eye on that traffic. If the traffic and positions haven’t dropped at all, give it some time and check them again.
You never know, things might initially look good. This was the case for CognitiveSEO some time ago, when an update initially boosted us up in March 2018.
After some time, however, the traffic went down again, making the boost look less significant.
If you take a look at the spikes in the graph above, you can see that they match the following graph from the cognitiveSEO Signals tool.
We’ve heard about and seen other similar examples. However, it can always go the other way around, when you have a slight push down, but then things start to get back to normal. That’s why you don’t want to make any hasty, poorly calculated decisions.
Worst thing to do is, however, to start changing things when the traffic hasn’t changed at all and your positions are good, based on what you’ve read on the internet.
You’ve read that the update possibly targets websites with 5% greater keyword density? Don’t rush in starting to remove keywords or rephrase articles, especially if you’re still ranking high with them.
Why? Well, it’s because:
Changes in your pages might actually attract Google’s bot to crawl and reconsider your website.
Even what you consider to be improvements to your content/page can sometimes result in ranking drops. That’s why you should do your best to avoid any changes to your content as long as you’re ranking high and are ‘content’ (bad SEO joke) with your positions.
For example, we have an article that ranks very well and has ranked very well for years now. The thing about it is that we don’t consider it to be one of our best. It has been written many years ago and competitors have since improved a lot, pumping big pieces of very detailed content. However, our article still ranks very well.
When we launched our Content Tool, we started an optimization campaign to improve all our articles. However, we skipped that article. We don’t want to make any changes to it and risk making it drop. Once it will start dropping on its own or, better said, our competitors will outrank us, we will consider updating it and transforming it into a better piece of content to try and get it back at the top.
I’m not going to list anyone here, nor will this be a guide on how to pick a good expert. You’re going to have to do that research on your own. The only advice I will give in this direction is to follow step number 3. Double check and don’t rush to make a choice.
What I will say however, is why you need an expert when dealing with a penalty.
First of all, you will save time. An expert will always know what to look for and will also be able to prioritize issues. Second, you won’t have to worry about making any mistakes or taking any unnecessary action that could potentially do more harm. This, of course, is if you choose the right expert, so make sure you do your research well. Third but not least, the more you stay penalized, the more money you lose! Even if you have to pay someone to help you, in the end you’ll be better off.
Having an expert help you is the best and most efficient way of dealing with a Google Penalty.
If you have enough experience with SEO and want to deal with a penalty yourself, everything must have a beginning. Good luck and be brave! However, it’s still a good idea to have a second opinion from another expert before you start implementing any major changes.
Every penalty fix should start with a website audit.
Whenever you notice some significant changes in traffic, it’s good to audit your website, even if it’s the 5th time this year. You never know what plugin caused an issue or what the dev team missed out on.
There are 4 main areas where you should take a look:
Technical:
When Google launches new updates, it can go through websites again and reconsider them. Old issues that Google might have overlooked on purpose might now be a reason for concern.
Are you confusing Google with bad hreflang or canonical tags implementation? Not a problem if your site loads in 3 seconds and all the others load in 10. However, if a new crawl reveals that other, better structured, sites start loading in 3 seconds as well, you’d better get to work.
This is a very broad subject, but our colleague Andreea has a great article on how to fix technical SEO issues.
Backlinks:
Backlinks can always be an issue. Even if Google said that Penguin 4.0 ignores spammy links, we’ve heard recent stories of websites getting penalized after a negative SEO attack.
You can always use the cognitiveSEO link analysis toolset to audit your link profile. The tool makes it easy to spot and sort out spammy links with the Unnatural Link Detection feature.
Content:
Content is a very important part of your website. Make sure you’re not disrupting Google with duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles.
Also, it’s a good idea to compare your content with the content your competitors have. Is there any particular area that you could improve on? Are there any topics that are searched but haven’t been covered?
User experience (UX):
Many recent updates and algorithms (such as RankBrain) focus a lot on user experience and how the users interact with your website.
You can start off by asking some friends to interact with your website. Give them specific tasks, but don’t tell them the steps. For example, ask them to contact you, find your number, send a message through the form, purchase a product or enroll in a newsletter.
Just give them the homepage and ask them to take notes on issues that they might find. Make sure to do this on both Desktop and Mobile Devices, with an emphasis on mobile devices, because it’s a growing market.
You can also use tools such as UserTesting to get your input, or ask a UX expert to have a look at your website and give some advice.
Even if a traffic drop shows up right after an update is announced, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the update is the cause of the drop.
As mentioned before, during a new update, Google might take a look at your website and find some undealt with issues.
It can also be a manual penalty, so check your Search Console. You’ll usually get a message there announcing your penalty, the reason for it and some steps to have it fixed. You can submit your website for reconsideration after dealing with the issue. More details about this can be found at this link.
There’s also the possibility that you are the recent victim of a negative SEO attack. You never know what really takes you down until you audit, so that’s why we have step 5 in place.
Make sure you exclude any other updates or issues before you start trying to fix the problem.
Once you have everything in line, it’s finally time to outline the plan. The secret to a successful recovery plan is prioritization. You might find a dozen of issues, but if you start fixing the minor, most insignificant ones first, you’ll lose money because they won’t have an effect on the penalty and your rankings will still be low.
A plan will not only help you execute everything faster, but it will also help you keep track and monitor your results. If you don’t monitor the results of your actions, you won’t know what caused the penalty.
Once you’ve finished one step, give it a rest to see if it has any effect. Doing everything at the same time won’t help you figure out the cause of the penalty, so you won’t be able to know what to avoid in the future.
Most of the time (as long as your website is not completely deindexed), the best way of getting out of a penalty is to keep doing the good things.
Getting penalized is similar to gaining weight. You add a little bit every day, but you don’t really notice it, until one day the mirror finally ‘breaks’ it to you. The probability of you losing weight very quickly is low. If you’ve gained 25 pounds in one year, expect to take it around 1 year to lose it!
Trying to run 5 hours per day won’t work because, generally, you won’t be able to sustain it. Trying any shortcuts, such as pills and very restrictive diets, can get you into more trouble.
The best solution is to keep doing the right things over a long period of time and results will come. If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you should definitely know what the right things are. If you haven’t followed us… Well, now it’s the right time to start!
Just as a general outline, great content mixed up with great distribution result in great backlinks, which result in great rankings.
Brace yourself:
As for the ending, unfortunately you never know if you’ll ever recover from a penalty. It could take 2 weeks or it could take 2 years. That’s why it’s a good idea to always follow the rules and also never put all your eggs into one basket. Go take a look at the advantages of PPC, for example. It can come in handy during a Google penalty.
What are your experiences with Google Updates? Do you always see traffic fluctuations on your website? Have you ever been massively penalized? And… more importantly, have you ever recovered from a penalty? What were the steps you took? Maybe we can gather some more detailed steps for specific types of penalties in the comments section.
The post Google Update Survival Guide: What To Do When Google Updates Its Algorithm appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
