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The BEST SEO Plan 2020 | GROW YOUR SMALL BUSINESS QUICK

12+ Key Strategies For SEO Growth

SEO seems to get more complicated as the years go by, and 2020 is no different. To stay ahead, you need to keep track of the changes, while understanding the foundational SEO building blocks. Today we’ll go over the basics, the latest strategies and what’s to come in the world of SEO.

What We’ll Cover:

What is SEO & How It Started

3 Basics Steps of SEO

What People Are Searching For

6 Key Areas of On-Page SEO

6 Strategies For Off Page SEO

New Frontier of SEO in 2020

Googles BERT Update

The Future King of Content

A Holistic View To SEO

Persistent SEO Growth

What is SEO and how did it start?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and when it started, it was all about ‘tricking’ the google algorithm. People used link-farms, blog syndicates and ‘backlink services’ to boost themselves up the rank. Now, it’s much harder to game the system.

SEO in 2020 all about giving Google, and the searchers, what they want. You need to provide value, while understanding how that fits into SEO. Googles mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”, so as you read this post, try to think about SEO in that context.

3 Basic Steps To SEO

At its core, SEO fits into three basic categories. We will cover these each in this blog post, so don’t worry if you don’t understand them just yet.

Optimizing Your Site

You need an ongoing technical optimization of your website, so that google can read and define what your site contains. The way Google works is by scanning (i.e. indexing) websites to see what they are about. They look through your Meta descriptions, content, link structure, search abilities, and every element of your website to determine your rank. Things like page speed, mobile optimization and even how you name your images, all play a part.

Promoted Content and Outside Links

Another way Google analyse websites is to track the links that point to it. The reason these “backlinks” are so important is because they tell Google who is relevant, and important. If your website has 500 links from Wikipedia, and another handful from Government websites, then google will consider it more ‘important’. Google will also index those pages that link to you and confirm that the content is similar and therefore relevant.

Continual Content Strategy

On your website you should include content on your industry, products and services, and every topic related to your niche. Your blog is the perfect place to add content, and it’s so important because content is the way google reads what your site is about. The more content you have about your niche, the better. You should link this content together naturally, so if you contain a phrase in one post or page that connects to another, then connect them with a hyperlink to build the strength of your site.

If you keep up with the right on page optimization, Google can read your site and score you high for your primary topic. With plenty of outside content and links pointing to your site, Google see you are relevant for your area. Use a continual content strategy, and Google sees you as the expert in your field, and they will rank you at the top of google.

What Are People Searching For?

A key understanding of how this all works is understanding keywords. When people search for something in google, they are using a keyword. There are many millions of keywords they could use, and your job is to find the best ones that most represent your market.

Short Tail Vs. Long Tail

You can split “keywords” up into two categories. Short tail keywords are your main keywords of 1-3 words long. Keywords like “Florida Hairdresser” or “Mens Barber shop” would be “Short tail” keywords. The “Long Tail” keywords are keywords like “Florida hairdresser near me” or “barber shop in Miami Florida” or other longer phrases that make up 3+ words long.

You should have a list of short tail and long tail keywords to optimize your website. You should also look for related keywords in your niche, so you can compile content on every topic that connects to your niche. Following the ‘hairdresser’ example, you may look for keywords like “Best haircut ideas for 2020” or “how to style my hair”. These keywords could have blogs written on the topic, or be added to certain pages on your site.

Keywords play an enormous part in your SEO strategy, so we included the concept at the start of this post so you can understand when we use them later.

Now you have an overview of how SEO works, let’s dive into the basics and start going over all the strategies you can implement to rank higher on Google.

The Basics: 6 Key Areas of On-Page SEO

Google needs to know what your site is all about, so they can rank you for the keywords you want to rank for. You can tell google everything they need to know from just a few areas in your site.

Metadata

Add meta descriptions and titles to every page using your top keywords. Use these top keywords in your page titles, headlines, and meta descriptions. When google index your site, this is what they will look at first. The Home page meta description will often be shows in the Googles search ranks, so make sure it’s written well for a human reader and contains all the relevant keywords.

Images

While google are getting much better at knowing what’s in an image, their deep learning algorithms are far from perfect yet. One thing you can do is to name your image file names and add meta tags to every image using your main keywords. This will tell google that your images relate to your content, and your site will increase in relevance for that keyword.

Content

You need plenty of content on your website. The more your subject is covered, the better. Words are the way google reads what your site is about, keep a blog where you can update it with new related content, and add website pages that cover every area in your niche.

Page Speed

Google now give your website a rank based on the loading speed, so compress your images, remove any unwanted plugins or code, and do a speed test to make sure your site is running fast. The average person spends less than a minute on a website, so improving your page load speed not only helps you rank in google, but also helps your visitors to enjoy staying on your website longer.

Mobile

About 50% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices, so it’s no surprise that Google have made this an important part of being optimised. If you’re optimised for mobile, not only are you making Google very happy, you’re also making it much easier for your customers to find you and sign up to what you’re offering.

Interlinking

Google loves seeing how sites interlink with other sites, and they also like how your site links to itself. When you have menus on the top of your page and in the footer, this is an example of interlinking. You can include links within your blog posts and general site content, by hyperlinking certain keywords and phrases that link to other parts of your website. It’s important to pay attention to your keywords here and link certain keywords with relevant pages.

If you can focus on these six key areas of on-page SEO, then your site will have a very good chance of ranking in Google. This is an ongoing process, so there’s never enough you can do. For now, let’s move onto the next area of SEO, Off-page optimisation.

The Basics: 6 Strategies of Off Page SEO

Off-page SEO relates to things that happen outside of your website. This means getting links from other related websites or blogs, sharing content on social media, and linking back to your website. Before we dive into the methods you can use, first let’s go over why ‘backlinks’ are so important.

A ‘backlink’ is any ‘link’ that points from another webpage, social media post, blog comment, or any source online, ‘back’ to your website. Google also rank the source of the backlink, so a link from Wikipedia will be higher ranked than a link from a blog comment on a random site that gets no traffic. It’s social proof in the form of hyperlinks. The more high quality links you have, the more important Google thinks you are. If you don’t have any links then you’re like the guy at the party that nobody knows.

Here are some of the top ways you can get high quality backlinks to your website, to kick-start your off-page SEO.

Guest blogging

If you haven’t already noticed, google loves written content. If you create blog posts for other blogs in your niche, and link back to your website, this is a way to get relevant high quality backlinks to your site. To find these opportunities, search your niche in google and add “guest blog” or “write for us” in the search. You’ll find thousands of potential blogs that will accept guest content.

Press releases posting

Has your business just launched, you have a new logo, a new customer review or any excuse for a potential news story? It’s time you posted a press release. You can make a press release on anything that resembles news, and share it among the thousands of press syndicate sites. If you have a powerful news story, then you could post it to big websites like Huffington Post. These are harder to get published, but if you do, you’ll have one of the highest quality backlinks you could ever get.

Influencer marketing

Every niche has influencers, and they bring a lot of traffic and powerful backlinks. One link from an influencers website, or a mention in a blog post or webpage, could equal hundreds of lower quality links put together. Make a list of all the top influencers in your niche, those who might be connected to your niche, reviewers, bloggers, authors, experts in the field, or anyone with a sizable audience in your field. Reach out one by one and build a relationship with them, with the goal of providing value. One thing you could offer is to write some content for their site, offer to mention them on your site or blog, and have them mention you or get them to link to you in return.

Social media marketing

Google’s algorithm made the change to start reading all the social media platforms and analyze it with their new algorithms. This means a link from a Facebook post or Instagram post is as valuable as any other on the internet. The more you share, post and engage on social media, the better it is for your SEO. At the very least, have links to your site on all your social media pages and profiles, and then link to your site whenever you mention it on social media.

Answering questions on Quora

There are many question-and-answer websites, one big one is Yahoo Answers, and another is Quora. Find the site that asks the most questions about your niche or business and create a profile. Link your profile to your website and start answering relevant questions with more links to your website. This is another way to get free, targeted, relevant backlinks to your site.

Posting on Subreddits

This is one of the lower quality type of backlinks, but it’s still useful to know. Reddit is a social media website which networks every type of interest under the sun. Find niche related “SubReddits”, which are conversations on specific topics, and post content relevant to your niche. You can answer peoples comments, jump into conversations or create your own conversations. Each of these types of posts allow you to link back to your website, which gives Google another bunch of juicy backlinks to chew on.

Follow these 6 types of off page SEO tactics and you’ll build a powerful network of links pointing back to your website. This is one of the best ways to optimize for the search engines and to stay in the ranks you have to keep building these links consistently.

Build A Content Hub

Over time, you can build content hubs where your backlinks themselves point to other backlinks. Your Guest Blog might link to your Facebook page, which links to your website. A tweet might link to a Reddit post where you link to a guest blog which links back to your site. For every good piece of content you create online, consider adding backlinks that point to that piece of content.

The result is a content hub. Your site is in the center, and all the backlinks that point to your site are on the outside. Then you have all the sites that link to your backlinks, and these links can all interconnect.

This “content hub” is a ranking rocket ship when trying to rank for certain keywords. Google sees these links pointing to your site, and all the links pointing to those links. They assume that you are well known and talked about for those keywords and they rank you at the top of google.

New Frontier of SEO

With the new Google BERT update, Google are using their advanced machine learning algorithms to determine how relevant your website is. The focus is on natural language, so your content should reads like people speak, and flow like a natural conversation.

The future is in voice search, so this natural language understanding is great for people and also the algorithm. It’s hard to optimize for this, however the best way is to follow what your visitors enjoy. Look at the top blogs in your niche and see what they talk about. Use topics that your audience want to hear about and write your content in a way that’s easy to read.

The Future King of Content

We’ve talked a lot about content already, and you know that “content is king”, but one thing is very important going into the future. As natural language plays a bigger role in Googles algorithm, your focus should be more on content that people want to share. If someone shares your content, not only is that a good backlink to your site but also tells google “people like this”. Nothing tells google more about the social proof of your website than someone sharing your content.

Every page of your website should invite sharing. You should have social media buttons, “tweet this” buttons, and invitations to share. You can even run contests on social media to boost the amount of shares you get. Create content that people want to hear about and tell their friends. If you make your content good enough for people to share, then you’re making your visitors, and Google, very happy.

A Holistic View To SEO

Let’s recap everything we’ve talked about with a holistic view of how SEO looks today. It’s important to understand your customer journey and see your site from their shoes, so let’s step into their world for a moment.

Your customers are on their desktop or mobile, and they are browsing the web looking for a solution you provide. They look at a few websites which take too long to load, so they close them down and keep looking. They look on social media, then pick out a few of the top influencers to see what they have to say, and finally, they do a google search with a specific keyword.

Along the journey they have noticed your business being mentioned a few times, so they end up on your site. They look through your services on their desktop, but then they need to run out of the house. They load up your site on their mobile, and since your site is mobile-ready, it loads on their mobile device beautifully.

On the way out, they see you have a newsletter, so they sign up, and then call you ask you for an appointment or to ask about your services or products.

Now you can see why each part of SEO is important. If you didn’t optimise for mobile, you would have lost the customer as they had to run out. If your site loaded too slow, then you would have lost the customer in the first few minutes of them looking around.

When you customer looks to influencers, you want to be there, and when they search keywords in Google, they should find your business in the top.

Persistence SEO Growth

The key to running a good SEO campaign is persistence. It’s hard to rank on the top of google, but if you can implement all the steps in this post, then you’ll have the best chance. One thing you can do to boost your chances of success is to hire a local SEO agency to help you with all this. If you’re trying to boost your business, then a small business SEO package would work well to get you up the ranks in google.

Now you know the basics of SEO and how to optimize your site both on page and off page, to give yourself the best chances of ranking at the top of Google.

P.S. Don’t forgot about your Google My Business

Check out our guide on growing your small business

Check out our guide on Local SEO and Google My Business

Free SEO Audit

The post The BEST SEO Plan 2020 | GROW YOUR SMALL BUSINESS QUICK appeared first on Search Recon.

from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.com/best-seo-plan-for-2020/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=best-seo-plan-for-2020 from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.tumblr.com/post/614228418656157696

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garykbender · 5 years ago

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Top SEO Practices For 2020 | Search Recon

Why SEO Is Important For 2020?

The hardest part about managing your SEO is the new developments that come with advancing technology. Social media, Google updates, website tool development, user platforms all change and develop over time. This requires all website development teams to keep a sharp eye on their SERPs and what they need to do to stay relevant, reliable, trusted, and popular.

It isn’t just about keyword density or meta tags anymore. Yes, all of the prior tools are still relevant. However, you need to look beyond your current practices and adopt new skills. Going from page one to the sand box or from the sand box to page one can mean all the difference in the world. If you are serious about how your potential clients find you via a search engine then you must be serious about your SEO every year and after every major development.

What Is On-Page SEO?

On-page or on-site SEO has become much easier to optimize, particularly with the number of tools on the web available. This article won’t dive into them too much as the assumption is that you have them under control. However, there is movement in the use of websites as a whole. Current on-page SEO isn’t just focused on tags and meta data. Google ranks based on what it perceives as a high-quality site as a whole.

This means you need to take a holistic approach to web development for maximum on-page SEO potential. Low click through rates and high bounce rates will kill your rankings. No matter how easy a key word is to rank, how you utilize your information is key. Classic on-page SEO practices will unlock the door but a high quality experience and adaptive structure will get your site through the door.

What Is Off-Page SEO?

Similarly, off-page or off-site SEO is built on a solid foundational idea that back

linking can raise your trust factor and worthiness to rank higher in Google. But what does that mean when how people use digital platforms change? It means that you need to evolve with the times and change your strategies as society changes how it interacts with the digital world.

The most significant example is social media. Profile links are trash in 2020. Some social media sites are worthless for as the sites themselves are no longer popular to draw an audience or click through rates. Google knows this and knows where people get their information. Thinking about Facebook? Start a Facebook Group on your niche. Thinking about Instagram? Get influencers to grow your traffic. Thinking about TikTok? Again, it is all about the influencers.

What SEO Practices Should I Be Focusing On?

There are probably 10s if not 100s of things that you could be doing to maximize your SEO potential. But that doesn’t really mean anything if you don’t have content and authority to back it up. If you are ready to SEO optimize your website the best thing you can do is plan, plan, and plan again.

Write out your strategy from large groupings to individual actions. Make multiple checklists and an accounting of all of the costs for those actions. Make sure that each of your actions is either: 1) common and basic SEO necessity like meta tags and meta data; or 2) industry specific to your nice like influencer marketing for fashion dropshippers. Below are the items you will need to think about.

BERT And Optimized Experience

Is there a running tally for the number of Google updates? There have been too many to count. The BERT update was a major update. It knocked the breath out of a lot of people that use spun articles. Why? BERT affected most spun articles because BERT uses natural language algorithms to score the quality of your articles.

Regardless of the keyword density or the keyword stuffing or the quality of the spun article, BERT can weed out the ruffians based on the context of the conversation. So, you don’t have to use the same keyword over and over. You can talk natural, and must talk naturally. Instead of using “car accident attorney in Chicago” 10 times in a 1000 word article you can use any type of synonym for attorney and talk about accidents in general. BERT can recognize this.

Google made this change because it recognized that the reader wants engaging text. The reader doesn’t want a list of facts in sentence form repeated 50 times. The reader wants a narrative that supplies useful and diverse information from word 1 to word 1000.

High Quality Content

Content is king. Content will always be king. If you want to dominate your niche, you need to dominate your content. This isn’t particularly new. However, the trend for Google is to continually focus on the ability of your site to deliver content that is useful and authoritative to the world. Wikipedia ranks because it is useful and authoritative. Make your site the Wikipedia of your niche. Give the reader something unique and important. Google will reward your effort.

Google EAT Criteria

For Google, your web reputation comes down to 3 things, E-A-T. You can E-A-T the bear, or the bear can E-A-T you. (Hint: Google is the bear) E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. If you can promote these three qualities on your website then you will be light-years ahead of your competition. Start to increase the length of your articles. Start to use proper English and subdivisions.

Start to answer questions in your articles. For example say you are writing on widgets. The article body could be divided up into subcategories that all started with a question: 1) What type of widget should I use for X application? 2) What size widget yields the best results? 3) Where can I get the best and cheapest widgets? It is completely industry and niche dependent. However, the point is to show Google that your articles answer important questions and provide the expertise and authoritativeness to be very trustworthy (E-A-T).

Mobile First Development

How many people still use there desktop at home? A lot, sure. But how many people use their phone to brose? Literally everyone! Google is quickly moving to a mobile first indexing pattern. This means you need to develop your site as if the mobile experience is the only worthwhile experience. Soon it might be, at least as far as Google thinks.

Desktop or laptop browser optimization is secondary to the experience of the mobile user. This means that you need to focus on the utility of a smaller screen, no mouse, and near instantaneous load times. Super easy, right? Don’t worry, everyone is in the same boat.

Secured Websites

If your website isn’t protected by a SSL then you don’t need to worry about much else, you won’t be ranked soon anyway. SSL is the standard of the industry. Accept it, own it, and use it. Not only has Google started to enforce this standard but the users are becoming more aware of their own privacy concerns and navigating away from sites that aren’t secure.

Diversified Knowledge Portfolio

This is a fancy word for the fact that your off-site SEO needs to focus on your social media profiles. This includes YouTube. Your digital content is no longer just articles. Google will start to rank videos as the first listing for certain searches. Why? First, it does because it owns YouTube. Second, people use YouTube as a search engine. They don’t necessarily want to read something. Sometimes they want to be told something and shown it in motion. Think about all of the platforms your service or product could be on, not as an advertisement, but as useful content.

Keyword Search Importance

Website Voice Search

As mentioned earlier, your content needs to answer questions. This is growing in importance due to smart home devices. Sure, people still physically type into Google things like: “how do I hot wire my car.” However, if they can just get Siri, Alexa, or Google’s Assistant to tell them how to do something, they will just verbally ask. “Hey, Siri, what is the weather out today?”

Start optimizing your content to make it friendly for voice searches. Start to answer the Who, What, When, Where, and Why questions related to your niche. For example, for SEO you could ask: Who provides the best SEO help? What is SEO? Where on my website is on-page SEO? When was the last Google update? Why is SEO important?

Final Takeaway

SEO may seem daunting. There are countless ways to either screw up or forget and miss something important. However, don’t forget that each item you do to maximize your SEO the better you are making your website. SEO is all about the long game, not the short game. Go into it with a plan, execute that plan, and then add or modify as the digital world evolves and changes.

Need help with SEO or marketing? Contact us or use a Free SEO Analysis button.

Free SEO Audit

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from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.com/seo-top-practices-2020/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=seo-top-practices-2020 from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.tumblr.com/post/612496686483423232

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garykbender · 5 years ago

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10 Essential And Easy SEO Tips for Small Business

Competition for those top search engine rankings is fierce. And as a small business, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Not only do you lack the big marketing budget of your larger competitors, you’re trying to juggle all the other responsibilities of running a small business, from filling orders to keeping up with payroll and more.

But you don’t have to have the digital marketing budget of Walmart to compete. The internet gives you the power to reach billions of prospective customers from a small office – or even a garage. But if you’re going to take full advantage of those opportunities and build your online presence, then you’ll want to heed these ten essential SEO tips for small businesses.

Tip 1: Do the Research

Too many small businesses rush into things without the proper planning. They pick up a social media tip here and a content marketing idea there, try it out for a week or two, watch it fail, and throw their hands into the air, saying, “Nothing works for me!”

But there’s a good chance that it could work if you’d do the proper research.

So, what’s the most important research for a small business that’s looking to make effective use of SEO?

First, you’ll want to engage in some keyword research. Use Google Ads’ keyword finder tool to search for keywords that are related to your small business. Note the amount of traffic each keyword generates as well as how competitive it is. And as you go through, take notes of any keywords that look like they might be worth pursuing.

Second, you need to know your competition. I know you may not want to check out their sites and social media accounts since they’ll make you feel the weight of the work involved in catching up. But if you fail to take a healthy account of your competitors, you’ll be destined to remain behind them.

So, find out what keywords they are ranking for. Look for topics and areas that they may be missing, find out what kind of backlinks they have, and then, use that data to begin developing a plan for your site.

This is the foundation for any successful SEO strategy. If you’re unwilling to do the necessary research on important keywords and competitors, you might as well just throw in the towel.

Until you’ve got this tip honed, don’t even bother looking at the rest of them.

Tip 2: Develop Quality Content Tailored for Your Audience

Keyword-stuffing doesn’t work anymore. Google, Bing, and Yahoo have gotten smarter. They won’t be fooled by lists of keywords hidden at the bottom of each page. And these days, they’re thinking less like search engines and more like humans.

So, what does this mean for implementing effective SEO tactics?

Once you’ve gotten a solid list of valuable keywords that are rankable, you’ll want to begin developing quality content that’s tailored for your audience. Don’t worry about filling your blogs or articles up with X number of keywords. Instead, focus on creating answers to your audience’s biggest questions (you may even want to consider checking out a site like AnswerThePublic.com).

And as you put your content together, make it engaging, entertaining, and informative. The longer you keep people’s eyes glued to your site, the better your site will rank.

And speaking of quality content…

Tip 3: Don’t Forget the Power of Video

YouTube is one of the largest, most visited sites on the web. TikTok has taken the world by storm. Livestreaming has become a regular event for individuals, organizations, and small and large businesses alike. In other words, video is one of the most powerful ways to connect to your customers.

But video isn’t just a great tool because of its incredible reach. It also offers other benefits that you should consider as you develop your larger SEO strategy.

When you upload your videos to a site like YouTube and embed them into your business’s pages, you are creating easy backlinks. And though they aren’t as effective as other kinds of backlinks (which we’ll get to shortly), they’re certainly worth something.

In addition, video keeps your visitors on your pages longer. If you’ve got a ten-minute video on your homepage and a prospective customer watches the whole thing, Google will be impressed with your ability to retain peoples’ attention. And they’ll reward you with a higher quality score.

This is why you should think about content marketing from a wider perspective than just blogs or articles. Content video marketing is the next big thing. And your small business can reap the benefits of riding the wave if you’re willing to take the dive right now.

Tip 4: Listen to Google

Although it doesn’t always feel like it, Google wants you to survive – and even thrive. After all, when you succeed, Google does too.

This is why Google has offered webmasters so many tools and guides. They don’t try to hide the things that lead to higher rankings or penalties. And though they may not give the world access to their whole algorithm, they are willing to tell us a tremendous amount about what does and doesn’t work.

So, listen to them!

Check out their Webmaster Guidelines and visit their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. They even have a series of training and help videos that are well worth checking out if you’re interested in learning how to best optimize your site for higher search rankings.

As you listen to Google, you’ll discover the things that lead to penalties (such as ad-heavy layouts, bad content, and keyword-stuffing). Avoid those things. And if your site has already fallen into any of those traps, fix it.

Don’t neglect this essential source of information. Be willing to listen to Google and adjust your site’s SEO accordingly.

Tip 5: Effectively Utilize Metadata

Although keywords are less important than they once were in the content of your pages, they are still important. They’re just playing a larger role in metadata.

In other words, your site’s metadata matters. Every one of your pages should have simple and descriptive titles, meta descriptions, headers, and image alt tags. In addition, your URL should make the page’s content clear. All of this is incredibly simple and yet it’s so easy to neglect. Don’t get everything else right and lose points by forgetting to put quality metadata in place.

Along with effective metadata, you should also look at the structure of your site’s pages and make sure they make sense. A confusing or inappropriate structure can leave your site struggling to make it to the first page of the search rankings.

Tip 6: Build On-Site & Off-Site SEO

Targeting the right keywords, building great content, developing an effective structure, and implementing quality meta data… These are all vital things to do when developing an effective SEO strategy for your small business.

But they aren’t enough.

In addition to your on-site SEO efforts, you need a plan for off-site SEO. Whereas on-site SEO is focused wholly on building the best site you can, off-site SEO seeks to develop connections that will draw more people to your site and give it a sense of credibility and authority.

This is largely done through backlinks. But you may be wondering, “How do I get other sites to link to my business’s page?”

There are a variety of different methods, but these are the most popular:

Guest Blogging

Writing guest blogs for sites that serve a similar niche as you is a great way to develop quality backlinks. Normally, you can include a bio with your blog as well as a link to your site. And the more guest blogs that you’re able to create, the more backlinks you’ll receive.

Influencer Marketing

When influencers, whether through social media or their website, mention your brand, products, or services, it builds off-site momentum for you. And if they link to your site, it’s even better since it also leaves you with another backlink.

Reviews

If you offer customers the ability to leave reviews, whether through Facebook, Google, or some other platform, you’ll be developing a stronger SEO game. But be warned, if you don’t maintain high standards when it comes to your product or service, you may end up with negative reviews. And that can be very bad indeed. So, always offer top-quality service along with that invitation to leave a review.

Social Media Marketing

We’ll discuss this further below. Needless to say, social media is yet another easy way to develop backlinks and greater authority.

Tip 7: Be Willing to Experiment with PPC

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is one of the easiest, most cost-effective ways to reach new customers. And though it’s more expensive than pulling in organic traffic, it can help jumpstart your efforts if you’ve got the money to spend.

In addition to being incredibly easy to set up, PPC advertising is also one of the most reasonably priced ways to drive lots of traffic to your site, quickly.

Once your larger SEO strategy is on point and running smoothly, PPC advertising can be just the thing to get noticed and build momentum so that you move up the search rankings faster and get to a place where you don’t really need it anymore.

Tip 8: Go Local

As a small business, there’s a good chance you have a local presence in your community. If you have a physical location that customer’s can visit, you need to spend time honing your local SEO strategy.

You should setup a ‘Google My Business’ profile, ensure your address and phone number are on every one of your site’s pages, and contact local directories to have your site listed. All of these things will help you develop a stronger local footprint and make it more likely that Google will rank you when someone in your town searches for “…businesses near me.”

Tip 9: Don’t Neglect Social Media

As you’re likely aware, social media is an absolute behemoth. It has the power to take your small business to the next level of success and to connect with customers (and prospective customers) more quickly and easily than ever before.

So, are you taking advantage of it?

Every small business should, at the least, have a Facebook page setup. Depending on the demographics of your target audience, you might want to consider an Instagram or Twitter account as well (and if you’re targeting Gen-Z, you may want to look into TikTok).

Include social sharing buttons on all of your pages so that it’s easy for customers to engage with you and share your content with family and friends.

You can also interact with other businesses (and through groups) using your brand’s account. So, like, share, and comment on content that’s coming from others in your niche. Develop relationships and discover opportunities to build greater credibility, authority, and backlinks.

And all of this is on top of the more basic features of social media – being able to share content from your site with millions of people, generating new leads.

Tip 10: Be Consistent – And Patient

When it comes to SEO strategy, one of the number-one keys to success is consistency. If you try something new out for a week and find that it does little to increase traffic or sales, don’t give up. SEO is a long game. It’s a process of relationship building. And like any relationship, it won’t bear good fruit until a little time has passed.

So, be willing to create a sustainable content schedule (of written and video content) and consistently release it. Share what you’ve created with your social media audience and interact with others every week. And keep doing it until you see results.

There may be moments when you need to refine things. If that’s the case, do so and keep going. But whatever you do, don’t give up. Instead, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day. And neither will your small business’s online marketing strategy.

The post 10 Essential And Easy SEO Tips for Small Business appeared first on Search Recon.

from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.com/seo-tips-small-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=seo-tips-small-business from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.tumblr.com/post/191002761278

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garykbender · 5 years ago

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Search Intent: What it is and 3 Steps To Make It Work For You

Understanding SEO and Search

Organic search visits are vital to your website and are one of your top sources of traffic. There are more than 3.5 billion searches on Google daily, so optimizing your website to rank and attract visitors is vital for your business success.

Organic search is a result of customers looking for a specific type of information on Google, Bing or other search engines and being presented with a series of results that lead them to websites that algorithms have determined have the best answers to satisfy their query. Optimizing your website for search engine queries will lead users directly to your site and eventually end up converting a searcher to becoming a customer.

Traditionally, websites relied mainly on including individual keywords to strengthen their search engine optimization which would enable them to show up on the first page in order to gain customer attention. However, keyword stuffing is no longer enough to rank as Google algorithms have changed and additional factors are now required to ensure inclusion and notice. Along with necessary tactics such as backlinks, establishing domain authority, lengthening posts and more, creating more user-friendly content and understanding how users are searching must be part of optimizing your site to attract potential customers. This is where understanding and using search intent enters the game.

What Is Search Intent

Search intent is the process of understanding what keywords and short and long query structures are used by potential customers during various the stages of the search and conversion funnel. People search differently depending upon their ultimate goal and understanding and optimizing for search intent is hugely important for your website SEO and your business’ digital marketing efforts.

The 4 Types of Search Intent

Online searches are broken down into 4 different categories, and understanding their differences is the first step in creating powerful content and a digital presence will enable successful ranking and subsequently customer acquisition and retention.

1. Informational Search Intent

Also referred to as a Know search, informational search intent is when users are looking for answers regarding a certain subject. Informational search is when a user is looks for information on a subject that is posed in question form and generally (although not always) includes interrogatives such as How, Why and What. Other words often found in information search intent queries include: guide, tips, find, etc.

Informational search queries are often the beginning of a searcher’s purchasing cycle. This is the time when users are gathering information about they will use along the way.

2. Commercial Investigation

During the commercial investigation search, users are looking for more information with an end goal to do something, such as buy a product or service. During this type of search intent, prospective consumers may be looking for reviews, price comparisons, best of, and similar information that will lead them closer to conversion.

3. Transactional Search Intent

Transaction searching is when the user is intent on making a purchase or taking a specific action. This could be a purchase, however it also may be signing up for a membership, downloading a file, or “doing something.” Vocabulary used in a transaction search may include: Buy, download, sign up, purchase, discounts, or other action words.

4. Navigational Search Intent

When searching for a specific location or website users are using navigational search intent. This could be in the form of a url, hours of operation of a restaurant, addresses, etc that could be local or global. For ecommerce business, it is important to rank well in search engine results pages for your own brand. However, using brand specific keywords in advertising or other non-organic SEO practices may not produce good results.

The Search Intent Cycle

Understanding how to guide your users to your website and keep them connected to your business through their search intent process throughout the sales cycle to purchase is imperative for successful conversion.

Example: Your company sells 3D printers, so you need to include content that would guide users through their search process ultimately leading to purchasing from your website.

The search intent query cycle of a potential customer may look like this:

What is a 3D printer (informational search intent)

What can I do with a 3D printer (informational search intent)

How much do 3D printers cost (commercial investigation)

Reviews of 3D printers (commercial investigation)

3D printers on sale (transactional intent)

Buy a 3D printer (transactional intent)

Formlabs (navigational intent)

Amazon (navigational intent)

When following the search cycle from learning to purchase, you will have numerous opportunities to grab the users attention by answering their questions along the way, thus moving your website up in the search rankings and guiding users to revisit your website. Offering information that helps them decide on making their purchase not only helps your chance of conversion but also builds trust in order to make that conversion.

3 Steps to Optimizing Your Business For Search

Step 1: Do Your Research

Optimizing your website to attract users begins with understanding who your users are and exactly what they want and how they are searching. Knowing why and how a user is searching for something, will help you to build your content to answer their search queries and any related questions they may have in future searches. Covering all relevant topics and questions immediately will prevent users from leaving your website and seeking additional resources elsewhere on the web.

Determining how your users are searching begins with looking for the data. Data-backed insights will give you an idea of what may or may not work, so before creating content employ tools that will help you map out a content plan.

There are a number of ways to determine what your target audience is searching for.

Begin by looking at your current Google Analytics for your website to determine what pages and posts are getting the most attention and research the path and keywords used that are bringing in the most traffic. Ubersuggest is another free tool that will allow you to not only see how your website is working, but you can also easily check on the traffic and paths of your competitors.

Using Google Trends and the Google search bar are a great free resource that will give you information about current trends and how people are searching.

Social media sites such as Pinterest will auto populate the most common search terms and long keyword sentences and are a valuable resource, especially for ecommerce sites.

Paid and free tools such as the Content and Optimizer Tool, Answer The Public,and Keywords Everywhere will give you more detailed data and alternative options that will help you understand how your audience is searching, the words and phrases they are using and how you can adapt your content to connect.

Once you have your data, pair it with an internal investigational search. Ask people. We all make an assumption that the way we search online is the way everyone searches. Your data may show something different, but in addition to data ask your people. Friends, family, peers, employees can sometimes provide insight that is often overlooked.

Step 2: Check out the competition

Before you begin creating your content, it is necessary to know what the competition is doing, this information will guide you in your content creation and allow you to understand what is working and how you can use that to your advantage. Your data and research has given you the insight, pairing that with your competition that is ranking high in Google will give you additional information about powerful content.

Compare how your current content stacks up to your competitors and ask yourself if what you are producing aligns with your competition. If you have a newer website, you may want to explore how you can avoid creating content that will compete directly with your competition, but instead improve upon it and offer more information that your users are searching for.

Step 3: Creating Optimized Content

Once you have identified how your target demographic is searching, have checked out the competition, and you have a content plan that includes a variety of search intent data, you need to insert that information into your website in a way that makes sense and causes users to click on when ranking on Google.

This begins with the information that is shown on Google, therefore the headline and description of every page, post, product etc that is displayed must be optimized for user interaction.

The Powerful Headline

In less than 5 seconds, someone will decide whether or not they want to read your blog post, page, digital content and that decision is based on 1 thing – the headline.

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” – David Ogilvy

David Ogily’s quote is decades old, but still holds true today. Headlines matter. They matter to your readers and they matter to Google. Headlines are a major part of the perfect blog post and need as much care and feeding as your complete post.

Every good headline – meaning it will attract, convert, and rank – has 3 key elements.

Numbers – Using numbers in a blog post is a great way to get readers to click and share. People know when they see a number in the title, they will be able to scan the post quickly for key information. Odd lower numbers like 5 and 7 work better than even numbers, and a competition search will guide you if you are including numbers in your blog posts title. Ex: If a competitor has a high ranking post that list the “top 5…,” you can attract more attention by creating a listicle name “the top 7, 9, or more.” Only use a number if it makes sense. We love lists and numbers, but make sure the number actually works with the content.

Superlatives and Emotional Words – Using words like best, most, fastest, latest, will attract attention and clicks. Add -est in front of words with one syllable to create a superlative. Ex: great becomes greatest.

Keyphrase That Attracts – Your search intent research has told you what your potential customers are searching for, use this information to create a title paired with numbers and/or power words to grab your users attention.

Example: A quick search for 3D printers with the Keywords Everywhere extension for Chrome gives an idea of how user’s are searching which will guide you in crafting the perfect headline and descriptions.

Note: Sentence case is best to use for headline capitalization. Sentence case is when you only capitalize the first letter of the first word in a heading – like you would in a sentence. Proper nouns are capitalized.

Headlines should be under 45 characters to ensure titles do not get cut off on Google. Insert your keyword phrase in the first half of the title.

Tip: CoSchedule has a headline analyzer that will give you an SEO rank of your headline and suggestions for improvement.

Tags and Descriptions :

Within your content, be sure to use headline tags and that answer search intent questions. The snippets and meta descriptions which are seen directly under your headline on search engine should use additional CTA and emotional keywords related to transactional queries will give your content and website more opportunity to reach searchers, rank on Google, and get clicks.

When you take the time and do the work needed to understand “the why” behind your future customer’s search question, you give your business the opportunity to connect, educate and solve your audience’s problems. This will build a bond and environment of trust that will have them returning again and again.

Keyword research, while still useful, is now only the beginning of creating an SEO optimized digital presence. Search intent gives you the information that will allow you to build a more robust site that will move your site up the Google page rankings and help compete in this digital age.

Free Local SEO Audit

The post Search Intent: What it is and 3 Steps To Make It Work For You appeared first on Search Recon.

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garykbender · 5 years ago

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The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to SEO in 2020

Table of Contents

Introduction.

What Is SEO and Why Do We Need It?

What Exactly Is SEO?

What Is the Search Engine?

Why Do We Need SEO?

A History of SEO

The Black Hat Era of SEO

The Birth of White Hat SEO

Our Current Position in the SEO Game

How SEO Actually Works

The Primary Functions of a Search Engine

Search Engine Crawling and How It Operates

Search Engine Index and Ranking

Checking Whether Your Pages Can Be Found

The Basics of Robots.txt

On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO

Defining On-Page SEO

Understanding Off-Page SEO

The Importance of User-Friendly Websites for SEO

What Makes a Website User-Friendly?

How to Make Your Website User-Friendly

Title Tags and How to Use Them for SEO

Understanding Page Title Tags

Why Do We Need Title Tags?

Differences between Title Tags and H1 Tags

Best Practices for Title Tags

Keyword Research for SEO

What Are Keywords and Why Do We Need Them?

Choosing the Right Keywords

Short-Tail vs. Long-Tail Keywords

The Initial Brainstorm for Keywords

The Use of Keyword Research Tools

Evaluating the Commercial Intent

The Competition Evaluation

Link Building and Its Importance for SEO

What Is Link Building?

Steps for Link Building

Conclusion

Introduction

Nowadays, everything is all about ranking. With the age of the Internet engulfing everything, you need to make your product easily found so that you may have hopes of selling it. However, with so many companies competing against each other, it might be rather difficult for you now to stand out amongst the others – which is why you have to give the search engine exactly what it wants.

However, Search Engine Optimization (or simply put, SEO) is not as easy to understand – particularly if you are a beginner. There are many tricks and twists to it – which is why this guide is here to help take you through every important step.

What Is SEO and Why Do We Need It?

SEO has been around for quite some time, particularly among those that have a service or product to sell. However, for new entrepreneurs, the term is rather vague to understand. This is why, before beginning to optimize your content, you might want to learn exactly what SEO is and why do you actually need it. Knowing this will help build your fundamental knowledge – but also improve your confidence as you are moving ahead.

– What Exactly Is SEO?

SEO is short for “search engine optimization.” To put it simply, it is the practice of improving both the quantity and the quality of a website’s traffic – all while bringing exposure to your brand. To do that, specialists use non-paid (also referred to as organic) results from the search engine.

Despite what we get from the acronym, SEO is not only about the search engine itself – but it’s about the people as well. To put it simply, it’s about understanding what people are looking for online: the words they are using, the answers they are looking for, and the type of content that they are searching for. Once you know the answers to these questions, you should know exactly how to connect with these people.

– What Is the Search Engine?

A search engine is practically an answering machine. It looks through billions of content pages, balancing thousands of factors, and determining exactly which one will answer your question the best. It seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it? But how do search engines actually do that?

Well, they do this by finding and cataloging every piece of content available on the Internet (e.g. web pages, pictures, PDFs, videos, etc.), through a process called “crawling and indexing.” After that, they order it based on how well it answers the query through a process that is referred to as “ranking.” This way, every person browsing for information on the Internet should immediately find exactly what they are looking for.

– Why Do We Need SEO?

Indeed, social media, paid advertising and other platforms in the online medium can generate quite a lot of traffic – but most of it actually results from search engines. An organic search will include a lot more online real estate, appearing more plausible and credible to the smart searcher – and also receiving far more clicks in comparison to paid advertisements. For example, surveys show that in the US, only about 2.8% of the people actually access the paid advertisements.

That being said, SEO is one of the very few marketing channels that may also pay dividends throughout time once it’s set up properly. Provided you have the right content that uses all the right strategies, your traffic may go higher over time – whereas paid advertising will require that you continuously invest in it.

With that in mind, while search engines are becoming smarter and smarter, they will still require your help. This is why you will need to optimize your website, so that it may deliver better information to those that are looking for it.

A History of SEO

In just a short time, SEO has come quite a long way. Think about the fact that the first search engine was only born about 27 years ago. It was called Archie (short for “archive”), and it was actually the precedent of the first web page that was ever created.

Which actually makes you wonder: if the purpose of a search engine is to help you find websites based on the terms you look for, how can a search engine exist when there aren’t even any websites to find? Perhaps the best answer that you may be given is that the Internet was eerily empty at that point.

To put it simply, Archie served as the catalyst for an entire flood of search engines, most of them launching between 1990 and 1999. Some of these search engines include Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves (currently Ask.com) and MSN (currently Bing). One could say that all of these have miraculously survived until this day.

As a matter of fact, when Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page came up with the prosperous search engine we now call Google, it originally went by the name “BackRub.” The reason was that it used backlinks for all of its searches. Obviously, “Google” as a name had more popularity as time kept passing.

– The Black Hat Era of SEO

With every good thing that comes and goes in our life, we begin to take advantage of it as much as we can. As a result, once the search engine began picking up steam and people saw its monetary value, they began to use it more and more for advertising.

This is why, the moment people began to care how high they were ranked on the search results, that was when the SEO practice was also born. Since keywords were a major determinant of whether your web page was visible on the search engine or not, website owners began stuffing the same keywords over and over within the content and the meta-tags. Their purpose was to artificially boost the ranking of their page.

This is what people call a regular case of “black hat SEO.” It meant that it was an aggressive strategy of SEO – one that was greatly frowned upon, particularly by Google. It is also exactly why this search engine “decided” to create a few guidelines for how it was used.

One can imagine that people weren’t ready to give up the black hat SEO practice, as it could easily manipulate the rankings. This is exactly why they kept disregarding the rules after Google’s launch and kept using their own methods for about two years. It was only when Google became the main search engine that people decided to play after its rules – of course, if they still wanted to hang onto their success.

You could say that Google did not really give website owners much of a choice in this, as it kept cracking down the websites using spammy black hat SEO – all while growing more and more in popularity. That was when the SEO game began to change, and white hat SEO took the place of black hat SEO.

– The Birth of White Hat SEO

A great innovation that came up during the Internet frenzy was also originated from the founder of Google: Page Rank. This technology filters the resulted content by its quality and not its keywords. In the world of search engines, this was clearly a first. This caused a great uproar, as not everyone knew how to create high-quality content without relying mostly on the use of keywords.

No matter if they knew what this move would lead to or not, this hurled every Internet user right into the new era of SEO. At this point, keywords were just a minor part of this puzzle and were only used to form the bigger picture.

This strategy was commonly referred to as white hat SEO, whose strategies focused mostly on the human rather than the robot. This type of SEO would be based on the guidelines that would make the content useful – and not just visible.

Fast forward to 2013, about two decades since the first search engine came into the mix, the history of SEO saw yet another groundbreaking development: an update called Hummingbird. This option was as efficient and useful as it was stressful for those that were using it.

The update changed the way we searched yet again. People could now opt for conversational search, and they could now type a full question or sentence by using an entire string of words. They were no longer just using keywords that were placed within a sentence.

Longtail keywords became very important because Google began to decipher the intent of the user rather than mapping out the phrases and keywords. They were looking for meaning rather than matching, which further differentiated it from the traditional strategies used for SEO.

However, this did not mean that keywords lost their importance entirely. It just meant that you had to consider quite a number of other factors (about 200), including backlinks, content quality, redirects, and how user-friendly the site is.

In 2016, Google came up with yet another bot – and that bot was RankBrain. This artificial intelligence software would allow Google to sort (or crawl) through the website, ranking the content by the use of semantic search. This meant that the more people would ask conversationally structured questions, the more the search engine would have to harmonize with the way in which the users search.

– Our Current Position in the SEO Game

Nowadays, SEO is a rather tricky yet interesting game for those in the domain of marketing. We have to keep up with every algorithm change that Google throws at us – but we also have to continuously re-optimize and reimagine our content so that we stay or get up the ranks. Historically speaking, this means less focus on keywords, and more focus on naturally written text that people could trust.

It also means taking other factors into account, such as cookies, localization, search history and so on. Nowadays, SEO focuses mostly on bringing forward the content that people are most likely to read based on their needs – shifting the focus on quality rather than anything else.

How SEO Actually Works

As we have previously mentioned, search engines are pretty much answering machines. Their purpose is to find, analyze, and organize the content on the Internet so that it can provide the most relevant search results for those that are looking for answers.

For it to appear in the search results, the content that you provide needs to be visible to the search engine. It is certainly one of the most important parts of the SEO puzzle – mostly because if your website cannot be found, it won’t be appearing in the results pages.

– The Primary Functions of a Search Engine

When it comes to search engines, there are three main functions that you will have to understand:

The Crawl Function: This function will be scouring the Internet for content, browsing and analyzing the content/code of every URL that they come across.

The Index Function: This function will store and then organize the relevant content that has been found during the crawling stage. Once that page has been added to the index, it will be marked as a possible page to be displayed during a relevant query.

The Rank Function: This function will offer pieces of content that will most efficiently answer the query of a searcher. This means that every result found by the search engine will be ordered going through the most relevant to the least relevant.

Each of these functions is dependent on one another and they work together to bring the searchers the answers they need.

– Search Engine Crawling and How It Operates

We kept talking about search engine crawling – but what exactly is this process? Well, search engine crawling is practically a discovery process. Here, the search engine dispatches a team of robots (also referred to as spiders or crawlers) to look for newly updated content. The content may be anything, from websites to videos and images – but regardless, the content is found via links.

The robot generally begins by fetching a couple of web pages, following the links in an attempt to come across a new URL. If you hop along this link path, the crawler will gather the new content and place it in their index (a.k.a. “Caffeine”). This massive database of URLs will then be retrieved whenever a searcher is looking for content that matches the URL.

– Search Engine Index and Ranking

The purpose of a search engine is to process and store the information they can retrieve from an index – which is a huge content database. This database contains all the pieces of content that were discovered and were deemed good enough to come to the searcher’s aid.

Moreover, whenever someone conducts a search, the search engine will be going through the index, looking for the most relevant content to answer their query. That content will be ordered in the search results from most relevant to least relevant – a process that is known as “ranking.” It’s safe to assume that the most relevant the website will be deemed, the higher up it should appear in the search results.

If you so wish, you may block the access of search engine crawlers from your website (or parts of it), in the event that you want to keep it away from certain pages. Sometimes, there might be a good reason why you may want to do this. However, if you wish for your content to become accessible to the ones searching for it, you need to make it easily found by the crawlers. You must make sure that it can be indexed. Otherwise, you may as well call it invisible.

You also need to remember that not every search engine is equal. Granted, Google has a fairly large market share – but you may want to optimize your content for other engines as well, such as Bing or Yahoo.

However, despite the fact that you have more than 30 major search engines that you could use, the SEO community is mostly attentive to Google. If you are asking yourself why, then the answer is rather simple: everyone looks up things on Google. If you add Google Maps, Google Images and YouTube (a property of Google) in the mix, it is safe to say that around 90% of Internet searches are made on Google. That’s about 20 times Yahoo and Bing combined.

– Checking Whether Your Pages Can Be Found

As you may know by now, it might be a good idea to check whether your website is showing up in the search engine results or not. For example, if you already have your own website, it might be a good idea to check exactly how many pages from your website can be found within the index. This might ask for quite a bit of insight as to whether the search engine is crawling through the pages that you want to be found or not – and those that you want to be ignored.

A good way to check how many of your pages are indexed is to go to the search engine and look for your domain in the search bar (the formula being “site:yourdomain.com”). This advanced search operator will return all the results that they have indexed for the specified website.

While the number of results found right under the search bar (see the “About XYZ results” section) is not exact, it might still give you a fairly good idea over how many pages are actually indexed. You may also use the Google Search Console’s Index Coverage report to see a more accurate number.

If you don’t seem to be showing up anywhere in the results yet, there might be a few good reasons for that – and they are as follows:

The website is new, and it hasn’t had the chance to be crawled yet

Your current navigation system on the website makes it rather difficult for crawlers to navigate effectively

You have not been linked from any external websites

Your domain features a basic code-named crawler directive that is blocking the search engine from advancing

Your website has received a penalty from Google for using a variety of spammy content.

That being said, while it is recommended that you “help” the search engines find your other important pages, it is quite easy to forget that there are some pages that you do not want the Googlebot to show in the search results. This might include old pages from your website that do not have a lot of quality content, special promo code URLs, duplicate links, test pages and so on. To keep the Googlebot from poking its nose where you do not want it to, you might want to make use of robots.txt.

– The Basics of Robots.txt

The Robots.txt files are found in the root directory of a website (example, domain.com/robots.txt) and will suggest exactly which page from the website should be crawled and which page shouldn’t. Plus, if special robots.txt directives are found, you may even set the speed at which the pages are being crawled.

Overall, this is how the Googlebot (or any search engine robot) handles robots.txt files:

If the search engine robot cannot find any robots.txt for a website, it then proceeds to crawl the website.

If the bot comes across an error and cannot determine whether a robots.txt file exists or not, it will not crawl the website.

If the Googlebot does come across a robots.txt file, it will respect the suggestions and proceed to crawl your website wherever it does have permission.

These robots will ensure that the search engines will only find the suggestions that they find relevant and with important content. Otherwise, the searches that were deemed unimportant will not be crawled – allowing the pages that matter to actually get the traffic.

On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO

When taking your SEO strategy into consideration, you should know that you may divide it into two categories, all with their own differences. Regardless, both are highly important for the success of your SEO campaign, all while being on completely different sides of the road in regard to improving your ranking.

Still, to understand the differences between these two types of SEO, you must have a basic understanding of how these two algorithms work. By going through a basic breakdown, you will see that there are two things search engines look at when trying to compare your website with others it finds on the web.

On-Page SEO: it looks at what your website or page is actually about.

Off-Page SEO: it looks at how popular and authoritative your web page is.

Simply put, you are generally ranked for the on-page factors, a.k.a. the content you add to your website. However, how high you are on those ranks will be determined by what’s on the off-page side – meaning, how much traffic your website gets.

– Defining On-Page SEO

Also referred to as on-site SEO, on-page SEO is the action of optimizing different pages and parts of your website that directly influence your ranking during the search result. These are the things that you have control over, and that you can influence to change the success of your website. Here are the factors that are generally taken into consideration. Here is what you may approach to ensure that your on-page SEO is on point.

Title Tags

Take your targeted keywords and place at least one on each page of your website. You might want to first look into some practices as to how to write a good title tag. For example, you may want to watch the length and make the keyword as visible as possible. You may also want to ensure that it’s catchy.

URL Structure

When working on the SEO strategy of your website, you might want to make sure that the URL is not forgotten. After all, Google searches check the URL first – and then go off to the rest of the content.

However, just because it does not have the keywords, you shouldn’t go changing the links just so that they fit the standard. You shouldn’t make any changes unless you want to redirect an old link to a new one. In this case, it is best that you consult with a professional in the matter.

Headings

The headings are usually some of the most important words on the page – and for that reason, you might want to ensure that you emphasize them properly. Search engines look at the headings more than they do at the actual content of your page. This is why you might want to work the target keywords into the headings – but also make sure that they reflect exactly the message that you want to send with your article.

Page Load Speed

The purpose of entering a good website with quality information is to get access to that information as quickly as possible. If a potential viewer sees that it takes ages for them to access the website, they won’t be sticking around for very long; instead, they will be clicking the back button and accessing the next website. As a result, if you optimize your web page to load everything quickly, you will be improving your on-page SEO.

Internal Linking

Linking internally to other pages on your website is very useful not only for your visitors but for you as well. For the visitor, it is an opportunity to find out more about a certain matter on a different topic. For you, it is a way to keep the interest in your other posts alive.

Page Content

Perhaps the content of your page is what matters the most – mainly because Google algorithms nowadays focus mostly on the usefulness rather than the keyword stuffing. This is why you need to ensure that users can find what they are looking for on your website.

– Understanding Off-Page SEO

While on-page SEO focuses on what occurs directly on your web page, off-page SEO is concerned with how your web page is affected by external factors. For example, off-page SEO focuses on raising your website’s authority by the means of using links from other websites.

Here’s a good analogy of how off-page SEO works. Let’s say that you have a bathtub packed with many rubber ducks – the ducks being your web pages. If they stand in the bathtub by themselves, there’s nothing that can really bring them to the top. However, if you start filling that bathtub with water (which are the links), those ducks will begin rising up at the top. Look at Wikipedia and its popularity – it has so many links that every rubber duck is set to float to the top.

This is why you need to put quite a great deal of focus on the backlinks for your off-page SEO. If you are not completely certain how to do that, here are some strategies that marketing specialists tend to use:

Create great content that others will want to use and link due to their value.

Sharing your content on social media that will ultimately begin to generate links.

Outreach to influencers that may eventually link to you.

Write guest posts for websites that have content closely related to your domain. These posts will have links that will send right back to your website.

At the same time, while link quantity still holds great importance, SEO experts and content creators have come to the realization that link quality is much more important in comparison to quantity. This is why their focus stays on things such as creating shareable content that will earn them valuable links – and therefore will improve their off-page SEO game.

At the same time, people asked themselves exactly how many links you need to have for a good off-page SEO strategy. However, that might be a difficult question to answer, as it depends on your competition’s domain authority. You want to be certain that you are not playing in a different sandbox than they are.

Moreover, SEO manipulators also used to think that if you bought links, it was considered a good way to build your off-page SEO. However, while this might have been useful in the beginning to raise your rank, Google caught on to the trick and will now penalize you for that. You may also end up penalized if you submit the links into a directory that has the only purpose to increase the authority of your domain. Once more, quality beats quantity where link building is concerned.

Some people believe that you have to choose between on and off-page SEO – but in truth, both of them are just as important. To make one more analogy, it would be like choosing whether you need a house foundation or a roof. Both of them work best when the other is present – but while you may want to work on the foundation first (on-page SEO), you should continue with on-page SEO. From time to time, there should also be some maintenance work on your “house”.

The Importance of User-Friendly Websites for SEO

Countless times you have probably heard the phrase “SEO friendly website” – but what exactly does this term entail? Why do you need one, and how exactly can you use this to make your SEO game more effective? We, you’ll be surprised to find out that the answers to this are actually easier to understand than you think.

– What Makes a Website User-Friendly?

So, what exactly makes a website user-friendly? Well, we say “user,” but it actually means that the website was meant to be easily “crawled” all while allowing the users to navigate the website swiftly without any issues.

A user-friendly website is formatted and won’t make the reader want to exit from the moment they access the website. It’s unique, but easy to use, it has a meaningful structure – and it also has understandable content that can be understood by anyone.

User-friendly websites will increase your organic traffic, as the search engine results pages (also referred to as SERP) will mostly display the pages that are most successful – and that don’t have people clicking back from the first few seconds of accessing.

– How to Make Your Website User-Friendly

Most people resort to web designers to make their websites more user-friendly. However, if you are just beginning your business and do not have the money to hire such a person, you may want to learn how to do this by yourself. Over time, you’ll learn more about what a user expects from your website – but in the meantime, this is what you may want to focus on.

Create Digestible Content

Imagine that you have come across a nice-looking website that is easy to navigate from one page to another – but the moment you try to read the content, you feel a massive headache coming. It may not necessarily that the content is bad – but it is written in a way that is not very easy to digest by the regular reader. It may have too many fancy words or too many huge blocks of texts – all of which are not very popular among readers.

To avoid this, you might want to section the content in smaller blocks – three or four sentences tops per paragraph. It will make everything more visually appealing. Moreover, you should work with the formatting options that were placed at your disposal – such as bold, underline, bulleted or numbered lists, headers and so on. It will make it easier for the user to skim through and digest the content.

Focus on Accessibility

One more tenet of SEO is accessibility. You should make sure that your website is not only compatible with your desktop, but with all phones and platforms as well. For instance, not everyone may have access to their computer at every time of the day – and they might have to use their phones in order to enter your website. If they see that your website is difficult to navigate on their mobile phone, they will quit all attempts and you will only end up losing your clients.

At this stage, you should also focus on making the website fast – regardless of the platform that is being used. If your website loads slowly or fails to load, it will receive a high bounce rate. This will send your potential visitors back to other websites that are more responsive.

Avoid Popups and Lightboxes

Admit it, as a user, how many times were you eager to sign up or provide your email address as you were reading an article or trying to access a web page? Chances are, never. If you wanted to sign up, you would have done so from the very beginning – not because they started flashing those lightboxes at you. They are invasive, which is why many people opt out of websites that are bombarding them with popups.

Instead, you might want to try asking the visitor for their email or ask that they log in at the end of the article – or in-line so that they can easily skim through. Visitors like the feeling of being given the choice, so if you begin pressuring them, the chances are that they will be running for the hills soon enough.

Add Images

Regardless of their age, people will be more confident in content that features pictures. Sure, they go there for the text – but they also like the images, as it makes everything much easier to read. However, make sure that it has been properly optimized with a good file name and that it is closely connected to the content of your website. For example, infographics have become quite a popular addition to marketing content.

In the end, a user-friendly website will keep you from losing clients every day, offering the right environment that doesn’t make them leave the website continuously. If a website is “leaky” and difficult to maneuver or read, clients will be looking for other websites that are more user-friendly. By following the advice above, you will be preventing that loss from happening.

Title Tags and How to Use Them for SEO

Without denial, the titles are likely one of the most important parts of SEO. However, while it is a basic thing to have the keywords written within a title, it is not always something very easy to do – particularly if you also want them to be SEO friendly. Applying the best practices for optimized titles requires quite a bit of a learning curve – and as you might come to realize, it’s a bit more technical than you thought.

Generally speaking, a lot of people dealing with their own marketing – or even agencies – tend to neglect title tags. Instead, they focus on the keywords in the rest of the content. However, doing this will eventually lead to great losses, as title tag optimization is not to be ignored.

– Understanding Page Title Tags

We kept talking about title tags – but what exactly are page title tags? One might think that the title tag is the phrase that you write at the top of your page, defining the name of your article. However, that is not particularly true. In fact, a title tag is an HTML element that features quite an extensive number of key roles – no matter if they are on search engines, browsers, and the web in general.

Like pretty much any HTML tag, the title tag features angle brackets and a starting tag (<title>) and end tag (</title>). The actual title for your content is found between those tags. For example, if you had an article called “How to Become an SEO Expert,” its title tag would be <title>How to Become an SEO Expert</title>. There are some computer commands that allow you to see them in their true form in the browser (e.g. CTRL+U on windows), but mostly, this will depend on the system that you are using.

– Why Do We Need Title Tags?

With all this coding, you might be asking you: do I actually need to go through all this trouble? Do I need to focus so much of my attention on these title tags? Well, you should know that title tags are not exactly there just to be pretty. They serve a very good purpose, particularly for SEO and search engines.

To put it simply, the first thing that the user sees when looking up something on Google is the title. Once they read the title, they will determine whether it is worth the effort to read the description and the actual article or not. Unless you specify it otherwise, the title meta tag will also appear on most other social media platforms when the content is shared.

– Differences between Title Tags and H1 Tags

In a way, these two are quite similar – and indeed have quite a number of features that do almost the same thing. At the same time, there is a very big difference between H1 tags (<H1></H1>) and title tags (<title></title>). The main difference between the two is that the title tag doesn’t actually appear on the web page itself. Its purpose is to appear on the search engine and the websites that are making a reference to the title on your web page.

In most cases, they tend to be the same – but it also depends on what you are using. For instance, if you are a WordPress user, you will likely be using the H1 tag. However, when you are posting, WordPress will take that information and put it in the Title Tag section.

Another difference is that while there may be multiple H1 tags on a page, there can only be one title tag. However, this will depend on the platform that you are using. For instance, some may prefer H1 tags because they look bigger and attract more attention – but platforms like WordPress will take the other H1 tags (other than the first) and turn them into H2 tags.

– Best Practices for Title Tags

No one becomes an SEO expert overnight. You will simply have to practice until you become better at what you do. That being said, here are some things that you might always want to keep in mind when you are writing your title tags.

Write for Humans

Granted, titles are first read by algorithms and robots that will determine whether your website is worthy of being on the search results or not. Those robots will determine through the title if your content has all the right information, judging by the keywords that you added within the text.

However, in the end, it’s the user that will be clicking on that link – and they certainly will not do so if your idea of a title is just a bunch of keywords that barely make any sense. The more people skip clicking your website, the more the search algorithm will believe that your title is not actually such a great one.

Try to think about what your consumers want to read in the title – and what they would be more likely to click on. You may even look at what your competitors are doing. Don’t copy their titles – but use them as an inspiration. If they have managed to climb their way into the top, then it means they are doing something right.

Keep Titles Short

When you are coming up with a title for your SEO tag, then you should remember that you must keep it short. Why, you may ask? Because if you add a long one, Google will shorten it in the search results and add “…” at the end. As a result, a fancy article called “SEO Marketing Experts 101 – The Perfect Way to Use Keywords in a Text” might end up as “SEO Marketing Experts 101 – The Perfect Way to Use…” – and the reader won’t even know what the article is all about.

This is just one example of how Google can cut away the meaning of your title simply because it is too long. You may want to make it long and complete – but if the user doesn’t see a good part of your link, they typically won’t click on it. Technically speaking, it won’t affect your SEO directly – but eventually, the lack of clicks will certainly affect the website’s position.

But what is considered “too long” when it comes to titles tags? In most cases, it is a good idea to keep the character count between 60 and 70 characters. However, since Google has a 600-pixel limit for displaying the limit, you might still end up with a title that is too big if you mostly use wide characters. One good tip here is to use characters and symbols that have fewer symbols (e.g. “|” instead of “–“).

For this reason, you might want to make use of various tools and plugins to ensure that your title is the right fit. For instance, the Yoast SEO plugin will ensure that your title is not too long – and therefore, will be fully visible for the viewer.

Main Keyword at the Beginning

Google places a lot of emphasis on the keywords that are positioned closer to the beginning. This will also increase your click-through rate, as it seems that most users click on the pages whose keywords they just saw right away – as in, the moment they began to read.

Indeed, sometimes you might not be able to add those words right at the start of the title – and if you attempt to do so, it might end up sounding unnatural. However, you might want to try to place them as close to the beginning as possible.

In a similar manner, you might not be able to write the exact keyword that has the most search volume – not without making the title sound awkward. For example, an article on title tags might have the main keyword “title tags SEO” – but since it sounds weird, it might not be that big of a problem if you wrote “SEO title tags” instead.

Add the Right Keywords

Think about the keywords that you want to focus your article on. For instance, if you have three or four keywords that you wish to incorporate in the text, you might want to make sure that they are naturally introduced in the title. After all, your title will be encompassing what you have to say in your article.

That being said, you don’t need to stuff every keyword that you have in your title. If you do that, it will simply look very crowded and unnatural – particularly if you are trying to add keywords that don’t have much to do with the article. If you really have keywords that you want to place in the title but don’t have the necessary space for them, you might want to take advantage of the meta description.

Make Them Catchy

If the title tag seems that it was written by a boring human for a reader that is just as boring, then the chances are very high that you won’t be too successful. If the title tag won’t be catchy enough to convince people to click on it, Google will see it as a negative thing and push you down the ranks. On the other hand, if you get enough clicks, then Google will deem it as positive and improve your position.

Try adding emotion to your titles, make the reader resonate with what you are trying to add there. Use jargon, or simply add some numbers in there if that is your preference (e.g. “5 SEO Tips That You Wish You Knew About”). Add the right keywords in the right places – and with everything said and done, make sure that it sounds catchy for everyone trying to read it.

Keyword Research for SEO

While keywords are not the only thing important for SEO anymore, they still make for a large chunk of it. You know how to show up in the search results at this point – but you also need to determine which strategic keywords you have to target in order to match the contents of your website.

The emphasis on keyword use has changed quite a lot in the past few years – but ultimately, its power lies in the way you understand your target market. The keyword research will offer you specific data – but most importantly, data that can help you get the answer to questions such as:

What are the users looking for?

How many users are looking for it?

In what format do they prefer to obtain that information?

There are numerous questions that keyword research can answer. If they are used correctly, these keywords may help your brand grow. They will do that by making sure your web page is going higher and higher on the SERP (search engine results page).

– What Are Keywords and Why Do We Need Them?

Keywords may be described as words or phrases within the content of your website that will make it easier for other visitors to find you by using a search engine. They focus on the primary topic of your article, as well as the story that occurs within your writing.

Keywords are pretty much considered basic SEO elements, which is why you might want to have a good understanding of the way in which they work. You use them to make sure that you talk the same language as your customers.

Keywords allow you to know exactly what your customers are looking for and how they are looking for it. You may use them to tailor the content in a way that seems appealing to your customers and their needs.

– Choosing the Right Keywords

Not every keyword will work when it comes to SEO. You must learn how to choose the right ones – how to target the correct set of words so that you attract the audience that you desire. If you choose the wrong keywords, you may indeed be getting traffic on your website – but those people will all be coming with a different requirement in their mind.

For instance, let’s say that you are the owner of a beauty website and want to make the phrase “fix broken nails” your target phrase. It might seem relevant to you, and you surely are not wrong. However, the next thing you know is that your website is continuously clicked on by DIY enthusiasts looking for new hacks and tools. Make sure that the keywords that you choose are relevant to your niche.

– Short-Tail vs. Long-Tail Keywords

Keywords generally come in two forms: the short-tail kind and the long-tail kind. As you might have realized, short-tail keywords are those keywords that have one or two words in their length. Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, have three or more words in their construction.

Long-tail keywords are generally an effective strategy for targeting your niche. Whenever a customer looks up a long-tail keyword, the chances are very high that they already have something quite specific in their mind – and that they have already done quite some research on the matter.

This means that anyone finding your website through a long-tail keyword has a better chance of clicking to view your content rather than someone looking for a generic, short-tail keyword. Anyone accessing your website through a generic keyword is most likely still in the research stage and does not know exactly what he is looking for.

– The Initial Brainstorm for Keywords

When it comes to keyword research, there are a variety of tools that you may use – including the Keyword Planner from Google. That being said, while it is a commendable move, there are quite a few steps that you might want to go through before that.

Why, you may ask? While the Google Keyword Planner does give you a close idea regarding the keywords that you should use (for instance, getting “fitness tips for women” when your input is “fitness tips”), it leaves out a whole bunch of keywords that are related to your topic but do not actually contain your seed keyword. For this reason, you might want to undergo some preparation first.

Granted, it is recommended that you also use some keyword research tools – but before blindingly using what was placed right in front of you, you might want to put your own mind to the job first. This is why, especially at the beginning, you need to have a clear image of the direction in which you plan to take your keyword research – and also ask yourself the right questions and issues.

Website’s Mission

In order to find the right keywords for your website, you first need to figure out what the goal or mission of your website is. What is your promise to the readers? What answers do you want your content to provide? It is very important to know this, as it can help you define the initial keyword search – but you also need to be very clear about it.

Marketing Persona

Once you have defined your mission, you also need to take a look at who your audience is. An efficient way to do so is to brainstorm and create a few fictional profiles of what you believe your ideal readers or customers would be. This way, you may begin to understand them on a personal level – all while seeing the world through their eyes.

Related Industries

When you are trying to come up with the right keywords, you might also want to take a look at the industries that are related to yours. Now, we aren’t saying that you should copy what they are doing. Instead, you should use them as a source of inspiration and look for some things that are recurring. For instance, someone that might be interested in fitness tips might also show an interest in weight loss tips, workout equipment, and healthy recipes. You don’t have to base your entire article on those keywords, but you may use them as a way to attract visitors.

Make a List

In the end, once you have brainstormed pretty much every area of importance, you might want to create a list with all the starter keywords that you are planning on using. Write those keywords down based on all the words that your website has to offer. Once this is done with, you may move onto the part that you were likely expecting: and that is the use of keywords research tools.

– The Use of Keyword Research Tools

Now that we have all the seed keywords in front of us, we can begin to expand them as well. At this stage, it might be a good idea to make a spreadsheet to put your keywords – mostly because the following tools will lead towards a fair number of them. Here is where you may start to get your hands on some keywords:

Google AdWords Keyword Planner

Most users consider this tool to be the first stop, as it is the easiest and most readily available option. It allows them to find new keywords that are related to their topic, being quite a useful choice when it comes to getting additional ideas. The only issue here is that while the keyword planner might give you similar keywords to the ones you have, it will not help you much in terms of topically related keywords.

Google Search Console

Formerly referred to as Google Webmaster Tool, this program will show you what search keywords you are appearing for but aren’t raking particularly well. You may want to go to “Search Traffic > Search Analytics” in order to see what your missed opportunities are. Using this tool, you should be able to see which pages aren’t ranking properly so that you may insert a couple more search terms.

Google Trends

Another Google tool, Google Trends is a great option to compare the traffic for different keyword sets. Not only will it check the popularity of the keywords in certain regions, but it will also analyze their seasonality. Moreover, perhaps the best thing about Google Trends is that it can tell you whether the interest for a particular keyword is fading or growing. It will also provide you with keyword search suggestions that are closely related to your option.

Google Related Searches

Whenever you are looking up something on Google, you probably notice that as you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there are a few related search queries there. Not only are they a gold mine when you are looking for long-tail keywords, but they can also be very useful when it comes to giving you extra ideas. Plus, it’s not even difficult to use – all you have to do is look up a Google search, and the suggestions will be right there for you to see.

Yoast Google Suggest Expander

This keyword suggestions tool is perfect if you are looking for something basic yet useful. Mining off from Google Suggests (the suggestions that appear whenever you are looking up something on Google), the Yoast tool will add words before and after your keyword, coming up with new keywords this way.

Like the Yoast tool, this one also feeds off on Google Suggests and provides you with other related searches. All you have to do is add your seed keyword, and you will receive many other suggestions that people tend to look up on Google. Choose the ones that you believe are most related to your topic – but also make sure that you choose the ones that have the most searches, as you want to actually make them visible on Google.

Soovle

This tool is yet one more efficient option to come up with related keywords. You may type in any seed keyword that you have, and it will provide suggested search queries from platforms such as Wikipedia, Amazon, Google Suggest, Ask.com, YouTube, and many more.

With these many keyword tools, the chances are that your spreadsheet is now packed with so many keywords that you don’t even know what to do with them. Still, your website doesn’t have to be optimized around all of them – you just need to learn how to sort through them.

– Evaluating the Commercial Intent

Perhaps the best way to pick the right keywords is to use the ones that have the highest search volumes. After all, your purpose here is to increase your search traffic, isn’t it? Even so, as regular traffic isn’t all that matters, you should focus your attention on the targeted keywords.

Be honest with yourself: most times, you don’t just want the visitors to come by your website, look around for a bit, and then leave once more. You want them to stick around for a bit more – and to take some sort of action to connect to your website.

The best way to determine whether they are likely to do so or not is to take a look at the commercial intent hidden behind the used keywords. By “commercial intent,” we refer to the readiness of someone in regard to making a purchase.

Not only does this influence the conversion rate on a particular website, but also the click-through. This is exactly why you may want to find the keywords that have a higher commercial intent. To do so, you may start by dividing the keywords into a few separate categories:

The “buy now” keywords: These keywords will include words such as “buy,” “discount,” or “coupon.” The “buy now” keywords are generally used for the people that are ready to pull their wallets out and make a purchase. They are call-to-action keywords that subtly influence them into taking action.

The product keywords: These keywords are specific phrases that are generally used when people are looking for a product in particular or a review. Users that are looking up this kind of keyword usually have something in their mind and are only searching for some extra information before they decide to make the purchase.

The tire kicker keywords: these keywords include searches such as “download” or “free.” These keywords are mostly for window shoppers that are looking to collect information on a purchase that they might want to make in the future.

The informational keywords: These are your usual “top xyz” or “how to…” searches whose purpose is to find broad overviews and comparisons. These viewers are generally in the earlier stages of their buying cycle and are mostly looking for information on a particular service or product.

If you need something with high commercial intent, you might want to look into the product and “buy now” keywords. At the same time, you might not want to completely disregard the other keyword types – particularly the informational ones. These keywords are the staple of blogging articles – which is what most people tend to look for. In the end, by determining the categories of keywords that you need, you should be able to thin them out quite a bit.

– The Competition Evaluation

You evaluated your own content – but you have to remember that you are not alone on the market. You have quite a lot of competition trying to get higher up than you – and if a certain keyword is commercially viable and very popular, the chances are that your competition is also going to try and use it to rank up.

That being said, this does not mean that you should try to rank for the keywords that have no competition – it might be rather difficult to find any good ones. However, you may still get to the top of the game by trying to outcompete them with the same keywords. The secret here is to use the right keywords for your niche and mix them with some that are less fought over – but do not make that your primary concern.

Still, how do you analyze the competition in your search for the right keywords? First things first, you should look at the pages that appear highest on the Google search – because you can trust them that they’re doing a better job. However, instead of copying their style, you should focus on creating content that is even better than the one that has ranked up.

For instance, let’s say that the first results that are showing up are a few blog spots that are quite shallow and short in length. To rank up higher than they are, you might want to go with an article that has more depth and features more of the right keywords. Try to determine exactly what keywords they are using and focus on adding more weight to your content.

In the end, keyword research is an essential aspect of SEO. It allows you to find the right keywords for your website – those that allow you to go higher for relevant searches and reach your targeted traffic. It is not something very complicated – but you have to know your audience and competition.

Link Building and Its Importance for SEO

One more important aspect when it comes to working with SEO strategies is how you can use link building to help elevate the ranking of your website. The issue at hand here is quite simple: once you link your website to a highly optimized one that is high in the ranks already, the Google Crawler will find it and deem it trustworthy for the other people to read. It gets you high up the Google search not only because of your content – but because other important pages trust you enough to link back at you.

– What Is Link Building?

As per the link building definition, this is the process of getting hyperlinked – a.k.a. linked with other websites. Practically, through link building, you help promote your website by using another website as your stepping stone. The owner of a website will try to attract as much traffic through organic searches as possible – which is why they will constantly have to look for quality links from more reputed websites.

Simply put, link building is the process where a new website will become linked to a website that already exists – one that has received good optimization to rank as high up on the Google search as possible. This is quite an effective tactic for new website owners, as it can elevate their ranking by increasing the authority of their domain.

But why do you need link building? Well, whenever you provide new content, the Google spiders will be crawling the Internet, looking for high-quality information. New pages might not have a lot of trust built into them at the very beginning – but when the crawler sees that you linked to a particularly high-quality website, it will tell Google that you used good sources to come up with your content. This means that if you add multiple top-quality links to your website, there’s a very high chance that your ranking will improve as well.

– Steps for Link Building

If used correctly, link building can do quite a lot to raise you up the ranks of Google. That being said, there are a few important steps of link building that you may also want to learn more about. By linking properly, it will tell Google that your website is highly resourceful and that you have good information to provide them.

Here are the steps that you might want to follow when link-building your website:

Start of Link Tag: This is a starting tag that will tell Google that a link is about to be added. It can also be referred to as an “anchor tag�� that will inform the search engine you are about to follow up with some other link.

Link to Referral Location: This section indicates a URL to which you have attached the link. This may be anything that you want – all except for another URL (e.g. text, graphics, images, etc.). The local link will be sending you towards another location so that the reader may get more information in regard to the content that they are currently reading.

Anchor text: This is a type of text or link and when you click on it, it will take you towards other pages that are relevant to the content that you provided. Generally, these texts are written either in blue color or underlined in that color to show that they double as anchor texts.

Closing of Link Tag: This part will show that the link has been successfully added to the coding part.

Ideally, when adding links, you may want to add them to your other pages as well instead of just to your home page. It will help in terms of individual ranking for each page. Moreover, make sure that the pages you link to are of high-authority – and that you are not linking to your competition. The last thing you want is to lose your clients to another service, simply because they looked better than you.

Conclusion

When it comes to building up your domain, you need to make sure that you are on top of your SEO game. This doesn’t only involve the use of keywords – but it also implies using them in the right context while making things sound natural. Since “black hat SEO” is frowned upon, you need to learn how to properly apply the white hat kind.

In the past, SEO was focused on quantity – but now it is focused on quality. The more you optimize your content for humans, the more successful your website will be. Hopefully, our guide managed to help you out into how to apply proper SEO to your text.website.

While you’re here why not take a few seconds and use our Free Audit Tool to see how your Websites SEO health scores.

Free Website SEO Audit

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garykbender · 5 years ago

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Local SEO: Best Tips for Success

Let’s talk about Local SEO

If you’ve got a local, brick-and-mortar business, you may wonder about the importance of search engine optimization. After all, dozens of potential customers pass by your physical location each and every day. And that’s on top of your local advertising budget – money spent on radio ads, television, billboards, and merchandise with your logo that your customers carry around and wear.

Can local SEO really make a difference for your business? And if so, how much of a difference could it make? Are there that many people searching for local businesses through Google, Bing, and Yahoo?

Yes. Local SEO has the power to drive hundreds of prospective customers to your site at no cost. Local SEO adds zero to your current advertising budget. And it will likely have a greater impact on your business’s traffic and sales – even if you don’t do any actual business online.

Consider the following statistics…

Nearly half of all Google searches seek local information.

Over 95% of people learn more about local companies online than anywhere else.

18% of local mobile phone searches led to a purchase within 24 hours, compared to only 7% of non-local searches.

Searches for ‘near me’ and ‘close by’ have grown over 900% in the past few years.

More and more of your customers are finding you online. And as that number grows, it’s going to become ever more important for your online presence to be rock-solid from the foundation to the roof.

If your website is out-of-date or unoptimized, your customers will likely never see you. And if they do, there’s a good chance they’ll pass you by without even giving you a shot. Websites that are nonresponsive, difficult-to-navigate, or look like they were built in the late 90s simply won’t cut it anymore.

It’s 2020. Does your business’s website look like it?

If you’re shaking your head and wondering, “How am I going to get my site up-to-snuff on top of everything else I’ve gotta do…” then fear not!

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Local SEO, from what it is to the best practices for making your site irresistible to Google’s local search algorithms.

So, enough with the chit-chat, let’s get down to business.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO. You’ve heard the term. And you even realize that it’s a necessity in today’s digital world. But you’re not sure exactly what it is…

Local Search Engine Optimization (or Local SEO for short) is a method of refining your online presence, including your website and any social media accounts, so that more prospective customers in your town find and engage with you.

When someone searches for ‘best used bookstore near me’, they’re likely wanting to find a business they can walk into – or at least call – as soon as possible. They’re begging for any local used bookstore to stand up, raise a hand, and say, “Come on by! I want your business.”

Local SEO is how you make yourself known to those customers who want an answer, product, service, or solution – right now! It’s your means of standing up, waving, and calling out to them.

So… Can Local SEO Help My Business?

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “I get it. I see that local SEO has potential. But my business is [fill in the blank]. Can it really help me?”

Well, that depends. While local SEO can be a huge boon to business owners who have a physical location, it won’t help everyone. For example, if you run an online-only business, local SEO is a bit different. People need to be able to visit your location for local SEO to have the most impact.

This means that influencers, authors, and any business or organization that lacks a physical presence should focus on SEO proper rather than local SEO.

But if you’re running a business that has a brick-and-mortar location… and if you want to attract more customers to that location… then local SEO is for you, regardless of your industry. And it’s something you need to incorporate if you’re going to build an effective marketing strategy that won’t devour your budget.

So, how do you optimize your business’s website for local searches?

There are many ways to achieve that goal. And we’re going to look at three big categories of ways…

Building a solid local SEO foundation – Before you can frame a house, you’ve got to pour a foundation. This isn’t just true of physical buildings. It’s also true for your online presence. Without a solid foundation, all the tips and tricks you can find will fall flat. This is the stage where you make sure your website is built and formatted correctly. And it’s where you create local-focused, keyword-infused content that’s engaging and relevant to your customers.

Establishing a long-term local SEO strategy – Once the foundation is built, you’re going to want to look at the ways that you can refine your online presence so that you’re easy to find and people can learn more about you. You’ll want to establish strong social media presences and create ways for people to leave (hopefully good) reviews.

Putting the finishing touches on your local SEO – If you want to take your local SEO strategy to the next level, you’ll want to move beyond the basics that we lay out in the previous two sections. Putting the finishing touches on involves drilling down into long-tail keywords, cultivating links, and developing authority for your domain.

Let’s take it a step at a time…

Building a Solid Local SEO Foundation

Your Website

The most basic foundation of your digital presence is your website. This is where all SEO begins and ends. And you can pull out all the tricks and tips you want – if your website isn’t in good shape, it’ll all be for naught.

So, what exactly do you need to do to your website to ensure that it’s local SEO friendly?

One of the first things you need to do is ensure mobile responsiveness. More people are accessing the internet from their phones and tablets than ever before. If your site is built for desktop only, you are missing out on important traffic and revenue.

In fact, even Google is looking at your mobile site before your desktop configuration. So if you don’t do anything else, at least make sure that your site is built for smartphones.

You’ll also want to make sure that your website has a simple, logical structure. If your site was created from scratch, this is something that you’ll have to ask your developer to ensure. On the other hand, if you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, most of this will be taken care of through their methodology and with the help of plugins.

When using a CMS, effective use of categories and tags can make a huge difference in your SEO success. Especially if you tag relevant, keyword-rich content with the location you’re interested in targeting. These are basic but important things to consider when building and maintaining your website.

In addition to tags and categories, you’ll want to make ample use of metadata. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, metadata is the hidden data that describes the words, pictures, links, and other visible media on your site. This includes everything from a page’s title and the description it shows in search results, to tags on images and even GPS coordinates.

Google has an entire online manual available that spells out all the possible metadata you can include on your site. It includes…

Business Hours

Menus

Price Ranges

Telephone Numbers

Addresses

Geographic Coordinates

And more…

When you tag the data on your site with these labels, you’re making it easier for Google to find and rank the information on your site. And an easy-to-understand site is a higher-ranking site.

There’s one more thing to remember as you’re building your business’s digital footprint. Always make sure that you have a consistent NAP: name, address, and phone number. If the name of your business is ‘ComputersGalore,’ then always use that spelling and spacing. Don’t make it ‘ComputersGalore, LLC’ on Google My Business, ‘Computers Galore’ on your Facebook page, and ‘ComputersGalore.com’ on your site’s about us page. Consistency is key.

So, make sure that every mention of your name, your physical address, and your phone number is exactly the same, no matter where it’s found.

It seems simple, stupid even. But it’s one of those things that makes Google’s job easier. And anything that makes Google’s job easier will make Google like your site better and rank it higher.

Keywords

Since search engines first emerged, keywords have been an important way to get noticed. And though recent advances in search algorithms have made individual keywords less important than they used to be, they’re still hugely important.

With that said, there are some things you may want to consider regarding keywords as you develop the content on your site.

With the advent of voice-controlled devices like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, more and more people are conducting searches via their voices. And though this might not seem like that important of a shift, the reality is that people speak differently than they type.

Today’s effective keyword strategy will keep this in mind. So, instead of focusing on keywords like ‘veterinarians in Dallas, TX’, it will make more sense to go with something like, ‘What are the best veterinarians near me?’ Search terms that take the form of questions are becoming much more common.

In fact, you can use a service like Answer the Public to find out exactly what questions people are asking about any topic you can imagine. This is a great way to develop content that’s tailored to the questions your customers are asking.

And that’s the kind of content that gets noticed by Google and moved up the rankings. This is especially helpful for Local SEO if the content you’re writing is focused on local concerns.

Which brings us to our next piece in the local SEO puzzle…

Local-Focused Content

Content is king in the SEO world. That’s true when it comes to general principles of SEO, and it’s just as true when it comes to local SEO. In fact, it may be even more true for local SEO.

Think about it this way…

Which of the following do you think would be more relevant to people looking for car advice who live in Michigan… ‘3 Tips to Keep Your Car Running Through the Winter’ or ‘3 Tips to Keep Your Car Running Through a Detroit Winter’?

The answer is obvious.

Now, some of the specifics here will depend on your industry. But generally, if you produce content that’s focused on a locale and has some real depth to it, your local SEO efforts will benefit.

The key in all of this is having content that has depth to it. It’s not enough to regurgitate a bunch of facts from Wikipedia on a bullet list. You need to give some serious thought to the questions related to your business that local people are asking.

This is where Answer the Public can become an amazing source of content-inspiration. You can use it to discover the things that people want to know – and that you have the answer to. It’s as simple as typing in your industry or a related term. Then, go through the questions and comparisons listed there. Make a list of topics that you could address. And write the content that addresses those topics with the keywords in mind.

The more local-focused the questions and issues are, the better off your local SEO will be. And if you can develop a library of quality content that’s laser-focused, you’ll find your site rocketing up the search rankings.

Local Links

Next to keywords and content, links are one of the most important elements in any SEO endeavor. When authoritative domains link to your site, they lend their credibility and authority to you. And the more of those links you cultivate, the more likely Google will push you to the top of the search engine results.

As with the other foundational principles that we’ve discussed so far, links are important for all SEO efforts. But they’re especially important for those of the local SEO variety.

The primary difference between traditional and local SEO, when it comes to links, is that you want to cultivate local links.

So, what are local links?

Local links can come in many flavors, including…

Citation Sites & Local Directories – These are usually directories categorized by industry, location, or some other criteria. They’re like an online Yellow Pages, with hundreds of listings for businesses and organizations of every stripe. These listings include the NAP of each business – name, address, and phone number. But most of them also give you an opportunity to include a website. This is a quick and easy way to increase authoritative, inbound links to your site. Take note though, some of these citation sites will charge you to be included. Once you find a site that you think might work, look for a page that gives info on how to submit your site. That should answer any questions you may have about the particular site you’re looking at. Examples of these include: Yellowpages, Apple Maps, Foursquare, and Yahoo’s Localworks.

Industry-Focused Local Sites – In addition to more general citation sites, you might also consider industry-specific sites. For example, some newspaper websites include a place for local businesses or organizations to offer contact information – and a web address. And then there are local clubs and associations such as the Chamber of Commerce. Sometimes, these organizations will also provide a place to include information about and links to your business. Depending on what industry you’re in, you may also want to consider local universities and government associations. Links from any of these sites will boost your business’s local credibility.

Local Partners – In addition to the above, you may want to consider ways that you could band together with other local businesses and offer link exchanges. Perhaps each of you could write related blogs and include links to each other. With that said, it’s worth noting that excessive link exchanges are forbidden by Google. But including a link here and there to other local businesses can help you build your site’s authority.

If you can put these four things in place – a solid website, relevant keywords, deep content, and local links – you’ll have a great foundation to build on with more advanced local SEO strategies.

Establishing a Long-Term Local SEO Strategy

Google My Business & Bing Places

Google My Business (GMB) is the online profile formerly known as Google Local or (for a brief time) Google+ Local. It gives you an opportunity to let Google know exactly who you are so that Google can pass along the correct information to searchers. A well-done Google My Business profile has the power to supercharge your local SEO.

You’ve likely benefited from GMB even if you didn’t know that’s what it’s called. If you’ve ever searched for something like ‘Mexican restaurants near me’ on Google, then you’ve probably seen the box that appears on the side of the search results, filled with information about local businesses.

You can easily find addresses, business hours, phone numbers, and even reviews. That entire profile is a product of Google My Business.

What you may not know is that it’s completely editable. If you’ve got a business, you can create a Google My Business profile and include whatever information you want your prospective customers to know – from contact information to business and service descriptions to the days of the week that you’re open.

When your Google My Business profile is up-to-date and consistent with your website and social media profiles, it becomes a powerful tool to reach customers. In fact, for many customers it’s likely to be the first thing they see.

And speaking of the first thing your customers ‘see’, you can also include pictures on your GMB profile. By including photos of your store, your menu, your staff, your products, and even your customers (with their permission), you’ll increase your credibility and make people feel more comfortable walking through your doors.

And you shouldn’t forget about Bing! Since Google is the world’s largest search engine, we tend to spend more time focusing on it. But Bing has a similar program to Google My Business called Bing Places. It offers many of the same features you’ll find on Google but it reaches users who are on Bing. So, it won’t target quite as many people as Google but it’s well worth doing since it’s free and easy.

With this said, it’s important to realize that you are not in complete control of your Google My Business profile. Customers can leave their own reviews and can answer FAQs that others have posed. However, if you focus on providing top-quality service, reviews can be one more way to build your local SEO potential.

Online reviews can be the boon or bane of your existence. Collecting four- and five-star reviews will push you ahead of the competition. But if you develop a reputation for single star service, people will take note and avoid you.

And it’s not just prospective customers that recognize the value of online reviews. Search engines do too. Google has said that high-quality reviews will improve your business’s visibility.

And online reviews don’t just have to be through Google My Business. You can gather reviews through Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, Angie’s List, and Glassdoor. Every positive review through any of these sites will help you in your local SEO efforts.

And if your reviewers include important keywords – such as the city you’re in – those reviews will boost your local SEO even further.

And when you get a review, make sure to respond to it. Google notices when you respond to reviews – especially negative reviews – and they reward you with higher search rankings. So get in the habit of checking your reviews every month and responding to each and every one.

Moving to Social Media

Today, more and more people are discovering local businesses through social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make it easier than ever to share and engage with content from companies near them. And though trying to maintain multiple social media accounts can be overwhelming, every business should have a Facebook page. They’re easy to set up and completely free.

If nothing else, a Facebook business page will give you one more opportunity to make your contact information known and to create links back to your website. Facebook also gives you the opportunity to collect more reviews.

So, if social media is so valuable, why isn’t it higher up on this list? Google has made it clear that social media has a limited impact on your site’s rankings. With that said, it still does have an impact and if you’re looking to maximize your local SEO, you need to make use of every tool available to you – including social media profiles.

So, even if you’re not going to be regularly posting on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. You can at least create an account and pin a post or image that lets people know who you are and points them back to your site.

Once you’ve gotten to this point, you’ll be well on your way to local SEO success. But there are a few more finishing touches that you can add to your overall strategy – and that can make the difference between a good search ranking and an awesome one.

Putting the Finishing Touches on Your Local SEO

Drilling Down on Your SEO Keywords

We’ve already looked at the importance of keywords. But we ought to say one more word about it.

When developing content for your site – even your ‘about us’ copy – you should think long and hard about making things as specific as possible. By using long-tail keywords, you can find niches that would otherwise get lost in all the other sites out there.

What do we mean by ‘long-tail keywords’? These are the phrases that include three, four, or more words. There won’t be as many people out there searching for the exact phrase but the people who are searching for it will be more likely to want exactly what you’re selling.

Think of it this way, if someone searched for ‘music store’, they could be looking for any number of things: a place to buy a new guitar, a place to sell an old banjo, a place to browse for pianos, or a place to test out a set of drums.

If you own a music store that specializes in buying and selling used guitars, you’ll be competing against every other music store in town. But if you use long-tail keywords to develop the content on your site, you can target your customers more directly. So, rather than trying to rank for ‘music store’, you could focus on ranking for ‘place that buys guitars near me.’

By doing this, you’ll be much more likely to connect with the people you really want to connect with.

Cultivate Inbound & Outbound Links

As with keywords, we’ve already discussed the value of links to your site. But links are worth one more look.

It’s not enough to only have one other site linking to yours. You want to cultivate a diverse set of links. This is why putting your profile on as many citation sites as possible is important.

But you should also look for other opportunities to cultivate inbound links. For example, you could write blogs (or hire someone to ghostwrite them) for community websites – a local newspaper or community organization – then, ask if you can include a link to your business’s site in the ‘about the author’ section of the blog.

This creates links which increases site authority. And if you can get some inbound links from an authoritative site that include your location as a main term… well, that’s the jackpot of the local SEO world.

But don’t just greedily grab for inbound links. Share the love and the wealth with some outbound links as well. Link to blogs related to your business or to other local businesses. Become known for giving as much as you get.

If you’ll view the cultivation of quality inbound and outbound links as a core part of your long-term local SEO strategy, you’ll be planting seeds that will continue to blossom well into the future.

Developing Your Domain Authority

Domain authority is your site’s overall influence in the digital world. When your website is viewed as authoritative on its topic, search engines will rank you higher. So, what’s domain authority made up of?

How many incoming links point to your site?

What’s the quality and relevance of those links?

What’s the quality of your site’s content?

How popular is your site/business on social media?

How effectively optimized is your website?

In other words, have you done everything that we’ve discussed in this guide? If you’ll take all the tips laid out here and put them into practice, you will see an increase in domain authority. But don’t think this is a onetime deal.

Developing your domain authority takes time. And it’s something that you must continue to do in the future if you’re going to maintain that authority. Getting a site to the number one spot on Google takes work. Keeping it there takes continual dedication.

But if you’ll follow these steps – and do them well – you’ll be able to achieve what so many other local businesses wish for (but are often unwilling to put in the effort for): a top ranked local website.

Free Local SEO Audit

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from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.com/local-seo-best-tips-for-success/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=local-seo-best-tips-for-success from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.tumblr.com/post/190500300958

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garykbender · 6 years ago

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Top 10 Analytic Tools for Websites

You’ve got a beautiful and responsive website filled to the brim with engaging content. Every page and blog post is SEOed. Your digital store is so clean and intuitive, it looks like the lovechild of Apple and Amazon. And your social media game is on point.

Every ‘i’ is dotted. Every ‘t’ is crossed.

So, you’d probably think I’m crazy if I said, “That’s not enough.”

And even if you didn’t think I was crazy, you’d want me to be crazy. After all, you’ve spent hours and hours (not to mention all those dollars), putting every piece of the puzzle in place.

How could all of this not be enough?

Why You Need An Analytic Tool for Your Site…

Today’s web is an ongoing process. And unless you’re analyzing all that incoming data (things like clicks, conversions, bounce rates, social media engagement, etc.), your state-of-the-art, cutting-edge online presence is destined for the garbage bin.

You need a tool that can take that data and give you a clear picture of where you are – and how to get where you want to be.

When you think of online analytic tools, your mind likely shoots to that classic (and free) mainstay: Google Analytics. And Google Analytics is great… It can just be a little complicated if you’re new to the whole analytics game (and don’t worry, we will cover it in our list).

But what if you’re not a data-nerd?

What if, like Sgt. Joe Friday, you want to be able to ask, “Just the facts, ma’am”?

What if you want to easily…

Get a clear picture of your visitors – including leads and conversions?

Discover your greatest sources of traffic?

Gauge the success/failure of your online marketing efforts?

Learn how people navigate your site so you can make it more user-friendly?

Find out where you lose prospective customers?

Optimize your site so it’ll climb the rankings like King Kong up the Empire State Building?

It’s all possible. But to do it, you’re going to need an analytic tool. Fortunately for you, I’m about to give you a rundown of the top 10 analytic tools for websites in 2020. So, let’s jump right into it…

#1 Oribi Analytics

Oribi prides itself on making online analytics as simple as possible. Rather than blasting you with every piece of data imaginable, Oribi focuses on what really matters. By doing this, they provide a more streamlined and user-friendly experience than many other analytic tools. You can tell by the dashboard that this is a service that’s focused on helping the average Joe (or Jane) understand what’s going on with their website and how to make it more effective. One of the other things that makes Oribi stand out is the way it incorporates information from your social media channels to help you optimize every aspect of your online presence.

Key Features

Dynamic and Automated Processes – Oribi makes it easy to track pages and define conversion goals without having to deal with messy code. They also will automatically update any events that you add to your site.

Simple and Practical Reports – Oribi doesn’t just provide you with a list of facts about your site. It lets you know – visually – which pages are working and which aren’t. And it gives you advice on how to optimize things.

Marketing Analyses – Oribi provides reports that will tell you exactly how well your marketing efforts are doing, broken down by channel.

Analyzing Your Customer’s Journey – Oribi allows you to follow individual visitors to your site, across multiple sessions. You can also check out the journeys of particular segments of your audience.

Pricing

You can sign up for a 10-day trial to test drive Oribi. Once you decide to make the investment, it will cost you $350 per month (or $3,600 per year) for a standard license and $500 per month (or $4.800 per year) for an agency license.

Pros

Incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use

Events-based analytics

Explains why things are happening

Gives advice on how to fix problems

Responsive customer support

Cons

Pricey

Lack of ROI tracking

Only provides PDF reports; no CSV or XLS

#2 Clicky

Though it’s not the prettiest analytic tool of the bunch, if you’re looking for a no-nonsense, real-time analytic tool, Clicky will definitely do. In fact, in some ways, it will do better than many of its competitors. It provides a tight balance of ease-of-use with a hefty attention to detail. And though it’ll give you all the data you could possibly want (sometime in interesting ways, like their heat maps), it won’t overwhelm you.

Key Features

Ease-of-Use – Clicky is simple. There’s nothing flashy or fancy about the interface or dashboard. But it gets the job done and helps you focus on what really matters – the data and what they mean.

Heat Maps – Check out exactly how your visitors engage with your site through detailed heatmaps you can sort by page, visitor, or segment.

Twitter Analytics – Clicky has a better Twitter integration than many of the other analytic tools on our list, giving you the ability to search Twitter for mentions of your site going back to Twitter’s earliest days.

Details, Details, Details – Clicky doesn’t skimp on the data. They provide you with highly detailed reports on every aspect of your site.

Pricing

Clicky offers a free trial as well as a free, limited plan. If you want all the details, you can choose between a Pro Plan ($9.99 per month), Pro Plus Plan ($14.99 per month), and Pro Platinum Plan ($19.99 per month).

Pros

Affordably priced

Easy to use once set up

Twitter & video analytics included

Effective real-time tracking

Cons

Cheaper plans lack key features

It can be difficult to get everything set up

Outdated design/interface

#3 Whois Visiting

WhoisVisiting is an analytic tool that’s designed to help B2B businesses get new leads, hold on to them longer, and convert them into customers. Since it’s more narrowly focused than many of the other analytic tools we’re looking at here, it’s better at what it does. It will help you discover more about the people visiting your site – so they become actual people rather than mere numbers. It also provides more tools to connect with them right from your site. As a result, it’s not going to be your best option if you don’t fit its target market. But if you do… few tools are better.

Key Features

Learn More About Your Visitors – When anyone visits your site, WhoisVisiting will create a profile for them and give you details that you’d otherwise miss out on, including their company’s contact information. This makes following up with them much easier.

Trigger Alerts – You can set up alerts so that WhoisVisiting will immediately let you know when certain people log on to your site.

Analyze Your Visitors – WhoisVisiting will categorize your visitors as a ‘hot lead’, ‘ignored visitor’ and more so you know exactly who to pursue and who stumbled onto your site by accident.

Pricing

WhoisVisiting offers a free, 14-day trial so you can test it out. And if you decide to go forward with them, your price will depend on how many unique visitors you get per month, starting at $69 and moving up from there.

Pros

Focused on B2B

Simple price structure

Simplifies lead generation

Cons

Focused on B2B

Doesn’t provide data on users with fixed IP addresses

No goal, conversion, or site search tracking

#4 Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the ‘Old Faithful’ of the analytic tool world. It’s a cloud-based tool that will allow you to track your visitors’ every moves and interactions. It’s been the industry standard for years. Unfortunately, as time has gone on, it’s lagged behind many of the other analytic tools in features because it’s focused on spitting out hard data – and little else. However, Google has recently begun to integrate it with some of its other platforms, creating a more robust system – even if it isn’t the best.

Key Features

It’s Google! – This is Google we’re talking about. So you can be confident that it’s not going to randomly go out on you. In addition, it’s going to continue to receive updates and support into the foreseeable future.

It’s free! – Yes, Google Analytics is free. And that’s great when you compare it to many of the other services on this list… some of which can cost hundreds of dollars per month!

Integrated with Google Ads – Google Ads is one of the best ways to pay for exposure. Everyone uses Google Ads. And Google Analytics makes integrating the two systems incredibly easy.

Powerful – Because it’s Google, it has a ton of features… you just might get lost in a maze of menus to find them.

Pricing

Google Analytics comes in two flavors – free, which is what most people will use and which contains plenty of features to keep you busy for a long time… and premium, which costs $150,000 per year and will only interest you if you represent a multinational corporation.

Pros

The industry standard

Tons of data available to analyze

Real-time, detailed tracking available

Cons

Steep leaning curve

Can eat up a computer’s RAM

Support can be lacking

#5 Smartlook

Smartlook offers you a myriad of ways to analyze your site’s visitor data. In fact, that’s what it’s completely focused on – painting a picture of your visitors, how they interact with your site, where they go, and when they leave. All of this data will help you hone your site’s user experience, leading to more sales. And they don’t just offer analytics for your site, they also do app analytics which is something to keep in mind if your business engages customers on multiple platforms.

Key Features

Visitor Playback – Smartlook records everything that every visitor does and provides you with a tool that lets you play it all back in detail. Advanced filtering is also available, letting you segment your visitors so you can see how every group interacts with your site.

Detailed Heatmaps – Get a visual of how people interact with your site. You can even segment the heatmaps to see how different groups approach your site differently.

Event & Funnel Analytics – You get the ability to perform detailed analyses of your events and funnels. Learn exactly what’s holding your site back and get the understanding to fix it.

Pricing

You can access a free version of Smarlook with several limitations (including the absence of ‘always-on recording’) or you can pay $31 per month for the Starter Plan or $79 per month for the Power Plan.

Pros

Detailed analysis of your every user

Customizable, easy-to-use dashboard

Heatmaps, event & funnel analytics, and more!

Cons

Issues have been known to occur with the always-on recording

Not always mobile friendly

Occasional bugs

Privacy concerns since visitors are being recorded

#6 Fullstory

If you’re looking for a full-featured, easy-to-use analytic platform that goes beyond analytics, Fullstory may be your best bet. Every one of your visitors’ moves is captured by Fullstory. Then, you’re able to see their experience in its entirety. Every keystroke. Every mouse click. Every page that causes half of them to bounce. It’s all intuitive and simple. Like several other platforms we’ve mentioned already, Fullstory goes beyond just giving you the full story (see what I did there?). It helps you understand what you need to chance, and how.

Key Features

Know Every Move Your Visitors Make – Fullstory keeps a meticulous log of every visitor’s journey through your site. Then, they put all that data in easy to see and understand charts, etc. This information can go a long way toward helping you hone your site and make it easier to navigate.

Easy-To-Use Dashboard – No matter what you’re trying to achieve with Fullstory, they make it easy. The dashboard (and platform as a whole) just makes sense and it’s pleasing to look at.

Flag Frustrating Moments – As I’ve already said, Fullstory doesn’t just give you data. It goes far beyond. It analyzes your visitors moves so that key frustration and error points can be caught and fixed.

Team Tools – Fullstory is built for teams. Teammates can add notes, share sessions, and more. This makes it easy to collaborate with others.

Pricing

Fullstory offers a free trial of its platform as well as a free plan that limits you to 1,000 sessions per month. If you decide to go with the Business or Enterprise plans, you’ll have to schedule a call with them because pricing varies depending on the size of your business.

Pros

Video recording that lets you see what your customers see

Simple and easy-to-use interface

Lots of filters based on visitors’ actions

Cons

Pricing is hidden until you call (and there are complaints out there about it being too high)

Lacks funnel-building features

Privacy concerns since visitors are being recorded

#7 Heap

Heap is an easy-to-install and easy-to-use analytic tool that specializes in helping you understand the individual visitors to your site. Like several other tools on this list, Heap captures every move of your visitors and uses that information to give you a detailed look at how your site is working – and isn’t. It includes a ton of sought-after features, like funnels, user search and interactions, custom event monitoring, and more. And since all data is captured in real-time, every report is up-to-date.

Key Features

Customizable Interface – Heap’s dashboard is fully customizable and easy-to-use. Data is visualized in attractive charts and graphs, making it easy on the eyes.

Follow Every Visitor – Heap allows you to examine the behavior of each visitor, even over multiple sessions. This can give you a window into the way your customers think and act.

Increase Conversions Through Funnels – Heap’s funnel feature gives you the chance to see exactly where your bottlenecks are and what may be keeping leads from turning into customers. Measuring the effectiveness of A/B testing is also a snap with Heap.

Pricing

Heap offers a free plan for sites that see less than 5,000 sessions per month. You can move to the Growth plan or Enterprise plan if you need more sessions/projects. But prices for both plans can only be obtained by calling Heap.

Pros

Intuitive interface that’s easy to navigate and use

Includes lots of options regarding funnels, user tracking, and more

A full set of features for conducting A/B tests

Cons

Price can only be obtained by calling

Can be challenging/lengthy to set up

#8 KissMetrics

KissMetrics is an online analytic tool that’s geared toward helping businesses optimize their marketing strategies and practices. It accomplishes this the same way that many of the other tools on this list get their work done: by closely tracking every user and analyzing all that date. This ends up giving you a better picture of your customers and it helps you understand what they expect and want – as well as how to meet their needs more efficiently.

Key Features

Highly Integratable – KissMetrics integrates with almost any third party platform you can imagine, from Facebook and Instagram to Slack and WooCommerce. If your online presence is spread across multiple platforms (as many are), KissMetrics makes sure you don’t miss a beat.

Intelligent Campaigns – With KissMetrics, you can increase sales and engagement through automated e-mail campaigns that run exactly when you need them to.

Segment and Analyze Your Audience – KissMetrics has a robust set of features that it uses to analyze every move of your visitors and gives you the power to look at them according to any kind of segment imaginable.

Pricing

Unfortunately, KissMetrics doesn’t offer a free trial or free plan. It starts at $250 per month for the cheapest plan and goes up to $850 per month for the most expensive.

Pros

Simple user interface

Intuitive social media integrations

Easy-to-read and easy-to-understand reports

Geared toward B2C businesses

Cons

No free trial or free plan available; pricey

Initial setup can be confusing

Service can be sub-par

#9 Woopra

Woopra bills itself as an analytic that’s designed for “product, marketing, sales and support teams.” As that tagline implies, it’s a tool that’s designed to be implemented and used broadly. It has over fifty one-click integrations (everything from Zendesk to Google Ads). Its interface is simple and elegantly designed but powerful enough to give even the most data-driven employee plenty to chew on. And it’s designed to optimize every aspect of your site’s user experience – from onboarding to check-out and beyond.

Key Features

Robust Feature Set – Woopra is built to analyze every ounce of data that comes from your users, no matter how big or small, and no matter where it comes from. All of this data is then filtered through its system so you can know your customers better. And knowing them better will allow you to design your online presence around their needs.

Customer Profiles – Customer profiles are created for every user that logs on to your site – whether they’ve been there a thousand times or only jumped on for a few seconds. You can then synchronize the data Woopra collects with your own customer data so that you’re able to serve them before they even realize they have a need.

A Wide Net of Data Collection – Woopra casts a wide net in its data collection efforts. It will gather information from your CRM, mobile marketing automation, social, and support tools. Then, it will integrate that with everything collected in Woopra proper. This makes it a powerful tool for seeing the big picture of your online presence.

Pricing

Woopra’s core plan is free but limits the amount of integrations, actions, and reports you can access. It also only retains your data for 90 days. You can upgrade to the Pro Plan but it will cost you $999 per month. And if you want to move to the Enterprise Plan, you’ll have to contact Woopra and get a custom price.

Pros

Simple interface that allows easy access to all your data

The ability to tag, follow, and understand every visitor

Easy to set-up and use

Free plan is available

Cons

Some users have found certain data to be inaccurate

Pricey if you need more than the free plan offers

#10 Statcounter

Statcounter has two big goals: to help you increase your site’s traffic and generate sales leads. Every feature is built to help you accomplish those two goals. So, how do they do it? Statcounter has an intuitive dashboard that will give you an overview of your whole site in seconds – from traffic sources to popular pages to engagement stats and exit links. It also gives you the ability to sync your Google keyword data so you can learn more about the searches that are leading people to your site. And if that’s not all, like most of the other analytic tools mentioned here, you can get a full rundown of how your users navigate the site.

Key Features

E-mail Reports – Setting up e-mail reports that summarize the data you need to see on a regular basis is easy. You can have it send a mobile report daily, weekly, or monthly.

Mobile App – Statcounter’s mobile app gives you all the data you need about your site, regardless of where you find yourself. It’s available on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

Easily Track Paid Traffic – Monitoring your ad campaigns is simple with Statcounter and it even includes ‘click fraud’ detection so you don’t waste any of your marketing budget.

Simple Dashboard – Statcounter’s dashboard gives you all the major information you need to asses your site’s current health at a glance.

Pricing

Statcounter offers a 30-day free trial as well as a limited free plan. If you want the full-featured tool, you’ll have to subscribe to one of their paid plans which start at $9 per month.

Pros

Easy to install and use

Reports are simple, clean, and straightforward to understand

Has ‘click fraud’ detection to keep you from wasting valuable ad dollars

Setup alerts so you’ll know when certain users log in to your site

Cons

Lacks the more advanced features of other analytic tools

No real-time visitor reports

Lacks some of the more advanced visuals of rival tools

Wrapping Up

By now it should be obvious that no matter what your site’s analytic needs are, there is a tool to meet them. Whether you’re a B2B company, a B2C company, an influencer with a growing blog, or something else entirely – you can find an analytic tool above that will accomplish what you need it to at a price that’s affordable.

And since many of these tools offer free trials (or even whole free plans), it would be a great idea to test several out. There’s no reason to fully commit until you’ve explored and seen which tool is going to provide you with the answers you need.

Finally, one more word of advice. It’s easy to see these platforms as a silver bullet. But they aren’t.

Succeeding in today’s online marketplace isn’t as simple as setting up your site and installing one of these tools. You need to actually make use of the data and reports they provide. After all, a tool is only as good as the person wielding it.

So, start wielding.

And if you’ve had experience with any of the tools I’ve mentioned here (or maybe some others that I didn’t mention), leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

If you liked this post check out our recent post on The Best SEO Tools for 2020

The post Top 10 Analytic Tools for Websites appeared first on Search Recon.

from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.com/top-10-analytic-tools-for-websites/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=top-10-analytic-tools-for-websites from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.tumblr.com/post/190275204248

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garykbender · 6 years ago

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The Top 10 SEO Tools for all Websites in 2020

You would agree with me that running a profitable website is not easy nowadays. No thanks to the number of new websites erupting with every passing day. So, how do you pull more traffic from a congested internet with an infinite number of websites? It’s simple, through SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the easiest way to get visitors to a blog. You might post good content regularly, own a perfectly designed website but if your page does not rank well on search engines, what’s the point? To this effect, we have compiled a list of the best ten SEO tools that will -among other things, help rank your website on the first page of Google and other search engines when familiar keywords are searched.

What is SEO

SEO is a very important skill in digital marketing. It entails increasing visibility of webpages in search engine results, identifying the purpose and content of a webpage, driving traffic to webpages, improving rankings of webpages, creating useful and educational content for users on the web.

Research has shown that the first link ranked on a google search gets about 30% of visitor clicks, the second gets about 15%, while the third link gets 10%. What SEO basically does is ensuring that your website is structured in a way that is fully understandable by search engines. Hereby, making your website rank higher and thus easier to find.

Why you need SEO tools

With appropriate SEO tools, you would:

Know important keywords to target on your web page.

Capture more traffic from a congested internet with a seemingly endless number of websites.

Filter specific data from general site visitors.

Optimize your content to gain more authority on the web.

Study your competition to always be steps ahead.

Top 10 SEO Tools for websites

Out recommended tools include:

#1 Link Research Tools

Link Research Tools (LRT), as its name implies provides a complete set of tools that allows you to conduct link research on websites; yours and your competitors. Its backlink tracking power is arguably the best out there. Asides its functionalities, part of what makes LRT quite popular is the training that comes with its tools. LRT is all about upping the know-how of its clients. Hence, building a very effective producer-client relationship.

Key Features

Link Detox: This feature appoints a risk score to each link pointing to your website. By auditing these links, it discovers strong links, as well as spammy links that could trigger google sanctions.

Competitor analyzer: Compares your website’s strengths and weaknesses with your competing websites. It gives you an idea of the link building work required to rank as high as your competitor- especially if you are just starting out.

Link Alerts: Notifies you of newer links to any domain, helps you to monitor your backlink profile, link growth, and tracks your competitor’s link-building campaigns.

Backlink analysis: LRT combines fresh link data from multiple sources. Finds and reinstate deleted links, and analyzes SEO metrics to select for each link.

Pricing

LRT plans range from €2.499 to €359 per month.

Pros

Fish out spammy links

Link prospecting made easy

Monitor backlinks to any domain

Fast google penalty recovery

Cons

A little bit slow

Too many redundant tools

Error tracking is often misleading

Limited backlink database

#2 Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a popular tool among SEO professionals all around the globe. Yes, it is the second-fastest website crawler after google but have you seen its user interface? It is one the best out there. Furthermore, its site audit feature is arguably the best SEO analysis tool on the market. This feature allows you to note parts of your website in need of updates or improvements thus, improving your SE ranking. You can also use Ahrefs to check for several backlinks; including your competitors. The option to see keyword difficulty and other related keywords that rank for target phrases make its keyword explorer tools particularly loved among SEO experts.

Key Features

Ranking Records: Allows you to see the history of every keyword used on your website.

Content Search: Boasting a database of over 1 billion web pages, you can perform a content search in no time.

Keyword Generation: With Ahrefs, you can generate millions of keywords on any research query.

Link Monitoring: Ahrefs allows you to keep track of where your guest posts are linking through its site explorer feature.

Pricing

You can use Ahrefs for a 7-day period for $7. After which you will have to subscribe to a monthly plan ranging from $99-$999.

Pros

Provides a detailed backlink analysis report

Helps to build a content strategy

Extremely fast, generates results in seconds

Checks URL rating

Shows tips for website improvement

Cons

Does not show site speed

Quite expensive

Newbies might not find its interface interesting

#3 Majestic

Majestic is a web-based SEO tool with the widest and probably the longest backlink index. It dates back to 2011. Majestic, like LRT, is a favorite for backlink analysis. It boasts of a backlink database you cannot find in other tools. With one of the biggest crawl depths available on the market, you can easily discover all the websites that link to yours and all other websites. Its trust flow and citation flow metric make it a fan favorite among search marketers. Majestic is not an all-in-one tool. It is best used with other SEO tools for advanced professional practices.

Key Features

Backlink Checker: This feature is particularly great if you’ve previously used a tool other than majestic to extract backlinks from your website or competitor. You can easily upload these backlinks on majestic and analyze them using Majestic’s data. Thus, streamlining your research operations.

Site Explorer: The site explorer tool allows you to determine the trustworthiness and authority of a URL using the citation flow and trust flow metrics. With this, you can judge your site’s link profile and take the necessary steps to improve if necessary. You can also determine sites to avoid and those to partner.

Compare Domains: This feature allows you to analyze multiple sites with the aid of charts. With this, you can compare your site with your competitors, check on other useful metrics, and always stay one step ahead of them.

Pricing

Majestic’s lite plan which costs $49.99 per month is ideal for light users. Its pro plan is ideal for professionals at $99.99 while its API plan for developers costs $399.99 per month.

Pros

Large backlink index dating back to 2011

Quick information retrieval

Handles bulk requests conveniently

Possess metrics to visualize and analyze data

Mobile friendly

Cons

Doesn’t integrate with google analytics

Does not reveal search traffic data

Not an all-in-one tool

The user interface is outdated

Lacks keyword metrics like daily searches, keyword difficulty, and suggestions

#4 Moz

Undoubtedly, Moz is one of the best SEO tools available on the market. Despite Google’s frequent algorithm changes, Moz always finds a way to be up to date. Furthermore, its chat portal also allows users to get insightful answers to their questions. Moz offers a full-fledged service. From keyword research to a full site crawl, Moz is everything you need to improve your SEO. You get to know your website’s performance levels and also methods for improvement. Its page optimization feature tells you how you can improve the SEO of each of your webpages. You should get the MozPro for advanced SEO functionalities. The MozBar browser extension integrates SEO analysis, google SERP, and Moz scores in your browser.

Key Features

Ranking Research: Tests performance and organic rank of thousands of keywords over a specific range of time. Compares mobile vs desktop visibility, reveals competitive advantages, and keeps you abreast of all fluctuations in keyword rankings.

Backlink Analysis: Tracks your website’s authority and ranking. Builds relevant and high-quality backlinks. Reveals important link metrics required to out-rank your competitors.

Site Audits: Automatically carries out weekly in-depth crawls of all your webpages to fish out new and recurring issues. It allows you to better monitor these issues and take action before they cause major damage.

Keyword Analysis: Extensive research on the competitiveness and search volume of keywords. Finds intuitive suggestions of keywords used by top-ranked sites from a database of thousands of high-quality keywords.

Pricing

Moz offers a free trial period of up to 30 days. After which you would have to choose from a set of plans ranging from $99-$599 monthly.

Pros

Comprehensive SEO toolkit

Easy to use

Community Q&A

Simplifies keyword research

Provides accurate metrics

Con

Quite pricey

Incessant error messages

Poor reporting

#5 SEMRush

SEMrush is a keyword research tool proficient in finding specific and profitable keywords. SEMrush helps you to get on top of your competitor’s winning formula. It reveals their traffic data, clicks on paid ads, and even their backlinks. It also reveals those keywords that your competitors are ranking for, allowing you to incorporate them into your webpages. Armed with this information, you can come up with strategies to beat your competition.

Key Features

Domain vs Domain Analysis: This feature provides an extensive comparative analysis of your website and your competitor’s. It reveals your competitor’s website traffic, search data, and keywords you would like to rank for.

On-Page SEO Checker: This feature allows you to keep track of your rank status. It also provides relevant tips on how you can optimize your website for better performance.

Project Management: Allows you to manage multiple websites from a central location. It also provides an on-page SEO recommendation for your campaigns, tracks brand reputation, social media success, and much more.

Traffic Analytics: This feature allows you to track where your competitor gets its bulk of traffic from. While this data helps you to formulate strategies required to tap into your competitors’ stream of traffic, it also assists in choosing the best websites to invest in.

Pricing

While you can get up to 10 free results daily, SEMrush’s premium plans range from $99.95-$399. Discounts are available if you pay a year upfront rather than month to month.

Pros

Provides thorough keyword analysis

Reasonably priced

Identifies toxic elements

Cons

Lacks geographical search filters

Poor keyword list management

Occasional errors in data

Unfriendly user interface

#6 SEO Profiler

SEO Profiler is a cloud-based SEO marketing tool. From link building to keyword research, web page optimization, SEO audits, link analysis, URL monitoring and more, SEO profiler is all you need to gain an edge over your competition. It optimizes your website, simplifies workflow, and ensures that your website follows Google’s regulations as regards SEO.

Key Features

Automatic Website Audits: SEO profiler automatically check for errors on your website. Thus, ensuring your webpage is better posed to ranking high at all times.

Daily Ranking Monitor: The daily monitoring tool helps you to know where you rank on search engines. This feature spans over 92,000 cities in 120 countries worldwide.

Website Optimization: An optimized webpage would definitely rank higher than a non-optimized one. SEO profiler offer tools that would help convince search engines to prefer your webpages during a search.

Backlink Builder: SEO profiler helps to locate sites that can help your site rank higher through site-linking. With this tool, you can manage these links and ensure that they do what you ask of them. It also allows you to cut them off if they become toxic.

Project Management: If you have more than one website, an SEO profiler is the tool for you. it allows you to manage all your websites from a single platform. Thus, streamlining workflow, and ensuring better organization of resources.

Analytics and Reporting: With SEO profiler, you can easily sync with your Google Analytics account. This opens up your website to better and effective statistical monitoring. Also, exporting, and documenting reports becomes easier.

Pricing

SEO Profiler offers a 7-day free trial period. Its premium subscriptions range from $69.95-$999.95 per month.

Pros

Streamlines operation

Quick site audit

Integrates with social media

Mobile friendly

Efficient project manager

Cons

Cannot handle multiple searches

Slow data gathering

# 7 Serpstat

Serpstat prides itself as the growth hacking tool for marketing operations. It offers services such as positions tracking, keywords grouping by tag, SERP historical data, local search, and more.

Key Features

Search Analytics: This feature reveals keywords placing your competitors above you in search results. It conducts in-depth analysis to help you leverage their weaknesses for your site growth.

Content Marketing: Serpstat helps you create content that answers the questions of your audience, thus attracting more traffic to your website.

Competitor research: Identifies and analyzes your top competitors. Since you are aware of their performance levels, you’ll strive harder to stay competitive.

Rank Tracking: This feature enables you to monitor how you and your competitors rank on search engines in various cities and languages.

Om-page Audit: Conducts an in-depth crawl of your website. Analyzes and addresses ranking factors, and also fix optimization errors. Keeps you in the loop of your websites’ stats at all times.

Pricing

Serpstat offers a free trial period. Its premium plans, however, ranges from $69.00-$499.00 per month

Pros

Finds missing pages

Resolves problems with images

Corrects interlinking verification

Provides keyword variations and analyzes keyword trends

Cons

Keyword search metrics is not always accurate

Error in accessing specific domain backlinks

# 8 Raven Tools

Raven tools will effectively manage your SEO, social media, and online ads campaign. More so, from one central location, you can easily manage link building, ad campaigns, track search engine trends, generate detailed campaign reports, optimize social networks, conduct analysis and research. Raven also allows you to collaborate efficiently with your team. You are sure to work with the best set of data since Raven integrates data from giants like Majestic, Moz, and SEMrush.

Key Features

Social Stream: With Raven’s social stream tool, you can monitor and join social discussions instantaneously. That is, whenever your brand name is being mentioned on any social media platform, you would know instantly.

Site Audit: Raven crawls your website to extract data on technical SEO. Quickly analyzes and finds issues keeping your website from ranking higher.

Ads Campaign: Raven lets you create a perfect marketing campaign in minutes. More so, it generates automated, custom, mobile-ready marketing reports that would not only save you a lot of time but also make your business look great.

Pricing

Raven tools offer a 30-day free trial period. But if you want to go premium, you can choose from their plans ranging from $109-$479 monthly.

Pros

Automatic report generation

Social media integration

Easy-to-use backlink explorer tool

Email scheduling option

Cons

Does not reveal month-over-month reports

Does not handle SERP requirements effectively

#9 SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is a cross-platform and multi-lingual software offering everything you need to increase your search traffic. From ranking to link building, audits, and tracking, it covers all aspects of an SEO campaign. More so, the SEO power suite can be integrated with tools like google analytics, google search console, and social media platforms.

Key Features

SEO Spyglass: SEO spyglass allows you to view and analyze your competitor’s backlinks, steal their strategy, compare your website with theirs, spot and remove risks before they become critical.

Link Assistant: Allows you to find link building opportunities. Automatically reveal contact information, and conduct outreach campaigns.

Rank Tracker: Enables you to research keywords, automate your reporting, analyze competitors, and monitor your rankings.

Website Auditor: Performs a deep crawl of your website for improved on-page optimization, site structure and reveal competitors winning content strategies.

Pricing

SEO power suite offers a free version. However, you can make a one-time payment of $299 or $699 to enjoy premium benefits and updates.

Pros

Makes report exporting easier and faster

Daily rank checking

Fantastic keyword research capabilities

Cons

Not mobile-friendly

Does not show the history of all domains

Separate dashboards for each tool

#10 SE Ranking

SE Ranking is a popular keyword ranking tool with a user-friendly interface. You can use it even if you have little to no experience in digital marketing. With SE ranking, you get accurate data, detailed analysis, and reports on a regular basis. The SE ranking disavows tool helps you to avoid google sanctions by marking all toxic links disavow and generating a disavow file.

Key Features

Competitors research: This feature enables you to monitor the amount of paid and organic traffic your competitors receive.

Keyword Suggestion: This tool assists in keyword optimization. It allows you to find the best performing keyword for each niche.

Backlinks Explorer: This feature helps you to keep track of various links to your website. With this, you can determine the best links, and also cut off nonfunctioning or toxic ones.

Website Audit: Helps you to analyze your website. It reveals your website’s overall performance and allows you to take steps for improvements where necessary.

Website Ranking: Enables you to check where your website is positioned on SERP results in any location of the world.

Pricing

SE ranking is available for prices between $39 and $189 per month.

Pros

Gives accurate and actionable metrics

Tracks rankings of multiple search engines

Affordable pricing

Competitor analysis

Integrates google analytics

Cons

Its user interface is a little technical

Takes a while to load results

You have to pay extra to access certain tools

Wrapping Up

While any of these tools would certainly do a great job in improving your SEO, you need to select the tool most suitable for you. Since most of these tools offer a free trial, you can test-run each of them until you find your best fit.

However, I have to mention that mere reliance on SEO tools is not enough to achieve your SEO goals. You need to put in a lot of work to make them work. I mean; creating informative and engaging content regularly, redesigning your web pages if required, and rewriting previous content. While all these would make your website, even more, SEO optimized, it would also attract visitors, keep them, and leave them asking for more. Thus, boosting your organic traffic and ranking eventually.

Do you use any of these tools? Let me know your best pick in the comment section below.

The post The Top 10 SEO Tools for all Websites in 2020 appeared first on Search Recon.

from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.com/the-top-10-seo-tools-for-all-websites-2020/ from Search Recon | Florida Local SEO Authority https://search-recon.tumblr.com/post/190003445298

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garykbender · 6 years ago

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Search Recon | 10 SEO Tips Every Startup Needs To Be Following 2019-2020

10 SEO Tips for Every Startup

Introduction:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which the content of your website is optimized to help users find it in the course of their search using search engines. Search Engine Optimization has several advantages for your website as it helps improve your traffic. Most search engines work like libraries and web pages are like books. So, every time a user searches for something on a webpage, relevant webpages appear.

However, there is a hierarchy in how these web pages are arranged. This is where Search Engine Optimization can help. SEO helps ensure that the web pages of your website are among the top pages that come up when keywords related to your website are entered on search engines.

Search engines order results of a search are based on algorithms. The algorithms consider several factors among which are keyword usage, location, accessibility of pages among other things.

However, here are 10 SEO tips to help you get the traffic you want for your website.

Make Your Website ‘Findable’ Online

Before considering ranking your website, it is important to ensure that your web pages can be found online. Although there are several ways to get this done, the best way to get this done is through crawling.

Crawling simply defines the process by which Google follows links from already known pages to new pages. The computer program used to get this done is called Spider.

If your website is linked to another website that has already been ranked in Google’s index, Google spider would find your website the next time they crawl that site. Once Google spider finds your website, then your website can also be indexed and you can start your journey getting up the ranks.

However, there are several factors that can stop Google crawlers from accessing your website;

No-follow Internal Tags: Links with no-follow tags are not crawled by Google

No-indexed Pages: Google crawlers do not also work for links that are on no-index pages.

Bad Internal Linking: If your website does not have good internal links, this greatly reduces the chance that your internal links would be crawled.

Blocks from Robots.txt: If your website contains Robots.txt files that indicate where Google can and can’t access on your website. Blocked pages using a Robots.txt file are not crawled by Google.

Use a Sitemap for Your Website

Google Sitemap is one important program for new websites when it comes to SEO. Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, the tool helps you develop and upload a sitemap of your website.

A site map makes it easier for Google to crawl your website and index all the pages of your website. The sitemap is also updated every time you make changes to your website, so new pages can also be indexed.

This way new content from your website can also be found when checked online. You can get a Google Search Console account online at no cost.

Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

A lot of web users tend to access the internet from smartphones and other mobile devices. Studies by Google shows that about 63% of Google searches come from Mobile devices. This is why Google itself continually strives to make the user experience of its search engine on mobile devices better. And the search engine has also moved to a mobile-first indexing system. This means that websites with good user experience on mobile devices would rank higher than other websites

Research has also shown that about 8 in 10 users tend to stop engaging content that does not display well on their device. This is why it is important to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.

Start with Less Competitive Keywords

When it comes to keywords, it is important to note that some keywords are more competitive than others. A competitive keyword is one that is linked to a lot of websites. When starting, you might want to choose less competitive keywords when starting.

Less competitive keywords make it easier for search engine users to find your website. We have a great guide on keyword research and volume.

Always Use Appropriate Keywords in Page Title Tag

Since it might be tedious to go through the content of all websites, most search engines use title tags and meta descriptions to determine the kind of content you have on your website. This makes them very important in SEO.

Using the keywords in a Page Title Tag and meta information increases the chance of someone finding their way to your web page when they search for that word or related words on a search engine.

It has been shown that there is a strong link between having keywords in the title tag and search engines and your website’s ranking on search engines.

Ensure Your Titles Are Not Just Written for Search Engines

Most search engine users tend to visit web pages with titles that address their queries more than other web pages. When writing titles for your web pages, writing the title tag for the searcher rather than the search engine would help you perform better in search engines.

If you’re writing titles for just the search engine, you’d most likely be worried about just the keywords. However, writing titles for searchers consider a number of other important factors. Clarity and relevance to the potential questions surrounding keywords are some of the factors to consider.

Make Your Title Succinct

Another factor that would most likely reduce the rate at which search engine users visit your website is having long title tags on your web pages. Long title tags stand a higher chance of getting cut off on search engines and this might not be good for your website.

Most people often make this error when trying to get a lot of keywords in the title tag. But the secret is to have the main keywords in a succinct title tag. If the page title is cutoff it is shown to negatively affect website SEO performance. Once again drive readers to your website and not robots.

Ensure Optimal Page speed

Pagespeed simply defines how fast your page loads. And it is an important factor for ranking websites both on desktop and mobile.

Users get frustrated when they have to wait for too long before web pages load, so the faster your page speed, the higher your ranking with search engines and the higher the traffic you get. Some tools can be used to monitor your Pagespeed e.g. Google Pagespeed Insight tool.

Get your website verified with Google pronto and make sure to use their webmaster tools. They have a lot of great tools at your disposal many websites seemingly forget about. Also a good place to get started with Whitehat SEO is Think With Google.

Ensure Your Content is Search Engine Optimized

If you assess the top-ranking pages on Search Engines, one thing is constant. Their content is written in line with some basic SEO principles. With respect to content, there are there basic considerations in search engine optimization;

Type of Content: What type of content do you offer. Blog posts, product pages, landing pages, etc. Irrespective of the type of pages you offer, it is important to ensure that your content is written to meet up with SEO standards. Some types of content have specific rules, you might also want to look out for this.

Format: Usually, the type of content usually determines the format employed in presenting your content. List-style articles, how-to-guides, opinions pieces all have different formats. Some types of content might also require relevant videos and images.

Content Angle: This involves highlighting specific selling points of your website. This helps you have visitors keep visiting your website.

In all, ensure the content of your web pages follows the basic rules of SEO. Short and precise sentences and paragraphs. Links to useful resources can also be embedded in the content. Long paragraphs can be broken using images.

Use Relevant Videos in Your Content

By embedding relevant video content, you can also improve the ranking of your website and ultimately the traffic of your website. Google displays rich snippets on mobile views of search results when videos are embedded. This makes the mobile view of these websites exciting for viewers.

Keep Your Website Fresh

Google and other search engines often rank websites that are frequently updated higher than websites that are not often updated. One way to help your website go up the ranking is to regularly update the website.

Updating your website as frequently as once or twice every week can help get you up the rankings fast.

With these tips, you can improve the ranking of your website. Good SEO helps you enjoy better traffic organically. Although you might choose to run financial promotions, the right SEO can certainly help you get optimal results for your promotion if you want to.

If you need help with your startup company Contact our SEO Agency. We also offer a free in depth analysis of your website. If you are starting out on Shopify and Marketing on Social Media we specialize in that as well.

Click here for 15 essential SEO tips for new websites.

Check out this helpful video by Neil Patel on startups for some further tips

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garykbender · 6 years ago

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What Is a Good Keyword Search Volume? The Definitive Guide 2019

What Is a Good Keyword Search Volume? Volume, Types, Tools, a Guide

Keywords and keyword volume are important if you’re looking to rank your business at the top – or towards the top of google search results organically. Keywords are what drive most SEO practices on the internet.

Therefore, keyword research is one of the most important and traffic defining practices you can undertake to find search terms within your industry. Here, we’re going to take you through what Keyword research actually is, with a focus on keyword research for the Florida area.

We’ll look at the main types of searches, keyword volume, and how to target them to gain more visits from local visitors in Florida.

First of all, here’s a quick takeaway answer on what is keyword research, then we’ll dive into more details about SEO in general and relate that to SEO in the Florida area, along with how to find search terms that are relevant for your Florida customers – and your desired traffic.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research concerns the words that are typed into all search engines such as Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. These searched terms provide results on the search engine page.

The list of results that come back after conducting a search appears on what is called the SERP – Search Engine Results Pages.

Keyword research is analysis …and skill, to find suitable search terms (keywords) that will allow you to dominate the SERP listings, and obtain top positions – or as near the top as possible in the Search Engine results page.

According to Hubspot, Google processes approximately 70,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.8 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year.

Stands to reason then, that ranking high on Google for the right search terms can result in increased business. So let’s dive a bit deeper into search results.

What affects search results

Articles and other web pages appearing in the search results compete not only with each other but with a number of other factors.

Paid ads

Firstly, at the top are usually the paid ads, you may have embarked on an Ads campaign yourself if you’re looking for local work.

These are also Google Adwords (or Google Ads) search results where people have bid money to appear at the top. This is largely considered a quicker route, but of course – it costs money to get there and can be expensive!

YouTube results

Appearing more these days are YouTube results. Google owns YouTube, so they’re keen to ensure relevant YouTube results are more visible to those searching. These often appear at the top

When it comes to targeting search results, you ideally need to find search terms that produce less of these competing factors.

Before doing keyword research

The process starts much further back than the point at which a user types in any words into a search engine like Google.

As a business, either global or local, for any seller of products and services, there’s more initial targeting involved – especially if we’re going to hone in on one area like Florida.

As part of an SEO function for any business owner in Florida, the practice of targeting the right “keywords” to gain traffic and customers, this is referred to as “keyword research” or sometimes “keyword analysis”.

The ultimate aim is to develop an SEO plan that’s designed to target and attract the kind of traffic that will likely purchase products or services from your business. Effectively, drawing people into your “store” where they can begin to understand what you do, and where you can start to build rapport with them.

If you’re helpful to your customers and they like what they read and/or see, then they’ll also be exposed to your products and services and be more inclined to purchase – it’s a win-win!.

“Effectively, drawing people into your “store” where they can begin to understand what you do, and where you can start to build rapport with them.”

A key part of keyword analysis is understanding your audience and what they’re trying to search for. For this, it often helps to reflect on how you yourself have performed searches in the past, what information or service were you trying to look for?

So to help provide some structure to this for you, let’s look at what “User Intent” is …because keyword analysis comes in many forms and can target a number of different kinds of users.

User intent – the guidelines

Google is by far the largest search engine – in the western world at least. So most of what we discuss is in terms of Google use.

To that end, Google actually describes it’s customers’ searches in terms of “user Intent”. This is important, as you need to understand the intent of the person performing the search …before conducting any type of keyword research.

Often too, if we’re using “user intent” to target high volume search terms, then in actual fact, high volume keywords numbers can be deceiving. As an extreme example, let’s take the search term “Tea”

Typing “tea” into Google will bring up a variety of results. From the keyword research tools (explained below) we can determine that “tea” is searched just under a million times per month. The reason for this is that the term “tea” is high volume, yet it’s vague.

Google doesn’t know if you want to buy tea, go for tea, make tea or want to know the benefits, or history of tea. The term is too ambiguous so the search results will vary.

Also, the search volume numbers for “tea” simply reflect that the search results of “Tea” appear in many many searches per month, many will be longer sentences with the word “tea” in them. This is why high volume search terms look attractive but are harder to attain. More on that later.

Types of searches

Loosely speaking, the two main types of user intent searches, as outlined by Google in their Quality Rater Guidelines, are those customers that want to “know” and those that want to “do”.

These search types apply everywhere in the world, so that includes Florida and will include searches around your business. Ideally, we must first understand both of these search types.

Not all searches are the same…

There are five distinct types of user search objectives that cover all searches on Google…

Informational Queries

Transactional Queries

Navigational Queries

Commercial Investigation

Local Queries

Three popular types of search queries

Let’s go over the three main types of keyword searches and what their intent is, we’re honing in on these three because …of the five different types, these three are the ones where we stand the best chance of vying for top SERP positions…

Informational search queries

Whether you’re repairing your RV, want to know the time in Tallahassee or the name of the first woman in space. These types of searches form a large portion of daily search questions typed into Google.

Targeted SEO and the whole idea behind keyword research for this type of “user” involves providing informational and thorough content designed to answer specific questions that users type into Google.

Or, that will guide users through more complex tasks. Often in the form of Guides and/or How-To posts. Often these are designed to provide a solid response/answer, with recommendations, and incorporating the writer’s experience – conveyed to help the reader.

Google’s SERP (search engine results page) will seek to present and direct users toward the right answers for their “keyword search”. Presenting the user with results from authoritative websites with expertise that can be trusted.

Transactional search queries

Typically these are searchers who are looking to make a transactional purchase, a new pair of shoes, a concert ticket or to Book a Hotel in Miami.

But also, this type of search doesn’t always have to refer to monetary transactions. A transaction can also be defined as a “Do” request. Often to locate a specific resource.

So this type of user might just want to locate a song to listen to or watch a particular movie or find out when a particular artist is in concert next. These are all part of transactional searches.

Navigational search queries

This particular search could be seeking directions, perhaps a street in Tallahassee, or the address of a hotel – or your business. See our article about Google My Business to understand more about how you can stand out in local business searches for this type of search.

But mainly these refer to “Navigational” searches that are seeking a particular web site.

These could be YouTube, or it could be your website name in Florida… so it’s where the user is intent on finding a particular website, or a particular brand.

The typical examples of keywords they type in might be Addidas.com, Airbnb Tallahassee, or Netflix Sci-Fi. They’re looking to navigate directly to a particular, familiar source for specific information.

If people begin to search for your particular site name and it becomes a popular search, then you know your marketing is having a great impact and your name is becoming a known brand – with authority!

Commercial investigation

Here. the searcher is looking for a particular product or a particular service that will fulfill their needs.

It could be to compare two brands such as Dodge vs Ford for example. Or it could be a search to find a product that will give them a solution, such as “SEO experts for hotels”.

Assess what your ideal user’s intent is

Now we understand what the main types of searches are, we can figure out what your users want, this helps us to understand and target keywords that we know your users might be looking for. This could be more complex as it might involve the use of a couple of combined searches within your industry. “Plumbing service in Orlando” for example.

Are your customers looking for a specific solution to solve their problems? (Commercial Investigation). Are they looking to find your software category from your particular website? (Transactional Search Query). Or are they looking for information “the best way to clean a window” (Informational Search Query)

Now, let’s look at what tools are available to you that would enable you to locate suitable keyword search queries within your industry for the Florida area.

Keyword research

We don’t really know how many questions are being asked about any particular subject. You could probably make a pretty good guess based on how you as a typical user would use Google. But ideally, we need more structure and accuracy to what we target.

We could probably guess that “plumber in Miami” is searched more than “taxidermist in Miami” but that’s still largely guesswork.

So we ideally need to determine two main criteria…

What keywords are being searched in Google

What the volume is of those keywords being searched. i.e. how many times is it being searched

… and we need some software tools to help us determine these.

Tools for conducting keyword research

For proper keyword research, we need three elements.

The Keywords we want to target

Search numbers about that target keyword

The skill and experience to interpret the data.

Before we get on to the tools available to decide what we want to search for, let’s explore what keyword volume is so we can understand the number of searches better…

Keyword volume

The number of times a search is performed is critical. Targeting high volume keywords is a desire that every business owner has, but the stakes are far higher. You’re not the only one who wants to rank for high volume search terms – and this is where the fight is the toughest.

High volume keywords are also often dominated by ads and renowned industry websites with very high domain authority.

Low keyword volume

For most businesses, and certainly, local businesses like our example in Florida, the keywords that are most ideal to target are not the ones you instantly think of. The ones that spring to mind are in fact, arguably the worst ones to shoot for – because of the level of fight you need to put in.

Instead, there are lots of searches that are much lower in volume but that are easier to attain. Often known as “longtail keywords” …these, in fact, are easier to target and beat the competition with.

You could argue that a number of much lower keyword phrases are less work to target and will acquire more search traffic than a handful of higher keyword search terms that are much harder work and have less chance of ranking and bringing traffic.

So how do we decide what we’re going to search for that might have a suitable search volume? That’s where keyword research tools help us…

Keyword research tools

There’s a wealth of keyword research tools available to anyone with a reasonable budget to spend on acquiring keyword metrics and data.

There are also some tools that are low cost, or even free to use, but these typically provide less analytics and data than full professional paid-for versions. A professional will usually want more data than the free or low-cost versions can offer.

Example of a free keyword tool

For example, the free site ubersuggest is one method for viewing some search data. Entering the keyword you want to target, or even a competitor’s domain name will provide some information.

This information is helpful for those looking to gain some insight into keywords and determining if a keyword is worthy of targeting.

However, this information is fairly basic, which is why businesses typically employ the services of a professional – more on that later.

The number of times it’s being asked per month can have a significant bearing on whether it’s a suitable keyword to try and rank for.

Example of a paid keyword tool

There’s a selection of keyword research tools available that require monthly subscriptions. These include tools like SEMrush, Serpstat, and ahRefs. But these can be expensive if you’re only intending to use them a handful of searches for your business.

Also, you have the added complications that the information they present to you requires some skill and experience to interpret. If it’s not something you’re used to then it can seem quite daunting.

If you’re experienced at using keyword research as a method for search analysis, then subscribing to a paid keyword tool is a good way to plan a keyword campaign.

Keyword research tools can be inaccurate

Another factor to take into account, and which can make interpreting keyword volume a skill, is that the numbers are invariably wrong – or perhaps more accurately, we can say with confidence that they ‘differ’ from one another.

Let’s take these two examples from a free tool (ubersuggest) and a low-cost tool (keywords everywhere). And we’ll apply them to a simple search query.

The volumes show differing amounts per month. This is typical for most (if not all) keyword search queries performed on both keyword research tools – in fact across all keyword research tools.

The reason for the differences is simply that no third-party software tool is privy to Google’s own figures. And Google do not share their search figures.

So the software is trying to “guess” what the search volume for any given phrase is, mainly using their own metrics – which are often based on factors like PPC advertising, historical data, and other varying metrics. The metrics they all use differ between each one too since they don’t share their own data either.

Add to this that we’re trying to interpret search volume not just from Google, but from other search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, etc and there are so many!

Furthermore, volumes like this are usually lower in number than the actual number of searches. Most tools take a conservative estimate, so we can often take a guess that the actual search numbers will be higher than this. Factors like this you only get to know from industry experience.

So why use keyword search tools?

The simple answer is that’s all we have. Short of using your own guesswork, these tools provide the closest numbers we could hope to attain, so we use them mainly as a guide.

If the number is high, we interpret that to be a high volume search term. If the numbers are low, we know it’s a more rare search term. This enables us to target with reasonable accuracy.

With so many factors to interpret, how is a business owner in Florida supposed to understand the metrics, let alone know with enough degree of experience and accuracy which search terms to target?

Well, rather than learn a whole new job – aside from running your business! This is why businesses in Florida employ us.

Florida SEO experts

We are the SEO experts in Florida, our business is to interpret and target exactly these kinds of search results plus many other factors affecting local SEO in Florida. Analyzing, interpreting and targeting relevant search results designed to bring traffic into your business from organic search results.

To finish

With our extensive experience in providing Florida businesses with SEO analysis, targeting relevant Keywords and traffic volume, we are best placed to grow the traffic for your business extensively. Why not give us a call, and we’d be happy to discuss all the options with you, and how we can help grow your website traffic and impact sales. Contact Us now and start your keyword journey.

Check out this video by Neil Patel on Keyword Research and Niche Research

If you interested in more SEO tips and Tricks check out are article on Diagnosing a Ranking Drop and How To Solve It

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