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seo1code-blog · 8 years ago

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5 easy ways you can turn marketing efforts into more sales

But how can you determine the best marketing tools for your unique situation? And since the point of marketing is to build brand awareness, generate leads and increase sales, how do you market properly in this complex environment?

Let me share with you five marketing tips that will connect to sales and help boost your bottom line results.

Tip #1: Identify your target audience

It all starts here. And I’m often surprised at the number of companies and entrepreneurs who skip this step. They don’t know who they are trying to reach.

If you think “everybody” can use your product, then you need to do more research fast.

There has to be a clearly defined target consumer for any service or product.

Tip #2: Know the total market size of your target universe

This way you can determine how much money is really out there for you to go after.

Sometimes a niche can be too small for you to meet your revenue goals.

If you’re targeting Asians in the US and the Census Bureau reports there are 15 million Asian Americans, then that’s the maximum size of your target universe.

If you’re targeting Chinese Americans and they represent 3.79 million of the Asian American pool that is your maximum audience size.

You won’t be able to sell to 6 million Chinese Americans because they don’t exist.

Tip #3: Where is your target audience located?

Knowing where your target audience resides is related to the total market size.

You want to “fish where the fish are.” If they’re online, you need to be there. If they don’t trust the internet or computers, then you need strong offline marketing tactics.

Your job is to know where your audience spends their time. Where do they network? Are they concentrated geographically? Do they attend certain events? Where are they on Sunday afternoons and Monday mornings?

By understanding the location of your audience your marketing efforts can be fine-tuned to deliver maximum value and results.

Tip #4: What percentage of your target market is reachable?

It is rarely possible to reach 100 percent of your target audience.

First, you need to know how you can reach them. Can you meet them at their mosque or church? Can you find their contact information on an existing email list? Can you buy an offline billboard that they’ll drive pass on their way to work? Can you do geo-fencing and connect with them while they’re in a physical location or geographic range?

Knowing what percentage of your target market you can effectively reach allows you to make realistic forecasts and set effective budgets.

Tip #5: What is your marketing budget?

Most likely you will need to create a mix of organic and paid marketing tactics.

This means you will need to know the cost of creating a campaign and executing the plan. The most effective campaigns are targeted to a specific audience and time frame.

Are there seasonal peaks to consider? For example, holiday advertising rates are more expensive because of higher demand.

So if radio advertising is part of your campaign, adjust this for higher cost. Similarly, you may have to bid higher amounts if you plan to use search advertising.

Competition for keywords is more intense and rates get higher during peak

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seo1code-blog · 8 years ago

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International Targeting What is international targeting?

If you manage one or more websites designed for users in a specific country speaking a specific language, you want to make sure that search results display the relevant language and country version of your pages. To ensure that your content reaches the correct audience, you will use two general mechanisms:

URL-level targeting You can use three implementation mechanisms for this: Page-level markup Use the <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x" href="alternateURL"> tag in the <head> section of your pages to list alternate language versions for each page. Each page should provide an hreflang tag that links to all other language variants of itself, as well as a tag that refers back to itself. For more granular targeting, you can use the hreflang attribute to indicate language and country combinations (e.g. en-ie, en-ca, en-us). Read more about the hreflang tag in our Content guidelines section. Sitemaps You can use sitemaps to submit language and regional alternates for your pages. Read more about using a sitemap to indicate alternate language pages in our Content guidelines section. HTTP headers If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL. Site-wide targeting In addition making sure your site URLs map to alternate language variants, you will also likely use geographic-specific domains or configure your entire site structure to deliver content to a specific geographic and language preference. To learn more, read the best practices as explained in Multi-regional and multilingual sites in our Content guidelines.

Once you have configured multi-language or multi-regional sites and pages, you can use two sections in the International targeting pages to keep your international presence healthy: The Language section—this helps you ensure your hreflang tags use the correct locale codes (language and optional country). More commonly, you can make sure that alternate pages have tags that link back to the pages for your site. The Country section—you can use this tool to set a site-wide country target for your entire site, if necessary.

International Targeting SEO: Hreflang Manager WordPress Plugin + WooCommerce

Language targeting The Language section of the International Targeting page provides a bird's eye view on errors from hreflang links throughout your site. When you set up hreflang tags, Google finds them on your site and eventually crawls the corresponding URLs referred to by the tags, reporting errors on the originating pages and missing return links on the destination pages once they are crawled. This helps you maintain a healthy international presence so that search results for your visitors display the language and country variant you want them to see. For example, if you manage three international sites and you want to monitor errors for the Spanish site, you'd choose the Spanish version from the site selector (e.g. www.example.es) to see all language variants for that site with return errors.

This page displays two common errors in multi-regional sites:

Missing return tags from alternate language codes For every language code and alternate URL you indicate with an hreflang tag, Google ensures that the alternate page has a return tag that links back to the page on your site. Unknown language codes Google shows when you use an incorrect or unknown language code in your hreflang attributes. The report graph You can mouse over the lines in the graph to see the total hreflang tags Google found on the selected site (blue line) and the number of hreflang tags that suffer from errors (red line).

No return tags This error is the most common error for international sites. For each language code you provide, the table lists a total count of alternate pages that have no return tag linking back to the selected site. The table aggregates missing return tag by implementation and locale:

Page-level -- the total number of hreflang errors by language in the <head> section of your pages. Sitemap -- the total number of hreflang errors found in your sitemap. HTTP headers -- the total number of hreflang errors for alternate files provided in your HTTP header configuration. You can click on an error to inspect details for that locale. For page-level tags, the detail report shows a maximum of 1,000 URLs on your site, paired with the alternate-language page that's missing a return tag to its mate. For sitemap details, the report lists the sitemap that indicates the URL pairing and the alternate URL that has no return link. For HTTP headers, the detail page indicates the configuration and alternate URL with no return link. As with page-level errors, the detail page shows a maximum of 1,000 URLs with missing return tags.

Unknown language code For unknown language (and optional country) codes that you have indicated in your site, the table displays the locale followed by unknown language code. As with the no return tag error, you can drill down to see URL-level details and total counts of unknown language codes for that specific locale.

International targeting Target your search results to a specific country Google Search returns the most relevant and useful sites for a user. Because of this, search results can differ between a user in Ireland and a user in France.

If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, you can help us determine which countries are most important to you. If your site has a country-coded top-level domain (such as .ie or .fr) it is already associated with a geographic region (in this example, Ireland or France). If you use a country-coded domain, you won't be able to specify a geographic location. You can specify a target country in the International Targeting report.

Set a country target On the International Targeting report, click the Country tab. Check the Geographic target checkbox and choose your country target. If you want to ensure that your site is not associated with any country or region, select Unlisted in the drop-down list. This setting is only for geographic data. If you're targeting users in different locations—for example, if you have a site in French that you want users in France, Canada, and Mali to read—don't use this tool to set France as a geographic target. A good example of where it would be useful is for a restaurant website: if the restaurant is in Canada, it's probably not of interest to folks in France. But if your content is in French and is of interest to people in multiple countries/regions, it's probably better not to restrict it.

How do we determine location without Search Console? If no information is entered in Search Console, Google relies largely on the site's country domain (such as .ca, .de). If you use an international domain (.com, .org, .eu), we'll rely on several signals, including IP address, location information on the page, links to the page, and any relevant information from Google My Business. If you change hosting provider for a country domain, there should be no impact. If you change the hosting provider of an international domain to a provider in another country, we recommend using Search Console to tell us which country your site should be associated with.

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seo1code-blog · 8 years ago

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5 Evergreen Ideas for Attracting More Website Visitors

The dream of every website and blog owner is to create high-quality content, generate massive traffic, and make sales.

We all know the role traffic plays in helping you get an interactive blog community and in earning with your site.

Needless to say that without traffic your blog is as good as living in an internet desert and in total obscurity. Even though your dream is not to earn money with your blog, you still need people to read whatever you’ve got to tell them, right?

Now, in case you don’t know, one major factor that separates your site from the popular websites on the internet like TechCrunch, Mashable, Forbes, HuffingtonPost, Buzzfeed, and the rest, is the amount of traffic they command.

Looking at their traffic stats, I bet you’ll be disappointed at yourself, and wish you could do something to be like (or a bit close) to them.

However, what if there are a few things you could do to make that happen, won’t you jump up in excitement?

Fortunately, If you are really willing and eager to turn things around and boost your website traffic, then read this post till the end.

In this post, I’m about to show you a few evergreen ideas you can implement right now that will significantly boost your website traffic beyond your wildest imagination.

But before we go to the nitty-gritty of attracting more website visitors, it would be nice for us to really understand what traffic is all about, in case you are new to blogging or internet marketing.

However, if you already know what it means, you should simply jump this section.

What is Website Traffic?

Traffic is typically the measure of the total number of people who visit your blog or website and the various channels through which they get there.

There are different sources (channels) through which people visit a site which includes:

Organic search

Direct traffic

Referral traffic

Social media

Paid traffic

“If you’re not familiar with these traffic sources, this post by Amy Winer will make it clearer.”

That being said, for the sake of clarity, this post shall focus mostly on all types of traffic except “paid traffic.”

5 Evergreen Ideas for Attracting More Website Visitors

1. Run blog contests

You may have heard about running contests or giveaways on sites. But here, we are looking at running those giveaways in a special way as to make them fetch you more traffic.

You simply need to use a tactic that makes people invite their friends, colleagues and family members to your site before they can be eligible to win the contest.

At the end of the competition, users should be picked based on the number of public votes or depending on the number of persons they were able to refer to the contest.

This will help you achieve two major feats – increase the number of readers who visit your blog and also build your email list.

Talking about blog content, Enstine is one of the few bloggers that has done this really well in the past and also benefited immensely from it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I bet you know what I’m talking about.

If you can do it regularly, you are sure of getting a huge spike in traffic that eventually becomes your loyal and trusted followers as long as you provide them with lots of valuable content on your blog.

Useful resources:

2. Leverage Social Sharing Communities

Social sharing sites have become a part of the traffic generating machine for smart bloggers and other website owners.

You will be missing out a great chunk of internet traffic if you are not leveraging the top sites like Reddit, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, etc.

A recent post on the Expanded Ramblings blog by Craig Smith shows that “Reddit has 250M users with 853,824 Subreddits and 50,000 communities.”

Participating in a site like that can help you tap the abundant traffic that abounds there.

Useful resources:

3. Target Long-Tail Keywords

(source)

What are long tail keywords?

Ahref defined Long tail keywords as “the search queries with very low individual search volume, but an enormous total search demand as a group. The name comes from the “long tail” of the so-called “search demand curve” – a graph, that plots all keywords by their search volumes.”

It’s true that smaller sites may not be able to compete with the big guns when it comes to targeting generic keywords but they can leverage the power of long-tail keywords to drive more targeted traffic to their sites.

According to Mike Lieberman, “Research shows us that 70% of searches conducted online use long-tail keywords. More importantly from a marketing perspective, these keywords have a 36% greater conversion rate, meaning they are more likely to result in a sale because they give consumers exactly what they’re looking for.”

Effectively targeting long tail keywords in your blog post can tremendously boost your monthly search visitors.

The long tail keywords may take you to Google’s top ten results, and even though 60 percent of all organic clicks go to the top three search results, you still have the remaining 40% at your disposal – you can still capture those extra clicks by continuously publishing high-quality, in-depth content targeting long-tail keywords.

That was the exact strategy Neil Patel used to increase his traffic by 91% generating 173,336 qualified visitors in the process.

To get more insights into what I’m are saying, check out the following posts:

Interestingly, when you’re targeting these long tail keywords most times, you don’t to build backlinks before you can rank them in Google, and even if you’ll build links, it’ll be very small. This is especially when the keyword also has low competition.

4. Interview Influential People In Your Niche

I’ll also accord Enstine Muki a lot of respect for this. When it comes to interviewing successful bloggers, he’s the king.

Interviewing the influential figures in a particular niche and publishing it on your blog could give your blog a significant boost in traffic.

People love to listen to experts for solutions because they know that those expats are knowledgeable and highly experienced in their niches.

Such interviews can provide people with insights into how things are done. But you should be sure that you interview those experts who have unique success stories – those who were able to make something out of nothing.

People would certainly want to hear their stories and see how they can emulate them in creating their own success.

You also want to interview people that have a good number of audience and are considered to be a god in their industry. This is because, after the interview, there’s a possibility that they will share it with their audience.

If their audiences are big enough, that alone can give you a lot of traffic than you can ever track.

In this era when influencer marketing has gradually taken over from traditional advertising, interviewing influencers and publishing the interview on your site is one quick way of attracting more website visitors to your site.

5. Build a community

People are interested in visiting sites that give them an opportunity to share their personal opinions on relevant topics. Everybody wants to be heard or to at least, have a sense of belonging.

If you make your site an interactive community of a sort, you attract more traffic as they would always have the chance to contribute and see themselves as being wanted.

You can make this happen by implementing third-party commenting systems like Disqus or Facebook Comments.

Another proven way of increasing interaction and building quality traffic is to create an active forum where people can share their thoughts or ask questions. One good place to achieve this is by creating your own Facebook group.

Conclusion

It is true that driving blog traffic could be difficult, but with all the strategies we listed in this post, that shouldn’t be a big challenge to you anymore.

Remember, none of these tactics will work if you don’t implement them, it is therefore pertinent that you put on your working cap now and get to work.

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seo1code-blog · 8 years ago

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DON’T LET YOUR WEBSITE GET LOST IN TRANSLATION: RESOLVING ISSUES WITH INTERNATIONAL TARGETING

Target your audience based on location and language settings

International Targeting SEO: Hreflang Manager WordPress Plugin + WooCommerce

DON’T LET YOUR WEBSITE GET LOST IN TRANSLATION: RESOLVING ISSUES WITH INTERNATIONAL TARGETING

As more and more businesses take advantage of the incredible opportunities offered by the World Wide Web to expand into global markets, it’s more critical than ever that sites are correctly optimised for international search. The detrimental effects of having the wrong content presented to users in organic listings cannot be underestimated. If your French content ranks in the Spanish SERPs, you will see decreased click-through rates, increased bounce rates and ultimately, your conversion rates will suffer along with the user experience of your visitors!

Google uses several pieces of information to ascertain the best target audience for your content, such as

hreflang tags

geo-targeting settings in Google Search Console

ccTLDs (country-code top-level domain names), for example .es, .fr, .co.uk

IP address of the site’s web server

location and currency information on the page

Hreflang tags are little snippets of HTML code that allow webmasters to signal to search engines which language(s) and region(s) their site is targeting. They also indicate alternative versions of the content that may be more appropriate for the search engine to serve. Hreflang tags are also useful to eradicate issues of duplicate content which can potentially arise when you have very similar content in the same language which is targeted to different locations. For example, you could have separate, but very similar, content targeting English speakers in the UK and English speakers in the US.

These tags have a strong influence on Google’s decision as to what content should be served up to international users. How do we know this? Well, there is abundant evidence that the incorrect, or complete absence of, implementation of these little snippets of code can result in the wrong content being displayed in the international SERPs. Given that incorrect implementation of hreflang tags can cause havoc for your international targeting, it’s crucial that you get it right.

HOW TO IDENTIFY IF YOU HAVE AN INTERNATIONAL TARGETING PROBLEM

The first step, of course, is to ascertain whether or not there actually is a problem with your site.

If your Google Analytics dashboard is showing poor traffic or user engagement metrics, then this could be a first indication that something’s up. For a more in-depth analysis, you could look at what countries your visitors are from when analysing the traffic to your geographically targeted content.

In order to confirm whether or not your site’s hreflang implementation (or lack of) is the culprit, it’s definitely worth checking in Google Search Console to see if any issues have been flagged. If Google have detected a problem, you are likely to receive the following error message:

While this is useful to make you aware of any issues, it is certainly not advisable to rely on this exclusively – the list of errors that Google provide here will by no means be exhaustive. It really is up to you to do the digging to identify the full extent of the problem (more on how to do this below).

Finally, in order to gain a really clear perspective on exactly how your site is behaving in the international SERPs, you can use an international proxy in combination with changing the language settings in your browser. In this way, you can carry out a search for your brand terms and identify exactly what content from your site is being displayed for a range of locations and languages. For example, you could identify the content that’s served up to French speakers in France, as well as English speakers in France – be aware that this may not be the same content!

GATHERING THE DATA

Once you’ve identified that you’ve got a problem with your international targeting, getting to the root of the issue will require some nifty tools, mind-bending data manipulation and a bit of good old detective work. Essentially, however, the problem shouldn’t be too difficult to resolve – there are only a handful of ways that things could have gone wrong, and once you’ve spotted the issues they shouldn’t be too difficult to fix.

Very fortunately for us SEOs, the Screaming Frog tool has a neat custom extraction feature that allows us to collect the hreflang data for all URLs on a site. All you need to do is go to Configuration > Custom > Extraction and then fill out the form using the following Xpaths:

(//*[@hreflang])[1]

(//*[@hreflang])[2]

… etc

You can extract up to 10 hreflang elements at a time using this format (see image below). Make sure that you select ‘Extract HTML Element’ – this will ensure that the entire HTML element is extracted, along with the link and the hreflang value. In addition, don’t forget to opt to crawl subdomains if some of your language- or location-specific content resides on subdomains instead of in subfolders.

After you’ve run the crawl, simply download the custom report and you’re ready to start digging through the data.

ARE YOUR HREFLANG TAGS RECIPROCAL?

A key problem to look out for with hreflang implementation is a lack of reciprocity between tags. Pages must link to each other. For example, if page A says that page B is its equivalent, page B must also refer back to page A in the same way. These mistakes are easy to overlook but crucial to fix.

Once you’ve downloaded the report from Screaming Frog, this is where the real fun begins. You will find that the extracted hreflang elements are listed in columns in the spreadsheet according to whether they were the first, second, third (etc) hreflang element extracted from the page. In this way, you could have a mixture of different language and location tags located in each of the columns.

What you actually want is for the tags to be arranged in columns according to the tag contents. For example, all fr-fr tags are to be located in one column, all en-gb tags to be located in another column etc. This will require some filtering, sorting, cutting and pasting. In addition, you only want the linked URL to be specified here, not the entire hreflang tag – you can use ‘find & replace’ to remove the rest of the html element. For example:

In a new tab in the spreadsheet, you now want to utilise this data that you have so neatly arranged in order to clearly visualise which pages are missing the appropriate hreflang tags and – more crucially – instances where pages are not reciprocal. Using some VLOOKUP, IFERROR and EXACT functions you want to draw this data into a new sheet to create something that resembles the following:

In this set-up, you have each URL on the site located in the far left column. Then, for each language or country variation, a column that specifies which URL is linked to from the necessary hreflang tag on that page. In addition, another column indicates the connection in reverse. A third column clearly states whether these URLs are reciprocal.

Now you can clearly see which tags are reciprocating and which URLs are lacking hreflang tags altogether.

ARE YOU INCORRECTLY USING THE “X-DEFAULT” TAG?

Another mistake that can cause issues is the overuse of the ‘x-default’ tag. This tag is used to specify that a page is not targeted to any specific language or location.

For example, you would implement the following piece of code

on an international landing page that requests for users to choose their country or location from a drop-down menu.

The ‘x-default’ tag is not to be used to refer to URLs which are also associated with specific language or country selectors. For example, the following code would be incorrect:

These tags are contradictory and provide conflicting information to Google; the former tag is indicating that the content is targeted to English speakers in the UK, while the second tag is saying that the content is not targeted at all.

HAVE YOU UPDATED GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE?

In addition to hreflang tags, another way to indicate your target audience to Google is to update the international targeting settings in Search Console. In order to be able to do this correctly, you will need to ensure that you have a profile associated with each country-language subfolder (or subdomain). For example, you would want a profile for https://example.com/uk/ and a profile for https://example.com/france/ – in this way you can target each subfolder to a specific country. In order to do so, simply go to the ‘Search Traffic’ dropdown and select ‘International Targeting’ in the Google Search Console profile. From here you can then select the country that you wish to target for that section of the site.

OTHER COMMON ERRORS

Listed below are another couple of common errors that can trip up webmasters and SEOs in their quest to correctly target their content:

Are your language codes correct?

An easy mistake to make, but a mistake nonetheless – these finicky little codes could have you targeting your content to users in Georgia (GE) as opposed to Germany (DE). A useful way to make sure that your codes are correct is to use this hreflang tags generator tool.

Have you tried to target just a region, but not a language too?

While it’s possible to use hreflang tags simply to target speakers of a particular language (for example,signals that the content at this URL is targeted to all English speakers, independent of location), it is not possible to specify a country code by itself.

So that’s it! Now you have the tools in your arsenal to diagnose any pesky hreflang problems. It’s definitely worth putting in the time and effort to diagnose and fix any international targeting issues on your site, because remember – incorrect targeting of content is not only bad for SEO but bad for business too!

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