Last Update Nov 2, 2023 @ 12:29 pm

Keyword research plays a critical role in any effective online marketing strategy. In this article, we’ll look into keywords to learn about what exactly they are, why they matter so much, and how you can use them to take your business, product, or search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to the next level.

What Is a Keyword? 

A keyword is a specific word or phrase that users type into search engines to look for services and products. From an SEO perspective, a keyword is also a word, term, or phrase that is added to online content in order to encourage search engines to rank the content higher in their results pages.

Understanding and mastering keywords is a fundamental part of getting traffic to your website and ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, tailoring your website to user queries, which are based on keywords, is the foundation of website and search engine optimization.

If your website doesn’t contain the keywords that most people use when searching for a product or website like yours, you will quickly end up losing traffic to your competitors or those who understand and utilize keywords better. The volume of traffic your website receives largely depends on the popularity of your chosen keywords. Keywords can have a high or low search volume, and including more keywords that have a high search volume on your site, such as keywords that millions of people a day are searching for, will affect how your website ranks in SERPs.

However, it’s important to remember that your conversion rate, the number of users who browse your site and actually become customers instead of just moving on to a different site or topic, is more important than simply getting a lot of traffic to your site.

If you’re driving thousands of people a day to your site but almost none of them are buying anything, something is off with your keyword, SEO, or marketing strategies. This is one reason why you should focus on targeted keywords to get noticed by your target demographic, especially if you have an ongoing pay-per-click (PPC) campaign – after all, using PPC ads means choosing targeted keywords, not generic ones. That way, you will attract actual potential customers who want to buy what you are selling, not just anyone.

If you’re searching for a specific service or product, it’s usually not easy to find it using a vague query or just a few words. To find something specific or niche, you usually need to enter phrases or search terms consisting of more than three words (known as long-tail keywords or keyphrases) into the search engine. These are an important and effective way to help your target audience find your site.

This leads to the question: How, exactly, can you find effective keywords to optimize your site and rank higher in the SERPs?

To do so, you will need to consider several strategies and techniques that we will discuss, summarized as follows:

• Finding keywords that best fit your website’s content
• Checking keyword competition
• Using keyword research tools

How to Find Keywords That Fit Your Website Content 

Before moving onto the two strategies that entail choosing which keywords to include in your website content (checking the competition and keyword research tools), it’s important to first understand the different types of keywords, their classifications, and varying functions in order to maximize their utility and effectiveness in bringing customers to your site.

The Function of Short, Medium, and Long-Tail Keywords

Keywords can be classified by the number of words that make them up as follows:

• Short-tail keywords (one to two words)
• Medium-tail keywords (two to three-word keywords)
• Long-tail keywords (more than three words)

Short-tail keywords (also called head keywords or seed keywords) typically have high search volumes and high competition. Since they are vague words, they’re not the best choice to reach your target audience and increase your conversion rate. They might bring traffic, but it won’t be targeted precisely enough to bring true potential customers to your site.

Because of this, the cost of advertising for them can outweigh the benefits versus more specific keywords. However, short-tail keywords are still useful for representing your website content in SERPs and getting closer to finding your primary keywords.

Medium-tail keywords allow you to reach your target audience more effectively, but they still cater to a broad demographic due to their somewhat general nature. For example, the medium-tale keyword “beautiful country music” is more specific than the generic term “music”, but it doesn’t target users looking for music from a specific artist. On the other hand, medium-tale keywords can be useful for creating distinct topics on different pages of your website.

Long-tail keywords are phrases consisting of more than three words (for example, “vintage floral green women’s dress”, or “1989 album by Taylor Swift”, etc.) that relate to more specific products and services, making it easier for your target audience to find your site. Their conversion rate, importantly, is typically higher than that of short keywords, but their search volume is lower because there is less competition. Long-tail keywords can be valuable for organizing your website’s pages in such a way that user queries in a search engine will naturally and intuitively lead them to the right spot.

The Function of Short, Medium, and Long-Tail Keywords

To summarize, long-tail, specific keywords to your industry or niche are typically more effective than vague, general, medium, or short-tail keywords, as they face less competition, have a higher potential for improving your SERP ranking, and lead to more conversions and sales versus people who will just leave your site without buying anything.

Remember that keyword popularity can vary depending on user queries (the information users search for), not just search engine algorithms. Short-tail keywords may not always have high competition, and long-tail keywords may not immediately bring a noticeable boost in conversion rates. That’s why it’s important to adapt and update your keywords according to the most popular searches, especially within:

• Title Tags
• Meta Tags
• Product Descriptions
• PPC advertising (if applicable)

Primary, Secondary, and Supplementary Keywords 

One of the fundamental aspects of your marketing strategy is selecting keywords for your website content. The keywords you choose can be categorized as follows:

• Primary Keywords, which represent your website’s main topic or theme.
• Secondary Keywords, which add distinct sub-topics or themes to each page.
• Supplementary Keywords, which add more details to each page

Once you define your target demographic, you need to choose a limited number of keywords that fit the context of your industry and choose one of them as the primary keyword for your website. Since the primary keyword represents your website’s content, it should be included in the title tags of each website page to ensure that it is featured prominently and noticed by Google or other search engines when they analyze your page.

You can also combine your primary keyword with related secondary keywords to create a list of all the possible combinations that come to your mind, creating diversified and specific content across your site that will help users find the right page more easily.

Using Keywords in Your Domain Name 

Before taking a look at the use of keywords in your domain name, let’s first clarify what a domain name is.

A domain name is your web address, consisting of your hostname, the Second-Level Domain or SLD, and the Top-Level Domain or TLD, separated by a period. For example, bluemovies.com is a domain name consisting of the SLD “bluemovies” and the TLD “.com”. Your domain name should reflect what you do and your industry, be distinctive, and be easy to type and concise to encourage as many people as possible to visit your site.

Hyphenated words can be used in your domain to increase visibility in SERPs because search engines read hyphens as spaces. However, it can be harder to remember them due to their pronunciation and longer format.

One way to solve this issue and still make hyphenated domains work for you is to select a domain name with hyphenated keywords and also register non-hyphenated domains that redirect traffic to it. This way, search engines will still recognize your keywords while also helping your domain be more memorable and accessible for all users.

Using Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research tools play a critical role in selecting the right keywords based on their relevance, density, volume, seasonality, and other various aspects of keywords. Below is a list of some of the more noteworthy keyword research tools:

1. Wordtracker
2. Google Keyword Planner
3. Microsoft Advertising Keyword Planner
4. Free Keyword Tool
5. Google Trends
6. Google Suggest
7. Keyword Tool/Keyword Tool Pro
8. Semrush
9. Keyword Discovery
10. GoodKeywords

1. Wordtracker

Wordtracker, introduced in 1998 by Mike and Andy Mindel, was among the first keyword research tools introduced and has continued to evolve over the years:

2. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for discovering the most searched keywords in your industry on Google and identifying appropriate keywords to plan your PPC ad campaigns:

3. Microsoft Advertising Keyword Planner

Microsoft Advertising Keyword Planner helps you find the most relevant keywords for your PPC campaigns on various search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo!, and Ecosia:

4. Free Keyword Tool

Free Keyword Tool is a tool offered by WordStream to help find suitable keywords for Google or Microsoft Ads: 

 5. Google Trends

Google Trends reveals the latest research trends on Google, providing useful filters for regional and language-based keyword analysis:

 6. Google Suggest

Google Suggest automatically generates a list of keywords related to your query as you type it into the Google search box:

The related keywords suggested by this tool can change depending both on the most popular search terms on Google at the time and the default region you choose in Google settings:

7. Keyword Tool

Keyword Tool offers both a free version and a paid version, the Keyword Tool Pro. It’s a useful tool that finds the most relevant keywords from Google, YouTube, Bing, and other search engines using Google Autocomplete:

The free version uses Google Suggest to find keywords:

8. Semrush

Semrush is a well-rounded SEO tool that assists in many different aspects of SEO, online content marketing, and PPC advertising campaigns. Semrush allows you to find keywords tailored to your SEO strategy, analyze your website’s traffic, and gain insights into your competition. It offers several keyword tools that can be found on the “Semrush Features” page:

9. Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery also offers both paid and free search tools. The free option includes the Free Search Term Suggestion Tool, where you can find the top 100 keywords from over 200 search engines.  This is another valuable tool for keyword research:

10. GoodKeywords

GoodKeywords offers three keyword tools. The first one, Keyword Strategy Studio, is meant to help enhance your existing keywords and identify new ones that are in line with industry trends. Secondly, the Keyword and Product Idea Generator can help you discover fresh ideas for your products, articles, PPC ads, and various other marketing ideas. Finally, Keyword Pad is a useful tool to organize and manage your long-tail keywords, allowing you to optimize their utility and performance.

If you want to take a deeper look at keyword research and how to use these tools, feel free to check out the Ultimate Guide for SEO Keyword Research.

Keyword Competition 

Keyword competition is intrinsically related to keyword difficulty, which measures the challenge of ranking keywords in the top position of SERPs. The keyword difficulty score helps you understand how hard or easy it is to compete with other websites that are also trying to rank for the same keyword.

A higher difficulty means it will be more challenging and require more time, money, or effort to rank well for that keyword, while a lower difficulty suggests that it’s easier to achieve a high SERP position for that keyword.

The level of difficulty or competition you will face when trying to rank for various keywords depends on several factors, such as:

• Search engine algorithms
• The effectiveness of your SEO strategies
• User behavior and the tendency to only utilize the first few pages of results
• Which search engine is being used
• Regional variations in keyword popularity

One strategy to identify effective keywords for your business is to study your competitor’s approaches. To do so, you can use the keyword research tools listed above or visit your competitor’s sites and examine their HTML code using the “Page Source” option. These approaches become even more useful when combined with other techniques, such as:

1. KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index)
2. Keyword Proximity
3. Keyword Prominence
4. Google Search Operators

Let’s take a closer look at each of these important SEO techniques and ideas.

1. KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index)

This index calculates the value of a keyword’s efficiency by considering its popularity (the number of user searches over a given period) and the level of competition (the number of competitors for that specific keyword.)

To find the KEI of a given keyword, use the following formula: KEI = (P^2/C) x 100, in which P stands for “popularity” and C stands for “competition”.

As an example, you can calculate the KEI of the keyword “music” by considering the searches of the last month (numerator) and the competitors (denominator) as follows:

• KEI Calculation for “music”: KEI = (3,600^2 / 8,930,000,000) x 100
• KEI = 6.89

We find that the keyword “music” has a KEI value of 6.89, which is considered relatively low due to its combination of high search volume and medium competition.

• KEI Calculation for “country music”: KEI = (1225^2 / 57,200,000) x 100
• KEI = 38.11

On the other hand, the keyword “country music” has a significantly higher KEI value of 38.11. This higher score means that “country music” is a more effective keyword choice for SEO, as it combines good search volume with lower competition.

It’s fairly intuitive to understand that “country music” has a higher KEI value than the keyword “music” because it has a good search volume and lower competition while being more specific. To get an even better KEI score, tailor your keywords to be as precise as possible, for example, if you sell country music apparel, try keywords like “country music T-shirt” or “country music cowboy hat”.

In short, the higher the KEI value, the higher your chance of ranking first on SERPs will be.

You can calculate KEI yourself or find it already integrated into some keyword research tools, such as Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker. For example, Wordtracker has integrated KEI calculations into its keyword research tool to help you select potential keywords using your competitor’s content and other methods.

2. Keyword Proximity

Keyword Proximity has to do with the proximity or arrangement between two or more keywords within a search term as they appear in a web page’s textual elements, such as HTML paragraphs, sentences, and heading tags.

The goal is to ensure that these keywords align in the same order as the most commonly searched terms. In other words, the more closely aligned the keyword proximity is on your site to the way they are aligned in most commonly searched queries, the greater chance you will have of getting your site noticed on search engines and ranking higher on SERPs.

3. Keyword Prominence

Keyword prominence hinges on the positioning of a keyword within the HTML structure of a website. Generally, keywords located near the beginning of HTML elements, such as the title tag, heading tags, paragraph tags, meta description tags, and URLs, are noticed more easily by search engines and hold greater prominence.

For example, a keyword placed at the beginning of the title tag is more prominent than those placed at the end. If you put this keyword at the beginning of the H1 tag, it becomes even more prominent.

However, there are certain instances where the keywords placed at the end may be more prominent than those placed at the beginning – here’s an interesting article about it.

4. Google Search Operators

Google search operators are specialized queries that refine the search results to include only those containing your specified search query.

For example, the Google operator “inurl:” restricts search results to those containing your search term in the URLs. If you type “inurl:music” into the Google search box, Google will only return pages in which the URLs contain the keyword “music”.

Some Google search operators are particularly useful when doing research on your competition and analyzing the sites you are competing with on SERPs. Below is a list of some of the most important ones:

• Related: This operator helps you identify your competitors by finding websites related to the URL you input after the operator. For example, if you put “related:ebay.com” into the Google search box, Google will locate websites related to “ebay.com” (such as “amazon.com,” and more).
• Allinurl: This operator functions similarly to “inurl:”, but it considers all words after the operator for the search. For example, using “allinurl:shop health” will refine your search to pages containing both “shop” and “health” within their URLs.
• Intitle: This operator narrows down results to pages containing the query term in their titles. For example, using “intitle:health” ensures that your results feature pages with “health” in their titles.
• Allintitle: Similar to “intitle:”, this operator considers all the words following it for the search. For example, using “allintitle:health shop” narrows your results to pages with both “health” and “shop” in their titles.
• Allintext: When you use this operator, Google restricts results to pages containing all the words from your query within their textual content. For example, using “allintext:google advanced search operators” filters results to pages containing all these words in their text.

After using these search operators to find competing sites to yours, you can take a look at their ranking positions on the SERP and analyze their use of meta keywords, meta titles, and meta descriptions. Once you’ve done so, try to make your website just as good or better.

Remember, when it comes to SEO, you don’t have to be perfect – you just have to be better than your competition!

Keyword Density

Keyword density is related to the ability to create compelling content on a website while also maintaining a certain number of keyword repetitions. It is measured as the percentage of repeated keywords relative to the total number of words within the page content. It can be helpful to consider the following factors:

• The frequency and distance between repeated keywords
• How keywords are distributed on the page
• Keywords within the HTML elements

You can calculate keyword density by dividing the number of repeated keywords (NKR) by the total number of words on the page (TKN).

The formula is as follows: KD = (NKR/TKN) x 100.

For example, if you repeat a word six times in a 300-word article the keyword density will be 2%, calculated as follows:

KD = (6/300) x 100 = 0.02 or 2%.

As you can see, it’s fairly simple to calculate keyword density yourself by counting the keywords and your total word count, or if you want to quickly check its percentage there are tools available like SEO Review Tools Keyword Density Checker.

Excessive keyword density can lead to keyword stuffing (too many or unnaturally repeated keywords on a web page), which could make your page content sound strange and be identified by search engines as spam. That’s one of the main reasons why an analysis of keyword density is necessary – to avoid being penalized by search engines.

Keyword Density is also known as Keyword Frequency, although these two terms have slightly different meanings: keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword is repeated on the web page, while keyword density is its percentage.

Keywords: The Heart of SEO

Understanding what keywords are and how to use them is the beating heart of an effective and well-rounded SEO strategy. Keywords serve as the bridge or access point between what users are searching for and the content, products, or services you provide. Without the right keywords, it becomes a lot more difficult for people to find your website.

However, keyword research and strategy must be maintained and corrected over time. It is not a static process, but one that must be continuously refined and researched to make sure that your website stays on top of SERPs and doesn’t lose its spot to the competition.

Selecting the right keywords that align with your content, intentions, and target audience is critical to not only attracting users to your site but also making sure that these users are the right ones that you want – ultimately leading to more conversions in your sales funnel, and the income that you need.

By understanding the different types of keywords and what they are for, you can tailor your content to meet the specific needs and queries of your target demographic. Keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and Semrush play an important role in staying ahead of the race, and anyone can use them to help improve their SEO.

Through all of this and the rest of the complex nature of SEO, keywords function as a map covering the vast, sometimes difficult-to-navigate online world, which contains massive amounts of information. Keywords keep you on track and allow others to navigate towards you.

To succeed in the fast-paced, online, digital marketplace of today, mastering the art of keyword selection is not merely a choice but an absolute necessity to ensure that your digital identity, website, or business remains prominent on SERPs and can reach the people you need to reach in order to make sales.

Don’t neglect your keywords- reach out to SEO experts today if you need help and get your website started moving up the rankings!

The post The Importance of Keyword Research for Your SEO Strategy first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 18, 2025 @ 4:57 am

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an ever-evolving landscape that requires marketers to keep up with the latest trends. With Google constantly updating its ranking algorithm, SEO trends change yearly. Therefore, it’s crucial to stay ahead of the game. Currently, there will be several changes to the SEO world, and businesses need to understand and adapt to these changes to achieve top rankings. To help you do this, we’ve consulted digital marketing experts specializing in SEO, and here are 10 SEO changes to get ready for as well as tips on how to align your strategy with these trends. Now let’s get to work!

Get Ready For the Following 10 SEO Changes

SEO is a never-ending story of changes and adaptation. Because this field is constantly evolving, staying on top of the latest trends and updates can be a real challenge. It’s like trying to catch a wave, but just as soon as you think you’ve got it, it changes direction, and you’re left behind. Google’s algorithm is the main driving force behind these changes, and it’s always on the move. This means that what worked yesterday may not work today, and it’s your job to be ahead of those trends.

The algorithm is designed to deliver the best possible results for the user. So to boost user experience, Google is always finding ways to improve. The results are great for users. However, SEO practitioners like yourself must be agile and adaptable, always ready to pivot their strategies and techniques. This can make it challenging to keep up, but it makes SEO so exciting! As the experts from MoversTech CRM advise, the constant evolution of SEO keeps us on our toes and ensures that we’re always learning, growing, and delivering the best possible results for our clients.

The New “E” in E.E.A.T

Google’s popular EAT acronym, which stands for Expertise, Authority, Trust, has received an additional E: Experience. The author’s or creator’s experience now plays a crucial role in determining the credibility and trustworthiness of the content. In today’s digital age, where information is readily available at our fingertips, Google wants to ensure that users receive accurate and reliable information from knowledgeable and experienced sources.

Additionally, you also need to consider user experience when writing content. This involves ensuring that the content is easy to understand, well-organized, and user-friendly. Content that provides a positive user experience is more likely to be shared and engaged with, further increasing its visibility and authority in the eyes of Google.

Content That is Audience-Targeted Instead of Traffic-Targeted

If you’re wondering how to convert site visitors to leads, switching traffic-focused content to audience-focused content is a great way to start. Finding ways to pique their interest will attract more qualified leads and visitors who are genuinely interested in your product or service. Google’s algorithms are here to serve the most relevant results to users and reward websites that produce high-quality, user-centric content. So by focusing on the needs and interests of your target audience, you can ensure that your content will not only rank well but also provide real value to those who encounter it.

By prioritizing the experience of your target audience, you can not only improve your search engine rankings and build a more substantial, more engaged following over time. Remember, SEO is not just about winning the race to the top of the search engine results pages; it’s about providing real value to the people who matter most – your audience.

The Emphasis on Author’s Authority and Credibility

Google wants to make sure that the content that ranks is produced by real people with real audiences in mind. To elevate the authority of your creators, make sure they are experts in their field and include author bios and author pages on your website. Linking your creators’ social media accounts will also help Google understand that they are real people and experts.

Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure your content is high quality and trustworthy. This includes ensuring the content is well-researched, accurate, and up-to-date. Google’s ever-evolving algorithm is constantly seeking to reward content of real value to users. By emphasizing the expertise and authority of your content creators, you will establish trust with your audience and Google. As a result, your website’s pages will have a higher chance of ranking in the search results.

SEO Automation

SEO automation will also play a big role. Automated tools can help with tasks such as link building, keyword research, and site audits, freeing up time for marketers to focus on other important tasks. Moreover, with the help of automation, businesses can save time and resources while keeping up with the fast-paced and ever-changing world of SEO.

Automated tools perform repetitive tasks quickly and efficiently, ensuring they don’t overlook any important aspect of your SEO strategy. Furthermore, by automating some of the tedious tasks, businesses can focus on creating high-quality content that provides value to their target audience and helps them increase organic traffic. This not only helps improve rankings but also helps build trust and credibility with your target audience. And as you can see by now, that is crucial for the success of any business in today’s digital landscape.

The Rise of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a larger role in SEO we will see a significant increase in the use of AI content and content writing software. AI-powered tools can help with keyword research, content creation, and SEO optimization, making the SEO process faster and more efficient.

However, it is important to note that while AI can make certain aspects of the SEO process easier and more efficient, it can never replace the human touch. AI-generated content may be well-optimized for search engines, but it can lack the creativity, empathy, and nuance that only humans can bring. This is why it’s crucial to strike a balance between using AI tools and relying on human expertise to create and curate content that not only ranks well but also resonates with real people.

Moreover, AI-generated content should be reviewed and edited by a human editor to ensure that it meets the highest standards of quality and relevance. In the world of SEO, the key to success lies in combining the best of both worlds – the speed and efficiency of AI and the creativity, empathy, and expertise of humans. By doing so, you can create content that not only ranks well but also connects with your target audience, drives traffic, and boosts conversions.

SEO Competitor Analysis

The competitor analysis is one of the most critical SEO changes to get ready for. It’s an essential component of SEO and an important tool for businesses to stay ahead of the competition. By keeping a close eye on your competitors’ ranking, you can gain valuable insights into their SEO strategies, tactics, and techniques. In order to maximize the benefits of competitor analysis, it’s essential to use various tools and methods.

For instance, tracking your competitors’ search rankings will give you an idea of which keywords and phrases they are targeting. On the other hand, monitoring their backlinks will help you see where they are getting their links from and what content they create to attract links. Additionally, analyzing their website structure and content can help you understand what they are doing differently. This way, you’ll learn what opportunities you may have to improve your rankings. By using these methods, you can make data-driven decisions that will help you improve your SEO rankings and stay ahead of your competitors.

Helpful and Satisfying Content

Creating content that’s both search engine and user-friendly can be a challenge, but it’s crucial to stay ahead of the game. It’s important to keep in mind that the goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your website, and if that traffic doesn’t result in satisfied users, then your efforts are all for naught.

So to make sure your content meets Google’s helpfulness standards, consider the needs and interests of your target audience. Use language that’s easy to understand, provide valuable information, and make sure your content is relevant to the topic at hand. By doing so, you’ll not only satisfy Google’s requirements but also provide a better experience for your users, leading to increased engagement and conversions.

Changes to CTRs by SERP Positions

We will see changes to click-through rates (CTRs) by SERP positions. This means that businesses will need to focus more on creating high-quality content that users will find helpful and relevant if they want to achieve higher CTRs. Therefore, in order to maximize your CTRs, you need to make sure your content is top-notch. We can’t emphasize enough how providing value to your target audience is crucial.

This means conducting thorough research on what your audience is looking for and creating content that contains information that is relevant to them. You should also make sure to optimize your content is both desktop and mobile devices. Moreover, using visually appealing media such as images, videos, or infographics can also increase your CTRs. Multimedia content is always more appealing and enjoyable for the audience to consume.

Less Crawl Frequency

Google’s search bots crawl the web frequently, but not as much as they used to. This means that the search engine giant is prioritizing the pages it crawls. It’s actually giving more weight to those that are considered to be high-quality and relevant. So to get ahead of your competitors, it’s important to make sure that your pages are high quality and relevant to your target audience. In addition, you should aim to reduce the number of broken links and 404 errors on your site and implement effective site navigation. Otherwise, you might be risking a Google penalty.

The Importance of Image SEO

When it comes to SEO, people often overlook image optimization. However, it’s one of the most important factors to consider. Google has made significant improvements in the way it evaluates images. Now, it can recognize the content of images much better than before. To optimize your images for search engines, you need to use relevant file names, alt text descriptions, and meta tags. On top of that, make sure that your images are of high quality and appropriately sized.

However, it’s not just about optimizing your images for search engines. You should also consider how images can enhance the user experience on your site. High-quality images that are visually appealing and relevant to your content can keep visitors engaged and increase the amount of time they spend on your site. This, in turn, can positively impact your site’s rankings and help you achieve higher CTRs.

Businesses must take image optimization seriously and make sure they are doing everything they can to improve their visibility in the search engine results pages and attract more organic traffic to their site. By incorporating image optimization into your overall SEO strategy, you can help ensure that your site remains relevant and continues to rank well in the SERPs.

The Bottom Line

SEO is constantly evolving, and we can only expect even more changes int he future. It’s crucial for businesses to stay on top of these changes and adapt their SEO strategies accordingly. From the increased importance of EAT and user experience to the rise of AI and SEO automation, there’s a lot to keep track of. However, the common thread amongst all these changes is the importance of creating high-quality, helpful content for real audiences. Therefore, if you want to stay ahead of the competition, focus on producing content that your target audience will find useful and relevant.

And if you need help navigating the ever-changing landscape of SEO, don’t hesitate to reach out to SEO experts. Not only will they know what SEO changes to get ready for, but with their expertise and knowledge, they can help guide you in the right direction and ensure your website stays at the top of the search rankings.

The post Biggest SEO Changes To Get Ready For first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Dec 26, 2022 @ 1:44 pm

Even though keywords are essential in SEO, a business can not be successful without original content. Content is the sole reason why people search for any website. That is why we want to shift the focus today to content creation. If you learn how to create original content to improve your SEO, you will rank your website higher and gain more organic traffic and loyal customers.

Throughout this article, we will discuss original content and how to use it to boost your search engine optimization strategy. In the end, you should have all the knowledge required to put this strategy to use and help your business benefit from it.

What Is The Definition Of High-quality, Original Content?

Before creating original content to improve your SEO, you must first understand what defines original content. The essential characteristics of original content are:

• Comprehensiveness: the content needs to include all necessary elements important for its subject. It needs to be a well-rounded material that will be a unique source of truth for the user. If they don’t have to search for additional content to further understand it, you have achieved success and created something comprehensive;
• Usefulness: the content needs to be helpful to the user. One of the common mistakes is that you can create something comprehensive but present it to the wrong customer group;
• Helpfulness: the content needs to add value to the user. It needs to help them with something or solve a specific problem they have;
• It is educative: the content also needs to educate the user. The goal is to broaden their understanding of the subject and help them learn more. The more they know, the better.
• It is accurate: the content must be valid. You should never include unverified data to attract users. The originality must imply the accuracy of the information as well;

Before you begin content planning for SEO, you must do it with these characteristics in mind. If you manage to do that, your content will automatically become the best answer for the search query, which is the ultimate goal.

With that in mind, let’s see how to achieve this.

The Content Should Tell A Story

Before we get to any technical details on optimizing SEO content, let us first work on creating something original and unique. The actual value of content lies in its context and how you present it to the user. The best way to explain this is to use a story as an example.

Everyone loves stories, both kids and adults. They take you on an adventure, and that adventure depends on how the story is told. The hidden meaning or the conclusion of a story represents its context. It is a fun and engaging way to capture readers’ attention, captivate them with your ingenuity and imagination, and create a fantastic experience. That is why marketers use storytelling as a marketing tool to entice potential customers.

When creating any content, think of the best ways to present it to the users. If you are trying to sell a product based on the content you release, it will not achieve its full potential. However, suppose you focus on telling a story about your business, the vision of the company, and how it relates to your products. In that case, the content will suddenly become comprehensive and meaningful to the users.

How To Find Inspiration For Original Content?

Finding inspiration to create something original and unique is the most challenging part. For example, if you are looking for blog content for your industry, there are a couple of different strategies you can use:

• research competitors;
• research your clients and their needs;
• utilize SEO keywords;
• re-purpose content to create something new and fresh;

Research Competitors

Remember that your competitors have the same goal as you. They want to create something original and unique and present it to their clients. You can use that as a source to find motivation and inspiration. However, there is a pitfall here you should try to avoid. You should never copy their content to try and make it yours. Remember that their content is optimized for their business. It is not written for your company and does not align with your vision and company goals.

What you should try to do is to take their idea and transform it into something better. That is a very challenging approach but also a very efficient one.

Research Customers And Their Needs

Another source of inspiration is your customer. If you had to choose between researching competitors and researching customers, you should always go for the latter. Customers will tell you exactly what they need. You only need to listen and give them what they want.

Analyze overall sales, most sold products, and even customer reviews. Any customer communication will give you a potential topic to discuss and improve.

Utilize SEO Keywords

SEO keywords are phrases that customers use to find your business online. When you do your SEO keyword research, you will have a list of the essential phrases. Each of those phrases can be a subject for a piece of content.

For example, let’s say you are selling shoes. Market research shows that the current trend is quality shoes for winter weather. You already know this is what the clients will search for. Use that research to create content for your blog and attract potential buyers. You can talk about the materials you use in shoemaking, how they perform under heavy weather conditions or even write about some fun facts about shoes.

Re-purpose Content To Create Something New And Fresh

That is one of the essential skills you should have at your disposal. If you understand how to re-purpose or re-write old content, you will have an unlimited source of inspiration.

What you can do is take a popular article from your blog and:

• turn it into an infographic with valuable statistics;
• define the most impactful paragraphs and use them to create social media posts;
• invite professionals in the industry and do a podcast with a Q&A session to cover the subject of the article;
• turn your article into a video submission or a series of video submissions, optimize them for the web, and create a video playlist on YouTube;
• try to re-write the article from a different perspective, and talk about what’s changed from the first version;
• make a case study out of the article;

Many beautiful ways exist to re-purpose content and provide new things for your customers.

How To Improve Your SEO Through Original Content?

Original content on its own is essential for SEO. Google values originality, and anything that helps users solve problems automatically ranks your website higher.

However, you still must optimize content to get the most out of it. Here, we will discuss content optimization’s technical side and how it affects SEO rating.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Creating original content to improve your SEO does not mean stuffing it with too many relevant keywords. That is a common mistake that you should avoid. First, your content will lose its value and originality because keyword stuffing is evident to the users. Second, Google will recognize and take it as a bad thing, negatively affecting your SEO rating.

Use Links To Boost Your Content

Link building is an overall strategy that boosts traffic. If you want more customers on your website, you will partner with another business and ask if you can create content for them, but reference your website or business by adding a link.

If your business gains popularity, others will seek out your company to do the same for you. However, to naturally attract links, your content needs to be original. It will attract more attention based on its quality and help boost your SEO efforts. That is how you will get backlinks from authority sites.

Remove Unnecessary Content

Have you ever visited a website and gotten lost in the amount of content? If yes, could you find what you were looking for, and how much time did it take? Was your experience pleasant or not?

These are all fundamental questions to ask yourself. While exceptions exist to the rule, overcrowded websites quickly lose traffic in most cases. Content pruning is necessary for SEO because it helps your users to focus on the essential things.

That does not just mean removing entire pieces of content that do not fully satisfy the level of quality. You should also remove unnecessary elements that do not contribute to each piece individually. For example, if you write a 5000 words article but only a fifth has relevance, you have wasted time writing 4000 unnecessary words, wasting readers’ time. The same logic applies to links, keywords, images, and any element of content that does not contribute to its purpose.

That is also bad for your SEO efforts. However, if you eliminate some of it to make it more compact and impactful for the readers, it will contribute to the website and your business.

Your Content Should Contribute To Various SEO Elements

Even though content alone is a huge part of SEO, it can also impact other SEO elements. For example, you should structure content to aim for featured snippets. Furthermore, you should optimize content to fit mobile devices. We already spoke about using links to enrich your content and make it more valuable.

If you add images, you should also properly optimize image attributes and the image itself. Keep in mind that images add to the value of the content. They should be relevant and relatable. When done correctly, they will also show in image searches on Google, which is also very important.

Another thing to remember is that you can also optimize your content for voice search. That has been a prevalent strategy in the past two years. Google includes voice optimization, and you should not skip this step.

Create Original Content to Improve Your SEO By Making It Accessible

Accessible websites are the thing of the future. All customers should have the same rights and possibilities to fully enjoy the content. However, people with various disabilities cannot use the internet similarly. That is why you should optimize your content to be accessible to everyone.

First of all, you should adapt your writing style to your customers. Overcomplicated sentences and technical terminology will confuse 80% of average readers. Second, provide alt attributes to all images to help users understand the context. Furthermore, you should ensure that the color contrast is not challenging. Also, underline links and make them a different color to help people understand they are links.

There are many ways to create original content to improve your SEO and make it accessible to everyone. It is best to research this subject thoroughly, develop a checklist of best practices, and make sure you use them to improve user experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is a process that improves the quantity of unpaid website traffic.

How does SEO work?

SEO uses elements that search engines value the most and ranks the website based on its use.

What are different SEO types?

There are On-Page and Off-Page SEO.

How often should I optimize my content?

Once in three months to once in six months, depending on your time availability.

What is content marketing?

It is a form of creating and publishing content that targets various customer demographics for marketing purposes of advertising a business of products.

How can I tell if my content is valuable to the users?

Content is valuable if your website ranks high, has increased shares on social media, and attracts user attention in the form of comments.

How does content affect online users?

It increases conversions and may influence purchase decisions.

The post How to Create Original Content to Improve Your SEO? first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 19, 2022 @ 12:50 am

Someone will assert that search engine optimization (SEO) is either obsolete or ineffective at some point each year. But is it actually the case?

When you actually think about it, what’s really dead are those outdated and dishonest SEO strategies that writers still use when they’re writing content. Comment spam, weak material, and keyword stuffing are all still common practices in the online world. And they can do a lot of damage to the authority and ranking of your site.

In essence, what we have done is produced a list of SEO strategies that we have put to the test and found to be beneficial to both SEO and rankings.

Additionally, getting a WSQ SEO course and certification in Singapore is something you can do if you would like to learn more about search engine optimization (SEO).

Here’s a look!

By breaking down these SEO tactics and ways of thinking, you will not only be able to plan and implement your website and its content more effectively, but you will also be able to increase the performance of your website as a whole.

The following items create a very well-rounded search strategy and are included on the list in order to address all three areas of optimization:

• On-page SEO tactics
• Off-page SEO tactics
• Technical SEO

On-Page SEO Techniques

On-page search engine optimization, or on-page SEO, refers to the activities that can be performed for the content and pages on your website. It comprises tactics that optimize specific pages and assist search engines understand the topics and intent of the information that you have published.

If you want to attract visitors to your website, the content you provide needs to be a reliable source of information that people will find interesting and informative.

This particular form of search engine optimization will focus mostly on keyword research, content generation, and the optimization of keywords.

Off-Page SEO Techniques

Off-page SEO works to improve your site’s relationships with other websites and the impact it has over other websites. It involves utilizing a variety of different tactics in order to build the reputation and authority of your website.

The majority of off-page SEO focuses on the creation of high-quality backlinks. Your website will be seen by search engines as having information that is useful and well-established if it has a significant number of links going to it from other websites that are relevant and authoritative in their fields.

Technical SEO

Building a positive user experience is an important part of technical search engine optimization. This pertains mainly to the non-content components of your website and is largely geared toward enhancing the backend structure and basis of your online presence.

For instance, increasing the loading speed of your website or switching to HTTPS will typically result in an improved user experience and engagement rates for your site.

This makes it possible for search engines to see your website as having a high level of authority, which ultimately improves your rankings.

Now that the explanations are out of the way, let’s get started on the actual work!

Carry Out A Search Engine Optimization Audit On Your Website

An SEO audit is essentially an examination and monitoring of the overall performance of your website, followed by the establishment of new objectives and SEO tactics based on the findings of the audit.

Regularly auditing your website is essential for determining the reasons why you may not be generating enough search traffic and sales. In addition, this method can assist in increasing total site earnings by making the most of the content that is already available to you on your website.

Even if many SEO businesses already perform site auditing services, it is still best practice for you to perform the audit on your own website. This will ensure that you are always up to date with the latest information.

This helpful SEO audit checklist was released by Business2Community. It comprises all of the components that you should verify when the process is being performed.

An SEO audit may appear to be a daunting chore at first, but it is a necessary step that will assist you in comprehending and making the most of the content and structure of your website as it currently stands.

If you want your SEO audit to be successful, you need to make sure that you verify all of the variables on the list and will provide the methods and actions that are most appropriate to increase the ranking and authority of your website.

For instance, your sites might have some great ranking; if this is the case, you might want to concentrate on your on-page SEO and optimize the titles and descriptions of the content pages on your website.

Enhance The Meta Title And Description To Achieve A Higher Click-Through Rate

Another essential SEO component that you need to pay attention to is the click-through rate (also known as CTR) of your website.

Imagine that you have achieved a high ranking for a term that receives thousands of searches per month. Even though this is very good news, the traffic that you require won’t come to your website unless consumers click on your pages when they are displayed in the search results.

As a consequence of this, it is absolutely necessary for you to optimize your website in order to attract clicks from search engines. Work on your title tag and meta description to achieve this goal, as this is the most effective method.

After all, these two aspects combine to create the first impression that users get of your content when they see it on the search results page, which in turn affects your CTR.

How then can you improve the percentage of people that click through to your website from the search results on Google? Here are some helpful hints:

• Create a captivating headline by highlighting benefits or leaving a question mark in the reader’s mind.
• Include your keywords in your title and meta descriptions to get the most out of your optimization efforts.
• Make sure your lengthy meta descriptions are original and engaging by giving them a personal touch.

Gain Access to Additional Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are fantastic and absolutely ideal for any website proprietor who is trying to increase the amount of organic traffic that visits their site. The fact that snippets can be beneficial to people, as well as SEO, is the finest thing about them.

They provide users with prompt responses to the questions that they have and offer websites a fantastic chance to outrank their rivals in search results.

Examining search queries that have already produced featured snippets is one of the simplest ways to obtain a featured snippet from a search engine.

It is ideal to take ideas from what is currently successful and utilize them to improve the authority of your site and the number of clicks it receives.

Here are some considerations to make:

• The amount of space occupied by the snippet
• Excerpts from your competitors’ websites
• The formatting of the snippet
• The positioning of the paragraph from which the excerpt was taken.

To increase your chances of generating more clicks, you need to give careful consideration to each of these important aspects.

Ensure That Your Content Writing Is Always Up To Date

If you’ve been posting for more than 3 months and have posts in your archive that are older than that, you definitely have a goldmine of pieces that can be repurposed and used in other contexts.

Undoubtedly, some of your older pieces continue to pull in crazy amounts of organic traffic. Did you know that by keeping all of your content up to date, you may significantly enhance the quality of these posts?

Google gives higher rankings to websites that consistently add new information and make sure it is up to date. Improving your rankings may be accomplished in a number of ways, one of the most effective of which is to update and republish your articles with new data and statistics.

Improve The Performance Of Material That Isn’t Doing Well By Adding Backlinks

Backlinks are links that point to your website and can be very helpful in increasing the authority and ranks of your website. However, getting backlinks might be difficult at times.

Building links to your website undoubtedly has already cost you a significant amount of time and even money. The time has arrived for the most exciting portion, which is when you have to link to a few of your previous entries. These links have the potential to be quite successful, particularly when applied to some of your posts that are not performing as well as others.

Backlinking is the most effective method for guaranteeing that none of your postings link to pages that have since been deleted. Reworking old articles that aren’t performing well can help those articles acquire more traffic from organic search results.

Fill In The Blanks In Your Content

If your competitors have information on specific themes that you haven’t yet addressed in your postings, a content gap arises between your two sets of postings. However, if you aren’t paying close enough attention, content gaps may also appear on individual pages.

If you fill up the content gap on your website, it will not only help your pages rank for keywords, but it will also raise your topical relevance, which will, in turn, boost the ranking of other keywords on your site that are linked to the issue.

You are likely already aware, at this point in time, that Google is an algorithm. It is designed to analyze the material on your website and comprehend the goals you had in mind when you created that content.

And speaking about things that pertain more to your major topic is one efficient technique to boost the search engine’s confidence in the aims of your website.

Add Some Meat To The Content You Have

According to the findings of a study conducted by Backlinko, longer content frequently results in more accumulative backlinks, which in turn frequently leads to increased traffic and improved rankings.

However, not everyone has what it takes to write more than 2,000 blog pieces. In addition to being more time-consuming and labor-intensive, it is also not necessarily required in the situation. Additionally, the majority of consumers merely only a single sentence to answer their questions.

Because of this, we strongly suggest that you conduct a SERP analysis on your keyword in order to determine the average number of words contained in the content that ranks well.

After all, it is not optimal to write long-form material about a subject that ordinarily requires you to produce brief point-form content. Rather, it is preferable to write point-form content.

You should try to stay away from stuff that is lacking in depth. These are examples of content that, while having been published for some time, does not generate any traffic and does not provide any value to readers.

It’s possible that the content is poorly written, or maybe it’s just not relevant to the user’s search intent in the first place.

Redesigning and rewriting them is the plan at this point. Carry out some in-depth study on the subject, read what others have written about it, and consider how you may make it better or add more to the conversation as a whole.

Transform Unlinked References Into Hyperlinks

It is not unheard of for websites to make reference to your company as well as the goods and services that you provide without providing a link to your page.

These kinds of unconnected mentions can take place for a variety of causes. However, forgetfulness, rather than malicious intent, is the primary factor here.

In either case, it can be disheartening to see your product being utilized online without receiving the praise or attention you feel it deserves for your efforts.

Fortunately, there is a way to fix this problem:

Locate all online mentions of your company that are not linked.

Make contact with the company and make an effort to convince them to become links.

Assuming you have an effective system for establishing internal links, this should be viewed as a positive development; more so if you are successful in converting these companies into links. The authority that comes from these links will, to some extent, trickle into some of your pages as well.

You may also create your own internal link structure and search through your pages and content to locate locations where you can link your sales landing page. Similarly, you can also construct your own internal link structure.

Make Use Of Search Engine Optimization On Youtube

Videos, most frequently those sourced from YouTube, have increasingly become prevalent on the results pages of search engines. When thinking about search engines, unfortunately, the vast majority of SEOs entirely neglect YouTube.

However, given that YouTube is currently the most popular video hosting website, with over 2 billion monthly active users and over 1 billion hours of video seen every day, you should probably start thinking about implementing some sort of video marketing strategy.

It is a fact that marketing on YouTube is not appropriate for all businesses or all fields. However, considering that practically everyone these days has access to powerful video cameras, it will be to your advantage to experiment with video marketing.

The most effective strategy for investing in videos on YouTube

• Invest in video-friendly search engine optimization (SEO).
• Make your own personalized thumbnails.
• Organize your videos into playlists.

Not only will the use of these SEO strategies and tools bring you an increase in the volume of organic traffic, but they will also endear you to Google, which will result in an improvement in your ranks.

In addition, incorporating video explanations or video testimonials into your material is an excellent method to increase the “time on page” of your visitors as well as the conversion rate of your website.

The post 9 SEO Strategies That Can Be Put Into Action for Increased Organic Traffic first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Jun 4, 2024 @ 12:56 pm

When it comes to online searching, most visitors won’t go past the first page of results they find. Typically users will choose one of the top five suggestions they see when looking for products and services. We gathered the best ways to stay top of mind and on top of the search engine.

Google Page Experience Algorithm

By May of 2022, Google will roll out its new page experience algorithm. This will rank pages based on their “web vital” metrics. “Web vitals” measure responsiveness, speed, and visual stability.

Focus On User Experience

Businesses need to improve the user experience on their websites. Making sure your site is easy to ease for customers will also help increase your Google rankings and web vitals. Check your site for working links that take consumers to the correct content they are searching for. Remember the easier to use your website is, the more responsive it will be. Be sure your website is mobile-friendly as well.

Creating Quality Content

Focus on creating a solid user experience. You will want to consistently create new content and high-quality content for your platform. Be sure to update any old content on your website to keep it fresh and engaging for your users. By using headers with articles and well-labeled sections of content, you can increase your views and deliver quality content with ease.

Do Keyword Research Properly

Know your keywords well. Related words and synonyms are a good way to ensure you are using the best keywords for your website. Be sure to use keywords in your website pages URL’S as well. Try to use the most commonly searched keywords for your products. Know your customers and how best to target them online using the keywords they would most often choose.

Expertise, Authority & Trustworthiness

Utilize the EAT principle (expertise, authority and trustworthiness) when creating content for your website. You can build trust for your consumers by adding positive forums, testimonials, and good reviews for your products and services. This recognition is an essential way to gain trust and loyalty from buyers.

Start Blogging

You can also optimize your ranking by creating easy-to-read blogs with sections that have specific subtopics. Titles should also be attention-grabbing with strong words and essential keywords.

Concise Data

Using short clear snippets such as lists, tables, short paragraphs and videos are a helpful way to get views, because Google can easily display that information in searches. Adding Videos can also be a great way to express complex ideas in a user-friendly way.

SEO Currently

Finally, you can hire an SEO expert to ensure your site is optimized and has organic search engine traffic. Currently, making sure your customers find you is key.

The post Search Engine Optimization Strategies That Work first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Jan 11, 2023 @ 9:27 pm

In the present age, marketing is vastly different from how it used to be years ago. In the era before the internet, people commonly relied on word-of-mouth recommendations, and marketing was limited to billboards, television commercials, and radio jingles. However, the advent of the internet and advancements in technology have changed the face of marketing by introducing the concept of digital marketing.

Incorporating SEO tools plays a significant role in this marketing sphere because businesses need to have a substantial web presence if they want to progress. But without proper optimization of their website according to the search engine algorithms, this is impossible. So, here we will put forward the 7 best SEO tools that every digital marketing agency should have to leverage their clients’ businesses online.

However, before digging deep into the article, let’s have a basic understanding of SEO and its importance in businesses’ digital marketing strategies.

What is SEO?

SEO is the abbreviation of search engine optimization. It refers to an extensive array of techniques and practices related to optimizing a website so that it can be effortlessly discovered by search engine crawlers and rank higher on the search results page. In addition, it is used to improve a site’s SERP position and drive more traffic to it.

Thus, it plays a significant role in today’s digital marketing domain. But are you wondering how to use SEO in digital marketing?

Search engine optimization involves improving a site’s content quality by incorporating important keywords, links, proper content structure, etc. It also enhances the website’s functionality by increasing its loading speed, ensuring that it can be appropriately indexed and rendered by search engines.

Besides, SEO improves the crawlability of a site. Also, the traffic generated through SEO is called organic traffic, which is responsible for higher rankings and better conversions.

What Significance Does SEO Possess in Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing refers to marketing products and services of a business online over the internet. It is crucial to remember that SEO is not a form of marketing but a tool.

Thus, effective SEO tools for digital marketing comes in handy for several purposes, some of which are mentioned below.

1.    Improves Visibility

With proper on-page SEO techniques, any website can become more visible on search engines. Including relevant keywords, meta tags, and links enable search engine crawlers to discover the site quickly, helping it rank higher on SERPs. Thus, it improves the site’s visibility, letting users find it easily.

2.    Improves Ranking

As per studies, an estimated 75% of users do not check search engine results after the first page. Thus, it is evident how important it is to have a site ranked on the first page. Now, as SEO helps search engines discover a webpage easily, it improves the site’s positioning on the search results page, ranking it higher.

3.    Increases Traffic

When a site’s ranking and visibility increase, it naturally makes the webpage drive more traffic. This, in turn, increases the site’s engagement rate, which further improves its search results page rank. It also helps the site have a prominent place on the search engine.

4.    Enhances User Experience

The modern generation has a short attention span, particularly in the context of the internet. But they are not to be blamed as numerous sites offer the same content. So, if a site does not load within 3 seconds, the audience can quickly move to another. Thus, SEO tools like CRM make a site more responsive and improve its loading speed, consequently reducing its bounce rate.

5.    Increases Brand Awareness

As already stated, improved visibility and high ranking of a site lead to increased traffic. So, when more people start visiting the site, they become more aware of the respective brand and business. Brand awareness is crucial to any start-up company or large-scale business because most people rely on brands they are more familiar with and can easily recognize. Hence, SEO can come in handy to increase a company’s brand awareness.

Top 7 SEO Tools Essential for All Digital Marketing Agencies

There are many domains in SEO, such as keyword research, site structure, link building, and more. And all of these areas require equal emphasis and attention for a site to perform well.

Therefore, here are the 7 best SEO tools for digital marketing your marketing agency should be aware of.

1.    Keyword Research Tool

Keywords refer to some important words and phrases that online users often use while searching on the search engine.

In the initial days of the internet, keywords were the key to web success. It was all that mattered in terms of SEO, and as such, you could see sites stuffing keywords wherever possible regardless of whether they were relevant to their content or not.

However, nowadays, search engine algorithms have enhanced and are dedicated to delivering a good user experience. So, the practice of keyword stuffing has been eradicated through the advent of many other SEO techniques.

Keywords, nonetheless, form a major part of SEO implementation, and they are regarded as the pillars of an effective SEO strategy. So, using a good keyword research tool can help you discover relevant words and phrases you can incorporate into your client’s webpage content.

Apart from giving you keyword suggestions, such a tool also gives you access to the keyword’s search volume, ranking difficulty, competition data, and an overall analysis of its performance.

2.    SEMRush

Being a one-in-all platform, SEMRush is one of the best SEO tools to help your client’s site gain measurable results. In addition, it can help you improve your digital marketing strategy in all areas, be it SEO, social media marketing, advertising, email marketing, or others.

With a vast keyword database, the Keyword Analytics tool of SEMRush can give you valuable keyword insights to boost your SEO campaign. Also, you can perform a detailed analysis of the resulting keywords.

Moreover, the tool gives you access to a database of about 43 trillion accurate links and has one of the fastest backlink crawlers.

You can also acquire a storehouse of information through SEMRush’s Domain Analytics report and learn more about URLs, domains, and subdomains. It will help you analyze the competition in your client’s business niche and develop better and more effective SEO strategies.

Besides, you can also gain insight into the desktop and mobile traffic generated by the site using SEMRush. Thus, it is considered a complete tool for all your SEO needs.

3.    CRM

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a tool used for the management and assistance of customer relationships. The CRM tool can help your client’s business generate leads and transform them into potential customers.

It also helps them build links by improving and automating the entire backlinking process so that they can establish more relationships. Besides, it will help your client’s site rank high faster.

The main goal of CRM is to improve your client’s business relationship with customers and potential converts. Hence, it gives you an insight into and an in-depth analysis of their customers’ behavior, using which businesses can serve their customer needs accordingly.

CRM accumulates accurate customer information in one central location, including their needs, purchasing behavior, purchase history, etc. It can thus allow your client to track customer data and put more emphasis on their customers.

CRM also automates repetitive tasks, streamlining your client company’s workflow and speeding up their sales. Thus, the tool is increasingly used by businesses of all types and sizes to accelerate their success in the digital era.

4.    White Label SEO Tool

White label SEO tool refers to a re-brandable SEO tool that your digital marketing agency can obtain from a provider and use as your own.

White label SEO has become a common practice in the current digital marketing industry because companies seldom have the time or resources to develop an efficient SEO tool from scratch. So, this tool can help your agency gain access to advanced tools, which can further be used for analyzing your client’s sites, or you can even resell them. In addition, it is more cost-effective than having an in-house team that will have to develop everything independently.

The tool also allows you to meet an increase in demand without hassles and broaden your SEO services. Thus, with this tool, you can make your client learn how to use SEO in digital marketing and help improve their online performance.

5.    SEO Audit Tool

Just as humans need to go to the doctor for regular health check-ups to ensure they are doing well, similarly, a website also needs to undergo a health check once in a while, which is referred to as an SEO audit.

Gaining an insight into the performance of the existing SEO framework of your client’s website is crucial as it will help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current SEO strategy. In addition, using an SEO audit tool will help you maintain their website and improve its loading speed. As a result, your client’s website can deliver a better user experience, and because this is what search engines are rooting for, they will also enhance the site’s visibility.

From keyword analysis to backlink analysis and competitor analysis to improving usability, an SEO audit tool can come in handy for various purposes. It also takes care of your client’s site structure and ensures that search engine crawlers can easily crawl the site while rendering and indexing it.

Apart from the technical areas, the audit tool can also help you enhance your client’s web content by making you aware of missing headers, keywords, meta descriptions, etc.

6.    Backlink Analysis Tool

Backlink analysis refers to evaluating the quality and volume of links your client’s website has gained from other sites. This analysis helps you determine the impact these links can have on your client’s site and what strategies you can implement to enhance their backlink profile.

Thus, it is one of the most important SEO tools for digital marketing, and using it can help you create content that has the potential to attract high-authority websites so that they can link to your client’s site.

You can also use the tool to evaluate your client’s backlinks and their competitor’s backlinks to find more link-building opportunities for them.

A backlink analysis tool can give you access to a storehouse of anchors, referral pages, and domains to help you determine which sources are reliable and can be beneficial for your client website’s link-building strategy. It can also give you access to pages that attract links the most.

7.    SEO Monitoring Tool

You may be dedicating a lot of time and effort to building the SEO strategy, but you also need to check if these strategies are worthy of that time and effort or not. And for doing so, using an SEO monitoring tool is a must.

SEO monitoring refers to checking your client’s site ranking on the search engine results page and identifying techniques to improve the same. Hence, the respective tool will help you determine how well your client’s website performs in keyword rankings, page speed, conversion rates, bounce rates, organic traffic, and other parameters.

Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, and many websites existing on the internet make the competition more challenging. Hence, ranking high is not an easy task.

SEO monitoring tools will thus alert you about the areas of your client’s site and SEO strategy that require improvement. And when you apply more effective SEO strategies, their site’s performance will improve, resulting in positive consequences for your client’s online business.

Key Takeaways

SEO is a broad concept. It involves several components and the use of various tools. In today’s age of digital dominance, it has become widely prevalent, with almost all businesses incorporating its use.

SEO has become an integral component of digital marketing. Hence, using the right tools to facilitate an effective digital marketing strategy for a business is highly crucial.

• A keyword research tool is essential for finding the right keywords.
• SEMRush can give you holistic SEO assistance.
• CRM helps you improve link building and establish better customer relationships for your client’s business.
• A white label SEO tool is a cost-effective approach for your agency.
• The SEO audit tool determines the efficiency of your SEO strategy.
• The backlink analysis tool identifies the backlink quality.
• The SEO monitoring tool helps in maintaining your client’s site properly.

Thus, to ensure that the client’s website performs well and their online business has a significant web presence, any digital marketing agency must use the right SEO tools.

The post 7 Best SEO Tools Every Marketing Agency Should Have first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 24, 2022 @ 6:18 pm

The Skyscraper Technique has been around in the SEO world for quite a while.

It was coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko and it became popular among SEO practitioners.

Why so successful?

The answer to that question is this guide. We’ll explain what the Skyscraper Technique is, how it works and the results it can bring to your content creation efforts.

And to your link building, too.

(And we’ll also make a note on how to use the Skyscraper Technique ethically.)

Read on!

What is the Skyscraper Technique?

The Skyscraper Technique takes its name from the magnificence of tall skyscrapers, and from the fact that an existing building can always get overtaken by a higher skyscraper.

Not only higher, but a better quality skyscraper, you want to hope!

The Skyscraper Technique work in the exact same way — it’s about building better, more useful content than your competitors, and letting readers decide which one they like best.

(Most probably yours, since it’s outstanding!)

In Brian Dean’s words:

“Have you ever walked by a really tall building and said to yourself: “Wow, that’s amazing! I wonder how big the 8th tallest building in the world is.” Of course not. It’s human nature to be attracted to the best. And what you’re doing here is finding the tallest “skyscraper” in your space…and slapping 20 stories to the top of it.”

The technique in a nutshell

1. Browse the SERPs for your target keywords and note down the top 10
2. Find the backlinks for these results (using tools like Monitor Backlinks’ Link Checker or Buzzsumo)
3. Choose the ones with the highest number of backlinks and read them start to finish, noting down what they’re doing good and the common topics they talk about
4. Create content on the same topic as your competitor, but make it 10X better (not necessarily longer, even though a Semrush study found that long form articles get top results in terms of performance and traffic)
5. Promote that newly created content and pitch it even to the people who are linking to your competitor’s content.

This is where things can get unethical…

Building your content on the same topic as another person’s is not the problem. It happens every time in book and scientific publishing: it’s competition, which you study, of course.

The problem happens when you approach people who are linking to your competitor and ask them to replace their link with yours. That’s where things get nasty.

Keep the practice ethical by suggesting your link as additional value to that page, not as a replacement. Your goal is to ethically compete with your competitor, not to destroy them.

Now let’s see how to go through those 5 steps we listed above.

1. Finding High Quality Competitor Pages with a Lot of Backlinks

Your goal is to build upon the best available content in the SERPs and create something better that users (and search engines) will love.

Now, there are several ways to do that. Let’s list a few.

Google SERPs

This is the most important method: to make a list of content pieces appearing in the top 10 of Google SERPs.

In fact, because links play a critical role in Google’s algorithms, you can be fairly sure that these pieces have at least a few quality backlinks.

Collect these links in a spreadsheet. You will analyze them in the next step.

Competitor Backlinks

Analyze your competitor’s content and check backlinks for the best pieces.

You can use a backlink tracker for this scope.

Below is an example:

Some pretty good backlinks in the mix, right? Like that quoted statistics from Adjust.com.

You will analyze competitor pages that got great backlinks like that in the next step. For now, just collect the URLs.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a good tool to find topics that people want to read — they’re the ones with the most shares and backlinks!

In the example below, for the topic “SEO copywriting”, we found some good pages that got at least a few backlinks and a lot of Facebook and Twitter shares:

Give this method a try and collect the best pages for the next step.

Ubersuggest

You can also use Ubersuggest to find top linked competitors for a target keyword.

Look at the example screenshot below:

When you look up a keyword or key phrase in Ubersuggest, you’ll be shown a number of sections in Keyword Overview, that includes Content Ideas.

In the Content Ideas section you can find a list of suggested content you can get inspiration from for your article, and each piece comes with the number of backlinks.

You can see immediately which content has the most backlinks.

Alternatively, you can click on Content Ideas on the left sidebar under Keyword Analyzer and get many more content… with all the backlinks!

It becomes easy to see who’s your competitor here, and what they are doing well, so that you can replicate their success and build upon it.

Forums

Forums are another great tool for going topic hunting.

Give Quora, Reddit, and Stack Exchange a try.

Once you have your topic ready, search it in Google and focus on the top 10 results in the SERPs: those are the ones you want to outrank!

2. Analyze Top Performing Competitor Pages

No matter what method from the previous section you used, nor if you used a combination of them, now that you have your list of competitor content handy, time has come to analyze them one by one.

• Start with the best page (i.e. ranks #1 in Google or has the most backlinks)
• Read the page beginning to end and note down the topics and angles it covers (leave out original findings if you can’t cite and link back to your competitor’s work)
• Proceed to the other pages and do the same work until you reach the end of your list. Also, note down common topics between the pieces you read
• Create an article outline using the topics you found in your analysis and note down where you could expand and build upon — you will use this outline later when you work on your Skyscraper content.

That’s a lot of work, we know, but analyzing top performing competitor content is critical to creating your 10x content.

3. How to Make a Piece of Content 10x Better with the Skyscraper Technique

As you have done in the previous section, creating awesome Skyscraper content involves studying your competition to see what’s doing well and replicate that.

But at the same time, you add more value and new sections with ideas or interviews that are unique to you.

Let’s see what areas you can add your “touch” to.

Headline

Start with your headline. You want it to be magnetic!

Get into your ideal reader’s mind: what type of language and approach would attract their attention?

A word of advice: refrain from copying your competitor’s headline. You want your content to be unique! Make your personality shine starting from the headline.

Length

You can make your content longer, but the smart way — not by filling it with fluff, but by adding a lot of value.

As an example, you might add extra hacks. Or more tools. Or more data.

The end result should be a compelling read that readers feel like it’s a go-to gem in the niche or industry.

Freshness

You also want to make sure your content is up to date.

Maybe the competitor content you analyzed dates back 2015 and it hasn’t been updated since.

You can do much better!

Scour the web and libraries for the latest research articles and statistics in your industry and build your content upon the new findings.

Readers will feel they can trust you because you bring current facts to the table.

Visuals

Also, make sure to add images and screenshots.

Not many websites do that, often they only have one or two images, if they have any at all! You want to be a champion of visuals!

Just remember to add descriptive alt text to make these visuals accessible even by visually impaired people.

Examples and Tutorials

Finally, make sure every section in your content comes with practical examples and guided tours so readers don’t have to guess what they should do to apply your advice — be a great not just a good teacher!

4. Promoting Content Created with the Skyscraper Technique

The hard part is promoting the content using as many channels as possible.

You have to get as many eyes on your content as you can reach, and email website owners who are likely to link to it.

Like resourceful or curated blog posts and resource pages.

Make a list of people who might potentially be interested in linking back to your content.

Find link prospects among:

• People who already link to your competitors
• Bloggers in your niche (search “niche + blog” in Google)
• Resource page and resource articles
• Broken link building

Finally, reach out.

Below is an email template you can use for your pitches:

Hey NAME!

I stumbled upon your fantastic article/resource page/roundup while searching for NICHE TOPIC.

Can’t believe how many of those resources I did not know! I learned so much from your piece.

You know, I have recently published a resource on the same topic, specifically on YOUR TOPIC/ANGLE HERE. Would you like to take a look?

This is the URL:

I’m open to feedback!

Also, if you happen to like it, would you consider adding it to your list of resources? Maybe my text can give your readers some more data to work on.

Let me know what you think. I’m all ears.

Cheers,
YOURNAME

Remember to always tell your link prospects why you’re reaching out but avoid telling them to replace a competitor’s link that they find helpful.

Not only this is unethical, it’s also upsetting to the link prospect who will see their own decision on what to link and what not questioned.

Always be kind to your prospects, and never pushy.

5. Monitoring Your Backlinks

You can use a backlink tracker like Monitor Backlinks or Linkody to track your backlinks. It’s also useful to setup a Google Alert for your content.

But don’t look for overnight success.

Mind what Neil Patel says about branding: until your brand takes off and gets recognition, it’s harder to build backlinks.

It’s certainly harder to build links for an SEO guide on a small blog, even if the quality is high, than one on Brian Dean’s blog.

10x content is great, but if searcher satisfaction happens at 1x, you won't beat the big brand who commands the first click.

— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) December 20, 2016

Why Is the Skyscraper Technique So Effective?

Mostly because Google swears by its three ranking factors:

• Content
• Links
• Rankbrain

With the Skyscraper Technique you create awesome content, right? Check!

And awesome content easily attracts backlinks, you know? Yes, so — check!

That means that the Skyscraper Technique allows you to create great content that Rankbrain will read and understand (for search intent) and that people are more likely to link to because its quality is high (the go-to resource in the niche).

See? You caught three birds with one stone.

What If You Don’t Want to Build Links?

Brian Dean created the Skyscraper Technique as a method to acquire backlinks, but you can also use it to just create top quality content that will naturally rank better in Google.

Just remember to always play it smart with your keyword strategy and search intent which are essential to rank well.

Conclusions on the Skyscraper Technique

Whether you use the Skyscraper Technique to acquire links or just to come up with great content, this is a great method to increase the quality of your website.

Epic content always gets rewarded, both in the SERPs and among users, who are more likely to share it and link to it.

Over to you: Have you ever tried the Skyscraper Technique? If yes, how did it go?

Share your experiences in the comments below.

The post Skyscraper Technique: What It Is and How to Use This SEO Goldmine first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 24, 2022 @ 6:20 pm

Resource page link building is the second most popular link building tactic (Moz, 2016) and for good reason: it’s easy, fast and with high rates of success.

So, if you’ve been considering this tactic for your link building campaigns, you can go ahead and be sure you made a good decision.

Not sure how to implement it, though? Fear not, you chose the right article to help you through the steps.

Let’s begin with the basics.

What Is Resource Page Link Building?

Resource page link building is the practice of obtaining links from curated lists of online resources on websites in the same or a related niche.

Contrary to other link building techniques, where the marketer has to convince the webmaster to link back, resource page link building comes with the added benefit that website owners often encourage suggestions of new resources from readers. That makes it extremely easy for link builders to send a totally legitimate link request.

Below is an example:

Other times, when there’s no sign of direct encouragement from the webmaster, a persuasive email pitch will still do the job.

All in all, with this link building technique being so easy, it can be implemented even by complete beginners, as long as you have good link-worthy content to share with webmasters.

What Kind of Content Works Best With Resource Page Link Building

Because you’re going to have to convince the webmaster that your content is one of the best resources out there on a given topic, your content should be long-form and comprehensive — created, for example, with the Skyscraper technique.

In other words, link-worthy content — your very own version of a Wikipedia page.

Ask yourself these questions about your content:

• Is it a go-to resource that displays authority and trust?
• Does it contain expert insight?
• Does it contain original research and/or data?
• Is it useful enough for someone to want to link to it?

For example, if you compiled a collection of commented marketing statistics, that might be link-worthy content that you can pitch.

The same applies if you have interviewed experts (e.g. doctors, psychologists, marketers, CEOs, etc.) and you created a long-form resource filled with helpful insight from these great people.

Resource Page Link Building Techniques (The Guide)

1. How to Find a Resource Page

This is the easiest step in the process, for all you need is your web browser.

To start, load Google search engine and use any of these search strings:

niche + “resource page”
niche + “helpful resources”
niche + “resources”
niche + “links”

These searches will return only pages that list resources in your niche or industry.

See the example screenshot below for the search terms “breastfeeding resource page”, returning 16+ million results:

You can also use intitle:, inurl: and site: operators to further refine your search. For example:

php programming intitle:resources
gardening + inurl:links
robotics blog + site:.edu

When you want to add more specific search terms, a lot depends on your niche. For example, if you have a recipe blog, you may look for something like:

links intitle:best recipe sites
links intitle:cooking resources

By simply searching Google for smart search terms, you will retrieve tons of pages — including roundup blog posts and posts containing short sections with “helpful resources” or “further reading” — that you can pitch later for your resource page link building campaign.

2. Resource Page Quality

You can assess resource pages by metrics (using online checkers for Moz and Majestic metrics, for example) or by manual review.

Some helpful metrics (and why):

• Moz’s DA (Domain Authority): Moz’s domain-level score is an estimate of how well ranked a website is in Google and it’s been designed as a comparative tool (with competitors). The score range is 1-100.
• Moz’s PA (Page Authority): like DA, but at page level.
• Ahrefs’ DR (Domain Rating): like DA, it’s a score that covers the whole domain’s backlink profile (not only one page) and measures its strength on a 1-100 scale. The higher the rating, the better.
• Ahrefs’ UR (URL Rating): like DR, but at a page(URL level.
• Majestic’s TF (Trust Flow): this metric from Majestic, on a 0-100 scale, tells you something about the quality of the backlinks of a given site. TF is higher when a site got more backlinks from trusted “seeds” (authoritative websites).
• Majestic’s CF (Citation Flow): a 0-100 score by Majestic, it measures the “link power” of a website (how many sites link to it).

Your manual review should include:

• Relevancy Assessment: is this page relevant to your niche? Will your link add value?
• Update Frequency & Broken Links: how often is the site updated? If the site is rarely updated, so might be this page, which might accumulate broken links and be seen poorly by search engines. Use Dead Link Checker to find broken links on the page
• Links On the Page: are they quality links? Are they followed or nofollowed? Do they look spammy? You will want to avoid a resource page filled with spam links. Also, you may want to think twice if the page only lists links with a nofollow rel attribute, because Google treats these links as “hints” and it’s not certain that they’ll follow them.

Now that you have assessed the resource page and its main domain, create a spreadsheet where you collect all this information.

See the example below:

For this example, we created a spreadsheet with 10 columns that include some metrics and manual review parameters:

• Page URL
• Page Title
• Page Authority (PA)
• URL Rating (UR)
• Domain Authority (DA)
• Domain Rating (DR)
• Relevancy
• Update Frequency
• Broken Links
• Link Type (Follow/Nofollow)

Feel free to use this example as a template for your resource page link building spreadsheet. Naturally, you can add more metrics and parameters as you see fit.

3. The Pitch

When you request a resource page link, make sure that you mention having read about the request for new resources if the website owner placed one, or kindly suggest your page as a helpful addition to the list.

Stay relevant! Don’t pitch a C programming course to a plumbing page! Links don’t all have the same value and you will end up looking spammy.

Don’t forget to send your pitch to the right person — even if there’s only a contact form and no personal email, address the person by name.

Also, be personable and friendly: you want to inspire trust, not sound salesy and pushy.

Below is an example pitch (that you can use as a template):

Dear (NAME),

Today I was searching for interesting pages on (TOPIC/NICHE) and I stumbled upon your resource page.

What a nice collection of websites! I’ve been browsing a few, I really like (PICK ONE).

The good news is that I also wrote about (TOPIC/NICHE) and I’ve been called an expert for it. Would you like to give it a read?

It would be cool to see it appear in your list, but naturally that’s up to you.

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,

(YOUR NAME)

If you deem it applicable, you can suggest an area where you would like the link to appear: that will make things easier for the webmaster. However, offer it only as a suggestion, since the final placement is up to the webmaster’s editorial decision.

4. What to Avoid

Some website owners only link to their own content in their resource pages, so if you pitch them, 99.99% of the time the answer will be a “no”.

Don’t waste your time! Only consider pages that link out to other sites.

Also, you’ll want to avoid websites that only link to highly authoritative sites (i.e. sites from doctors and the government if you’re in the medical niche) because they’re unlikely to add your link to their page.

Last but not least, only pitch websites in your niche or that promote your niche, because links are not all the same and Google will penalize both your site and the webmaster’s for unnatural (irrelevant) links.

The point is — focus your energy on achievable goals and you will up your chances to score a high quality backlink.

5. Bonus Tip: Look for Broken Links On the Resource Page

Did you know that you can be extra helpful to the website owner — and further up your chances to get a backlink?

You can find broken links on the resource page you’re hoping to get a link from and let the webmaster know about it. (They’ll thank you for pointing them out!)

Here’s how:

• Use the LinkMiner Chrome extension or the previously mentioned Dead Link Checker tool to find broken links on your target resource page
• Add a line or a “P.S.” to your pitch about any broken links you’ve found, such as: “P.S. Hey! As I ran through the listed resources I noticed that the links to ABC and DEF are broken. Thought you might want to know.”

You could even suggest your page as a replacement for one of the broken links. In that case, make sure you stress the fact that your content is of the same quality (or higher) and about the same topic as the dead page.

Conclusion: Resource Page Link Building Is Worth the Effort

As you can see, resource page link building is not only easier than many other types of link building tactics, it’s also helpful to webmasters because it adds value to their sites.

And if the webmaster really enjoys your content, that could lead to interesting relationships among content creators (further collaboration or a partnership).

What really matters is that you run a manual review — as well as a metrics review — for each resource page to assess its quality, because the last thing you want is a backlink from a low quality, spammy page that will get you penalized.

We hope that our guide can help you get started and a run a successful link building campaign.

Here’s to your success!

The post The Ultimate Guide to Resource Page Link Building first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Jun 14, 2021 @ 11:07 am

You might be hearing a lot about schema markup, microdata, and structured data. However, many of us have no idea about what it is and how to use it.

Let me tell you this: Schema Markup is one of the latest evolutions in SEO and is the most potent but least-utilized form of SEO among marketers despite its considerable benefits.

According to a study by Bing and Catalyst, merely 17% of marketers use Schema.org markup.

It’s becoming increasingly important in the age of voice search and acts as a signpost that leads digital assistants towards the information that correctly answers the user’s voice query. In addition to this, it can also help in boosting your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Let me help you understand a basic question that might be bothering you when you read the headline.

What is Schema Markup?

Schema markup is a form of microdata that can be added to your webpage to create an enhanced description (also known as a rich snippet) that appears in the search result.

It’s crucial in the age of Hummingbird and RankBrain to determine the context of a query. In 2011, top search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, and Google collaborated to create Schema.org.

In a nutshell: Schema markup is a code that you put on your website to enable search engines to give more informative results for your users. The schema markup tells the SERP to display the desired information.

I am sure you might be wanting to know something more about schema markup.

Let’s dive deeper.

FACT#1: Schema conveys to the search engine what your data truly means.

Every content on your website gets indexed and returned in search results. Once you use the scheme markup, some of the content gets indexed and returned differently.

How does this happen?

Schema markup tells the search engine what the content actually means.

For example: If the word ‘Hemal Bhatt appears in an article, then the search engine will produce a SERP entry with Hemal Bhatt.

When you place the right scheme around the word ‘Hemal Bhatt,’ you’ve told the search engine that Hemal Bhatt is the author of the article and asks the search engine to display better information for the user searching for Hemal Bhatt.

FACT#2: Schema markup utilizes unique semantic vocabulary in microdata format.

All you need to do is add bits of schema.org vocabulary to your HTML Microdata. Schema is an inter-industry collaboration where you need to agree upon a set of code markers that tell you what to do with your website’s data.

FACT#3: Schema markup was invented for users.

A website with schema markup allows users to see everything about a website in the SERPs. You can even call it a ‘virtual business card.’

Schema markup helps users get the information they need.

Why is Schema Markup Important?

Schema markup helps to rank your website better for all types of content. You can get data markup for the following:

• Local Businesses
• Events
• People
• Recipes
• Products
• Videos
• Reviews
• TV episodes and ratings
• Restaurants
• Software applications
• Movies

For movies, rich snippets come in varying sizes, depending on the website.

For instance: A major website like IMDb has a small amount of information listed in their rich snippet, displaying the movie’s rating.

While another website like Rotten Tomatoes, the rich snippet is much bigger and shows the rating, genre, runtime, etc.

It doesn’t just happen because Google decides to show you more or less information.

Everything depends on the Schema markup that has been added to the page. Adding schema to your site will allow search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. to help your users understand your context.

Schema markup exists because search engines want to provide more avenues to supply desired information about your content on your website pages.

It powers rich snippets that have higher click-through-rates than regular search results. This means more traffic to your website.

The function of the markup is to help search engines understand your content better.

 This one is a fantastic example by Ahrefs about what *Google’s Knowledge Graph looks like.

*Google’s Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base of entities and the relationships between them.

Here, all the edges that are connecting the nodes represent real schema markup properties.

By looking at the above google knowledge graph, you can tell that schema markup aims to provide easy-to-read information about your company, products, services, content, and likewise.

Listen up:

• Google helps you to understand things better than plain text.
• Users are likely to get more relevant search results.
• Marketers get rich snippets and can become an entity in the knowledge graph.

Getting included in the knowledge graph offers excellent branding opportunities in the SERP. You get a knowledge panel whenever people search for you, and your brand name appears as a relevant solution for non-branded queries.

Thinking about the bigger picture, schema markup is an essential part of structured data that enables semantic web and search.

It also allows URLs to convey the actual meaning of your content to Googlebot.

 I firmly believe that schema is essential for SEO as it:

• Provides you with a distinct set of data.
• Matches with your search query or intent.
• Increases user experience on search engines.
• Improves search engine optimization practices of UX.
• Enhances your ranking factor.

Let me give you 3 reasons why schema markup is important for SEO:

1. It offers extensive rich snippets.
2. It drives organic click-through rates.
3. It boosts your website SEO.

As said above, schema markup provides rich snippets for articles, movies, products, events, and many more.

In addition to this, there are hundreds of other data markup types for different genres. You can get many like these from entertainment to medical schedules. As a matter of fact, any type of data on your website can have an ‘itemtype’ and ‘itemscope’.

Let me give you a concrete example from Schema.org.

If you have a page about the Hollywood movie ‘Avatar’. Your website links the movie tailor and provides all information about the director, cast, run time, reviews, etc.

In this case, your HTML code should look like this:

If you want to get details ‘about’ the movie, add the itemscope element to the HTML tag that encloses the item’s information.

Adding an itemscope means you’re specifying that the HTML displayed in the <div>…</div> block is about a particular item.

If you want to specify the type of item using the ‘itemtype’ attribute, then the markup specifies that the thing is a movie as defined in the Schema.org type hierarchy.

I will continue explaining the 3 common ways schema is useful for SEO.

• It offers extensive rich snippets.

Schema markup will make your web page look better in SERPs since it enhances the rich snippets displayed under your content’s page title.

The first result contains all the information the user is searching for. It shows that the rich snippet looks way better than the second one, which has the metadata that Google chooses.

Which one would you choose?

Obviously, the first one as it consists of an extensive rich snippet.

A structured data markup allows you to display the exact information you need your users to see on your web pages’ snippet.

• It drives organic click-through rates.

An extensive rich snippet that’s well-presented in search engine result pages will garner the highest organic click-through rates.

In the above example, the first snippet is classified as an extensive rich snippet resulting from a structured data markup on a specific web page.

It can also provide an indirect SEO benefit because it makes your web pages indexable easily by offering targeted metadata that’s accurate than only keywords.

Other significant ranking factors include SEO behavioral data like time on site, bounce rate, click-through rate, etc.

• It boosts your website SEO

Schema markup is an indirect ranking factor but is one of the powerful SEO practices that can help rank your website at the top of the search engine results pages.

A structured data markup can aid in:

• Enhancing your rich snippets
• Driving higher click-through rates
• Allowing search engines to understand your web page content
• Making your website more indexable than other websites without schema markup

Experts have also claimed that web pages with a structured data markup can rank up to four positions higher than those that do not utilize a data markup. Thus, we can say that investing your effort in schema markup can improve your SEO. Try it!

To round it off

SEO and schema markup are a huge world in itself. Use schema to make your website trustworthy and give it a sense of authority on search engines.

Make the most of the common schema types that suit your business niche and give you richer results.

The post Schema Tags in SEO: Understanding the What and Why! first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 12:23 pm

One of the easiest ways to get your website noticed when Google first released its search engine was to do keyword stuffing.

You didn’t need to do anything fancy with your content. All you had to do was add some keywords at the end of each post or page and repeat them multiple times to rise to the top.

As Google’s algorithms got better at recognizing this tactic, content writers started repeating keywords within the body of each page or post instead.

SEO traditionalists still use that method, although the value-based search algorithms don’t reward that writing style.

Mentioning keywords within your content is a crucial way to start building an audience. The difference between then and now is that the targeted words and phrases must appear natural, as if written for regular conversation instead of bot-targeted material.

What Is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing involves the constant repetition of the same terms throughout each sentence or paragraph. It is an intentional process that tries to use terminology recognition to gain a better rank on Google.

Here’s an example of this process to review.

“Keyword stuffing is a way to stuff keywords into each sentence to incorporate keyword stuffing as an SEO strategy. When you start keyword stuffing, you’ll see specific keyword stuffing outcomes that can help your brand to grow.”

Google calls content like this “irrelevant.” Your website visitors would likely feel the same way.

If the search engine thinks your content has no value, it won’t receive the higher ranking you want. That means you have less, not more of a chance to get found.

Current High-Quality Content Will Always Be King

Although the “content is king” phrase is overused today, the statement has truth to consider when looking at the topic of keyword stuffing.

If you keep saying the same things repetitively, how much value does that reader get from your content?

Does a book feel more engaging if the characters keep going through the same situation? If you watch a movie, how enjoyable would it be if the characters kept fighting the same battles?

We don’t like repetition when we see it. That’s why keyword stuffing has always been a terrible strategy, even when it worked as a way to get found.

The only way to be successful in today’s SEO environment is to write naturally. These tips can help you achieve that goal.

Tip #1: Avoid Using Grammatically-Incorrect Phrases

This problem frequently appears when someone searches for a specific product, service, or issue within a particular city or region. Many of the phrases that reach the top of the search list follow the same pattern: [topic] + [location].

If you were looking for a new grill to add to your backyard, you might tell Google to search for “Pellet Grills Los Angeles.”

How grammatically-correct is that phrase?

It’s not. Even if you separate the topic from the location, proper grammar requires you to add a comma to the keyword, eliminating the benefit of its inclusion.

You could say, “If you are looking for pellet grills, Los Angeles has numerous stores to offer.”

Some content writers eliminate the comma to get the keyword. Once you do that, you reduce the value of the page or post.

That means neither option is suitable for your SEO needs.

What can you do to change this situation? You add the stop words to the phrase to make it grammatically correct because search engines ignore them.

Your exact keyword could be any of the following and still potentially rank for “pellet grills Los Angeles.”

–          Pellet grills in Los Angeles

–          Pellet grills for Los Angeles

–          Pellet grills at Los Angeles

You cannot add more value terms to the keyword because that changes what you’re trying to say.

“Pellet grills for sale in Los Angeles” is different from “Pellet grills in Los Angeles” because the first option indicates you’re a customer. The second option communicates to Google that you’re performing research.

Tip #2: Assign Primary Keywords to Each Post or Page

Think of your primary keyword as a thesis statement. What content can you build around that word or phrase to add value to your website?

For most websites, the assigned primary keyword should be a phrase that reflects the overall goal of the content.

If you wanted to talk about gardening, your assigned keyword might be “Spring Garden Planting.”

Anything that involves activities reflecting the assigned keyword would add more value to the material.

One of the best ways to find keywords for your content is to use a product like Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool. You can enter terms or topics from your industry or brand, add filters to find close matches, and develop a list from that material to target.

The assigned keywords should rank high for popularity and low for competition to significantly impact your content.

Tip #3: Embrace Synonyms and Long-Tail Keywords

Once you start repeating the same word in a sentence or paragraph, Google’s algorithms may pick out your uploaded content for keyword stuffing.

This issue doesn’t need to be intentional to be problematic. Many writers use the same terms to describe a specific outcome to their readers without realizing what they are doing.

Almost any noun can become repetitive while being grammatically correct, even if it is redundant.

The most famous example is this: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

This sentence indicates that buffalo (the animal) intimidate others from Buffalo’s city, even though they are also bothered by themselves if they come from the same place.

Something less extreme might look something like this: “You can’t do keyword stuffing with words like because because because won’t make the sentence readable.”

Some common words and phrases that get used in the same sentence of a paragraph frequently are “specific,” “wanted,” and “sales.”

If you try to edit your content manually, these terms may not stick out as being incorrect. Even professional editors miss redundancy issues.

That’s why a tool like Grammarly is worth using. It can find your repetitive words and phrases, highlight them for review, and offer alternatives that add more definition to your work.

Instead of saying “specific” a second time, you can try the word “particular.”

You can take the same approach to your keywords. Instead of focusing on a specific word, use phrases that can help to convey the same information.

Tip #4: Make Your Content More Informative

One of the most popular ways to communicate value to people and algorithms is to create long-form content. When you have a page or post that goes beyond 1,500 words, more clicks can start coming your way.

If your content reaches 3,000 words or more, you’re in the sweet spot for the SEO marketing effort.

Here’s the problem: if your content is boring, 3,000 words of dull information is still worthless.

It helps to go beyond the first click-based metrics to look at how people interact with your content. Is your bounce rate high, indicating that people visit and leave almost immediately?

Do you have a long average stay time because people are reading your content in its entirety?

If you want to avoid keyword stuffing, the best way to approach your content is to make it more informative. The following methods can help you achieve more success in this area.

–          Add variety to your content. Break up your writing to have bullet points, number lists, and other visually unique items. Reading large content blocks is challenging, even for graduate-level visitors. Try including some original videos and images to continue with that momentum.

–          Keep things casual. Unless you’re writing a formal research paper, the content’s tone should have a personal feeling to it. Each page or post is an opportunity to build relationships with your potential customers. If you can make connections, you will create more loyalty.

–          Tell stories. It helps to give people practical examples of what you’re discussing while using a storytelling narrative. When people see the connections you draw from start to finish, the value-based outcomes can generate without any keyword stuffing.

–          Offer a surprise. When you do something unusual with your content, the structure creates a “hook” that keeps the reader going. Curiosity drives excitement! Please remember to keep whatever you start with this tip in line with your brand messaging to make it useful.

–          Have actionable content. How can someone make their life better after reading your page or post? When you can outline specific actions for people to take, the achievable outcomes reflect the content’s advice.

Tip #5: Review Your Work with SEO Tools

Keyword stuffing doesn’t have a chance to exist when you are using today’s best SEO tools. You can review your work, upgrade your content, or shift items to your optimization strategy using several low- or no-cost methods.

Google uses artificial intelligence with its current algorithms to find and remove poorly created and low-value pages from search results.

By emphasizing SEO tools, you can examine your pages and posts from every conceivable angle. Several excellent choices are available today to help you improve the optimization process.

–          SpyFu. This tool provides in-depth features, digital marketing support, and exceptional reporting. Although it is somewhat complicated if you’re first starting the SEO journey, it has about everything you need to accomplish your metrics and goals.

–          SEMrush. You’ll receive a simplified process with this tool, making it a little easier for small business owners to achieve some SEO benefits without resorting to alternative tactics of luck to get results.

–          Moz. Suppose you want to learn more about keyword stuffing, local optimization, and content best practices. In that case, this tool provides a plethora of resources you can access on free and premium levels.

–          KWFinder (Mangools). When you need a keyword research tool, this option does an excellent job of finding alternatives without being overly expensive.

These tools provide an advantage that human eyes don’t offer. They can analyze your pages and posts at the deepest levels to predict how well each one performs.

You can also use Yext or one of its alternatives to provide the local citations needed to enhance the value your site offers.

As you get to know your customer base better, your keyword targets will improve. Your content will begin providing more value, and that means your brand will get stronger.

Tip #6: Quality is Always Better Than Quantity

Writing high-quality content involves more than sitting down in front of Microsoft Word with an idea and a keyboard.

You must have a plan to implement if your goal is to compose valuable content for people to read.

How does Google define value in the quality vs. quantity debate? That answer is not entirely known, but we do understand that the search engine giant wants to answer questions with speed and accuracy.

If you can identify the questions potential customers would ask while searching for your business, you can plan pages or posts that address those concerns.

Adding techniques like authority stacking can enhance those efforts.

It can be challenging to know where to start with this step, so it may help to keep these processes in mind as you get to work.

–          Keep track of social media. Watch your social media platforms for mentions. You can also follow cues, trends, and industry topics to see how people interact. These online conversations can become the foundation for your next idea.

–          Understand your customer’s needs. There is no way to offer a value proposition if you don’t understand what consumers want from your website.

–          Review the competition. Competitive analysis can show you what already works and what doesn’t perform well in your online space. This information lets you know how to improve your communication so that your pages or posts receive the attention they deserve.

–          Test your titles and subtitles. Your title is the lure that brings people to your content. The subtitles are the hook that pushes the reader to keep reviewing the information you’ve offered. Although keyword stuffing doesn’t work, you should put your primary keyword in your primary H1 title to ensure everyone understands what you’re talking about in the post.

–          Perform the research. Data from 2019 suggests that images are a mandatory component of any content offering. People are more willing to share useful long-form content than short-form pieces because the information supports their expertise. Many readers are likely to share items when you can make a social connection with them.

Once you’ve gone through those steps, your content needs the other SEO efforts that communicate value. It should contain a helpful meta description, links to relevant internal pages, and outbound links to authoritative websites that verify the information you provide.

Keyword Stuffing FAQ

1. What are some great examples of keyword stuffing?

Google gives these examples of keyword stuffing.

–          Phone number lists that add no value to the website.

–          Text blocks that list locations for where the page attempts to rank.

–          Repeating phrases or words so often that it sounds unnatural.

–          Repetitive coding or meta descriptions that hide the keywords from visitors, but not from the web crawlers.

2. Why do search engines penalize keyword stuffing?

Google makes approximately 500-600 changes annually to its search algorithms. The goal is to provide value to each person attempting to find specific information. Keyword stuffing doesn’t add value because it only repeats the same data.

The best way to avoid this penalty is to provide unique content that attempts to answer common questions about your information, products, or services.

3. How do crawlers detect keyword-heavy posts?

Crawling is the mechanism that search engines use to find new or updated content. Sometimes referred to as “spiders,” these bots can recognize PDFs, videos, images, content, and more. When websites get searched, the information goes into a comparative index to find uniqueness.

Those comparisons can tell if your content is original or duplicated. It will also register the keyword repetition used for stuffing practices.

Is it 100% accurate? Not necessarily, as some black hat SEO methods are temporarily successful. It continues to get better, which is why the risk isn’t worth the reward.

4. Can keyword-heavy posts be user-friendly?

A keyword-heavy post or page is theoretically possible, but the dynamics of creating that content are incredibly complex. You may also encounter a situation where Google discards the stuffing behavior because the remainder of the ranking factors provides significant value to readers.

Instead of overusing keywords, focus on the information you want to share. Most writers find natural secondary keywords appear naturally with this composition method.

5. Are keywords still useful for SEO?

Keyword placement can help an optimization campaign be successful with reasonable placement strategies. You don’t need constant repetition of the same word or phrase seven times in the same sentence or paragraph.

You want long-tail keywords in your descriptions, subheadings, URL, title, and similar critical structures. It doesn’t need to be found throughout the text body.

6. Will my search rankings improve if I avoid keyword stuffing?

SEO provides zero guarantees. When you provide consistent value to website visitors, it is possible to get your page ranking to rise. Following Google’s general guidelines can help with this process.

Let your content be readable to humans. Create things that people want to share while separating yourself from the competition.

If you optimize for the crawlers or attempt to deceive users with your structure, Google may not display your website as prominently once those efforts get discovered.

How to Solve Keyword Stuffing Problems

The best way to resolve issues with keyword stuffing is to write naturally. Don’t worry about any density ratios, repetitive phrasing, or total words listed in your page or post.

Those items can get fixed later with the best SEO tools out there today, including some free options.

Write authentic content. If you have some expertise that can help others, find ways to share it through your website. When your passion flows through your words, everyone will pick up on the emotion to fuel their efforts to find success.

Keyword stuffing was successful in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It’s not helpful today! Incorporate these ideas into your next page or post to see if you can achieve the optimization benefits you want.

Although there is no way to predict results, your chances get better every time you publish content following the guidelines outlined within this piece.

The post 6 Ways to Avoid Keyword Stuffing Your Blog’s Content first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 12:11 pm

Not only are search engines continually making alterations to their algorithms, leaving SEO experts to adapt, but the way people are searching for things is changing too.

More and more businesses with an online presence have to adapt to the new realities of voice searching. With that in mind, we’ll look at some of the ways to optimize your website content for Google voice searches!

Why Do It?

Cost-effectiveness is a big deal in the world of SEO; we don’t always have the time or the budget to do everything that we’d like. Considering that, should you spend your resources on an effort to optimize your website content for Google voice searches?

After all, there are plenty of trends that help you rank on Google – is this one worth it?

In a nutshell, yes. Unlike fads that come and go, voice searching is here to stay. And all estimates show that it will only get bigger as time goes on. In the next couple of years, voice-activated searches will make up half of all online searches.

This is due to the advent of smart speakers and home assistant devices; people that have Alexa or Google Home in their households are more likely to resort to voice searches.

The future of online searching is here, and it’s your voice. Thus, long-term optimizations of website content are necessary. And we’ll tell you where to start:

1. Keyword Optimization
2. Long-form Questions
3. Local Search Optimization
4. Personalization

Adapting To Keywords

We should note that many of the tweaks you’ll do while you optimize your website content for Google voice searches complement the SEO guidelines you’re already following.

The fact that voice searches will become a  bigger deal in the near future doesn’t mean that you should forgo other aspects of optimization.

Whatever happens, website design will still play an important role; your website’s functionalities and visual appearance are still the primary way people interact with your online business.

Still, some aspects of SEO will have to be improved. For instance, the way we approach search keywords is fundamentally changing.

The keywords we’ve used so far are, from a linguistic standpoint, often short and slightly unnatural or awkward.

But now that voice searches are widespread, the focus shifts towards long-tail keywords and entire phrases. Indeed, voice searching makes logical use of the way we naturally talk.

After all, how we type online is radically different from how we speak in real life.

But when we use search engines via digital assistants, it’s a more intuitive process. People will utter entire sentences as their search phrases of choice, and your website content needs to be optimized for that.

“How’s the weather in New York this morning?” is something you’d ask a digital assistant like Google Home, but you’d never type that into Google if you were seated in front of your laptop.

Instead of this natural language, you’d probably go with “new york weather”. Considering this difference is crucial.

Anticipating Questions

While voice searches often come in the form of long sentences, it doesn’t mean that they are less specific. The queries posed to a digital assistant are still precise; after all, you don’t have actual conversations with Alexa.

But the logical question here is: How can you optimize your website content for Google voice searches without looking spammy?

Actually, it’s not that difficult. As a business owner or a niche marketer, you need to think about the long-form questions your target audience will ask most frequently.

You may already see where we’re going with this, but you’d be smart to add a Frequently Asked Questions section at the end of your blog posts or other content.

This tactic is likely to pay off in terms of increased traffic and other positive website analytics. Follow these steps:

1. Search the Internet for niche-related questions about your topic, ones that your visitors ask digital assistants most often.
2. Create an FAQ section at the bottom of a blog page.
3. Structure each question as a subheading that’s succeeded with a paragraph answering the question
4. Use long-tail keywords in the subheadings.

This also gives a new degree of quality to your content. If you ask the right questions and answer them in a useful way, Google will reward the effort with a better ranking..

Local Searches

Studies indicate that a majority of voice searches are local. That’s logical, as people use voice search with digital assistants to find daily services and products. It’s rarely something abstract.

That’s why businesses need to do their best to keep their Google My Business profiles perfectly updated, with consistent contact information across all online platforms and. Here’s how to achieve that:

• Enter your accurate service area and business address
• Don’t choose too many categories while describing your business, as it will make it harder to find
• Only have a single profile for your business to avoid display issues on Google Maps

For example, if you’re a local deli owner, this means including detailed information on opening hours, the exact location of your store, etc.

Of course, you also need to optimize your website content for Google voice searches that are specific, such as “best meatball sub” with a local twist.

While this may seem simple, you’d be surprised at how many businesses fail to complete such tasks promptly. Yes, crucial information like opening hours and street addresses should be available on your website.

But you also need to make sure that Google’s crawlbots can parse this website content.

It’s vital that you don’t put such information in images. Sure, it’s easier for people who actually view your website or Facebook page to see stuff like that, but for Google’s sake (and your ranking), you need to ensure this can be found in HTML as well.

Technically, Google does parse images as well, but you don’t want to leave this up to chance.

Personalized Content

While you optimize your website content for Google Voice searches, there are basic tenets you need to keep in mind; relevance, context, and conciseness.

This can mean a different SEO strategy compared to what you’d usually do before voice searches became an integral part of the online browsing experience.

Voice searches are one of the reasons why personalized browsing has become important in the past couple of years. Google has worked to combine all of its different services into a cohesive system of user profiles.

Apart from being able to provide a better-tailored experience to users, this has also given advertisers more power in terms of audience targeting than ever before.

In terms of marketing strategies, this means that person-based marketing has become the pinnacle of digital advertising.

This methodology for product placement gives advertisers the ability to target their prospective leads with more precision, simply based on how they behave online.

In the past, this had amounted to our browser history. But as language processing tech improves, Google Voice search will gain the ability to learn things about our life through our voice and the background audio.

That information will be used for product placement with our other personal information.

The Future of Google Voice Searches

Once you begin working to optimize your website content for Google Voice Searches, you will realize that this isn’t just about working within the confines of today’s technology. You also need to look towards the future of web searches in general.

Google’s voice search technology has proven to be the bedrock of Google Now — the company’s virtual assistant. The way Google has combined cutting-edge language processing technology with its complex search algorithms has produced something unparalleled in its niche.

Today, Google Now is more powerful compared to all of its biggest competitors, including:

• Alexa
• Cortana
• Siri

What does this mean for website content in the future? Well, if you think that search engine optimization has been disrupted with voice searches so far, you haven’t seen more than the tip of the iceberg.

Platforms used for conversion tracking, such as Google Analytics, are beginning to take stock in voice searches. Google is adding data from voice queries into its all-powerful Google Search Console.

Indeed, Google is aware of the fact that single-device tracking of conversions is going the way of the dinosaurs. These days, our online environment is multi-device and multi-media.

That means our approach to searching for data and information has changed, as have our purchasing habits.

Rising Voice Queries

Data provided by Google Trends suggests that voice searching is becoming more significant by the day. In the previous decade, the number of voice searches has been raised sevenfold.

This is, in large part, due to call functions and navigational queries to Google Maps. Still, the advent of virtual assistants has ushered in an age of increasingly complex voice searches.

How people use voice searches also depends on their age — an important factor when performing audience targeting. For instance, adults most commonly utilize voice search to get local directions.

That’s completely logical, seeing as using such a hands-free option is far safer when you’re driving.

However, younger people have other uses for Google Voice Searches, more relevant to website content. Younger millennials use Google voice searches for local service queries, text message dictation, and playing music.

Why Is The Popularity of Voice Search Increasing?

The incredible growth of voice recognition solutions in tech is due to a couple of different reasons.

Their implementation in both mobile devices and the increasingly valuable niche of smart home solutions (Alexa, Google Home) is constantly improving. And the main reason for that is: it’s easier to speak than to type.

Someone who doesn’t have experience with typing can complete about 40 words each minute. However, an adult can speak almost four times as much in the same period with less effort.

The use of voice searches for hands-free phone interaction in cars is just one example. A quarter of all voice searches happen when people are in situations or locations where typing is not ideal.

Apart from that, voice search is becoming more popular because it’s just getting better. The problem with voice recognition technology in the past was that it was too imprecise and clumsy.

Ten years ago, attempts at voice searches and voice commands looked laughable, with the digital assistants constantly misunderstanding their users’ queries. Indeed, this tech was the butt of many jokes in pop culture.

However, this situation has vastly improved.

These days, Siri and Google are capable of adapting to the unique speech patterns of individuals. After all, each one of us has its pronunciation quirks.

When you factor in accents and different local colloquialisms, even the most basic query can be hard to understand. However, these two platforms have made strides in machine learning that allow their voice recognition software to adapt using complex metadata.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is information that any local business should include on their listing for voice searches?

Pet friendliness, working hours, WiFi availability, parking, accepted payment methods, and contact information.

1. How accurate is Google Voice Search?

According to estimates from 2017, Google Voice recognition has reached a 95% accuracy level.

1. When was Google Voice Search created?

The first iteration of Google Voice Search features was made public in 2012.

1. What languages does Google Voice support?

Currently, it supports English, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, German, and French, though most users still use English as it’s the most precise.

The post How To Optimize Your Website Content for Google Voice Searches first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 24, 2022 @ 6:20 pm

Don’t worry if you’re new to website SEO and to the practice of link building.

Link building is not as difficult as it might sound. It’s essentially networking and building relationships with other webmasters and content creators.

Human beings to human beings. That’s what it is — a dialogue. And there’s nothing scary about it— even though we understand it might sound too much if you’re an introvert.

This short guide is here to teach you a few techniques that work and that won’t require years of experience in SEO.

So let’s start.

Why Link Building?

First of all, let’s answer a fundamental question: why link building?

Essentially, you may want to build links for two reasons:

• To improve your rankings in search engines
• To grow traffic (and consequently, conversions) to your or your client’s website

The first reason is what SEO is after, as getting links helps you get higher rankings for your content in the SERPs of the major search engines.

The second reason is what brand building, public relations and webmaster relationships are after: exposure of your brand or name and website name (and link) get people interested in you and what you do, and interested in your website, so they’ll come and visit and, hopefully, contact you or download or buy from you.

That’s how it works. You may want to build links for both reasons or only one of them. You’ll work with the same link building techniques.

How to Do Link Building: 3 Pre-Link Building Tips

1. Create content first, go after links later

You already heard it. Content is king.

But is it king when it comes to link building, too?

The answer is yes. Because it’s near impossible (unless you buy a lot of meaningless links) to get quality links to a piece of content that is not quality at all.

So the first step before you build any links is to invest in the quality of your content.

That means:

1. Content that answers searchers’ queries thoroughly and possibly better than the competition, or that shares at least some original ideas
2. Carefully picked images, videos and/or audio, and links
3. A piece of content that speaks directly your audience and encourages feedback (call to action)

Create that masterpiece before you seek out opportunities to get it linked.

Remember: people want to link out to something helpful and memorable, not the usual rehashed stuff.

2. Don’t try to get links from any site

Not every link is like another.

Only links that come from sites that relate to yours to some extent are valuable to your users and search engines alike.

Imagine finding a non-contextual pharma link on your favorite electronics store site: would you click it?

Even if it’s a legit link, it’s irrelevant, and it’s unlikely that you’re also interested in pharma when you are searching for the latest iPhone.

So that irrelevant link is also bound to carry little to no traffic to the pharma site.

Now imagine if that was your link. You would lose traffic and search engine “points”, since search engines also penalize for link schemes (and an irrelevant link like that smells unnatural link everywhere).

So:

1. Search Google or another search engine for websites in your niche or related to it
2. Manually surf and choose the ones that you think are more relevant (and have a lot of content you could get a link from)
3. Collect the sites in a list — an Excel file or a Google Doc will do — for when you build links later

3. Don’t be afraid to experiment

One link building technique might work for you better than another.

Or maybe you want to get original and create your own methods to acquire links.

Don’t be afraid to experiment: like anything in marketing, link building is a creative practice and you may just find out that something you never tried before (or that none of your mentors tried) actually works for you.

How to Do Link Building: 10 Easy Link Building Techniques for Beginners

There’s no need to get complicated when you’re starting out, so this list of 10 ways to build links is all about simplicity and easiness to replicate results.

1. HARO Link Building

This is one of the most effective link building and brand building techniques, and we’re not alone in thinking so. Nearly one hundred experts responded to our HARO query recommending HARO, because it works.

All it requires is that you sign up on platforms like HARO (Help A Reporter) and Source Bottle or follow the #JournoRequest hashtag on Twitter to get media queries in your niche emailed directly to your inbox every day or week.

Then you will respond to interesting queries through email or tweet.

Anna Rubkiewicz, Co-Founder & Content Strategist at Contentki, has found good success with using HARO to earn quality backlinks:

“To fully explore the backlink potential of HARO, I have dedicated 3 months last year and read all 3 HARO newsletters daily. I answered each and every question that fit the profile of the company I was working at. While it required a lot of dedication, it was definitely worth it! Within these 3 months, I was able to earn 18 backlinks from websites that had a domain authority of over 70. As far as backlinks are concerned, I can’t recommend HARO enough – you do, however, need to be consistent to see the results at scale.”

Brett Downes

Brett Downes, Founder and SEO at HARO Helpers, also got great results with HARO for a recent site:

“I launched my site at end of March, and have earned 49 referring domain backlinks and my DR is 53, higher than 90% of sites in the same niche as me who have been operating for a few years.”

Laura English, Lead Copywriter at Sonder Digital Marketing, recommends:

“Putting aside 10 to 20 minutes a day to get through all the callouts on HARO and SourceBottle and putting forward a couple of quotes is fairly simple and a sustainable strategy.”

How to Do HARO Link Building

1. Signup on HARO or Source Bottle or follow #JournoRequest on Twitter
2. Receive interesting emails and tweets, and reply to those emails or tweets
3. Make your pitch emails as in depth as possible, and respond to the query precisely. On Twitter, say that you’re interested and ask that they contact you through email
4. Always end your pitch with your full name, the name of your brand and your website URL, so it gets easy for journalists and bloggers to link back

2. Link Earning Outreach

I’m calling it link “earning” because results are not guaranteed with link outreach if your only scope is to get links that boost rankings.

That happens because the target webmaster may choose to not link out at all, but only to share your content to their social media followers. Or they may choose to create a link but with a rel=nofollow attached to it.

It’s really up to the webmaster to see what to do with the resource you offer.

How to Do Link Earning Outreach

1. Look for sites that can bring in traffic and help ranks
2. Offer your content in a warm email, highlighting how helpful it is and why (don’t ask for a link)
3. Follow up after 4-5 days if you get no response (this time, kindly suggest the idea of a backlink)

Email Template

Hello [NAME],

I’m [YOUR NAME], a reader of your blog. I read the recent post on [TOPIC] and I found it enlightening. [ADD A GENUINE COMMENTARY OF THE POST HERE]

Some time I ago I also wrote about [TOPIC] and the piece took me some long time to get together! Here’s the URL in case you are interested: [URL]

Mind if we swap feedback on our respective pieces?

Warmly,
YOUR NAME

3. Guest Posts

Although Google’s John Mueller recently told SEOs that guest post links don’t work because Google is pretty much ignoring them, guest posts are a great brand building tool and they can get you links that will bring in traffic and leads.

In fact, don’t worry if site owners assign a rel=nofollow to your outbound links in guest posts: Google now uses nofollow as an hint, meaning that there’s a chance they might actually follow the link and assign a value to it.

How to Do Guest Posts

1. Know the niche you’re going to write for (e.g. cooking or gardening)
2. Search Google for sites in that niche (example keyword: “write for us” gardening, or “guest posting” cooking)
3. Select a few of those sites that have the quality you’re looking for, especially traffic potential, and study them thoroughly, by reading some of their posts and the About page
4. If there’s a chance to leave comments on blog posts, leave some interesting ones that add value, so you’ll get a first meaningful interaction with the site owner
5. Find the site owner’s contact information, come up with a guest post idea and pitch it, highlighting how valuable it may be for their readers. If the site has a comment section, let the owner know that you already interacted there so you’re not a new face
6. If your idea gets green-lighted, write it and get it published, along with a backlink to your site (hint: let the site owner choose the format and the landing page)
7. Do this for each site you have targeted for guest posting

4. Link Reclamation

This one may be harder for you to put in practice if you’re really new to having a website and an online presence, but if you’ve been on the Web a while, you might find that your name or brand name is cited somewhere.

With link reclamation, you can turn these simple textual citations into live backlinks to your site.

And it works! Sam Williamson, co-founder of CBDiablo, used unlinked mentions to build their first links:

“When we first launched our website we’d already built up a bit of an offline following, so there was already a bit of discussion going on about us online. An easy way for us to quickly gain links into our website was to find mentions of our business which didn’t include a link to our website, and ask for one to be included.”

Sam suggests that you use search operators on Google to find mentions from last month, last year and so on, so you don’t miss any mentions.

How to Do Link Reclamation:

1. Search Google or another search engine for your name (example: “John Doe” or “ACME Inc.”)
2. Find the author’s or website owner’s email address or social media account
3. Get in touch using warm emails, thank the author for citing you, and ask if they would be so kind to add a live link to that citation

5. Host Expert Roundups on Your Blog

“But shouldn’t I join others’ roundups instead?” You may be asking.

Naturally, it can’t hurt if you do, and you could scores some good backlinks that way, but there’s a reason we are recommending to host your own roundups instead: it’s easier and a traffic and backlink magnet.

Adelina Karpenkova, Content Marketer at Joinative, says:

Adelina Karpenkova

“We […] find it effective to publish expert roundups on our blog. First of all, these pieces of content perform especially well in terms of driving traffic. And the more people see our content, the more likely it is that a few of them will want to link to this roundup on their website. Moreover, when you host interviews with professionals that run their own blogs, it won’t be a big deal to get a link from this blog. Sometimes, you won’t even need to ask for it – people are usually willing to share something they contributed to on their owned channels. For instance, after we featured this native advertising trends roundup, we got great links from Taboola, Revcontent, and other relevant websites.”

How to Do Expert Roundups:

• Setup the roundup on your blog and come up with a list of questions to ask experts
• Find experts through HARO, Source Bottle, MyBlogU or by manually searching Google for experts in your niche (for example, search for “[niche] speaking contacts”)
• Once you got in touch with the experts and got their go ahead for the roundup, send them the interview questions by email
• Copy and paste their insights into the roundup article, edit and review, and publish
• Email all experts the live URL of the article and kindly ask that they help spread the word

6. Go Local

Another link building idea is to leverage local entities, radios, websites and organizations to get backlinks.

Even your old school or church group are good candidates for this strategy.

Colin Little from Social Launch SEO, explains:

“I’d recommend to anyone starting out, especially if it’s for a local business client, to reach out to local bloggers, radio stations, local charities etc. Having that local connection will help in your outreach efforts and it can result in some big wins.

Start by searching city sponsor(s), city blog, city radio station, etc and look for good low cost to free opportunities to drop a link. Local radio stations, charities and blogs can have surprising domain stats that will be a great starting point.

They’ll often be more willing to give you a break on the cost of guest posts or link insertions since they feel they’re helping out a local business in their area. The quickest way to check the page/domain quality is to use an SEO chrome extension like Mangools.

Once you get the hang of identifying, stat checking, and building your outreach list you’ll start generating some high quality local backlinks with ease.”

How to Go Local:

• Look up local entities or businesses you have personally used (school, church, sports club, local library, favorite shoe shop, etc.) and find out if they have a website
• If they do, find a way to support them (or see if you helped them in the past) and contact them asking for a link opportunity, even in the form of a guest contribution
• After this first stage, that will get you the first links, take a habit in checking the metrics of any interesting or related local business website you run into before you contact them for a link opportunity
• Remember that a low score website that however has the potential to drive in a lot of traffic is still a great site to get a link from. Link building is not all about SEO!

7. Monitor Competitors’ Backlinks

Have you ever thought about getting linked from the same sites where your competitors get dofollow links from?

All you need is a backlink tracker like Linkody or Monitor Backlinks or a free tool like Google Alerts to retrieve competitor backlinks and sift through them to uncover hidden gems.

Jeff Moriarty, Marketing Manager for Moriarty’s Gem Art, shares:

“One of the first link building strategies we used starting out was setting up Google Alerts for all our main competitors. This showed us exactly where they were being mentioned online and we were able to then request to get links on those same websites. This was so much simpler and took less work than going out and just requesting links from websites we hoped would link to us. With this strategy, on average we got 1-2 links out of every 5 requests we made. Was very successful for us and we continue to do it today.”

Riddhi Khatri, SEO Executive at Elsner Technologies Pvt. Ltd, suggests to “Find who is currently ranking highly in Google’s organic search for [your] keyword” and says that by monitoring competitors “you may find quality links like business listing, profile creation, social media profiles, guest post and many more. You may directly create a business listing by filling out your business information. For guest posts you may outreach to their emails, It’s a great way to earn high quality links.”

“I am sharing this technique because I personally use it for my client’s website link building. It is an easy way to rank higher than your competitor and I also find it less time consuming. It’s best for SEO beginners without much knowledge of SEO.”

How to Monitor Competitors for Links:

• Signup for a backlink tracking service like Linkody or Monitor Backlinks. You can find more by searching Google for “backlink tracker”
• Add your competitors’ websites to the tracker and wait for the tool to retrieve backlinks (usually within 24 hours). If you don’t know who your competitors are, find who is ranking on page one of Google SERPs for your main keyword(s)
• Browse the backlinks list and note down websites where you would like to be linked. Note down all the guest posting opportunities, too (i.e. where did your competitor guest post?)
• You may also want to check metrics for each backlink (MOZ and Majestic metrics, Alexa Rank for traffic estimates, social shares through Buzzsumo, comments and other engagement on blog posts, social media followers)
• Reach out to each website that the backlink comes from to see if there’s a link opportunity for you

8. Pinterest Group Boards

Danielle Miller, Social Media Marketer at Miller Media Management, says that a good and unique strategy to get backlinks is to “put out a stellar piece of content and get it posted to Pinterest group boards.”

Pinterest group boards are an option for regular boards that allows you to invite people to the board to submit pins. In other words, you create a collaborative board.

Danielle says:

“So many SEMs forget to leverage Pinterest. Pinterest repins build backlinks and have strong search engine rank. Pinterest works because posts have longevity and continue driving traffic for years. Group boards are key because they have thousands of captivated followers, so you don’t need to wait to build your own following.”

Danielle also shares a success story:

“When I started my social media marketing business, I created a set of free marketing plan printables on a Saturday morning. That day, I pinned the promo image to a few group boards. Over the years, this piece of content has been repinned over 12,000 times. All these backlinks have improved my search rank and this pin continues to drive traffic to my website to this day.”

How to Use Pinterest Group Boards:

• Signup for Pinterest if you don’t already have an account
• Find a group board related to your content and submit it. As an alternative, you can create your own board but it will take longer to drive repins and followers

9. Internal Linking

Internal links are completely under your control, so why not take advantage of the opportunity to improve your search engine positioning?

But just linking one page to another won’t do it.

Kevin Puls recommends “Linking relevant pages to each other by using (linking) the keywords, or LSI (Latent Semantic Index)/synonyms.”

How to Optimize Internal Linking:

• Using keywords in your anchor text to link to your other content on the site
• Also uso LSI keywords (or related keywords) to link to content where that topic is touched upon
• Make your anchor text useful to the user who’s searching for content on your site

10. Build Relationships

This one wins every time, because relationships are at the core of any marketing activity — and SEO is no less.

International SEO consultant, speaker and blogger Milosz Krasinski says to build relationships with these 4 types of persona:

• Journalists
• Editors
• Bloggers
• Other link building agencies or freelancers

Milosz elaborates further:

“Journalists looking for a unique angle, give them what they are looking for.

Editors – ask them about their editorial calendar so you can provide them with necessary information in advance.

Bloggers – contribute by doing expert roundup in a given niche.

Lastly, connect with other freelancers who are having relationships with whom you don’t have so may mention each other on upcoming blog posts.

All that can be done with no tools by simple email and basic research.”

Milosz kindly shared a SEMrush screenshot with us showing the correlation between the number of published contributions (dofollow links) and the growing number of authority score:

How to Build Relationships:

• Manually search for journalists, bloggers and publishers and get in touch to know their needs. For journalists, you can also leverage HARO and Source Bottle as seen earlier in this post
• Email these new contacts or reach out to them on LinkedIn. Remember to introduce yourself and to be helpful
• Ask them how you may help them with a current project. Don’t charge for that help, this is for networking and relationship building, not money.

Conclusion: How to Do Link Building When You’re An SEO Beginner? You Stick to A Few Tactics

We offered 10 strategies in this guide, but you may just pick a few and stick with them over the course of your SEO campaign.

It doesn’t matter how many you use, as long as you do your best to make those tactics that work.

That said, there’s one strategy we strongly advise you don’t skip: building relationship. It’s so foundational that even if you may find yourself at loss of options sometimes in the future, you’ll never be really option-less if you have built a network of professionals to rely on.

Also, as a beginner, don’t overlook SEO communities: they can help you get things right and back on track if you make a mistake along the way.

What’s your biggest link building fear?

Share it in the comments below and we’ll do our best to help you.

The post How to Do Link Building (The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide) first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 24, 2022 @ 6:20 pm

If you’ve been keeping up with the world of SEO and Google, you may have heard about this “BERT” update Google rolled out in late 2019.

Because Google is constantly updating its algorithms, the thing shouldn’t come as a surprise, but BERT is something new compared to previous updates as it relates to a machine’s understanding of human language.

But let’s see the details of it and why it matters to SEO.

What Is BERT?

BERT is an algorithm update that Google introduced in October 2019. The name is an acronym that stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and Google uses it to better understand human language and the contextual use of terms in content.

That means that the BERT update affects both web search and voice search, as understanding context and the intent of both words in content and voice queries is at the core of it.

Note that when we talk about context here, we refer to the text surrounding target words.

For a more technical overview of BERT, watch DeepCrawl’s 2019 webinar on Understanding Natural Language Processing and BERT for Search.

Can You Optimize for BERT? (Yes, in 9 Ways)

In other words, given the nature of this update, does it make sense to speak of ‘BERT SEO’?

The short answer is YES — there are areas where you can make improvements for BERT to better understand your content.

We’ll explore these areas in 9 points, some of which come from the expertise of a number of SEO professionals we interviewed through HelpAReporter.com.

1. Good Grammar and Sentence Construction

Because BERT helps Google to understand the meaning of words in queries (intent) and content based on context, it’s critical to be as precise as possible in sentence construction in your content and to review your grammar to perfection.

It may help to have someone else review your content, as it’s hard for the one who writes to catch every typo and awkward sentence construction.

2. A New Way to Look at Keywords

With the introduction of BERT, keywords stay relevant but they’re no longer to be taken as exact-match terms to be found in the text. Rather, they can and should be seen as topics that your text is built around.

This doesn’t change things in practice: you will still use keywords in your content, but you no longer have to worry to reach a certain density or to use the keywords “as is”.

Something to pay attention to is the context around your keywords. Alex Kehoe, Co-Founder & Operations Director at Caveni Digital Solutions, says:

“Position keywords with high context sentences that are historically associated with your desired keyword. For example, if you wanted to target, “Jogging in Minnesota” you may also include sentences about miles, kilometres, or running shoes. All of these phrases and discussions about them will increase the contextual relevance of your, “Jogging in Minnesota” keyword phrase. Topic and associative relevance is the best way to use BERT to your advantage.”

Using specific words for your topic in a certain frequency is also another BERT SEO best practice, as Karolina Gawron, Head of Marketing at Surfer, explains:

“To help Google understand your answer is the best in SERP, you have to use specific words in a specific frequency. Smart usage of entities (nouns like people and places) from Google NLP (Natural Language Processing) API is the best guarantee your content is the most relevant to the main keyword.

For example, if you write for the “tasty breakfast”, phrases like “morning”, “coffee”, “fried eggs” will be highly relevant to the query. Words like “evening”, “dinner”, “potato chips” will not be relevant to the topic.”

How to figure out which phrases are relevant to your topic? Gawron says you can “analyze top-performing pages in SERP with Google demo API or use on-page optimization tools to get the phrases picked by their algorithm with the right density.”

Image kindly contributed by Karolina Gawron

“People Also Ask” and “Related Keywords” also play an essential role:

Girdharee Saran, Head of Digital Marketing at MyAdvo Techserve Private Limited, says:

“[Use the] “People also ask” section because these are all long sentence queries and coming directly from people, you can get better results by answering these queries directly in your content. If you include a well-thought answer to these queries and also add FAQ schema, it will add to the understanding of the search engine. Not sure if this can be categorized as a BERT update but using this strategy, we are able to gain more visibility to our content. Also for a few questions, Google picked up our newly written answers.”

“Related Keywords” can also help make a difference in your rankings. As Stacy Caprio, Marketing for AcneScar.org, says:

“These keywords are generated using Google’s semantic algorithms as related to your target keyword and you should include them in your content so Google’s BERT algorithm recognizes your content as inclusive and complete.”

3. Focus On Users Rather Than On Search Engines

With BERT, you can focus on answering your audience’s problems more than having a good number of keyword repetitions in your content.

That results in a switch of focus from optimizing for the search engine to optimizing for users.

It’s nothing new at its core, as websites are built for users and not for search engines, but having to rely less on keywords actually frees up your resources to give more to users and spend less on On-Page SEO.

4. Use a Table of Contents

John Matyasovsky, Digital Marketing Specialist at Roofing SEO Webmasters, says:

“Including a linkable TOC helps define the entities (i.e.: topics instead of exact match queries). Since each topic has sub-topics, the organized TOC helps define the context of the language. It also exists for user navigation, which indicates a user-focus.”

There are a number of TOC plugins you can use if your website runs on WordPress, a handy and easy-to-install example being LuckyWP Table of Contents.

5. Use Topic Clusters

International SEO consultant, speaker, blogger Milosz Krasiński explains in detail:

“A Topic Cluster refers to multiple pieces of content which are lumped together by way of a shared topic or sub-topic. These pieces of content will, together, form a comprehensive overview of that particular topic and will provide more than enough to satisfy searches.”

An example of this is a long-form content piece containing several sub-topics of the same topic, in the effort to provide a comprehensive guide for the user to read and put to use.

Krasiński explains how Topic Clusters can help you optimize for BERT:

“It’s a known fact that being visible for an actual topic is much more effective than being visible for just a keyword or phrase. As BERT is all about the context, therefore, it makes perfect sense that by using these clusters, you can create signals for search engines and optimise your SEO – even when it comes to the mega-fussy BERT.”

6. Make Content More Organic and Conversational

The way you present content to your users users can make or miss your content performance in the SERPs.

Niles Koenigsberg, Digital Marketing Specialist at FiG Advertising + Marketing, explains:

“As voice search has steadily risen over the past decade, it has become clear that this trend will be sticking around. BERT is just one of the ways that Google is working to capitalize upon voice search by honing in on the complex details of conversational language. For that reason, it would be wise to slightly adjust the content on your site to sound more natural and organic.

It would also be wise of you to rework your content and make it more simple and succinct. The BERT update is designed to help Google focus on the context of the words used inside of the sentences in your content. That means you shouldn’t beat around the bush with your blogs and site content, and instead focus on being straightforward, direct, and insightful. Try to avoid using unnecessary words that just fluff up your content and increases the reading difficulty. Word count is still important for ranking metrics, but it’s not as important as providing new and useful information.”

In other words, get to the point with your content, using as many relevant words as the topic necessitates.

7. Have an FAQ section on your website

This optimization was proposed by Tarun Gurang, Sr. Digital Marketer at iFour Technolab Pvt. Ltd.  who says an FAQ section on your website is “helpful for the users and generate traffic to the website. Also, the FAQ section consists of all three sections grammar, sentence construction, and the keywords as topics with the form of LSI.”

“And the major benefit of using the FAQ is to provide appealing content for your targeted audience which they want or are looking for. I am sure by doing this, you will see a significant improvement in terms of traffic and keywords ranking for any website.”

8. Pay Attention to User Intent

User intent is “what a user is looking for when they conduct a search query”, says Riddhi Khatri, SEO Executive at Elsner Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

“Google’s BERT is itself an AI framework. It will learn every new information that it gets. The main purpose of BERT is to help google to understand user search intent and the other way to optimize for BERT is optimizing for user intent.

To optimize your website for user intent, identify the user queries that they are searching for, understand those queries and then research your targeted keywords.

Focus on the user before generating content that they want to see or read when they search for their queries. When you write content ask yourself, “Can my readers find what they are looking for in my content?””

9. Contextual Backlinks

Backlinks may be another area where you can optimize for BERT, according to Subro Chakraborty, Co-founder at InfluRocket:

“Topical backlinks are essential from a BERT perspective. If your page has anchor texts that are irrelevant to your topic or the backlinking page doesn’t have contextual content, that backlink might even hurt you as google will consider it spam.”

Conclusion on BERT SEO

According to Google there isn’t much to optimize for BERT, but as we saw in this article, there are actually a few things you can optimize can make your content perform better in Google.

The key takeaway is that BERT SEO is all about On-Page SEO, specifically about the quality of your content and how much effort you put forward to make sure it’s easy to read, conversational, grammatically correct and on-point with the topic you’re tackling.

How has your content been performing since BERT?

The post BERT SEO: How To Optimize Your Content For Google first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Mar 24, 2022 @ 11:32 am

You expect to see certain things in your Google Search Console report and adjustment that you might need to make.

If you need backlinks to your website or need to implement any 301 redirects or other URL parameters that you need to adjust, Google Search Console can pretty much do everything.

This tool, formerly known as Google Webmaster, is an important SEO tool. Google also releases new data and analytics, which we can track on the Google Search Console.

Google Search Console (GSC) is a service provided freely by Google to help manage a website search’s functionality. It collects reports and tools that it uses to rectify errors while also strategizing and optimizing your rankings on the search engine.

One of its primary functions is to check if Google can find and crawl through your website.

If you’re able to fix problems with indexing and request re-indexing of the updated or new content, Google will be able to index and recrawl your web pages faster.

There are different sections of the GSC tool, and the “Enhancement” section is one of them.

The Enhancement lets you know how active your AMP pages are and if your structured data is working.

The goal is for it to say that you do not have any error codes. You can view all the tools and reports at the left menu bar “Enhancement” tab.

Google Search Console is essential for your website, and Enhancement is vital to the GSC. So, how do you optimize this Enhancement?

Here are a few ways to optimize Enhancement in GSC.

Speed

Google Search Console allows you to view issues related to the speed of a webpage directly. With this report, SEO marketers can look into solving the problem of page speed by URL.

How The Page Speed Report Is In Google Search Console Is Used

This report is something that you can use to track changes over some time. If you are updating a URL, the page speed report will let you track and monitor whether or not the website users are experiencing a better performance. With this, you will know if the URL paramater is performing well enough.

The page speed report also gives marketers the avenue to see all the page speed issues within GSC’s convenience. This means that the PageSpeed Insight tool is no longer necessary for you.

Mobile Usability

This is another thing that you have to check on your website.

Google launched this report in GSC first before moving over and changed to an index that prioritizes mobile.

Your website’s mobile usability report allows you to troubleshoot any development and design issues with mobile.

The mobile usability report shows you all the problems with your website that affect it and not allow it to deliver a good web experience for people browsing your website with their mobile devices.

Some of the things that Google reports on are: having contents that are wider than the mobile device’s screen, the elements are too close to themselves, the viewport for content is not set, or the text of content is too small and hard to read.

All of these problems matter to Google and are things that you have to really pay attention to, especially because the website’s mobile-friendliness is not a very important ranking factor for Google.

So, you have to make sure that your website is up to par to deliver on the mobile experience. For the sake of SEO, you have to fix all of the reported issues to improve your mobile optimization.

How to fix issues with mobile usability report?

The truth is, there are times when you have carefully thought of your web design strategy. But within a slight twinkle, what you see is an unclickable, slow, and poor scrolling website. This means you will likely get a high bounce rate and zero leads on the website. If you design your mobile site poorly, it has a side effect that can cost you a lot in terms of customers and organic traffic.

According to one of the dissertation help reviews from the professional writer service, there are several errors that you can notice within the mobile usability. But here are ways to fix some of these common errors.

• Website content is more extensive than the phone screen: ensure that horizontal scrolling is not essential for visitors to view the material’s entirety.
• The closeness of clickable elements: make the buttons and links as far apart as possible.
• Viewport not configured: use Meta viewport tag on your pages for adjusting the dimensions based on the kind of mobile device that the website visitors use.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

You must be able to increase your web page’s speed with the slightest opportunity you get.

With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), you have all the benefits of mobile search results gathered together in one master tactic that is also easy to implement. It increases your page’s load time, improves your server performance, and boosts your mobile ranking.

After the Google announcement that the GSC will start to track images that interact with the feature ‘swipe to visit,’ this feature already appears in performance reports.

When you want to check the AMP markup for error, your ideal location is the GSC AMP report. The AMP report is present in both the new and old GSC versions.

The AMP as a technique has the basis of open-source specifications and makes it possible for developers to develop JS and HTML pages that load very fast. The reason for the AMP HTML is so that web pages on mobile devices can render quickly as there is an exponential growth in the number of people that browse the internet with their mobile devices. The AMP HTML was introduced by Google so that website owners can remove any page that loads very slowly on mobile devices.

How to use the AMP report?

With the AMP report in GSC, you can monitor your AMP pages. Implementation issues such as site templating are those things affecting the AMP pages that you can watch here. If you need to make any severe or significant changes, the AMP test tool will help you do that. The issues that your AMP pages have will also be listed in this section if you use productive results.

All AMP related issues are reported to the site owners by Google, and the AMP results can also be filtered under the performance report.

In order to use the AMP for SEO, you must make sure that your developer is up to speed with AMP, then you go ahead and convert your normal HTML to AMP HTML.

Breadcrumbs

The breadcrumbs report helps site owners in fixing all issues that prevent breadcrumbs from showing in the SERPs. There are woes associated with implementing structured data that website owners know of. You can add the code to your website, and it still will not show the SERPs.

Luckily, Google has it all sorted out for us. After adding the code to your site, go to GSC > Enhancement > Breadcrumbs. This will allow you to see the errors. The report that you see will show the structured data errors for breadcrumb and the number of affected URLs.

How to fix breadcrumbs in GSC?

This report has something in there, irrespective of the breadcrumb structured data that you have used (author, blog posts, organization, local business, etc.).

The structured data marks your pages and informs the search engine on what to show the website users.

If it is not displaying SERPs, the breadcrumb report will inform you of what to check. Usually, websites that have breadcrumbs have more organic traffic thanks to the breadcrumbs.

For instance, one luxury real estate website recorded a 33% increase in their first year’s organic traffic. Local business also had its page views boosted by 71% in one year.

Although structured data is not a factor for ranking, and leaving the errors will not cost you any ranking position, fixing the mistakes helps increase your website’s user experience.

Analyzing the individual error will help to fix the structure data for breadcrumb in the GSC. You can also work through the mistakes with a structured data testing tool.

HTML Improvements

The HTML improvements report all the problems that Google found when indexing or crawling your website. Some of the issues that may be in this report include:

• Content that Google couldn’t index
• Duplicate/long/missing/short title tags
• Long/short/duplicate short meta descriptions

Using HTML Improvement Report for Improving SEO

There really is nothing hard about this. You only need to fix up all the areas with problems that Google reports on your website.

But there are some simple HTML rules for SEO that you need to pay attention to in order to avoid Google highlighting these problems on your website. These are:

• Make sure that your SEO title tag has around 60 characters (or width of around 612 pixels).
• Have a description of up to 160 characters.
• There has to be a unique description and title for each page.
• Google has to crawl on all the pages that you are looking to rank on the SERPs. Make sure that the content isn’t blocked by .htaccess files or robots.txt.

Data Highlighter

The Data Highlighter works similarly to the Structured Data and can be used as a substitute. It marks the exact same things as structured data. The good thing is that there’s no need to get a developer to write your HTML code snippets. However, it also has its own limitations, which are in writing the tags. You have to do this individually for all URLs. So, if your website has a thousand webpages, you know you are in for such a strenuous bit of work.

How to use the data highlighter for SEO

• You have to start by clicking on the “Start Highlighting.” You will get a popup.
• Enter your URL in the appropriate space, then choose the type of data that you’re looking to highlight (products, events, articles, movies, local business, reviews, TV shows, restaurants, etc.).
• After making the selection, it’s up to Google to render that page in Google Search Console. This will make it possible for you to highlight the relevant data.
• The next thing is to select the images or text that you are highlighting per page. You can highlight ratings, categories, titles, and images.
• Afterward, Google will give you a prompt to highlight other data in other web pages too, and create page sets.

Links to Your Site

This section of the GSC shows you the website’s report linking to your URLs and the most used keywords by the backlinks. There is plenty of valuable information that you can get from this report.

Here are some of the biggest things that you will learn:

You get to know whether or not you need to start disavowing backlinks, especially those ones that appear suspicious from drug enhancements or pharma sites, PBNs, foreign language sites, adult-themed websites, thin content sites, unrelated spammy sites, link farms, and many other websites involved in the practice of black-hat SEO.

• You will also be getting the perspective on those linking to your website and what they link to. With this information, you can increase the quality and number of backlinks to your site by increasing advertising or engagement on the site or targeting similar sites that have liked you very well.

Internal Links

The internal links report shows you the total number of internal links that you have pointing to one particular page.

Using Internal Links for SEO

• Having many internal links to one page shows the importance of the page to Google. This will increase the page’s keyword ranking on Google.
• Build internal links to webpages with little or no internal links to them. Don’t send all your links to your ‘Contact us’ or ‘About’ pages.
• Identify and redirect pages that you have renamed or deleted, but have internal links.

Conclusion

The Google Search Console tool is an essential tool to help increase your website’s SEO rankings. However, a critical section under the Google Search Console is the “Enhancement” section. With the GSC enhancement section, you can fix all the errors on your website and make it second to perfect. Website speed and mobile usability are just some of those things that the Enhancement works for. So, it is essential for your search engine ranking.

The post Using Google Search Console Enhancements first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 12:10 pm

Ever since Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking factor, many web owners are installing an SSL and switching their site from HTTP to HTTPS.

Yes, an SSL certificate can not only authenticate, encrypt, and decrypt the information that is transferred across the browser and servers, but it is also play a role in getting your website ranked higher in Google.

If you are noticing a drop in rankings, it is probably because one of the reasons is Google is penalizing you for not adhering to its internet safety protocols.

However, a quick look at the questions posted by website owners in different forums says that many are still not sure about how to install SSL certificates. So, this post is dedicated to those webmasters.

Since WordPress is the most commonly used CMS, let’s deal with how to install SSL certificates on WordPress and why it is important for SEO. Then we will cover the other platforms such as Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix.

WordPress Plugins

Installing an SSL certificate using a plugin doesn’t require much effort. Once you install the plugin, it will automatically do the entire job for you.

The Really Simple SSL plugin is the most popular WordPress plugin. First, install the plug-in and activate it.

When it is finished, browse Settings and go to the SSL page. Your SSL certificate will be automatically identified by the plugin, and it will set up your WordPress site to implement HTTPs.

The plugin will also set up redirects from HTTP to HTTPs. Besides, if some of your URLs are still loading content from insecure HTTP sources, the plugin will try to fix them.

The plugin should be on active mode at all times, save you from facing mixed content errors. You can either choose the free versions of Really Simple SSL plugin or go for the premium version to access more features and avail more benefits.

WordPress Installation

This is a manual solution, and it will need some effort on your side.

To start manually installing an SSL certificate in WordPress, follow through this simple process:

• Visit Settings and navigate to the General page.
• You need to update your WordPress URL address and site URL address fields. Replace HTTP address with HTTPS.
• Next, click on the Save changes button to save your settings.

You will be logged out and asked to re-login.

After that, add the code given below to your .htaccess file to arrange WordPress redirection to HTTPS.

For Nginx server users, add the code below in your configuration file to redirect from HTTP to HTTPS.

Delete example.com and replace it with your own domain name.

To enable Force SSL on your WordPress admin area or login pages, you need to configure SSL in the wp-config.php file.

Go to your wp-config.php file and enter the given code on top of it.

That’s all, stop editing!

You have successfully set up your WordPress site to implement an SSL certificate.

Squarespace Installation

If you have used Squarespace to create your website, you can be assured that all such sites are automatically protected with free SSL certificates that prevent any third-party from illegitimate access to your website.

If there is nothing wrong with the domain connection, the SSL certificates will be connected automatically. It is included for third-party domains, sub-domains and built-in domains.

To choose an SSL setting, first, click on “Settings” in the “Home” menu.

Then go to the “Advanced” tab and click on “SSL”. There, under the “Security Preference” tab, choose the settings. It is recommended to check the “HSTS Secure” and “Secure” fields. Finally, click on “Save” to exit.

(Source: https://bigcatcreative.com/blog/squarespace-ssl)

Shopify Installation

Once the custom domain has been added correctly, the Shopify platform provides the SSL certificates to the store directly.

When your website is eligible, you will receive a notification on the dashboard.

To activate the certificate, you must login to the Shopify panel using your login credentials.

Then click on the “Online Store” tab and then o the “Domains” tab.

Finally, you click on the “Activate SSL Certificates” tab.

When the activation is successful, you will find the confirmation.

(Source: https://atmosol.com/shopify/activate-ssl-shopify-store )

When you have activated your certificate, it may affect you’re the traffic to your site for some time. You must use the webmaster tools to inform the search engines about this change. The domain sitemap must be updated when the change is done from HTTP to HTTPS. After publishing the new sitemap, the earlier HTTP sitemap must be removed.

Wix Installation

Wix does not support any third-party SSL certificates. All sites on Wix are already enabled with HTTPS protocol along with the inbuilt SSL certification.

• Login to Wix account and browse to manage site and click on button on the left side.
• After that move down to Professional Options>> SSL certificate
• Here, on the right side, you can see the option “Manage” once you click on it you will have an option to “Turn Off” or “Turn On” SSL certificate.
• Make sure you have added https:// URL in HTML code else, it will show site not secure warning while browsing the site.

SEO Benefits

Though SSL carries less weight compared to other signals like high-quality content, Google has announced that implementing SSL will still give your site a minor ranking boost.

For example, Cloudtec, a tech company, reported almost twice the number of top 10 search engine rankings after implementing SSL.

Not only that, but the website’s overall page visibility also boosted.

It has also been found out that 53% of consumers will trust a brand more when they see the padlock. You can display both the padlock and HTTPS on your web browser when you implement SSL.

Also, when a study was conducted to assess whom consumers trust the most and the least, 49% of participants said they trusted Certificate Authorities.

What do all these findings lead to? It indicates that you will have more page visits, and your SEO rankings will boost when you install an SSL certificate.

An SSL certificate might not directly affect your SEO rankings to a large extent, but it will definitely fetch you positive results indirectly.

Moreover, sites that still implement HTTP are punished by most of the search engines.

They will display a Not Secure warning whenever a user visits over HTTP site, which will turn them off.

Wrapping Up

Installing an SSL certificate is simple if you use a plugin. If you are going to do it manually, be prepared to put more effort. Follow the procedures listed above and also learn how to fix mixed content errors in WordPress as you may encounter it.

Whether or not you want an SEO ranking boost, installing an SSL has become mandatory to provide security to users. And for those looking to rank high in search engines, what better way than to implement an SSL certificate while enjoying the added benefits?

The post How to Install SSL Certificate to Boost Your SEO Rankings first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 19, 2021 @ 2:11 pm

When most people start a website, a lot of them are eager to be on the first page of Google search results and to drive millions of traffic. However, this is something that sounds like a pipe dream when you are just starting out.

But think of it this way, the top result on the search engine has a 33% chance of getting clicked.

Now, the reason why other sites rank higher than you is that they are constantly improving on their search engine optimization efforts.

Fortunately, it is never too late for you to get started.

What is SEO?

Before we begin, let’s start with the basics. What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

In a nutshell, SEO is the process of getting organic website traffic from search engines. Meaning, it is free. You are not paying any search engines to place your website on their results.

It is also considered natural because your website should rank for relevant search results.

For example, you own an online clothing store, and your products are made using sustainable means. When someone searches for an “eco-friendly clothing store online,” your e-commerce website should appear on search results.

Effective SEO is vital to getting your business in front of the eyes of your target market. Appearing on top of search engine results allows your site to receive tons of traffic and boost your site’s overall performance.

Google ranking factors

Google uses over 200 ranking factors in order to determine whether your website is relevant and not using any shady means to rank.

We are not going to list all of them here. But here seven of the most important ones that you should pay special attention on:

HTTP Vs. HTTPS

It was back in 2014 when Google recommends that sites switch to HTTPS. It was just until that time that most sites really bothered to use it.

As an incentive, Google announced that those who switched to it would receive a minor bump in rankings, providing sites that switched an edge over their competitors.

Now, if you’re looking for the difference between the two, HTPPS, without a doubt, has a major advantage.

You want your site to be as secure as possible, right? So, even if you’re not accepting particularly sensitive information from your clients and customers, you need to switch to HTPPS.

Why? Because HTPPS could end up boosting your SEO results as well. Although there are several steps involved for you to switch, your efforts will be worth it in the end.

Moreover, it’s already a standard protocol these days, so you no longer need to have doubts about whether you should switch or not. The last thing that you want to happen is for you to fall behind your competition.

Mobile-first Index

The number of mobile users continues to grow and has even surpassed the number of desktop users.

So, if both your mobile and your desktop site aren’t significantly different in any way, you can still take it easy.

Google has announced that this change will not significantly impact your rankings in a major way. But since most users are now accessing their sites through their smartphones and other mobile devices, it still makes sense to make your site as mobile-friendly as possible.

After all, this can impact user experience (which is also an important factor in SEO) and will determine whether or not users would want to come to your site or switch to your competitors.

High-quality Content

The thing is, your target audience is relying on search engines to look for certain information or specific products and services that they need. So, don’t expect them to scroll further down the search results.

This is also true for search engines such as Google.

As much as possible, search engines want to return results that are relevant and high-quality. So, in order for your e-commerce website to rank better, you should focus on creating impeccable, relevant, and engaging content for users.

After all, quality content means increased search rankings on search results, and more organic traffic coming into your site.

Website Speed

Site speed is known to be one of the leading SEO factors for years. Because Google wants to constantly improve one’s mobile experience, a fast loading website helps it do that.

Back in July 2018, Google announced that they’ll be focusing on mobile page speed, which is another reason why you should switch to a more mobile-friendly site.

Meaning, if your site isn’t loading as fast enough for mobile devices, your site could be potentially penalized.

Fortunately, you check with Google’s mobile testing tool to know how your site will measure up.

Social media signal

When people share your content on social media networks, that’s another clear cut sign that your site is valuable.

Although Google mentioned that social media signals aren’t a direct ranking factor, still, there’s no denying it that the top ranking sites on Google search results receive a lot of shares.

Why? Probably because of the following factors:

• These social media shares generate traffic to the site itself.
• More shares mean that the content is more likely to build on backlinks.

So, social media shares do help with your search engine rankings, even if it’s only in an indirect way.

User experience

For some time now, Google has been using artificial intelligence to rank webpages, and it calls this signal as RankBrain. Additionally, other signals can affect your search engine rankings:

• Click-through rate: The percentage of users that click through your site after it shows up on search results.
• Bounce rate: The number of users that click through your page only to quickly go back again on search results.
• Dwell time: How long users stay on your site after arriving.

So if users visit your site then bounce away, then Google will think that it isn’t relevant to their needs anymore. Now, if more and more people do this, you’ll find it harder to rank on search results.

On the other hand, if people click through your page and stay for a little while, then it’s a positive indicator for Google that the website is relevant to the user’s search.

So, make sure that your content matches the intent of the user by coming up and incorporating a more targeted keyword.

Also, try to optimize titles, descriptions, and content to earn clicks and deliver value. Doing so will boost your search engine rankings.

SEO Tips to Boost Website Traffic

Now that you some of the important factors, we have listed down eight SEO tips that you can follow to optimize your site and boost your traffic:

1. Eliminate anything that slows down your site

We couldn’t stress this enough: Your page load times are important. If your site loads fast, users will keep coming back for more. Not to mention that page load speed can affect your e-commerce fulfillment process.

Google’s algorithm will eventually notice your site’s popularity and will adjust the search engines accordingly, giving you higher rankings.

So, make sure that you take off any non-essentials that slow your site down. These include large images, flashy graphics, music players, unnecessary plug-ins, and videos.

2. Produce relevant content

None of your other efforts will matter if you create content sounding as if a robot wrote it. So, write high-quality content, have patience, and start seeing the results.

Here are some tips:

Create a readable content

A lot of people nowadays simply scan texts and not read a webpage from top to bottom.

Ensure that you provide a clear structure for every piece of content that you create. For instance, if you have a blog on WordPress, utilize headlines, subheadings, bullet points, and bold fonts in the most relevant sections of your copy.

You might also want to add an author box on your blog in case you accept guest posts.

Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content, also known as the content that shows up for several unique URLs, isn’t welcome at all in search engines and might cause your site a massive drop in traffic.

There are times, of course, that it’s hard to avoid duplicate content, especially if you’re an e-commerce site with the same product as your competitors. But ideally, try to make it as unique as possible. Use plagiarism checkers like Copyscape in order to ensure that your content is unique and original.

3. Conduct keyword research

Now another thing that you need to do is to choose a great keyword that you can focus on.

Search for a keyword or a phrase that you want your post to show up for in search engines. And one of the easiest ways for you to conduct keyword research is by using Google Keyword Planner. It is a free tool from Google that displays an estimate search volume for a given search phrase.

For instance, you noticed that “artisan cafe Chicago” is receiving 870 monthly searches, and higher than any word combinations you’ve searched previously. You can do your research, and plan on writing content that’s related to that topic.

4. Practice on-page optimization

On-page optimization is one of the most vital SEO considerations, especially if you’re a beginner, because there are a lot of small details and elements that are overlooked.

This includes your page title, meta description, header tags, URLs, and so on. Keep in mind that although these details might be minute, it plays a significant impact on your search engine rankings.

Here are some tips:

1. Your page titles should be clean, concise, and engaging. Ideally, it should be between 50-60 characters and must have your target keyword.
2. Meta descriptions must include your target keyword and other relevant terms. It should be between 150-170 characters and must include a call-to-action.
3. URLs should be short and descriptive. Ideally, you should remove stops words and it won’t exceed five worlds. In case you change your URL to improve your search engine ranking, you can implement redirects to communicate that a particular page moved location.
4. Use H2 and H3 subheaders. This is a great way to break down your content into supporting ideas. More so now that website visitors tend to just scan blog posts than read them from top to bottom.

5. Use social media

If the visual element is a forte of your business, then you should set up an account in more visual platforms like Instagram or Pinterest, wherein you can post high-quality photos.

If you’re a business that’s more service-oriented, you can use Quora to help position yourself as a thought leader or expert in your industry. Similarly, you can also consider platforms like Facebook and Twitter, as social signals coming from these sites can help improve your search engine rankings.

Use social media to build a community and interact with your fans and followers, share relevant information, and don’t spam them.  The main idea of social media is to be social. So you need to interact with them and not annoy them.

6. Link building

Off-page SEO, such as getting links from other sites, plays a crucial role in improving your website’s ranking and organic traffic.

That’s because incoming links are considered as “votes of trust” and could positively affect the rankings of a website. The more authoritative and relevant the links pointing to your site, the better it’s ranking position on search results.

Now, when it comes to link building, you need to understand three things:

1. Links are considered an essential aspect of SEO.
2. The quality of links is more important than the quantity.
3. It’s better to generate and build links naturally.

7. Configure 404 pages

At the end of the day, SEO is all about user experience, and having a proper 404 page can help you with that goal.

This page is shown whenever a user is searching for your page that doesn’t exist anymore or follows a broken link. Now, if your 404 pages aren’t configured, it could negatively impact the user experience.

Ideal 404 pages should:

• Provide the user a reason what happened to the page instead of displaying that it isn’t found anymore.
• Pick a design that is consistent with your branding or with the rest of your site.
• Provide the user with options on how to navigate on other parts of the page.

8. Mobile-friendly website

Your site’s mobile-friendliness also has a positive effect on your search engine rankings.

Because more and more people prefer to use mobile devices than desktops when accessing the internet, there’s a need to set up a mobile-friendly site. You also have to look out for the user’s experience the moment they land on your site:

• Have a responsive site that automatically fits any kind of device.
• Utilize large fonts for easy readability on the small screen.
• Place menus on your site that make it easy for your site visitors to navigate.
• Make sure that your most important content isn’t hidden by ads.

Final Thoughts

SEO might feel a little overwhelming at first. More so when search engines roll out a new algorithm update.

But following the tips we’ve mentioned in this article can help place your website on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Hopefully, with these tips and strategies in mind, you’re ready to make necessary changes in your site and optimize it for SEO.

The post Improve Your Ranking: 8 Expert SEO Tips to Boost Site Traffic first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 12:08 pm

The world of SEO is such a complicated and intimidating place. Doing SEO without the right tools in your arsenal is like going to war with a kitchen knife: you can, but you will have an awful time. Good thing developers have made tools and software that will help us in our SEO efforts.

Usually, they are cloud-based apps that allow people to work simultaneously.

Cloud software may not be for everyone, though. For the same price of around $100 per month, you can get your hands on something better, something more powerful: like SEO PowerSuite.

SEO PowerSuite is a software that will give you such tremendously powerful tools that will help you optimize your SEO endeavors. It automates SEO, giving you an enormous advantage among your competitors.

SEO PowerSuite contains four tools that will speed up your SEO ventures to Mach 4. These four tools include:

1. Rank Tracker
2. SEO Spyglass
3. Link Assistant
4. Website Auditor

In this review, we’ll feature SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Tracker.

We’ll cover things it can do, pros and cons, and why SEO connoisseurs like yourself need to think about getting your hands on SEO PowerSuite.

Let’s jump right in!

Best Rank Tracking Tools

Rank Tracker is a simple, yet powerful keyword rank checking tool under the SEO PowerSuite software.

It is a reliable keyword monitoring tool that allows you to track keyword performances and rankings, giving you a flawless and excellent SEO execution.

Using SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Tracker, you can automate your reports, trace your snippets, and find out the difficulty level of each keyword you nominate.

With this powerful tool, you can personally structure the way you make strategies to help grow your client’s businesses.

Key Features

Having a Rank Tracker in your arsenal is like Thanos having one of the Infinity Stones of SEO (The PowerSuite is the gauntlet, of course!) It allows you to do different things such as:

• Monitor Keyword Positions

If you need to check global or local keyword positions, then Rank Tracker is the right tool for you. It allows you to scan multiple keywords from all over 400+ search engines. Aside from that, you can also scour the web for listings, search results, and even spy on your competitor’s keyword rankings!

• Geo-Targeted Rank Tracking

Rank Tracker can accurately determine your geographical location and use that to your advantage. Are you in L.A.? London? Singapore? Rank Tracker can determine the highest-ranking keywords in your area and use them to optimize your SEO efforts. It can even assess keyword rankings from multiple and different places!

• Access to 23 Keyword Tools

With Rank Tracker, you can have your choice of keyword research method. You can use Google’s Adwords, Autocomplete, Related Searches, Bing’s Search Suggestion, and Related Search, Yahoo’s Search Assist, and many more.

As you go on your conquest of finding ideas for the best keyword, Rank Tracker will systematically gather those keywords for later assessment.

• Analyze Keywords

This tool can help you determine numerous keywords for you to prioritize.

It can also calculate Keyword Difficulty for every keyword that you have: something that will give you an insight as to what your competitors have

• Automated Reports

The hassle of receiving and creating manual reports is now gone.

Behold, an automated reporting system that can give you daily rank check depending on when you need it; daily, weekly, monthly: it depends on you.

Client Reviews

Many reviews claim that SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Tracker is an excellent tool for SEO campaigns.

It gave them tangible results by reporting accurate keyword rank tracking in multiple search engines.

Pros and Cons of Using SEO PowerSuite Rank Tracker

Pros:

1. Excellent value-to-cost ratio
2. Saves hours of work
3. Continuously upgraded
4. Astounding functionality

Cons:

1. Uses a lot of RAM

Rank Tracker’s Final Verdict

SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Tracker is an exceptional tool every SEO experts need to have.

It is neat, efficient, and, most of all, continuously improving.

With this tool, you can track the keyword rankings of your choice anywhere in the world while receiving automated reports from your desired time. Its keyword tracking ability is off the charts, something you need to best your competitors.

The tool may eat up some of your RAM, restrict you from further actions unless you have their license, and challenge you financially.

Still, in the end, the pros trump the cons: SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Tracker is one of the best rank monitoring tool for SEO purposes.

The post SEO PowerSuite Rank Tracker Product Review first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Oct 17, 2022 @ 9:12 pm

We are almost halfway through 2020! Even though digital marketing began back in the 1990s, it is not going anywhere as of yet. In fact, various advancements over the years have evolved it further to make the practice easier and even more useful.

Businesses all over the world are hustling to make themselves known by using advanced marketing strategies. SEO is an intrinsic part of any marketing campaign, and one aspect of it which cannot be overlooked is the local SEO.

Local seo is the component that works on promoting your business geographically.

Improving it will make it easier for people in your vicinity to find you, and bring you a lot more business from local relevant searches.

According to Think with Google, 2018 saw a whopping 900% increase in searches that contain ‘near me, today/tonight’ from the past two years.

In addition to that, conversion after local searches is much higher. Safari Digital reports about 72% of users to visit a store within 8km of where they were searching.

Even if you have just started your business, or already an established brand offline, you might be struggling to climb the search engine result pages. Hang in there, as you are in for some tried and tested tips to dominate your local market super fast.

Want your business to be in these top spots (aka snack pack)? Read on to know how you can achieve this.

Design a mobile-friendly website

The initial step even before you start working on Local SEO is to have a website that is optimized for the mobile phone.

Local searches are often carried in a hurry, which is why people use their smartphone the most to search for something nearby.

According to Junto, 61% of people who search on mobile are more likely to contact a local business that has a mobile-friendly site.

Use Google’s tool for checking whether your site is mobile-friendly or not.

Focus on optimizing your Google My Business listing

The foundation of Local organic SEO is Google My Business. It is an innovative tool that allows business owners to list their companies. It guides people who are looking for something with the related business and services nearby.

Without claiming your GMB profile and optimizing it well, you can never nail Local SEO. Don’t commit the same mistake as 56% of business owners, who, according to Safari Digital, have not claimed their GMB listing.

Make sure you put accurate information regarding your business. Double-check the physical address, as it is the most essential info according to 52% participants of Bright Local’s survey.

A discrepancy in name and address will negatively impact on citations, rankings, and will even confuse search engines.

Other than that, add a detailed description with keywords. Do add images of your store or office, opening and closing hours, and posts that announce events or discounts.

Read up the terms and conditions of Google My Business carefully to avoid violating any of them unknowingly in the future.

Optimize your website homepage according to Local SEO

One crucial step in local SEO is optimizing your business website accordingly. Here, you should add your NAP (name, address, and phone number) so that local customers who are directed to your site can quickly contact you.

Your homepage content should revolve around your location, and the name of your city should be mentioned a few times in the web copy.

Schema markup addition

Schema is the HTML code that is added to a website’s <head> part to help the search engines understand what the site is about. Schema markup affects how the site will be represented in search engine result pages.

For this, you need to have a schema code for a local business for your website. You can use an online schema generator tool to get the code, which you can then paste in <head> section of your website builder.

Schema markup addition will instantly improve your ranking in the local search results by increasing CTR.

The key to adding keywords

You can find the perfect keywords to rank on using google search bar’s auto-complete, or by using free and paid keyword finding tools.

Narrow down your search by analyzing the keywords your competitor is ranking on, and also related long-tail keyphrases. Create a google sheet by sorting out every keyword’s search volume, competition, and difficulty.

Once you have a list ready, begin your on-page SEO by adding these keywords in the URL, H1 tags, Title tags, and Meta description.

Finding keywords is relatively easy; however, using them all in only the title or meta description is not possible. Specifically, long-tail keywords, whose click-through rate is higher than generic keywords, cannot fit in basic descriptions.

So how should you go about it?

You can do so by adding a blog to your website. Write helpful, engaging content related to your business, and that’s how all those highly searched keywords can be added to your site. Don’t forget to keep in mind the do’s and don’ts of SEO while creating blog posts.

Let’s say you are offering plumbing services in Vancouver. You could publish content related to quick plumbing fixes, signs your kitchen/bathroom needs plumbing work, or even suggest types of fixtures and pipes.

Anyone in your locality who searches for this advice will easily find your services on the first page of the search engine. Additionally, it will help you build a lot of backlinks.

Build high-quality backlinks

Backlinks or inbound links have a profound effect on your local search ranking. Having a strong backlink profile translates to a highly optimized local SEO.

You can get quality backlinks by creating useful content for your target audience that is share-worthy. Make sure to add content related to local news, events to improve SEO. Also, use location names and locally used terms frequently in such content so that nearby customers get attracted.

You can also publish guest blogs on other websites to give interesting insights and establish yourself as an expert in your niche.

As every guest post of yours will show a link of yours, it may give you direct sales. Generally, people want to hire or buy from trusted industry experts.

One can find blogs that accept guest posts by searching words such as [location]+guest post or [location]+write for us.

Hiring local SEO professionals

Optimizing local SEO is not a quick and simple process. It requires a systematic, detailed approach as well as constant campaign tracking. If your business’s hectic schedule is creating a hurdle in optimizing your local SEO, consider hiring an expert to get behind the wheel instead.

However, I would like to add a word of advice here. Locals experts have a better understanding and experience of your area’s market position. They know the relevant location’s restrictions and regulations. Therefore, they will get your business on the map more effectively. For instance, SEO experts in Seattle can best handle your local SEO if your company relies heavily on Seattle based clients.

Analyzing competitors’ citations and building your own

Citations are crucially influential as they are one of the topmost ranking factors.

They are basically the mentions of your business on other websites. Build citations on business directories like Yelp, Glassdoor, and Foursquare. For added citations, use social networks, blogs, and other websites whose mention will add value.

A winning strategy in this regard is analyzing your competitor’s sources of citation. Tools like Whitespark can significantly help you with that. Keep your NAP consistent to avoid mismatched citations.

Ask for customer reviews and ratings.

Reviews signal customer’s trust towards your brand, and you should dedicate much of your efforts to fetching some good ones. Engage with your customers by staying active. Respond to their questions and reviews. According to the Moz Blog, Google reviews profoundly impact Google’s local rankings.

Pay special attention to the negative reviews and satisfy the customer by responding personally. You can, later on, ask them to update their comment on the listing, if their issue is resolved successfully. Remember Wendy Piersall’s saying that Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.

Final Thoughts

By now, we have explained most of the tips that can help you get to the top of SERP locally. Devise your marketing campaign according to these, and witness an assured increase in leads and sales as a result of optimizing Local SEO.

The post Local SEO Tips: 9 Ways to Rank on Google Maps first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 11:59 am

Organizing your website content is very crucial to not only audiences but also search engines. How you organize the content can make or break your site’s ranking by engines. The site should have content that is organized in a way that visibly communicates the relevance of topics to search engines. The foundation for having your site ranked for the desired keyword phrases and terms lies in proper internal linking, also known as virtual siloing and an ideal architecture.

Considering that siloing may be time-consuming, if you are going to do it to help in ranking your site and at the same time you have other work to do, for example, you are a student who is overwhelmed by your assignments or essays, you might want to consider seeking professional help for the academic work. Visiting Paymyessaywriter.com can help you with your academic essays and assignments. It allows you to free up your precious time to work on the issue of siloing your site.

But first things first, let’s look briefly at what is siloing?

What’s SEO Siloing?

To help your website rank well in SERPs for board keywords like “fruit candy” and longer, specific keyword phrases like “organic fruit slices candy,” your website needs to have clearly organized content so that it appears relevant for the terms and phrases.

Search engines like Google look at the structure of your site to determine the main topics as well as whether there is sufficient keyword-supporting content. It’s similar to what farmers do to their harvests of different produces. When a farmer harvests oats, barley, wheat, and others, they store each grain in a different silo, the reason being to help preserve the integrity of their produce. Storing all these products in the same silo mixed together would mean their value is reduced.

Siloing a site means grouping pages that are related, structurally, or by linking in order to have keyword-based themes for the site. You can silo your website to help distinguish the various content themes and allow search engines to easily and clearly understand what it’s all about the site. You don’t want to have a site that is seen to contain a disorganized mixture of content with no focus on keywords.

A silo strategy lays the fundamentals for ranking the site based on your preferred keywords or keyword phrases, and this is important in search engine optimization. It helps in positioning your site as an expert or authority source when audiences are looking for a specific topic.

Siloing a site helps improve its pages relevancy for the desired search terms and phrases. Links are placed strategically within the theme-focused parts of the site. This, in turn, helps to pass what is known as PageRank or linking value between pages that are closely related as well as landing pages to help reinforce the themes. 

Physical Siloing vs. Virtual Siloing

You can silo a website in two ways- physical siloing and virtual siloing. In physical siloing, it’s done through the directory structure, while virtual siloing is performed through the linking structure.

The URL address of a page within the site can help provide users as well as bots important clues regarding the page. Take this URL, for example; it hints that the page deals with some form of wireless mouse products by Logitech: https://www.windowscentral.com/best-logitech-wireless-mice

When you have a physical URL directory structure for a website done the same way you use a filing cabinet in organizing related pages, it helps create physical silos. You have each theme of a site with a group of pages within one folder that’s dedicated to a specific category, for example, “wireless.” In the same category, you will have subfolders representing different categories like “mouse,” “keyboard,” and “monitor.” 

Each file takes a distinct location in a particular category, and there aren’t two files that are filed into both categories- it’s either one or the other. It is important you realize that you don’t have to have the same page content being indexed under several URLs. When creating a physical silo structure, you need to make a directory structure that is in line with the different themes that are covered in your site.

On the other hand, virtual siloing entails the use of an internal link structure of a website. It involves how pages within a site link to other pages, and it helps in connecting groups of pages that are related and in separating unrelated pages. It also helps in strengthening the primary landing pages within every silo.

In physical siloing, you have theme-related pages being located in the same directory of a website. However, when it comes to virtual siloing, it’s formed by links placed between theme-related pages. Even when you don’t use physical silos, having virtual silos, or connecting related pages with the use of text links may be effective. That’s because spiders for engines crawl the content of a website by following its links – making it a powerful way to help with indexing and ranking.

When you link pages tightly related together in theme and topic, you consolidate the theme relevance to a particular part of your website. The linking patterns can help establish a site hierarchy with top-tier landing pages as well as support pages for every SEO silo. Instead of having the linking done incoherently, you can have distinct sections of a website using virtual siloing. For example, you could have a wireless mouse, cord-based mouse, USB-powered mouse. When linking support pages, they should link up to corresponding landing pages. 

Carefully linking in a website shows how different pages related to each other, and it helps reveal the topic structure of the website. In addition, it helps strengthen the main landing pages – and these landing pages are the ones you intend to show up within SERPs or research engine results. With virtual siloing, it contributes to an increased PageRank on the top-tier landing page of every silo. That top-level page becomes the most relevant or significant page on your website for the keyword associated with that theme. And this is how siloing helps to enhance your search engine rankings.

Ways to Silo Your Website

You can silo your website following these four steps:

• Come up with the overall theme for your site
• Choose the soloing strategy you will use
• Plan the linking structure
• Implement and build the site’s silos

Determining Website Theme

When determining your site’s theme, also work it out with keyword research. You need to know what content you want or plan to have, as well as what it is about. In determining the site’s theme, you will be answering questions such as, what subject matter currently rank for your site? What subject-themes appear legitimately relevant for the site? How would a person or user search for the content? And here, you should think of the main search queries that users place on the browsers so that search engines display the results. Last but not least, think of how to implement clear subject themes. 

While there are many factors to consider when determining and understanding how engines rank websites and identify the relevance of the sites to searcher queries, the subject matter expertise, as well as clear themes, are a driving force to the ranking of the website. If you want your site to rank for keywords in engines, it should offer information that is properly organized based on a clear structure. The format should also be easy for the engines to understand. Search rankings help a website to attract customers or users researching and shopping for services and products.

When identifying the site’s relevant themes, you can examine the past traffic data for the site. You may want to look at sources like PPC Programs, Google Search Console, Tracked Keyword Phrases, as well as doing Keyword Research. 

Identify a Siloing Strategy

It’s important you determine how you are going to implement a site structure that is able to identify the themes for your website clearly. You may decide to use physical siloing, virtual siloing, or both. 

While both virtual silos and physical directory silos allow you to come up with tight themes in linking strategies, they take different approaches to the concept. Virtual siloing is pretty essential; however, physical siloing helps reinforce the themes though it may not always be feasible. That being said, you need to design the silos prior to creating a website, if possible. This allows you to have more control over the design process. 

Plan the linking Structure

Look at your link structure right from the main navigation menu so that you understand how best you are able to connect pages together. This way, it helps to reinforce the themes you have chosen according to how users search for your content. A point to note here is that you will generally have not less than five supporting content to be able to establish a silo theme. When planning a site silo structure, there are things you should take into consideration. You need to establish a list comprising high search volume keywords. These should be keywords that your site already ranks for. Also, identify keywords relevant to the site. You can use the top search queries that users place when searching for your content or products and services. After you have identified the search queries, you can implement the subject or theme of your site. 

When it comes to internal linking, you need to realize it isn’t just about numbers. The Google algorithm today demands that links in websites should be placed in the right place. When doing internal linking within a silo structure, it is important you keep it within your category. Take, for example, you manage a wireless computer accessories store. In this case, the main category may include something like mouse, monitors, and keyboards. Under each section, you may have different brands of accessories. When on the mouse section, you may want to link the Logitech Mouse page from the Apple Mouse page.   

URLs containing parent pages need not link outside of the specific category or silo. Parent pages need to link to another parent page or pages. It is not advisable that you link to your home page from the parent or main pages because it can result in keyword cannibalization.

Implement and Build the Silos of the Site

When it comes to implementing and building your silos, you need to publish high-quality content. The content should include the targeted keyword phrases you have identified for the specific theme-based silo. Ensure you trim and create links to help connect supporting pages in each silo. It will also help in reinforcing the top-tier silo landing pages. 

In implementing internal links along with the best anchor text, you will link to other pages in a specific or same silo category. Website content silo helps increase your ranking power by giving more authority to a website regarding a specific theme or topic. It makes finding the content much easier since everything has been grouped together. Besides, website content silo is good for SEO as well as enhancing user experience (UX) on your site.

Often, you find great websites out there, but they are hidden from exposure to a wide range of search engine result pages or SERPs. The reason could be because the websites lack an organic SEO strategy, or the strategy doesn’t pay sufficient attention to siloing or clear subject relevance.

Besides, knowing exactly the amount of content you need to get a top-ranking within SERPs is quite empowering. Content alone can’t be enough to help your site rank well in search results; however, having sufficient content is essential to bring your site up on the SERPs.

Conclusion

When you have established your silo structure and identified the keyword phrases and the siloing strategy to use, whether physical or virtual or both, you need to ensure you maintain the silo. As you have competitive research along with additional content being added to help in shaping your site, you will need to ensure that you carefully plan and implement the category silos, internal linking, supporting content, and the silo strategy in general. Ensure you prune back while also expanding the silo content to help in improving the relevance of your site’s subject.

The post How to Structure Your Website Hierarchy to Make It a Silo first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Jun 4, 2024 @ 12:58 pm

SEO is an important part of your business. No matter what your niche is, it will be hard to grow if people can’t find your site on search engines or through organic backlinks on other websites. What exactly are SEO backlinks and why are organic ones important?

A backlink is any hyperlink that links from one webpage to another. An organic backlink is a link that is put on a page without the intention of influencing search engines. For example, if the link is sponsored, has tracking parameters, or redirects through monetization, Google’s algorithms will determine that your link isn’t organic.

Your goal should be to get as many organic links as possible because they are one of the factors that will make your website rank higher when someone searches for relevant keywords in a search engine. 

So, where do you start?

Identify Your Competitors

There are many people who avoid visiting their competitors’ websites and reading the content those competitors publish. This is a mistake. Your competitors are targeting the same market as you, so it is likely that they are attracting similar people. You can get lots of inspiration by researching how they do things.

The first step in getting your own backlinks is to find out which of your competitors are getting the most backlinks. To get that information you will need to create a list of their websites. If you don’t know who your competitors are there is an easy way to find out. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Do a Google search with keywords you expect your customer would use when looking for a website that is in your niche. The tops results should belong to competitors who are nailing SEO optimization.

Now that you have a list of websites, it is time to run each of them through a backlink checker. Backlink checkers are useful web crawlers that will find backlinks for you. They will also give you information on how much traffic each of those backlinks generates and lots of other useful information. You will then have a much shorter list of competitors that should contain only those that have the most traffic and biggest number of backlinks.

Analyze Your Competitors Backlinks

Okay, you have determined which competitors are getting lots of backlinks. It is now time to find out what kinds of websites are putting up all those links to your competitors. This is where a good backlink tracker will be useful again. It will let you open each of the webpages that have a link to the competitor you are researching.

If your competitor has loads of backlinks, there will be thousands of websites in results. Don’t worry, you don’t have to research all of those websites in detail. Open a bunch of tabs and give each of them a quick glance. There will be a bunch of unrelated websites, but there should also be a few groups of websites in a similar niche. Those are the groups you are interested in.

When you do this for all the competitors you are researching, you will find out what sort of websites are likely to mention your business. Most likely there will be several different groups of such websites. For example, if you are selling gardening supplies, you might find websites of florists, chili pepper bloggers, agriculturists, and so forth, on that list. The next step to get your own backlinks is to find out what kind of content each group shares.

What Do They Share?

Even if you know who is interested in putting links to your type of business, that doesn’t mean they will link just anything you publish. You should now open the links that link to your competitors and check what type of content is being linked. Once again, you will get various results. There might be links to their webshops, blog posts, homepages, about sections, etc.

Once you find out what kind of content each of the groups is likely to share you should compare your website to those of your competitors. Find out what is different and if you lack something they have on their websites that can make you more successful.

If you find your website is lacking you should focus on fixing one part of the website at a time. Choose one type of content, based on the group you want to attract first. For example, if you noticed that florists are attracted to your competitor’s blog, and they are the group you want to attract the most, focus on improving your blog.

If your website is of the same quality or better than your competitors’, then it means that your problems are elsewhere and you should move to the next step immediately. Otherwise, work on improving your website before moving forward.

Reach Out To Others

Your website is now top-notch but you are still not getting backlinks. This is can be expected if you haven’t worked on your SEO previously. After all, it is hard to find a business online if they are ranked low in searches. Most of the people don’t look past first 10 results in Google search. Instead, you will have to find those willing to link your site.

Thanks to the research you did in the previous steps, you have already found some. It is time to start getting in touch with them. Send emails and ask if they are interested in collaborating with you. The type of collaboration will depend on what kind of content they share, what their business does, and how that relates to your line of work.

This is where you will have to get creative to motivate them to visit your website, to publish a guest post written by you, or to let them publish a guest post on your website. There are various ways of approaching this step in the process of getting backlinks, and you will have to feel out what will work best for your site.

Consider Hiring SEO Professionals

Generating organic backlinks can be time-consuming and not everyone has time to do it on their own. Even if you do have time, there is a possibility that you would rather invest that time somewhere else. If that is the case, you should consider hiring companies like ourselves or KingMakers who specialize in partnering with website owners.

Whatever you decide to do, you can’t ignore SEO. Good SEO will drive new customers to your website and improve the growth of your business. If you hire professional help; do research on the company and their track record of SEO wins. This way you will get to know people who are interested in your business and get more opportunities for growth and collaboration.  

The post How To Build SEO Backlinks first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 12:18 pm

As you are aware, SEO is fluid and always evolving. This evolution is due to the introduction of newer methods of optimization. Schema markup is one of the latest forms of optimization. When utilized correctly, it can really impact your business’s ranking in the search engine result page (SERP).

What is Schema Markup?

A schema markup is a code you put in your website that informs search engines to provide additional information to users when your website pops up in searches. It is part of structured data that has helped search engines transform throughout the years from just blue links to more detailed results. Schema markups show up on numerous search engines, including the three main ones, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

In the example above for Ticketmaster France, the schema informs users of the upcoming concerts in France for which they can purchase tickets. This schema allows them to click directly to the concert with ease. Check out the Complete Guide to Structured Data by 3 WhiteHats

Why Are Schema’s Important?

Schema further enhances your website for search engines. It provides search engines with more details about the data on your website, helping to explain the content on it. The schema breaks down the content; whereas without the schema, the search engines could return results that may not be related to your website.

It doesn’t just help search engines but also users. It provides them with more details regarding your website. The information provided depends on what you share in your schema. Think of it as an online “business card,” which entices users to come to your website over your competitors.

The tactic is a great way to rank better for articles, events, products, and so on. While there is not a clear link between schema’s and ranking higher there is some correlation. So it definitely is a tactic you should use to help boost your website’s SEO.

Your Guide To Schema Markup

Now that you know the importance of schema markup, there should be no question of whether or not you should implement the tactic. If you want your business to rank higher on search results and also stand out amongst the competition, schema is the way to do it.

Step 1: Start with Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper

This Google tool allows you to structure your markup with ease. It guides you throughout the process making it easier and less stressful on you. Once you open the tool, it prompts you to select the type of data you want to markup: an article, event, product, and so on. Select the data type and paste the URL or HTML to the page and click “Start Tagging.” For the purpose of the guide, we have selected an article, and will go through details related to that. Schema is a great way to generate more traffic to the business blog you just started.

Step 2: Tagging Data

Now, you can start to tag items from the web page you have selected. If you’ve selected articles, it will allow you to tag different data from within the article that highlights things like author, name, and other such data, as seen below.

You will notice the web page in a left panel with the data items on the right. In order to tag the data, you need to go one by one, highlighting items in your article and tagging them under the “My Data Items” panel. So start by highlighting the name of the article first and then tag it in the data item panel.

As soon as you highlight the name, a drop-down menu appears which allows you to select the type of data you have highlighted.

Continue to do the same for the author, date published, image, and so on.

As you start tagging various elements of the article, you will notice the information appears in the data panel. In the above example, you notice that the name of the article, “101 Best (FREE) Ways How To Promote A Blog And Increase Traffic” has been highlighted and shows as the name in the data panel. Add as much information as you can, going by the options you have in the data panel.

Don’t worry if there is some data missing, like for example date published, you can leave whatever information that is not present blank. In our example, we have tagged the name, author, date published, and image.

Step 3: Creating HTML

Once you have finished the tags, you can prompt the tool to “Create HTML.” This will present the HTML of the page with all the tags, microdata, you selected from the article.

Step 4: Adding the schema to your web page

The tool will highlight specific HTML text that should be added to your CMS or source code of the website. You can also download the HTML file, copy and paste it directly to your website code.

Step 5: Test the web page

You can test the code generated with the tool before publishing it on the website. The Structured Data Testing Tool will help you do that.

Once the tool opens up, it gives you the option to choose between pasting a URL or code snippet, click on the code snippet option.

You can paste the code into the tool.

Then click on  “Run Test” to see how the schema would appear in search results. The tool will also display all the data that you have added.

If you need help determining what type of schema to use and how to go about it, you can refer to schema.org. They have a list of the different types of schema and how they are commonly used. This will help further explain the significance of each type of schema you use for your data.

You also need to understand that to make the most of schema, the more you markup the better. So when you select the content to mark up, be sure to break it down as much as possible when you tag it. This also means that you want to make markups of all the important content on your website; be it an event, product, person, or review.

Conclusion

It is surprising to see that many businesses still don’t utilize schemas considering how easy they are to create. It won’t drastically change your ranking but does help. Businesses should definitely consider schema to markup as much data on their website as possible.

You would think that schema would become less relevant with time as more websites utilize it. But if you consider that search engines reward businesses that value user experience and provide more information about their content, schema should be relevant for years to come. So don’t delay the inevitable, enhance your SEO efforts with schema markup.

The post How To Write And Optimize Schema For Your Website: A Step-By-Step Guide first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 12:15 pm

Many people struggle to increase conversions through multimedia content. Some developers add videos to their content. Most web users prefer high-resolution videos. It is necessary to optimize your website using an ideal SEO tool to attract users. We present to you a guide on how to optimize videos.

1. Keyword Research

Video keyword research is different than ordinary keyword research. Typically, YouTube suggests videos to web users rather than through search engines. It is prudent to optimize videos for Google search and YouTube. However, the search generates 25 percent of video traffic for most websites.

Developers get the most traffic from YouTube suggested videos. For example, a keyword that generates 100,000 google searches per month might generate 50 YouTube searches. Here are five effective video keyword research methods:

· YouTube Suggest: This technique resembles Google Suggest. It provides several suggestions when you search for a keyword. YouTube enables you to get the most popular keywords. Insert an underscore before the keyword to get suggestions.

· TubeBuddy Tags: It displays the precise tags which other websites use in their videos. Install the extension in Google Chrome and check out a video uploaded on your competitor’s website. You will get a list of video tags. Green numbers indicate the rank a video has in a typical YouTube search. Add poorly optimized videos with a low keyword rank. You can outrank it by uploading a high-quality optimized video.

· Tubular Labs: A unique program allows developers to view rival channels. Tubular Labs offers attractive topics and keywords for videos. However, you need to sign up in the program and connect it to an active YouTube channel. Click “Insights” to view the videos which your audience watches when they are not checking your website.

· YTCockpit: It is an SEO tool that developers use to conduct infographic research on YouTube. Enter a keyword idea in the tool to get a variety of suggestions. Each keyword has crucial metrics such as CPC and the search volume.

The tool displays Google searches as monthly searches. Although they might be inaccurate, these figures enlighten you about how a certain topic interests your audience. Moreover, it displays the number of comments, likes and the video length for all videos with a keyword rank.

· YouTube Analytics Stats: YouTube Analytics is appropriate for channels with several video views. It provides awesome keywords with ranks. Click on the Traffic Sources and Analytics on the YouTube dashboard. Click on the YouTube Search icon to get keyword suggestions. You could optimize a video around a certain keyword to improve its YouTube search rank. Also, you can create a video for the keyword.

2. Create Videos

Most high-resolution videos have a high YouTube rank. They have five key features:

· Total Watch Time: A crucial factor that earns a video a high YouTube ranking. Total Watch Time refers to the watch time minutes which a video generates. It is visible in YouTube Analytics. SEO experts recommend creating long videos to optimize your watch time. Generally, most viewers watch 40 percent of a video. High-ranking videos normally have an extended watch time. They have high audience retention.

recommend creating long videos to optimize your watch time. Generally, most viewers watch 40 percent of a video. High-ranking videos normally have an extended watch time. They have high audience retention.

· Audience Retention: It is the percentage of your video that an audience views. Focus on the initial 15 seconds of your video to retain the audience. Analyze the retention reports of your videos to assess its performance. You could apply pattern interrupts in your videos to reset the attention of your audience.

· Session Watch Time: It is the amount of time web users spend on a channel after viewing a video. YouTube rewards videos that retain users on the platform. However, there is no precise method you could measure the Session Watch Time. Nevertheless, you can optimize it by creating playlists and include a link in your website. Use YouTube’s End Screen to encourage your audience to spend more time on YouTube.

· User Engagement: An optimized video should actively engage its viewers. YouTube measures how an audience comment, like, share, subscribe or add a video to their playlist. You could ask users to leave comments about your videos or add clear CTAs. Reply to their comments to attract more comments and higher rankings.

3. Video Optimization

There are several factors to consider when optimizing a video. A nice video title contains a target keyword. It has a high click-through-rate (CTR). Write long descriptions for your videos for YouTube to understand their topics. Include YouTube video tags for the video to attract viewers. Upload a clear transcript to ensure that YouTube clearly understands each keyword.

YouTube mainly relies on CTR to rank videos. A video could get a high ranking if many people click on it while searching for a target keyword. Besides comprising a target keyword, a video title should attract many clicks. Thumbnails can have a positive or adverse effect on your video. Ensure that they are interesting and unique. Conduct further infographic research to improve your YouTube profile. Include the URL and follow links to your Facebook or Twitter account.

4. Channel Authority

A channel’s authority determines how videos perform. If you upload a video in a high-authority channel, it is likely to get a high YouTube ranking. Ensure that your channel stands out from those of your competitors to attract new visitors. Include an alluring channel header and an animated logo. The right channel description contains several keywords to boost its ranking. You could ask viewers to subscribe to your channel after watching each video.

To ensure that your channel stands out from those of your competitors to attract new visitors, you can use find YouTube banner templates to help your channel look better

5. Video Ranking

Google uses specific keywords to generate video results. Create videos around keywords with existing videos to get a high ranking. Build high-quality backlinks to improve your rank. YouTube videos get higher ranks compared to self-hosted videos.

Add the video at the top section of your website to display it as the main multimedia content. Publish a detailed transcript below the video to enable search engines to understand it clearly. Optimized transcripts have high readability.

6. Video Promotion

Create an effective promotion strategy to improve your YouTube ranking. You could include them in an email list for your subscribers to view it. Share it on Facebook and Twitter to increase conversions. Some people embed their videos in their blog posts.

Optimizing videos is a challenge for some developers. Infographic research is necessary to create a high-resolution video. Factors such as video title, video ranking, video optimization, and promotion determine a video’s rank in a YouTube search. Use an efficient SEO tool to generate the right keywords for your videos.

The post A Step-By-Step Guide On How To Optimize Videos first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Oct 15, 2024 @ 5:00 am

When it comes to running a business, there’s a lot involved. From looking after sales, employees, and customers, it can be hard for you to get ahead and work out key areas that can boost your long term sales. When you take your business online, however, this is an entirely new ball-game. In order for your website to be successful, you need to know how to build a great SEO digital marketing strategy that can be implemented as soon as possible to get the best effect.

If you’re unsure of how to do this, let’s take a look at this search engine webmarketing123.com guide on how you can achieve this overall. Let’s get started.

Steps On Creating An SEO Strategy For Your Business

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

Before you can create the bulk of your campaign, you first need to know who your target audience is. How do you do this? This can be done by narrowing down key demographics. If you’re a business that specializes in fishing, for example, you could do something like this: 

As you can see, this shows you who your target audience is and who you’re trying to target with your SEO campaign. Understanding your target audience can then help you to know where to spend your money and where to avoid wasting it.

Step 2: Define Your Keywords

The internet is run by keywords. When you Google something, you place keywords into the search bar. Google will then give you optimized results. This is why choosing the right keywords is important. How do you find which one is right, though? This can be done through keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner.

When searching for the right keywords, you need to look into the different types of keywords. These include:

• Broad Match – Broad match keywords are generic keywords that are usually single words like, basketball, toys, cows etc. These are very broad and are generally used by many people but also have high competition.
• Exact Match – Exact match are keywords that are exact matches of what a person might be looking for. These can look like shoes for men, land for sale, kids toys for girls, christmas gifts for grandparents. These types of keywords are more popular when choosing keywords but do have high competition as well.
• Long Tail Keywords or Phrase Match – These keywords are very specific and don’t have a high search result each month but also don’t have high competition. These can be something like: Cannon H143 High Definition Camera, X-files Season 9 Blu Ray DVD Box Set etc. These are long specific keywords that people use when trying to find a specific type of product.

When choosing keywords, it’s a good idea to have a mixture of all three with Exact Match and Long Tail keywords being on top. They should also be relevant with what you’re selling as well, so people aren’t disappointed when they click through to your site after Googling specific keywords.

Step 3: Audit Your Website

The next step is to audit your website to make sure it’s up to date. When auditing your website, here’s some things to consider:

• Check the length and age of your content on your homepage, about us page and other pages that are key. Generally, sub-pages are 500 words while your homepage should be around 1000 words. Make sure the content you have is always unique and not copied. It should incorporate some of the keywords you want to rank for.
• Check how fast your website loads. A slow-loading website not only affects your SEO but how long your visitors are on your website. Make sure to keep your website speed under 3 seconds of less otherwise you can lose traffic.
• Is your website mobile-friendly or has a responsive design? If not, it needs to. A responsive design means it will shrink or resize to the screen-size when your website visitor is viewing your site.
• Do any of your pages have an error? If so, this needs to be fixed. You can find broken link checkers online to use. This will help you determine if any pages have this error.
• Are you continuously updating your blog on a weekly or monthly basis? If not, creating a content strategy and calendar is a great option.
• Are login areas, forms, and your checkout process working well?
• Do you offer social-sharing icons to help people spread the word about your business?
• Does your site meet expectations when visitors view it after clicking through based on their keyword search?

These are just some of the key things you should look for when auditing your website. By updating your content, especially when using your keywords and using fresh, unique content, you will have a higher chance of getting indexed better in Google.

Step 4: Decide On The Best Strategy To Get Your Message Across

There are multiple ways on how you can market to your audience. However, not every marketing channel will be best for your needs. This is where you need to decide where your audience hangs out the most. Some marketing strategies and channels include, but aren’t limited to:

Social Media Marketing

With the rise of social media, it’s no wonder many businesses tend to use social media marketing as part of their SEO strategy. When looking to market on social media, you need to work out where your target audience is hanging out. This may be in certain groups around a particular niche, with influencers in your niche and more. Once you’ve narrowed down where they hang out on social media, you can start to infiltrate into this area by marketing to them more effectively.

Video Marketing

Places like YouTube offer a great platform for people to really up their game when it comes to video marketing. To create engaging content, you don’t necessarily need expensive tools. Using a free video editor can help you get started without the cost barrier. Some people don’t like to read but they do enjoy watching videos. This is where incorporating video marketing strategies around your niche or what your target audience likes is key. Look at what other competitors do when they work on their video marketing. See whether you can create a video that’s more enticing than your competition to get their attention.

Content Marketing

Many people like to read blogs and other content to get some good information. These people tend to hang out with blogging influencers. Because of this, it’s a good idea to try partnering with influencers in your niche to guest post or gain a review from them with a backlink to your business. This can help with referral traffic and can also help target more specific audience members as well.

These are just three of the most powerful content marketing channels you can use. Others that can help include, but aren’t limited to:

• Email marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• PPC advertising

By incorporating one or more of these into your strategy and A/B testing, the results over a period of time you have a higher chance of getting better overall results from your marketing efforts.

Overall

When it comes to digital marketing strategies and where to start, these tips above can help you get started. There’s a lot involved in this type of marketing, however, with patience and the willingness to learn, you can create a powerful SEO strategy for your business. Are you ready to get started?

The post SEO Digital Marketing Strategies For Every Business Owner first appeared on SEO Optimizers.