Keyword Rankings Are Meaningless: Learn How to Grade Your SEO

Like many enterprise proprietors and executives, you possibly test the effectiveness of your search engine optimization marketing campaign through googling the key phrases you suspect are maximum essential to see in case you display up on the primary page. And whilst you acquire reports about your internet site traffic, you cognizance at the chart that indicates common ratings to your centered keywords.


When you’re spending precise money on seo, it’s common to obsess over your keyword ratings. You’re aggressive and, to you, prevailing on-line method claiming the pinnacle spot in google consequences. The trouble is key-word rankings are an beside the point metric to gauge on line success. To in reality recognize whether or not your search engine optimization campaign is running, you want to examine which measurements deserve your attention.


Related: 10 basics to expertise seo


Relevancy gets effects.

Lengthy-tail keyword phrases are the various building blocks of an search engine optimization approach. They're used to optimize copywriting, metadata and link-building strategies. They serve to reinforce your internet site’s relevancy so the right internet pages appear amongst search effects for the right humans within the right places.


However it doesn’t depend how your website ranks for every precise search word due to the fact there is extensive range in how humans search -- mainly with the growth of voice searches -- and the outcomes google suggests every man or woman based totally on his or her records, vicinity, device and other information.


There is no generic "web page 1." google is customizing search consequences the use of rankbrain, artificial intelligence that analyzes search queries to provide better answers -- making effects less predictable and giving web sites much less manage over whilst and where they seem. This indicates your page 1 may be absolutely unique than what your friend sees five miles away.


Google search console affords proof. This tool shows the actual phrases humans searched whilst your internet site was amongst consequences. You'll see your web site's common rank for those searches too. Using this statistics, it is clear that you must now not choose your seo success on how one specific word ranks when numerous different comparable search terms -- the terms humans genuinely used -- are displaying your site in the top positions.


Related: the 7 pinnacle competencies you want to be accurate at seo


An seo strategy that builds your website’s relevancy and authority in the favored geographic place will ensure the site will be visible for a diffusion of seek phrases. This will increase the number of possibilities on your website to be visible amongst effects.


High-quality content on and rancid your website and the usage of strategic hyperlink-constructing procedures (inner hyperlinks and inbound links) is a vital factor to achieving relevancy. This method protects the internet site’s viability towards the common adjustments in google’s guidelines and priorities.


Degree natural growth.

Now which you recognise to disregard keyword rankings, how do you examine whether your natural seek relevancy and visibility are growing?


Make sure the number of latest site site visitors arriving thru organic search is developing, month to month and 12 months over 12 months.

Make certain the wide variety of visits and new visitors from within your target marketplace is growing.

Anticipate accelerated conversions, particularly the ones from visitors who arrived thru natural search. Track the extent of specific cellphone calls to a website call-monitoring variety and the range of contact paperwork submitted.

Associated: seo educational: 12 immutable laws for dominating google's search


Conversions rely.

Don’t let ego fuel your obsession with key-word ratings. And take into account that your personal seek enjoy isn't always what your prospective clients see. Nor does it constitute the effectiveness of different companies’ seo campaigns or whether or not their websites successfully convert clients.


Focus on the outcome. Your goal is for the cellphone to ring and your inbox to be inundated with contact forms so your agenda is full. To get there, consider an professional who will construct a campaign that uses a verified manner, creates unique branded content and monitors relevant metrics.

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3 Tips for Writing Online Ad Headlines and Text That Grab Your Buyers' Attention

The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes and Bryan Todd’s book Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | IndieBound

Just as with print advertising, on web pages, your headline swings the biggest difference in response. It’s in that split second of reading your headline copy that your customer first makes up their mind whether or not you’re really relevant.

So start with that keyword your customer just typed in and fit it into your headline. That will be the first signal to them that you’re truly relevant. This means you’ll want to create enough different ad groups that each of your major keywords can have an ad of its own.

Related: 5 Steps to Finding the Most Profitable Keyword

For instance, let’s say that you sell custom power supplies. There’s certainly more than one way potential customers might come looking for what you sell. They might search for “adaptors,” or “power supplies” or “transformers.”

Go to your major keyword tool, such as Spyfu or Google’s Keyword Planner tool, and come up with all the possible major variations and related terms for your market niche. Then, separate them out into smaller groups that you can match to specific ads. For example:

Custom Power Adaptors—Get a Quote Today
www.xyzadaptors.com/Adaptors
Fast Custom Production Time. Excellent Local Support.
Huge Range of Adaptors

adaptor
adaptors
ac adaptor
power adaptor
custom adaptors
This ad isn’t very flashy, is it? It’s not loaded with over-the-top language. In fact, to folks like you and me, it’s probably boring. But that’s OK. It’s not meant for the average guy on the street. This particular company caters to engineers. It speaks the language that engineers would understand, relate to, and appreciate. It matches its audience just fine. And it gets a good clickthrough rate.

Use your major keywords in your headline, and create as many different ad groups as you need to do this with all of your biggest keywords. That’s what makes the formula work.

Related: How to Seamlessly Include Keywords in Your Web Content

Your ad text: Where your inner salesperson comes alive
After your headline, you’ve still got a second chance to convince your customer even further that you’ve got what he wants and get more clicks. There’s a second secret that makes this work. Check out the difference between these two ads:

Popular Ethernet Terms
3 Page Guide—Free PDF Download
Complex Words—Simple Definitions

0.1% CTR



Popular Ethernet Terms
Complex Words—Simple Definitions
3 Page Guide—Free PDF Download

3.6% CTR

The second ad got 36 times the CTR as the first! What happened? What was the secret?

Look closely at the two ads. They both have the exact same wording. There’s only one difference between them. The first ad listed features and offers first, benefits second. The second ad listed benefits first.

Features and offers are what your product has or what you’re going to do. They describe it, what it includes, and how big or small or robust or thorough it is. Benefits, on the other hand, are the emotional payoffs your customer gets from using your product.

So, the list of features for a book-and-video course you sell may include these items:

12 timeless principles
17 brief, easy-to-understand video tutorials
24 chapters, 222 pages of rock-solid content
64 full-color photos
Helpful, easy-to-read charts and graphs
Step-by-step tips and instructions
Fascinating stories, anecdotes, and personal experiences
Introduction by Malcolm Gladwell
But your list of benefits will tell your customer how they’ll actually be helped by what you’ve written. Sometimes, there’s a little bit of crossover between these and the features:

Achieve a 46 percent improvement in less than 30 minutes.
Reach your goals in one-fourth the time using the 80/20 principle described in Chapter X.
Apply any one of these 12 techniques immediately, and see instant results.
Catapult energy levels, convert fat into muscle, and develop strength, endurance and flexibility all at the same time.
Discover how making more mistakes can be a strategy that builds your skills even faster.
Get compliments from your friends as they ask you again and again (jealously), “What has happened to you?”
You don’t have to be a master copywriter to convince your customer they’ll get something of value. State your case simply and clearly, and test to see if putting the benefits up front and the features second will boost your response.

Related: 3 Tools to Uncover Your Competitor's Keywords

More rules of the road...
Our friend Richard Stokes and his team over at AdGooroo (www.adgooroo.com) shared some examples of legacy affiliate ads that have stellar performance on Google and therefore get solid positions and low bid prices, and which get served well above 95 percent of the time on searches. Here are a couple:

Keyword “FTD fruit baskets”:

Fruit Gift Baskets, FRESH
capalbosOnline.com/Since-1906
Always Fresh! Register & Save 5% on
Every Order. Nationwide Delivery.

Keyword “fashion sneakers”:

Fashion Sneakers & Shoes
www.zappos.com/Fashion-Sneakers/
Upgrade to Free Overnight Shipping
By Ordering One Item of Clothing!

80/20 Sales and Marketing
80/20 Sales and Marketing
By: Perry Marshall
Buy From
Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, 3rd Edition
Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, 3rd Edition
By: Perry Marshall
Buy From
Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords, 5th Edition
Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords, 5th Edition
By: Perry Marshall
Buy From
Ultimate Guide to Local Business Marketing
Ultimate Guide to Local Business Marketing
By: Perry Marshall
Buy From
80/20 Sales and Marketing
80/20 Sales and Marketing
By: Perry Marshall
Buy From
Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, 3rd Edition
Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, 3rd Edition
By: Perry Marshall
Buy From

1
2
3
4
Why do these work?

Both include the keyword phrase in the ad’s headline.
Both make careful use of exclamation points.
The second has an implicit call to action (“Upgrade to . . .”).
Each word is capitalized, and the first ad makes use of all caps.
The second ad makes careful use of the word “Free.”
Specific, concrete numbers are used wherever possible.

 

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9 Ways Startups Fuel Great ROI From Their Existing Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing still remains one of the most cost effective marketing techniques that is widely adopted by most of the businesses worldwide.

Nearly all -- 93 percent -- of B2B companies rely upon content marketing for demand generation and brand building. Startups already know the potential that content marketing holds for them. However, that power factor still remains missing that can bring in more customers and retain the existing ones.

Here are nine effective ways to boost your existing content marketing strategy.

1. Create content based on user persona.

Persona is a fictional representation of your ideal audience. You need to answer the basic question of who you are writing for? Before you start preparing content. If you have an idea of your target audience then it becomes easier for you to prepare content.

Document your persona using elements like:

-- Age group.

-- Gender.

-- Likes/Dislikes.

--The pain points and how your content can solve the problem.

-- Is the target a decision maker?

-- Which device do they use to access information?

-- When do they prefer to read?

-- Are they active on social media?

-- Which social channels do they prefer and at what time?

-- Do they enjoy watching videos?

-- Which brands do they follow and why do they follow them?

-- What influences them to share content?

Related: The Science of Building Buyer Personas (Infographic)

I will also recommend you to read the buying process map before you prepare the content calendar.

2. Identify the crucial micro moments.

As a business, you should remain aware of the micro moments that are bringing in and converting the people.

Recognizing the most critical micro moments for your brand is an art. It implies making sense of why individuals turn to mobile and when your brand can be generally useful.

Catch your audience’s attention follow the below-given suggestions:

-- Identify the Micro-Moments that Matter the Most to Your Business: Whether that is to draw customers attention to your website or to buy your product online, what are the micro-moments you have to prevail upon?

-- Convey on needs at the time: Streamline your content to fit these moments and also make sure that information is bite-sized, simple to consume and visually inspiring.

-- Measure Results: The key to any marketing activity is to evaluate the outcomes and choose whether the outcome was worth the time and cash.

Related: Leveraging Micro-Moments in Your Content Campaign

3. Prepare a solid layout for the content using Gestalt principles.

The use of Gestalt principles helps to create great designs. Designs need to be coherent, associated and bound together. 

Here are prominent Gestalt principles that you should use for your content layout:

-- Proximity: Proximity can make your images stronger by gathering your subjects together with a goal. You should make use of proper spaces in order to hold the attention of the visitors and properly arrange the text into one group, appropriately spacing it from the CTA on your site page.-- Similarity: Similarity occurs when shapes, colors, sizes or objects look enough similar to be perceived as a group or pattern in the viewer’s mind.

When you use all these components in your images it gives your viewers a  feeling of rhythm and will mean harmony.

-- Continuation: You should make use of text and images to manipulate the direction in which the visitor will look.

This could be awesome for your landing pages. Having flow can grab your audience’s attention right to the call to action.

-- Closure: One of the approaches to keep the viewer associated with the images is to have them finish a picture, shape, or an idea.

By having the viewer work at filling in the missing pieces in an image, will turn them into an active applicant, and they will also stick for a long time taking a look at your site images.

-- Simplicity: This is also an important concept that you can follow in your design, as it's important to keep your website pages clutter free with a specific goal to streamline the procedures leading to transformation

-- Figure/ground: It basically refers to the relationship between an object and its environments. It's important that you should make a clear difference between the figure and the ground.

You need to take this principle into consideration in order to create beautiful graphics and if you want to come up with exclusive logos.

Related: Boost Facebook Engagement With These Three Psychology Principles

4. Don’t ignore aesthetics.
Aesthetics simple means having visually appealing content. The attention span of readers comprises of a few seconds and you need to make an instant impact that persuades the reader to take an action.

An aesthetic design helps to attract more attention, improve design usability, enhance perceive credibility and influence the brand choice.

Here is how you can make your content visually more appealing:

-- Make your content easy to scan and use bullet points and numbering wherever needed.

-- Use responsive design and avoid grammatical mistakes.

-- Add relevant images and videos that explains your content well.

-- Use proper contextual links and similar posts feature in order to make it easier for the readers to click on the links. This will help to reduce the bounce rate and improve the overall time on page.

-- Adopt an easy navigation that is mobile friendly and use effective CTAs that matches the main theme.

Related: The Fascinating Connection Between Design, Human Nature and Buying Decisions

5. Leverage the power of content curation.
Content curation will help you to save time and produce lots of content in order to generate indirect traffic and conversions.

Major benefits of content curation include:

-- Allows you to attract a huge amount of traffic.

-- You can create content really fast so this allows you to produce more content for increased social sharing.

-- Enhances your brand identity by strengthening and broadcasting your brand values.

-- Helps you compete effectively and efficiently, and also offer you with unique benefits critical in today’s market.

You can use tools like Scoop.it to curate content and reach the masses. It is easy to use and its premium subscription which starts at $11 a year comes with more features such as the ability to customize Scoop.it, make use of analytics as well as to distribute an email newsletter.


Related: Four Ways to Stock Your Content War Chest

6. Adopt a storytelling approach.
It is one of the most powerful way of attracting audience’s attention. It has the power to form a personal relationship with your audience and also helps you in building an attractive and friendly platform for you and your brand.

Follow the below given points to improve storytelling while building your brand:

-- Know about your audience is the first step you need to consider when creating a story. You have five minutes to grab your audience’s attention while telling your story in the right place, time as well as in the right context.

-- Make use of various platforms and channels in telling stories to your readers, which will help you in making your brand messages more appropriate.

-- Be specific in telling a story and also support your videos with micro moments, as it will help your brand to connect at a much higher level with your audience.

-- Be authentic, as original is better. Don’t try to polish things in the hope that it will look pleasant to your audience, doing this can sometimes have the adverse result.

-- Make it more actionable as it will help your audience to take immediate action.

Related: The Five Elements of Storytelling Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know

7. Use the right tools to save time and resources.
Hard working content marketers do all the work themselves while smart ones make use of tools!

Outbrain

If your content is facing publishing and distribution related problems then you can use this tool. It will help you in achieving the awareness for your content and also your brand on authoritative sites as well.

HubSpot

This tool provides you with great customer support and it has many tools that you can use for monitoring and generating an effective blog posts and landing pages.

HubSpot has social media analytics and message-scheduling capabilities by which your content can flawlessly publish to social media platforms after you finish creating your content.

BuzzSumo

This tool will help you in telling the performance of your content and breaks down that performance by numerous metrics through domains, keywords etc. You can use it free for the first five searches and can find out how much it is helpful for your content marketing strategy.


By using this tool you can also find out which content is being shared the most.

Related: The 25 Tools Every Entrepreneur Should Know About

8. Run PPC ads on selected platforms.
PPC still remains one of the most popular and highly effective choices when it comes to lead generation. Especially for startups where it is necessary to raise up the revenue, you need immediate results. PPC is an ideal way to grab more clicks in no time and improve your ROI.

Writing attractive and persuasive PPC ad copy will also help you in grabbing the attention of your audience to click on your content.

Use platforms like Reddit, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn or any other platform whose demographics matches the demographics of your target audience.

Make use of orient’s model when designing image ads. If your ad contains images of people, place them toward your CTA and avoid positioning your models towards the viewer as those front-facing images will attract attention toward the model, rather than the essential parts of your ad.

In order to rank high in search and grab your customer's attention, ensure that your content should be of high quality, relevant as well as SEO-ready.

Related: Five Reasons Why Pay Per Click Ads Work for Small Business

9. Take the help of micro influencers.
Micro influencers are an ideal target community for startups because they can be reached easily. Micro influencers can be anyone from a blogger to a niche expert who have a loyal following of people. If you can convince such micro influencers to promote your brand then you have hit the jackpot!


Micro-influencers can help you in:

-- Increase engagement: Micro-influencer can bring your brands and products in front of the audience.

-- Attract higher quality leads: Working with micro-influencers also fosters higher-quality leads since they apply their impact in particular niches. Because of this specificity, the leads you produce from these micro-influencers will be more focused on. The outcome is a higher number of leads who are already interested in what you offer.

-- Cultivates trust: Micro-influencers can help your customers in developing a high level of trusts for your brand. You can find a list of top influencer marketing platforms here.

Related: Micro-influencers Bring Mega ROI for Brands

Follow the above given ways in order to drive high-quality traffic, increase conversions and to retain customers coming back for more.

Also, it’s important that you should calculate the ROI on a regular basis in order to identify whether your money and efforts are yielding the proper results or not.

 

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Cloud-Based Startups Face Tough Marketing Challenges

  

More than a decade after the dotcom bubble collapsed, the world has entered an emerging post-dotcom era known as “dotcloud.” Doing business now requires a higher level of entrepreneurial skills and strategies, and today’s new class of born-in-the-cloud startups are driven by an imperative for speed, convenience and personalization. What worked a few years ago is now irrelevant. Marketing in this aggressive startup environment requires a new approach.

My book, “Born in the Cloud Marketing: Transformative Strategies for the Next Generation of Cloud-Based Businesses,” tackles how new, born-in-the-cloud startups have to pivot on marketing, address new realities and experiment with new marketing strategies to succeed in this agile marketplace. Following is an excerpt from my book.

Related: Why Alexa Will Soon Be Handling Customer Support Calls -- and What Businesses Should Do to Prepare

The first wave of dotcom technology made a critical error in deploying an overly mechanized and automated customer service approach. Customers would dial into the call center only to be greeted by a voicemail tree -- otherwise known as “voicemail hell” -- with no option to talk to a human, and sometimes with options that were limited to only the most common problems. Callers with an issue that was out of the ordinary would be at a loss.

“Digital marketing will become more attuned to consumers’ lives,” said Deepa Miglani, senior vice-president of U.S. marketing at Babbel, a language learning app. “With a bounty of data and smarter analytics, marketing will better understand what we like, what we don’t like and what we want. This trend to make content more personal and more relevant will shape digital marketing to be less product-driven and more emotionally driven.”

In a report from Autopilot that surveyed more than 500 U.S. marketers, it was predicted that scalable personalization would be big in 2017. “Netflix and Amazon are paving the way for contextualized content. Eighty-one percent of marketers today personalize marketing, but only 13 percent take things a step further by leveraging app and service context. Expect to see more behavior-based personalization come into focus next year.”


Craig Bloem, founder and CEO of FreeLogoServices.com, expands on this school of thought. “Personalization will be taken to a whole new level in both small and large businesses, in that marketing will be personalized to the individual,” he said. “Personalization will continue to develop for businesses that do not have personalized product offerings as well. Digital marketing will progress so that all emails include personal information about a customer, such as their name, as well as personalized promotional offers based on products in which they have previously shown interest.”

Chatbots and personalized automation.
“Very soon, maybe even by the end of next year, a lot of online transactions and ordering products and services will be done online through chatbots,” said Alex Bar, owner of Third Temple Digital. “Progress made in natural language processing now makes it available for people to literally chat to the IM bots in the same way they would to a shop assistant or a waiter and inquire about goods and services. This kind of chatbot is already available at Messenger, and it makes all the sense in the world that businesses and customers alike will opt more for them in the future. Especially, as the current way of ordering goods and services online (constantly confirming card numbers, typing confirmation codes and trying to fathom endless captchas) is slow and simply not user-friendly enough.”

Related: Survey Finds Marketers Know All the Important Tech Trends But Aren't Prepared for Any of Them

Chris Hall, founder and CEO of Bynder, a cloud-based marketing platform, said that “nothing will be off the table in terms of what can be automated or synced, especially for businesses that exist in the cloud from the start. The key component will be implementing tactics that bring agility to the forefront of digital marketing. We know consumers want personal interactions with brands, but they also want them in real time.”


At the end of the day, Hall said, consumers want to feel like they’re always interacting with something natural and real. "This is a tremendous challenge for marketers and something that marketing technology and SaaS will continue to help address over the next several years. Technology will, of course, continue to get smarter, and as a result, consumers will get savvier in what they consider a great digital experience. Brands must take this with a grain of salt, realizing they are allowed to become more automated in their process, so long as they stay authentic and original in their approach.”

Market to customers, not to audiences.
Today’s cloud technology allows retailers and online businesses to target at a much more granular and personal level, while still retaining a great deal of automation. “The number one shift will be the transition from marketing to audiences to marketing to customers,” said Ed Haslam, chief marketing officer at Conviva. “The traditional digital marketing world was based on the cookie or anonymous ID associated with a visitor that evolved from the traditional non-digital world of print and broadcast TV media companies."

Digital marketers and media companies must transition from the panel-based audience and segment-based world of targeting to one of very personalized observed or census-based customer targeting, Haslam said. "Stop marketing to audiences and instead market to customers at scale.”

Getting Siri on your side.
Much of digital marketing has revolved around getting found by search engines and coming up within the first page of the SERPs. In the future, this will be even more difficult, as search moves from a text-based search engine to a voice-based one. “The future of marketing lays in the use of virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Home,” said John Leo Weber, director of digital marketing at Geek Powered Studios. “These semantic voice search technologies signal a shift away from blanket online marketing tactics that help boost visibility online, and represent a move towards zero sum marketing. On a desktop computer if you search 'best coffee shop in Austin,' you will see approximately 10 organic Google results plus three map listings and three to seven AdWords ads. That gives a coffee shop 20 possible ways to be found. But, with semantic voice search you might ask your virtual assistant, 'what’s the best coffee shop near me?' She might respond 'I found a coffee shop with five-star reviews one block away. Would you like directions?' In this scenario, the same search yields a singular result for one coffee shop, as opposed to the 20 in the previous example. With one result, marketers will need to fight for a smaller window of visibility.”


Related: The Evolution of Voice Search Feature

Danny Watkinson, SEO consultant at Dijitul, a UK-based digital marketing and training provider, said one of the biggest technological talking points in the second half of 2016 was the growth of personal assistants and voice-activated tools such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. The growth of this technology could have a significant effect on digital marketing, particularly SEO, in 2017. The clear majority of websites gear their SEO strategy toward traditional search engine keyword searches carried out by typing. However, typing is slowly being replaced by spoken voice search.

People don't speak the same way they type, and therefore search is becoming more conversational and long tail. For example, someone may type "Japanese restaurant London," but when voice searching, they would be more likely to say, "where can I get Japanese food in London?" Brands -- and SEO professionals -- are going to have to adjust to this to ensure that organic traffic levels stay up.

 

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How to Pick Your First SEO Keywords

 

One of the best ways to grow a business is through search engine optimization (SEO), the process of making changes to increase a website’s likelihood of being ranked for relevant searches within Google and other search engines.

Related: These 9 SEO Tips Are All You'll Ever Need to Rank in Google

Keywords are a critical component of the strategy; optimizing your site for specific ones gives you the power to control which searches you rank for (and therefore who your target audience is). Accordingly, adjusting your keyword distribution gives you power to change your campaign over time.

To be successful, you need to start by picking the right keywords. Over time, you’ll gather data that helps you determine which of your keywords are most successful, and which ones need more work -- but how do you pick the right initial set of keywords?

Set and understand your overall goals.
Before you decide which keywords are right for your brand, spend some time thinking about what your SEO goals are. Most companies use SEO to increase website traffic, which in turn, increases revenue, but you’ll need to be more specific than that.

For example:

How fast do you want to see results? SEO is a long-term strategy, so it sometimes takes months before you start seeing results. If you want results faster than that, you’ll need to choose lower-competition and higher-volume keywords.

How relevant does your audience need to be? Are you laser-focused on one specific audience, or  flexible with the types of people you have coming to the site?

What types of traffic are you seeking? Do you want people to buy your products, or are you focusing for now on brand awareness?

Decide on a blend of head and long-tail keywords.
Once you know your goals, you should be able at least to decide on a balance between “head” keywords and “long-tail” keywords. Head keywords are short phrases, usually one-to-three words, associated with higher traffic but also higher competition.

Related: 12 Local SEO Tips From SEO Agency Founders

Long-tail keywords are longer, usually conversational phrases that have lower traffic but lower competition. Head keywords are better for long-term, traffic-centric strategies, while long-tail keywords are better for short-term, fast results-centric strategies. You’ll need both, in some combination, for the best overall results.

Conduct your preliminary research.
Once you have those goals and that initial vision in mind, you can work on your preliminary research:

Come up with root ideas. Start by sketching out some ideas for what people might search for related to your business. You don’t need to be exhaustive here, but try to come up with at least a few broad categories of searches, and both head and long-tail keywords they might use to find you.

Use topic and keyword generators. Next, use an online tool to help you come up with more keyword and topic ideas, based on some of your preliminary ideas. I like to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool for this, since it helps you come up with ideas and gives you stats on the keywords themselves (which you’ll need later).

Create a master list. Export all the keywords you can into a master spreadsheet, so you can quickly compare them and sort by various fields.

Narrow down the list.
Once you’ve got a “master list” created, you can start weeding out the weakest candidates. Take a look at the following variables with special focus:

Volume. "Search volume" refers to how many times a particular phrase is searched for. It’s a handy way to gauge how much traffic you’ll receive from a specific query, though you should know that volume tends to fluctuate over time.

Competition. Next, look at the level of competition for each keyword. It’s no coincidence that the highest-volume keywords also tend to have the highest amount of competition, and of course, the higher the competition, the harder it’s going to be to rank for that keyword. You’ll need to strike a balance between the two.

Relevance. You should also consider the relevance of each keyword to your core brand. Sure, it might have high traffic and low competition, but will it really be forwarding the type of traffic your website needs?

Current rankings. It’s worth checking to see if you currently rank for any of these terms -- if you do, that might help you build early momentum.

Pick your top candidates.
At this point, your top candidates should be a matter of personal taste. You’ve narrowed your list down to keywords with the highest likelihood of earning you the results you want, so for now, pick a handful that you’ll have an easy time optimizing for (or the ones that seem the most attractive).


Related: 7 Reasons You Should Stop Managing Your SEO and Hire a Pro

Your first blend of keywords isn’t going to be perfect, but it will give you a solid baseline you can use to improve your level of traffic even further. Pay close attention to how your results develop over time, and don’t be afraid to make changes when you need to.

 

 

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The Complete Guide to Dominating Local Search Optimization in 2018

The Complete Guide to Dominating Local Search Optimization in 2018

 Share   Add to MARKETING > LOCAL SEO November 16, 2017
The Complete Guide to Dominating Local Search Optimization in 2018
You can find anything in the world online but people are using it most to find what they want close to wherever they are.
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Guy Sheetrit
Guy Sheetrit
•
Guest Writer
               
SEO keeps on changing and there is just one rule to remember: grow with it.

As digital marketers and SEO experts enter the final stretch of 2017, the biggest question confronting them  is what does 2018 have in store for local SEO, the most viable channel of interest for local business owners? Here is how to can dominate local SEO in 2018.

1. Local citations: You just can't have enough of them.
A Google research recently revealed that four out of five users trust search engines for local searches. This makes local SEO a high stakes affair for local businesses. The best way to give your local business clear visibility on SERPs is to create content rich pages on business directories. Here are some best practices:


ADVERTISING

inRead invented by Teads
Get your Google My Business listing and get the Google Maps Marketing done right.

Make a list of the top 10 business directories and build an engaging, content-rich business profiles on each of them. Begin with Yelp, Merchant Circle and Citysearch.

Look for the top 10 local business directories next and add your profiles there.

If the Chamber of Commerce or equivalent agency has a page for your city; list your business there. Repeat this for any popular local newspaper websites you come across.

Next, search for "[city name] directory and find if you missed any directories.

Also, look for category specific directories, such as OpenTable and Zomato for restaurants, Viator and TripAdvisor for art galleries and touristy spots, etc.

Lastly, make sure that your business' name, address and phone number (NAP) is consistent (not even a comma's difference is allowed!). Any discrepancies might cause Google to NOT show your business' information on a search result page.

The number, accuracy and quality of your business' local citations improve its chances of featuring highly in search results; check out this Moz guide to understand more about local citations.

Related: 5 Social Media Rules Every Entrepreneur Should Know

2. Leverage user reviews and ratings.
Positive reviews are an important local SEO ranking factor that improves your business visibility on Google. Google values the languages consumers use. A customer review is 100 percent user-generated content that powerfully boosts long-tail keyword traffic. Google trusts specific third party review websites and requires you to have 150 unique reviews in the past year, with an average rating of at least 3.5 out of five, to include your results on the SERP.


Enable your positive reviews and five-star ratings to be visible on SERPs; go to Google Developers Structured Data and enable Rich Snippets. Plus, make some time to go through this SearchEngineWatch guide on using reviews and ratings as a driver for local SEO success.

Related: 10 Laws of Social Media Marketing

3. Raise your schema markup game.
Schema markup has been on the radar of SEO experts for some time now. Now's the time for any local business to raise its schema game. Add structured data markup in your website's code to include vital business information for Google to find and showcase. Use Google's Structured Data Testing tool to identify possible errors in your website's code and fix them.

Beyond the basics, look for schema markup tags that help your business differentiate. Voice Search is on the surge and will continue to dominate in terms of global search numbers in 2018. To be a part of the party, make sure your business website uses structured data markup to the extent that any voice like 'the best rooftop bar around me' shows your bar in the top three results.

As of now, less than 50 percent of websites use local schema markup for local SEO, so there's tremendous advantage to be enjoyed by adopting it. Use it before it ceases to be an enabler of competitive advantage.

4. Get the basics right: Title and meta descriptions
As much as it's important to try out new things and experiment with SEO, one thing remains constant -- the importance of title and meta tags. Treat them as a mini advertisement for your web pages.

In 2016, Google increased the width of the main search results area to 600 px. Keeping this in mind, you'd do well to target for title tags within 55 to 60 characters. For meta descriptions, keep it between 180 and 200 characters.

Don't commit the cardinal sin of letting dots ruin your page descriptions. Here's an example of how it's not done! Descriptions of both the pizzerias (highlighted in yellow), miraculously, disappear when the impact words were supposed to come!

 

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17 Ways To Immediately Improve Your Website Traffic

17 Ways To Immediately Improve Your Website Traffic

 As entrepreneurs we can often feel like the deck is stacked against us when it comes to the digital world. We don’t have the same budgets as our massive competitors, nor do we have the army of marketers that they can employ. So how can a small- or medium-sized business, against overwhelming odds, carve out its piece of the market? The tips below will show you how.

1. Facebook remarketing
Facebook is a great promotion tool whether you’re in the B2B or B2C industry. But did you know you can set up remarketing audiences in Facebook? By installing a Facebook tracking pixel on your site you can continue to market to customers who have visited your site. This is a great way to create return traffic to your business blog or website. And you can start remarketing to audiences as small as 100 visitors.

2. Facebook email custom audiences
Staying with Facebook, you can also give that email list of yours a second life. Instead of just using it to blast emails to your customers once in a while, you can upload that list into Facebook and capture the social accounts of anyone that has their email address attached to it. This is a HUGE benefit since it will allow you to market to those users on their mobile devices.

Related: 4 Ways to Successfully Link Build to Increase Website Traffic

3. Twitter remarketing
Twitter remarketing works in almost the exact same way as Facebook remarketing. Simply install the pixel and you can now target your sites visitors on Twitter. The main difference is that Twitter will require a higher minimum audience count before you can start advertising towards them, 500 people to be exact.

4. Twitter custom audiences
Just like Facebook, you can target Twitter users on their mobile devices by uploading their emails into Twitter. However, if you cannot get at least 500 users into your custom audience through an email upload, then you won’t have the required minimum to advertise towards them.

5. Twitter Cards
Twitter Cards is a great tool to drive traffic to your site. They are larger tweets that incorporate images and allow you to have buttons built into the tweet. They allow you to have engaging calls to action, attractive images right in the stream, and you can even give them special functionality like having downloads attached directly to the tweet. Tweets with images get 18 percent more clicks than its text counterparts, so make sure you’re using Twitter Cards.

6. Spend 80 percent of your time on the ad's headline
Did you know that 8 out of 10 people will read a headline and not read the rest of your ad? If this is the case, you should be spending the majority of your time perfecting the headline to grab your audience’s attention – and driving them to your site. Whether you’re running ads in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or pay per click, make sure that your headlines are on fleek. (Yes, I went there.)

7. Build an email list
I just told you how you can use emails for social promotion, but they’re also an amazing tool for driving traffic through a newsletter. Make sure that you have a newsletter opt-in on your website. We personally use a great tool called Drip. It’s free and very easy to set up.

8. Blog, blog, blog
Blogging really does drive traffic. We recently ran an experiment where we increased our blogging from twice per week to over 10 posts per week. The result was a 300 percent increase in traffic in just two months. And this isn’t an unusual occurrence. Another company called Convirza ran a similar experiment with even better results. But, if you’re going to blog, you better do number nine.

9. Promote your blogs on Facebook
You may have heard that Facebook has cut back on their organic reach. This means that almost no one will see your social media posts on Facebook. Instead, you need to put a little bit of budget behind them. A good strategy is to have a campaign constantly running that is featuring your blog posts and target that campaign towards your custom audience and remarketing audience as described above.

10. Optimize your site for SEO
Trying to manipulate the search-engine rankings is a losing proposition at this point. Instead, what you should be concerned with is making your site look as good as possible for the search engine robots that will be crawling your website. Software like SEMrush can give you a complete SEO audit and show you what you should fix. Spending time on your site’s SEO optimization is always time well spent.

11. Exchange blog posts with other sites
Syndicating your blog on other sites is a great way to drive new audiences to your site. A great way to do this is to search for blogs that are in a similar industry as you and that are in a similar situation in terms of size and audience. Then, you reach out to their editor or site administrator and ask if they’d like to swap blog articles and you each take turns featuring each other’s blogs and linking back to the site. Special measures should be taken to avoid duplicate content, but this is a great way to drive new customers to your site.

12. Automate your emails
Shockingly, marketing automation has only been adopted by 3 to 5 percent of all businesses. Yes, this number is higher if you only look at larger companies but this list is trying to help smaller companies compete with their bigger brethren. So, why aren’t you using marketing automation? It may have been that the costs were too prohibitive or that it seemed too daunting, but there’s help with that. There are new lower cost marketing automation platforms like Autopilot and Hatchbuck that are great for small businesses. But if you still have your heart set on HubSpot or a similar product, then look for a certified partner, like my firm, that can help onboard you and can even waive the kickoff fees that can cost several thousand dollars.


Related: Generate Traffic With a Well-Rounded Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you have your software set up, you need to ensure you have email campaigns set up for everything. There should be an automated email campaign when someone fills out a form, downloads some content or signs up for the newsletter.

By staying in front of your customers through email you’ll continue to drive relevant traffic to your site.

13. Become a contributor
Contributing to other websites is a great way to drive traffic to your site. I myself write for about a dozen major media site, and while it may not result in immediate customers, the benefits are definitely felt throughout the organization. And our referral traffic from these sites is a huge boon.

To become a contributor you need to start small and work your way up. Also, you need to hone your craft when it comes to writing. To do this you need to be writing every single day. The more you write, the better you’ll be come and the better your chances will be at becoming a contributor.

14. Create a quiz
Quizzes are fun pieces of content that work really well at driving engagement with your visitors. Plus, they’re a cinch to promote on social media using the techniques presented earlier in this article. Sites like Quizzr allow you to create free quizzes to then post on your blog and drive traffic to your site.

15. Host a webinar or webcast
Regardless of your industry, I can guarantee there’s a topic you have enough expertise on that your customers would come to listen to you speak. The trick is to identify this topic and then to create a fun and engaging presentation. Carol Tice put together a phenomenal guide on putting on a great webinar.

16. Create a podcast
If you’re worried you can’t present to a live audience or develop the right message, then instead consider a podcast. Podcasts are great ways of distributing your expertise and are a surefire way of driving traffic to your site -- but you need to be consistent and promote it.

When you first start off, it will seem like you’re talking into a black hole and no one is listening to you. But if you stay persistent and promote your podcast on social media, your audience will grow and your future episodes will gain more and more listeners.

Another great trick to getting a boost in your podcast audience is to invite a guest that has a large social following and asking them to help you promote it. You’d be surprised who would say yes to joining your podcast, if you only ask them.

Zach Cutler put together a great article on getting your podcast off the ground.

17. Find partners in your industry
There are usually dozens of partnership opportunities for any business out there. The trick is to find those partners and establish a working relationship. To give an example of this, we signed up as a partner for Unbounce. They’re a landing page creation software that helps companies optimize their marketing campaigns. It was free to sign up as a partner and they then featured us in their partner section and allowed us to do a little write up on our firm. Before you knew it we were getting leads from their site and it’s been a great source of traffic for us.

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