Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors that land on your website and leave before viewing a second page. You can easily determine your website’s bounce rate by setting up Google Analytics. Now, if you’re thinking this isn’t such a big deal and that as long as they visit your website, irrespective of how long they spend on it or how many pages they view, they at least know your business exists, that’s not good enough. The longer visitors stay on your site, the more time you have to turn them into subscribers and customers. But how can you convince users to stick around longer and visit more pages? Luckily, there are a number of easy and free ways to improve your website’s bounce rate and grow your business. Here are five ways to improve your website’s bounce rate1. Create content consistentlyCreating content consistently is one of the best ways to keep users around longer and get them to view multiple pages. Useful, engaging content will drive traffic to your website. Once that traffic is there, they’ll stick around, keep reading, and eventually become a subscriber or customer if you have a wide array of informative blog posts for them to read. In fact, according to HubSpot, companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got about 4.5 times more leads than companies that published zero to four monthly posts. So, create a content plan that’s consistent and offers something for everyone. Not everyone prefers written content, so include a mixture of formats such as written, video, infographics, audio recordings, and more. Another important tip for your content: Practice effective internal linking. Relevant and useful internal links sprinkled throughout your content can guide users to more of your awesome content and keep them reading. 2. Add images and videosSpeaking of a mixture of formats, to improve your website’s bounce rate, be sure you add eye-catching images and videos to your website. Many users won’t spend a lot of time reading your website content, so you need to grab their attention with images and videos. Add a large high-quality image or video to your homepage to grab the attention of viewers as soon as they see your site. Most websites do this while keeping everything else on the page simple, like the Panera website for example.
If you don’t have the means to hire a photographer, you can find a ton of stunning, free stock images on a site like Unsplash. 3. Speed up your siteYou may not have realized it before but your website speed is important for improving your website’s bounce rate. In fact, according to Google, 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. And for every extra second that your page takes to load, the probability of users bouncing dramatically increases. So, don’t make your website visitors wait. You can use a site like GTmetrix to test the speed of your site. Not only will it tell you what your site speed is, but it’ll also give you advice for improving it. If you’re running your website on WordPress, it would also be wise to download and install some free plugins like WP Smush and W3 Total Cache to help boost the speediness of your site. 4. A/B testAs you’re attempting to improve your website’s bounce rate, don’t leave it up to chance. You should be A/B testing everything in order to determine what’s working and what’s not. You might be surprised by the small things that can cause users to abandon your website. It might even be something as simple as the color of your call-to-action button. So, perform A/B tests, or split tests, of every aspect of your website. Does your bounce rate improve with a popup on your homepage or does it get a bigger boost on another page? Does one font convert more visitors over another? Does showing or hiding a progress bar help or hurt your bounce rate? When we say A/B test everything, we mean everything. 5. Target abandoning visitorsDid you know that over 70% of people who leave your website will never return? If you don’t start to improve your bounce rate now, that’s a lot of potential leads and customers your business is missing out on. One effective way to stop those users in their tracks and get them to stay on your website longer, and eventually convert them into subscribers or customers is by utilizing exit-intent popups. Exit-intent popups are able to track when a user is about to leave your website and send them a targeted message at exactly the right time. Your popup can encourage website visitors to subscribe to your email list, download your lead magnet, or even offer a discount if they purchase. So, not only can exit-intent popups improve your bounce rate, but they can also boost your sales in an instant. Got more points to share on improving bounce rates? Share them in the comments. Syed Balkhi is an entrepreneur, marketer, and CEO of Awesome Motive. He’s also the founder of WPBeginner, OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights. Syed can be found on Twitter @syedbalkhi. The post Five ways to improve your website’s bounce rate (and why you should) appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/29/ways-to-improve-website-bounce-rate/
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Almost anyone running a B2B or B2C business knows that Google and other search engines like quality links, and could consider them as one of the top ranking factors. So, if you want your website to rank higher than your competition on search engines, a proper link building strategy is not debatable. However, if you’re going to implement link building in your 2019 digital marketing strategy, you have to do it the right way. Search engines shroud their algorithms in secrecy, so the SEO and link building industry is flooded with many myths that will never get you results but can get you into a lot of trouble. To avoid investing resources into wasted link building efforts, pay attention to these nine link building myths that won’t get you anywhere in 2019. 1. Guest posting is deadThis myth started to get really popular in 2014 when Google’s Matt Cutt said,
Because of how direct and stern this warning by Cutt was, it’s understandable that many people believe that guest blogging is genuinely dead. However, Cutt later clarified this statement by saying that what he meant was spammy blog posts for the sake of SEO purposes was dead. This means that publishing relevant and resourceful blog posts on authoritative sites for building links, exposure, branding, increased reach, and building a community is still very relevant in 2019. 2. Links not relevant to your niche are low-quality linksThis is a prevalent myth that contradicts the fundamental idea of link building in 2019. To rank high, you need to get top authority sites to link back to your site. To get these sites to feature your link, you need to provide relevant content for them. Moreover, whether or not that content is related to your niche or not, it still improves your ranking. So, when your site receives a non-relevant backlink from a non-relevant niche, Google will not frown upon these links. 3. Building tons of links to a single piece of content is spammyMany people still think that building tons of links to a single piece of content could negatively impact their keyword rank. Again, this link building myth contradicts itself because it goes against the idea of organic link building. If search engines do not penalize highly original and valuable webpage that other websites link to because of how helpful and informative their content is, why would they consider a piece of content with tonnes of backlinks spammy? However, if your links are low quality (from spammy content networks and directories), you could be slapped with a manual penalty or significant link profile devaluation. 4. Link building is irrelevant if you already rank high in search queriesIt’s sad, but many marketers still believe this. Link building, like other digital marketing strategies for social media marketing, blogging, and others should be consistent. Not only because it helps you maintain your position above your competition in search queries, but also because it helps you with the following:
Link building is not just about increasing the volume of links to your site; it also exposes your business to new customers. 5. Google will always prioritize sites with higher backlinks over others in search queriesThe truth is there isn’t a “one size fits all” for search engine ranking. There are about 200 ranking factors related to UX, mobile usability, technical performance, query intent, and many more. Google’s ranking factors are very dynamic. According to Google Webmaster John Mueller, the search engine focuses on a particular query intent to select its ranking factors. So, while link building is a valuable ranking factor, Google algorithms find a balance between its 200 ranking factors before displaying results to a search query. 6. All pages/posts/links on your site have an equal ranking valueWhen people talk about this myth, they usually mean either of these two things:
Both statements are wrong. In the first instance, a post that has been linked back to by high authority sites will rank higher than others which have not. There are tools like website auditor which can be used to check the individual ranking value of your site’s posts. As for the second statement, Google’s John Muller confirmed that their search algorithms take into account the position of a link on a webpage it appears. So take advantage of link positioning. SEO experts like Bill Slawski and Rand Fishkin recommend positioning your links higher on the page because the higher a link is placed on the page, the more it weighs, and the more value it passes to the pages it links to. 7. Internal links don’t help you rank higherWhile high-quality external links are one of the most important ranking factors, internal links also play a huge roll in helping you rank higher. This is because linking from higher to lower ranking pages can give a massive boost to weak pages. Interlinking related content on your website also creates what search engine experts call a “topic cluster”. In 2019, topic clusters are significant because when a search query is made for a particular topic and search engines find relevant topic clusters on your website, your site will be considered an authority in this field and will automatically rank higher than other sites with relevant single pages. 8. Stuffing your image alt texts with relevant keywords helps you rank higherImage links are not bad for SEO. However, too much of anything is never a good idea. And this applies to image link building. While there are no penalties for using image links, stuffing your image alt tags with keywords to manipulate rankings is against Google’s guidelines. Before Google started using AI and machine learning to understand images, people had to stuff their alt tags with text to ensure the pictures appeared in relevant search queries. However, in 2019, both text and image are translated into the same language in coding. 9. Wikipedia and Wiki-like pages are the Gods of domain authority building
Many people are convinced that getting a link back from pages like Wikipedia will automatically give them a higher ranking authority because of the exceptionally high domain authority Wikipedia has. But sadly, digital marketing has as many facts as it does fallacies. Information directly from Google’s Garry Illyes tells us that Google ranks Wikipedia just like any other website.
In conclusionDon’t allow the fear of spamming keep you from harnessing the many fantastic benefits of implementing a link building strategy. Also, although Google’s dynamic algorithms are usually hidden, SEO and link building agencies like seopow study them every day to let you know what’s a fact and what’s a fable.
Segun Onibalusi is the Founder and CEO at SEO POW, an organic link building agency. He can be found on Twitter @iamsegun_oni.
The post Debunked: Nine link building myths you should ignore in 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/13/debunked-nine-link-building-myths-you-should-ignore-in-2019/ Among all social channels, Facebook is the one that has the most monthly active users, 2.23 billion. This means more than 20% of the world’s population is active on Facebook every month. Can you guess how many Facebook pages exist? 50 million? 60? 70? Not correct. As of May 2018, there were more than 80 million Facebook business pages. And we as marketers have to try to be more unique than the other 79,999,999 marketers. Yeah, probably that sounds something impossible. Well, instead of being different, let’s try to give the best value we can to our audience. Eight effective tips to help you as a marketer to get the most from your Facebook business page for 20191. Get rid of promotional content and make more educational, fun contentWhen people start complaining that their page posts are not getting enough engagement, I just take my phone, search their business name on Facebook and start analyzing their latest posts. Post number 1: Promotional Post number 2: Promotional Post number 3: Promotional And I’m like, well, you really think, that the people who’ve liked your page are interested in seeing only promotional and sales oriented posts from your page? And they’re like, “Hmm, what else should we post, if we just want to get new sales for our business by using Facebook?” In such cases, I start explaining to people that users really don’t like seeing such kinds of posts because their feed is already filled with so many ads, that advertisers put on Facebook for promoting their products or services. Promotional content isn’t something, that will engage your customers and make them hit the “Like” or “Share” buttons. It’s something, that will make them scroll down through their news feed or even browse your page and unlike it. Source: WritersWrite And the reason why so many pages on Facebook fail, is the fact, that we want to get value from someone without giving it. Not fair, is it? Promotional/sales oriented content isn’t valuable in most cases. The good thing is you can promote your product or service and at the same time provide valuable content for your audience. They love to hear your company story more than what you are trying to sell to them. So, get rid of the promotional material from your page. Instead, start educating them with valuable and entertaining content. Renderforest reports, that 86% of marketers are satisfied with their video marketing results and consider them successful. This means that you can use lots of videos in your content marketing strategy and have success in it. What about starting to produce videos right away? 2. Only use Facebook ads for selling your product or serviceYou read it correctly. We’ve already talked on the first point, that you shouldn’t put any promotional content in your organic posts. People hate that. Instead of it, you can run engaging ads on Facebook and get new users/sales for your product or service. Of course, I agree that lots of small businesses might not have budgets for Facebook. But well, if you’ve started a company, then you should have at least $100 for testing Facebook ads. And you may want to read carefully as I’m going to tell you an easy trick on the next line for not wasting that $100 on Facebook ads. Let’s split the $100 into two $50. What’s your business about? Do a little research or analyze what ads your competitors currently run, if you can’t come up with an idea. Think of that content and create content for two ad campaigns. Once you’re finished, start running the promotion at least for a week for each campaign. Seems easy, right? Wait, you’re not done. Instead of sitting and smoking a cigar, while your ads run, start analyzing how they perform. After your ad has been in the process of running for several hours, you may start optimizing it. By optimizing and measuring your ads every 24 hours, you can at least get your invested money back after the campaign ends. You can do this several times while you find out which ad type works the best for your product or service. And this whole idea means that you don’t have to invest thousands of dollars to start Facebook ads. All you need to kick off is $100. 3. Conduct webinars and provide valuable information to your audienceWebinars can help you to: – Stay connected with your current customers – Make announcements about your products or services – Talk about niche related topics – Connect with a wider/new audience and tell them about your services Webinars are a little bit underrated among Facebook marketing, but they can become a huge weapon for increasing your engagement and driving more sales. And here comes a question. How to start conducting webinars? Well, the first step is to choose a topic, that can bring value to your audience. Let me tell you some interesting webinars topics that might be interesting for any audience:
These are really basic ideas that you can start with, and then you can make your webinars a big part of your digital marketing strategies. After deciding what topic to choose, you have to think about the environment and the time you are going to shoot it. Be sure to make everything in high quality: Setup lights, camera, and voice. There are lots of tools, which will help you stream your webinar in a professional way on your Facebook page. After setting all these things up, it’s time to go and create an event for your webinar. Write an engaging description, pick an eye-catching title, create a beautiful cover pic or cover video for your event. Don’t forget to choose the right time. You have to understand your audiences’ timezone and pick a time that will be convenient for them to participate in your webinar. Source: RightMixMarketing 4. Use Facebook insights wisely and make decisions based on your dataMake the most of the data that Facebook Insights provides about your right audience for targeting and marketing. Here is a short list:
5. Use Facebook polls and get feedback from your audienceConducting polls is a very interesting way of engaging your audience. Why? Let me give you a quick example. People love playing games everywhere. And why not think about a game idea and give your customers something each week? Why will it work?
Facebook gives you the opportunity to create polls with texts, photos or GIFs. You can publish them in your story or news feed. They’re a really cool way to increase your page engagement rate. Source: HubSpot 6. Build a Facebook group in your niche and discuss interesting topics thereFacebook groups are a little bit underrated nowadays. But I can’t really find the reason why. WordStream reports that more than 100 million Facebook users belong to meaningful Facebook communities. Why not build another great community on Facebook who can ask questions, discuss some topics, and gather an active community around your brand name? People love communities. They love to meet new people on social media and discuss their problems, ideas with others. And also they love to hear what other people talk about their minds. And you can build that emotional relationship between them. And when your community will become a little bit bigger, you can do other cool things, including the following:
This list can last long. I just want to give you the idea of how you can use the community for making a stronger emotional connection with your brand. It will also help you to get your brand name more popular on Facebook. 7. Reply to any activity on your page positivelyWhatever happens on your page you must react promptly before any other person․ Any activity should be under your control. In the past, where bots or automatic answers weren’t available in Facebook, it was a little bit harder to react to all the activity happening on your Facebook page in a short time. But now you can set chat-bots and automate the whole messaging process of your page. We have to realize that people who live in the 21st century, don’t like to wait even a minute more. They want their issues to be solved ASAP. If you can’t give the best experience to your users, then the chances are high that you’ll lose your customers. Just be with your customer whenever they need you. You can set an auto-reply for any recommendation you’ll get for your product. If it’s a positive recommendation and your customer is happy, thank him/her and tell them something awesome. If the recommendation was negative, don’t mess up. You have to find out the reason why the customer is angry with you and left a negative review on your page. When getting negative feedback for your company, you must dig very deep for finding out the real reason why your customer isn’t satisfied. Maybe someone from your employees did something bad to him/her? You should know about it. Even if it is the worst feedback about your company (in a professional way), don’t remove or ignore it. If someone else comes and sees bad and unanswered feedback from someone, that can hurt your business a lot. Also, you can’t remove negative feedback, so you have to answer as clear as possible, for not negatively impressing others. 8. Always analyze your competitors and keep an eye on themDo you know what’s the ranking of your page among your Facebook competitors? There are several tools and ways that you can use to analyze your competitors for generating new ideas for your page. If we start from the beginning, the first thing to analyze is the kind of posts your competitors making on their page. You can use the Facebook “pages to watch” report and add your competitors there. Source: Buffer What about the ads they are running? You can see that information publicly by checking their ads and info section. By doing this, you’ll know where and how your competitors target their ads. And it can give you lots of ideas for your next marketing campaigns. If you do this analysis twice per month, it will be complete enough for knowing everything about your competitors. ConclusionFacebook marketing tips haven’t changed a lot since the last year. Usually, marketers underrate some tools Facebook provides, such as groups and polls. If you understand how you can bring value to your audience by using these tools, they’ll be effective for you. Roman Daneghyan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest. He can be found on Twitter @roman_daneghyan. The post Eight tips to get the most from your Facebook business page in 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/27/tips-successful-facebook-business-page/ Does social media have an impact on your SEO? Do retweets, shares, and likes of a page actually boost that page in search engine results? Studies like this one by HootSuite have suggested that there’s a correlation between social media shares and higher rankings. You might have noticed that yourself: content that ranks well on Google often also has a lot of shares, retweets, and likes. Most experts agree, though, that rankings aren’t directly affected by social signals. (And that’s what ex-Googler Matt Cutts said on the subject a few years ago, too.) Google+, which once included the promising Authorship markup, is soon going to be shut down. So what’s going on? Why do posts that get shared a lot also tend to be posts that rank more highly? Social media and SEO: Correlation, not causationWhile social media shares might be correlated with better rankings, that doesn’t mean that the social media shares cause better rankings. A piece of your content could get shared thousands of times on Twitter without necessarily budging at all in Google’s search engine results. Instead, when social media appears to be causing a boost in ranking, this is what’s happening:
As AJ Kohn puts it, “It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a result of that activity.” And, back in 2017, Simon Ensor suggested here on Search Engine Watch:
In that post, Simon took a look at the impact of link earning, co-citation and co-occurrence and brand authority and CTR – it’s well worth a read if you want to dig deeper into why social media tends to have an impact on SEO. Here, though, I want to focus on the practicalities: what can you do to harness the power of social media? #1: Create content that’s worth linking toIf your site has very little content, or if the content is poorly written or uninteresting, why would anyone feel moved to link to it from their site? A common culprit here is self-promotional content: standard web pages that advertise your services or products, or tell readers all about your company. These are important for your site – but they’re not likely to get much traction on social media. Instead of producing more of the same on your blog, focus on creating content that’s more informational and less salesy. Maybe it’s a tutorial helping readers to do something, a collection of useful tips, a well-designed infographic, or something else that people will want to share with their audience. You don’t need to invest a lot of time in this (though if you do have the time, it’s well worth mapping out a full content marketing strategy). Simply having a couple of really good in-depth blog posts, or some interesting and useful data, can give you the opportunities to get not only lots of shares but also links from influential websites. #2: Don’t try to build links on social mediaIf you’re thinking about “building links” on social media for SEO, you’re thinking about it wrong. Yes, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn themselves are authoritative – but links from personal accounts on those sites tend not to be. Firstly, most links from personal accounts are “no-followed” which means that they don’t strictly pass search engine reputation. And secondly, from a search engine perspective, even if they did pass reputation, it would likely be from the personal user and not the social media site (so it wouldn’t be worth a lot unless that user was very influential). On top of that, links on social media tend to get buried deep into a news feed within minutes or hours – they don’t stay visible like links on websites. Instead of approaching social media as a way to build links, then, you need to think about it as a way to build a following. That doesn’t necessarily mean going after as many people as possible, though. #3: Build (the right) social media followingHaving a huge social media following probably won’t hurt, but it may not help as much as you’d imagine, either. Instead of focusing on the sheer quantity of people following you, think about the quality of your following. Being followed by just 100 people can be better for SEO than 10,000 if it includes the top 5 influencers in your industry who publish content on a regular basis. To get noticed by these people, it’s a good idea to:
If you want to harness the power of social media to – indirectly – help your SEO, try creating valuable and interesting content, building the right following on social media, and helping out your followers (without expecting anything immediately in return). You’ll likely see that you naturally gain valuable backlinks – and that your content, and site as a whole, begin to rank better as a result.
Joe Williams is founder of Tribe SEO. He can be found on Twitter at @joetheseo.
The post Social media: How does it affect SEO? appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/12/social-media-how-does-it-affect-seo/ You are now living in the midst of a tantalizing revolution as the great minds of user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO) finally converge to produce beautiful on-page content designed to rank in search results AND engage or educate the user. Gone are the days of plugging in keyword phrases into your blog posts to get the density just right and building landing page after landing page targeted at keyword variations like, “automobiles for sale”, “cars for sale” and “trucks for sale”. Since the introduction of RankBrain, the machine-learning component of Google’s Core Algorithm, in late 2015, Google has moved farther away from a simple question and answer engine and has become a truly intelligent source of information matching the user’s intent — not just the user’s query. Crafting compelling content is tough, especially in such a competitive landscape. How can you avoid vomiting up a 1,500-word blog post that will meet the deadline but fall very short of the user’s expectations? If you follow these 10 on-page essential elements, your brand will be on the right track to provide a rich content experience designed to resonate with your audience for months to come. The basics:Title TagAlways seen in the <head> block or the beginning of a web page’s source code, the title tag is text wrapped in the <title> HTML tag. Visible as the headline of the search listing on results pages, on the user’s browser tab, and sometimes in social media applications when an Open Graph Tag is not present, this text is intended to describe the overarching intent of the page and the type of content a user can expect to see when browsing. What I mean by “intent” can be illustrated with the following example. Say my title tag for a product page was Beef for Dogs | Brand Name. As a user, I would not expect to find a product page, but rather, information about whether I can feed beef to my dogs. A better title tag to accurately match my users’ intent would be Beef Jerky Dog Treats | Brand Name. Query = “beef for dogs”Query = “beef jerky dog treats”How do I know what the title tag of my page is?Identifying what has been set as the title tag or meta description of your pages can be done URL-by-URL or at scale for many URLs. There are distinct uses for each discovery method, and it is always important to remember that Google may choose to display another headline for your page in search results if it feels that its title is a better representation for the user. Here are a few great online tools to get you started: URL-by-URL inspection:
At scale:
Are there guidelines for crafting the perfect title tag?Yes. The optimal title tag is designed to fit the width of the devices it’s displayed upon. In my experience, the sweet spot for most screens is between 50-60 characters. In addition, a page title should:
Meta DescriptionThough the text below the headline of your search result, also known as the meta description, does not influence the ranking of your business’ URL in search results, this text is still important for providing a summary of the webpage. The meta description is your chance to correctly set a potential user’s expectations and engage them to click-through to the website. How do I build the perfect meta description?Pay close attention to three things when crafting a great meta description for each of your website’s pages: branding, user-intent, and what’s working well in the vertical (competitive landscape). These 150-160 characters are a special opportunity for your page to stand out from the crowd. Do your page descriptions look and sound like they are templated? Investing time in describing the page in a unique way that answers user’s questions before they get to the website can go a long way in delighting customers and improving search performance. Take for example the following product page for the Outdoor Products Multi-Purpose Poncho. The top listing for this product page is via Amazon.com, with a very obviously templated meta description. The only information provided is the product name, aggregate rating, and an indication of free delivery. While not the top listing, the following result from REI Co-op clearly includes the product name, breadcrumbs, aggregate rating, price, availability, and a unique non-templated meta description. The standout feature of this meta description is that it does not copy the manufacturer’s text, provides some product differentiators like “easy to pull out of your bag” and “great travel item” that speak to user questions about portability. The meta description plays an important role in complementing other elements of a well defined rich result, and it is often overlooked when retail businesses are using rich results to improve the ecommerce search experience specifically. That said, the same considerations apply to information focused pages as well. Section HeadingsSection heading elements (H1-H6) were originally intended to resize text on a webpage, with the H1 being used to style the primary title of a document as the largest text on the page. With the advent of Cascading Styling Sheets (CSS) in the late 90’s, this element had has less effect. CSS started being used for much of this functionality, and HTML tags acted as more of a “table of contents” for a variety of user-agents (i.e. Googlebot) and users alike. For this reason, the primary header (h1) and subheaders (h2-h6) can be important in helping search engines understand the organization of and context around a particular page of written content. Users do not want to read through a huge brick of text and neither do search engines. Organizing written words into smaller entities (sections) will help digestion and lead to better organic results, as seen in the example below: In the example above, the primary topic (How to Teach a Child to Ride a Bike) is marked-up with an H1 tag, indicating that it is the primary topic of the information to follow. The next section “Getting Ready to Ride” is marked-up with an H2 tag, indicating that it’s a secondary topic. Subsequent sections are marked up with <h3> tags. As a result of carefully crafted headings, which organize the content in a digestible way and supporting written content (among other factors), this particular page boasts 1,400 search listings in the top 100 positions on Google — with only 1,400 words. Over 92% of long-tail (greater than 3 words) keyword phrases get less than 10 searches per month, but they are more likely to convert users than their head term counterparts. Focus on providing your potential users with answers to the search questions about a particular topic, rather than granular keyword phrases, will lead to a more authentic reading experience, more engaged readers, and more chances of capturing the plethora of long-tail phrases popping up by the minute. Internal LinkingInternal links are hyperlinks in your piece of content that point back to a page on your own website. What is important to note here is that one should not create a link in a piece simply to provide a link pathway for SEO success. This is an old practice, and it will lead to a poor user experience. Instead, focus on providing a link to a supplemental resource if it will genuinely help a user answer a question or learn more about a specific topic. A great example of helpful internal linking can be found above. In this article about “How to Ride a Bike”, the author has linked the text “Braking” to an article about types of bicycle brakes and more specifically how to adjust each type for optimal performance. If there is supplemental information on your own website to substantiate your claims or provide further education to the reader in the article at hand, link to this content. If this doesn’t exist or there’s a better source of information on a particular topic, link out to this external content. There’s no harm in linking out to 3rd parties and in many if not all cases, this will serve as a citation of sorts, making your content more legitimate and credible in the user’s eyes. External LinkingLinking to sources outside your own domain, also known as external linking, is often seen as one of the major ranking factors in organic search. External entities linking to your content are similar to calling someone you live next to a good neighbor, with a credibility effect similar to the citations you put in a term paper or an article on Wikipedia. When writing a post or crafting a page for your own website, consider the following:
If you are crafting the best user experience, you will want to take special care in building an authentic, data-driven relationship with your past and present customers. There are no magic rules or hacks in how you link to external sources. As the SEO industry evolves, you will realize professionals are simply “internet custodial engineers,” cleaning up the manipulations of the past (part of the reasons for Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, and less notable algorithm changes by Google) and promoting the creation of expert-driven, authoritative, and accurate (E.A.T.) content on the web. For more information on E.A.T., check out Google’s Official Quality Raters Guidelines. Getting Fancy:SEO-friendly imagesNow more than ever, visual search as an alternative to text search is becoming a reality. In fact, even Pinterest’s CEO Silbermann said, “the future of search will be about pictures rather than keywords.” Seen below is data from Jumpshot compiled by Rand Fishkin at SparkToro that confirms Google Image Search now makes up more than 20% of web searches as of February 2018. As a result, including images in your content has some unique benefits as it relates to search engine optimization (SEO):
A great example of using varying types of content to break up a topic can be seen below. In the article titled, “How to Tie the Windsor Knot”, the author has provided an informative primary header (h1) based on the functional query and also included video content (in case the user prefers this method of consumption), origin information, a comparison of this knot to others, and an explanatory graphic to walk anyone through the entire process. By providing an abundance of detail and multimedia, not only can your business realize the additional search opportunities in the form of video object structured data and alternate text on the images, but meet the E.A.T. standards that will delight your potential users and drive performance. Open Graph TagsDeveloped by Facebook in 2007, with inspiration from Microformats and RDFa, the Open Graph protocol is one element of your page that can be easily forgotten because it’s often built into popular content management systems. Forgetting to review how your shared content will display on popular social networks can kill productivity as you race to add an image, name, description post-publishing. A lack of “OG Tags” can also hurt the shareability of the piece, decreasing the chances for its promotion to be successful. “OG Tags” as they are commonly referred to are similar to other forms of structured data but are specifically relevant to social media sharing. They can act as a failsafe when a page title is not available, as Google commonly looks to this field when it cannot find text between the <title> elements. How can I construct and validate open graph tags on my website?Unless your content management system automatically generates Open Graph tags for you, you will have to build a few snippets of code to populate this information for those sharing your posts. You can find a few tools to help you out below: Documentation:Code snippet generators:Code snippet validation:Meta Robots TagsThe content your team produces will never get the success it deserves in organic search if no one can find it. While a powerful tool for ensuring search results stay nice and tidy, the meta robots tag can also be a content marketers worst enemy. Similar to the robots.txt file, it is designed to provide crawlers information about how to treat a certain singular URL in the search engine results and following it’s contained links, a single line of code can make your page or post disappear. Where can I find the meta robots instructions?This specific tag (if your website contains one) is generally contained within the <head> section of the HTML document and may appear to look similar to the following: <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”> What instructions can I provide to crawlers via the meta robots tag?At bare minimum, your URL will need to be eligible for indexing by Google or other search engines. This can be accomplished with an INDEX directive in the content field above. Note: It is still up to the search engine’s discretion if your URL is worthy and high-quality enough to include in search results. In addition to the INDEX directive, you can also pass the following instructions via the meta robots tag: NOINDEX – Tells a search engine crawler to exclude this page from their index NOFOLLOW – Instructs the crawler to ignore following any links on the given page NOARCHIVE – Excludes the particular page from being cached in search results NOSNIPPET – Prevents a description from displaying below the headline in search results NOODP – Blocks the usage of the Open Directory Project description from search results. NONE – Acts as a NOFOLLOW, NO INDEX tag. If you are taking the time to produce a high-quality article, make sure the world can see it with ease! Competing against yourself with duplicate articles and/or pages can lead to index bloat, and your search performance will not live up to its true potential. Canonical TagsThe canonicalization and the canonical tag can be a tricky subject, but it is one that should not be taken lightly. Duplicate content can be the root of many unforeseen problems with your business’ organic search efforts. What does a canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) do?In simple terms, utilizing a canonical tag is a way of indicating to search engines that the destination URL noted in this tag is the “master copy” or the “single point of truth” that is worthy of being included in the search index. When implemented correctly, this should prevent multiple URLs with the same information or identical wording from being indexed and competing against each other on search engine results pages (SERPs). Can my canonical tag be self-referential?Absolutely. If it’s the best version of a page, do not leave it up to a search engine to decide this. Wear the “single source of truth” badge with pride and potentially prevent the incorrect implementation of canonical tags on other pages that are identical or similar. Page Speed TestLast but not least, we can’t forget about page speed on individual pages of a business’ website. While the elements listed above are great for helping search engines and users better understand the context around a piece of content, page speed is important for ensuring the user gets a quality technical experience. The entire premise of using a search engine is centered around getting a quick answer for a particular question or topic search. Delivering a slow page to a user will likely lead to them leaving your website all together. According to a study from Google across multiple verticals, increasing page load time from 1 to 5 seconds increases the probability of a bounce by 90%. That could be a huge loss in revenue for a business. Source: Google/SOASTA Research, 2017. Tools for testing page speed:Page by page:
At scale:
Crafting the perfect piece of content is more than simply understanding your audience and what they want to read about online. There are many technical elements outlined above that can make or break your success in organic search or many other marketing mediums. As you think about producing a blog, an informational guide, or even a product page, consider all of the information a user needs to take the desired next step. (All screenshots were taken by the author for the purpose of this article.)
Cooper Hollmaier is Associate Program Manager, SEO at REI.
The post 10 on-page SEO essentials: Crafting the perfect piece of content appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/26/10-on-page-seo-essentials-crafting-the-perfect-piece-of-content/ Constantly evolving search results driven by Google’s increasing implementation of AI are challenging SEOs to keep pace. Search is more dynamic, competitive, and faster than ever before. Where SEOs used to focus almost exclusively on what Google and other search engines were looking for in their site structure, links, and content, digital marketing now revolves solidly around the needs and intent of consumers. This past year was perhaps the most transformative in SEO, an industry expected to top $80 billion in spending by 2020. AI is creating entirely new engagement possibilities across multiple channels and devices. Consumers are choosing to find and interact with information by voice search, or even on connected IoT appliances, and other devices. Brands are being challenged to reimagine the entire customer journey and how they optimize content for search, as a result. How do you even begin to prioritize when your to-do list and the data available to you are growing at such a rapid pace? The points shared below intend to help you with that. From analysis to activation, data is keySEO is becoming less a matter of simply optimizing for search. Today, SEO success hinges on our ability to seize every opportunity. Research from my company’s Future of Marketing and AI Study highlights current opportunities in five important areas. 1. Data cleanliness and structureAs the volume of data consumers are producing in their searches and interactions increases, it’s critically important that SEOs properly tag and structure the information we want search engines to match to those queries. Google offers rich snippets and cards that enable you to expand and enhance your search results, making them more visually appealing but also adding functionality and opportunities to engage. Google has experimented with a wide variety of rich results, and you can expect them to continue evolving. Therefore, it’s best practice to properly mark up all content so that when a rich search feature becomes available, your content is in place to capitalize on the opportunity. You can use the Google Developers “Understand how structured data works” guide to get started and test your structured data for syntax errors here. 2. Increasingly automated actionable insightsWhile Google is using AI to interpret queries and understand results, marketers are deploying AI to analyze data, recognize patterns and deliver insights as output at rates humans simply cannot achieve. AI is helping SEOs in interpreting market trends, analyzing site performance, gathering and understanding competitor performance, and more. It’s not just that we’re able to get insights faster, though. The insights available to us now may have gone unnoticed, if not for the in-depth analysis we can accomplish with AI. Machines are helping us analyze different types of media to understand the content and context of millions of images at a time and it goes beyond images and video. With Google Lens, for example, augmented reality will be used to glean query intent from objects rather than expressed words. Opportunities for SEOs include:
3. Real-time response and interactionsIn a recent “State of Chatbots” report, researchers asked consumers to identify problems with traditional online experiences by posing the question, “What frustrations have you experienced in the past month?” As you can see, at least seven of the top consumer frustrations listed above can be solved with properly programmed chatbots. It’s no wonder that they also found that 69% of consumers prefer chatbots for quick communication with brands. Search query and online behavior data can make smart bots so compelling and efficient in delivering on consumer needs that in some cases, the visitor may not even realize it’s an automated tool they’re dealing with. It’s a win for the consumer, who probably isn’t there for a social visit anyway as well as for the brand that seeks to deliver an exceptional experience even while improving operational efficiency. SEOs have an opportunity to:
4. Smart automationSEOs have been pretty ingenious at automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as pulling rankings reports, backlink monitoring, and keyword research. In fact, a lot of quality digital marketing software was born out of SEOs automating their own client work. Now, AI is enabling us to make automation smarter by moving beyond simple task completion to prioritization, decision-making, and executing new tasks based on those data-backed decisions. Content marketing is one area where AI can have a massive impact, and marketers are on board. We found that just four percent of respondents felt they were unlikely to use AI/deep learning in their content strategy in 2018, and over 42% had already implemented it. In content marketing, AI can help us quickly analyze consumer behavior and data, in order to:
5. Personalizations that drive business resultsPersonalization was identified as the top trend in marketing at the time of our survey, followed closely by AI (which certainly drives more accurate personalizations). In fact, you could argue that the top four trends namely, personalization, AI, voice search, and mobile optimization are closely connected if not overlapping in places. Across emails, landing pages, paid advertising campaigns, and more, search insights are being injected into and utilized across multiple channels. These intend to help us better connect content to consumer needs. Each piece of content produced must be purposeful. It needs to be optimized for discovery, a process that begins in content planning as you identify where consumers are going to find and engage with each piece. Smart content is personalized in such a way that it meets a specific consumer’s need, but it must deliver on the monetary needs of the business, as well. Check out these 5 steps for making your content smarter from a previous column for more. How SEOs are uniquely positioned to drive smarter digital marketing forwardAs the marketing professionals have one foot in analysis and the other solidly planted in creative, SEOs have a unique opportunity to lead smart utilization and activation of all manners of consumer data. You understand the critical importance of clean data input (or intelligent systems that can clean and make sense of unstructured data) and differentiating between first and third-party data. You understand economies of scale in SEO and the value in building that scalability into systems from the ground up. SEOs have long nurtured a deep understanding of how people search for and discover information, and how technology delivers. Make the most of your current opportunities by picking your low-hanging fruit opportunities for quick wins. Focus your efforts on putting the scalable, smart systems in place that will allow you to anticipate consumer needs, react quickly, report SEO appropriately, and convey business results to the stakeholders who will determine budgets in future. Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of leading enterprise SEO and content performance platform BrightEdge. He can be found on Twitter @jimyu. You might like to read these next:
The post Five ways SEOs can utilize data with insights, automation, and personalization appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/12/five-ways-seos-can-utilize-data-with-insights-automation-and-personalization/ Social listening is a tactic that’s not unheard of. Quite a number of brands use it these days and even more consider trying it out in the near future. However, for many, the step-by-step process of social listening remains unclear. This article aims to answer the most burning questions about social listening:
What is a keyword?As we know, social listening is a process that requires a social media listening/social media monitoring tool (e.g., Awario, Mention, Brandwatch). The first thing you do when you open the app is entering keywords to monitor. Keywords are the words that describe best what you want to find on social media platforms and the web. A keyword can be one word (e.g. “Philips”), two words (e.g. “Aleh Barysevich”), four words (e.g. “search engine optimization tool”), etc. Each one of these examples presents one keyword. After you typed in your keyword(s), the tool will search for mentions of these keywords and collect them in a single place. Which keywords should you monitor?You can monitor absolutely anything. You can monitor the keywords “Brexit” or “let’s dance” or “hello, is it me you’re looking for”. However, in terms of marketing purposes, there are six main types of keywords that you are most likely to monitor. They are: 1. Brand/company Now let’s go through each type together to make sure you understand the goals behind monitoring these keywords and how to get the most out of them. 1. Brand/CompanyMonitoring your brand/your company is essential in most cases. While the goals of social listening can be very diverse (reputation management, brand awareness, influencer marketing, customer service), most of these goals require listening to what people say about your brand. To make sure you don’t miss any valuable mentions, include common misspellings and abbreviations of your brand name as well. In case your brand name is a common word (e.g. “Apple” or “Orange”) make sure to choose a tool that gives you an option to introduce “negative” keywords. These would be keywords such as “apple tree”, “apple juice”, “apple pie”. Excluding them from your search will help get mentions of Apple the brand only. Any tool that has a boolean search option will also save you from tons of such irrelevant mentions. 2. CompetitorsPick a couple of your main competitors (or even just one), and enter their brand/company name as a separate project. There’s a good reason for that: Questions and complaints directed at your competitors can be replied by your social media manager first. They could explain why your brand is better/doesn’t have specific problems that your competitor does. This is social selling, a process of finding hot leads on social media. Most social media monitoring tools also let you compare how your brand is doing on social media against your competitor’s brand. This can be useful for tracking your progress and discovering new ideas. For example, knowing which social networks, which locations, and what time slots get your competitor more attention could help you upgrade your social media strategy. Knowing how their campaigns, social media posts, and product releases perform could help you improve your own plans, and avoid some mishaps. 3. PersonThe CEO of your company might not necessarily be the company’s face or even a public persona at all. However, if reputation management is one of your goals, monitoring mentions of the CEO are important. Their actions on social media could easily attract attention and cause a social media crisis. Also, you’ll know straight away about any publications that mention your company’s CEO. Same, of course, goes for any other people in the company. 4. CampaignIt’s crucial to monitor marketing (and other) campaigns as well as product launches. Reactions on social media happen very quickly. Only by monitoring such events in real time, you’ll know straight away if it’s going well or not, if it’s working at all, and if there are problems that you might’ve not noticed while creating the campaign. The earlier you know how the reality is unfolding, the better. To monitor a campaign, enter its name if it has one, its slogan, and/or its hashtag as a keyword. It’s important to understand that there are loads of marketing campaigns that have caused serious problems for the companies. Something that could’ve been avoided with social media monitoring. 5. IndustryNot in every industry can you monitor the so-called “industry keywords”. However, if you can, these are the source of endless opportunities. Most of these are in the realms of social selling, brand awareness, and influencer marketing. For example, if your product is a productivity app, this would be your keyword “productivity app”. Include a couple of synonyms and words such as “looking for”, or “can anyone recommend” and you’ll get mentions from people that look for a product like yours. Specify the language and the location to get more relevant results. With a social media monitoring tool that finds influencers, you can go to the list of influencers that is built around your industry keywords and choose the ones to work with. 6. URLMonitoring your brand by excluding your brand’s URL (which is possible with a social media monitoring tool) is important for SEO purposes. It’s a big part of link-building. All you have to do is find mentions of your brand that don’t link to your brand, reach out to the author, and ask for a link. In most cases, the authors wouldn’t mind adding the link to your site. Besides, you can monitor competitors’ URLs. This will give you a list of sources where they get links from. It’s only logical that if the author is interested in the niche and is willing to write about your competitor, they probably wouldn’t mind reviewing your product as well. ConclusionThere’s a lot you can do with social media monitoring. All you have to do is start. Starting is the hardest part. Then, appetite, ideas, and knowledge come with eating. Hopefully, this article gave you a clear idea of where to start. Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter at @ab80. The post Social listening 101: Six crucial keywords to track appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/12/social-listening-101-six-crucial-keywords-to-track/ The robots.txt file is an often overlooked and sometimes forgotten part of a website and SEO. But nonetheless, a robots.txt file is an important part of any SEO’s toolset, whether or not you are just starting out in the industry or you are a chiseled SEO veteran. What is a robots.txt file?A robots.txt file can be used for for a variety of things, from letting search engines know where to go to locate your sites sitemap to telling them which pages to crawl and not crawl as well as being a great tool for managing your sites crawl budget. You might be asking yourself “wait a minute, what is crawl budget?” Well crawl budget is what what Google uses to effectively crawl and index your sites pages. As big a Google is, they still only have a limited number of resources available to be able to crawl and index your sites content. If your site only has a few hundred URLs then Google should be able to easily crawl and index your site’s pages. However, if your site is big, like an ecommerce site for example and you have thousands of pages with lots of auto-generated URLs, then Google might not crawl all of those pages and you will be missing on lots of potential traffic and visibility. This is where the importance of prioritizing what, when and how much to crawl becomes important. Google have stated that “having many low-value-add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing.” This is where having a robots.txt file can help with the factors affecting your sites crawl budget. You can use the file to help manage your sites crawl budget, by making sure that search engines are spending their time on your site as efficiently (especially if you have a large site) as possible and crawling only the important pages and not wasting time on pages such as login, signup or thank you pages. Why do you need robots.txt?Before a robot such as Googlebot, Bingbot, etc. crawls a webpage, it will first check to see if there is in fact a robots.txt file and, if one exists, they will usually follow and respect the directions found within that file. A robots.txt file can be a powerful tool in any SEO’s arsenal as it’s a great way to control how search engine crawlers/bots access certain areas of your site. Keep in mind that you need to be sure you understand how the robots.txt file works or you will find yourself accidentally disallowing Googlebot or any other bot from crawling your entire site and not having it be found in the search results! But when done properly you can control such things as:
Robots.txt ExamplesBelow are a few examples of how you can use the robots.txt file on your own site. Allowing all web crawlers/robots access to all your sites content: User-agent: * Disallow: Blocking all web crawlers/bots from all your sites content: User-agent: * Disallow: / You can see how easy it is to make a mistake when creating your sites robots.txt as the difference from blocking your entire site from being seen is a simple forward slash in the disallow directive (Disallow: /). Blocking a specific web crawlers/bots from a specific folder: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: / Blocking a web crawlers/bots from a specific page on your site: User-agent: Disallow: /thankyou.html Exclude all robots from part of the server: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /junk/ This is example of what the robots.txt file on the theverge.com’s website looks like:The example file can be viewed here: www.theverge.com/robots.txt You can see how The Verge use their robots.txt file to specifically call out Google’s news bot “Googlebot-News” to make sure that it doesn’t crawl those directories on the site. It’s important to remember that if you want to make sure that a bot doesn’t crawl certain pages or directories on your site, that you call out those pages and or directories in the in “Disallow” declarations in your robots.txt file, like in the above examples. You can review how Google handles the robots.txt file in their robots.txt specifications guide, Google has a current maximum file size limit for the robots.txt file, the maximum size for Google is set at 500KB, so it’s important to be mindful of the size of your sites robots.txt file. How to create a robots.txt fileCreating a robots.txt file for your site is a fairly simple process, but it’s also easy to make a mistake. Don’t let that discourage you from creating or modifying a robots file for your site. This article from Google walks you through the robots.txt file creation process and should help you get comfortable creating your very own robots.txt file. Once you are comfortable with creating or modify your site’s robots file, Google has another great article that explains how to test your sites robots.txt file to see if it is setup correctly. Checking if you have a robots.txt fileIf you are new to the robots.txt file or are not sure if your site even has one, you can do a quick check to see. All you need to do to check is go to your sites root domain and then add /robots.txt to the end of the URL. Example: www.yoursite.com/robots.txt If nothing shows up, then you do not have a robots.txt file for you site. Now would be the perfect time to jump in and test out creating one for your site. Best Practices:
Things to keep in mind:If you have a subdomain or multiple subdomains on your site, then you you will need to have a robots.txt file on each subdomain as well as on the main root domain. This would look something like this store.yoursite.com/robots.txt and yoursite.com/robots.txt. Like mentioned above in the “best practices section” it’s important to remember not to use the robots.txt file to prevent sensitive data, such as private user information from being crawled and appearing in the search results. The reason for this, is that it’s possible that other pages might be linking to that information and if there’s a direct link back it will bypass the robots.txt rules and that content may still get indexed. If you need to block your pages from truly being indexed in the search results, use should use different method like adding password protection or by adding a noindex meta tag to those pages. Google can not login to a password protected site/page, so they will not be able to crawl or index those pages. ConclusionWhile you might be a little nervous if you have never worked on robots.txt file before, rest assured it is fairly simple to use and set up. Once you get comfortable with the ins and outs of the robots file, you’ll be able to enhance your site’s SEO as well as help your site’s visitors and search engine bots. By setting up your robots.txt file the right way, you will be helping search engine bots spend their crawl budgets wisely and help ensure that they aren’t wasting their time and resources crawling pages that don’t need to be crawled. This will help them in organizing and displaying your sites content in the SERPs in the best way possible, which in turn means you’ll have more visibility. Keep in mind that it doesn’t necessarily take a whole lot of time and effort to setup your robots.txt file. For the most part, it’s a one-time setup, that you can then make little tweaks and changes to help better sculpt your site. I hope the practices, tips and suggestions described in this article will help give you the confidence to go out and create/tweak your sites robots.txt file and at the same time help guide you smoothly through the process.
Michael McManus is Earned Media (SEO) Practice Lead at iProspect.
The post Robots.txt best practice guide + examples appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/12/robots-txt-best-practice-guide-and-examples/ Historically digital marketers are more concerned about attracting traffic to the site than boosting on-site conversions. This is unfortunate because conversion optimization usually requires smaller investments and provides faster results than growing your traffic. Here are eight ways to increase your ecommerce conversions quickly by providing better usability and smoother user experience. 1. Make your checkout process simplerThe name of the game is convenience. Don’t make it difficult for the consumer to finish a purchase. The more barriers your site throws up, the more likely it is your customers will leave the cart without completing the purchase. According to BigCommerce’s 2019 Omni-Channel Retail Report, convenience is among the top 3 reasons U.S. consumers across all generations chose to buy from an online store. When shopping online, millennials have become used to speed and convenience while younger generations have never known shopping without these. You should have a simple checkout process because that’s what is expected from your site these days (and often the primary reason why they shop online anyway). For example, sites that force you to sign up before you can check out are frustrating, and many users are not willing to spend time creating an account. Remove the forced signup and provide an option to checkout out as “guest.” Every section of your checkout process is another opportunity for the consumer to quit and walk away. Consider whether any given section is worth the chance of losing sales and if you can safely remove it. Or, if it can’t be removed, find a way to streamline the entire process. For example, include a duplicating button that allows users to make their delivery address their billing address, without entering the same information twice. Create easy cart navigation and decrease the number of steps needed to complete the purchase. This will increase sales and profits as well as customer satisfaction. Featured tool: Convert.com allows to easily A/B your site shopping experience to come up with the best solution for your customers. Additionally, for WordPress, here’s a detailed A/B testing tutorial. 2. Provide one-click upsellsAccording to ConversionXL, it is 25 times more expensive to develop new customers than it is to re-convert your current customers. You need to work to keep re-engaging your existing customers continually. They are more valuable to you than a new visitor. Studies have shown that if you can increase your customer retention by 5%, you can increase your profits by up to 25%. You can keep these consumers through a one-click upsell option. It convinces customers to complete an additional, unplanned-for transaction. It’s exactly how impulse shopping works in brick-and-mortar stores. They place enticing items by the register to convince you to add them to your purchase while you stand in line. PayKickstart users have demonstrated powerful proof of concept: Many of them have seen both their average customer value and the total revenue more than double after they implemented one-click upsells: 3. Make your shopping experience mobile-friendlyMobile shopping is continually growing. More people are using their mobile device or tablet to shop on ecommerce sites than ever before, and with the fast adoption of smartphones worldwide, the numbers will continue to go up. Users are more likely to abandon a cart and navigate away from your site if it’s difficult to browse on a smartphone. You don’t always need to develop an expensive app, but you do need to make your website easy to read and use on a smartphone. One powerful way to make your shopping experience mobile friendly without investing into a standalone app is to use web design platforms that support progressive web apps (PWAs) which act like native mobile apps but don’t need to be installed by your customers. According to Google, PWAs are “a new way to deliver amazing user experiences on the web.” PWAs also support many app-like functionalities that most mobile-optimized websites do not, such as push notifications, which can be especially useful for omnichannel retailers. Duda allows agency professionals to roll out progressive web app versions of their clients’ sites with one click of a button: 4. Provide personalized shopping experienceSeveral studies found personalized experience is a growing ecommerce trend that shouldn’t be neglected:
With Amazon leading the digital marketing industry, most of US consumers already expect to receive personalized treatment whenever they shop online. Alter helps you set-up personalized shopping experience without the need to invest into an in-house solution. It works as follows:
Some content management systems also provide for solid personalization options (which would be even easier to implement). For example, Duda allows you to personalize CTAs and special offers based on time of day, geolocation, number of visits and more: 5. Match your customers’ expectationsMany of your customers discover your products through Google search. Are your landing pages doing a good-enough job matching their expectations? Search intent optimization is often overlooked. Yet, it’s what often determines your users’ on-page engagement. Whether they will instantly see what they expected to see determines whether they will want to stay and give your landing page a chance to convert them into buyers. Text Optimizer is a great way to optimize your landing page copy to meet Google’s and its users’ expectations. It uses semantic analysis to extract important concepts from Google’s search results. Use these terms when crafting your landing page copy to optimize it better and engage more of your site visitors: 6. Add a sense urgencyHave you ever had a case of FOMO or fear of missing out? You’re not alone. The fear of missing out on something amazing or special or even extremely ordinary is a powerful psychological force that you can tap into. Add a sense of urgency to your shopping cart page to develop FOMO in your costumer. This can give hesitant customers the extra push they need to complete the purchase. Amazon uses FOMO extremely well by adding a countdown timer tied into your shipping. It tells you to buy the product in the next XX minutes to qualify for one-day shipping. You can use this tactic by adding a timer to your cart page, or a countdown clock to the end of a sale (here’s how). You could even go simply by writing “checkout now” instead of only “checkout.” 7. Add breadcrumbsSite navigation can be tricky. If you’ve never been on a particular website, you might struggle to find your way around after you move from the landing page. This is especially troublesome for e-commerce sites. You need to implement clear site navigation for both SEO and usability. Setting up breadcrumbs throughout your pages is a simple way to help your users feel confident at each step of their journey. Make it obvious where the consumer should go and what they should click next, and you are likely to see your conversions go up. Conversion optimization may seem overwhelming. Luckily there are tools and solutions that can make it quite doable. Before investing in attracting more traffic to your site, try implementing the tips above to get the most of those visitors you already have.
Ann Smarty is the blogger and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on twitter @seosmarty
The post How to increase conversions: Ideas, tools, examples appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/12/how-to-increase-conversions-ideas-tools-examples/ So you’ve created your website, following all the recommended SEO best practices. That means you’ve included valuable, relevant keywords on your pages, made it mobile friendly and even started a blog that you’re updating frequently with original, relevant content. But despite your best efforts, you’re not seeing as much traffic as you’d like, and your site is still ranking too low on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It could be that your site is missing just one thing: backlinks. Backlinks are links from another website that point to your website. Getting backlinks from websites with high domain authority that are relevant to your niche will help you rank higher on Google searches and grab your audience’s attention. Why is there such an emphasis on backlinks? Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) uses them to discover new pages, confirm pages are legitimate and determine the popularity of these pages. After all, Google doesn’t want to risk its own reputation by ranking subpar sites high on the SERP. According to a study by Backlinko, the number of domains linking to a webpage “correlated with rankings more than any other factor”. Backlink generation isn’t easy, especially for new businesses or businesses just starting to build their web presence. However, with time, effort and the right tools, you can make sure you’re ranking high and receiving the views you deserve. If you’re a business owner and want to boost your backlinks, here are eight tools to get you started. 1. MozBarMozBar is a free SEO toolbar you download onto your web browser. It shows you the domain authority (DA) of a certain website, which gives you an indication of whether or not you should reach out for a backlink. If you do earn a backlink from a website with a DA, this will positively affect your own site’s authority. In terms of DA, it ranges from 1 to 100, and the higher, the better. There’s no ideal number to look for, but generally, try finding sites with excellent content that relate to your field. If the DA is, say, a 35, that won’t help you as much as a site with a 75, but it won’t hurt, either. Research sites thoroughly and makes sure they aren’t spammy before pursuing them. 2. SEMrushSEMrush, which helps with all types of marketing strategies, shows users a few key tools for backlink generation. When logged into the paid version, you can navigate to the mentions section and find which websites are mentioning you but not linking to you. Once you discover these mentions, you can reach out and ask for a link to your site (as long as the site is relevant and has a high DA), which will boost your rankings. Another tactic is to go into the backlink audit and see who’s currently linking to your website. Check to see if the link appears underneath the proper SEO-rich keyword and if the site is legitimate and relevant. (If the site is not legitimate, you may want to reach out and ask them to take it down, since that backlink can potentially hurt your ranking.) While on SEMrush, try the backlink gap tool, which shows you which backlink opportunities your competitors are not taking advantage of. Then, you can reach out and ask for those valuable backlinks instead. 3. PitchboxPitchbox is a platform to find websites that may want to spread the news about your business or backlink to your pages or content. You simply sign up for Pitchbox, log in, paste the link to the page/content you’re doing backlink generation for and add in some specific keywords you’re looking to target. Then, in a minute or two, Pitchbox will come up with (usually) hundreds of websites you can reach out to. You can filter for or delete any websites with low domain authority, and go through the sites one by one to see which are valuable. You can reach out to these websites using a Pitchbox email template. Pitchbox will show you the contacts for that site (or allow you to manually input them), automatically place in the person’s name and their website name, and send as many follow-up emails as you’d like. When using Pitchbox, double check the contacts to make sure they’re current. Another best practice is to email a maximum of two people at the website since you don’t want to spam numerous people within an organization. If you’re having trouble with backlink generation, consider offering a backlink exchange. Just make sure, again, that the site you’re promising to link to relevant to yours and not spammy. 4. AhrefsAhrefs is similar to SEMrush and allows you to use the platform’s backlinks checker to view your current backlinks. Since they’ve already linked to your content before, you can ask these sites to link back to your other pages as well. Ahrefs also allows you to disavow toxic backlinks that might hurt your ranking. Another helpful backlink generation tool is the Ahrefs Site Explorer. By entering the name of your competitor, you can see all of their referring backlinks. Using that information, you can reach out to the same sites that are linking to your competitors and see if they want to link to a valuable piece of content from your site. 5. Google AlertsLet’s say you don’t have time to log onto SEMrush or Ahrefs every day and go through your mentions and backlinks. Instead, sign up for Google Alerts, which will email you when you’re mentioned somewhere. Visit the websites that mention you and try to find the contact information for someone you can reach out to there. If you can’t find them, log onto Hunter.io, which is a free tool for finding email addresses using only a domain name. 6. Broken Link BuilderSomebody’s broken link can be your backlinking opportunity with Broken Link Builder. With this tool, you can find dead websites and their respective backlinks, and then offer up similar content to the website that was linking to the dead link. It’s a white-hat SEO tactic that benefits both webmasters and backlink seekers. Broken Link Builder only takes 30 to 60 minutes to generate a report for you to find valuable backlinking opportunities. 7. MajesticMajestic is a backlinking tool, like SEMrush and Ahrefs, that examines all the backlinks for your website, as well as your competitors, and allows you to perform very specific searches. You can search and filter backlinks however you choose, including by crawl or discovery dates, anchor text, link type, URL snippet or merchant ID. Majestic also claims to have the largest index out of any other service. 8. LinkodyLinkody is another platform for tracking and performing research on backlinks. It tells you when you lose or gain links, and you can disavow bad links. You’re able to see your competitors’ backlinks and analyze your own link profile. You can choose to receive daily notifications in your inbox, view which links point to your landing pages and connect your Linkody and Google Analytics accounts for more backlink information. If you don’t want to pay for the service, you can use Linkody’s Free Backlink Checker to check two unique domains per week. Tracking backlinksWith backlink generation, you need to track your efforts. A good place to do this is within a Google Sheet. Create a spreadsheet and share it with your team working on backlinks. They should input information like the date the backlink was pursued, the DA of the website, the URL of the website, the target URL of your content or page, the date the backlink was added, the contact’s email address and any notes about the process. Then, when you’re doing another round of backlink generation, you can refer to your Google sheet and reach out to the same people to see if they’d like to link to something else of yours. Backlinks will always be part of Google’s ranking requirements. Understanding their importance and learning how to use these tools empowers you to do effective backlink generation that can increase your rankings and bring in more visitors to your site. Mario Medina is a content strategist. He can be found on Twitter @mariovmedina. The post Eight tools you need for backlink generation appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/20/eight-backlink-generation-tools/ |
ABOUT MEPleasure to introduce myself I am Gillian 32 from Calgary, Canada. I am working as social media expert and have helped many clients with their social media marketing. Archives
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