Google is undisputedly a search kingpin. The company has successfully managed to create a service that suits both users looking for items of interest and advertisers looking to sell their wares.
Through Google Ads, you can come up with online ads to reach audiences all around the world who have an interest in your product. Since the Google Ads program runs on the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising concept, you have to ensure you have funds at the ready for every time visitors click on your ad.
Because there are so many advertising channels out there, it can be a tad bit difficult to determine which one is best for your enterprise. Looking through the web may leave you confused that you ever were because bloggers and influencers are always letting you know why this-and-that are great investment options without caring to elaborate further.
You can count on Google Ads to deliver because businesses make about $2 in income for every $1 they spend in Google Ads.
Truthfully speaking, both Google Ads and SEO are integral in your marketing campaign. When done right, both these tools can help you establish a presence on Google search results. That said, if you’re looking for immediate and stronger results, Google Ads is your best option.
New websites are likely going to find it hard to stand out using only SEO. This is because SEO takes some time before the results start to trickle in. Since the waiting time can last months, you need to elevate your businesses to match up with the larger companies who have already built a name for themselves in your industry.
The best way to do this is by using Google Ads. The program excitingly allows you to get on the very first couple of pages on Google without having to strain much. Once your website is live, you can enable your ad to become visible in as little as 24 hours.
Having said this, we should point out that embracing Google Ads doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to ditch SEO completely. Instead, you need to use Google Ads to enhance your presence on Google whilst using SEO to boost your organic ranking.
With Google Ads, you can discover just how effective the keywords you’ve been using are. Once you get a good idea about which keywords work great, you can tailor your SEO campaign to make use of these keywords.
Compared to traditional advertising channels like TV and magazines, Google Ads is highly measurable.
While SEO strategies tend to have a positive impact on long-term campaigns, it’s not easy to accurately determine what actions actually positively impacted your campaign. The same applies to social media marketing efforts.
On the flip side, Google Ads provides you with accurate results on the aspects of your campaigns that made the masses embrace you. It’s relatively easy to operate from a position of strength.
The transparency of Google Ads comes with plenty of PPC metrics which allow you to zone in on all aspects of your marketing campaign, even on a granular level. You can find out the steps visitors to your website took right before they made a purchase. This approach is great if you’re quickly looking to ascertain whether your campaigns are actually worth it.
In your bid to find audiences interest in your products and services, you don’t want to cast your net too wide and miss out on relevant prospects.
Thankfully, Google Ads allows you to narrow down your targets. This fantastic PPC platform is robust enough for you to feed in multiple keywords and target various demographics according to gender, age, income level, location, and many others.
This kind of reach is fantastic for both small and large businesses looking to establish a foothold in their respective markets. Local companies will also want to get in the act because they can target individuals in their local without a hassle.
Compared to other marketing ventures, Google Ads stands out in the fact that their marketing approach is much more impressive. Their set up allows you to flex your muscle and retarget audiences who have shown an interest in your business. This means you can connect with visitors who checked out your website or that of your competitors. With such remarketing efforts, you can quickly help clients transition from one stage of the sales funnel to the next one.
Having highlighted this powerful feature, it’s evident that you need to incorporate Google Ads in your marketing strategy if you want to make strides forward.
Google Ads offers great flexibility with budgets. You’re allowed to spend whatever amounts you wish to. This kind of control is great if you’re working within the confines of a budget. You can decide to start small before expanding just how much you spend on your campaign. The accelerated spending feature offered by Google also allows you to focus on burning through your budget.
Alternatively, you can make use of Google’s bidding factors to play around with your budget. What this really means is that if you’re only after the clicks, you can elect to only pay for clicks. Anything else you obtain from the campaign, like impressions and brand awareness, will be offered for free.
This kind of optimisation is fantastic because you can manoeuvre with any kind of Google Ads budget without having to worry.
Objectively speaking, businesses are always looking to do much more than just break even. Most businesses are able to do this by creating value in the markets they operate in and then leveraging the buying power of their clientele.
While this traditional approach has worked well over the years, the dawn of the internet age has forced many enterprises to rethink their strategies.
Sure, value addition remains a central premise for business operation. However, much more is needed if you want to stand out. We’ll be looking to highlight some of the major areas you need to cover ground if you’re looking to register impressive sales numbers going forward.
Traditionally, word of mouth marketing typically spread from one person to the next. The modernised version is somewhat different in that it describes both targeted efforts and naturally occurring happenings where individuals share their satisfaction with a brand.
Data from Nielsen has shown that about 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other kind of advertising. As it’s already apparent, trust plays an important role in word of mouth marketing. In light of this, you need to foster the right conditions for word of mouth marketing to thrive. With that done, you’ll have broken down trust barriers that may exist and allowed influential customers to openly share their experiences with your company to the masses.
Given the fact that 74% of consumers have reported word of mouth being the key inspiration behind their buying decision, it’s crucial that you tap into this kind of marketing strategy.
If you look closely at the numbers, you’re bound to discover that there’s some long-term value when you invest in word of mouth marketing. This is because referred customers usually stick to a company over extended periods when compared to people who find your company using other means.
A contented customer base is likely going to direct more of their family, friends, and close associates to your direction. Going by this exponential growth curve alone, it’s logical to see just how valuable the first referral is.
As you look to venture into word of mouth marketing, it’s essential for you to understand that it happens in 2 ways, either organically or through marketing and ad campaigns. Since the two have inherent overlaps, it’s necessary for us to distinguish the two.
Video is one of the most powerful mediums out there. Research has shown that adding videos to your landing page can increase your conversion rate by as much as 80%.
When customers watch things like explainer videos, they’re able to visually identify the reasons why they need your product. This means that they’re likely to go further down the sales funnel and complete a sale.
It’s not surprising that this is the case because vision is our most dominant sense. Plenty of the information we are able to transmit to our brains is visual in nature. If the adage, a picture is worth a thousand words is actually true, then, there’s plenty to be said about moving pictures.
You can massively boost your return on investment by using video to tell your story. Luckily, you don’t need to be tech-savvy to come up with great videos. The internet is awash with video production and editing tools that you can quickly acquaint yourself with.
Importantly, you don’t need to come up with perfect videos in order to resonate with audiences. Content is the most important thing you need to be mindful of when producing your videos.
Organic traffic continues to shine when it comes to bringing in new prospects. Since most people discover brands online, it’s essential that you factor this is in your sales and marketing strategy, even if you’re a local business.
More specifically, you need to strive to have your brand get to the very first page of search engine results relevant to your client base.
Two decades before the online world became what it is today, many people weren’t acquainted about the best practices of the web. Today, the game has changed. Our phones are smarter and so are we.
Since most of the precious information is usually situated at the very top of search results, i.e. page one, it’s nigh impossible for visitors to check out websites found on successive pages after page one. We wrote a guide covering some great tips you can implement yourself to increase your local business rankings.
Brands like Facebook and Google use user engagement as a currency in measuring how websites are faring. They analyse even the most mundane of user actions like reactions, number of shares, the comments, and the click-to-conversion ratio. All this is done in a bid to bolster the efficiency of their algorithms.
The more engagements you’re able to register, the more likely it is for your ad to be shown frequently to audiences. As such, you need to aim to stay on page one of search results.
Having shared this, it’s worth documenting that website design also plays a key role in determining the success you have with prospects. The presence of broken links and error messages is not something that many willing buyers will be able to stomach. As alluded earlier, trust is of the essence in the sales game. You need to make sure that clients can trust in your business for them to truly become loyalists.
You’ve done it. After weeks of planning and countless discussions with your design team, you’ve finally got the green light. You’re ready to launch your beautiful brand new website to the world!
But although you might be tempted to push the ‘live’ button right away, it’s really important to test a few vital elements of the site before you start showing off the fruits of your labour to your potential customers.
Carrying out the ten final checks below will give you extra peace of mind that your new platform will perform at its very best after launch (and have a great chance of ranking well in the search engines, too!).
Before launch, go back to basics. Review and proofread all the content on your website to make sure it’s free from typos, poor grammar and duplicate copy.
This is essential for two reasons. Firstly, poorly written content won’t leave the best impression on your users. You only have five seconds or so to capture their attention and encourage them to explore everything your company can offer, so the last thing you want is for them to head straight over to a competitor’s site because they’ve been turned off by sub-standard writing.
And secondly, the major search engines such as Google will take your syntax into consideration when deciding whether or not to rank your web page in their organic listings. Bad content is less likely to rank well.
Pretend you’re a potential customer. Work your way through your site pathways to see if your new platform offers a simple, seamless experience.
Are your instructions clear? Is your main call to action displayed prominently on each page? Does your contact form return that reassuring ‘thank you’ message once it’s been completed? If you’re finding it difficult to get from A to B, or you’re encountering needless hurdles along the way, you need to address these flow and usability issues before you unleash your site to a wider audience.
It’s a simple check, but it often gets overlooked by webmasters who are keen to launch sooner rather than later. The load time of your pages will have a big impact on the user’s experience (and you’re probably already aware that slow load speeds can have an adverse effect on your SEO, too).
As we mentioned in a previous blog post How Important Is Site Speed For SEO, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you assess and improve your page load speed. Google’s PageSpeed Insights will give you plenty of food for thought, but other alternatives such as WebPageTest, GTmetrix and Pingdom will also return useful feedback.
This is a big one. More of us than ever before are using smartphones and tablets to navigate the web, so any new website must be able to render correctly on mobile browsers.
The best way to make sure your site is mobile responsive is to test it on as many devices as possible. If you spot any glitches, or you find that some or all of your content is displaying incorrectly, let your developers know so they can fix the problem before launch.
Again, there are tonnes of tools out there that can help you test responsive websites. Google Search Console’s Mobile-Friendly Test will show you exactly how your page is being displayed on a typical smartphone screen and will provide you with a site-wide mobile usability report that highlights any major concerns. Elsewhere on the web, you could use Responsinator, mobiReady or MobileTest.me to gauge the responsiveness of your latest creation.
If you want to improve your SEO rankings, you need a winning link building campaign.
Link building is a form of off-page SEO that helps to improve the credibility of your website. Getting links to your site placed on other reputable sites establishes your authenticity and boosts your rankings.
While the premise behind link building sounds simple enough, a successful campaign can be tricky to execute. If you want to get on the first page of Google, take a look at this step by step guide and start building your link building strategy today…
These small but mighty directives are often used by web designers while they’re creating your new website in a test platform. The noindex directive stops the search engines from being able to access the test site’s content while it’s still in development; the nofollow tag prevents Google from following links between pages.
As you can imagine, launching a website with noindex and nofollow tags is far from ideal if you want your pages to be found – so make sure they’re taken off the code when everything’s ready to go.
These handy tags let you control what content shows up when one of our web pages is shared on Facebook. They’re also recognised by Twitter and LinkedIn.
Needless to say, if you don’t have the right Open Graph tags in place, you won’t have any say in what copy is displayed when somebody shares your page or post on social media. Set up and customise these vital pieces of code as soon as you can (or ask your developer to do this for you).
If a user requests a page that doesn’t actually exist, your site will return what’s called a 404 error page. This page can play a key part in keeping the potential customer on the website if they’ve reached a dead end; an empty template will confuse them and, in the worst-case scenario, encourage them to jump ship.
Test your existing 404 pages to see if it follows the same design theme and contains visible links back to the homepage or other resource pages that might be of interest. If it doesn’t, get your developer to improve it ASAP.
Every website should contain two sitemaps: one written in HTML, and one in XML. The HTML sitemap is a more user-friendly version that’s easy for human eyes to follow, whereas the XML addition is designed specifically to help the search engine bots find and index your website’s pages.
Make sure your developer creates an accurate XML sitemap file, then uploads it to your root directory so it can be found at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
We’ve seen it time and time again. An organisation has created a flawless website – its design is impeccable, its UX is incredible, and its content adds that extra je ne sais quoi to the whole platform. But several weeks after launch, there’s not been one single enquiry… or so it seems.
In reality, plenty of people have tried to inquire about the company. But the contact form hasn’t been working properly, so all attempts at communication have been bouncing straight back to their potential customers.
Before you open up your website for business, make sure that your contact portal is set up to send your enquiries straight to the email address of your choice (and isn’t pinging correspondence to your developer, who may have used their own email to test the form during the development phase).
As we all know, the work doesn’t end with the launch of a website. If you really want to make a splash online, you’ll need to invest in an ongoing search engine optimisation campaign that will increase your reach and exposure over time.
To make sure you’re able to monitor your online performance, set up a Google Analytics account and link it to your website’s header to start tracking your site data from day one. The data generated by the software will give you valuable insight into where your traffic is coming from, how users are interacting with your pages, and how people are converting into genuine leads.
We all know just how important backlinks are to an SEO campaign. What remains unclear though is just how many backlinks you need to have on your website.
Today, we’ll be seeking to answer the age-old question of quality vs. quantity. To some degree, both these options offer valid reasons as to why you need to back them.
However, for the sake of clarity, we’ll be imploring further into the topic in today’s discussion.
Backlinks are essentially the hyperlinks from your site to other sites. If you happen to be an authority in your industry, then, it’s not uncommon to find websites linking to yours for the sake of credibility.
Those who are renowned for achievements in their industry are oft-referenced in articles by others. The more backlinks you receive, the better your odds of registering increased traffic and seeing a boost in search engine rankings.
Search engines love backlinks since they serve as an indication that other people love your website. Aware of this stance, there are some unscrupulous entrepreneurs who seek to use underhand methods to rank highly.
Such back hat practices usually involve the payment of money for links to your website across various other sites. While this may see you gain some ground over your competition, in the long term, Google and other search engines are bound to discover your exploits. This usually happens because when backlinks are purchased, some emphasis is usually placed on the quantity aspect. The poor sources where your links originate from usually sound the warning bells for Google to respond.
To avoid getting penalised by Google, try steering away from such link schemes. In the worst case scenario, your website may be de-indexed. When this happens, search engines may choose not to display your website completely in search results.
Age plays a key role in determining just how many backlinks you need.
New websites typically little link building activity. Instead, most of the work needs to go into building branded links. If you’re working on local SEO, you need to put more emphasis on developing your social profiles, local citations and branded web 2.0s.
Ideally, you need to wait at least a month building your social profiles and setting up content for your site. Once the groundwork is done, it easy for you to justify just why you’re doing link building.
There’s some wiggle room for you to flex here. You can come up with as many links as you’d wish in this scenario. Having said that, it’s best to wait for a while for the content you post to simmer. Once sufficient traffic is recorded, you can get back to building backlinks. A good waiting period is about a week’s time.
You can play with your options on such websites. The fact that you can come up with as many backlinks as you want however doesn’t mean that you can compromise on the quality.
Setting backlink targets is not the most prudent thing. The best ways to go about is to build steadily and naturally go into building links.
Rather than being an instantaneous activity, link building needs to happen on a consistent basis. As an ongoing process, it doesn’t make sense to include targets and deadlines into the mix. A steady development is the only sure fire way for you to have an edge over your competition.
You should not stop pursuing your SEO targets even once you manage to break into the first page of search results, monthly link building services are offered by multiple companies for a reason.. its an ongoing task and is not a one off thing.
Many people make the mistake of focusing on the number of backlinks instead of quality. 1 high-quality backlink can be just as effective as 100 low-quality backlinks. As such, it’s not a pure numbers game.
You need to strike a perfect balance between the number of backlinks you generate and their quality. If you’re unsure how to do this, you need to ensure that the backlinks you create conform to at least half of these qualities:
You require fewer backlinks if you’ve done due diligence and properly optimised your website. If you have a poorly optimised site, the odds are that the backlinks you share will have zero effect on your audience. This is because you don’t have grounds for prospects to trust your website and regard you as an authority in your field.
Some recommended optimisation steps are:
As you look into your competition, be sure to take note of how many links are pointing to each of their pages on search engine results. While at it, be sure to ignore the numbers from the webpage containing the most backlinks and the webpage with least number of backlinks.
Once you have the numbers right, ensure that you develop high-quality content (whitepapers, infographics, blog posts, and landing pages). Providing in-depth coverage about your industry is likely going to put you in good books with your audience.
With the content sorted out, it’s necessary to come up with smart sharing initiatives, not just to your audience, but also to other industry titans. Striking a rapport with some of the top brass in your field may be a masterstroke on your part since you’ll be able to promote your business on a person-to-person basis.
Site speed is just one of those important metrics that increasingly becoming harder to ignore. Especially in 2019.
Visitors to your website probably don’t have all the time in the world to wait as your page loads. A slow website is not something you want to have, especially if you’re looking to achieve top tier status when it comes to SEO rankings.
While it’s true that search engine optimisation relies heavily on keywords and backlinks, there are other small conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for a website to rank.
Today, Google’s algorithm is built to consider loading time as an important attribute when determining how your website ranks in search results. Once you’re able to identify the weaknesses in your page and make enhancements to bolster your site speed, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to achieve that top spot you’ve always fancied.
Some of the factors affecting site speed include file sizes, plugins, and slow servers. Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, here’s a quick brush of things you need to know.
It takes about 400 milliseconds for an eye to blink. If you can able optimise your page to be just as fast, then, you stand a good chance of tiding the masses over to your side.
Slow site speeds usually negatively impact SEO strategies. This is because targeted customers tend to become frustrated with slow load time and may decide to bounce off your website. According to Google statistics, it takes about 0.4 seconds of load time before users decide to look elsewhere for content.
Essentially, this means that the slower the load speed, the more likely visitors to your page will deem your content irrelevant. With the opposite being true, it makes absolute sense why Google decided to introduce site speed into its algorithm.
While hiring the services of a cheap web host seems like a grand idea, there’s also the downside of slow load time. This arises because such deals usually involve the sharing of servers. When this happens, space and resources that would have been dedicated to your website become spread out to a bunch of other websites.
If you’re looking to achieve fast site speed, then, it’s worth reconsidering your current strategy and adapting better suiting hosts that are capable of handling your business needs.
Always check for new updates on your content management system, be it Drupal, WordPress, or Wix. In most situations, updates usually resolve common errors and bugs in the system. When this happens, you usually notice a considerable bump in site speed.
Gone are the days when dial-up internet dictated the times. Today, users get frustrated whenever websites take forever to load.
Since larger images are certainly going to take longer periods to load, you need to optimise the images that you upload on your platform.
Making tweaks to things like the size of images uploaded and the format can make all the difference. Generally, browsers usually load PNG, JPG, and GIF images super fast. On the other hand, formats like BMP and TIFF are typically heavy which means that they usually cause slow site speed.
If you’ve ever dabbled in coding using either HTML, CSS, or Javascript, then, you’re well aware that there’s usually plenty of coding that happens before a website comes to life.
To ensure that your site speed is not affected by lengthy lines of code, you need to ensure to the backend of your site is not clogged up with redundant code. Else, you may find yourself having to pay the consequences.
If you’re using WordPress for your site, then the odds are you’ve got a number of plugins installed. While plugins are great in terms of functionality, you need not have too many hanging around. This is because every plugin usually makes a file request. The more requests generated, the slower your site speed is going to be.
Think about it, when you’re visiting a new city and want to ask directions, wouldn’t you rather ask a source who points you to a direct location? Exactly.
The same concept applies to websites. Nobody likes being redirected to a whole different page. In a way, it’s like telling visitors to your page to hold on the line as you process something else. Unless you really have to do it, avoid doing it since it may negatively impact your SEO goals.
Search engines are responsible for plenty of traffic on most websites. Given just how key a role they play, it’s necessary for you to acquaint yourself with the best SEO tips and plugins that will enhance the reception of your website to the masses.
In today’s article, we’ll be looking to share some of the best WordPress Plugins for SEO.
People love the plugin because it provides them with a comprehensive solution for all their on-site SEO needs. Using it, you can add an SEO title, a relevant meta description, and slot in some meta keywords for every post on your pages.
The plugin is robust enough to allow for the customisation of titles for your main site, archives, and tag pages. If you’re looking to play around with your content, you’ll love the fact that the plugin includes Open Graph meta data, Sitemaps, Twitter Cards, and the power to ping search engines whenever you make changes tour website.
Some of the standout features of the plugin are:
The page analysis is a definite gem because it ensures that you’re always on the right track. Its intuitive interface further adds to the allure.
This particular plugin offers stiff competition to Yoast SEO. If you’re looking to test out its features, you can opt to begin with the free plugin before you decide to pay for some premium services.
On the premium version, you get access to real-time customer support, plus the ability to join support forums and video screencasts.
If you’re charged with the running of an e-commerce store, you definitely need to try out the advanced WooCommerce support. There, you’ll get plenty of insights about how to better manage your business.
Some of the other amazing attributes are:
This plugin is ideal for those who want to work with a powerful plugin that is able to function without any disturbing ads or upsells running in the background.
The plugin design is simplistic since the developers spent most of their time developing a plugin that is able to meet your website needs. SEO Framework is a great choice if you’re looking to maintain highs speeds on your site without having to spend plenty of time perusing complex SEO articles.
Despite having mentioned that the interface is simplistic in nature, the API is open for advanced users to play around. Having started as a project in the WPMUDEV community, it has morphed through the years to become freely available to all and sundry.
Some other cool features are:
Notably, even the free version doesn’t have footprints. Using it, you can swiftly manage all your meta descriptions and titles with ease.
You can also come up with XML and HTML sitemaps, monitor what your visitors are doing with Google Analytics, and make some optimisations to your tags using Open Graph and Twitter Cards for easy sharing on social media platforms.
In the free version, you also have access to content analysis which is a shining attribute among webmasters. Using it, most of them are able to develop better SEO optimised posts. If you’re a developer, you’ll love the fact that you can make use of more than 75 hooks to tailor the plugin as you’d like.
Some of the features on the premium version include:
This great plugin is quite comprehensive. It’s robust enough to allow you to quickly transform your SEO strategy.
Rank Math is able to utilise the functionality of multiple plugins on your WordPress website and streamlines all of them into a single easy-to-manage plugin that is not bulky.
The plugin enables you to easily manage on-page SEO of your posts, products, pages, and a range of other taxonomies. As a webmaster, you also have access to no archive meta tags in a number of other pages.
The beauty of Rank Math lies in the fact that it seamlessly integrates with Google Search Console to bring you all the necessary information you need right inside your WordPress dashboard. Crucial information like keywords to rank for, the search impressions of your website, and errors on your page are all accessible from the admin console.
Other awesome features are:
It’s not uncommon to hear beginners to SEO inquiring about the essence of title tags and Meta descriptions.
While we could dive straight into explaining just how important they are in modern SEO practices, a little definition of terms is necessary.
When users search for content on the web, title tags and Meta descriptions are what usually load up on the search engine results. To gain more clicks, it’s is therefore imperative that you invest some time to develop compelling meta tags that prompt more users to check out your website once the search results roll in.
This is the title section of a webpage which briefly summarises what’s contained in a page. They are usually found in three main places, on search engine results, browsers and on external platforms like social media pages.
To rank, search engines require websites to have title tags to include relevant keywords and phrases that accurately describe what’s contained in the page. As such, if you find yourself straying away from the agenda of your page, you may be forcing Google’s hand to display some other title instead.
Since this is not something you want to happen, it’s best to really craft meaningful title tags. There’s plenty of opportunities for you to lure prospects to click through your site by having a relevant title tag. A great way to capture some of this information is by providing accurate, concise, and compelling narratives of your page.
Here’s an example of how the HTML code looks like:
Meta descriptions are meant to convey a summary of all the content contained on a webpage. As you can already tell, it has some similarity to the previously mentioned title tag. The key difference here is that Meta descriptions allow you some ample breathing space.
You have the freedom to flex your wordplay with plenty more space as you let visitors to your site know what you’re offering. If well utilised, you can grab hold of a significant portion of the population.
Here’s how Meta descriptions usually look like:
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=” This is where you insert your Meta description. Write something interesting.”>
</head>
A great way to do this is by monitoring the click-through rates in Google Search Console. Using the tool, you can locate pages with reasonable volume but low click-through rates. To practice, you can try optimising the pages as per the highlighted steps above.
If you really want to push your website as the best out there, don’t make the mistake of neglecting Metadata. The best way to keep abreast with the times is by constantly monitoring the happenings of this section.
Having said that, we caution you against making too many changes in a short span of time. This is because it usually takes some time before adjustments made come into effect and cause an impact. In light of this, you need to hold out for a while in order to track what’s actually working
Importantly, you also need to consider the average time visitors spend on your site. While CTR is a great metric to monitor, it’s not the be-all and end-all of success.
If a significant portion of visitors is spending fewer amounts of time on your page, that could be an indicator that your metadata is not appealing enough or your webpage isn’t living up to the standards people expect. When this happens, it may indicate that your website is built on the foundations of clickbait, something you want to avoid.
As the saying goes, “Content is King”.
While it’s true that scintillating content is key to enhancing your website’s reception and reputation, you may find your traffic numbers suffering if there are some technical issues behind the scenes.
During the early years of search, marketers and developers focused on their tasks without bothering to learn about what lay at the other end of the fence.
Today, things are different. Marketers need to have an understanding of all the various technical concepts. At the same time, developers also need to know the ins and outs of digital marketing.
An understanding of both technical and creative aspects is needed.
These traits are what make on an effective digital marketer. Once you’re able to recognise the technical faults in a system and all the right buttons to press in case calamity strikes, you have better odds of seeing your website take off.
In a bid to enlighten you on all the key points you need to be conversant with, we’ve prepared this technical SEO checklist.
To check the robots.txt file, you need to follow:
Google Search Console> Crawl> robots.txt Tester
This robots.txt play an important role. It provides a directive to search engines and all websites need to have one somewhere in their root directory.
For proper functioning, you need to ensure that it is properly formatted. This means that it should only restrict files or directories that you don’t want to see indexed. While at it, ensure that it is included in your XML sitemap layout.
If you’d love to learn more about the workings of the robot.txt file, you can acquaint yourself with some Google recommendations.
Having been in the industry for a while now, one of the errors we’ve encountered one, two, many times usually happens during a website redesign. The dev site frequently gets blocked in robots.txt after the disallow:/ command is used. To avert this and avoid taking your website out of the index, you need to ensure that the disallow rule is done away before your launch the redesigned platform.
It’s not uncommon for website owners to come up with different URLs that come up with similar content. Since this is not a good thing, you can make use of canonical link elements to ensure that a website remains unique.
Often times, canonical link elements are used to ensure that the preferred version of a page remains indexed at all times.
When working with them, there are some guidelines that you need to follow. Ideally, you want them to reference a URL that does not redirect and is indexed. At the same time, the URL also needs to be in the full path, something like http://www.example.com/
A canonical tag that fits this would be”
<link rel=”canonical” href= http://www.example.com/product.php?item=foo987/>
To check this, you can use a platform like Screaming Frog.
With redirects, you can effectively let search engines know that your webpage has permanently relocated to a new location. This comes in handy when there’s a URL change or if a page is deleted.
While there are different types of redirects, we favour a 301 redirect because of SEO purposes. This usually notifies search engines that a page has permanently shifted house.
The best way to handle redirects is by having them redirect to the final destination. Having looping redirect chains is not advisable, if possible, ensure that you minimise the number of redirects.
You can use Screaming Frog and redirect-checker.org to check.
According to Google, duplicate content is that which can be replicated on your website or on various other web domains.
Whenever pages are duplicated, Google automatically filters such content away from search results. By doing so, they ensure that only distinct information is visible.
Having plenty of duplicate content can harm your organic traffic. Since most instances of duplicate content are unintentional, you can try to create a sense of originality by using canonical link elements.
To verify the status of your website, you can use a platform like siteliner.com.
In contemporary times, it’s crucially important for websites to consider the mobile-friendliness aspect. This becomes all the more necessary once you factor in Google’s mobile-first index.
For the smooth running of operations, you want visitors to your website to have a great experience irrespective of the device they are checking out the content from.
Directory listings are basically niche/general directories. Their main purpose is to function as an online phonebook for the storage of important information like NAP data (name, address, and phone number), map listing, and website address.
Notably, some directory listings are customised to allow you to share photos of your business, the hours of operation, and other valid data.
It’s also worth documenting that there are various other directory listing types out there which are dependent on how long you’d like your listing to remain active.
You have the option of having your business permanently listed in the directory listing, or over a short period like 1 year. Thanks to the options available in the market, you can choose to use directory listings free of charge or part with a small fee. ClickDo offers a local citation service which will get your business listed on the top 100 directories in the UK, we’ve personally used this service ourselves and highly recommend it to any local business owner in the UK.
Having pointed this out, the onus is therefore on your to ensure that your business is listed on at least a couple of directory listing on the web. By doing so, you’ll be helping your business take that next leap forward.
If you want to learn the ropes on directory listings, there’s a couple of websites that you can’t ignore.
These 10 directory listings serve as a great example of the options in the market. Acquainting yourself with them will help you comprehend the nature of directory listings and delve further into the field.
All the directories are structured differently. As you sample each of them, you may find yourself ranking higher in search engines and build trust with your clientele.
That said, it’s of the essence to comprehend that not all directory listings are created equal. Some of them can give you an edge over the rest. As such, it’s important that you carefully evaluate the nature of your business before zoning in on one.
The one trait you need to check out in when reviewing the quality of directory is whether the directory is monitored by a human, or if it has an open submission.
Human monitoring usually has an edge over open submission because there’s some cross-checking of submitted content. To stand out, you want to avoid having your information paired up with plenty of other spam listings.
As a rule of thumb, it’s important to stay away from directories that have a keyword anchor text, directories containing the text “add your link” or “suggest a site”, and low domain authorities.
The more accessible your business is online, the more likely people will be exposed to your product offering. As a consequence of this, you’re likely to realise that more people will be making utility of your services and willing to buy the items you’re selling. Brand Development plays a key role in your marketing strategy
On the flip side, if people are unable to locate your website or track it down over the web, there’s a very low chance that you’ll be able to unlock new clients.
Importantly, directory listings also serve as great tools to reach out to specific audiences and capture their imaginations. Who doesn’t want that?
With directory listings, you can choose to concentrate your efforts on a specific state, town, city, or zip code. Alternatively, you can decide to go big and advertise your products and services internationally. To get the most of your efforts, tools like Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Yellow Pages, and Yelp Advertising, are recommended.
Using these tools, you’ll be able to target specific prospects. Some of these platforms have mass appeal among entrepreneurs due to the fact that they offer free advertising capabilities.
Directory listings and SEO are a match made in heaven. Because listings get plenty of hits, it’s easy for businesses to rank higher on search engines. The backlinks from online directories are also high quality since they originate from recognised sources.
Having your business on the lips of everyone is no mean feat. For this to happen, you need to put the word out there in a number of listing directories, social platforms, review sites, and search engines.
The net result? Enhanced odds of customers finding your products and services on the web. Truthfully, there are hundreds of directory listings out there, this means that it may take an eternity for you to go solo. As such, we recommend hiring the services of an established company like ClickSlice to help you with your efforts.
Interestingly, you can have your business listed on a number of search engines, directories, review sites, and social platforms at no charge.
Before you commit to having your information displayed on such platforms, we advise that you first work on bolstering your profile. Once that is done, you’ll find it easy to make it to the top of search lists when people are seeking specific services and products.
A well-crafted strategy can effectively help you avoid annoying ad pop-ups and keep competitors looking for a slice of your business at bay.
If you want to have your business listed, you can do so for free. Since there’s a greater risk of getting things wrong with this approach, you need to carefully scan the information you provide to weed out the errors. Having a single dashboard from where you can review all the listings you’ve created is also recommended because it facilitates easy management.
Embracing a DIY approach sometimes leaves you vulnerable. In a bid to come up with an excel spreadsheet that lists out all the usernames and passwords of the various search engines, social media platforms, review sites and directories that you’ve come up with, you may find that the information is not accurate.
Having a single dashboard is a safer option because you can keep track of all the changes you make along the way without necessarily having to constantly perform password resets.
Google Ads – previously known as Google AdWords – is the search engine’s own Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising platform. It’s responsible for over 97% of Google’s revenue, and it’s been a real game-changer for users who want to get quick, easy exposure for their company online.
Businesses use the program to bid for advertising space above the organic listings. Via their Ads account, they can tell Google to display their ads for keywords that are relevant to their products or services, then use these ads to direct potential customers back to a particular page on their website.
They do not need to pay to appear in the search results, but they will be charged a fee every time a user clicks on their link.
As you can imagine, Google Ads provides marketing-savvy organisations with a quick, easy and incredibly effective way of boosting their website traffic and generating more leads or enquiries. The only downside is, these companies need to pay for the privilege – and costs can escalate pretty quickly if the account isn’t being managed correctly.
Many people think that Google Ads is only suitable for larger companies with big budgets. Trust us – that’s not true.
If you’re in a particularly competitive industry sector, you may need to pay a higher price for ad clicks, because there will be a higher demand for ad space. But we believe that every company can benefit from running a paid search campaign, as long as their account is well-optimised, and they are making the right first impression on the people who are finding their ads.
A successful PPC campaign relies on two things:
There are certain tools and settings you can use within Google Ads to maximise your chances of appearing in search whilst paying as little as possible for the exposure.
Here, we’ve listed five tactics that will help you manage your click spend budget and ensure you’re getting the best possible return on investment from your marketing efforts.
Keyword selection is an essential part of the process because the key phrases you choose to appear for will ultimately determine who is going to see your ad.
To find the right keywords for your campaign, you’ll first need to think about your user’s intent. Will they be looking for information on a specific topic, perhaps to research a purchase? Or do they want to buy something online? The intentions behind the search will affect the queries they use.
Next, use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to determine how many people are searching for a particular keyword on a monthly basis. The software can be used to generate ideas for your campaign, but crucially, it will also call upon an archive of search data to give you each term’s monthly search volume.
If the search volume is low, your ad will be seen by fewer people. But by the same token, if the key phrase is specific to what you’re offering, you may have a better chance of converting the user into a paying customer.
Pro Tip: Use exact match keywords.
Exact match keyword targeting enables you to reach customers who are searching with a specific keyword (or a close variant of it).
When you set your keywords to ‘exact match’ in Google Ads, you’re making sure that your ads are only appearing for searches that are 100% relevant to the search term you have chosen. You won’t reach as many people using this keyword strategy, but you will only pay for clicks that are more likely to convert into real business. It’s a much more cost-effective way of managing a campaign if money is tight.
If you only supply your products or services to a particular town, county or region, make sure this is reflected in your targeting settings.
You can tell the platform to only display your ads if the user is based in a place that’s of interest to you. This stops you from wasting your click budget on people who live in areas that you don’t currently service.
In the same way that you can restrict where your ads are shown, you can also make sure they are only displayed at certain times of the day.
If you’re a B2B provider that receives most of your enquiries between 9am and 5pm, you can ask Google to list your ad during these times. If you’re an online retailer, and you know that most of your customers are going to be searching for your products after normal working hours, you can change your settings so that your ads only appear in the evening.
And if you have no idea when your customers would normally be searching for companies like yours, you can experiment by testing different ad schedules, then monitoring the data to see which approach has generated the most clicks.
The copy used within your ad is what’s going to hook your customers in and convince them to click through to your site. It needs to pack a punch, sure – but it also needs to meet Google Ads’ guidelines if it’s going to be considered for inclusion in the listings.
You can find lots of information on how to write winning PPC ad copy here, but in a nutshell, you need to make sure your content highlights what makes you unique; contains one of your targeted keywords; and tells your audience exactly what they need to do in order to either get in touch with you or complete their purchase (depending on your goals for the campaign).
Thanks to Google’s recently expanded text ads, you now have even more space to fill. You can also add a range of ad extensions to your listing to make it really stand out. Click here for a closer look at the different types of ad extensions now available from Google Ads.
The best way to prevent overspending is to set an average daily budget for each Google Ads campaign. It’s important to choose a budget that’s sustainable and affordable for your business – but you’ll also need to consider whether this amount will be enough to get you enough clicks to make the campaign viable.
It’s a tough balancing act. If you’re struggling to work out how much you should be spending for the best ROI, we’d recommend asking a specialist PPC manager for help.
Need further help?
The tips listed above should go some way to helping you achieve a better return from your Google Ads campaign. However, there’s so much involved in running a successful PPC account, it would be impossible for us to list all our recommendations in one blog post!
For more advice and expert guidance, contact the team here at ClickSlice. We’ll use our decades of combined experience in using Google Ads to produce a campaign that delivers on all fronts.
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