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Clickslice an SEO agency, has taken over MalcolmColes, a credible marketing news and blogging site in the UK.
As there is a sea of content about Digital Marketing on the internet, it’s difficult to find the best fit for your needs, as most of the content is flawed. This acquisition will enable Clickslice to disseminate accurate information and reach people looking for the latest trends and updates in digital marketing.
The MalcolmColes website is a news and blogging website on the internet with a huge reader base seeking marketing news, measured analysis, and exclusive research on the hottest topics in digital marketing. They aim to keep the readers up to date on the marketing trends and ensure that information is accurate and readers are not misled by their content. The most popular topics on their news website were digital marketing stats, daily updates, and updates regarding changing SEO guidelines.
Knowing the right search terms that people would use to search for a business and targeting them on the website can be a determining factor for the success of any online digital storefront.
As SEO and digital marketing are constantly evolving fields, it’s crucial that business owners are updated on their changing trends. The acquisition aims to utilize the knowledge of digital marketing professionals at ClickSlice in providing accurate facts and updates on the changing marketing trends.
This will help improve the credibility of the content on the website and will help readers in making informed decisions on their marketing plan.
Founded by Joshua George in 2016, Clickslice has become the most trusted SEO agency in London, assisting clients in improving their online visibility on search engines. They are an award-winning agency offering SEO services for eCommerce stores, specifically SEO for Shopify stores and SEO for Magento stores which has been revolutionary for multiple e-commerce brands.
They also offer platform specific services such as their SEO for WordPress websites offering which generates amazing results for WordPress based sites. In addition to this, ClickSlice also work with lawyers, plumbers, doctors, electricians, dentists and several other businesses in the UK to optimize their digital storefronts.
Joshua and his team are a bunch of passionate individuals pushing boundaries and helping their clients boost their organic leads. By offering measurable results with more than 15x ROI, they have assisted various businesses in growing their online business by making minimal investments.
They have earned their reputation by providing excellent customer service and delivering great results. Using data-driven insights and best-practice digital marketing tactics, ClickSlice drives growth for businesses by leveraging result-driven SEO campaigns and unlocking full potential to generate organic leads.
If you’re determined to establish a rock-solid reputation for your business, you need a creative Digital PR agency you can rely on. Building credibility and trust as a Digital PR agency is our forte. We’ll secure your spot in the limelight and ensure you’re the voice to listen to. With our dedicated team in action, you can focus on driving your marketing strategy forward, knowing that your brand’s reputation is in safe hands.
It will no longer be possible to search for MalcolmColes on Google. Instead, any visitor to the MalcolmColes website will be automatically redirected to Clickslice. The next step of the Clickslice website is providing regular news and marketing updates to keep people informed about the correct information about marketing and how they can implement it to grow their businesses.
With numerous online information sources offering information on digital marketing, it is pretty challenging to find relevant and accurate information. By regularly updating digital marketing and SEO content, Clickslice aims to tackle such problems and ensures the relevant information reaches the right people.
Without a doubt, Clickslice understands the importance of marketing content because it is a highly effective way to reach, engage, and target your audience in ways that traditional advertising cannot. It is critical to maintaining high-quality digital marketing content, which Clickslice strives to do.
With tech companies like Google reporting billions of revenue per year, it’s normal to wonder how search engines actually make money. After all, they’re providing a free service, not selling a product – so where do the billions in revenue come from?
In this article, we’re going to be discussing how search engines are making money in 2023, why online advertising can be both beneficial and detrimental to business, and how the most popular search engines make the bulk of their revenue. So, how do search engines make money?
Let’s take a look.
To better understand how search engines make money, it’s important to remind ourselves not just what search engines do or offer us as a service, but their internal mechanisms and how they function.
So, what actually is a search engine? A search engine is a platform where you can freely search for information that has already been indexed and ranked according to its quality. Most search engines use ‘crawlers,’ (aka bots) to crawl the internet and find web pages to index. Once web pages have been indexed, the search engine will use an algorithm to rank web content and present it to users when they search for specific terms.
How do search engines decide how to rank content?
Typically, a search engine will decide to rank content based on the following factors:
It’s simple – search engines make the bulk of their money through advertising programmes. Whether it be PPC campaigns, or using your information to recommend you tailored products or services, most search engines make their profits by either selling advertising space or recommending you services. Advertising is the perfect business model for a search engine for two reasons:
When users search for common terms on Google, many of them are looking for a specific product or service. If you’re a large corporation or a highly profitable business, you’ll probably be willing to pay search engines hundreds of thousands of pounds a year (or more!) in order to be the first suggested product or service. This is a goldmine for search engines such as Google, whose Google Ads programme runs on a PPC, auction-style basis. Unlimited ad potential. Think of how many million keywords and keyword combinations exist in the world. Search engines get to sell all that space to various buyers – and even obscure, long-tail keywords are bought up. With unlimited possibilities for ad space, search engines have unlimited earning potential.
So, what kind of advertising methods do most search engines use?
The most popular form of advertising on search engines is PPC advertising. PPC advertising works by selling ad space under popular keyword search terms, with companies paying the search engine every time a user clicks through to their advert. While this can offer businesses and start-ups the opportunity to get quick and easy brand visibility, it’s incredibly expensive. When trying to buy up ad space for competitive, broad-term keywords (such as ‘car insurance’ ‘lawyer’) companies can end up spending upwards of £20,000 per month, if not more.
We all know by now that search engines collect thousands of pieces of data about each of its users, and use this information to recommend ads that might correspond to their interests. For example, if you recently googled “cooking classes”, you might find that some of those pesky, unskippable Youtube ads are about online cooking classes, or cooking-related. While this can be infuriating when it comes to questions of privacy and tech overreach, the ultimate goal is to both provide the user with more relevant adverts, while also allowing the search engine to make money.
While the majority of a search engine’s revenue will come from their advertising models, most search engines will also branch out into other business models, whether it be tech expansion, subscription models, or merging with other services. Here’s how the most-used search engines in 2023 make their money:
Google is the most popular and most-used search engine in the world, so much that ‘to Google’ has become its own verb. In 2021, Google accounted for over 28% of all digital online advertising – an enormous sum. While Google makes the majority of its profits from search ads and display ads, it also makes a lot of money from its merger with YouTube. Google collects profits from YouTube’s premium content service, and also makes profit via the Google Play store.
Google also has ventured into hardware products, selling its own range of tech products including home speakers and headphones. Like any company, Google has even used Google to advertise their products, and has even been in trouble in the EU courts for abusing their own algorithms to recommend their own branded products.
Like Google, Yahoo also makes the majority of its revenue from search and display ads. Yahoo also offers a subscription service to its users, where paying members can enjoy upgraded features such as enhanced online protection or trading features. Interestingly, one feature of Yahoo’s Plus plan is that it is ad-free.
Often simply considered as Microsoft’s not-so-successful side project, Bing has actually enjoyed some modest success as a search engine. Unlike Google and Yahoo, Bing hasn’t branched out into other services or products; instead, Bing itself is a by-product of the Microsoft project. While it still makes money, most of Bing’s revenues come from search and display ads.
In 2023, the easiest way for a search engine to make money is through search and display ads. Not only are search engines targeting consumers looking to buy, but they’re able to sell their ad space to the highest-price bidders, allowing them to rake in billions of pounds of profit every year. While some search engines do offer additional products or services aside from search services, the advertising model is the most profitable and sustainable.
If you’re building an eCommerce store, it’s important to remember that a significant percentage of your customers won’t be shopping from a desktop PC or laptop, but via the mobile version of your site instead.
This means that you need to ensure your mobile site is as functional, fast, and easy to navigate as your desktop version – and this can be a tricky task for beginners. Luckily, Magento is renowned for providing a world-class mobile experience for eCommerce, so it shouldn’t be difficult to optimise your store for mobile users.
In this quick guide, we’re going to take a look at some of the ways you can enhance your Magento store for mobile users, from improving loading times to improving your on-site content.
Yes! Mobile sites need to be structured and organised to support the use of fingertips rather than a mouse or trackpad, and all text and images need to be resized to make for easier reading and viewing on a smaller screen.
And don’t forget the loading and memory capabilities of a mobile phone vs. a PC or laptop: even the most advanced smartphone can’t compete with the graphic and memory capacity of a desktop machine.
You also need to take into consideration that most mobile networks aren’t going to be as fast and responsive as stable WiFi accessed via a desktop. Many potential customers will browse their phones while travelling or commuting, meaning their internet connection and bandwidth capacity can fluctuate significantly within short periods of time.
For these reasons, it’s key to ensure that your Magento site is responsive and mobile-friendly for your customers who prefer to shop on the go.
So, what can you do to make your site usable via a mobile device? Here are just some tweaks and tips you can use for a Magento website:
Improve speed and rendering time
Speed is going to be a key factor when it comes to your site’s mobile performance; if your loading times are too long, users are going to simply swipe off your site and head to another. To avoid this, there are a couple of things you can do:
– Reduce your page sizes. This will cut down on loading time and help your content load faster.
– Prioritise above-the-fold content. When navigating a website, ‘above the fold’ content refers to the image or text that is first visible when a visitor loads up your home page via a mobile device. To prevent slow loading times and a high bounce rate, create a manual CSS system, whereby your above-the-fold content is rendered in priority.
– Forget JSS bundling. On a performance level, most mobile devices will find it difficult to support large JSS bundles, which can reach up to 15 mb in size.
Optimise images
Images are going to be one of the biggest challenges for any mobile device, but there are a number of ways you can optimise them to make your mobile site more responsive:
– Compress all images. Compressing your images can allow you to save memory space without compromising on the quality of the image itself. This will help mobile sites run faster.
– Use JPEG, not PNG. PNG images – while pretty to look at on a desktop – will significantly slow down performance on any mobile device. Switch to JPEG where possible.
While this advice is relevant for mobile optimisation, it’s a good rule of thumb for any desktop website, too. You can seek out Magento SEO advice for more information on optimising images on your website.
Choose the right server
As anyone who uses Magento already knows, the platform can be incredibly greedy when it comes to resources and performance capacity. This is why it’s absolutely essential for you to host your Magento website using the right server. Don’t try to balance your budget or opt for the cheap option when it comes to your server: this is perhaps one of the most integral functions of your website.
For a Magento-friendly, mobile-friendly server, you should preferably aim for a VPS server or cloud server, at least 3GB of RAM, 25GB SSD capacity, and an individual database server.
When building your Magento website, it’s important to consider those using mobile devices – especially as over 50% of web page visits come via mobile. By ensuring your site is mobile-friendly, you’ll provide a cross-platform experience and grow your organic traffic.
Google analytics is a great tool for any eCommerce business; with access to important data such as impressions, page views, and the length of the average visitor session, you can track your KPIs and use the information to better optimise your store for sales.
So, can you use Google analytics with a Shopify website? Yes! In this article, we’re going to show you how to add Google analytics to Shopify, so that you can start tracking, monitoring, and improving your store’s performance. Let’s take a look!
Google analytics is a free tool that allows you to monitor user activity on your website. If you’re a commercial sweller, this is the perfect way to help you understand how users interact with your business. For example, an eCommerce owner might benefit from tracking the following data:
If you’re using Shopify, you’re running a commercial business: you’re selling a product or service that can be bought or downloaded online, and so it’s useful to know what your customers think about your products or your business itself.
However, being an ecommerce business, you’re unable to directly speak with your customers in the same way a brick-and-mortar seller would be able to. You can’t rely on customer feedback or reviews alone: you want to be able to understand why people don’t buy from your site. This is where Google analytics comes in useful: you’re able to derive key performance indicators based on the data that Google analytics offers.
With access to the data outlined above, a Shopify owner will be able to improve their poor-performing landing pages, take steps to tackle high bounce rates, double down on popular products or popular product categories, and work on improving their conversion rate. Without access to this data, it’s almost impossible to understand your average customer.
So, how can you add Google analytics to Shopify and begin tracking these important insights? It’s simple:
First, you’ll need to make a Google analytics account for your Shopify store. Make sure you’re not using an account that’s already linked to another business – this won’t work.
When prompted, type in the name of your Shopify website, and paste your site’s URL into the given box.
You’ll be given a list of industries to choose from; select the industry that corresponds to your business niche, and click “Get tracking ID.”
Click to accept Google’s Ts & Cs.
Copy the tracking ID code, and head back to your Shopify store. Click on > Online Store > Preferences.
You should see a box named “Google Analytics” – that’s where you need to paste the ID code given to you by google.
Save your changes – and you’re done!
Adding Google analytics to your Shopify website is a great way to track important KPIs and observe customer behaviour: you’ll have access to key information that’ll help you better optimise your site in the future.
If you need help working through the data presented by Google analytics, or if you want to work on strengthening your site’s performance, it’s a good idea to hire Shopify SEO services. SEO experts will be able to identify poor performance areas on your website, and work with you to improve them.
Tagging is a great way to make your website more user-friendly; if your products or services are easily located and organised, it makes for a much simpler user experience, and therefore more sales. Win-win, right?
Not so fast. While tagging your products can certainly help elevate the user experience on your website, it’s important to place your tags strategically. Even more importantly, you need to make sure your Shopify store is optimised in other ways – tags only make up a small percentage of the task.
So, when it comes to your site’s Google ranking, do Shopify tags actually help SEO? In short, it depends.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at how product tags on Shopify can impact your store’s SEO performance, what not to do, and how you can use Shopify tags to improve your ranking and overall UX. Let’s take a look!
Shopify product tags are, in short, digital labels assigned to different products in your eCommerce store. Tags exist to help organise your product inventory for your customers; for example, if you were running a clothing eCommerce store, you’d want to organise your products with labels such as “skirts”, “dresses” “women’s clothes” “men’s shirts”, and so on.
Tagging makes it easier for customers to navigate your store, and a positive user experience translates to a higher number of transactions.
In short, yes – but it’s important not to overestimate their importance. Typically, Shopify tags can help your site’s SEO performance in two main ways:
As mentioned above, user experience is always going to be a key factor when it comes to any SEO optimisation efforts. Google rewards sites with a low bounce rate, so if your customers can’t find what they’re looking for and click off after a short period of time, this is going to negatively impact your ranking.
Having a well-organised website with a well-tagged inventory is going to prevent this, and will render the overall shopping experience more positive for your customers.
As you probably already know, Google indexes all web content and organises it according to its most relevant category; by adding Shopify tags to your products, you can help Google better understand where to place your site, in turn helping your business rank within its correct niche.
When it comes to SEO, Shopify tags aren’t going to be the most important feature that you’re going to want to optimise, at least not when it comes to the technical side of SEO. While UX is incredibly important for your ranking, your tags need to be placed strategically in order for them to positively impact your site’s performance. But you cannot rely on tags to do the heavy lifting alone – in fact, using only tags can often result in your site being penalised by Google.
This is because you can’t “stuff” your product pages with tags and no other content, as this would be seen as both duplicate content and keyword stuffing – both of which are two poor SEO techniques. Google is now incredibly unforgiving towards shoddy SEO practices, which is why it’s always a good idea to consult with Shopify SEO services before beginning any DIY optimisaton campaign.
Put simply, in order to create SEO-optimised product pages, you’ll need to ensure that your pages are filled with engaging, unique content. Once this has been achieved, you can add Shopify tags. Tags will make it easier for users to find the product categories they’re looking for, and will also help Google better index your website pages.
When it comes to good SEO, there’s no “miracle” technique that’s going to get your site ranking overnight. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s also a comprehensive strategy that covers several bases.
Not only do your product pages need to promote unique content, you’ll also need to consider title tags, alt text, meta descriptions and more. All of these features are incredibly important when it comes to your site’s SEO performance, so it’s important not to rely on tags alone to get your website seen.
If you’re looking to promote your chiropractic services online, Google ads can be incredibly beneficial if you’re looking to make those quick, speedy gains that get the ball rolling and the revenue coming in.
If you’re new to Google ads, the process might be slightly confusing – but it’s simpler than it looks.
In this guide, we’re going to go over 7 essential steps that you need to take before and after setting up your Google ads account, as well as tips on how to optimise your digital marketing strategy to enhance your ROI. Let’s get started!
Google Ads refers to the PPC advertising system offered to commercial businesses on Google’s search engine. If you manage to secure the top bid for a certain keyword or search query, your website or a specific web page of your choice will appear at the top of the search engine. Your metadata will be accompanied by a small ‘ad’ symbol, identifying that it’s an advertisement, and not a Google endorsement.
If you’re offering a chiropractic service, it can be useful to use Google ads while you’re establishing your online presence. Google ads can make quick gains and get a lot of traffic to your website fast – but the PPC model is expensive, and unless you have a hefty ad budget, it’s not the most sustainable marketing model. That being said, it can still be useful to those looking for a quick boost in revenue and traffic.
So, how can you set up Google ads for your chiropractic business? Here are 7 important steps to take before, during, and after the set-up process:
The first thing you want to do before launching a Google ads campaign is ensure that your website is immaculate, high-functioning, fast, and aesthetically pleasing. We don’t need to tell you how expensive Google ads are – it’s likely you already know. So to avoid paying Google for hundreds of instant click-offs, do everything to ensure that your website is in optimal condition. This means ensuring that your website is safe, easy to navigate, protected, fast, and that all your web pages are optimised for the user experience (UX.) A poor UX will lead to a high bounce rate, which means a poor – or non-existent – ROI when it comes to your ad budget.
Before beginning any ad campaign, you need to perform keyword research relating to chiropractic services. You should try to target achievable, high-intention keywords and try to obtain traffic from users searching with commercial intent where possible. If you’re not sure how to perform effective keyword research, you could hire a chiropractor SEO expert or agency to carry out the research for you.
You should also, where possible, try to target location-based keywords. As chiropractic services are conducted in-person, this gives you the maximum chance of obtaining new clients through your campaign, and therefore achieving a high ROI through your campaign.
You’ll also need to confirm the linking of your Google ads account to your business on your website. You should easily be able to find a tutorial on how to do this on YouTube.
So, unless you officially set up a budget ceiling when creating your campaign, Google will continue to show your advertisements and charge you per click, even once your imagined budget has been reached. This can end up costing you thousands in unwanted ad spend, so make sure to establish your budget beforehand.
Once your campaign has been launched, it’s essential for you to begin tracking conversions and other important KPIs on Google analytics. This is one of the most important parts of any Google ads campaign, as the data presented will let you know whether or not your copy is actually effective.
Once your campaign has been launched, it’s essential for you to begin tracking conversions and other important KPIs on Google analytics. This is one of the most important parts of any Google ads campaign, as the data presented will let you know whether or not your copy is actually effective.
If you’re noticing a low conversion rate, this is a good indicator that you need to temporarily suspend your campaign and work on improving your landing pages and other on-site content. If you haven’t already, it’s also a good idea to review your site’s functionality, to ensure that your paid clicks aren’t being presented with a malfunctioning or slow-loading website.
If you’re running an eCommerce store, you’ll probably already know how difficult it can be to get your products and your store visible online, especially when you’re just starting out.
When you haven’t got an unlimited marketing or advertising budget, it might seem impossible to get your products or services seen – but with so many new avenues for marketing online, it’s actually easier than ever.
In this guide, we’re going to go over 7 ways you can promote your eCommerce website, including several options that cost absolutely nothing! Let’s take a look.
One of the easiest ways to promote your eCommerce website is by having a strong social media presence – and even better, it’s free! You don’t necessarily need to always cater your social media content to promote your eCommerce store – you can simply gain traction on social media by talking about global events, responding to customers, or simply sharing high-value content that your followers or readers will find useful. By increasing your following on social media with relevant posts, you’ll be able to increase your reach within your target market.
Having a strong social media presence also helps build your brand identity and brand authority, while allowing you to build a loyal customer base for free.
Aside from having a positive, active social media presence, you can also use social media to actually sell your products directly to your followers or subscribers. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Tik Tok now have in-app purchase options available for business accounts, allowing customers to make a purchase directly from their news feed.
With almost every study conducted on the subject concluding that social media is one of the most powerful forms of advertising, you should incorporate this strategy into your marketing model.
If you aren’t already using SEO strategies on your website, you’re missing out on potentially thousands of site visitors and easy sales. SEO marketing (search engine optimisation marketing) refers to how well your site ranks on search engines such as Google. Having a poor ranking means that it will probably be difficult for you to get organic traffic from web searches, which can mean missing out on an easy way to gain new customers.
What’s great about SEO is that with the right strategy, you’re able to promote your business to customers searching for your exact products or services. For example, if your eCommerce store is the first Google search result when a user types in the phrase “vegan hot chocolate”, you’re exposing your business to new customers who may never have found your services otherwise.
A good SEO strategy also offers long-term benefits for your eCommerce store; unlike PPC advertising, your SEO ranking doesn’t disappear as soon as you stop paying for your advertising budget. A website that has been skillfully optimised by an eCommerce SEO agency can remain at the top of Google’s search results for years.
PPC advertising is another way you can promote and market your eCommerce store – but it is probably the most costly option on this list. PPC advertising (pay-per-click advertising) involves paying advertisers (such as Google or Twitter) to promote your products on their platform, and you pay the platform every time someone clicks on your advertisement.
While this can be a useful marketing strategy if you’re a new company looking to make quick gains, it’s a bad idea if your website isn’t yet optimised for user experience (UX). If you end up having a poor conversion rate, all that ad money will have been money down the drain. Before opting for an expensive PPC ad campaign, it might be a good idea to run an SEO audit on your site to test for any UX problems.
If you’re selling a physical or digitally-downloadable product, there’s no need to stick to one eCommerce platform. There are no rules in place to stop you from creating a multi-channel business and selling your products everywhere; from eBay to Amazon, Etsy to Instagram – and don’t forget your own eCommerce website! In fact, the more channels the better; when you have several streams of income, you’re protected in the event where one platform shuts down or goes out of business.
Companies understand the power of word-of-mouth online, and this is why so many social networks have recently been transformed into reliable advertising platforms. By partnering up with influencers, you’ll be able to target your target market more easily than a traditional campaign. You’re also more likely to build trust with new customers, as influencer features and reviews tend to fare better than traditional advertising campaigns. However, like PPC, partnering with influencers can be a costly enterprise, with some high-profile influencers demanding four to five figures for just one or two Instagram posts.
If you’re going to partner with an influencer, make sure that their current audience corresponds with your target market, and make sure that they have enough followers and online engagement to make the investment worth your time (and money!)
Building an email list is a great way to retain existing customers, and customer retention is much cheaper than searching for new leads. The main difficulty when it comes to creating an email list is actually being able to obtain your customer’s email address in the first place. Many customers are tired of unsubscribing to spammy marketing emails, and now systematically ask not to be sent promotional email marketing when they sign up for an account with an eCommerce business.
To get around this, it’s a good idea to offer something exclusive that will motivate your customers to opt-in and subscribe. In the marketing world, this is referred to as a ‘lead magnet’, and can be anything from a generous discount code to exclusive offers.
Once you’ve secured your email list, don’t overdo it and start spamming daily emails. You should only email your subscribers when you have something interesting to offer, such as a promotional sale, a new product, or an update to your services or policies.
We all know that images are important when it comes to SEO. They enhance the user experience, they help bring important context to complex topics, and they help to make your content more shareable. But what role do images play in the spidering process?
Spidering – often referred to as ‘crawling’ – is how search engines find, analyse, and index web pages on the net. Crawlers will take into account important information about your website – such as its loading time, content relevancy, site usability, and more – before indexing it to be ranked later on. But can images be spidered by search engines? Let’s take a look.
As mentioned above, spidering – also known as crawling – is how search engines explore and evaluate online web pages to index within their search engines. Spidering allows the search engine to measure your website according to its content and important metadata, and your website won’t appear on major search engines before being crawled.
While it is eventually an algorithm that will decide how search engines decide to rank your content in their search results, the spidering process allows the search engine to evaluate your site in terms of relevance, keywords, loading time, and other features related to its usability. These factors will all come into play when it comes to determining your overall ranking – but does the spidering process pick up images? Not quite.
While crawlers are incredibly sophisticated at identifying metadata, they remain bots; this means that they’re unable to process any visual or non-text content. This also means that videos and images aren’t taken into account when crawlers evaluate your website – unless you take active measures to make them ‘seen’ – such as adding relevant alt text.
So, how can you take measures to SEO-optimise images on your web pages? Here are several things you can do:
The easiest way to help crawlers pick up your images is by adding alt text. Adding alt text allows the crawlers to identify your images as topically relevant, and will give context to an otherwise empty space or code; this can give your page an SEO boost. Most web-building platforms will have an alt-text box included whenever you upload an image to a page, so you don’t need to worry about writing complicated HTML. Always make sure to add a relevant alt text caption that aligns with your content keywords; this shows that you’re offering supplementary information that a user might find useful. It’s also important to note that adding alt text helps your site become accessibility-friendly; alt text is used to help those who are visually impaired read web pages.
While spiders are unable to read images or visual content, they will still be able to read file names. It’s a good idea to include a relevant keyword when saving and naming your image files; this can make it easier for the spiders to identify topical information.
As crawlers will be able to read all text content on your website, it’s a good idea to add some relevant captions when including images on any page. Captioning is also a great way to determine whether or not your images are necessary or not – in most cases, you should only add an image where it adds additional context or helps enhance the user experience. If you struggle to find a relevant caption for your image, feel free to scrap it.
If you have your own custom website, using a URL shortener is an effective way of making the links on your page appear more clean and aesthetically pleasing. Some URL shortener services also offer you ways to track your web pages when it comes to link sharing and online traffic.
With so many different URL shortener services available on the web, it can be difficult to choose the right one for your website. In this blog, I’m going to go over some of the best and most popular URL shortener services, what each provides, and how they can benefit your tracking and SEO efforts.
So, which URL shorteners to use in 2023? Let’s take a look.
A URL shortener is a service that allows you to shrink any long, messy URLs for your website into short, more aesthetically appealing URLS or ‘slugs’. Some URL shortening services also come with tracking tools, so you can easily monitor the amount of traffic or shares your links are getting on a daily basis.
A URL shortener is a service that allows you to shrink any long, messy URLs for your website into short, more aesthetically appealing URLS or ‘slugs’. Some URL shortening services also come with tracking tools, so you can easily monitor the amount of traffic or shares your links are getting on a daily basis.
Let’s face it, long, lengthy links full of numbers and symbols make us think of one thing: spam. Using a URL shortener is a great way to clean up your links and make your web pages seem more professional when they appear in the search bar. Shorter URLs are also easier for mobile users to access, and in general, they’re just more visually appealing than a big jumble of letters and numbers.
If you have a custom website, you’re probably tracking and monitoring traffic. Some URL shortening services allow you to monitor traffic for your website, so you can get an idea of how many people are sharing your links, and where. Having access to this information can help you improve your marketing strategies, by seeing where your content is most popular.
If your content is great, visitors are more likely to want to share your content with their social media audiences. However, are visitors going to feel compelled to share a link made up of thousands of characters? Most likely not. As I already said, long links connote spam and poor quality content. This is why a URL shortener is essential if you’re relying on organic traffic to boost your website hits. The more traffic you get to your site, the higher your Google ranking is likely to be.
Don’t forget that many sites also have character limits when it comes to sharing posts, such as Twitter, where the character limit is 280. You want to make your URL as compact as possible, so people can share your content organically without feeling like they’re promoting spam.
The answer to this question is slightly complicated. On the one hand, yes, URL shorteners are going to help your long-term SEO goals by making your content more shareable, and making your site more reader-friendly and easy to navigate. However, when used to disguise links and avoid nofollow tags, it can lead to spamming, which can lead to low user confidence.
A nofollow tag (typically seen in a URL as rel=”nofollow”) is a way for social media sites to indicate to Google not to consider the link authoritative when ranking pages. This is typically implemented to discourage the abuse of link sharing on social media, whereby users attempt to manipulate Google rankings by spamming on social media.
However, URL shorteners can often get past this, making it easier to redirect traffic to your website. While this can be used as a tactic to generate website traffic, it’s important not to forget that user trust is highly important when it comes to SEO. Promoting your content naturally – without spamming – is the best way to use URL shorteners.
If you’re looking for a URL shortener to use for your website, here are some of the most popular URL shortening services, and what they offer:
Bit.ly – One of the most popular URL shorteners, Bit.ly allows you to create short, custom URLs for your website easily using a custom domain name. Bit.ly also allows users to monitor and track your links when it comes to shares and clicks.
Geniuslink – allows you to track important data, while also customising and shortening your URLs to reflect your custom domain name.
Tinyurl – Tinyurl was one of the first-ever URL shorteners on the web, and can still be used to shorten longer links. You can also customise your links to reflect any custom domain name.
When it comes to seeing results from an SEO campaign, it’s important to note that URL shortening isn’t going to be the most determinative factor in increasing your ranking. In some cases, it might even simply be neutral. Successful SEO strategies need a combination of the following to truly be effective:
Backlinking is the backbone of SEO; backlinking shows that your page is an authoritative source when it comes to your keyword and website niche. Put simply, Google considers each backlink to your site to be a “vote of confidence” for your content. The more backlinks you have to your site (preferably from reputable sources), the higher your content is going to rank.
It’s simple: poor quality content isn’t going to rank well, and it certainly isn’t going to convert (if your intent is commercial). Whether it’s poorly written content, or bad SEO practice (keyword stuffing, spamming redirects) ignoring the user experience is bad for SEO. User confidence is an important factor in building trust and credibility, and this begins by creating high-value content that is relevant to your target keyword searches. When you actually provide something of value to your readers, they’re more likely to share your content, revisit your website, or explore your other content. All of this boosts your engagement and helps SEO.
If you’re new to SEO and trying to rank your online content, it’s not a good idea to try to tackle your online strategy without expert help. You can maximise your gains and reduce time wasted by hiring an ecommerce SEO agency to help you navigate the process. An SEO agency will be able to offer expert advice, design a personalised SEO strategy that works for your business, and increase your conversions and sales.
So, is URL shortening worth it? In general, yes. It’s always a good idea to make your content more readable, and URL shorteners can help you monitor and track your shares, impressions, and ranking. Just make sure that you’re also implementing a well-rounded, comprehensive SEO strategy to accompany it.
While longer URLs can still rank on Google, a shorter URL is more aesthetically appealing and is going to make your website appear more professional. When you use a URL shortener, you can also use target keywords as slugs, which can help make your content intentions clearer, making your site more user-friendly (and therefore improving your SEO by enhancing your site’s credibility).
It depends. In general, your URL isn’t going to be the most important factor that plays into your SEO ranking. However, clean URLS can enhance your website readability and make it easier for users to navigate your website. The longer a reader remains on your website, the more Google considers your content to be high quality.
The best way to make your URL SEO-friendly is to use a relevant keyword as the URL slug. This makes it easy to track and monitor the keyword ranking, and also enhances the user experience by making your site navigation easier.
Since its launch in 2007 as a novelty social media site, Twitter has since grown to be one of the most influential and popular news-sharing platforms in the world. As of 2022, the app now sits as the #1 download in the ‘News’ category on the app store.
Reports of Twitter’s decline in recent years has been driven primarily by the platform’s inability to capitalise on its large user base: from 2009 to 2018, Twitter was listing a net loss on the New York stock exchange. Despite having introduced several subscription-based features for top users, 85% of Twitter’s profits still come from ad revenue.
However, as a user base, Twitter is its own thriving ecosystem. It’s also now one of the most active social media sites in the world, with almost 230 million active monthly users.
But why is Twitter so popular, and why do traditional news sites find it difficult to compete?
While other social media sites such as Facebook (now Meta) and Instagram are constantly evolving to keep up with their competitors, Twitter remains as popular with users as ever, despite the original concept of the site remaining mostly unchanged. There are a few factors that can help explain Twitter’s popularity:
It comes as a shock to nobody that the internet struck a massive blow to the traditional print news model. Newspaper circulation has been in steady decline for years, and even fell under 1 million in 2020. To combat financial losses – and in an attempt to “digitise” the traditional print model – many British newspapers decided to implement paywalls, where readers have to subscribe or pay one-off fees to access long-form articles.
As of 2022, over two-thirds of leading online newspapers across Europe and the US operate an online paywall, while Twitter remains free to use. Not only does Twitter remain free to use, but newspapers are present and active on the site, allowing users to access headlines and news without having to pay monthly fees to access content.
Another reason Twitter is treated like a news site: it is largely populated by newspaper accounts and journalists. A majority of journalists use the platform to share their content with their readers, turning the platform into a news sharing site by default.
Issues such as Brexit divided Brits into warring camps, and much of these political battles were played out – and continue to be played out – online, especially on Twitter. This leads us onto perhaps Twitter’s key USP as a news site: it allows users to curate their own newsfeeds according to their own political and social sensibilities.
What’s worse is that Twitter’s algorithm actively encourages users to create their own political echo chambers. As research by UK think tank Demos confirmed, Twitter’s algorithm is most likely to recommend users, tweets, and other content based on content you’ve already positively engaged with. While this might create a more user-friendly experience for individuals, it can amplify social and political tensions on a wider scale.
In order to understand the breadth of Twitter’s influence, it’s important to first understand that the way we consume news has drastically evolved in the last fifteen to twenty years. In the pre-internet era, news stories typically broke in one of two ways: during TV or radio news bulletins, or on the front page of the daily newspaper.
Nowadays, internet users are bombarded with endless streams of information: news, current events, politics, scandals, and more. The online content-generation business is thriving, but what is often labelled as “news” isn’t actually newsworthy. In addition to this, Twitter even exists cross-platform: readers read tweeted news outside of Twitter; via Instagram, Facebook and other social media sites.
When trying to understand the Twitter phenomenon, it’s important not to leave out the commentary factor. Twitter isn’t just a platform for reading or sharing news, but a site where active commentary flourishes and thrives. Unlike your typical online newspaper comments section, Twitter users are able to debate and argue using fast technology, and are often rewarded with likes, retweets and followers for sharing their views.
Twitter creates something of a positive feedback loop, whereby users are more likely to engage with news stories in the hopes of kickstarting a debate, finding like-minded individuals or simply expressing their views and opinions. On Twitter, reading news isn’t a passive activity; it actively encourages users to engages and debate about current events and news.
While Twitter is a largely liberal social media website – in the sense that users can generally post what they wish – the platform carries a certain legitimacy and trust factor that its rival Facebook hasn’t yet managed to achieve. This can be perhaps explained by the presence of high-profile figures, newspapers, and institutions that use the site extensively; for politicians and celebrities, it’s stranger to not have a Twitter account than to be a known Tweeter. The second-last US President even preferred to consult his Twitter followers about policy decisions before his press team.
This trust factor is also due to Twitter taking misinformation perhaps more seriously than other social media sites. Twitter was the first social network to introduce fact-checking during the 2020 US Presidential election, and also implemented fact-checkers to monitor misinformation circulating around the COVID-19 pandemic and the COVID-19 vaccines.
Perhaps one of the most significant decisions taken by the company was the suspension of sitting US President Donald Trump in January 2021. Following the January 6th storming of the US capitol building by protestors, Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account after he appeared to condone the protests. By suspending the most influential and powerful of its users, Twitter sent a strong message to its critics: that nobody was exempt from adhering to their code of conduct policies.
Decisions like these – along with their attempts at moderating user content – has helped Twitter foster a reputation for trustworthiness that other social media sites have been unable to achieve.
With the liberalisation of information – thanks in large part to Twitter and the internet – the influence of alternative news sites and highly partisan reporting is increasingly wide-reaching.
This has contributed to a significant decrease in media trust amongst Brits, which in recent years hadn’t been particularly strong to begin with. For example, in 2015, only 51% of Brits claimed to have trust in the mainstream media. As of 2022, this figure has plummeted to just 34%. Divisive matters such as Brexit and Coronavirus have driven users to engage with content that corresponds to their personal beliefs; in turn, “balanced” reporting appears untrustworthy.
While Twitter is now the most popular hub for news sharing, many advertisers are turning away from the site. For the most part, this is due to Twitter’s terrible pay-per-impression advertising model. When you advertise with Twitter, any interaction with a paid tweet – such as clicking the image or simply expanding the tweet – counts as an impression.
This flawed model can lead to high costs and a poor ROI rate, especially for new businesses. Plus, Twitter offers no real or concrete data about your campaign – you’ll be able to access data on impressions, but nothing else.
In 2022, the best way to grow your business online is via organic growth on Google. Not only is an SEO campaign more likely to help you reach your target audience, it’s the most viable long-term strategy for growth. Tweeting is fleeting; around 500 million tweets are posted per day on the app, making it easy for your campaign to get lost amongst the noise. With the help of an Ecommerce SEO agency London, you can achieve real-time growth and a long-term content strategy for your business.
Google Instant worked by offering popular search results to users based on their location and search history. For example, a user in France typing the letter ‘A’ into Google might be suggested the French health insurance service Amelie, while a user in the US might be suggested ‘Amazon.’ Again, these suggestions would depend on the user’s own search history and current trending topics.
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