Important Technical SEO Components to Consider
Important Technical SEO Components to Consider
The race for higher rankings on Google’s first-page search results is a continuous game, so every marketer wants to take their SEO strategies up a notch frequently.
If applied well, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can often mean the difference between a high ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. But what elements of technical SEO are the deciding factors of a successful website? Before we go into the elements, let’s take a look at what technical SEO is and what it does for your website.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO implies optimizing your website by improving its technical aspects. This is done to help search engines understand your site content and possibly increase search engine ranking.
Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
You apply SEO techniques to your digital marketing strategy primarily to drive traffic and earn money. Improving the website user experience (UX) will help you accomplish your objectives.
Technical SEO is not only there for search engine optimization but also to improve marketing tactics to boost your SEO goals. You need more working marketing tactics to succeed. But an on-point technical SEO makes everything else easier for you to handle.
Many marketers believe that they should focus on the technical details of a website just to please search engines. A website should be fast, clear, and easy to use for your users in the first place. Fortunately, creating a strong technical foundation for your website often coincides with a better experience for both users and search engines.
Now let’s take a look at some important aspects of Technical SEO.
Speed
Nowadays, there is no let-off for having a slow website. Most people on the internet are impatient and don’t have time to wait for a page to open. Research by Marketingdive shows that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t open within three seconds. Such a short time!
If your website is slow, people are more likely to get frustrated waiting for content to load. They’ll eventually move on to another website that will load faster, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.
Even Google Search Console picks up blogs with good website speed for ranking. Search engines know that slow web pages offer a less than optimal experience. So, a slow web page also ends up further down the search results than its faster equivalent, resulting in even less traffic.
If the bounce rate of your blog or website is high due to slow loading time, it can create a negative impact on the ranking as well. Imagine all the time you have spent creating that sumptuous piece of content, just to be let down by your site speed. It’s definitely not worth it.
Search Engine Crawlability
Search engines use robots to crawl or spider your website before they index it. Web crawlers usually draw on XML sitemaps to identify the web pages that should be indexed. Failing to keep a tidy sitemap makes it harder for crawlers to reach all pages on your website.
Search engines don’t rank web pages that they cannot access. A great internal linking structure will make sure that they’ll understand what the most important content on your site is. If the search bots are unable to crawl and find your website, then you must check for crawl errors. They create trouble for the site in its appearance on the SERP.
These technical errors mean that the audience might be unable to reach your website. Additionally, if there are any crawl errors, a user who typed a search query cannot find the information on the search results.
No Duplicated Content
Having the same content on multiple pages or other sites leaves search engines confused. If these pages show the same content, which one should they rank highest? As a result, sites with duplicated content might be ranked lower.
Unfortunately, sometimes you might have an issue with duplicate content without your knowledge. Due to technical reasons, different URLs can end up showing the same content. For a visitor, this doesn’t make any difference, but for search engines it does. They’ll see the same content on a different URL.
Luckily, the technical solution to this issue is readily available. With the so-called canonical link element, you can indicate what the original page or the page you’d like to rank in the search engines is.
And, to make it easy for you, self-referencing canonical links to all your pages are always a welcome boost. This will help prevent duplicate content issues that you’d might not even be aware of.
Website Security
One critical ingredient in Google ranking is website security. HTTPS is the etiquette where information goes through web browsers and websites securely. The HTTPS protocol is designed to protect web users from man-in-the-middle attacks.
It makes sure that no one can intercept the data that’s sent between the browser and the site and acquire the information for any purpose. This means that if people must log in to your site, their credentials are safe. To implement HTTPS on your site, you’ll need an SSL certificate.
Google is committed to protecting its users, this is why it made HTTPS a ranking signal. As you can imagine, secure websites rank higher than unsafe equivalents.
But how can you check if your website is HTTPS in most browsers? It’s easy, on the left-hand side of your browser’s search bar, you’ll see a lock if it’s safe. If it’s not safe, you’ll see the words “not secure.” This means that you and your developer have some work to do!
Generally, a technically optimized website is a secure website.
Meta Descriptions and Tags
Metadata is an important structural consideration and it also affects how crawlers interpret your webpage. A meta description makes it clear to a crawler what the title and content of a page are, along with what description should be displayed alongside the link to your site.
Optimizing title tags, Meta tags, and Meta descriptions for SEO is the key to success if you want to make your SEO strategy effective. Thorough keyword research and strategic placement of the keywords help in optimizing the meta description and tags.
Generally, search engines are continually evolving. At clickslice, we are devoted to keeping you up to date with all aspects of technical SEO so that your website is not left behind in top search engine results.
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How To Write Instantly Clickable Headlines
How To Write Instantly Clickable Headlines
There’s more than one reason why some sites get so many clicks, views, and site visitors who are later converted to loyal customers. However, the top reason is that all of these sites have unique, powerful, and engaging headlines for their blogs.
There’s no doubt about it, your headline is the most important part of your article. It doesn’t matter if the actual content in your article is a true masterpiece or complete drivel if no one even clicks through to it in the first place. You have to lure them in first.
According to copyblogger, on average 8 out of 10 people will read the headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. So what makes a killer headline?
I’d be lying if I told you that there is one right way to write a compelling headline. The truth is, different variations have been more successful over the years. If you follow certain headline formulas, you’ll write headlines that will persuade people to click on your content.
Let’s go on and look at how you can write a captivating headline that will lure readers to your site.
Start With The 4 U's
If you are looking to boost the odds of people actually clicking on your headlines and reading your content, you have to make your headlines as intriguing as possible.
Melanie Duncan’s 4U formula is the perfect foundation for compelling readers to click on your headlines. The 4U formula instructs you to make your headline useful, urgent, unique, and ultra-specific.
Useful Headlines
Think about the headlines that you actually click on when you’re scrolling through your news feed. Are they headlines that offer something that can help you? Of course, they are.
Similar to the articles that go with them, headlines should identify the user’s problem and offer them a practical solution. How-to articles and listicles are examples of headlines that are useful.
Urgent Headlines
Smart bloggers create a sense of urgency in their headlines to push people to click. Think of creating something similar to the Fear Of Missing Out in your audience’s conscience.
With the number of content that people encounter online every day, you cannot afford to write headlines with no sense of urgency.
Ultra-specific Headlines
Have you ever wondered why so many headlines these days have numbers in them? It’s because they are ultra-specific.
Most people have very short attention spans online. They will find it hard to click on something without knowing what the payoff will be. An ultra-specific headline will let the reader know exactly what to expect from the article.
Unique Headlines
People like a rarity. Use unusual words, be a bit controversial, or crack a joke. Anything to break up the monotony of the same boring headlines we’re bombarded with every day will help. Show some personality!
Create Classic List Headlines
You may have gotten tired of seeing list posts all over the place, but you have to rethink your stance on them.
Bloggers prefer list headlines because they are clickable and readable. According to Brandongaille, numerical headlines are the most preferred type of headline, mainly because the audience already knows what to expect even before they click.
When creating a list headline, start by thinking about the tips that can help your readers. They must be specific, practical tips that the readers can apply to their lives right away. Include an adjective in your headline to emphasize the efficacy. For example, ’29 legitimate ways to make money online.’
Touch on the Benefit of Your Post
Your headlines need to give the reader an idea of exactly what’s in it for them if they view your post. The headline has to convince them that there are benefits to taking time out of their daily life to look at your content.
It’s all about demonstrating a clear value proposition to your reader, the kind of ultra-specific headline that Mellanie Duncan suggests. To create a headline with this formula, you need to understand your target audience, what search terms they are using to find your post, and what information they hope to find in it.
Look at these headlines, ‘Fast and Easy Ways to Prepare Pizza’ and ‘Create your own Email Account in Minutes.’ Right from the moment the reader sees the headline, it is clear to them that this would be something useful to them.
Check the Length
Regardless of the formula, or formulas, you choose for your headlines, you need to keep an eye on their length. You want headlines to be short enough that they aren’t too lengthy, but long enough to cover all of the information.
The best headlines are the ones you can read in their entirety in the Google Search rankings. This helps in terms of SEO and also readability. If someone can’t read your entire headline in the Google rankings, they’ll be much less likely to click through.
The highest-converting headlines, according to CXL, are the ones between 16 and 18 words. You should try to keep your headlines within this range for the best results.
Appeal to the Reader's 'How To' Instinct
Most readers rush to the internet to find solutions with the main aim of improving their quality of life in one way or another, whether it’s personal or business life.
‘How to’ headlines help you to highlight people’s wants and needs, and then how to meet them. However, since you wouldn’t want to spill the beans, don’t include the process in the headline. That certainly won’t compel readers to stick around for your whole post.
While using this formula, keep your focus on the end result and the real motivations that the reader has. You can write a headline like ‘How to Start an online Business’ or ‘How to Write Irresistible Headlines.
You might be wondering why so many sites are getting traffic to their content, but not anymore. But yours could be better because the answer may be in your headlines. These are the first thing that people see from your brand before deciding whether or not to click over to your copy.
In Article Writing, Content is the king, and the headline is its crown jewel. By understanding the art behind great headlines, you’ll attract your ideal readers, those who convert into paying customers.
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How To Improve Your Marketing ROI
How To Improve Your Marketing ROI
When you launch a marketing campaign, you want to ensure it’s as successful as possible. Whether your goal is to increase your sales, attract new customers or build brand awareness, you need the right strategies to maximize your return on investment (ROI).
Marketing campaigns are often expensive, but they are necessary. You can’t unleash the full potential of your campaigns without a powerful marketing strategy.
Regardless of the mode of marketing, you need to determine the Return On Investment(ROI) of your marketing campaigns. The truth is, measuring return on investment is essential for every well thought out marketing strategy, although calculating it may seem unclear at first. However, there are a variety of metrics that you can track when it comes to measuring the ROI of your digital marketing campaigns. Thus, it’s also necessary to know which ones to measure and which ones to avoid.
Here are the most innovative ways to improve the return on the resources you invest in your marketing activities
Establish Campaign Goals
Every business has goals, and so does every marketing campaign. When you create business goals, you must consider multiple factors that could impact your journey to achieving your goal.
Most organizations have recently begun to embrace the use of “SMART” goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound). According to Managers.UK, SMART is a strategy that helps you plan your approach to reach the goals and also measure your progress with ease.
For starters, you need to determine what a strong ROI would be from your campaigns. Remember that your marketing ROI depends on many different factors, such as cost structure, your industry, and market demand.
Additionally, your campaign determines your ROI, too. For instance, the ROI from a digital campaign will be different from that from an e-mail marketing campaign. It’s also important to define the purpose of your marketing strategies clearly when establishing campaign goals.
Always try to set only realistic goals. Setting unrealistic expectations from your marketing team or campaigns can drastically impact your overall strategy.
Try Out Various Platforms
Sometimes you might spend a lot of time running your marketing campaigns on LinkedIn in vain, only to find out that exactly the same strategy brings positive ROI on Facebook.
A common mistake marketers do is judging the potency of a campaign based on its performance on one platform. This is very ineffective and short-sighted. Always consider running marketing campaigns on multiple platforms simultaneously. Allocating more or less the same budget and testing similar ads can tell you where your audience is most likely to respond to your proposition.
After trying, you can use the capabilities of each channel and experiment with your marketing angles. You can advertise one product using multiple content formats depending on the platform you choose to exploit. Most likely, your potential customer tends to use multiple channels daily so you also need to exploit every channel available.
Find out your brand’s area of influence by utilizing multiple channels, and it will increase your chances of success.
Create Audience-specific Content
Your brand needs to stand out if you have a chance of becoming successful in a digital space where consumers are constantly bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of ads daily. Content is the linchpin of your marketing strategies, and you need to ace it to ensure that you stand out from the ever-growing crowd of marketers.
It is necessary to ensure that your content is personalized for your target audience. Once you figure out your target market, you can create content accordingly. It can be defined based on their interests, demographics, location, and gender.
From sharing content about your product or services to engaging with your audience regularly via emails, be sure to connect with your audience on a personal level. Also, the best way to determine what your audience really wants and expects from your brand is to ask them directly. Schedule and conduct regular surveys, polls, Q&A sessions, and webinars to communicate with your customers.
Once you gather information, analyze it, and identify common points that will help you understand the audience’s needs better. This will enable you to create better-personalized content for them, and increase your ROI.
Use Split Testing
Split testing, commonly referred to as A/B Testing, is a method of conducting controlled, randomized experiments to research user experience. This method implies that you experiment with new angles by introducing one or two changes in a variable at a time. In A/B testing, “A” refers to the control or original variable, whereas “B” refers to the new version of the testing variable.
Marketers should use this approach as it allows them to eliminate guesswork and make decisions based on raw data. To identify your best performing platforms you need to test them! However, it is important not to spread yourself too thinly across all platforms. Test a couple at a time and see what works.
Don’t stop with testing out your marketing channels. It is also crucial to test the content that you upload on those channels. Always remember to make only one change at a time so you can attribute the improvement or decline to that specific change.
Even the smallest change could make all the difference to your conversion rates – and therefore your ROI!
Invest In Marketing Automation
With the evolution of marketing, marketers are increasingly looking for efficient marketing automation tools to perform simple and regular tasks to reduce their expenses. This is probably one of the reasons why the market for marketing automation tools is expected to grow to $6.4 billion by 2024, according to Marketsandmarkets.
Time is just as valuable of a resource as money. Producing effective marketing content routinely, conducting a proper review, and implementing changes is a labour-intensive process. Applying marketing automation tools in your marketing strategy takes away the burden of manual and highly repetitive tasks.
Choosing the right automation tool enables you and your team to identify your target audience and automatically generate necessary actions based on acquired information. A marketing strategy that heavily relies on automation lets you save a great amount of time and resources while contributing to ROI, and the better your marketing ROI becomes, the more confident you’ll feel in investing further in the right kind of marketing.
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Why Your Website Is Not Ranking
Why Your Website Is Not Ranking
You have a great website, you love it, and you think your potential new customers would, too, but if only they could find it. Even worse is finding a sudden drop in your SEO rankings and all your hard work is gone!
Ranking in Google’s results is easier said than done. There are millions of different websites trying to steal your rankings and, in most cases, those competitors succeed. Of course, you don’t want them to. But beating their ranking isn’t a matter of simply publishing content and hoping for the best.
Appearing on the first page of search results, among millions of websites, puts your site in a reasonable position of being visited by users. Therefore, you just can’t afford to ignore this.
There are a variety of reasons why your site can face a drop in ranking. This article has put together a list of the most common reasons why you are not ranking. Let’s check them out.
Duplicate Content
If you have recently updated content on your site and a substantial amount of content is duplicated, it can negatively affect your site rankings.
According to Google Search Central, Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
You don’t want to create content, publish the content, and then find out that your SEO juice is getting split between the original page you created, and an unintended duplicate page. That would cause both pages to rank meagrely instead of just having only one page that is ranking exceptionally well.
If you have created a new page and it has blocks of content that are similar to other pages on your site including titles and tags, then that might also be considered as duplicate content.
Solution
Fortunately, there is a solution to this issue. Before you upload content, use a site audit tool to find pages containing any duplicate content. If any, you can use 301 redirects so that the old pages aren’t accessible by search engines or users.
Lack of Consistency
If you write and publish a blog every now and then, you better think again. If you only record and publish a video when you are in the mood, that’s just not good enough. ‘Every now and then’ and ‘when you are in the mood’ are not doing you any good in your search for high website rankings.
For the vast majority of marketers, creating consistent content is a challenge. Many argue that it takes a lot of time to write, record, and edit content. It is even harder if you don’t get the results you hoped for immediately.
Solution
For a committed content creator, there is a dire need to have, and adhere to, a strict content marketing calendar and a practical growth strategy. Add due dates to your content and this will help keep you on schedule.
Frankly speaking, the more content you create, the better you become at what you do, and the more your site will rank. So long as the content is high quality.
Not Mobile Friendly
According to a Hitwise study, nearly 60 percent of all Online Searches are now carried out on a mobile device, with some sectors, like Food and Beverage, reaching 72 percent.
Maybe you are doing everything else right, but if your site doesn’t have a layout or easy functions for use on a phone or tablet, you will not rank. This is because Search Engines are all about improving the user experience, and a responsive website is the first step in improving user experience.
Google was the first engine to move to the mobile-first index, that’s why a site that isn’t mobile-optimized will be severely penalized and will have trouble showing up in ANY search.
Solution
Google automatically suggests the changes that you need to implement on your website when you take Google’s mobile-friendly test. Afterwards, ask your developer to implement the changes or make your website completely responsive. This is necessary to ensure that it can be accessed by users irrespective of the device they are using.
Poor Linking
Respectable websites linking to your site increases your digital profile and raises your website in the rankings. However, the wrong links do the exact opposite. Links from disreputable sites can easily earn your site a penalty and hurt your otherwise solid rankings.
The same applies to low-quality links. These are links created or purchased with the intention of manipulating the PageRank that directly impacts a site’s ranking in the search results.
To identify low-quality links, look for site messages under Search Console. If you have lots of unnatural links pointing to your site, the chances are high that Google will directly send you a message asking you to fix those links.
Solution
After identifying the list of URLs pointing to your site that are of low quality, try and remove them by sending an email to the webmaster and ask them to remove your link. It might take time, so please give the process at least 6-8 weeks to send and get responses to emails.
Increased Local Competition
A rise in local competition can negatively affect your site rankings. Local competition is often fueled by the rise of multiple websites publishing similar content in the niche that you specialize. This subsequently leads to the emergence of more competitive keywords.
So, how do you identify competition? easy. Just enter your main business keywords directly in the Google search and identify your competitors. You can also use SEMrush to find your new online competitors, discover what keywords they rank for, and also track your rankings, so you know when a competitor overtakes your rankings.
Solution
Just because you have stiff competition doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the road for your content. As long as the competition is healthy, you have nothing to worry about. Rather, it is time to monitor your competitors’ strategies using a competitive analysis tool to find what is missing in your SEO strategy.
Up your game by creating engaging content, and most of all, adhering to your SEO strategy. This way, your local competitors will have nothing on you.
