Beginners Guide To Online Marketing
Beginners Guide To Online Marketing
Fewer than 20 years ago, extroverts had a way better chance of becoming rich and successful. Why? It involved a ton of networking. For you to be successful, you had to hire employees and build a huge company. Even for a career in arts, music, or movies, you had to get every person in your industry to know you.
While connections are still a great deal to date, you don’t have to go looking. You can get them right from your couch, at the comfort of your home. That is online marketing. In a world where 93% of all marketing interactions start with a search engine, according to Inforza, you need to be on top of your game.
Online marketing is evolving at the speed of light. This is one huge reason why getting started in online marketing might seem like a daunting process if you are completely new. To keep up with the evolution, you need a strong foundation with the judgment to think critically, act independently, and be ferociously creative.
Not to mention the fact that it’s a huge industry with a lot of competition. But don’t worry. To get yourself started on this all-important marketing journey, there is so much that you need to know to begin online marketing, and we have you covered.
This guide starts at the beginning, to provide already-intelligent professionals with a healthy balance of a strategic and tactical online marketing process.
Determine Your Business Goals
Having a primary goal to measure your digital marketing efforts’ success might be the most critical and beneficial digital marketing step of all.
Before starting a business marketing plan, companies must determine their main achievable digital marketing objectives and have a predetermined marketing budget to go along with it. Great marketers think in terms of growth frameworks. And they take time to learn how to position their marketing strategy into a sustainable, ROI-positive revenue engine for the brand.
According to Nibusinessinfo, your customers, prospects, and partners are the lifeblood of your business when setting objectives for online marketing. You have to build your marketing strategy around them. The most important thing in marketing is understanding what your customers want, and working towards quenching their thirst, which can be challenging when you’re dealing with such a diverse audience.
Marketing is strategic. To succeed, you need highly focused goals. It is better to start a journey knowing where you are heading, that way it is easier to arrive at your destination faster.
Learn Traffic Acquisition
Even if you have the most amazing web storefront, blog, or product in the world, if you’re not getting traffic, your business’s growth strategy will fall flat.
Many brands are focusing all their efforts on getting higher conversion rates. Of course, that’s extremely important for the success of your brand. However, before people can convert, they need to find your website first. Growing a website takes time. It takes consistent sharing of great content for months and months on end.
Your growth is slow and steady just as the traffic coming to your site is slow and steady. While that strategy will work, it’s always nice to employ more effective strategies to get a huge jump in traffic every once in a while.
Improve Conversion Rates
In addition to bringing visitors to your website, you need to keep them there. Not only that, you need to transform them from interested prospects into customers. Conversion optimization is the practice of converting first-time visitors into customers and converting first-time customers into repeat buyers.
Interestingly, the outward look of your page is the first towards achieving high conversion rates. According to an analysis by Portent, the first 5 seconds of page load time have the highest impact on traffic conversion rates. So now you know that your website has to be deemed world class even at first glance.
After that, your website needs to move the relationship forward and seal the deal. Conversion rate optimization provides a significant opportunity for businesses of any size. It takes a scientific approach to optimize websites and to enable businesses to convert more visitors into subscribers or customers.
Conversion optimization isn’t rocket science. In many ways, it’s common sense. But you need to actively think about what you’re doing and know the best practices.
Routinely Create Quality Content
Are you blogging regularly? If yes, great job! Don’t have a blog yet? It’s time to share your industry knowledge with the rest of the world. Nothing makes search engines happier than websites that continuously update their content. But don’t get me wrong, it’s not just about search engines. The more you blog, the better for you.
However, it’s understandable that finding the time can be challenging. Research from Zazzle Media supports this. It reveals that 60% of marketers find it hard to produce content consistently. And even when they do produce content, they may not be happy with it. No pressure, just consider your schedule and try to remain consistent, whether that’s every day, every week, or several times a month.
Note that while creating this new content, it’s crucial to ensure it’s written for humans, not robots. Search engines have come a long way and, over the years, have gotten sophisticated enough to discern quality and spam-worthy content. To build your website’s credibility, your content should always answer the audience’s questions. Write for humans, then tweak necessarily to satisfy search engines. After all, your customers are humans, not robots.
Get Found With SEO
Search engines are a powerful channel for connecting with new audiences. Step one of a strong SEO strategy is to make sure that your website content and products are the best that they can be. The second step is to communicate that user experience information to search engines so that you rank in the right place.
Want your business to succeed in the world of SEO? It can be done, as long as you’re strategic. If you know nothing about SEO, taking up Clickslice SEO training and courses is just the best way to go about it. Investing in a long-term SEO plan for continuous organic search success is important. It can eat up a lot of your valuable time but in the long run, it is worth it.
Build a Robust Social Media Presence
The opportunity for direct face-to-face communication is currently limited, the more reason for growing brands to embrace social media to reach their customers.
Today, brands are riding the wave of social media marketing. According to Buffer, 73% of marketers believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been effective for their business.
Social media has become such a functional and essential aspect of many marketing strategies and across all generations. It is the simplest and least expensive way to reach a huge audience.
Optimize Your Website For Mobile
Last but not least, you should understand that mobile marketing has become more relevant than ever.
More and more consumers browsing and making purchases with their smartphones or tablets, a mobile-friendly website is vital. According to a report from Hitwise, nearly 60% of all Online Searches are now carried out on a mobile device, with some sectors, like Food and Beverage, reaching 72%.
Although investing in mobile-specific marketing can require a substantial investment, especially if you’re just starting, you can take the first step by ensuring that your business’s website is optimized for mobile.
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5 Easy Link Building Strategies That Anyone Can Use
5 Easy Link Building Strategies That Anyone Can Use
We all know how important link building is. It is not the funnest part of SEO, but it is a prominent cornerstone. Despite all its significance, building links is not easy. 65% of digital marketers state that link building is the hardest part of SEO, according to SEO Tribunal. This is why most people struggle to build needle-moving links to their site, regardless of the strategies they employ.
Link Building is a gradual process. It doesn’t just happen overnight. It is also reliant on several strategies that vary in terms of efficiency, expertise, and required resources. For starters, the quality and authority of the pages where you build links play a key role in determining how high you’ll rank in search engine results.
If you are new to link building, or you are just looking to grow your site, you most likely need some insights on what you should do, shouldn’t do, and what strategies are available. If Link Building is done right, it can help your rankings. Done wrong, and your rankings disappear.
In this post, we will go over some of the most successful strategies for link building from professional marketers. They’re especially helpful for busy marketers who have a lot on their plate and want to stay mindful of their rankings. They are Link building strategies that you’ll be able to use with ease.
1. Strategic Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the oldest tactics in the link building book.
But how exactly does it work? You write an article for another website in your niche, link to yourself from that article, and publish it on their website. It’s as simple as that.
In a survey by Semrush, an overwhelming majority of specialists consider Guest blogging to be one of the most effective ways to grow a backlink portfolio. However, there is an old way of mass guest blogging just for links, and that is long dead. You don’t want to post an article on a website that’s not even relevant to your niche and has zero authority, just because you want to get a backlink. That style of guest blogging won’t cut it. Search engines are getting smarter, more advanced and can tell when you’re not guest blogging to add value.
To reap the rewards of guest blogging, you need to be strategic and authentic in your content creation. Make sure that you’re creating unique content for the other site, and ensure that the site is relevant to your niche, authoritative, and attracts your audience.
Guest blogging is a sure way of building links. Just find the right site, create quality content, and join up with the 90% of marketers who utilize content pieces as their main way to generate more backlinks, according to Userp.
2. Repurpose Your Content
Not all link building tactics are outreach-based. It’s very possible to build links by merely changing content to fit in appropriate places such as infographic directories and video-sharing sites.
First of all, your content needs to be in an appropriate format for you to be able to do that. This is where content repurposing comes in.
For instance, let’s say you have an amazing interactive infographic that you’ve poured your heart and soul into creating, and you wish it had a wider audience. Well, why not transform that content into a different format, such as an infographic or video? Then can submit that content to infographic or video-sharing websites.
Using infographics results in the exposure of your content to a broader audience. This is good because more eyeballs equal more links. Articles with infographics actually earn 178 percent more links than those without, according to Venngage.
3. Utilize Influencers
Every industry has important key players, and taking steps to grow influence will encourage backlinks from other websites. Posting and sharing relevant case studies are helpful tools in this strategy.
Cultivating influence requires a company or brand to provide value to other members of their industry. Once a brand has established an authoritative or expert image amongst its community, it’s more likely that others will cite or link out to their content.
Utilizing influencers is another way to increase brand awareness. The right influencers provide a bridge to new traffic, and this introduction can lead to conversions and future backlinking.
Building a relationship with the webmaster and decision-making figures of a website is not as easy as it sounds, but it is key for this tactic to work and the results are often worth the effort on both sides. As Join notes, the influencer will gain more credibility because they included some references, and you will become the valuable reference that they made.
So how do you know the right influencers to approach? To find strong potential leads for both industry influencers and guest blogging sites that have proven themselves in your niche, a keyword search will prove pivotal.
4. Get Active On Social Media
Being inactive on social media is doing your brand website a disservice. Social media has revolutionized the marketing space and can be a welcome boon for your link building plan and guest posting efforts.
In an industry survey by Link-assistant on how SEO professionals build links, the results showed that most specialists use social media for link building, with 88% using links on social media profiles and 81% sharing their social media content.
After creating your website, become active on social media by sharing new posts, images, and updates. There’s no better way of helping your fans find what they want to see than by sharing it on multiple social media platforms.
Social media does not require any form of experience, just know your audience better, and you can easily boost engagement. Consequently, you’ll expose your brand and site to more people who could share your best posts with their target audience.
The exposure that social media creates is unmatched. Creating a website without accompanying it with a Social media page is equivalent to not creating it at all.
5. Keep Track Of Your Backlinks
Most people spend time and money to get new links, but they don’t track their status. This comes as a result of commitment or just laziness.
Without tracking your backlinks, how will you know whether to build more or pause? You may have over 1000 links pointing to your web pages right now, but when you check it after two or three months, some of the links might be gone.
You don’t have control over the blogs and authority sites that link to you. The site owners can easily remove your link from their post or resource page without notifying you.
This is why it’s important to monitor your backlinks and make sure that you maintain steady levels of traffic and higher rankings.
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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.
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What To Look For When Hiring An SEO Expert
What To Look For When Hiring An SEO Expert
Presently, search engine optimization is the most important form of digital marketing. Gaining organic traffic, reputation building and the promotion of your business are goals of website optimization.
Your company’s Website may look great, with plenty of multimedia sizzle. But if the site isn’t consistently attracting targeted visitors and converting them into customers, then it’s not doing its job, and this can negatively affect your revenue.
If you want to make your business visible on the leading search engines and grow traffic for your site, you need an expert to do the job for you. Hiring an SEO consultant is a great investment into the long-term growth of your business, provided you hire the right one. But what do you even look for in an SEO expert?
SEO results highly depend on the strategies of the specialist you hire and their campaigning style. So, while hiring an SEO professional, you need to ask the right questions and consider certain important things.
Your assessment of candidates should focus on the following factors.
SEO Experience
Anyone can set up an SEO Agency overnight and call themselves an SEO expert, but that doesn’t mean that they know what they are doing.
There are hundreds of little things that go into the bigger picture of doing SEO and it takes many years of experience to know what works and what doesn’t.
While hiring an SEO professional, you need to make sure that you find yourself an experienced one. Communicate with them well to know their years of experience and success in the field.
The SEO market changes quickly, and an SEO professional has to stay updated with this capricious field. So, while hiring one for your website, you should ask a lot about their years of experience in the business. Their qualifications, success rate, and approach to being up to date with the changing courses of the market should also be subjects to bring up in inaugural conversations.
Proven Track Record
It’s easy to talk a good game in SEO, but it’s another thing to have happy clients.
When choosing an SEO consultant, look for a track record of producing desirable results for businesses similar to yours. This is the most effective method to check whether the SEO service provider you have contacted is the right one for your website.
If you have chosen an experienced SEO expert, they will be more than happy to share their previous work records and success to establish their competency. A proven SEO consultant should also show how multiple optimizations that they used contributed to the clients’ bottom line.
You can verify their claim by reviewing the previous jobs that they are associated with at the review sites. Check out what their previous clients are saying about them. Thus, you can pick the right SEO professional for your company.
Here at ClickSlice, you will get SEO experts with a proven record of successful SEO work for established and new websites. This is a necessary factor considering the rising number of snake-oil salesmen on the internet these days.
Understanding of SEO Levels
Search Engine Optimization consists of three tiers:
- Technical – This is the structure of a site that, more than often, determines how easy or difficult it will be for search engines to crawl and index your content.
- On-page optimization – involves using such elements as keywords and HTML tags in ways that help to generate increased search engine traffic to your site.
- Off-page optimization – off-page strategies such as link building help you increase traffic on your site.
You should make sure that you can get personalized services from the expert and off-page SEO strategies to increase awareness of your content on other websites through social media posts, press releases.
Knowing this, it goes without saying that the expert you hire must be up to date on best practices and the latest trends in SEO. They should have a strong command of SEO toolsets and platforms that facilitate keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink optimization.
Of course, you don’t want a one-dimensional SEO expert. You need someone who will approach their strategy from all three angles to maximize success.
Realistic Strategies
It is better to get yourself an SEO professional who doesn’t promise overnight results. Does the expert focus on conversions – converting a visitor to your site into a customer – or are they more concerned with search engine rankings?
Ideally, Getting ranked on the first page of the search engines is not the goal. Also, high traffic is not the goal. All you need is valuable, relevant traffic that generates leads. But that is not easy.
The focus of any SEO strategy should be to accomplish a relevant goal, with a realistic strategy, like increasing conversions, and not achieving a certain rank. A top-notch SEO expert will carve out a strategy that will set you up to consistently be and remain competitive in the search channel by developing a genuine insight into the product, the users, the revenue model, and the competitive landscape.
One sign of a blue-chip SEO expert? They will always start by asking you lots of questions around the business to inform their thinking on building your online visibility.
Find a Creative Geek
When looking for an SEO consultant, you want to hire someone who can come up with ideas, implement them, and measure their impact.
An SEO needs to be comfortable doing relatively geeky analytical and technical stuff day in, day out. The expert will have to crunch through a lot of data and spend time to come up with new ideas and strategies, so they should have a certain sharpness and ability to draw insights.
As Rand Fishkin cites, Finding an SEO who can recite the IP addresses for all of Google’s crawlers is great, but finding one who’s deeply curious and constantly investigating how that crawler works is even better. Ever-growing knowledge is a craveable trait in an SEO Expert you’d want to hire.
There are a lot of self-proclaimed SEO specialists out there, but true experts are few and far between. When hiring an SEO Expert, separating the wheat from the chaff takes time and effort, but finding the right expert to help you grow is well worth the investment.
Thanks to the mentioned factors, you are now aware of hiring methods, skillset, and things to remember about hiring SEO professionals. Give a boost to your business with effective SEO services and drive, not just traffic, valuable traffic from search engines.
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SEO Tips For New Websites
SEO Tips For New Websites
You’ve launched your new website, ready to welcome crowds of new customers. But, if no one finds your new website, how will they see what you have to offer? It will take time for your website to become established on the internet and start attracting visitors.
Search engine optimisation has been such an essential topic for site owners for over 20 years. A lot has changed in the world of Search Engine Optimization and there’s currently a lot of SEO tips out there.
Organic traffic is the lifeblood of many websites. To help your site get better search engine rankings and more traffic much sooner, here are some SEO tips, pointedly chosen with new websites in mind.
Choose Low Competition Keywords on The Outset
When you first launch your site, it will have little authority on Google. For high competition keywords, it will rank lower than well-established competitors. Whilst there is nothing to stop you from targeting competitive keywords, it is best to designate less competitive ones. This is the quickest way to generate new traffic for your site.
You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to check how competitive a keyword you would like to use is. This tool will show the competition for the term as high, medium or low. Finding less competitive keywords gives you a higher chance of ranking for them and getting traffic to flow in your site when you are just starting.
Write for Humans First, Search Engines Second
Lately, more and more bloggers and content creators are going back to the old method of SEO. This method saw the use of keywords meant to drive search results surpass the absolute qualities of engaging, valuable and user-gratifying content.
Many new websites tend to hold keywords in such high regard that they forget the prime purpose of writing. Search spiders are just scripts. They don’t buy products, they don’t engage with you on social media, and they won’t become a loyal customer.
Don’t prioritize search engines over the actual humans reading your work. Instead, write content for the user, people who have eyes to read and credit cards to purchase your product.
Check Out Your Competitors
This is another valuable SEO tactic. Try to look at what your competitors are ranking for. Go to one of the tools you use to check out your rankings, but key in a competitor domain. You’ll quickly see what terms are generating traffic for their sites. From there, you can take the best for yourself.
If you don’t know who your competition is, search for some of your most important keyword targets. Take a look at the sites that consistently rank well. Again, don’t try to target a keyword just because a competitor is ranking well for it. Make sure that the keyword is highly relevant to your site and audience.
If well utilised, this is a quick and effective way to use your competitors’ work to uncover audience interests.
Use Better Title Tags
Search engines use title tags to determine the subject matter of each page or post on your website. Also, the title tag is one of the first things users see on your site.
The title tag is displayed as the blue link in search results. It is also the main heading when a page is shared on social media. You can make your title tags better by:
- Adding your main keyword to show search engines what the page is about. When someone searches for that term, search engines will see that your page has relevant content and present it to the user. You should also make sure that you include your keyword in the page’s meta description.
- Building interesting titles that grab the readers’ attention. Standing out in the search results can help earn you extra clicks. Of course, achieving this depends on your audience and the type of page in question. A product description page and a blog post will have very different title tags.
Go through all your pages and look at your titles. Are you making the most of your keywords? And are they as interesting and suitable as possible? If not, you need to change your approach towards title tags as this will increase your traffic.
Have Sensible URLs
When creating new pages, making your URLs short, readable and keyword-rich is a simple way to make the most of them. If users can’t read or understand your URL, then search engines may be confused as well.
Granted, the URL may be long, but as long as it’s easy to understand for both users and search engines, you are good to go. There are a few guiding principles, such as using hyphens instead of underscores and adding your primary keyword especially in the first few words. If possible, keeping them short and simple while reflecting site hierarchy is best.
One common mistake is using auto-generated URLs. These will work perfectly fine technically, but considering your audience, you should go for something more descriptive. Just as is the case with title tags, the reader wants to have an idea of what’s on the page just by reading the URL.
Improve Your Content
Look at the content you have for your page. Does it fully cover the topic in question? Does it address all the relevant keyword variations you can find? Does it address common audience questions? Is it engaging?
Search engines love quality content, so you need to make your page as good as possible each time. Look at who is ranking well for your target keywords. How can you create a resource that is much better?
Keep Your Website Fresh
Search engines promote websites that are updated regularly with new or refreshed content. If you’ve got a new website, you won’t have anything that needs updating straight away but it can be a big help, SEO-wise, to add new content regularly.
If you have just set up a new website, hopefully, the tips given in this post will have shown you some of the ways to get your site a perfect start in search engines. Your website should start ranking in search engine results and above all, get clicked by searchers.
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How To Create The Perfect SEO Keyword Strategy
How To Create The Perfect SEO Keyword Strategy
While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rolling out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search, and that is Keyword strategy.
While the need to develop a keyword strategy has stayed the same, how you do it hasn’t. Finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines intending to use that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization, is all that keyword strategies entail.
A modern SEO keyword strategy must focus on intent and how valuable they are to your business. Here are some tips to help you devise and execute a functional keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you care about.
Make a List of Relevant Topics
To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You can come up with about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important and admissible to your content.
If you’re a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they’re the topics that come up the most in sales conversations. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas. What types of topics would your target audience search for? Those are the topics that you’d want your business to get found for.
Find Your Keywords
Keyword research is usually the most important step towards achieving a legit SEO strategy. You can’t do much without knowing what keywords your target market is using to find solutions to the problems that your company solves.
Using the topics noted in the first step, you will need to get keywords. This requires a little research. You need to step inside the shoes of the potential customer of your product or service. How would you find solutions to your problem? What would you search for in your search engine?
One of the best ways to find fitting keywords is by using Google Suggest. To do this just start typing a keyword into Google’s search field, and it will populate a list of suggestions. These usually make great keywords for SEO because they come straight from Google.
This means you know for sure that people are searching for them. Plus, longer keywords, known as long-tail keywords, tend to be less competitive than “short tail” terms.
Type in different keywords until you have an extensive list of other keywords. If you want to check out the search volume and competition levels for those terms, you can use a keyword tool such as Ubersuggest.
Factors For Choosing Keywords
You cannot just choose keywords and expect your content to rank for them, you must curate keywords for:
- Relevance
Google ranks content for relevance. This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the readers’ needs. In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query. After all, why would Google rank your content higher if it provides less value than other content that exists on the web?
- Authority
Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative. That means you must do all you can in terms of keywords to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, informative content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks.
- Volume
You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site. Kind of like setting up shop in a ghost town.
Analyze Google's First Page
So you have already found a handful of keywords. Now it’s time to see who already ranks for those keywords. To do that, just type one of the words that you found into Google.
Scan the top ten results and jot down any patterns that you notice. For example, you may notice that the first page results are predominantly frequented by list posts. If you wanted to cover that topic on your site, you’d probably want to publish a list post.
Research Related Search Terms
This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it’s a great way to fill out those keyword lists.
If you’re struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google’s results, you’ll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.
Use Keyword Research Tools To Your Advantage
Keyword research and SEO tools such as SEMrush, and Ubersuggest can help you put forward more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you’ve generated up to this point. This exercise might give you alternatives that you might not have considered.
SEO tools also work to your advantage if you’d like to find how competitive your keywords are.
Create Something Different or Better
You already have your keywords. Now it’s time to create some super high-quality content. Sometimes you want to forge something bigger and better than what’s out there but other times it’s better to create something different from what’s there. The key here is to use your marketing spidey sense and create engaging content that is valuable to your target market.
Valuable content includes content that answers the questions that your buyers have, provides them with insights they can use and educates them so they can be better at what they do. The right keyword strategy helps your content stand out. Your aim should always be to create something that’s simply better than what’s already ranking on the first page of Google?
Bonus Tip: Be sure you don’t overlook your pages’ URLs because they’re important for your SEO. This is where your keyword research comes in handy. Using the most common and most searched appropriate keywords in your URL is a sure way of generating traffic for your site. If you are not conversant with keyword strategies, you can seek SEO training and courses created and delivered by Clickslice. These will come in handy in handling all your SEO problems.
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How Search Engines Work
How Search Engines Work
Search Engines are programs that search an index of the world wide web for keywords and display the results in order. They find and rank web content matching a user’s search query.
Examples of popular search engines include Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
How Search Engines Work
According to InternetLiveStats, Google receives an average of 5.5 billion searches a day. Or 63,000 searches per second. For every one of those queries, the search engine trawls through more than 130 trillion individual pages internet-wide and selects the fitting results in less than a second.
Behind those results lies a lot of groundwork. While Google, like other search engines, is notoriously secretive about the mechanisms behind search results, marketers benefit from knowing how search engines work. Understanding how search engines find, organize, and select results means you can better optimize your web pages to rank. Let’s get you informed.
A search engine is an interlinked network system that works together to identify pieces of web content, including images, videos, and website pages, based on the words you type into a search bar. Site owners use Search Engine Optimization to improve the chances that content on their site will show up in search results.
Search engines use three basic mechanisms:
- Web Crawlers
- Search index
- Search Algorithms
How Search Engines Crawl, Index, and Rank Content
From the outside, Search engines look simple. You type in a keyword, and you get a list of relevant pages. But that deceptively easy interchange requires a lot of computational heavy lifting backstage.
The hard work starts way before you make a search. Search engines work round-the-clock, gathering information from the ever-growing list of websites and organizing that information, so it’s easy to find. This is a three-step process of first crawling web pages, indexing them, then ranking them with search algorithms.
Crawling
Search engines rely on crawlers to scour the web for information. Crawlers start out with a list of websites. Algorithms, sets of computational rules, automatically decide which of these sites to crawl. The algorithms also dictate how many pages to crawl and how frequently.
Crawlers visit each site on the list systematically, following links through tags to jump to internal or external pages. Over time, the crawlers build an ever-expanding map of interlinked pages. It is critical for you to make sure your site is easily accessible to crawlers. If your site is not accessible to Search engines, Technical SEO services from Clickslice are at your disposal to ensure that search engines can crawl your site. If bots can’t crawl it, they can’t index it, and that means your site won’t appear in search results.
If you’re not sure whether your site is accessible to crawlers, check it out on a Site Audit tool. The tool catches accessibility issues and advises on how to fix them.
Indexing
After finding a page, a bot renders it similar to the way your browser does. That means the bot should see what you see, including images, videos, or other types of dynamic page content.
The bot organizes this content into categories, including images, HTML, text, and keywords. This process allows the crawler to understand what’s on the page, a necessary precursor to deciding for which keyword searches the page is relevant.
Search engines then store this information in an index, a giant database with a catalogue entry for every word seen on every webpage indexed. Google’s index, the Caffeine Index, takes up around 100,000,000 gigabytes and fills server farms. These farms are thousands of computers that never get turned off, around the globe.
If you want to know what crawlers see when they land on your site, use the URL Inspection Tool. You can also use the tool to find out why crawlers aren’t indexing the page or request that Google crawl it. Use a robots.txt file to control access by telling bots which pages they can crawl.
Ranking
In the final step, search engines sort through indexed information and return the right results for each query. They do that with search algorithms, rules that analyze what a searcher is looking for and which results best answer the query.
Algorithms use numerous factors to define the quality of the pages in their index. Google leverages a whole series of algorithms to rank relevant results. Many of the ranking factors used in these algorithms analyze the general popularity of a piece of content and even the qualitative experience users have previously had when they land on the page
To make sure that the algorithms are doing their job properly, Google uses human Search Quality Raters to test and refine the algorithm. This is one of the few times when humans, and not programs, are involved in how search engines work.
How Search Engines Personalize Results
Search engines understand that different results appeal to different people. That’s why they tailor their results for each user.
If you’ve ever searched for the same thing on multiple devices or browsers, you’ve probably seen the effects of this personalization. Results often show up in different positions depending on various factors.
It’s because of this personalization that if you’re doing SEO, it is better to use a dedicated rank tracking tool to track ranking positions. Your search results are personalized according to your:
- Language
- Location
- Search History
Understanding how search engines work is the first step towards ranking higher in Google and getting more traffic. If search engines can’t find, crawl and index your pages, you’re dead in the water before you even start.
The best way is to begin by optimizing your website for SEO. Sending the right signals to search engines guarantees that your pages appear in results pages relevant to your business. Serving up to searchers, and search engines, the content they want is a step along the path to a successful online business.
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How To Create The Perfect Landing Page
How To Create The Perfect Landing Page
A landing page is an essential part of any digital marketing campaign.
It is the place your customers are driven to allow them to purchase your product or service. Therefore, an eye-catching design, creative content, and a clear call to action are imperative to ensure this page converts viewers to customers.
What Is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a stand-alone webpage that is created specifically to advertise a product or service.
As the name suggests, it is the page that the customer ‘lands’ on when they follow a link from your social media or email marketing campaign. Landing pages will have a clear call to action, encouraging visitors to purchase a product.
The Benefits of an Effective Landing Page
Landing Pages Build Brand Identity
As mentioned, landing pages are generally developed as part of a marketing campaign. Therefore, providing that it aligns with your branding and social media marketing, an effective landing page will help improve your overall brand recognition.
It Tells the Customer Exactly What to Do
Webpages do not always contain a compelling call to action. They allow readers to make their own choices, whether they would like to browse your products, explore your content, or read about the company history.
Whereas, a landing page tells visitors exactly what to do.
Your customers know precisely why they are here. You are not giving away tips, information, or guidance as you might be in your blog articles and category pages. Here, you are instead promoting a product on the back of your hard-earned brand integrity.
Landing Pages can be Tested
A crucial element of an SEO strategy is cohesive auditing. You need to learn what is working for your business, and what isn’t.
The metrics for landing pages are very clear, and analytics will quickly show whether your landing page is a success. Where it isn’t, you can implement changes to turn this around.
Avoid Using Your Home Page
Technically, your home page is a landing page.
Many of your customers will arrive here through social media and web searches. However, a landing page is used to promote a specific offer, product, or service.
Your home page will struggle to convey this precise information.
The home page already has the job of highlighting your brand, the product or service you offer, and showing readers how to navigate the website. Adding the promotion of a specific deal to this list would be more than one page could handle. It would become cluttered and unclear, and the particular call to action required would become lost in the noise.
Tips For Creating the Perfect Landing Page
Minimalistic Design
It needs to be abundantly clear to the reader exactly what this page is advertising, and therefore a minimalistic design is imperative.
Many business owners are nervous about using white space, unsure if the complete design will look somewhat ‘unfinished’. However, effectively using white space is the key to a bold and eye-catching landing page. Blank space draws attention towards your graphics and text, forcing readers to focus on what is genuinely important.
Concise headlines will also help simplify your design, allowing you to pack the most punch with the least words. Of course, your brand identity should be visible from this landing page, so ensure your company colours and typography flow naturally from your other marketing materials.
Don’t Forget Your SEO
Your landing page will look very different to the other pages on your website, but this doesn’t mean SEO isn’t necessary.
The best way to develop an authoritative page is to have traffic from every source possible. So, if your social media and email marketing have control of those angles, allow on-page and off-page SEO to drive organic search engine traffic to your page.
Limited Navigation
Once on your landing page, the options for your readers should be limited. With too much choice, it is unlikely they will complete the desired action.
Your website should contain a detailed and well-structured navigation system, allowing customers to effortlessly access every corner of your site. However, your landing page should be the opposite of this.
Remove any navigation bars and distractions, forcing your user to focus on the sole purpose of this dedicated landing page.
A Clear Call to Action
A call to action is the most crucial element of your landing page. Put simply, this is a phrase or word that encourages the reader to take the desired action. A killer call to action will be the difference between a bounce and a customer conversion.
A call to action on a landing page may be used for a multitude of reasons. First and most obviously, to secure a sale. The push button will direct the reader to a sales page to input their details to complete the transaction.
However, calls to action can be used for other things, such as to add an email to a mailing list, to access free downloadable content, to enter giveaways or contests, or to receive a free trial of your service.
A simple ‘submit’ will not be enough to entice customers to click through. The text should be bold, bright, imperative language, tempting your reader to continue.
Build Trust
Unsurprisingly, over 50% of online shoppers read reviews before purchasing a product online. Whilst we wouldn’t encourage filling your seamless and minimalistic design with customer reviews, your landing page can be a great place to display any excellent press coverage.
This highlights why it is crucial to ask for feedback from any long-term clients, in turn, helping you reach a whole new pool of customers.
How ClickSlice Can Help
ClickSlice are SEO experts who specialise in getting your brand noticed online. We work with a vast spectrum of clients in various industries and are passionate about the power of an excellent online presence.
For a no-obligation chat about boosting your online visibility, contact our team today on 020 3287 3638 or hello@clickslice.co.uk.
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7 Ways to Improve Your Online Presence
7 Ways to Improve Your Online Presence
Building a solid online presence is imperative in the digital age.
It’s where your customers are finding you. Even if your core service requires a brick-and-mortar establishment, individuals will turn to the internet to discover your company.
Here’s precisely why and how you should approach solidifying your brand’s online identity.
What Is an Online Presence?
Put simply, if a business can be found anywhere on the internet, it has an online presence.
A robust online presence generally consists of an excellent website and fascinating social media accounts. Investing in your online branding in the early stages of your business can skyrocket your success.
More often than not, a business will have an online presence regardless of whether they are actively creating one.
Can your customers find you on Google Maps? Can they geotag on Instagram? Or leave a review on TripAdvisor? If any of these apply, then you already have the foundations of an online reputation.
Why You Need an Online Presence
Most businesses will struggle to achieve great success without an excellent online brand.
Because viewers convert to customers.
So, the most profitable businesses spend a great deal of time and money, developing an excellent website and engaging social media accounts. Providing customers with valuable information helps to build trust and shows readers that your product or service is the best around.
A strong online presence makes your business more credible, accessible, and helps to support the overall branding.
7 Ways to Improve Your Online Presence
A Flawless Website
A flawless website is the fastest way to show the integrity of your brand.
First and most obviously, the website needs to look incredible and accurately represent your business. A website is a crucial building block in your overall branding, so the aesthetic must encompass your company identity.
Next, the website should function without fault. It should be fast to load and free of broken links. Customers will quickly leave a website that is full of glitches or slow to load.
Finally, your website must be discoverable. Unfortunately, most people never venture further than the first page of Google, with the majority clicking on one of the top three links. Therefore, you must implement a robust SEO strategy to enable potential customers to find your website.
Consider Your Platforms
Building a social media presence is the next building block for your online company.
However, especially in the early stages of your business, mastering all of the platforms is near impossible. The options include Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Tik Tok, requiring written, image, and video content combinations. Attempting to provide your audience will value on each of these will undoubtedly be unsuccessful.
Spend time considering the content that fits your brand and focus on one or two platforms. For fun, snappy video content, opt for Instagram and Tik Tok. On the other hand, if words are more your vibe, Twitter or even LinkedIn may be preferable. Pinterest is perfect for infographics and beautiful imagery, and the platform is well known for excellent click-through rates.
Create Shareable Content
One of the best, organic ways to reach whole new customer bases is to create shareable content. Essentially, your readers will then do the marketing for you, sharing your blogs or social media posts to their followings.
However, you should be aware that there is a very fine line between enticing content and clickbait. Whilst headlines may draw people in (especially on social media), only valuable, interesting content will lead to shares.
Infographics work exceptionally well and can be created easily as an addition to your long form work.
Quality Over Quantity
When building your brand online, it’s easy to get bogged down with the numbers.
Reaching 100 website page views per day, or 10,000 Twitter followers, can feel like the key to success. But this is not necessarily the case.
The trick is to engage genuine customers, who are likely to convert to sales. This can, however, be especially difficult for service-based businesses, where location is crucial. For example, a viewer in Edinburgh will not utilise a hairdresser offering their services in Manchester.
This is where local SEO becomes even more critical. When search engines precisely understand where you are based, they can show you to your ideal customer base.
Network
Building a relationship with other businesses and social media influencers can be a great way to get yourself noticed online.
Social media users are wise to constant paid for advertisements, which can look try-hard at best, and tacky at worst. Also, affiliating your company with another brand that doesn’t align with your beliefs can have serious repercussions later down the line.
However, authentic relationships will hugely help with your online presence. You will undoubtedly notice a flurry of additional viewers if another company mentions and links to your website.
Ensure you are reciprocating and keeping open communication channels to allow these relationships to organically blossom.
Build a Mailing List
You can build a mailing list by taking the email address of your customers (with their consent) and storing them in a database. This helps create a personable relationship between yourself and the customer, allowing them exclusive insights into new products and sales.
Every email sent to these customers increases the chance of them heading directly to your website and making a sale. Ensure there is a call to action on every email issued, and monitor the response from your customers to help figure out which tactics work best for your audience.
Work With A Dedicated Agency
Here at ClickSlice, our expertise is getting brands noticed online. We are SEO fanatics, aiming to boost your search engine rankings, drive new readers to your site, and convert them into customers.
We pride ourselves on being consistent, using data-driven and reliable techniques that have proved successful time and time again.
For a no-obligation chat about building your online presence, contact our friendly team today on 020 3287 3638 or hello@clickslice.co.uk.
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Why You Should Hire an SEO Agency
Why You Should Hire an SEO Agency
Deciding to work with an external SEO company is a big move for any business.
It can be a struggle to place your trust in another team, with many business owners believing that keeping optimisation in-house is the best move.
Of course, an in house SEO expert is hugely beneficial, but this article will explore the many advantages of outsourcing your SEO work to an agency.
What Does An SEO Agency Do?
The purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to increase your brand’s online visibility.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to SEO, and a great agency will take a rounded approach that aligns with the company’s goals.
An SEO agency will look at the technical aspects of your website, including elements such as page speed and mobile usability. They will then look at your on-page SEO, optimising and developing content that helps your website rank above your competitors.
Depending on your company’s needs, you may also choose to explore international SEO, which can hugely benefit E-commerce companies looking to break into new markets.
SEO Agencies Are Results Driven
At the outset of your relationship, you will discuss exactly what you are hoping to gain from the partnership with your chosen agency. From here, strategies can be developed, and results will be regularly provided.
Meaning, you will be able to see first-hand the immediate outcomes their techniques have created.
Of course, the goal of SEO is to drive organic traffic to your website. But, the whole purpose of this traffic spike is to increase the number of sales your company makes.
Put simply; excellent SEO implementation will improve your bottom line.
They Have The Tools
Auditing your website and the website of your competitors takes a significant number of tools and resources. Whilst some resources are free, the best are those that require annual memberships, which your chosen agency will undoubtedly have.
Alongside these tools to kickstart your SEO campaign, great agencies will have access to programmes that monitor your progress, checking you are on track to hitting those goals every step of the way.
SEO Agencies Are Cost-Effective
Working with an SEO agency is a significant investment.
SEO is a holistic service that starts with a detailed website audit, analyses your competitors, and develops on-page and off-page optimisation strategies. These are highly skilled services, and therefore, agencies charge a premium.
However, the focus should always be on providing a significant return on your investment.
Consider the impact of your organic internet traffic multiplying by 500. The whole focus of SEO is to drive your genuine target market to your website, so these additional views will be by legitimate customers ready to purchase your products. In comparison to the monthly outlay for the SEO services, this extra income will be astronomical.
To Dominate the Local Market
SEO agencies can be particularly beneficial for service-based, local companies.
Local SEO is the process of optimising your website to ensure your brand is visible to those in the vicinity. For example, if you’re a window cleaner based in Bournemouth, there is little point in a client in Newcastle discovering your services.
Local SEO is complex and requires implementation from many different angles to succeed.
Unrivalled Experience and Knowledge
SEO is a full-time job. However, taking on a staff member to cover these elements of your business might not be feasible for you at this current time.
While you may choose to invest in in-house training and courses, working with an agency will provide the rapid results that your company craves, using tried and tested methods.
To Gain a Competitive Edge
Think about your biggest competitor. And now imagine ranking above them for every search in your niche.
This is not an easy task – especially if you are a relatively new business and they are an established company. However, through innovative research and robust strategies, there is no reason customers cannot find your website above the rest.
Once on your website, your excellent content will show them exactly why they should purchase your product or service.
It Provides Accountability
Most businesses are aware of the enormous impact SEO can have.
It is often added to to-do lists and left there for months on end. Understandably, businesses have other elements to focus on, and Search Engine Optimisation falls by the wayside.
However, a dedicated agency will research, plan, and implement a strategy. Your monthly and yearly goals will be regularly revised, and analysis will be conducted periodically to check you are on track.
An Objective Perspective
Most companies believe their website and social media presence is fantastic.
However, an agency will view your work objectively, removing the emotional connection you have with your brand.
This will allow the agency to revise every element of your website. From the framework that it sits upon to the content that your customers enjoy. They will use data to focus on the strategies that attract the greatest number of customers and eliminate the techniques that are not currently working for your company.
Knowledge is Power
Outsourcing your SEO might not be the long-term plan for your company. However, working with an agency is a great way to kickstart your business growth and allows you to see the masters at work.
After witnessing the phenomenal results that excellent SEO can bring, you may decide to invest in an SEO course for your team. SEO training allows your team to replicate some techniques used by the agency and gives a solid understanding of why these strategies are so important.
Choosing The Right Team
When choosing an SEO agency, your goals must be clear from the outset. This way, agencies can explain the strategies they will implement to help you meet your targets.
Of course, you should choose an agency with a proven track record. They should provide clear examples of the methods they implement and how these make a difference to companies’ revenue. Testimonials are also great and give a personable insight into the effects of SEO.
At ClickSlice, we specialise in designing and implementing successful SEO campaigns, always focusing on providing a return on your investment. To find out how we can transform your business, contact us today on 020 3287 3638 or email us at hello@clickslice.co.uk.
