Biggest SEO Mistakes To Avoid
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Content marketers have to put in days, even weeks, of hard work and time to prepare content. However, it can be disheartening for a content marketer if the content doesn’t rank in the search engine. If it has happened to you, you understand that it’s not a very good feeling, to say the least. Marketers create content to reach their target audiences and anyone else searching for it.
Many marketers and business owners fail to get results from their search engine optimization efforts because of falling prey to common SEO mistakes. SEO is one of those strategies that you can implement in a few weeks, but it takes time to master. The first five organic results account for 71% of all clicks on searc engines. If you want to compete for high-traffic words and phrases, there are a few mistakes that you must avoid so that you can get that first-page ranking.
Here are the most common SEO mistakes you need to avoid to keep your digital marketing strategy intact.
Failure To Set Goals
It is no surprise that you need clear goals to succeed with SEO. Many business owners and marketers ignore this and run SEO campaigns without goals. They believe that SEO will increase their traffic, and subsequently their sales. The problem is, things are not always quite that simple.
For your SEO efforts to pay off, you need to understand what you want to achieve. Is it better quality traffic, more organic leads, or more sales you’re trying to get? Failure to set your priorities straight from the beginning is like starting a journey without knowing your destination.
For example, you may be attracting thousands of monthly organic users to your website, but only 1% of them end up buying from you. In this case, you’re either driving the wrong traffic to your website, or your website is not effective enough in converting visitors into customers. Without clear goals, you’ll end up with a bunch of vanity metrics and not much else.
Not Using Analytics
SEO isn’t only about massive amounts of free traffic. It’s also about converting the traffic. You may easily get caught up watching which phrases are sending you the most traffic, and then get bummed when you can’t rank for those super-competitive, high-traffic keywords. But traffic isn’t all that matters. Sometimes, lower-traffic phrases will convert better because they’re more specific, and getting first page rankings for several of them can drive sales remarkably.
The only way to find out if your efforts are paying off is to track it. Use an analytics package to set up conversion tracking for your keyword phrases, and then compare them against each other to see what’s producing the best results. Google Analytics is used by 56.8% of all websites to track their progress and know what is holding them back. Knowing will help you better optimize your site as a whole and know which efforts are worth focusing on and which ones you should let go of.
Optimizing For The Wrong Keywords
Selecting and using the wrong keywords is one of the most common mistakes when creating content. For example, it’s easy to fall into the trap of optimizing for global keywords when you only offer services to local customers.
As you create content, it’s best to be as specific as possible. Sometimes you’re better off going for more specific phrases, which lead to quicker rankings and more qualified traffic. Other keywords to avoid are those that only bring in visitors looking for free information, not prospective customers interested in buying something.
Beginners tend to make the mistake of using broad keywords that have lots of competition, maybe with several SEO experts working full-time to defend the first-page ranking. 71% of marketers say using strategic and specific keywords was their number one strategy for SEO. Start with keywords that would probably start producing results immediately. You could then optimize for more competitive keywords as your website grows and gains authority.
Writing Poor Content
People online are searching for informative and quality content that matches their queries. But still, we come across websites that write very poorly written content for the readers. Irrelevant content with ordinary writings standards only harms your rankings.
The two most popular ways of creating a large quantity of content are hiring low paid article writers and using article spinners, software that takes one article and re-words it to make it look like several unique articles to search engines. The content might be well optimized, but you also need to consider the impression it’ll give visitors. Search engines, and more importantly, people can tell whether or not content is unique. If it’s not, you’ll lose trust, and you’ll have a much harder time regaining it.
Quality content has consistently been a factor toward gaining traffic and ranking for your site. Search engines have their users’ best interests at heart, so if your content is below standards or irrelevant, it simply won’t rank.
Poor Use Of Links
To get the best out of SEO, it is essential to include quality external links in the content. Always make sure your external links are from a relevant, high-ranked website with a higher Domain Authority. While there are many easy ways to get a high volume of links, you should emphasise quality.
One link from a popular blog might do more for your search engine rankings than thousands of low-quality directory links. Yes, they’re harder to get, but that’s also why search engines place such trust in them. Link building is one of the two most important signals that Google uses to rank your website for search. They are a more reliable measure of the quality of your website.
Using a call to action, like ‘click here, as your link costs you the opportunity of tailoring your anchor text. However, avoid using similar anchor texts every time you link to a page. It looks funny to visitors and can hurt your search engine rankings. Mix it up and use variations of the phrase. It will look more natural to site visitors and search engines.
At Clickslice, we offer extensive link building services to help you grow your traffic and rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages.
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What is Content Marketing and How Does it Help in SEO
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Are you looking for new ways to improve your website’s search engine rankings and overall SEO? And has it crossed your mind that content marketing might be one possible solution?
SEO, together with content marketing, has changed the digital marketing world. If you’re serious about your SEO, content marketing should definitely be part of your SEO strategy. In this age, SEO without content marketing is like a body without a soul. To be successful, both must go hand in hand. During a 2021 Statista survey carried out among search engine optimization professionals worldwide, 24.6% stated depth and accuracy of content was among the most important factors impacting search rankings.
If you’re wondering if there are any benefits your SEO strategy can reap from content marketing, then you’re in the right place. In this post, what content marketing is, why it’s important for your SEO strategy.
But just before we jump into the interrelationship between SEO and content marketing, let’s look at what the terms actually mean.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization(SEO) is the process by which a website is enhanced to perform better and rank higher in relevant searches. It is a technique of increasing the quality of traffic and attracting maximum visitors to your website.
What is Content Marketing?
On the other hand, content marketing comes down to sharing valuable and relevant content with your audience. That is free content to assist them in solving their problems and understanding more about a topic they’re interested in. It is focused on using valuable and relevant content to drive profitable customer or client action.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
Content marketing offer readers and potential customers informative and useful material that provides insight and value. It utilizes blogs, social media posts, graphics and videos, to attract traffic, keep them engaged, and move them further along the sales funnel.
According to a study by the Contentmarketinginstitute, 76% of marketers employed a strategic approach to managing content in 2019. They used an approach that formalizes the processes that people and technologies needed to scale and deliver content. Most of these marketers attest to the effectiveness of content marketing to drive traffic to a site with the top goals being:
- To support the organization’s goals and criteria for success.
- Improving the customer experience.
- Generating and nurturing business leads.
Content marketing is a mainstay in the revolution from traditional methods of marketing. For example, a traditional ad may only tell the audience what an organization does, whereas content marketing shares relevant knowledge on the matter at hand and actionable insights that help the target audience to understand why they should take action.
How Content Marketing Works Together With SEO
Now let’s delve into some of the benefits of content marketing for SEO and learn the specific ways that an active content marketing plan can grant you an edge over your competitors in terms of search engine rankings.
Keyword Opportunities
Search engines can’t and don’t see websites like you and I do. We can always look at a website with pictures of pet supplies and understand that it’s an eCommerce site peddling leashes, dog bowls, and dog toys. However, search engines like Google have no way of recognizing a website’s purpose unless those words are written somewhere. And that is where content marketing comes in.
The key to SEO success is researching and finding relevant keywords then using them in your content so that you rank higher in the search engine results pages. Astute keywords mainly consist of one or two words. According to Ahrefs, 70.87% of keywords with more than 10,000 monthly searches consist of only one or two words. Using these keywords appropriately and following a strategic approach is fundamental if your content is to rank higher. For one, marketers should never stuff a page with keywords and overoptimize. SEO and content work in perfect balance.
Quality Content
Content marketing requires consistency. Fresh, unique and creative content gets rapidly indexed by search engines and ranks higher than low-value and monotonous content. In fact, according to Carolfoden, 78% of consumers will trust your brand if you create more customized content.
Your content must be able to lure your clients as well as solve a particular issue. As long as you can write influential content by using important keywords and targeting visitors, you are likely to improve on SEO and rank higher. Content quality is the most important factor through which Google determines the relevance of a page and ranks that piece of content. Content marketers brainstorm creative ideas and embed the most important keywords to get content acknowledgement. This is another sure way in which content marketing benefits SEO.
Content Keeps Users on Your Page Longer
If someone is redirected to your website from a search, they can’t find what they are looking for and then they leave right away, it is called a bounce. Usually, the percentage of people who do this on each page on your site is read as your bounce rate.
Google factors metrics like bounce rate into the overall SEO profile on your site. If one of your pages has a very high bounce rate, that’s clearly a sign that there is something wrong with it. According to Forbes, you and your business content have just seven seconds to make that first impression that will encourage users to stick around. Google certainly won’t want to continue ranking a page highly if it’s sending all its visitors right back into the search results.
Content marketing can help you combat a high bounce rate and solve problems like this, especially if it’s done thoughtfully. The longer a user stays on your site, the more they are likely to be converted into loyal brand ambassadors.
Having understood the ways that content marketing can improve your SEO, you may be looking to create a content marketing strategy that both helps your visitors and your site. That’s where we come in. At Clickslice, we are all about making your website obtain high rankings in search engine results. We can incorporate our SEO services with Content marketing to give you an edge over your competition both content wise and in search engine rankings.
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Important Technical SEO Components to Consider
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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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Top 10 SEO Mistakes by New Websites
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Demands on SEO are growing every day, and so are the opportunities. Not only is the discipline expanding, so is the size of the market, which is predicted to reach $1.6 billion by 2027.
In recent years, SEO has evolved from being a siloed practice to a significant revenue channel that is being integrated into content marketing practices and overall digital strategies.
As you launch your site, you may decide that you’re going to stick with SEO for your primary traffic strategy, optimizing everything on your site in a bid to get search engines to give you a favourable ranking to generate traffic. So, you start by doing your keyword research and finding a few phrases that are bringing in massive amounts of traffic.
Now you expect your website to start climbing in search engine results. And it finally does, but not as fast as you’d wish it to. The next thing is you’ll start to ask yourself questions to try and figure out what’s going on, or what you may have done wrong.
Luckily, we have you covered. In this article, you will find ten mistakes that you are likely to make on a new website, together with their potential solution.
1. Looking Forward to a Quick Returns
It takes time for a new site to achieve the SEO results that they desire. This is mainly because site history is one of the website ranking factors considered by search engines, according to Yokellocal.
Internet marketers agree that SEO efforts can be measured between 6-9 months of a major push. To get your phone ringing while SEO ramps up, consider running Google PPC paid ads during the first several months that your website is online.
2. Not Knowing Your Audience
One of the fundamental base principles of SEO is to understand your target audience. That means knowing your consumers to the most minute and granular level. SEO is basically the voice of the customer.
Historical data is still a good method of giving SEO great insights into seasonal trends. However, marketers’ methods to understand their customers have to be more holistic than that.
To solve this issue, marketers should consider looking at the market from which the consumers mostly buy. Understanding the market is understanding the user.
3. Failure to Optimize for The Right Keywords
It’s easy to fall into the optimizing trap for global keywords when you only serve local customers or keywords that only bring in site visitors looking for free info and not looking to buy anything.
When it comes to SEO, it’s best to be as specific as possible. Focus on generic keywords to bring you a lot of traffic, if you’re successful. But how long will it take you, and how realistic is it? Sometimes, you’re better off going for more specific phrases, which usually lead to quicker rankings and more qualified traffic.
4. Having Duplicate Content
Large and small starting companies alike may go for duplicate content on their websites, and overlook it before posting. Duplicate content negatively affects SEO. It’s that plain and simple.
So what exactly is duplicate content? Duplicate content includes any form of matching content, pages and twin product listings across multiple pages. A study by Moz revealed that most people don’t create duplicate content intentionally and that up to 29% of the web is actually duplicate content!
If you often find this to be a problem as you start, there are a host of plagiarism tools online that you can use to check for duplicated content. Many are free and designed for revision and omission from a website.
5. Not Going For What Converts
Many beginners in the world of SEO tend to forget that it is not only about having free traffic on your site, but also converting site visitors.
It is easy to be distracted by watching phrases that send you traffic and forgetting about low traffic keywords. Often, these low-traffic keywords are in a better position to drive sales because they are more specific and appealing to the user.
To avoid making this mistake, you can employ the use of an analytics package to track conversion rates for your keyword phrases. You can then compare them against each other to see what’s producing the best results.
6. Failing to Optimize For Local Search
When you’re setting up a business that focuses on customers within a certain geographic region, it’s important to learn and understand everything that you can about local search. Most search engines, including Google, handle local search a bit differently than more global keywords.
You can start by including region-specific keywords in your page titles and meta descriptions. Then you might also want to include a physical address and a local phone number on your pages, such as in the header or footer so that you’ll show up in the local search results easier.
7. Slow Site Speed
When your site speed is low, it will deter people from trying to access content on your pages, and cost you hard-earned traffic. In the beginning, you have invested so much of your time and efforts to drive traffic from search engines but all that is a waste if the page takes too long to load.
Research by Backlinko suggested that the average time it takes to fully load a webpage is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile. This shows that most sites have work to do when it comes to site speed. You can run your webpage through the Google PageSpeed Insights to check the performance of your page to help you understand more about your site’s speed.
The time between when users send a request to access your site, and when it is actually rendered is critical.
8. Poorly Written Content
At times, marketers lack time to create content for their sites, even when it’s new. The two popular ways of creating large amounts of content include hiring low paid article writers or using article spinners – software that takes one article and edits it using different to make it look like several unique articles.
This is however not a good idea, as search engines have become smarter with time. Even if not search engines, people can tell whether or not content is unique and valuable, and if it’s not, you’ll lose trust, and the audience won’t take action.
At clickslice, we have all the necessary SEO services to make your content unique and successful in Search Engine Result Pages.
9. Not Optimizing For Mobile
We are now living in a mobile-first world where most users rely on mobile devices rather than computers. A 2020 study by Perficient showed that 68.1% of all website visits came from mobile devices.
Having mobile-friendly websites will play to your advantage as you look to make your way up rankings. If you haven’t made use of this feature, then your site is also missing out on the most advanced types of design.
10. Not Taking Advantage of Great Link Designs
Hundreds of Cascading Style Sheets will link to your website simply based on having a great design. Additionally, you can look for blogs that do reviews of great website designs in particular industries and ask them to add your website to their list as well.
The high-quality links from these sites likely won’t convert, but they will have a positive impact on your domain authority.
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How To Write Instantly Clickable Headlines
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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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5 Tips for Creating an Effective Guest Posting Strategy
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Guest posting is simply publishing an article on someone else’s website. 60% of bloggers write 1-5 guest posts a month and 3% write more than 100. It has become a massive part of running a successful blog by building potentially useful relationships with other bloggers in a certain niche. It is also an easy way to reach a whole new, relevant audience, and drive traffic back to your site.
In this article, we will show you how to create and execute a successful guest blogging strategy. Our aim is to equip you with all the necessary tools to use guest posting effectively to improve lead generation and gain more visibility for your business.
Determine Your Goals
Before you even start, your first task is to decide what your goal for guest blogging is. This is key in determining the right blogs to submit your guest posts to. Typically, there are three main goals that you should have at the back of your head before you start guest blogging.
- Getting traffic to your website is the main goal here. Traffic is everything in the online world.
- Establishing a name for yourself in your niche is also crucial.
- Although Google is not a fan, building backlinks can also be something to aim for while guest blogging.
You can achieve all these by posting the right content on top blogs. Sometimes you will need to post on a blog with an engaged audience, while sometimes all you need is a blog with a strong root domain authority.
Knowing your goals earlier will help you determine the kind of blog for you to guest post on.
Find Sites to Contribute to
After determining your goals, you’ll have to find a site that accepts guest authors and is looking for the content currently. Beyond that, you’ll need to ensure that posting on the site will help you meet your goals.
But how do you find a site that accepts guest blogging? There are lots of ways to do this. For starters, you can use Google to find these sites by using keywords such as ‘write for us’ or ‘become a contributor.
A site should not only be happy to accept your post, but it must also meet these criteria.
- The content on that site must be focused on your niche. You cannot go on to guest post on a site that has completely different content.
- The audience should also be interested in your type of content. 62.96% of readers perceive blogs with multiple authors to be more credible, so as long as the content interests the audience, you are good to go.
- The blog owner should preferably be active on social media so that you know that they will be promoting your content on their site.
Before You Pitch…
Pitching is approaching site owners to suggest a guest post, But before you do that, you must form a connection with them. For most site owners cold pitches won’t work unless the content is stellar.
Most site owners get tired of irrelevant pitches and poor quality content, according to Pageonepower. For this reason, they’ll only take guest content from people they already know, trust, and are fond of. But the million-dollar question is, how do you become one of those people? Here’s how.
Understand Their Blog Content and Audience
Getting to know and comprehend your target blog’s content is key. Sure, you already know that the content matches your niche. But you need to know even more about that content, such as, what level of audience they are writing for, and what makes most of their content. Is it general concepts or specific, any detailed tutorials? or do they like lists?
How Are The Other Guest Bloggers Doing?
Some sites might accept guest posts, but the audience only ends up tuning in for the blog owner. If there are other guest blogs on the blog, you need to know if they do well. Also, check if the owner gives the guest blogs comments and social sharing. If not, you don’t expect to do so well if your goal is to get traffic back to your website.
Make Your Pitch
The next step in creating a guest posting strategy is to finally sell your content idea to the site owners through email.
Make sure to connect with site owners on social media, so you can tag them when you share the content on their site. You can share anything you like and include a comment so it’s not just a plain link. Commenting on their blogs and signing up for their email marketing newsletter are also effective ways of creating a connection.
Submit a Great Guest Post
The common question when it comes to guest blogging is whether or not you should be using your best content for your guest posting. Actually, it depends on the quality of the blog you are submitting the content to.
If the site has 500-word articles with images, then your content should go in line with that trend. Businesses that blog have 434% more indexed pages than businesses that don’t create content, so having state of the art content on your guest blogs is an added advantage. Below are some tips to make your guest post as astounding as you can
It’s Not All About You
Information about you and your business should be on your author Bio. A guest post should never be all about your business, products, or services. It should be a source of information and not an advertisement. However, occasional mentions here and there won’t do you any harm.
Create Similar Content
Take a close look at posts on the site. If there is any special formatting on their blogs, make sure that your guest post has similar elements matching other posts on the site. For precise content, you can count on us to provide the best SEO services to take your content to the next level.
Include Internal Links
Quality guest post content should include internal links to your client’s posts. This will do you a favour by showing them that you have gone through their content and you understand it.
Generally, guest blogging on relevant eminent sites is a great way to soar levels and achieve the success of already popular blogs in your industry. Follow the strategy above and grab those guest blogging opportunities to grow your business or brand.
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5 SEO Tools You Should Know
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It takes a good amount of work to appear at the top of search engine results using internet marketing for your target keywords. Luckily, this is where SEO tools come in.
Having a basic understanding of how search engines and keyword research works is just one step towards achieving a good ranking, but it’s never that easy to push your site rank to page one, let alone to the top position of search results.
According to Slideshare, nearly 60% of B2B marketers say that SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation, and this isn’t something you want to ignore. You have to embrace an effective internet marketing strategy if you want to be successful.
The good news is that there is a number of search engine optimization (SEO) tools out there, some free and some paid, that can help you view your website the way search engines like Google see it. This way, you can improve your ranking and relevance for your target keywords.
In this article, we will explore five of the SEO tools that you need to know about if you would to achieve site rank success.
Ubbersuggest
There’s more to SEO than just what you see on the surface. The more you dig, the more data you’re likely to find. With this, you’re in a position to make more informed decisions in a bid to boost your search engine rankings.
Ubersuggest was developed by Neil Patel, a New York Times bestselling author, and one of the top 10 marketers according to Forbes. It is an all-inclusive SEO tool that provides an in-depth look at critical factors such as competitor SEO, keyword suggestions, and content ideas.
Imagine you can reverse engineer your competitors’ SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing strategy. Ubersuggest allows you to get insight into the strategies that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and gain an edge over the competition.
The Ubbersuggest tagline says it all, ‘Want more traffic? Ubersuggest shows you how to win the game of SEO’
With Ubersuggest, you can also see the exact content in your space that people are linking to, then approach each of these sites and ask them to link to you. This is all you need to come up with an action plan for improving your link profile and understanding which links will have the most impact on your rankings.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is simply one of the best tools around when it comes to SEO and content marketing. It’s only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawler.
It has two standout features;
- Site Explorer – is promoted by Ahrefs as “the best backlink checker tool in the industry” and is capable of providing a detailed backlink profile of any website. Whether you want to learn more about your website, or maybe you want to see what your competition has been up to, this feature does it all for you.
- Position Tracker – We all understand that SEO is all about moving your website up the search engine’s rankings for your target keyword research. Through the Position Tracker tool, Ahrefs helps you to see just how much success you are having in your ranking. You can track keyword research and rankings, or even see how your pages are ranking on mobile devices.
When using the Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs produces the “parent topic” of the keyword you looked up. This is a broader keyword with higher search volume than your intended keyword, but likely has the same audience and similar ranking potential. This provides you with more of a valuable SEO opportunity.
SEMrush
SEMrush is an elaborate dashboard that reports on the performance of domains as a whole and their specific pages. It is an undisputed fan favourite in the SEO community. Marketers love the fact that it lets you easily assess your rankings as well as identify changes and new ranking opportunities.
One of the most popular features of this paid SEO tool is the Domain Vs Domain analysis, which allows you to compare your website to your competitors easily. If you’re looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic, or even your competitors, this is the best tool. With it, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains to figure out what works best in your niche.
Semrush also offers an SEO toolkit that allows you to track a website’s visibility improvement over time as well as identify which keywords it’s ranking for, what the page’s rank is for a keyword and the keyword’s monthly search volume.
Spyfu
SpyFu is an adept competitor keyword research tool for Google Ads. In addition to keyword research, it helps with Pay-Per-Click competitive research, SEO competitive research, and also the creation of custom lists and domains.
This tool helps you drive traffic to your Google Ads campaigns and website, monitor both paid and organic rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and obtain reliable and accurate contact information for leads. You can search your competitor’s website or your own, to easily see how many organic keywords they have. Additionally, you can see how many monthly clicks they get, who their paid and organic competitors are, and the campaigns they’re running with Google Ads. It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.
While SpyFu has an amazing premium version, most marketers rave about the efficiency of its free features. If you’re just starting out, you can easily grow into the paid features as you start achieving a higher ranking.
Linkody
As a marketer, you spend a lot of time building backlinks to your website, but two questions will always be floating around your head:
Are there any websites linking back to yours? and Are there times when, for some reason, you lose a link?
Answering these questions can be difficult, especially if you rely on a manual tracking process. The best way to understand the performance of your off-page SEO is by having a good overview of your backlinks. Fortunately, Linkody can rescue you from wasted time and lost productivity. Linkody allows you to discover, track, analyze and has an easy-to-use interface.
Aside from that, the tool checks your links 24/7 and informs you of any changes so you can take immediate action in case a link is lost or broken. You can also use the free version of Linkody’s as part of a trial, adding to its reputation as one of the best SEO tools.
When it comes to organic SEO rankings, there is simply no easy way to push your website to the top of the search engines. All that you can do is implement a sound strategy, stick with it over the long run, and be ready to roll with the punches.
Once you combine this approach with some of the high-level SEO tools we have discussed, you’ll have taken the first step of the journey to reach your SEO related goals.
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How To Promote Your Marketing Blog
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The initial phase of starting your blog should be one of the most fun and exciting parts of your journey. These days, there’s plenty of amazing content to be shared online.
Ultimately, it takes more than an online presence and compelling content to be successful with blogging. You have surely come a long way, pouring all that time and effort into the process of ideation, researching your target market, and narrowing in on your niche, but this is where your efforts finally begin to pay off.
However, for your blog to be successful from the get-go, there are several things that you must do. First, you have to lay the groundwork for success by promoting your blog. That’s right, and there’s research involved in this stage, too.
If you don’t have the traffic coming in, all of your efforts would be a waste of time. You don’t want things to fall apart during execution just because you don’t have a good promoting action plan. It is something worth investing time and resources in. In a Survey conducted by Orbitmedia, all bloggers surveyed spend an average of 2 hours promoting their articles.
Let’s walk you through a simple but thorough blog promotion checklist.
Share Your Blog On Social Media
Got a really great new post you want to spread as far as possible? Sharing your content on social media is an excellent way to get more visibility, and ultimately increase traffic and shares. According to Oberlo, 97% of bloggers use social media to promote their blog posts.
However, promoting your marketing blog on social media is not just a case of posting once on Facebook and then moving on to something else. You need to have a powerful social media marketing strategy in place. A good strategy should include:
- Focusing on the most relevant social networks for your blog.
- Engaging with people on those platforms, including influencers and brands.
- Participating in social groups to grow your social media reach.
To cultivate a strong social media presence, ensure that you aren’t posting swipe-up links to your content daily. Instead, try creating a diverse social media content calendar with a variety of engaging posts, and post 3-4 a month to drive traffic to a new or relevant blog post.
Building Relationships
No matter how good your marketing blog content is, you don’t want the people that you connect with on a professional, or personal, level to feel like you’re just using them as a tool to spread your content.
Every step you take in promoting your blog posts will be far more effective if you take the time to build better relationships through direct engagement and contributing relevantly to conversations.
However, don’t try to game your network for links and shares. Real two-way relationships with other brand marketers are far more effective, require less work, and will provide better results as your blog grows.
Remember, you never have to force it. An easy way to leverage real relationships for blog promotion is to build off-site relationships with other bloggers and businesses. Remember to share other people’s content on social media, in your emails, and through links in your blog content. By building these relationships, you never know who will share your content in exchange.
Guest Post On Popular Blogs
Guest Blogging is still one of the most effective paths to follow when trying to promote your blog.
The key to making guest blogs work is writing the best content that you have on relevant blogs in your niche. Usually, guest blogs are more effective when written on relevant blogs in your niche that have a high volume of followers and subscribers.
This is an excellent way to promote your blog. In a Blogging research, Optinmonster discovered that 79% of editors find guest content too promotional.
Guest blogging gets you and your brand content exposed to the other bloggers’ loyal audiences. Do you want to establish yourself as an authority figure and connect with other thought leaders in a niche? If yes, then Guest blogging is the way to go.
When you guest blog, always include a link in your author bio to a landing page on your site where visitors can get an exclusive download or find more about your services.
Email Marketing
It might be ageing, but email is far from obsolete. Think about it: every account you sign up for typically requires an email address.
It takes a simple process. Placing email opt-ins on your blog and on social media will help you gather email addresses. Consider providing a great freebie or regular tips exclusively for subscribers to increase conversion.
You can use the subscriber list that you obtain to let your fans know immediately you upload new content, revisit old content in relation to trending topics, and encourage them to share the content with their networks.
With a strong call to action and undivided attention, you’ll be amazed at how willing your subscribers are to promote you. In fact, email generates an astounding 4,200% ROI, according to Litmus. It remains among the most powerful and cost-effective promotion strategies despite all the latest marketing fads.
Link Building
You must have heard this a lot of times already, but if you really want to rank on Google, then link-building is something you want to invest in. Once you know the ins and outs of your content, you can start to build organic links to your website.
Building links to your site is one of the best ways to ensure you’re cultivating a good, long-term SEO and promoting strategy for your blog. If you have no idea how to build backlinks, Clickslice has you covered. We offer bespoke link building services that will go a long way in promoting your blog content and creating awareness for your brand across the digital space.
Additionally, Search Engines look at how many links lead back to your site when deciding how to rank your website. Of course, there are different ways to build backlinks to your sites. Neil Patel recognizes that infographics still work today and can play a vital role in your link building strategy. In Fact, according to Hubspot, blog articles that include infographics generate an average of 178% more inbound links and 72% more views than all other posts.
These statistics make creating infographics a link building tactic that you can’t afford to ignore if you want to promote your brand’s marketing blog content.
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How To Improve Your Marketing ROI
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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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Beginners Guide To Online Marketing
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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.
