Saturday, September 15, 2018
SEO | Google | Algorithms
How Brands Can Optimize SEO With Google's Evolving Algorithm
In the world of SEO, technological innovations are constantly driving ideas forward. There are a number of things that are evolving in SEO -- first of which is voice search. Since the inception of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s voice assistant, people are constantly searching for what they need by physically asking their devices for information.
Optimize for voice search.
For instance, people pose inquiries such as "local Chinese restaurants near me” and expect to see Google results of Chinese restaurants in their area. SEO experts, content writers, webmasters and business owners need to make sure they are creating content that will answer these types of questions while still using the appropriate schema markup. Basically, your website needs to include the right words in order to help search engines return more detailed results. Everything from headlines to subheadlines can impact SEO rankings.
Consider mobile first.
Google is further adapting to the evolution of SEO through mobile-first indexing. Google announced that it will first look at a website's mobile version before its desktop version to best decide how the site should be indexed and ranked. Some web designers create a site without first checking how it looks on mobile screens. This includes not only cell phones but tablets, too. However, it’s imperative that webmasters and business owners ensure their websites are mobile-ready and user-friendly on handheld devices.
Furthermore, mobile site speed is going to be an important factor in mobile-first indexing. Web pages that take a while to load on a mobile device may suffer from lower rankings on Google because of the slow speed to get there.
In the past, Google only looked at backlinks and content as the primary factors for deciding search engine rankings. Now, Google is using its artificial intelligence (AI), RankBrain, to decide how websites should rank based on how many visitors come to the site, how many leave the site and how long they stay on the site. They’re also starting to look at how often a company’s brand is mentioned without having a backlink. Because of this, it’s possible that we’ll see brand mentions becoming a more important factor in SEO algorithms.
SEO 2018 | Google Search
SEO 2018 is All About Branded Search Queries
SEO pioneer and Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin was recently asked about the future of SEO and how SEO agencies and marketers should adjust to these changes. Rands says that SEO has changed to the point that the traditional SEO focus on generic related keywords for your products and services is becoming obsolete because of how Google now displays search results.
See below for highlights from Rand's thoughts on the changing SEO landscape:
There is definitely this problem in the SEO space where the amount of opportunity in SEO (is lessened), because of Google entering all these business sectors and taking away of a lot of the clicks and trying to solve the searchers' query before they ever click.
This means that you just don't have as much opportunity to earn search clicks from this search engine anymore.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Social Media | Tips For Businesses
Best Social Media Tips for Businesses
Social media isn’t just for personal use anymore. Businesses small and large have been using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for years – to the benefit of their bottom lines. And, if your business is struggling to make an impact, it’s time to make a change.
With 70 percent of the US population claiming at least one social media account, lagging behind on social media is no longer an option if you want to grow as a business. However, constantly changing algorithms and increasingly savvy competitors admittedly make it hard to find your audience, particularly without a little advice.
That’s why getting a few tips from experts can do wonders for your next campaign. Take a look at what we found to be the most helpful social media tips out there today and reach your audience.
Social Media Tips Businesses Should Follow
There’s no one-size-fits-all path to social media success, whether you’re an individual or a business. However, following a few core principles can make all the difference.
To find out the best social media tips for businesses, the experts you should look towards are social media management companies. These firms make social media success their lifeblood. Companies such as Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social exist to help businesses connect with their audiences more intelligently via social media.
What emerges is a simple seven-step formula for social media success:
Focus Groups | Marketing Strategy
Focus groups are the solution to improving marketing results
One of the main reasons why many new products fail is because marketers fall prey to the concept of “one-size-fits-all.” It simply doesn’t work in marketing. 65 to 75 percent of new products have failed to generate the anticipated revenue or profit due to a one-size-fits-all approach.
If you want to improve your marketing results, customer segmentation is the solution. Segmentation plays a vital role in marketing. Each customer is different, with individual needs and preferences, so you need to treat them differently. This is fact that remains regardless of the industry you are in.
So rather than approaching all of your customers in the same way, it’s always better to put them in separate groups. You can group them based on their behavior, psychographics, demographics, or geographical information.
This will help you create a more personalized messaging for your customers that connects better and drives greater revenue.
SEO | SEO Tips - Online Marketing
How to Quickly Bolster Your SEO Results Organically
With 51% of website traffic coming from organic search, 10% from paid search and 5% from social, it's critical to ensure you're doing all you can to bolster your website’s ranking in Google’s search engine. There are a few powerful techniques communicators can implement to elevate their brand's voice and increase website exposure organically.
1. Improve Page Speed
This might not be the first thing you think of when considering SEO, but it is one of the most important ranking factors. People won't wait for your site to load. A mobile site is almost guaranteed to lose traffic should it take longer than 3 seconds to load.
Sometimes we lose sight of what Google's end goal is as a search engine. It wants to solve users' problems as fast as possible and provide a great user experience since this is what directly influences the search engine's bottom line. If your page is ranking high, but takes 10-15 seconds to load, Google will notice. It will notice the second-ranked page takes 2-3 seconds to load and your stellar rankings will be gone.
To improve your page-load speed reduce the size of image files. In addition eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content, avoid landing page redirects and leverage browser caching.
2. Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions to Improve Click-Through-Rates (CTRs)
The importance of CTR is growing as a top ranking signal. Again, Google wants to provide the best user experience. Therefore, if an article ranked #1 sees a big drop in CTR and the second-ranked article experiences an increase, expect Google to re-order them.
To improve your CTR, ensure you set an optimized meta description and title for each page. The description attribute is a short, helpful summary of your page’s content. It’s a primary piece of information searchers use to decide which result to click on, so having an intuitive, concise and relevant description is key. Search results limit the number of characters they display for meta descriptions. It’s considered best practice to keep them to a maximum of 300 characters.
Page titles also are critical to give searchers quick insight into the content of a search result. It’s a primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's important to use high-quality, descriptive titles. Keep page titles to 10-70 characters.
Small Business | SEO
How small businesses can see big results with foundational SEO
Whether you are just starting on your search engine optimization (SEO) journey or have been at it for years, there’s a good chance some part of your site can be improved. In fact, from the hundreds of small business websites we look at every year at Bowler Hat (my agency), it is rare we see a site implementing SEO perfectly and completely.
Search engine optimization is not rocket science for any site, small and local businesses included. Yet, it is easy to get lost in trivial details before the essential, basic steps are put in place. This means for most businesses, there are easy wins on the table.
In SEO, as with many business endeavors, the Pareto Principle rings true:
…” for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”
This is definitely accurate when we look at SEO for smaller businesses. Getting 20 percent of the work done to get 80 percent of the benefits is key to getting an early return from your SEO efforts. Let’s look at the basics and how to use that 20 percent to score easy wins you can put in place today.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO can get, well, technical. Yet, don’t let the term scare you. If you make smart decisions at the outset, then much of the technical work is taken care of by your website hosting and website software.
Selecting a search-engine-friendly content management system (CMS) like WordPress will ensure you have a technically sound base for your SEO efforts. With the right kind of CMS in place, you will then want to ensure you host the site in an optimized environment.
In some recent testing we conducted, we compared a basic WordPress site on a standard web hosting to an optimized environment. The optimized environment did much of the technical optimization required to speed up WordPress. The physical file size was reduced by two thirds and loading time was reduced to one second from three.
All of this was done by making smart decisions rather than doing lots of work and performing manual optimization.
Or, 20 percent effort, 80 percent results.
The primary takeaway here is to make informed choices regarding your website content management system and hosting environment. Get this right, and the complexity melts away.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)