Improving Digital Performance With No SEO Strategy

May 15, 2018 / nancyrubin / Leave a comment

One way SEO strategy has affected how people write for the web is by created the term ‘keywords’ with the launch of one of the first worldwide online indexing tools, Google in 1998. Keywords were first perceived as words you could use to attract visitors to your website, which during the first years of Google consisted too often in maximizing high search volume terms that may not be related to the page content. The first personal blogs used to attract visitors by adding popular terms at the bottom of the page or directly into the metadata. Needless to say, the volume of visitors increased significantly. Since then, Google has punished this black hat SEO strategy with the introduction of Google Panda in 2011.

However, low-quality sites continue to find loopholes to drive visitor traffic. When it became obvious that link building could improve the ranking ability of a site, unscrupulous digital entrepreneurs offered to sell backlinks, causing several websites to suffer a drop in ranking when Google introduced the quality link penalty. However, the new approach to create quality and natural-looking links is to build a link wheel. While it is not a Black Hat style, it’s fair to say that it can be difficult for businesses to maintain informative content generation across each site of the wheel.

For now, Google hasn’t yet picked on it. However, as the general quality of content is sinking across the web, it’s fair to say that the AI within the ranking algorithm might start to penalize link wheels in future.

So what is the best approach to improve your online performance durably and without risking future penalties and algorithm updates? The answer is surprisingly simple. Don’t do SEO.

The web strategy pyramid ignores people

There’s only so much SEO you can do

The dangers of homepage SEO

Although no marketer in their right mind would intentionally ditch their SEO strategy, there’s an important lesson to learn. Namely, SEO doesn’t always work for you. In fact, when it comes to your main web page, your homepage SEO, the answer to the question ‘should you even worry about it?’ is more likely to be NO. It’s not a matter of ignoring your homepage completely. But it’s important to understand that your homepage should not be the main linking page for your SEO strategy.

Make sure you limit your keyword choice

One of the most common mistakes made by small companies is to reproduce the same SEO strategy that works for big brands. Big brands naturally receive more links because they are more customers, more advocates, and more press. Consequently, a variety of anchor texts link to the homepage, and such a link constellation is sustainable because there is sufficient content out there to justify the diverse keywords. For small brands, the external content spreads too thin to make it work.

Manage your reputation

Additionally, it’s the constant generation of content from commentators, social media users, bloggers, and journalists that create a rich brand reputation for big brands. Because big brands are likely to have a lot of advocates, they can enjoy a positive reputation even if they sometimes get things wrong. What happens to small businesses who have a handful of dissatisfied customers? They immediately suffer from a negative reputation, which affects your ranking scores too. Ultimately, if Google notices that your brand is unpopular, it’ll push you deeper in the search results. As it is difficult for small brands to find advocates, fixing a damaged reputation is a slow and painful strategy.

You can’t win the keywords war

GDPR will affect data accuracy

If you hone your SEO skills developing keyword-ranking strategies, it is time to change your ways before the GDPR comes into force at the end of May. Indeed, the General Data Protection Regulation is an EU data privacy regulation that affects the way data collecting, monitoring and analyzing tools handle EU data. With penalties of €20 million, it’s not something you want to ignore. Unfortunately, the GDPR will reduce the information you can get from your data processors, whether it’s Google Analytics or specialist keywords tools. Geographic reporting accuracy will be reduced in Analytics. It is currently unclear how further tools will deploy data privacy recommendations, but you can expect fewer data to improve your rankings.

The keyword search has changed

Additionally, since the apparition of voice-controlled assistants, such as Amazon Echo, the way people search online has changed. Amazon Echo, being shared by the family, can affect the way the search engine provides the most relevant results for a user. Additionally voice search transforms the way people think about keywords, as it tends to be performed in a conversational tone.

Alt text is overstated

There’s another essential voicing tool that is too often ignored, and it’s the screen reader. For the sake of accessibility, marketers insist that all alt text content should be completed, both for visually impaired users and for crawlers. The main issue with using screen readers as a cover for search engine writing is that it can generate confusing and unclear web pages. Imagine, for instance, a ‘send’ button at the end of a form. The alt text normally labels the button ‘send’ + [keywords]. The screen reader naturally reads the text ‘send’ that’s written on the button, causing duplicate and unnatural content for the user. A similar argument can be made for images used as placeholders. They disturb the screen reader experience and might ultimately be picked up by the AI learning function in Google’s algorithm.

Create useful alt text

How long do people spend on a page?

55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on any page and read only about 20% of the content. Users skip most of the content to find the answer they need, so that 70% of your SEO content is not seen. It’s a fast-paced environment, and people want immediate answers. In other words, the SEO rule of a minimum of 250 words per page is useless.

The key learning is that everything you know about SEO is changing. How long until the algorithm is updated, we don’t know. But one thing is for sure: Write for real people, not for search engines if you want to make the most of your online presence.

The Five Areas Of Marketing Experts Will Excel In

May 8, 2018May 8, 2018 / nancyrubin / 1 Comment

Starting out in business can be overwhelming. When you have an idea that you love and that you know can work, you’re often excited to get stuck in. But before long, you’ll realize that a lot goes into running a business. And you can’t always manage everything on your own. In fact, it’s impossible. As your business starts to grow, you can’t spend 25 hours every single day doing admin, making sales, taking care of customer service, watching the finances, running operations, and marketing the business too. You’ll never have the time! Instead, you need to delegate. And even more so, you need to make sure that you’re delegating to people that are going to be experts in each area, particularly when it comes to marketing. Because you’ll often get the best results when you work with people that really know what they’re doing.

When it comes to PR, you will always want to make sure that the time spent on this is going to get the best coverage possible. If you don’t have the contacts, then you won’t even be able to come close to what an experienced agency or PR consultant can do. When you’re thinking about running an event or working with influencers, PRs can pretty much nail this for you too. You just have to stand back, enjoy the results, and pay the bills.

SEO

Right now, you may think you know keywords, but do you really? Are you putting as much time as possible into getting your site to rank well on Google? Are you even doing any off-page SEO at all? If not, then you need to leave it to the experts. When you have an SEO agency or consultant in place, they will be aware of the latest techniques and policies, so that your SEO can always stay fresh.

Advertising

Next, you have advertising. And if you’ve never created an ad before or even tried to set up a campaign, you may find that you’re pouring money down the drain by trying to do it yourself. Of course, you could learn, but this is better outsourced to advertising agencies that get results. If you know you want sales or traffic or customer or anything else, then leave it to those in the know.

Social Media

From here, you then have social media. With so many different platforms to consider and a whole host of noise being made on all of them, do you know how you’re going to stand out? Probably not. But a social agency will know exactly what strategy your business needs to make waves and engage with your audience. So hire one and let them do their stuff.

Copywriting

If you know that you can’t create great copy, you could spend more time trying to get it right, or you could just cut your losses and get someone in to do it for you. Compelling copy matters on everything from your website to your newsletters. So make sure you have the right writer on the job.

4 Social Media Metrics Your Business Needs to Track

May 4, 2018 / nancyrubin / 1 Comment

Simply having a social media account is not enough to grow your business. Just like everyone else, you probably want to get more followers, more likes, more retweets, more click-through, etc. But are all of these things going to help you boost your business?

In this jungle of social media metrics, it could be confusing for you to choose which metrics are actually important for your company. But don’t look at this in a bad way. You have a lot of data in your hands, so use this data in order to understand your audience.

Luckily there is a solution. Take a look at these four metrics that will help you achieve growth.

Engagement: Do people actually like your content?

How many times did someone take action on your posts? Sharing, clicks, comments, reactions – all of these things matter.

These actions validate your content and they will show you if your posts are important to your target audience. If you keep tracking these metrics, they will help you plan your content strategy and see what kind of post you should create, but also which post you should avoid.

The simple step is to use average engagement rate that will take your metrics a step further. It will show you a true value of your content and how it impacts your followers. You can also identify optimal time for engagement. Knowing when your audience is most active will raise your engagement, so keep tracking and post when they are online.

Never underestimate your competitors because you can learn from them. See what kind of content works for them by tracking their engagement rates.

Mentions: Does anybody talk about your brand?

All mentions are important, whether they are written in a positive or negative manner. Your goal is to promote actual online conversations and discussions, but try to give your best to induce positive reactions.

For starter, you should become a part of that conversation and show people you care about their opinion. But when it comes to monitoring mentions, you should use these metrics in order to find out how many people are talking about your brand and more importantly – who is talking. A simple step that can inspire you to boost your mentions is to take a glance at your competitors’ mentions. Don’t steal their idea, just let yourself be creative. People will value your uniqueness.

Nevertheless, if you are having a trouble with social mention monitoring, you can always hire a professional to do the job for you.

Conversion: Do you have enough traffic to your website?

How many people took an extra step and visited your site via your social media page?

Tracking a total number of conversions will show you if your social media strategy achieves its purpose. To convert, you need to engage people by giving them a strong call-to-action. You can use analytic tools such as Google’s URL builder and collect all important data about the specific link. This will help you realize what kind of social media content is attracting the greatest amount of traffic to your page.

So, track the number of conversions that happened within a month or a week and match the data with particular content. These valuable metrics will tell you how fast your business is growing. So, if your conversion numbers aren’t where you want them to be, you can do something about that immediately. Start looking for new trends and change something in order to improve your strategy.

Sentiments: Do people like your products?

You can actually get into the mind of your customers while you are online. With a little help of sentiment and emotional analysis, you can track online conversation from all social networks and see how people feel about your products.

You would probably love to see just positive comments, but tracking negative ones will help you improve your business. A sudden spike in negative sentiment will show you what you should change. Moreover, you will be able to resolve this problem and calm people down. Maybe your brand is well-liked, but there is always a room for improvement.

These metrics bring as to a whole new level of marketing. Sentiments and emotional analysis will help you create a positive social media presence your business needs.

Track What Matters

Everyone obsesses over how many followers they have. Yes, it’s nice to have a large number of followers, but that doesn’t matter as much as you may think. What you want is for people to become familiar with your brand and your message. You want them to go to your website and buy your products. So, use these metrics in order to get to know your audience and grow your business.

Guest author, David Webb, is a Sydney-based business consultant,online marketing analyst and a writer. With six years of experience and a degree in business management, he continuously informs the public about the latest trends in the industry. He is a regular author at BizzmarkBlog. You can reach him on Twitter or Facebook.

How to Rank in Google Using the Best SEO Practices?

April 16, 2018April 16, 2018 / nancyrubin

There are numerous methods to rank in Google. Ordinarily, Google and other search engines use many similar algorithms to determine a website’s ranking. The most extensive and popular method to rank your website in Google is by exhibiting proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Digital marketing evolved as a result of the Internet revolution. SEO, for anyone who doesn’t know, is one of the branches of digital marketing or online marketing. Who knew something like SEO would become popular in the days of conventional marketing.

Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs are commonly used to refer to Google’s pages. In the SEO community, you will encounter a very typical question that says: how high do you rank in SERPs for a particular keyword? However, you must not be dazzled and remain firm on grounds that lead you to your destiny. In this article, we will cover simple yet authentic SEO methods to improve website rankings. Furthermore, you must keep these three things in mind for a better SEO: the quality and amount of the content (off-page content), backlinks, and things you can do to improve within the website (on-page content).

Method 1

Natural Optimization is the Best SEO Practice

The Hunt for Keywords

Google Keyword Planner is a tool that helps you search for the right keywords. You must get familiar with this SEO tool so you can use it to your benefit. If your website is about beauty products, you can search for keywords specific to the beauty industry. In addition, they must have a higher monthly search volume i.e. many people type in that particular keyword in Google search regularly. It is a ‘best SEO practice’ to do ‘keyword research’ at the beginning.

Google Trends Manifest Changing Priorities

‘Google Trends’ is an online facility showing the changing behaviors over a period of time. You see, keywords don’t always remain the same. As a general rule, the priorities in industries keep on changing giving birth to newer search phrases. Therefore, you mustn’t hold on to the same set of keywords forever. Keep vibrant and maintain your website according to the recent trends.

Mobile Optimization is Essential in the Age of Smartphones

You must optimize your website for the mobile audience. Mobiles are handy instruments and quickly becoming the leading search devices leaving behind computers & laptops. If your website doesn’t load quickly on mobiles, Google won’t rank it higher in SERPs. Nonetheless, getting your website AMP-friendly will make it run like a horse in derby race. It becomes responsive to user’s commands.

Adopt Google As Much As You Can

Ensuring your businesses are part of Google Plus and have ‘Google My Business Listings’ will definitely push the rankings upward. Google, by far, is the most popular search engine in the world. We must respect that and adopt Google as much as we can.

Method 2

Content Creation

Content Must Not Be Plagiarized

You must write highly relevant, error-free content for your website. Google appreciates the uniqueness and rejects any plagiarism. Distinctive content creation is easily the best SEO practice. Keep it simple, to the point, and don’t forget to add keywords you want the search engine to rank you for. You mustn’t sell any wrongful information either so the users get what they want.

A graphic designer can help you with the outlook of the website.

High-Quality Content

If your website is in English, not making any grammar, spelling, and sentence structure mistakes can help you earn a good position in SERPs. On the contrary, if you are simply copy-pasting content, Google knows and it will penalize your website for doing that. Your website may never be able to rank.

Significance of Images

Whether you are writing on your website or promoting your website, never forget to add images to the content. Tag them with your targeted keywords which is one of the best SEO practices.

LSI Keywords

You can use lsigraph.com to find the related LSI keywords against your targeted keywords. Use them throughout your content. Google appreciates those pages that include the LSI keywords. But don’t add those that are not relevant. You must use those keywords which are the most relevant to your data.

Tip – Don’t overdo keywords. Keyword stuffing can cost you.

Which Keywords to Select?

You must target those keywords which have less competition. For instance, instead of choosing ‘beauty salon’, you can choose a longer keyword such as ‘beauty salon in Brentwood’ because long-tail keywords are generally easier to rank for. But it must have some searches. Targeting longer keywords is part of the best SEO practices.

Tip – Google Adwords can tell you about the competition of keywords.

Sitemap – A Must SEO Tactic

A ‘sitemap’ is like a complete guide to your website and a ‘best SEO practice’. It is like a road system of your website leading people to the right products or services. Click through rate (CTR) increases by 1 % after creating a sitemap. Google likes sitemaps and you shouldn’t ignore anything that it likes to move up the rankings.

Guest Author, Fizza Arshad, has a passion for writing on various subjects.

Prepare For The Hurricane That Is Success

April 13, 2018April 13, 2018 / nancyrubin

The dream for any business is to explode like a fireworks finale above some capital city on Old Year’s Night and, if you work hard enough, you’ll find the chances of this happening are in your favor. The dream is an exponential rise, the kind that will be written in the folklore of Forbes Magazine.

However, the dream is very different to the reality because, if you don’t prepare your business for this level of success, you’ll see it fall by the wayside thanks to good old instability. Yup, seizing the opportunity to grow requires having everything in place to rock n’ roll with the momentum you’ve earned.

That’s why we’ve pulled together a lost of ways you can effectively grow your business and ride out any and all the brisk changes that crop up on the way up:

No Weak Links

The thing that makes growth possible is a sudden charge of customers running toward your gates. However, if things aren’t absolutely watertight at your end, you’ll find they turn around just as quickly as they came, taking everyone with them. That’s why you need to have everything in check. You need to make sure you are presentable from every direction, have a great online presence and that all your operations are able to run smoothly no matter how many people cue up. Think of this growth as a hurricane; the only thing that will help you survive is a strong foundation.

Have The Resources

This is the balancing act that you need to master in order to make growth possible. You need to have all the resources ready without having any unnecessary overheads. Our advice: utilize technology and make the most of outsourcing. Call ATB Technologies and ask them about their cloud storage solutions so that your IT can withstand the growth, build a pool of trusted freelancers you can call on during peak times so that you don’t put your business or brand at risk of onboarding problems and have automation processes in place so that human error isn’t a burden when the pressure builds.

Hire The Best Talent

Growth is not possible without having the right team around you, which is why you need to make this a priority. These people are a crucial part of your success and will either help big time or hinder you massively. Don’t just pick the person with the best qualifications though. Think about their soft skills, how they will fit in with your culture, the context they have applied their experience in so far, heir ambitions and everything else that makes up their professional personality. Yes, their experience is key, but you want them to be able to roll with the punches and fight for the same goals as you. Dedication and commitment – those are the two defining traits you are after.

Perfect Your Procedures

We’ll keep this one short: you need to have the proper procedures, processes and strategies in place if you are going to seize the opportunity to grow. That means having the right systems, tech, software, workflows and everything else of that ilk. It won’t be possible to succeed without them.

The Worst Things Don’t Happen At Sea, They Happen Online!

March 29, 2018 / nancyrubin

Sailors are wrong about the ocean, particularly if you are thinking regarding commercial prospects. Most people think that the idea of the worst things occurring at sea comes from issues like drowning, or boats overturning. Actually, it’s a business warning. It means the worst things that can happen to your company occur on the waters. In the past, this may have been true. After all, one bad storm could have wiped the entire trading prospects of a company. These days that’s not true, and businesses will have more than a few eggs in a variety of different baskets. Businesses are diversified as much as possible to guarantee that one bad problem won’t kill the company.

As true as this is, if you look at the business market it becomes clear that the danger hasn’t disappeared, it’s shifted to a new location. These days, the dangerous waters are actually in the online realm. So, let’s look at some of the problems you can encounter with your business online as well as the best ways to handle them.

When SEO Attacks

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There are a few issues you need to be aware of with SEO for your company. First, there’s the Google penalties. These little nuisances are a lot scarier than they seem, particularly when you discover they have names like Penguin and Panda. The penalties can actually cause your search ranking to plummet through the floor, and this will negatively impact the profitability of your business because no one will be able to find your site.

This is why you need to be careful about the type of SEO tactics that you use. SEO can be tricky, and it’s worth making sure that you don’t oversimplify it to the point where you start using blackhat forms of the service. An example of that would be stuffing content with keywords. Content, on the other hand, is a key way that you can build SEO and increase the ranking of your site the right way.

To do this, you just need to make sure that you are adding content that is relevant, targeted and written or produced to a high-quality level. This can be difficult, and that’s why a number of business owners now use professional writers for articles, video and infographics.

The other issue with SEO is a negative SEO attack. Here, a business that is competing with yours will use SEO to target your company and make sure that negative content surrounding your business appears when customers search your brand. It’s dangerous, it’s damaging, and it’s one of the reasons why you should always keep a check on the buzz around your business online.

This is just a couple of the issues you need to be aware of when marketing your business online Both are easily avoidable so let’s look at a problem that isn’t.

Hacks And Breaks

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In the past, the biggest security threat yo your business would be someone smashing a window in your office or cracking the lock on the door of your building. Today, a hacker can break into your business and take sensitive data or valuable information with just a laptop. They don’t even have to visit your business address to do this. Now, what does this mean for your company with regards to security?

Well first of, you need to make sure that you do have the right insurance services such as risk management. It is crucial that you know how much risk there could be surrounding your business. This will determine the coverage your company needs as well as the price or premium that you will need to pay. Be aware that there are a lot of insurance plans that will not cover loss from a data hack. That’s why you’re going to have to be careful about the type of company coverage that you choose.

Aside from this, you should be explore a few of the security possibilities for your business online. Start off by looking into https. You will notice that this site does use https. What does that mean? Basically, the site is operating with an SSL, and this ensures that all the data transferred through the site is secure. It makes the site far more secure and is recommended for any site that transfers data such as passwords which these days is every single site and blog.

If you don’t want to make this change to protect your company or the interests of your customers, do it to protect your profits. Studies show that 83 percent of users will leave your site if it is labelled as insecure which it will be without an SSL.

Aside from this, you should be using the services of an IT support team. They will make sure that your business is constantly monitored and checked to see if there is an issue with a hack. If there is an issue they will correct it as quickly as possible and make sure that if customer data is lost then at least, you will be aware of it.

Damage To The Brand

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You should also be concerned about the possibility of damaging your business brand online. A variety of issues can damage your business brand online and the first problem to think about is poor customer reviews. Everything these days is susceptible to reviews and if you have a string of bad reviews, slowly but surely your customers will begin to disappear.

As well as customer reviews you need to consider business interactions. These days there is just no excuse for a business not communicating or failing to stay in contact with customers. Using social media, this should be easy, and if it’s taking up too much time, a social media manager can handle this for you, guaranteeing that customers feel connected. If your customers don’t feel like part of your business, they will pursue a relationship with another organization, perhaps one of your main competitors.

We hope you see now that the worst things that impact businesses occur online, not at sea.

Don’t Fall Into These Traps With Your Online Business!

March 27, 2018March 27, 2018 / nancyrubin / 2 Comments

There’s no denying that the world we live in today is almost entirely dominated by the internet. Whether you’re shopping, socialising, gaming, watching TV, or doing just about anything else, the internet is almost certainly going to be involved. Because of that, it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that the business world has had to change and evolve. Online businesses are springing up every single day, and more and more people are able to create startups from virtually nothing thanks to the internet. And yet, despite this, there are a lot of businesses that end up falling at the very first hurdle because they end up falling into some incredibly common traps that come with running an online business. To help you avoid that fate, here are some of the most common pitfalls for new online startups.

Terrible web design

There’s an assumption that far too many people seem to have that as long as you have a website, you don’t really have to think about it that much. This is one of the most common reasons that online startups end up falling apart. If your web design is lacking, then customers aren’t going to be interested in your business. If it looks amateurish, then they’re going to assume that the rest of your business is the same and look elsewhere. That might sound shallow, but it’s a fundamental part of how many customers engage with businesses.

A misunderstanding of social media

Speaking of customer engagement, if you’re not using social media properly, then you’re missing out on an incredibly important aspect of your marketing. Far too many businesses end up using their social media pages for little more than copied and pasted advertising. If you do that, customers simply aren’t going to care and will unfollow your pages in an instant. You need to use social media to engage with customers on a personal level. This means creating entertaining and interesting content that they will want to share and enjoy.

Poor SEO

The other fundamental part of online marketing that is ignored all too often is that of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. One of the big changes in the internet age is that customers can now come to you rather than you advertising to them. But to do this, you need to make yourself visible to those customers. That’s where SEO comes in. SEO is the way in which you ensure that your business is the first result when a customer searches for specific keywords on search engines like Google. If your SEO isn’t up to scratch, your business is going to end up getting buried.

One of the most important things to remember is that these things don’t just impact businesses that are exclusively online. Every business needs an online presence, and if you don’t consider these things, then you’re just going to end up wasting it. Even if your business has always been based in brick and mortar, you need the internet to succeed in the modern era, just make sure that you’re using it properly.